Ridge says 2020 presidential race results may take days or weeks
Americans shouldn’t expect to see a winner of the presidency on Election Day, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge said Tuesday — echoing concerns from key stakeholders who warn that a sharp increase in the volume of mail-in ballots cast in November will delay the results for several days or weeks.
Mr. Ridge, the country’s first secretary of homeland security, told MSNBC the challenge ahead of November isn’t so much managing delays and cuts to the U.S. Postal Service, but changing public perception about the expediency of results.
If it takes awhile to count votes,
“so be it,” he said.
“We don’t need to know on election night,” Mr. Ridge said.
“Let’s quit thinking about, ‘we need to know on election night,’” he added. “It’s election week or election month. We get from Nov. 3 to Jan. 20 . ... Let’s do it right, and it will be done correctly.”
Mr. Ridge’s urging of patience is shared by Chris Deluzio, policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security.
Mr. Deluzio said he won’t be concerned if there aren’t results by midnight on Election Day — insisting election officials face a steep task in processing an influx of mail-in ballots while administering an inperson election at the same time.
“That’s fine. It doesn’t mean anything bad has happened or anything’s wrong,” Mr. Deluzio said of a delay in results, deeming it a reality of having a noexcuse mail-in voting system available during a pandemic.
To calm a public that will be eager for presidential results, election officials should be transparent about the status of the count and when they expect it to be finished, Mr. Deluzio said.
“The thing those public servants can’t control is the rhetoric that comes out of the White House,” Mr.
Deluzio said. “That’s the big question: whether [President Donald Trump] is going to immediately start sowing doubt around election results just because we don’t have unofficial results on election night — which we probably won’t.”
Mr. Trump has routinely cast doubt on the security of mail-in voting, claiming the system is rampant with fraud and will result in the “greatest Rigged Election in history,” he’s written on Twitter.
Mr. Ridge, a longtime Republican and a member of a new bipartisan task force in Pennsylvania focused on alleviating voters’ concerns about casting a ballot in November, has pushed back against the president’s rhetoric.
“I think this assertion that somehow, historically, there’s a precedent — or going forward there’s reason to believe — that there would be massive fraud because of the use of absentee ballots is what the president refers to as ‘fake news,’” Mr. Ridge said on MSNBC in June.
Mr. Ridge has called on state legislatures to give election officials more time to pre-canvass and process mail-in ballots ahead of time, rather than having to wait until Election Day.
Bethany Hallam, an Allegheny County councilwoman at-large and member of the county’s elections board, agreed that would help.
But Ms. Hallam isn’t so sure election results will be delayed by several days or weeks, at least in Allegheny County. With help from new voting machines, she said results in the presidential race could come by the following day “at the latest.”
To her, it’s not just about how fast counties can count, but how accurate their counts are.
“I think that outrage is inevitable regardless of when we get results,” Ms. Hallam said. “I think that the way we handle it is to assure folks we’re doing it as accurately and thoroughly as possible — stressing to people and informing the public that it is better we have accurate, foolproof election results than quick and messy election results.”