What a mess.

As if these United States weren’t already an international laughingstock with Joe Biden as president, now we have vote-counting delays in Arizona, Nevada, and California that would make a South Sudanese dictator blush.

As the editorial page editors of The Wall Street Journal write: “As of Thursday afternoon, the ballots were only 83% counted in Nevada and 70% in Arizona. The figure for one competitive House race in California was 39%. These delays are a result of mass mail voting, and they’re no good for public confidence.”

No good at all. Let’s take a moment to remember how we got here, though, for it was Joe Biden himself who, just before the election, deliberately tried to lower our expectations about the sort of timely elections our nation once enjoyed:

“We know that more and more ballots are cast in early voting or by mail in America,” he said. “And we know that many states don’t start counting those ballots till after the polls close on November 8. That means in some cases we won’t know the winner of the election for a few days — until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner. It’s always been important for citizens in the democracy to be informed and engaged. Now it’s important for a citizen to be patient as well. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

No, Joe, that’s not how it’s supposed to work. As we stressed last week, Election Day isn’t supposed to be Election Season. And yet here we are. Why, it’s almost as if his handlers had told him that control of the Senate would hinge on races in Arizona and Nevada, and that the Democrat machines in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and Nevada’s Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, would simply need a few extra days, maybe even a week or so, to find the necessary votes.

Ground Zero for electoral incompetence is right there in Maricopa County, just as it was in the 2020 presidential election. Nearly three days after the polls closed, the state’s two big races — the gubernatorial contest between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, and the Senate race between Republican Blake Masters and Democrat incumbent Mark Kelly — have yet to be decided. And they’re not even close to being decided.

“I am 100% going to win,” Lake promised yesterday. “I have absolute 100% confidence that I will be the next governor of Arizona.” Her opponent is a debate-dodger and a horrible candidate, and Lake is an electric one. That their race is this close is, frankly, stunning.

Things got off on the wrong foot when many of the county’s vote-counting machines mysteriously stopped working due to printer problems. The timing couldn’t have been better for Democrats because everyone knows that day-of voting turnout is overwhelmingly Republican. Never fear, though, said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates: “We apologize to those voters who are inconvenienced by some of the things that occurred today, but we feel very confident that every voter who showed up with ID … had the opportunity to vote and have their vote counted.” Uh-huh.

The lefties at the Associated Press were quick to dismiss any suggestion of impropriety: “Maricopa County remained the epicenter of election misinformation Wednesday after problems with voter tabulation machines in that Arizona county spawned conspiracy theories about vote rigging.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio asked the question on Wednesday afternoon: “If Florida can count 7.5 million ballots in 5 hours, how can it take days for some states to count less than 2 million?”

As the Journal’s editors point out, Florida preprocesses incoming mail ballots and has an Election Day deadline. Given the glaring success of the Sunshine State, why wouldn’t every state do the same thing?

Looking at you, Arizona. And Nevada.

Indeed, Nevada. What must it be like to be Republican Adam Laxalt, who ran such a great campaign against incumbent Democrat Senator Catherine Cortez Masto? Laxalt had been in the lead in 17 of the 20 polls taken since September, and his 3.4% lead in the RealClearPolitics average seemed a sure thing. He went to bed on election night with a 30,000-vote lead, and since then he’s awakened each morning only to watch that lead being sliced to death with a thousand cuts.

At this point, Laxalt’s lead is around 9,000 votes, with around 90% of the ballots counted. Whether there are enough uncounted votes in the rural counties to stave off what seems like another razor-thin loss to another mediocre Democrat remains to be seen.

This is no way to build trust in our elections. In fact, it does just the opposite. And let’s be clear: This is by design, and these are Democrat doings. This perversion of Election Day into Election Season introduces all manner of new uncertainties into our elections, and all manner of new opportunities for mischief.

Put another way: The simpler the system, the more trustworthy it is. And the more complicated the system, the more suspicious it is.

Our election systems in certain states are both an outrage and an embarrassment. And folks wonder why we don’t trust government.