HuffPost: The 2022 Election Nightmare Has Already Started
HuffPost: The 2022 Election Nightmare Has Already Started
Two-and-a-half hours after polls closed in every state in the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump declared victory and said he was going to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to stop states from counting any more legally cast ballots.
“We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four in the morning and add them to the list,” Trump said before adding, “Frankly, we did win the election.”
As the hours turned into days before the presidential election was finally called for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump built his lie that the election was stolen from him. The late-counted, or “overtime,” ballots (generally mail ballots and provisional ballots) cast in heavily Black and Latino counties favoring Democrats were deemed fraudulent. Election workers had switched real votes for fake ones, whether by USB drive or ballot drop boxes, Trump and his allies claimed. And on and on. The claims referred to the presidential votes only, though, while Republican victories from the same ballots were accepted. …
These repeated claims, from GOP politicians and the movement’s media superstars, have conditioned the base to believe in widespread voter fraud; a recent poll showed two-thirds of Republican voters do not accept that Biden fairly won the 2020 election. So when there’s another delayed count in the upcoming midterms, all hell may break loose once again. …
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the high rate of late-counted ballots can be chalked up to both the refusal of Republicans in state legislatures to pass bills allowing mail ballots to be processed prior to Election Day and the fact that votes were counted at centralized locations in the counties, requiring the ballots to be transported. …
Republicans in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania continued to refuse to allow any time for ballots to be pre-processed after 2020.
“We were saying, in Pennsylvania you have to pass something to deal with pre-processing,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonprofit active in monitoring elections. “To me, at this point, it is purposeful. They want chaos. If you refuse to pass laws, you are asking for what’s next.” …
The lies Republicans spread about the post-election vote count highlight a mostly overlooked aspect of elections: that they do not end on Election Day. Ballots must be processed, counted, canvassed and certified. When elections are extremely close, recounts may be in order depending on each state’s recount laws.
“In the past, election protection broadly has been about focusing on how we are preparing up to the election ― the day before and the day of the election,” said Quentin Turner, director of Common Cause Michigan. “But in the past couple years, that has changed. The days leading up to and on Election Day are the pregame. The work continues on in just as an intense way after the election. And that is where the most opportunities are for people who want to sow discord or doubt in the process.” …
In Michigan, Turner said that the most worrying period is the 14 days after the election, when county totals are canvassed and certified by local boards of canvassers. In 2020, two Republican members of the Wayne County board of canvassers initially attempted to vote against certifying the totals from the largest county in the state after being pressured by Trump and his supporters.
Though those two members reversed themselves and certified the legitimate vote totals, the newest Republican member of the board, appointed in 2021, said he would not have certified the 2020 election. Election deniers were appointed to county boards of canvassers in at least two other Michigan counties ahead of the 2022 election.
“We don’t know how the boards of canvassers are going to end up voting,” Turner said. “Hopefully, they all do their jobs like they’re supposed to.”