Opinion: Take your time, just get it right

A few election cycles ago, a reporter turned in an election story. The story included everything you’d expect. Vote tallies. Quotes from the winners. Quotes from the runnersup — at least the ones whose cell phones didn’t mysteriously straight to voicemail. Ended with notes about the turnout, and that the election still needed to be certified by the county commission.

Another sentence appeared, noting that vote totals weren’t available until after 9 p.m. because of a mechanical error at the clerk’s office.

“Who,” I asked, “cares about that, beyond the dozen people waiting at the county courthouse for results? It makes no difference to the average reader that the votes arrived at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., as long as they were correct and complete.”

That’s kind of the attitude I have when I’m seeing elections decided in the two weeks following the midterm elections. When the 116th Congress is seated in the third week of January, is it going to matter if the 14th representative from California was declared the winner on Nov. 6, Nov. 7 or Nov. 14?

A few years ago, the city of Clovis introduced a smartphone app where residents could alert city officials to potholes, code violations or other things that just needed fixing. The app was really adding one more avenue for residents to engage their government on problems. A city commissioner liked the app, but had concerns there would be a “microwave effect” — meaning they might expect unrealistically quick resolutions because the submission process got faster.

I wonder if that’s the same thing taking place with our elections. Many states saw their 2018 election participation meet or exceed their 2016 participation, but they were working with fewer voting machines and fewer poll workers because midterms traditionally get lower turnouts.

A friend who was a poll worker said there were lines out the door the entire day, and she’d never seen that in any election cycle. Another friend working the election hated the idea that a close vote that could turn on provisional or mail-in ballots meant that an election official screwed up.

Sometimes votes are close, and sometimes there’s a turnout spike and there are more ballots to count. That means we need to take extra time to count those provisional, mail and overseas ballots, no matter who wants to stop the election the second their preferred candidate is ahead.

George Dodge and Martin Zamora are separated by 25 votes for the New Mexico House District 63 seat, and it’s going into an automatic recount. I trust that Zamora won the race and unseated Dodge, but there’s nothing wrong with counting a second or third time and being 100 percent confident.

Whenever I take a box score from a coach, or get a piece of information for any story, and that person apologizes for taking so long to find the right sheet of paper or the right page in the records, I usually tell them, “I won’t complain about the time we’re on the phone, as long as I get it right.”

We should treat our ballots the same way.

Kevin Wilson is managing editor of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at: [email protected]