Counting Votes Is Not Cheating

Although Election Day is finally over, the campaigns and bitter fights seem to be never-ending. California has once again become a favorite punching bag for President Donald Trump and many of his allies and supporters. Apparently, the latest assertion is that our elections are corrupt because it takes us a while to count more than 20 million ballots. And as we saw in his interview on “60 Minutes” that ended abruptly, he believes that anyone who challenges his narrative must also be corrupt. 

Forgive me if I am less than alarmed.

After spending 15 years administering elections in one of Los Angeles County’s largest cities, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly of our elections processes. I’ve learned that many things can go wrong. Taking the time to count lawful votes isn’t one of them.

Such claims might carry more weight were they not coming from someone with a rather elastic understanding of facts and reality. But this debate is larger than our President. We are left to wonder whether Americans still possess the patience and confidence necessary to sustain our democratic institutions and whether we understand that the purpose of elections is not speed, but legitimacy.

Lost amid the rhetoric is the extraordinary scale of what California actually undertakes every election cycle. Los Angeles County alone has more registered voters than the total populations of 41 states. Millions of ballots must be processed and verified. Tens of thousands of temporary workers are mobilized. Signature verification, provisional ballots, cure procedures, audits, canvassing requirements and certification deadlines all unfold within a legal framework that itself seems to change every few years. Over the last decade, election officials have adapted to expanded vote-by-mail, same-day registration, ballot tracking technologies, heightened cybersecurity concerns, and a host of legislative reforms. Like every large enterprise, the system is imperfect. But imperfect does not mean illegitimate.

As Glendale’s former elections official, I can tell you that election workers are not political operatives. They are public servants. Republicans, Democrats and Independents work side by side, often under extraordinary pressure and with little public recognition, to ensure that every lawful vote is counted. Yet increasingly, the process itself has become the target. Distrust in elections has evolved into a political strategy, particularly on the right where allegations of widespread fraud and stolen elections have become recurring articles of faith despite repeated audits, court rulings and the inability of proponents to produce evidence commensurate with their extraordinary claims.

That should concern conservatives every bit as much as liberals.

History teaches us that democracies rarely collapse because citizens demand too much integrity. More often, they falter because citizens lose faith in institutions altogether. The Republican Party would be well to take note of this but it seems more intent on moving the goal posts, as evidenced by the current Supreme Court case of Watsoon v. Republican National Committee (RNC). 

The RNC is suing Mississippi’s top elections official over mail-in-ballots.  Ironically, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson is hardly some anti-Trump crusader. He is a Republican who has advocated for voter identification laws and consistently supported measures intended to strengthen confidence in elections. In other words, no one is inviting Michael Watson to keynote the California Democratic Convention.

Yet the legal theory advanced by the Republican National Committee would require states to discard ballots cast by eligible citizens who followed every rule and mailed their ballots on time merely because those ballots arrived after Election Day due to delays beyond the voters’ control.

No serious person is arguing that citizens should be allowed to vote after Election Day. The question is whether people who voted on time should lose their voice because a truck broke down, bad weather delayed the mail or military postal channels overseas moved slower than expected. Nearly 30 states have concluded that they should not. Such laws recognize a simple principle: Elections are supposed to measure the actions of voters, not the speed of the postal service.

The same misunderstanding was echoed recently by Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton who stated that election results should be final on Election Day and that “that’s it.” It is a catchy slogan, but it reflects a remarkably sophomoric understanding of both federalism and democracy itself. States administer elections because different states confront different realities. California is not Idaho. Texas is not Rhode Island. And Los Angeles County, for that matter, is larger than most states.

We must remember that elections aren’t sporting events. There is no mercy rule. They are exercises in self-government … and self-government occasionally requires patience.

More importantly, elections do not exist for the convenience of cable news producers, social media influencers or candidates eager to declare victory before all the votes have been counted. They exist to ascertain the will of the people and that task requires accuracy above all else.

This push towards urgency isn’t new. We’ve been here before. The famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline became a national punchline because impatience got ahead of accuracy. Here in Californian many remember the 1982 gubernatorial race when many believed Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley had defeated Attorney General George Deukmejian only to see later-counted ballots reverse the outcome. Those were not failures of democracy. They were failures of impatience.

Americans have waited for election results throughout much of our history. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t checking his phone for returns and Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t doomscrolling social media. Somehow, the Republic survived. We can survive waiting a few extra days, too.

What is troubling today is not that vote counting takes time but that ordinary administrative procedures have become fodder for conspiracy theories. Signature verification is portrayed as corruption, ballot curing as fraud and deliberate counting as something suspicious.  

Can California do better? Absolutely. We can revisit laws governing ballot collection, continue modernizing procedures and speed up reporting where possible. Election administration should never be beyond criticism or improvement. But there is a world of difference between reforming a system and undermining it, just as there is a difference between healthy skepticism and cynical manipulation.

As our nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is worth remembering that true patriotism requires loyalty to principles and institutions, not personalities. The Founders pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor not so future Americans could place their faith in strongmen but so that we might preserve a constitutional republic.

I have more faith in my fellow citizens than many of our leaders seem to. Americans know the difference between a delayed result and a stolen election, and between reform and sabotage. They also understand that trust, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.

I hope our leaders focus on improving our processes without disenfranchising voters and recognize that strengthening confidence in democracy is far more important than undermining its institutions.

We do not count ballots to finish elections. We finish elections by counting ballots.

Speed has value. Finality has value. But legitimacy matters more. Elections exist for one reason and one reason only: to ensure that every eligible citizen who casts a lawful ballot on or before Election Day has that vote counted.

Nothing more. And certainly nothing less.

And despite what people may post online without bothering to fact-check, deep down most Americans still understand that getting it right matters more than getting it fast.

Ardy Kassakhian is the mayor of Glendale and teaches political science at Glendale Community College. He previously served for more than 15 years as the city clerk and an election official and has spent more than two decades in public service.