Election experts raise fresh alarms about vote counting delays - and chaos - in battleground states [View all]

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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 isn’t likely until the morning after the election, said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the state’s election commission.

While several other states have moved to speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020’s 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 who’s 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.

“It’s 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