By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press
Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.
Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.
But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. That will make it look as if Trump is initially leading, even if that changes as more ballots are tallied later. Another reason is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.
In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it’s an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.
“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”
Trump’s demand also doesn’t seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
These claims have nothing to do with election integrity and all to do with making him president again, said David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies.
“When he’s behind, he’ll say continue the count. When he’s ahead, he’ll say stop the count,” Becker said. “But that’s not how it works.”
Becker said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”
Trump wants the race decided Tuesday night
During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.
“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump said. “Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”
It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.
Timing is one example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada. It’s a big country, and there’s simply no way to know who won those states instantly.
Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn’t count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
