Since losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump has put forward a lot of ideas to change how America votes.
Some, like hand-counting all ballots, are nonstarters. Others, like restricting mail voting, have proven a tough sell in states where it’s popular, including Republican-leaning ones. And a handful have become mainstream Republican positions, including imposing stricter voter ID and requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Democrats have generally opposed those proposals, arguing that they would do more to make voting harder than to prevent the relatively rare cases of election fraud.
But one Trump proposal deserves a second look: speeding up election results.
Elections results often come in slowly because officials are verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, allowing more time for mail ballots sent by Election Day to arrive and giving voters whose ballots were initially rejected opportunities to fix the issue and have them counted. Those are important safeguards for both access and accuracy. But there are other ways to get faster results that don’t have those trade-offs.
Dismissing the goal of faster results carries its own risks. Polls show overwhelming support for faster election night results among both Democrats and Republicans. Research indicates that unexpectedly slow vote counts can undermine trust in the results. And there are ways to speed up results considerably without making it harder for people to cast their ballots and get them counted.
Trump demonstrated why faster counting matters.
Ironically, Trump himself demonstrated why faster counting matters.
Just hours after polls closed in 2020, he began casting doubt on incomplete returns, pointing to the normal shifts that occur as large batches of ballots are reported from different jurisdictions as supposed evidence the election was being stolen. He continued making similar claims as counting continued over the following days and has periodically raised the same suspicions during subsequent elections.
Faster reporting would not have prevented Trump’s false claims. But it would have shortened the period during which incomplete returns could be portrayed as suspicious.
Voters largely agree. In a pre-election survey in 2024, 92% of registered voters told the Pew Research Center that knowing who won within a day or two of the election was at least somewhat important, up 10 points from 2020. The increase was largest among Democratic voters, which suggests that concern about Trump’s election denial was a factor.
There is some research to back up that concern. A 2024 PNAS Nexus study involving nearly 10,000 Americans found that simply telling people that vote counting would take longer than expected led to significantly reduced trust in the results. Researchers found they could largely offset that effect by explaining in advance why counting might take time. But in today’s fragmented media environment, there is no guarantee that explanation will reach the people who most need to hear it.
Voter trust is more important than ever. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll from March found that 66% of Americans were confident that their local and state government would conduct a fair and accurate election, down 10 points from before the 2024 election.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to speed up counting without reducing access to the ballot.
The single biggest administrative reform to speed up results is simply allowing elections officials to begin processing ballots before Election Day. In states that allow it, staffers can begin the time-consuming process of verifying signatures, checking voter eligibility, opening outer envelopes and sorting ballots days or even weeks before the election. By the time voting ends, the ballots are ready to be scanned immediately instead of sitting unopened in boxes waiting for workers to begin.
Some states go even further, allowing ballots to be scanned and tabulated before Election Day while keeping the results encrypted and inaccessible until the polls close. Florida, one of the nation’s fastest-counting states, follows this approach, enabling election officials to report nearly complete unofficial results within hours of polls closing.
Still, seven states — including heavily Democratic Illinois and solidly Republican Mississippi — do not allow ballots to be scanned until after the polls close, while 10 others prohibit scanning until Election Day morning. That means election workers in those states simply begin later.
Another simple solution is paying for more high-speed ballot scanners. Many counties have to buy the equipment themselves, making it difficult to justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on machines that would save only a few hours every other November. But for states — or the federal government — that investment would be relatively modest. The same is true of providing temporary workers to help process ballots during election season.
None of those reforms would make it harder for anyone to vote or have their ballot counted.
Beyond those relatively noncontroversial changes, there are reforms that involve genuine tradeoffs. One is requiring ballots to arrive by Election Day rather than allowing them to arrive later if they were mailed on time. States have to balance the benefit of getting results sooner against the risk that postal delays could disenfranchise some voters, particularly members of the military and Americans living overseas.
Democrats could also use the demand for faster results to push back on Trump’s other proposals.
Democrats could also use the demand for faster results to push back on Trump’s other election proposals. His call to replace ballot scanners with hand-counting would almost certainly make election-night reporting slower. So would his proposal to end most forms of early voting, which lets election officials spread the workload over weeks instead of one day and, in many states, begin processing ballots before Election Day.
Debates over how elections should be run have increasingly broken along partisan lines, and Trump has intensified those divisions, making bipartisan agreement difficult, if not impossible. But faster election results remain one of the few election reforms that voters across the political spectrum support. Lawmakers should seize that rare area of agreement.
For years, Republicans have largely treated slow election results as evidence that something is wrong, while Democrats have mostly defended the status quo by explaining why counting takes time. Both sides have missed an opportunity.
Americans deserve elections that are both accurate and fast. The country shouldn’t pursue faster results because Trump demanded them. It should pursue them because voters have every right to expect an election system that delivers trustworthy answers as quickly as possible.
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