There’s a fair amount of ways to steal an election: mail-in ballots, no voter ID, hacking voting machines, creating and submitting counterfeit ballots en masse, impersonating a dead voter, taking advantage of outdated voter roles, and the list goes on.

But in most cases, time is the critical ingredient. The more time there is between the actual vote being cast and the final tabulation of votes, there more time there is to introduce corruption.

That’s why, regardless of the outcome of this election investigation(s), we must remove the element of time from voting.

Going forward, starting with the Georgia runoff elections, we’ve got to simplify and shorten the voting window.

If we really want to reduce the probability or effectiveness of fraud, we will move to same-day voting. There’s absolutely no reason to have an extended voting period. All that does is open the door to temptation and give people time to execute various fraud schemes.

Likewise, all voting should be in-person, except for absentee ballots. If voting is important to people, they will show up at the polls and vote. If we want people to believe their vote matters, and it should, we should put the onus on them to put in the work and earn it. (Not to mention that voting at the polls brings a community together and shows our kids what a functioning republic looks like.)

There’s a reason that vote counting stopped at the same time in swing state cities on election night. It was because they needed time to introduce fraudulent votes. Without that time, the steal couldn’t have occurred.

Voting will never be perfect, so long as there are humans with an ounce of creativity involved. But making the window between vote and count as short as possible is the best we’re going to do.