I don't understand why there's so much delay with mail-in ballots. Many countries use them, and in none of them do they take anywhere near as long to count as they do in the US. What's so special with US mail-in ballots that it takes so long to count them?

It's because it's being marketed as a replacement for in-person voting rather than a limited option for special exceptions. Plus, mass amounts of mail-in ballots have been known to be susceptible to... "tampering" by various political groups... And its not like its impossible to fix either. If both Florida and Georiga can count their votes in a matter of hours, what's Arizona or Nevada's excuse?

That's true for for many other countries, too, so it can't be just that.

For context, in the last election here in Luxembourg over one third of the ballots were mailed in and yet the evening of the day the elections were being hold almost all ballots had been counted already.

Also, how are the mail-in ballots more easy to tamper with in the US?

Well there have been well documented cases in more recent elections of dozens of ballots with the names of dead people on them somehow voting. There's also been instances of tens of thousands of ballots somehow arriving all at once at 1 am when most people were asleep, as well as voting centers blocking the windows of the counting rooms for no explainable reason. It's not the fact that mail-in ballots themselves are the problem. It's the way in which they're implemented here in the US that makes a lot of people lose trust in our voting process. For some reason, the US makes it far too easy for corrupt political groups to meddle with the process, and its a large reason why our elections lately have been such dumpster fires.

And its not just mail-ins either. There was a recent incident in Arizona where 20% of the voting machines in Maricopa county somehow malfunctioned all at once. We are now on Day 6, and we still don't know who the next governor of that state will be. That's not just embarrassing, that's unacceptable.

I would be curious what counts as"well documented" because I've never seen any of the claims from your first paragraph substantiated. 

As for Arizona's vote counting, my understanding is that about a 10 to 15 day delay for final vote tallies has been pretty standard for Arizona for the past couple decades. The reason some states are so much faster is that they're allowed to actually open up and count mail-in votes before the day of the election. But some legislators are so concerned about the things that they made up in the first paragraph that now you're not allowed to. 

Waiting has always been a thing.

Every state legally has it set so that they have something like 1 to 3 weeks to certify elections. Doesn't matter if it's Texas or California. They need that time to count millions of ballots (and perhaps count and recount ballots), they need that time to verify voter registration.

In short, the process to vote is a lot busier than just counting through a stack of papers.

How long it takes to certify an election in each state.

None of these states did that.

The reason why some states were called sooner, is because the winner got a huge margin of the vote. It is a lot easier for an election to be called when (blank) has 70% of the vote, and there's no way for the other person to catch up.

On the other hand, when these vote counts are separated by only 100's of votes, you kind of need to count every vote before you have the actual result. 

That's the difference between Florida,Georgia and Arizona/Nevada. It's not because they're faster at counting, it's because the elections are a lot closer in those states. 

Most of the time, when "dead people voted", it is not dead people voted. It's usually because someone happened to have the same name as a dead person. 

John and Mary Smith decided to name their son after John. So they have John Smith Sr. and John Smith Jr. So John Smith Jr voted a couple weeks after John Smith Sr passed away. Or sometimes Mary Smith, decides to write her name as "Mrs. John Smith" because that's how they did it 50 years ago and she's not changing now.

Or very rarely, someone casts an absentee ballot, and then they die a day before the election time. 

I can't find anything about this. I'm going to make some assumptions here, especially since you haven't provided any evidence for your claim.

But I'm assuming what actually happened is that people put mail in their mailbox during the day. Some delivery person started delivering mail and picking up mail later in the day, got back to the distribution center at midnight or something, and then dropped them off at the vote counting place at 1am. Nothing particularly weird about that. 

Also voting center blocking windows for no explainable reason? 

Some of the ballot counters are dealing with personal information. That at the very least would include names, addresses and birthdates of people, because they have to verify voter registration. Some states may ask for more information besides that.

This is more of a personal thing, but having a huge crowd of people banging at a window is not a fun time to work. It's a distraction and would lead many people to doing worse work. 

Propaganda also makes it easy to make people lose trust in the system.

A lot of people are pretty talented at making normal boring events (like protecting confidential information) sound sinister. 

There was an issue with some printer settings.

