‘Quite normal’: Why taking time to count US votes is not a sign of fraud | 2024 US Election News

Just hours after the polls closed in the 2020 US presidential election, as millions of votes were still being counted, Donald Trump delivered an extraordinary speech.

“We were poised to win this election — frankly, we won this election,” the then-president told reporters in the early morning hours after Election Day, alleging “a major fraud” was perpetrated.

“We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 in the morning and add them to the list,” he said.

Trump’s premature — and false — claim of victory over his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who ultimately won the 2020 election, capped weeks of false voter fraud claims made by the Republican incumbent.

Four years later, with the 2024 race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris still too close, experts are again stressing that it can take days to count the votes — and that’s not a sign of abuse.

“Just like in 2020, it is quite normal for vote counting to take several days,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

That’s especially true “in closely contested states where things are going to be scrutinized and you’re going to have to count a lot of votes before you’re going to have a sense of who’s going to win those states.”

“It’s going to take time and that’s because of built-in verification steps in the counting process to ensure accuracy,” she told Al Jazeera.

Different procedures

Vote counting takes time in the United States for a variety of reasons, including how elections are administered and how ballots are processed.

Each U.S. state conducts elections in its own way, and as a result, each state’s vote count takes a different amount of time, explained Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University College of Law in Florida.

For example, the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin do not allow submitted ballots to be processed until Election Day, meaning their respective counts will likely take longer.

“Others get a head start by starting the counting process earlier in the early voting period,” Torres-Spelliscy told Al Jazeera in an email.

“And states have vastly different population sizes. Wyoming has a small population, while California has more people living in it than Canada. The larger the voter population, the longer it takes to count their ballots, which can number in the millions.”

Meanwhile, states must also sort through what are known as provisional ballots. These are ballots cast by people whose voter registration status must first be verified before their vote is counted, thereby taking a little longer.

Ultimately, the fact that it can take hours — or even days — after Election Day to count votes is not indicative of any illegal activity, Torres-Spelliscy said. “Just because it takes a populous state a few days to count millions of votes is not proof of fraud.”

Misunderstandings, misinformation

Still, misinformation can spread quickly in the time it takes to tabulate the votes – and between when the polls close and when an expected winner is announced.

While states can take weeks to release their official vote tallies, US media organizations make projections based on their own methods as well as preliminary results.

This “election call”—a news outlet announcing a projected presidential winner—can happen on election night. But in closer contests, such as the 2020 race between Trump and Biden, it could take a few days.

Most polls leading up to Election Day this year showed Harris and Trump locked in a too-close race that will likely come down to how the candidates fare in seven critical battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

The potential for misinformation during this period is especially high in a polarized nation where Trump has now spent years claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the electoral system in general is riddled with fraud.

These beliefs are held by many Americans: According to a September 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 66 percent of Republican voters said they believed the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

A phenomenon known as the “Blue Shift” can also add to false perceptions that something sinister is going on, as it did in 2020.

The term refers to a moment in the US election when the results begin to shift in favor of the Democrats as more mail-in ballots are counted throughout the day. In general, more Democratic voters have voted by mail than Republicans, but it remains to be seen whether that will be the case again this year.

In 2020, Trump “used that change in the numbers throughout the day … to create this idea that something was wrong,” said Lakin at the ACLU.

“But that was the normal processing of ballots; it was just a feature of the way people chose to vote in that particular year.”

‘Screams fraud and irregularity’

Despite countless experts debunking Trump’s fraud claims, the former president has continued to make false claims throughout the 2024 race.

On the campaign trail, the former president repeatedly warned against voter fraud, including the prospect of non-citizens voting as part of a Democratic plan to skew the results in Harris’ favor — a claim experts have ruled untrue.

His team has filed a series of lawsuits related to alleged irregularities on the voter rolls, the lists of people eligible to cast ballots.

And Trump also embraced the slogan “too big to rich” to urge his supporters to vote in numbers large enough to “guarantee that we win by more than the margin of fraud”.

“He’s already sort of announced that he’s the winner before the ballots have even been counted. This is the same claim he made in 2020: If he’s not the winner by the official count, it can only be because of fraud,” said James Gardner, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law in New York state.

“He’s already laid the groundwork to call out fraud and irregularities just because he might not win. If that’s your starting point, the fact that it’s taking a while to count the ballots is just one of a million different things you can say.”

According to Gardner, “the root of the problem is that the Republican Party under Trump is unwilling to play by the rules of democracy.

“It believes it deserves to be in power regardless of election results. So, as a result, it does not adhere to any of the ethics of democratic fair play. Democracy is based on fair rules of fair competition, and Trump’s Republican Party is not committed to them .”

Potential for violence

Torres-Spelliscy noted that even if Trump says he won before all the votes are counted, those types of statements make no legal difference.

“What matters is who states and DC certify and which candidate wins 270 Electoral College votes,” she explained.

Still, if Trump prematurely declares victory over Harris and ultimately turns out to have lost after the votes are counted, it would add to the distrust, anger and feelings of injustice already permeating many of the former president’s supporters .

“What’s going to happen this time — what’s already happening — is that all kinds of outlandish claims are going to come out through the media, and that’s going to at least inflame Trump’s supporters,” Gardner said. “And who knows what they’ll do.”

Amid Trump’s false claims of fraud after the 2020 vote, a mob of his supporters stormed the US capital in Washington, DC, to try to prevent Congress from confirming Biden’s election victory.

The January 6, 2021 uprising continues to reverberate across the country, Lakin said, as the false allegations of a stolen election “created this huge divide in this country and ultimately led to violence.”

“It would be unfortunate if it happened again,” she said. “It would be a travesty of democracy if we can’t figure out how to return to a peaceful transfer of power.”