Every election season it’s the same sermon from the politicians: vote, vote, vote. Get out and vote. Don’t sit at home. Vote, vote, vote. So people did. They voted. Now — where’s the count?

It’s Saturday. The election was Tuesday, and there are still races nobody has called. Up in Alaska, one Senate race sits a few hundred votes apart, and the state’s ranked-choice tabulation isn’t even scheduled until November 18 — nearly two weeks after the ballots were cast. Down in Mississippi, another Senate race hangs on a margin of about twenty-six hundred votes while the count trickles in county by county, whenever somebody gets around to it. The ballots don’t stop existing at nine at night, or on weekends. The counting apparently does.

And it didn’t used to be like this. We used to get results the same night, as a matter of routine. So why can’t we now? Part of it is honest change: most ballots don’t arrive in a booth on one day anymore — they come by mail, spread over weeks — and in some states the law won’t let anyone so much as open the envelope until election morning. Add signature-cure windows, provisional ballots, and ranked-choice rounds, and the pile is bigger while the rules are slower. But none of that is weather. Every bit of it is a rule somebody chose — and other states chose differently.

Here’s my position, and it’s simple. The voters did their job. Now the state has to do its job — and that’s what we pay them for. Not to do the job when they feel like it. To do it. Counting the votes in a reasonable time, the same night the polls close or the day after at the latest, is not some extravagant demand. It’s the assignment.

If I were in charge — I’m not, but if I were — the law would say this: you count in shifts, around the clock, seven days a week, until every ballot is counted. Full staff, too. If it’s twenty people at eight in the morning, it’s twenty people at three in the morning. Not a skeleton crew, not three people and a coffee pot. And if the counties can’t afford the night shift, then the state funds it. This is important. Fund it.

It can be done, because it is done. Florida gets it finished within hours of the polls closing. Texas is good at it. And believe it or not, Arizona — which has taken days over this in past elections, in a state of under eight million people — was fast this year. The Mendoza race here was called the very next day. Somebody made rules, or funded something, or simply decided finishing was the job. Whatever they did, it worked, and it’s proof the slow states have no excuse.

Because there is no excuse. A slow count isn’t a neutral thing; every day it drags on is a day the rumor mill runs the table while the actual answer sits in a pile in some county office. You want people to trust elections? Then act like their votes matter enough to count now, not eventually.

You got the turnout you begged for, politicians. Earn it on your end. Count them.