VICTOR JOECKS: Election results should be known election night

Political season used to end the evening of Election Day or perhaps very early the next morning. People voted. Officials counted the ballots. Everyone learned what happened within a few hours. That was a good thing. It limited opportunities for fraud, such as election officials finding ballots after the fact. It also puts everyone on the same page when it comes to results. Given social media and the plethora of news sources, that’s especially important.

But quick results are rarer these days. The Review-Journal decided not delay print deadlines for Nevada this election. The reason was simple. It’s unlikely the delay would allow the paper to publish meaningful results.

It’s worse around the country. “Why midterms ‘election night’ will be more like ‘election week,’” ABC News reported Tuesday. America put a man on the moon more than five decades ago. Now, officials need days, instead of hours, to count votes. At least you can’t blame this on the disastrous math education provided by Nevada’s public schools. The culprit is the expansion of mail ballots.

Nevada now sends a mail ballot to every registered voter. The law provides that officials can count a ballot received after Election Day. Those ballots must be postmarked before or on Election Day and received by this Saturday. Worse, if a ballot is received by Friday and has a postmark where the date “cannot be determined,” it’s counted.

Nevada does do some things right. It allows county election officials to process and count ballots before Election Day. Nevada waits to release tabulations until the last person in line has voted. That’s annoying, but there’s a good reason for it. You don’t want to discourage voters because results from another part of the state make them believe a major race is over.

Universal mail ballots are a mistake. They’re ripe for fraud and voter intimidation. Signature verification is a joke, too. But if Nevada is going to have them, the state should require ballots to be received by Election Day or that ballots be postmarked by the end of early voting.

At least Nevada keeps counting ballots and releasing information. Clackamas County, Oregon’s third-biggest, said it will release results just after 8 p.m. Tuesday. Its next update will come at Wednesday at 6 p.m. Pennsylvania officials have warned that it’ll take days to determine the winner of close races. They can’t process and count mail ballots until Election Day. Michigan officials have also warned of delays because of a surge in absentee voters.

This makes election officials look incompetent. In places such as Maricopa County, Arizona, they don’t need any help.

If someone wanted to erode civic trust, delays like this would be a pretty good place to start. Even if there isn’t fraud, the information vacuum will often be filled with conspiracy theories.

There are deep political divides in America. People should at least come out of election night unified in their knowledge of the results. Election Day shouldn’t be election week.

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.