Election experts raise fresh alarms about vote counting delays - and chaos - in battleground states
Source: CNN Politics
Updated 7:02 PM EDT, Sun September 22, 2024
CNN In Pennsylvania, officials are bracing for another presidential election in which the state could once again be the decisive battleground and take days to determine the winner. Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in vote-rich Philadelphia, put the odds of knowing the winner on election night at almost zero. In battleground Wisconsin, meanwhile, a final tally isnt likely until the morning after the election, said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the states election commission.
While several other states have moved to speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020s post-election chaos, political gridlock in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has prevented a change that could have paved the way for earlier projections: the ability to begin opening and processing mail-in ballots before Election Day.
Election observers worry that delays in counting mail ballots could give the public a false sense of whos winning the election. That could create a potential red mirage showing GOP candidates ahead initially before more Democratic-leaning absentee ballots are processed and added to the tally and leave an opening for false narratives about election fraud to flourish as the country awaits results. In Georgia, a controversial rule change approved Friday that requires workers to hand-count the number of ballots cast at precincts on Election Day could delay the results of the presidential election in another key swing state.
Its obviously a concern, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said of the time lag in the Keystone State. That period of uncertainty is something that is exploited by bad-faith actors to undermine the confidence in the outcome.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/22/politics/vote-counting-delays-election-states/index.html
Think. Again.
(19,041 posts)...no matter when the official results are published, in fact they've already started doing that even before the VOTING has started.
If election officials were serious about keeping things calm, they would simply announce that any official results won't be released until a few days after the polls close, when all the double-checking and auditing has been completed and there are absolutely NO causes for doubt.
BumRushDaShow
(144,197 posts)It's the MEDIA that insists they need "results NOW!!111!!!!11" and they are the ones who will magnify the issue in order to generate "controversy" and get more eyeballs and clicks.
Think. Again.
(19,041 posts)Edit to add:
Except in the OP article, it does only speak of the election officials who seem to want to get the results out prematurely and "speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020s post-election chaos."
AverageOldGuy
(2,169 posts)Localities are REQUIRED to start processing mail-in ballots on Tuesday before Election Day.
Required pre-processing days are the Tuesday and Saturday before Election Day; each locality can process more days if they need to.
Which means that by Election Day all mail-in ballots are processed except for those arriving on/just before Election Day and those arriving before noon on Friday AFTER Election Day but are postmarked on or before Election Day.
Ballots are processed and fed into scanner(s) but the scanner is not tallied until after polls close on Election Day.
BumRushDaShow
(144,197 posts)have been TRYING to get the "pre-canvassing" option added to what was a GOP-crafted state law.
The 2019 law passed almost unanimously except for one (R) and one (D), and they only added the "no-excuse absentee ballot" option as a sweetener for the (D) governor to sign off on their bill that included a "trade-off" that got rid of straight-party ticket voting, which the GOP felt benefited Democrats.
Well the law ended up going into effect right at the start of the pandemic (April 30, 2020) and after the GOP's guy lost in 2020, they started the "stolen election!!11!!" and "voter fraud!!1!1!" nonsense and have attempted to repeal the law ever since, including waiting a year after their own law's self-imposed deadline to sue the state for the provision to be considered "unconstitutional" (it's not).
Once Democrats took over the state House in 2022, the GOP's legislative effort at repealing Act-77 (as it is called) is now DOA, but we are stuck in gridlock trying to get the pre-canvassing ability enacted.