Tipsheet

It's Articles Like This That Fuel Stolen Election Narratives

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  September 17, 2024 6:00 AM

I’m ready for a rough election night. It's not that I’ve become bearish on Donald Trump’s chances of winning. Still, prominent news outlets warn about a long election night that has been fertile grounds for stolen election narratives. The Pennsylvania Department of State had a terrible thread about not expecting election results on election night. Now, The New York Times is also echoing the same warnings about the ballots moving at a snail’s pace because it’ll be a close election, among other things: 

For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail. 

Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump appears extremely close.

If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots. 

Election officials across the country are trying to telegraph to voters that waiting long hours or even days for a result is not unexpected in a close election. They are eager to counter conspiracy theorists who may seize on the uncertainty as evidence of fraud or malfeasance. 

“I keep objecting to the term ‘delays,’” said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania. The ballots, he said, would be counted “as expeditiously as possible, and counting votes takes time.” 

Counting mail ballots takes more time because there are more steps involved. A variety of security measures, including signature verification and ensuring that voters did not also try to vote in person, are required. Election officials must open the ballots and flatten them out before they can be put in a tabulator to be counted.

Yes, it’s good that we have more security measures, but that’s not why the tabulation process will be slow. It should be smoother. 

For starters, there won’t be as many mail-in ballots this year. Democrats are way behind on those requests from 2020, and Republicans have done well to chip away at the Democratic advantage. COVID is over. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots with the wrong date will be rejected outright—no more funny business. Also, it took days in California for the state, a Democratic bastion, to count the ballots for their 2024 primary. The process was so slow that even liberal reporters were unnerved by the spectacle. 

We’re already dealing with severe security flaws in our election machines, which hackers at August’s DEF CON convention in Las Vegas discovered, and given the timeframe, there’s nothing we can do to resolve these matters. To boot, and not that it’s a shocking development, everyone and their mother is warning about how the Postal Service is going to be garbage in delivering the ballots on time, though this was a trusted service in 2020, right?

Also, let’s not dismiss what some Democrats are now openly admitting—that even if Trump wins, they’ll try to overturn the results. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said this, but it likely never got the coverage it deserved for obvious political reasons. 

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So, given what’s transpired and what some have said, you can see how these articles from the Times and elsewhere are only fanning the stolen election flames if something goes haywire. And it does cut both ways: After 2016, at least half of Democrats thought Russia hacked the election results. You could probably guess why this never got a lot of attention.