Every election season, voters in California submit their ballots and then find out several weeks later who won. No one likes it. Republicans find it suspicious, Democrats worry it hurts trust in elections, and voters are just impatient.
Is it so hard for elections to be run cheaply, accurately, and quickly?
Well, according to Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, it’s actually impossible.
“You can’t have all three. You have to pick two,” he said in a conversation with The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini. “Accuracy is always going to be the priority. So you’re going to choose between fast and low-cost, right? If you want fast, there’s going to be a cost to it.”
For instance, Florida is one of the fastest states in the nation in counting votes (roughly 99% within hours) and it also spends the most ($15 per voter). California’s big problem is that over 80% of its ballots come in by mail, which requires a human to verify the ballot signature against the voter’s registration record.
Nevada has demonstrated significant innovation in vote-counting to help speed things up. Lakshya and Zachary were both impressed by the dashboard Nevada recently released, which shows how many voters are turning out in every county in near real time, updating every six minutes.
“It’s become the norm. The fact that a person could know where their pizza is when they order it on an app to the time it arrives at their door, that is more information than they knew about their ballot at one time,” Aguilar said. “We need to make sure that we had that information available to voters.”
Check out the full conversation above to hear about how Nevada has modernized its elections and how Trump’s election interference could unwind that progress.
