First, though, Georgia is a mess, and Florida is Florida. Florida is what banana republics and half-assed pseudo-democracies around the world laugh at and point to as a way to say, "don't look at us! Get your own house in order!" In my douche-y, hipster way, I proudly proclaim my disinterest in television, but there is a good show right now. It's called The Good Place. If you don't know it, I won't spoil anything for you, because it takes a lot of weird turns, but there was a great scene in a recent episode in which a very wealthy woman tries to marry a sleazy idiot from Jacksonville, Florida, amid many jokes about the idiocy of Florida. Her goal is to transfer money to him. The banker says that he is supposed to trip a silent alarm if anyone from Florida even enters the bank.
Florida.
Anyway, the Florida and Georgia elections were a mess, and so were the recounts. Read Rick Hasen for the details.
Now, so what? Here's the sort-of so-what. How confident are you that, for example, Kemp won fair in square, or that Scott or DeSantis won fair in square?
I'm going to rephrase the question. What does it take to get the wrong result, on the basis of screwy vote counts? There are four components: bad election administration, human error at the level of the voter, error at the level of the vote count, and closeness of the election. Let's go through them, shall we?
Bad election administration. Remember how people from Florida aren't allowed into banks in that show, The Good Place? They also shouldn't be allowed to run elections. Nor, obviously, should anyone running for office be allowed to run the election for their own campaign, but Kemp's a shitbag. There are a lot of elements to bad election administration, such as bad ballot design, inability to manage polling places, and basically, anything that Florida ever does. Some bad administration is intentional, like closing polling places in predominantly African-American areas to make voting difficult, purging voting rolls, etc., but that's malicious election administration rather than stupid election administration. Different forms of badness.
Next, one of the biggest problems with the act of voting is that it is performed by these pesky, little apes known as "humans." I dislike these things. They're always doing stupid things like listening to bad music instead of jazz, bleating about "sports," and voting for pussy-grabbing con men. And many of them bathe with insufficient frequency. They should keep their paws off me. Filling out a ballot is not actually that difficult. Even a badly designed ballot isn't that hard, if you pay even the slightest amount of attention, but most humans are remarkably stupid. Insert George Carlin quote here. No, you annoying, little human, when you put a mark in the box with an arrow from Pat Buchanan's name, you are voting for Pat Buchanan, not Al Gore. And now, ManBearPig is rampaging around the country. Apologize to Al Gore. Damned humans. (Does anyone keep up with South Park anymore? See? More tv references! I'm like, connected to pop culture, or something.)
Then there's the issue of human error in vote-counting. For some reason, a lot of people have this notion that a human hand recount of ballots is more trustworthy than a machine count. Have you seen this country's math test scores? Or hell, the debt levels of our population? These people can't fucking add. Have you ever counted a large sum by hand? You will get different counts because you will make errors. Humans make mistakes. When I add up points from exams, I add up the points for each exam three times to make sure I get the same total each time because I am terrified of making a mistake and getting caught on it by a student. That would suck. Machines will have variation based on, for example, whether or not the optical scan counts an incompletely-filled oval every time, but human hand recounts are not consistent either. Why do people trust hand recounts? I... don't get it.
I am being somewhat flippant here because there is logic to conducting a count under multiple methods and if a count comes out with the same winner every time, you can be more confident that you have the real winner. It's when they come out differently that you should worry, but people's trust in a hand recount just doesn't make sense once you understand the rate of human error in stuff like this.
Finally, electoral closeness. And this is where all of these observations interact with stuff I have written before. None of this really matters except when elections are close. Florida, for example, always has bad election administration. People are always stupid, and make mistakes at the polling place. There are always counting errors. You just never notice, except when elections are close.
Competitive elections, defined for my purposes in this blog post as elections in which the candidates' vote totals are close,* are elections in which all of the above factors interact to make it so that you can easily get the wrong result. Goo-goos ["good government" types] love competitive elections, but they want elections to get the right winner. Contradiction! Anyone arguing for more competitive elections is arguing for precisely the conditions that make wrong outcomes more likely, and that make this kind of stupid shit more likely.
On the other hand, think about congressional elections. Think about drawing districts in such a way that you have a bunch of homogeneously Democratic districts, and a bunch of homogeneously Republican districts. You'll still have shitty election administration, shitty ballot design, idiots going to the polling place, not following instructions, making mistakes, leading to counting errors, both human and machine, and none of that will lead to outcome errors. The right people will win. Democratic constituencies will be represented by Democrats, Republican constituencies will be represented by Republicans, and these kinds of narrow effects just won't matter because they won't be big enough to swing outcomes.
Close elections? That's why we have these problems. And to be blunt, that's part of why Florida has these problems. Florida is a close state. How many stupid people are there, proportionately, in Mississippi? Come on. Mississippi is way dumber than Florida. Those people can't fucking read. Florida has cities, and people in cities know how to read. Yeah, I'm stereotyping, but fuck off. What's Cindy Hyde-Smith gonna do? Come and lynch me? Zing! The difference? No Democrat has a chance in Mississippi. So, whatever problems occur won't affect outcomes. You can have shitty ballot designs, shitty election administration, vote counting errors, and all of that. It could be worse than Florida, and it just wouldn't matter because they're going to elect strange fruit-enthusiasts like Cindy Hyde-Smith regardless.
Sick of election administration problems, ballot counting issues, and all of that? Competitive elections are a big part of the problem.
*In my first book, Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections, I wrote about how absurdly many definitions there are of the term, "competitive election."