Gov. Doug Ducey is right. Arizona must speed up its plodding election system

Doug Ducey made the parting suggestion on Monday that Arizona needs to speed up its election results.

Not only is he right; he’s the right person to say it.

As a Republican governor whose most memorable acts have included twice defending the integrity of the Arizona electoral system when it was attacked by members of his own party, Ducey is the best person to call for faster counting on Election Day.

He never gave in to the Donald Trump and Kari Lake conspiracy theories that Arizona elections are rigged. In fact, he put his imprimatur on the last two contested state elections and famously left Donald Trump holding the phone as he blessed Trump’s 2020 defeat to Joe Biden in Arizona.

So if Ducey is saying we need to reform, he’s not saying it because Kari Lake is in the foyer screaming foul and accusing the state, without evidence, of slow-walking the votes.

Reform our election system because we can

There are powerful reasons to get same-day or near-same-day election results.

The first and best is that we can.

We live in the 21st century when the technology is widely available and the methods well-proven that you can produce same-day results. It requires an investment in equipment and a redesign of the rules, but it is well underway in other parts of the country.

Florida, with a population three times our size, is generally wrapping up its election counts on election night. That actually happened by accident – because of the train wreck of the 2000 presidential election that gave us the expression “hanging chads” and put the final decision in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Embarrassed by its performance in that cycle, the State of Florida, then led by Gov. Jeb Bush, began to reform its elections.

What went wrong?Lake to keep fighting in court as advisers debate strategy

Fast forward to 2022.

On Nov. 8, when Arizona was processing a record 290,000 mail-in ballots it received on Election Day, Florida already had 95% of its election ballots counted by election morning, reports Jen Fifield, of Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization.

While Floridians had their election results on election night, Arizonans waited up to a week to learn the outcomes of some of their most important races, including governor, attorney general, U.S. senator and superintendent of public instruction.

Don't make America wait for our slow count

A second reason, as Ducey pointed out on Monday, is that Arizona is now a swing state with much of the nation potentially waiting on our results to know who will be the next president or which party will control the U.S. House and Senate.

“Things have changed,” Ducey said. “Our elections have become much more competitive.”

As the days dragged on without Arizona results in the 2022 midterm, the Eastern hares grew impatient with the Western tortoises.

“It is rude of Arizona and Nevada to keep the country waiting to know the composition of its Senate,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan. “Why, days after the election, don’t we know which party controls the House? Why can’t the late-reporting states get their act together on vote counting? It’s the increase in mail-in ballots? So what? You roll with life and adapt. Florida, which spans two time zones, reports its tallies with professionalism and dispatch.”

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said he hopes the rest of the country learns from Florida “or we’re going to have more nights like what we’re having now in places like Arizona that looks like a Third World country counting ballots.”

None of this is rocket science, continued Noonan. “Leaders keep saying we have to be patient. Why? How about doing your job? Get the mail-in ballots, count them, hold them in a vault until the polls close, and announce the numbers, along with the Election Day vote, that night.”

The slow Arizona election results aren’t really about election supervisors and workers doing their job. They went to Election Day with the system they had, and the system they had was a Rube Goldberg contraption designed over years by a Republican-controlled Legislature.

Take the sword away from conspiracy-mongers

A third reason to speed up election results is to disarm the conspiracy theorists such as Trump and Lake.

“These delays are a result of mass mail voting, and they’re no good for public confidence,” argued a Wall Street Journal editorial. “So far the U.S. has been Las Vegas lucky in avoiding a mail-vote debacle, but only a fool keeps spinning the roulette wheel.”

Speaking of roulette wheels, the novelist Walter Kirn looked at the slow returns from Clark County, Nev., and Las Vegas and said, “This is a town in which umpteen-million quarters are dumped into slot machines every night and counted within hours. This is a town that counts for a living.”

Kirn made some gruesome observations about what would happen to casino staff if they moved as slowly as election ballot-counters, before adding, “The real consideration is how do (Americans) maintain faith in a system that really would not suffice in a grocery store at the end of the day, when they open the till.”

To get up to speed, Arizona will first need to start the policy discussion, something County Recorder Stephen Richer has already suggested, and it will need to update its laws and invest in scanning or tabulation machines that will make the process run much faster.

The incoming governor Katie Hobbs has signaled through her spokesperson that she is open to the idea “as long as we are not taking away people’s opportunity (to vote),” reported The Arizona Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl.

Both major parties need to come together in Arizona and make this happen. And they shouldn’t wait for Donald Trump and Kari Lake to stop barking at the moon.

Because it’s in no one’s interest to wait forever.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Doug Ducey is right: Arizona must speed up slow elections