Election chiefs from three important swing states recently went on cable news to make excuses about why they won’t have the election results on Election Day — even though this has been the norm in America for decades and is still the norm in many much larger states.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was asked Sunday on CBS News’ Face The Nation how “quickly” she expects to get the results, and she responded, in part, by saying: “I would estimate, end of the day on Wednesday [November 6], as the best guess on how we’ll perform.”
There is no good reason for such a delay, yet election officials in the post-Covid era are pushing the delays we saw during the 2020 election as the new norm.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also joined the show on Sunday, said that because of a recently passed state law governing how elections are administered, “all early votes and all early accepted ballots, they all will have to have their results reported by 8pm. That’s 70, maybe even 75% of all the vote totals will be reported no later than 8pm on election night.”
So why can’t Georgia report its election results on election night? As Raffensperger said, the state “will be waiting for … overseas ballots that come in no later than Friday [that week], and so those will then be the final numbers. And we’ll just see if that makes the difference in the total vote totals.”
Why would
