S01E07 Bill Cowles, Politics of Counting Votes

November 15, 2020 – U.S. states must adopt uniform election laws on when to count ballots to avoid the mayhem of the recent presidential election, a veteran elections supervisor said Sunday.

            Bill Cowles, supervisor of elections for Orange County, Florida, and a former member of the Federal Elections Commission Board of Advisors, said Florida is now the model for tabulating elections due to changes made after the historic Bush-Gore presidential election debacle of 2000.

            Florida now requires paper ballots be collected for recounts, avoiding the state’s hanging chad punch card ballot embarrassment of the 2000 race, Cowles said on the weekly Retail Politics Podcast with Gerry Shields.

            Florida now allows election supervisors to count ballots 26 days before the election to accelerate the tabulation process. Pennsylvania, where workers did not finish counting ballots until four days after the election, prohibits counting all ballots until election day. Arizona did not finish their count until nine days after the election. Nevada and Georgia also took a week to finish tabulating the votes.

“We are a country where the election process is decentralized,” said Cowles, who has served over 30 years.

The Florida changes also resolved problems with error ballots. Election workers had time to send affidavits rectifying unsigned ballots or other voter confusion before election day, making sure every vote counted. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to end a month-long Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

“Maybe the legislatures in Nevada and Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia will take a look at our procedures and rules and they’ll start consulting with Florida on how to make changes,” Cowles said.

Florida also adopted early voting, allowing voters to cast their ballots at the polls weeks in advance, taking the pressure to count all ballots on election day off election supervisors.

Cowles dismissed fraud claims, defending the accuracy and integrity of the American election system, noting that prior races resulted in only .0024 percent of American elections resulting in fraud charges and prosecutions.

“Fraud has become a campaign tool,” Cowles said. “People throw fraud around as a way to campaign and we’re seeing that in this post-election period.”

The recent presidential election vote counting debacle will start new debate over necessary changes as Bush-Gore did in 2000, Cowles said.

“You’re only as good as your last election,” he said. “We’ve already started working on the next one.”

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Gerry Shields is author of the new book, The Front Row: My Jagged Journey Recording American History from Reagan to Trump, available on Amazon.com. The podcast can be heard at: retailpoliticspodcast.com, Spotify or subscribe on Apple.