Why we may not know who won the Senate on Election Day
Planning the steal again? Sure looks that way.
It took five days after Election Day 2020 to tally enough votes for media organizations to call the presidential race for Joe Biden.
The same thing could happen in some of the country’s most important midterm elections this year.
Many of the same factors in the same battleground states are at play in 2022, starting with races that could have very slim margins. Add in the continued popularity of mail voting and state laws in Pennsylvania and elsewhere that can delay processing of those ballots, and the chance of another waiting game is distinct — possibly with control of the Senate up in the air.
Then-President Donald Trump used the delays counting mail ballots after Election Day to sow confusion and baseless conspiracy theories about the validity of the vote count, igniting a movement to overturn the results that led to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Now, Trump-aligned candidates on the ballot have signaled they could mimic the former president and use any delays in 2022 to undermine confidence in the results again.
The time between the end of voting and the release of unofficial results “is one of the most precarious time periods for the spread of election myths and disinformation,” said Rachel Orey, the associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s elections project. “When the public is uncertain, they’re much more amenable to claims of fraud.”
In Arizona, Kari Lake and Mark Finchem — Trump’s endorsed candidates for governor and secretary of state — indicated before the GOP primary they wouldn’t accept the results if they lost, preemptively blaming fraud. (Both won.)
Trump, too, has encouraged this sort of behavior. During the close Pennsylvania Senate primary won by Trump-endorsed Mehmet Oz, the former president encouraged Oz to simply declare victory because that would make “it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they ‘just happened to find.’”
Still, election officials are cautiously optimistic that any delays in results this year won’t be as large or as widespread as in 2020.
One main reason is that midterms usually have significantly fewer ballots to count than in a presidential election like 2020, which saw a record number of votes. And some voters who opted to vote via the mail in 2020 — the type of ballots that are often, though not always, last to be reported — are expected to return to voting in person, with the pandemic fading and Trump-aligned Republicans continuing to rail against mail voting.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, noted that mail voting in 2020 was dramatically higher than historical norms in his state and others. “We’re expecting well below that this year, given the trends we saw in the primary and the runoff,” he said.
And after the influx of mail ballots swamped election offices across the country in 2020, officials said they are using lessons they learned on the best ways to speed up processing of mail ballots. Some are adding staffing or setting up new locations for processing ballots.
READ MORE HERE
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
2 Comments
Comments are closed.
They didn’t steal 2018 and 2020 just so you can be comfortable, drink your beer, and vote your way out this fall.
The “vote harder” crowd cracks me up to a point. They completely fail to realize we already had the peaceful revolution. The 2010 midterms, the 2014 senate elections, and the 2016 Presidential Election culminating with Trump getting in office. At that point, the enemies of this country realized they have to go to a higher intensity level with all of their antics. Only now is the grassroots starting to realize the intensity level has to come up, but even then it’s been sluggish.
I realize this and I’m just some fucking civilian. Yet most of the alt media doesn’t?
The elections will be stolen, and the GOP that do get in will mostly be controlled oppo if they are even allowed to take office. People like Brian Fitzpatrick and Mehmet Oz immediately come to mind.
If Kevin McCarthy is your speaker, and McConnell is your Senate Leader, nothing will be done to stop the agenda. If they even allow that.
Now, this isn’t a blackpill. What this means, what are you doing today to expand and strengthen what you can do? Are you doing those extra kettlebell swings? Hitting the range more? Working on your commo? Learning skills that you aren’t comfortable with? Getting far outside your comfort zone? How about forming bonds with your neighbors?
Or are you just reading Jack Posobiec’s twitter account and watching Infowars and patting yourself on the back thinking you got this because you are a good person?
No we wont, got to spend the next weeks slowing putting more false votes in the system.
I think we need to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat!