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Counting votes quickly
Jun. 10th, 2026 07:03 amToday's New York Times has an editorial about deadlines for mail-in ballots, saying Congress should pass a Federal bill, among other things "making clear that states are permitted to begin counting early ballots as soon as they arrive." Let's think about this.
For every ballot, several things have to happen in some order: verify that the voter is authorized to vote, verify that the voter hasn't already voted in this election, record that the voter has voted in this election, and count the contents of the ballot. At an in-person polling station with paper ballots, the first two steps are normally done by an election official at a desk, who then hands the voter a ballot to fill out and (I guess) records the voter as having voted. Counting the contents happens a few minutes later (for machine-scanned ballots) or a few hours later (for hand-counted ballots).
The problem is people voting multiple times -- one or more by-mail and one or more in-person. This appears to be an extremely rare phenomenon today, but we'd like to keep it that way, and if there's an easy way to vote multiple times without getting caught, people will do it. So there has to be some rule telling election officials what to do if somebody tries to vote both ways. There are several possibilities.
1) Mail-in ballots take priority over in-person ballots. If somebody has already sent in a ballot by mail and then shows up at a polling place in person, that person shouldn't be given an in-person ballot. This requires that we have a complete list of who sent mail-in ballots before in-person voting starts: the deadline for receiving ballots by mail has to be before the start of in-person voting. If a state also allows a week or two of in-person voting before Election Day, as many do, that means mail-in ballots have to be mailed several weeks before Election Day in order to be counted. Many people and states consider that an unreasonably early deadline.
2) Mail-in ballots take priority over in-person ballots, but anybody who's requested and been sent a mail-in ballot and then shows up at a polling place in person gets a provisional ballot which won't be counted until the state has a complete list of who sent in mail-in ballots so it can decide which provisional ballots to reject. If a state has a high rate of mail-in ballot requests, this could mean a lot of provisional ballots that can't be opened and scanned until after the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. If that deadline is Election Day (as the editorial recommends), or shortly before, all the mail-in ballots can be counted as they come in and reported on or shortly after Election Day, but in-person ballots may take a while afterwards. In the extreme case that a state automatically sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters, then all in-person votes become provisional and can't start being opened and counted until after the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. This approach could make good sense if there were very few or no in-person votes.
3) In-person ballots take priority over mail-in ballots. This requires that we have a complete list of who voted in-person before we start opening mail-in ballots, so we know which mail-in ballots to reject, which means we can't even start counting mail-in ballots until the polls close on Election Day, leading to long delays in reporting results as is happening in California right now. This approach made sense when very few ballots were mail-in, but it makes less sense now.
4) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in, but if somebody is found to have voted both ways, all but one of the ballots is cancelled retroactively (perhaps chosen at random). This requires recording in a database not only who's voted which way, but the contents of each person's ballot, which violates the principle of secret ballots. If such a database exists, somebody will eventually break into it and use it to reward or punish people for their votes.
5) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in without worrying about deduplication. After all deadlines have passed, anybody who voted both ways gets a visit from the police. This approach allows double-voters to actually affect the results of an election, as long as they're willing to face the consequences. It could mean a lot of police work and a lot of court cases: some people may have honestly forgotten that they sent a mail-in ballot, others may be victims of mistaken identity or fraud (somebody else sent a mail-in ballot in my name and I didn't know about it, so I voted in-person; why am I going to jail?). And it could depress voter turnout: if I can't remember whether I sent a mail-in ballot, I won't risk voting in-person.
6) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in, first-come-first-served. This requires a single counting sequence for both in-person and mail-in ballots, so you know that one has been counted before deciding whether to count the other, and this makes parallel counting more difficult, although not impossible, if you have good communication lines. (Many sparsely-populated, rural parts of the country don't have good communication lines, and a place that normally has good communication lines could be impaired by a natural or man-made disaster.) You would still want to follow up with voters who seem to have voted both ways, to detect cases like the above (somebody else sent a mail-in ballot in my name and I didn't know about it, so my legitimate vote wasn't counted), but there's no way to fix a case like that without violating ballot secrecy.
7) Reduce the problem by eliminating either in-person or mail-in voting. If you allow mail-in voting, you still have some of the same issues as above with detecting multiple mail-in ballots from the same voter.
