Counting the votes? Here (really) is bipartisan consensus
As the election nears, we can fret about all the ways that vote-counts can go wrong. Or we can marvel that they rarely do.
“Think about what a miracle an election is,” said David Becker, head of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “We count 160 million pieces of paper” and do it “exceptionally fast.”
And it’s done in a wildly decentralized way. “We practice a fierce federalism,” said Ralph Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer for 40 years.
Each state sets its own rules, often leaving room for local variations. The result, Becker said, is “a system of 10,000 different jurisdictions and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.”
They were talking to the Television Critics Association about “Counting the Vote,” a Margaret Hoover (shown here) film that airs Aug. 27 on PBS. And this was a truly bi-partisan collection. Read more…