President Donald Trump’s attacks trying to undermine the legitimacy of the election are particularly egregious, because what he is complaining about is merely the long-established standard procedure for counting votes, the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips explained in an analysis on Monday.
Trump’s main contention is that all votes should be counted on election night, but as Phillips points out, “vote tallying has never been completed in a modern U.S. presidential election on election night” and then describes in a detailed fashion why this has never been so.
She emphasized that the electoral college does not even meet until the middle of December to officially vote, because “counting and making those results official takes a while in each state, so much so that federal election law gives states more than a month after the election to count and certify their results.”
She explains that absentee ballots always take a while to count, since there is more processing to do, and this election will be even more so, since the volume of by-mail votes is so high due to the coronavirus pandemic.
She goes on to list other normal reasons that have existed for many elections why a vote might take long to tally, such as voters being allowed to fix errors on their ballots and the counting of provisional ballots
Phillips then explains the normal procedure that has existed for many years in which once the ballots are counted, there is canvassing, followed by the certification of the votes.
In addition, part of the procedure is that campaigns can sue over the results, as Trump himself is talking about doing, which could drag out the entire process for additional weeks or more.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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