‘Entirely normal’: Why counting US votes takes time, is not a sign of fraud

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

“We were getting ready to win this election – frankly, we did win this election,” the then-president told reporters in the early morning hours after Election Day, alleging that “a major fraud” was being committed.

“We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock 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 untrue voter fraud allegations made by the Republican incumbent.

Four years later, as the 2024 race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris remains too close to call, experts again are stressing that it could take days to count the votes — and that is not a sign of malfeasance.

“Just like in 2020, it’s entirely 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 scrutinised 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 due to built-in verification steps in the counting process to ensure accuracy,” she told Al Jazeera.

Different procedures

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, states also must 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 bit longer.

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

Misperceptions, misinformation

Still, misinformation can quickly spread in the time it takes to tabulate the votes — and between when the polls close and when a projected winner is announced.

While states can take weeks to release their official vote tallies, US media organisations make projections based on their own methodologies 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 can take a few days.

Most polling leading up to Election Day this year showed Harris and Trump locked in a race that is too close to call and 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 in this period is especially high in a polarised nation where Trump has now spent years claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the electoral system overall is rife with fraud.

Those 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 nefarious is going on, as it did in 2020.

The term refers to a moment in US elections when the results begin to shift in favour of Democrats as more mail-in ballots get counted throughout the day. Generally, more Democratic voters have voted by mail than Republicans, but it remains to be seen if that will again be the case this year.

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

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

‘Yelling fraud and irregularity’

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

On the campaign trail, the former president repeatedly warned of voter fraud, including the prospect that noncitizens were voting as part of a Democratic plot to skew the results in Harris’s favour — a claim experts have slammed as untrue.

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

And Trump also embraced the slogan “too big to rig” to urge his supporters to vote in numbers large enough to “guarantee 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 that he made in 2020: If he’s not the winner of 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 has already laid the groundwork for yelling fraud and irregularity just because he might not win. If that’s your starting point, the fact that it takes a while to count the ballots is only one of a million different things that you can say.”

According to Gardner, “the root of the problem is that the Republican Party under Trump is not willing to play by the rules of democracy.

“It believes that it deserves to be in power regardless of electoral outcomes. 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 the Trump Republican Party is not committed to those.”

Potential for violence

Torres-Spelliscy noted that even if Trump does say he won before all the votes are counted, that type of pronouncement “makes no difference legally”.

“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 is ultimately found to have lost after the votes are counted, that would add to the distrust, anger and feelings of injustice that already permeate among many of the former president’s supporters.

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

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

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

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

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