Jeremy Stahl for Slate:
On Thursday, Florida Sen. Rick Scott proposed a bill that would change election laws with less than six weeks to go until November’s election, causing complete mayhem and ensuring that untold number of otherwise valid votes would not be counted. Scott’s proposal is simple and entirely unworkable. His Help America Vote Act of 2020 would require that mail-in ballots be counted within 24 hours of when voting closes on election day. Scott’s proposed legislation would also prevent mail-in ballots received prior to election day from being processed and counted until the morning of Nov. 3, contradicting state election statutes across the country including one that he signed when he was governor of Florida. Basically, the bill would move back the date by which votes can start to be counted and move up the date by which the count must end. This would limit the count to a single less-than 48-hour window, shortening the count in some cases by weeks. In Scott’s own home state of Florida, as one example, votes can start to be counted up to 22 days before election day. In Colorado, which does all mail-in voting, they can be processed as soon as they are received and counted 15 days before election day. Under Scott’s law, those votes would all have to begin to be counted on election day itself. Any votes that did not get counted simply would not count.
Scott, who has opposed providing funding for the administration of the election in COVID-19 relief bills, does not include in his bill any federal money that would help states meet this new deadline. Without funding to implement such an immediate revamp of election administration across the country, the deadline would be impossible to meet for most states. Further, the proposal would reject untold absentee ballots cast legally by election day but arriving afterwards.
“Not only is counting all the ballots in 24 hours impossible in many places, [in] lots of places ballots can arrive days after election day to count,” UC Irvine School of Law professor and occasional Slate contributor Richard Hasen told me.
Indeed, late-arriving absentee military ballots in Florida were a major point of contention during the contested presidential election of 2000, with Republicans at the time supporting the idea that late ballots be counted.