The misinformation war is getting underway. Candidates who understand they will lose, aided by Holocaust deniers, and even some members of Congress, falsely claim that some states (conveniently those that align with their political views) are far beyond counting or raising suspicions about delays. in the count.
These claims are erroneous and, more importantly, dangerous.
These are the facts. No state in U. S. history has been able to do so. The U. S. has counted all its ballots on “election night. “In fact, our Constitution and state legislation have identified that it takes days or weeks to count all the ballots.
State law provides weeks to officially certify election effects, as we check and recheck the counts. It’s how it deserves. We never “knew” who won an election on election night. We only believe that we know, based on wide margins, the polls and ballots counted up to this point. But we don’t know who won until the official effects are qualified. – weeks later.
While some accuse election officials in states like Arizona and Nevada of “corruption” for diligently checking and counting legal ballots in the days after an election, we will have to acknowledge that literally every state still has ballots.
Many states still have mail-in ballot counting and each state still reviews provisional ballots and counts army ballots. In fact, Ohio still reports that more than 180,000 mail-in and provisional ballots were counted Friday morning, which is likely more than all remaining ballots will be counted in Nevada. And this whole count is transparent, under the supervision of observers from both sides. No single state has rated the official results, and the first state to do so will not certify for several days.
We voted on other tactics as Americans. Many of us vote in person, on Election Day or in early voting, and those ballots tend to be among the first to be counted: They are loaded into scanners to be tabulated as they are deposited. The polls close, we can get an initial, unofficial count of those ballots almost immediately.
But other types of votes take longer to count. Provisional ballots must be verified before processing. We are giving more time for army ballots to arrive after Election Day. It will also have to be processed, which takes time and cannot begin until or after Election Day.
The mail-in ballot procedure is very important to the integrity of elections, as it involves validating the identity and eligibility of the voter (usually by comparing their signatures or identity number) and confirming that the voter has not attempted to vote more than once. We wish and wish that this procedure be conducted diligently before those ballots are counted, as each and every state does, and “election integrity” advocates celebrate this procedure, not attack it.
Counting all ballots has taken several days or weeks, and when we have narrower margins in our elections, and elections dictate control of legislatures and Congress, this is even more likely to be the case. It is also natural that those narrow margins accumulate the point of tension of those who need to know who won.
But it is cynical and potentially harmful to extremists and applicants who waste exploiting our herbal impatience to create chaos and uncertainty, while inciting anger. We’ve noticed this in the recent past, with riots at counting sites in places like Detroit, where election officials diligently overnight, under the watchful eye of observers from both parties, counted votes cast legally. And we saw the violence that could result, at the U. S. Capitol. U. S. Air Force on January 6, 2021.
We see it now: Several candidates who will have to think they will lose when all the legal ballots are counted are already attacking election officials and making implausible and unsubstantiated accusations. Members of Congress, elected in the same election, in states where ballots are still counting, spread incorrect information on social media about when states can or have finished counting. And Holocaust deniers are in place, spreading false statements about counting to metastasize the cancerous concept that any election in which the candidate you voted for lost will have to be rigged.
Holocaust deniers made it clear that this would be an ongoing strategy for them. They will seek to divide us, galvanize anger and unleash violence, taking advantage of our own impatience and heightened fears that oppose us. And we will have to resist those impulses, knowing that it takes time to count legally issued polls, that it is unreasonable to expect all those complex surveys to be counted in hours, and that those who count those polls are our neighbors and fellow citizens, rushing diligently to make sure that each and every valid poll is counted accurately.
A deliberative and exact procedure is broken. It is better for voter confidence and election integrity if we allow the procedure to deliver accurate and displayed results, even if it takes a few days.
David Becker is the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. He is a contributor to CBS News’ election law and in the past served as a general suggestion in the U. S. Department of Justice’s Polling Division. UU. Es co-author, with Major Garrett, of the e-book “The Great Truth: Defending Democracy in the Age of Big Lies. “