To your point, for those who know anything about the US electoral system and election history, this is nothing new. It only becomes featured when a close state race is pivotal in the control of the House or the Senate. A good example is Alaska. They are not finished counting votes there but since both candidates are Republican, it attracts no attention.
On Nov. 1, 2022, the @catturd2 Twitter account, described by The Daily Beast as a “MAGA troll account,” tweeted to its nearly 1 million followers, “Funny how we could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago.” Similarly, Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar claimed, hours before Election Day, that “one day is all it took until very recently” to “count all legal votes in an election.”
However, this assertion about past U.S. elections is false.
A comprehensive summary of how long counting votes in each state might take:
Is it taking longer now to tally election results than in the past? Joe says so:
We know that more and more ballots are cast in early voting or by mail in America. And we know that many states don’t start counting those ballots until after the polls close on Nov. 8.”
That means, in some cases, we won’t know the winner of the election for a few days — until after a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.
yep, none of these “delays” are surprising to anyone paying attention.
It could take several days before it’s clear who won some of the closer contests, as was the case in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Maricopa County officials emphasized that this year’s process was no different than in previous years.
“This is how things work in Arizona and have for decades,” said Bill Gates, the Republican chair of the county board of supervisors. He said staff are working 14 to 18 hours a day and will continue through the weekend.
For one, Nevada greatly expanded absentee voting in 2020, sending a ballot to every registered voter. The state passed legislation to do that in future elections as well.
Democrats control Neveda’s legislature.
Republicans have the upper hand in the race for control of the House, with a lead in 221 districts — more than the 218 needed to win.
“If current trends in the post-Election Day count continued, they would maintain that narrow advantage, based on an analysis of the returns since Wednesday.
Republicans would prevail with a 219-216 majority, with Democrats narrowly overtaking them in only two districts — Arizona’s Sixth and California’s 13th. But recent trends may not continue. The count will shift to new kinds of ballots, like Election Day drop-offs, late-arriving mail ballots and provisionals. These may break differently than those counted so far.”
— New York Times
Hello? “New kinds of ballots” like “Election Day drops-offs, late-arriving mail ballots” take longer to tally than before.
Very happy to see misogynistic lunacy backfires spectacularly on forced birthers’ faces. Anti-abortion measures were all voted down, even in an extremely republican state like Kentucky.
The original Republican slogan was “Rome, rum, and rebellion.”
“Rome” meaning those evil Catholic immigrants who were corrupting Protestant America; “Rum” meaning many Republicans were prohibitionists, and it was a slur against both the Irish and those slack-jawed lazy-ass southerners as stereotyped by northern and mid-western Republicans; “Rebellion” because southern Democrats were still the party which had supported the Confederacy, and the entire Democratic Party could be identified with it (it was a standard Republican electoral platform for years after the Civil War, known as “waving the bloody flag”.)
You can’t simultaneously have multiple voting methods, third-world megadisaster-condition wait times, and universally strong faith in the process. Then anytime someone expresses doubt Democrats shout “election denial!”, when they deny election results anytime they feel it will help them, of course.
Wait times are longer because elections are close. This has been the trend since 2000. Most of the country is split 50/50 so naturally results will take longer to project.
Expressing doubt because your side didn’t overwhelmingly win on election night is just being ignorant of current trends.
There’s nothing resembling universal faith in the process. And there’s not really a claim of denierism anytime there’s doubts expressed about the process - the question is, is it based on anything factual? It’s only denierism when it’s done without any rational support. But how many plausible cases can you think of where there may have had a real effect on results (vs individual cases here and there)? I can think of 2 - can any of the election deniers who care of so much about elections actually name two (real ones (if anyone is going to name anything from 2020, please, for the love of baby jeebus, don’t name something that’s been shot down over and over and that not even any of the craziest crazies in the Trump admin don’t believe))?
Clean elections should be something Americans demand and be given. It not that hard to create an election that is secure, fair, easy to vote, requires verification to vote and can have it’s results easily examined to see everything is done above board.
As for the balance of power, if the House goes republican I won’t need to keep seeing the Jan 6th crap on CNN, so that’s a plus. Not saying that what Republicans do will be any more productive, but a change is as good as a break.
You can’t blame people who see people in both parties tell Katie Hobbs to recuse herself from overseeing her own election See here is in charge of…
The secretary of state publishes an election manual in each cycle for counties to follow and certifies the election machines in all of Arizona’s counties ahead of the election, a process that entails overseeing what are called logic and accuracy tests to ensure the machines are processing and tabulating the votes accurately.
So her job was to ensure the accuracy of the machines, in an election she is running in and on the day of voting knows that the majority of same day voters will vote for her opponent and then…
So the long lines in Arizona were not caused by
They were long because about 30% of the machines malfunctioned for about 8 hours. Which is either due to incompetency or intentionality.
Then if the the Katie Hobbs types cry about people who suggest intentionality, well, perhaps she should have listened and recused herself when everyone was suggesting she do so, including those in her own party.
Clean elections mean if someone questions one part of the process (say the tabulating machines) they be given logs of scanned ballots, adjudicated ballots, final tabulated ballots toot swift. If you are going to use machines, they need to be designed that way so people can feel confident there is no cheating going on.
2020 as I recall they spent nearly 2 years trying to get that information only to be met by an army of lawyers, dragged it out for 2 years at the end of which and after a judge ordered the machines be turned over for analysis were all the images deleted and those who deleted them declared “you have no evidence!!!”.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work, it’s not how elections should be designed and doesn’t inspire confidence.
You made two separate unwarranted assumptions in a single statement. Election results taking long periods of time to process will lead to doubt in itself, regardless of anything else. We have to do better.
You left out “strong”, which isn’t “absolute”.
The fact is that it’s taking a very long time to process results in some cases. If we were all happy campers who loved each other, it wouldn’t matter, but there’s lots of distrust on all sides, for factual reasons.
I think it’s a question of the different voting methods being used. We’ve always had close elections. We need to do a better job of processing results in a timely fashion.
