Why does the vote count take so long for states …

Count the votes that will decide who will be the president of United States Over the next four years, it turned into an administrative nightmare that can last over 48 hours for several reasons: County-by-county scrutiny, the increase in postal ballots due to the pandemic and the The electoral college, which does not take into account the simplest measure of the total at the national level.

The press witnessed the huge logistics counting operation in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania on Wednesday: Hundreds of sealed black cases with thousands of votes processed by mail were piling up in an industrial warehouse, waiting for be prepared manually for counting.

The counting process in the United States, the fourth largest country on the planet, tends to be slower than in other developed countries and this year it has been affected by the sharp increase in postal and paper votes (deposited in outdoor mailboxes or in polling stations) due to the covid-19 pandemic because this type of ballot requires manipulation tedious and slow manual.

In large warehouses like the one at the Congress Center in Philadelphia, Pa., Dozens of county officials have spent the past two days opening each of the two envelopes in which Pennsylvania’s ballots were sent this year, flattening them. ballots. and feed the machines that automatically scan and record the vote.

This county-based centralized process was repeated in Maricopa, Arizona, the second largest electoral jurisdiction in the United States, where election officials still process 1.2 million ballots, including those cast on election day that have been completed on paper with marker and not digitally as elsewhere in the country.

The count in counties such as Allegheny, Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Maricopa or Fulton (Georgia) is followed closely across the country, because, because they are the most populous, they will decide whether the electoral votes of their respective states They will reward either the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, or the president, Donald Trump.

The popular vote does not decide

The inability to project an election winner without deciding on certain key states (most of which are approaching or exceeding 90% of the vote today) is due to the Electoral College system, which assigns a set number of delegates to the winner of the vote. ‘election. popular vote in every state.

While Biden comfortably leads the popular vote recount, this measure does not serve to project the election winner without ending the tally in every corner of the country and therefore makes early certainty of who will be the winner impossible.

In other developed countries, there are also calculations that somehow take into account the distribution of the population, but once the count data starts to arrive, it is aggregated at the national level and the photo, both in a presidential democracy, as a parliamentarian, begins to emerge rapidly.

Additionally, in other countries with stable and modern democracies, election day is held on a public holiday (usually a Sunday), so the influx of ballot boxes is easier, while in the United States, which this year have increased the days of Advance in-person voting due to the pandemic still takes place on the first Tuesday in November.

The incomplete role of the polling station

US officials assume that electoral decentralization and the federated independence of each state in administering the recount are the foundations of the health of America’s democracy.

However, such decentralization is not as effective when control is centralized over its vast territories.

Unlike what is done in Spain, France or Argentina, where each electoral college not only collects the vote, but also the count and sends a first tabulation, in the United States, schools only monitor the identification and the ‘access to the voting booth. vote and not count the votes.

Ballots filled in with a marker and paper are sent to a county counting center, where the votes also arrive by mail and the ballots are counted; a process that can also be seen in person, by webcam and by party prosecutors.

This process wouldn’t be a big deal in a normal year, as much of the enforcement of this right is done in digital booths connected to data centers, but this year paper voting has taken on a special role with 64 million votes received by mail before November 3.

“It takes time for counties to process so many missing votes,” said Georgia voting system setup manager Gabriel Sterling, who stressed that speed prevails over thoroughness.

In addition, the people responsible for carrying out checks are sometimes retirees, who receive the minimum wage. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2018, around 60% of those workers were over 61 and a quarter were over 71.

Despite the commendable work, long hours and meticulous work of the poll workers, fatigue is taking its toll and, as Sterling reminded today, some delays are due to the fact that in some counties they forgot to d ‘press the button to “download” the data.

* EFE.