This year Florida conspicuously achieved a prompt count, while also allowing no-excuse mail voting to all voters, in contrast to various other states which took a week or more to resolve close races, typically with large volumes of mail ballots remaining to be counted after Election Day.

The Florida approach involves a variety of different practices, including adoption of strong technology, training and funding of election workers and offices, and more. One of its key aims is to complete the pre-processing of mail ballots in advance, so that personnel can as much as possible turn their full attention to the in-person vote on Election Day. Pre-processing involves the sequence of steps such as reading bar codes, checking dates and signatures, identifying which ballots might be subject to challenge or “cure” based on these factors, and so forth – everything short of actually getting a count of the resulting votes.

Achieving these efficiencies does not come without trade-offs, and it’s worth identifying what some of these trade-offs are.