‘Normal’: Why counting US votes takes time, not a sign of fraud | 2024 US Election News

A few hours after polls closed in the 2020 US presidential election, with millions of votes still being counted, Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech.

“We were preparing to win this election – frankly, we won this election,” the then-president told reporters on the morning of Election Day, alleging that “massive fraud” had been committed.

“We want the voting to end. We don’t want them to receive votes at 4 in the morning and put them on the list,” he said.

Trump’s premature – and false – claim to defeat his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, who eventually won the 2020 election, capped weeks of allegations of fake voter fraud by Republicans.

Four years later, with the 2024 race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris too close to call, experts reiterated that it could take days to count the votes — and that’s not a sign of inefficiency.

“Like 2020, it’s normal for the vote counting to take a few days,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

That is especially true in “highly contested states where things will be closely watched and you will have to count a lot of votes before you have a feeling who will win those states”.

“It will take time, and that is because of the verification measures built into the counting system to ensure accuracy,” he told Al Jazeera.

Different processes

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

Each US state administers elections in its own way, and as a result, each state’s vote count takes a different amount of time, explains 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 incoming ballots to be processed before Election Day, meaning their respective counts will take longer.

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

“And the states have very different populations. Wyoming has less population while California has more people living in it than Canada. Since the number of voters is large, it takes a long time to count their votes, which number in the millions.”

Meanwhile, states must also organize what are known as provisional ballots. These are votes cast by people whose registration status must first be verified before their vote can be counted, thus taking a long time.

Ultimately, the fact that it can take hours – or days – after Election Day to count votes is not a sign of any illegal activity, Torres-Spelliscy said. “Just because it takes a large country a few days to count millions of votes is not evidence of fraud.”

Misconceptions, misinformation

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

While states can take weeks to release their official vote tallies, US news organizations make estimates based on their own methods and preliminary results.

This “election call” – a news agency announcing the presidential winner – can happen on election night. But in close contests, like the 2020 race between Trump and Biden, it could take several days.

Most polls leading up to Election Day this year showed Harris and Trump locked in a race that is too close to call and could go down as candidates in seven critical states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

The potential for misinformation at this point is very high in a nation where Trump has now spent years claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him and the electoral process is riddled 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.

The phenomenon known as the “Blue Shift” can add to the false perception that something bad is going on, as it did in 2020.

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

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

“But it was a normal vote count; it was just a feature of how people chose to vote that year.”

‘Screaming fraud and malfeasance’

Despite thousands of experts disputing Trump’s fraud allegations, the former president continued to make false allegations throughout the 2024 race.

On the campaign trail, the former president repeatedly warned of voter fraud, including the possibility that absentee voters were voting as part of a Democratic conspiracy to sway the results in Harris’ favor — a claim experts have dismissed as untrue.

His team has filed a number of lawsuits related to alleged irregularities in the electoral roll, the list of people eligible to vote.

And Trump has adopted the slogan “too big to cooperate” to urge his supporters to vote in large enough numbers to “make sure we win by a margin of error”.

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

“He has laid the groundwork for shouting about fraud and not following the law just because he might not win. If that’s your start, the fact that it takes a while to count the votes is 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 not willing to play by the rules of democracy.

“He believes that he deserves to be in power regardless of the results of the election. Therefore, as such, it does not conform to any democratic ethics. Democracy is based on fair rules of fair competition, and the Trump Republican Party is not committed to those. “

Potentially violent

Torres-Spelliscy noted that even if Trump declared the winner before all the votes were counted, that kind of declaration “doesn’t legally make a difference”.

“The important thing is who says and the DC confirms which candidate wins 270 votes in the Electoral College,” he explained.

However, if Trump prematurely declares that he has won 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 are already prevalent among many of the former president’s supporters.

“What’s going to happen at this point — and it’s already happening — is that there’s going to be all kinds of outlandish claims made in the media, and that’s going to infuriate Trump supporters,” Gardner said. “And who knows what they’ll do.”

Amid allegations of fraud by Trump after the 2020 vote, a crowd of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington, DC, to try to prevent Congress from confirming Biden’s victory.

The protest of January 6, 2021, continues to grow across the country, Lakin said, as false claims of stolen elections “created this great division in this country and led to violence”.

“It would be unfortunate if that didn’t happen again,” he said. “It would be an insult to democracy if we can’t figure out how to get back to a peaceful transfer of power.”