Several crucial swing states will not release their final results until weeks after Election Day due to the influx of mail-in voting, according to a Politico review of the states’ election rules.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, to a lesser degree, Minnesota and North Carolina, will likely decide this year’s election just as they did the 2016 election.
Except for Wisconsin, which has a bipartisan election commission, the elections in all of these states are being overseen and certified by partisan Democrats.
And none plan to begin processing their mail ballots until Election Day.
That means it may take several weeks for the final results to determine whether victory goes to incumbent Republican President Donald Trump, Democrat Joe Biden or one of several third-party candidates—including rapper Kanye West.
Vote fraud has long been a concern in mail-in voting, but due to the enormous influx of mail-in ballots this year, the threat of malfeasance is even greater.
Election officials have to do everything from opening envelopes, to checking voter signatures, to flattening ballots that have been crumpled in transit. They then have to log the millions of votes they will receive by mail.
In other words, the vote-by-mail process and its results are completely dependent on the partisan election officials running the show.
Michigan’s Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson already has warned her state’s residents that it will take at least a full week for her office to sort through all of the mail-in ballots.
“We should be prepared for this to be closer to an election week as opposed to an Election Day,” Benson told NBC News recently.
“The bottom line is we are not going to have the full results and a counting of all of our ballots on election night,” she said. “We already know that.”
Most states are allowed to begin processing mail-in ballots at least two weeks before Election Day.
Michigan clerks, however, are only allowed to verify the signature on the outside of the ballot envelopes—they cannot begin counting them until Election Day.
Minnesota can begin processing two weeks before Election Day, but the final tallies will not be run until election night.
Similarly, North Carolina can begin approving absentee ballots five weeks before Election Day, but the results will not be reported or finalized until election night.
Pennsylvania election officials cannot start processing ballots until the morning of Election Day, though state legislators are working to move up that processing date to ease the strain on election workers the night of the election.
And in Wisconsin, officials cannot begin processing and tallying votes until after the polls open. It’s unlikely the state legislature changes that date.
Even the states that can begin tallying the ballots before Election Day aren’t sure the results will be completely accurate.
“The question is, will it be conclusive or not?” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told Politico.
“So if any candidate has a 4- or 5-percent lead on election night, and they’re winning by a million votes and there’s only a couple hundred thousand outstanding absentee ballots, then the contest is over, right?” he continued. “I think numerically, that’s pretty straightforward … But if it’s a tighter race … well, then yeah, you just can’t say that it’s a conclusive result yet at that point.”
A number of Democratic operatives, including failed 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton, are suggesting that Biden may refuse to concede the race under any circumstance, maintaining that the longer it drags out, the better chance Democrats have to overturn a Trump victory on election night.
In fact, some “war games scenarios” by the deceptively named left-wing Transition Integrity Project have proposed that even if Trump narrowly wins in battleground blue states, they may send a rival set of Biden electors to cast the decision into turmoil.
In the meantime, they may use massive social unrest by radical activists—similar to ongoing race-riots and Antifa-led protests—to bludgeon moderate congressional Republicans into “compromising” on a Biden victory simply to maintain peace and stability.
Trump allies have been predicting that mail-in voting will lead to an Election Day disaster ever since Democrats first introduced the talking point in March as a response to the coronavirus panic.
“They are talking about sending 51 million ballots out to anybody who, you know, nobody knows who is going to get them,” Trump told Fox News.
“It’s a horrible thing,” he continued. “It’s a fraudulent election. Everybody knows it, you don’t even have to know politics to know it. Fifty-one million ballots are going to be indiscriminately sent out to people who didn’t even ask for them, people who will say, ‘Hey, I just got a ballot, that’s great, let me vote,’ and it’s a terrible thing.”
Despite mounting evidence of election abuses during recent primaries, including multiple cases of ballot mishandling and conspiracy to commit fraud, Democrats and their mainstream media allies—now backed by ‘fact-checking’ social-media censors—have dogmatically maintained that no such evidence exists.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
