Mailin balloting could make election day turn into week
A shift to mail voting is increasing the chances that Americans will not know the winner of November’s presidential race on election night, a scenario that is fueling worries about whether President Trump will use the delay to sow doubts about the results.
State election officials in some key battleground states have recently warned that it may take days to count what they expect will be a surge of ballots sent by mail out of concern for safety amid the pandemic. In an election as close as 2016’s, a delayed tally in key states could keep news organizations from calling a winner.
“It may be several days before we know the outcome of the election,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview. “We have to prepare for that now and accept that reality.”
Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, pleaded for “patience” from the public.
“We’ve gotten accustomed to this idea that by the middle of the evening of election night, we’re going to know all the results,” LaRose said Wednesday at a forum on voting hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Election night reporting may take a little longer” this year, he warned.
Delayed results are common in a few states where elections are already conducted largely by mail. But a presidential election hasn’t been been left in limbo since 2000, when ballot irregularities in Florida led to weeks of chaos and court fights.
For some election experts and Democrats, the prospect of similar uncertainty is especially worrisome this year, as Trump disparages mailin voting as fraudulent and has claimed without evidence that widespread mail balloting will lead to a “rigged” election.
“It’s very problematic,” said Rick Hasen, a UC Irvine law professor. “There is already so much anxiety about this election because of the high levels of polarization and misinformation.”
Hasen is among the experts who have been studying the strains on the U.S. electoral system during the pandemic. He recently convened a bipartisan group of academics to recommend safeguards for a disputed election. Some members have gamed out dramatic scenarios like state legislatures or governors refusing to seat electors, or a candidate refusing to cede power.
Meanwhile, some Democratic operatives, lawyers and even the presumptive presidential nominee have grown increasingly vocal with their concerns that Trump will try to meddle in the election. Joe Biden recently said he thinks Trump may use his office to intervene: “Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”
Trump campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso called the accusation “another unsubstantiated creation of the liberal conspiracy theory machine.”
Trump said last year in an interview that he would accept the results of the 2020 election. Since then, however, the coronavirus has dramatically changed how Americans vote.
As voters look for a safer alternative to inperson voting, election officials from both parties have promoted mailin and absentee voting options, and requests for mail ballots have surged in the primaries.