Counting votes once made Florida a laughingstock. Now it’s the gold standard.

Now that Election Day is finally here, I propose we start a new campaign — to pick the state that has the best system for accurately counting votes in the fastest time possible.

My nominee for that contest is Florida. Here’s why.

Florida’s now-exceptional record of very accurately counting votes in the fastest time possible was born out of abject humiliation.

Remember that 2000 election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush? Remember Florida’s punch-hole voting machines — which they had been warned about for years — coupled with five weeks of lawyers and campaign staff from the Gore and Bush campaigns looking at “hanging chads” and "pregnant chads" from every possible angle until they became cross-eyed?

The state became the laughingstock of the nation, as late-night comedians rightfully pounced on the ludicrous situation.

One person who was not amused by that situation was Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R). He was horrified by the embarrassing process and swore he would fix it. And he did.

Months later, the Florida state legislature enacted a massive overhaul of state election rules. What became known as “The Election Reform Act of 2001” banned the use of punch-card voting machines and required the Secretary of State (rather than county-level elections officials) to have the final say over which kinds of voting machines could be used in the future.

More than that, the legislation gave local counties the authority to start counting mail-in ballots 25 days before Election Day. Florida state law also requires early voting ballots, in most instances, to be completely counted on the day before Election Day.

In addition, results from early voting must also be posted within 30 minutes of the polls closing. Voting by mail is possibly the biggest difference between Florida and other states. In the Sunshine State, a mail-in ballot must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

All in all, this is a process that buys valuable time to get things right. A troubling contrast can be seen in states like Nevada, California, Arizona and Pennsylvania, where the vote counting process can drag on for days or even weeks.

In so many ways, the electoral process is the very foundation of a democratic governance. Should the process fail — or fall under a cloud of suspicion — our government as a whole is called into question, as are its “leaders.”

To this point, Walter Olson, a senior legal fellow at the Cato Institute and a fan of Florida’s revamped voting system, stressed that “public suspicion of the system, rightly or wrongly, seems to be directly correlated with the delay in results. It opens the door for accusations of wrongdoing, whether well-founded or not.”

After the fiasco of 2020, Florida was the running joke of the nation. But come 2020, it had become the state to emulate.

During the highly contentious presidential election between then-President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, more than 11 million people voted in Florida. Only California and Texas cast more votes. Amazingly, over 93 percent of the Florida votes were publicly reported by 9:30 p.m. Eastern time on election night — a mere 90 minutes after polls had closed across the state.

In contrast, by 9 a.m. the day after the election, Pennsylvania still had around 25 percent of its vote total left to count. Are you kidding me?

One reason was that local election officials there are prohibited from even beginning to process mailed-in ballots until after the polls closed on Election Day — 25 days after Florida had begun processing and counting mailed-in ballots.

With the Pennsylvania system, there is no way for a close race to be resolved in a timely manner. Worse, it severely limits the time to check “red flag” ballots and may inadvertently discard legitimate votes.

Not surprisingly, Pennsylvania became the epicenter for legal challenges and conspiracy theories in 2020, as partisan sympathizers argued — and screamed — about in-person vote tallies, mail-in ballots, stopping the vote count and state-level certifications of official results.

Much like many states' failure to require voter ID and proof of citizenship, this kind of incompetence plants the seeds of damaging doubts about our election results. Yet this could all be fixed almost immediately.

How? Follow Florida’s lead in counting votes accurately, quickly and legally.

In a report he authored, Andy Craig, the director of election policy at the centrist Rainey Center think tank, wrote: “Florida is famous among election nerds for having the fastest reporting of vote totals in the country, with near-instant results on election night.” Craig further called Florida’s vote-processing procedures “the gold standard” for other states to follow.

Every American should want and demand open, fair, legal, quick and highly accurate vote tallies. What we have now in so many states with counts going on days, weeks and even a month after Election Day is an embarrassment, damaging to the sanctity of the process.

For those reasons and more, I cast my vote for the great state of Florida to be the template for other states to use every two and four years going forward.

Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.