Election Day 2022: Why the US Counts Ballots So Slowly

It takes a lot of time to count ballots in US elections. What’s more, the speed at which votes are counted varies from state to state and county to county, as different jurisdictions use different methods to reach a final count.

All of this is standard operating procedure and by itself not even a mild indication of irregularity, let alone fraud.

Why it’s the case is less well understood. The US is unusually slow at confirming winners; the recent runoff presidential election in Brazil had a full vote count available a few hours after the polls closed. In the US, by contrast, no state will have a final count on Tuesday night. Some states will have large fractions of their overall totals unavailable for days and won’t be able to call close races for a week or two.

Much of the slow count is a function of the basic structure of US elections. American voters typically encounter long ballots featuring elections from school boards to the US Senate. In many other countries, voters might see only one item on the ballot — typically, the local candidates facing off for a seat in parliament, although there are plenty of variations. The US simply holds far more elections for far more positions than most other democracies.

On Tuesday every state will hold US House elections, about two-thirds will hold US Senate elections, 1 most will hold state legislative elections with many voters choosing representatives in two chambers; 36 have gubernatorial elections accompanied by up to half a dozen or more statewide executive offices to fill; and then there are all sorts of local offices, state and local judicial elections and state and local ballot measures, all depending on the state, county, city and other government bodies. Some voters may have only a dozen or so contests; others may face more than 50.

That makes tabulating the ballots a fairly complex operation. Machines can do it quickly, but machines are expensive, so in some cases the ballots have to be transferred from the polling place to the machines. That takes time, especially since those ballots must be carefully secured in order to, yes, prevent any possibility of funny business.

The US also has an unusually decentralized election administration. Decentralization means that each state and even each county (or whichever authority is responsible) has to choose how much to spend on rapidly counting ballots when there are competing priorities just within election administration, let alone all the other things states and local governments do. It isn’t surprising that as a result, some are quicker and some are slower. 2

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