Election chiefs from three important swing states recently went on cable news to make excuses about why they won’t have the election results on Election Day — even though this has been the norm in America for decades and is still the norm in many much larger states.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was asked Sunday on CBS News’ Face The Nation how “quickly” she expects to get the results, and she responded, in part, by saying: “I would estimate, end of the day on Wednesday [November 6], as the best guess on how we’ll perform.”
There is no good reason for such a delay, yet election officials in the post-Covid era are pushing the delays we saw during the 2020 election as the new norm.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also joined the show on Sunday, said that because of a recently passed state law governing how elections are administered, “all early votes and all early accepted ballots, they all will have to have their results reported by 8pm. That’s 70, maybe even 75% of all the vote totals will be reported no later than 8pm on election night.”
So why can’t Georgia report its election results on election night? As Raffensperger said, the state “will be waiting for … overseas ballots that come in no later than Friday [that week], and so those will then be the final numbers. And we’ll just see if that makes the difference in the total vote totals.”
Why would Raffensperger feel the need to wait for what should be a minuscule number of overseas Georgia ballots to come in? Whatever the reason, the delay sows doubt and insecurity in the minds of American voters who are rightly accustomed to having results on Election Day.
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Benson and Raffensperger aren’t alone in pushing to normalize delays. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on Oct. 13 that, in light of controversy surrounding the time between polls closing and “races being called,” “[t]he message is please be patient” as “counties are working night and day to count their voters’ votes.”
The propaganda press is also working overtime to justify delays, downplaying concerns about incompetent election administration.
Newsweek recently published an analysis by Aron Solomon headlined “We’re Unlikely to Know the Winner on Election Night. That’s OK.” The piece argues “patience” is “essential in the modern electoral landscape,” and that while precedent for “decades” meant Americans could know the results by election night, this expectation “has become an increasingly unrealistic standard.” Solomon argues that the widespread use of mail-in ballots causes states to delay their vote totals.
But that excuse doesn’t hold water. The widespread use of mail-in ballots in the 2024 general election cycle may not be as widespread as 2020 and in fact, in a state like Georgia, might be closer to the rate of use in 2016 — when the election was called the night of.
In 2016, 241,519 absentee ballots were issued in the Peach State, according to Savannah Morning News. The 2016 race was called by the Associated Press at 11:33 p.m. on Election Night. The last day to request an absentee ballot in the state for the 2024 race is October 25, and WRDW reported Monday that “more than 200,000 Georgians have requested an absentee ballot” this election cycle. That’s about the same amount of ballots as in 2016, when we knew the winner in Georgia before midnight on Election Day. For reference, well over 1.5 million absentee ballots were requested in Georgia in 2020, according to data from the secretary of state.
Time Magazine published a piece in September to explain “Why We Might Not Know the Winner on Election Night.” The article similarly echoed the claims about mail-in votes presented in the Newsweek analysis.
Then there’s Axios, which said the “2024 election could take days to call,” just like 2020. We all remember what happened in 2020: Former President Donald Trump was up by 196,000 votes in Pennsylvania with just 12 percent of the vote still not counted, as Politico reported the day after Election Day. Days later, President Joe Biden would be declared the winner after mail-in ballots came flooding in, overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor.
CNN recently published an article headlined, “Election experts raise fresh alarms about vote counting delays – and chaos – in battleground states.” The piece argues that while Republicans might be up in the race initially, the results may later flip to elect a Democrat. Voters who are concerned about the delayed results are then smeared as helping promulgate what CNN describes as “false narratives about election fraud.”
What a change from just eight years ago, when disgraced reporter Jeffrey Toobin said in a short New York Times documentary about the 2000 election that “the one thing no one expected in a presidential campaign is that we wouldn’t know who won on Election Day.”
No one expected that in 2000 because even back then the expectation had long been that election results are known on Election Day, save for extremely rare circumstances.
As we enter the final leg of the election cycle, the left and its propaganda press allies are trying hard to downplay concerns about delayed election results, keeping voters in suspense while officials take days to announce outcomes that may change days after Election Day.
These delays understandably breed distrust in the electoral process, and pointing out that there’s no good reason for such delays doesn’t make you an “election denier” or a spreader of “false narratives about election fraud.” It rather shows that you’re paying attention, and that you’re right to think that our elections are not being conducted as freely or fairly as they should be.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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