My understanding of the claim about thousands of ballots in the middle of the night actually has more to do with how the ballots were tallied more so than actual ballots arriving at night. Basically during the 2020 election there was some point where a number of votes were tallied in the middle of the night and went up. Quick Google indicates from AP News that this is due to how Wisconsin tallies votes where all the votes have to be figured out before any are put online for a given area. Milwaukee finished their vote counting at 3:00 a.m. and that's when they put up the results. If it's not that it's about a video seeming to show votes arriving in Detroit after the 8:00 p.m. deadline but this is again misunderstood. The 8:00 p.m. deadline is for people to cast their ballot, not for those ballots to be delivered or counted. This was again something I found through AP News. 

I'm petty enough I'd absolutely lean into these fears. The republicans spent two years screaming "ELECTION STOLEN" and what happened? Republicans lost faith in voting.
If you spent 2 years telling me the election is stolen but can't tell me how they stole it - that doesn't anger me, it makes me scared.

It means "the enemy" found a way to steal an entire countries election and can't be caught. There is either no evidence or they own every single judge and lawyer in the entire country. If someone is so powerful they can steal an election and you never know how - I'd immediately think "then why would I vote?".

Why would I (as a generic average third party person) take time off work (or after a long day of work) get in a long line of people to vote on things if my vote will never matter because this mystery super power can just steal any election.

Step 1) Scream election was stolen.

Step 2) Wait why did no one vote?!?!

Step 3) Profit.

I don't think they're inherantly slow, because states allow early voting mail-in weeks before the deadline.
But Republican-controlled legislatures in key states have declined on allowing counting to start earlier. Leading to several states having to count the mail-in ballots late or last, even though they came in weeks before the election day votes did.

How Republicans have prevented mail ballots from being counted earlier - The Washington Post

(List is based on 2020 election)

^Even though it says Before Election Day, for some states like Michigan that means November 2, only one day before election day 2020.

This 'problem' is primarily the GOP's own creation. It's a deliberate tactic because more democratic voters have traditionally used mail-in. And after Covid that was only going to grow.
So counting in-person first, it will look like the GOP candidate is in a big lead. And then days after voting closed, the democratic candidate makes a 'miraculous' comeback through mail-in votes, even though the vast majority those votes were in weeks before the in-person votes, and they were just sitting on them doing nothing.
There are some votes that legitimately arrive late, as long as they've been stamped before election day ended. But those should not cause a notable delay unless you've been building up a huge backlog of votes that you chose not to count over the course of several weeks, as some states intentionally do.
So the GOP suggest that there's something fishy going on with mail-in votes, and their voterbase who are not aware of these late-counting laws, will believe it.

And nothing has really changed about Covid, even though we like to pretend otherwise, instead of everyone wearing masks for 3-4 months to erradicate it. Mail-in is especially important for people with pre existing conditions, immune deficiency or other conditions that makes it difficult for them to attend in person, especially when crowded.

There's no evidence of large scale voting fraud in USA, whether mail-in or in-person is concerned. 
Even Trump's DOJ concluded as much: Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud | AP News

Could you provide a link regarding the 'dozens of dead people voting' claim you made?
That does sound reasonable, as it's on a smaller scale, but I've also seen some false claims made about this before.

And what country does all the voting in one day?
Not in my country (Sweden), where early voting begins 3 weeks before election day.
Sätt att rösta | Valmyndigheten

What would be the benefit of needing to vote on one single day? I can only see problems with vote counters being overwhelmed by millions of votes at once. If you want to avoid delaying the results, this is the exact opposite of what you should suggest.

Speaking of which, here's a big suggestion.
Make election day befall on a weekend, or otherwise make it a national holiday. As it is in most countries.



Why is it on a Tuesday in USA?
They're making it deliberately difficult for working people to vote in person.
And on that note, every state should allow fellons to vote, which is also the case in most countries. Otherwise, police and prisons become a voting suppression tool.

I was thinking about this, but I wasn't sure if he truly meant that ballots got dropped off, or they were added to the total at 1 am. So I wanted to lean into mailing possibly being later in the day, even though that is probably less true than counting often happening late at night. 

Not to mention, it makes sense to wait until you have a batch to add to the total count instead of incrementing as time goes on. 

I want to add, that a lot of these questions have innocuous answers or innocuous possible answers that get ignored in favor of more sinister possibilities.

If there were technical problems with the printers or the tabulators or etc, in a hard Republican district, I doubt we would hear about them. But hey, if it happens somewhere in a district that is more split, somehow that seems representative of there being election security issues.