Elon Musk can land a rocket booster on the launch tower minutes after liftoff, but swing states can’t count votes in a timely manner.

Unlike retrieving a rocket booster, counting votes is not complicated and does not require advanced engineering.

We’ve been able to do this quickly and accurately throughout our history, but this is the moment – ​​as Donald Trump casts doubt on any outcome he doesn’t like and trust in our institutions is weak – that we have hindered our ability to accomplish this simple task.

We no longer have an election night; we have election days. In 2020, the general election took place on Tuesday, November 3, but most media outlets did not call it until Saturday, November 7.

This kind of delay is a national embarrassment. This creates uncertainty and breeds distrust, and is also completely unnecessary.

The culprit is early voting, or the way some states treat — or more accurately, don’t treat — early voting. Only in government is it possible for people to do something well in advance and end up delaying everything, through easily fixable bureaucratic incompetence.

Think about Pennsylvania. It adopted no-excuse absentee voting in 2019 without making the necessary changes to count those ballots in a timely manner.

In their wisdom, Pennsylvania officials don’t allow election workers to begin processing early and absentee voting until 7 a.m. on Election Day, ensuring they won’t be able to keep up with it. (Something else important happens on Election Day – yes, you guessed it, the administration of an election.)

There are many steps involved in pre-canvassing absentee and mail-in ballots, from confirming that the outer envelopes are signed and dated, to opening the outer and inner envelopes, to unfolding the ballot himself.

Most states allow this work before Election Day because it’s the rational thing to do.

Pennsylvania lawmakers are in a partisan deadlock over whether and how to do the same. Republicans wanted a voter ID requirement as part of a change in the process, while Democrats opposed the provision. So the Keystone State will once again conduct vote counting in an absurd manner that will not serve the nation.

(Some Republicans worry that pre-canvassing will let Democrats know how many fraudulent votes they need to produce to win. Pre-canvassing does not, however, involve the actual tabulation of ballots, and there is no evidence that it encouraged widespread fraud in other states where it is the norm.)

It would be one thing if we didn’t know the results in Alabama or Massachusetts, red or dark blue states, on election night. But because Pennsylvania, as well as Wisconsin and Arizona, are likely to have delays, we’re talking about the most sensitive and important states on the map.

A former swing state, Florida, provides a model. This is a massive early vote, but a quick count. Counties across the state conduct early voting before Election Day. It helps that the state does not allow ballots arriving after 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, thus avoiding the problems of states that foolishly allow post-election polls.

California is the opposite of Florida in this area as in many others. The Golden State has made a habit of inundating itself with mail-in votes. He still hadn’t counted a third of his ballots after Election Day 2020, and that continued for weeks. This year, ballots arriving up to a week after the election will be considered valid. One Democratic lawmaker told the AP that the state doesn’t need to appeal to “a society that wants instant gratification,” as if there’s anything wrong with expecting quick, reliable election results.

It may seem facetious to say that Elon Musk will manage to send a rocket to Mars before states figure out how to eliminate intolerable delays in vote counting, but since Musk hopes to do so in just a few years, it is almost certainly TRUE. .

Rich Lowry is a writer for King Features Syndicate.