I'm probably missing some possibilities or some considerations, having never worked as an election official.
For every ballot, several things have to happen in some order: verify that the voter is authorized to vote, verify that the voter hasn't already voted in this election, record that the voter has voted in this election, and count the contents of the ballot. At an in-person polling station with paper ballots, the first two steps are normally done by an election official at a desk, who then hands the voter a ballot to fill out and (I guess) records the voter as having voted. Counting the contents happens a few minutes later (for machine-scanned ballots) or a few hours later (for hand-counted ballots).
The problem is people voting multiple times -- one or more by-mail and one or more in-person. This appears to be an extremely rare phenomenon today, but we'd like to keep it that way, and if there's an easy way to vote multiple times without getting caught, people will do it. So there has to be some rule telling election officials what to do if somebody tries to vote both ways. There are several possibilities.
1) Mail-in ballots take priority over in-person ballots. If somebody has already sent in a ballot by mail and then shows up at a polling place in person, that person shouldn't be given an in-person ballot. This requires that we have a complete list of who sent mail-in ballots before in-person voting starts: the deadline for receiving ballots by mail has to be before the start of in-person voting. If a state also allows a week or two of in-person voting before Election Day, as many do, that means mail-in ballots have to be mailed several weeks before Election Day in order to be counted. Many people and states consider that an unreasonably early deadline.
2) Mail-in ballots take priority over in-person ballots, but anybody who's requested and been sent a mail-in ballot and then shows up at a polling place in person gets a provisional ballot which won't be counted until the state has a complete list of who sent in mail-in ballots so it can decide which provisional ballots to reject. If a state has a high rate of mail-in ballot requests, this could mean a lot of provisional ballots that can't be opened and scanned until after the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. If that deadline is Election Day (as the editorial recommends), or shortly before, all the mail-in ballots can be counted as they come in and reported on or shortly after Election Day, but in-person ballots may take a while afterwards. In the extreme case that a state automatically sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters, then all in-person votes become provisional and can't start being opened and counted until after the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots. This approach could make good sense if there were very few or no in-person votes.
3) In-person ballots take priority over mail-in ballots. This requires that we have a complete list of who voted in-person before we start opening mail-in ballots, so we know which mail-in ballots to reject, which means we can't even start counting mail-in ballots until the polls close on Election Day, leading to long delays in reporting results as is happening in California right now. This approach made sense when very few ballots were mail-in, but it makes less sense now.
4) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in, but if somebody is found to have voted both ways, all but one of the ballots is cancelled retroactively (perhaps chosen at random). This requires recording in a database not only who's voted which way, but the contents of each person's ballot, which violates the principle of secret ballots. If such a database exists, somebody will eventually break into it and use it to reward or punish people for their votes.
5) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in without worrying about deduplication. After all deadlines have passed, anybody who voted both ways gets a visit from the police. This approach allows double-voters to actually affect the results of an election, as long as they're willing to face the consequences. It could mean a lot of police work and a lot of court cases: some people may have honestly forgotten that they sent a mail-in ballot, others may be victims of mistaken identity or fraud (somebody else sent a mail-in ballot in my name and I didn't know about it, so I voted in-person; why am I going to jail?). And it could depress voter turnout: if I can't remember whether I sent a mail-in ballot, I won't risk voting in-person.
6) In-person and mail-in ballots are both counted as they come in, first-come-first-served. This requires a single counting sequence for both in-person and mail-in ballots, so you know that one has been counted before deciding whether to count the other, and this makes parallel counting more difficult, although not impossible, if you have good communication lines. (Many sparsely-populated, rural parts of the country don't have good communication lines, and a place that normally has good communication lines could be impaired by a natural or man-made disaster.) You would still want to follow up with voters who seem to have voted both ways, to detect cases like the above (somebody else sent a mail-in ballot in my name and I didn't know about it, so my legitimate vote wasn't counted), but there's no way to fix a case like that without violating ballot secrecy.
7) Reduce the problem by eliminating either in-person or mail-in voting. If you allow mail-in voting, you still have some of the same issues as above with detecting multiple mail-in ballots from the same voter.
I'm probably missing some possibilities or some considerations, having never worked as an election official.
