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Let's go back in time to the twenty twenty US election.
The fate of the presidency is still in the balance. After election day, there is no White House Wintery yet.
Days after polls closed on November third, Americans were left wondering who had won the presidential election. At the time, Donald Trump promoted conspiracy theories, questioning the legitimacy of the votes that had been counted.
The Trump campaign wants to recount in Wisconsin and is suing to stop the counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If you count the legal votes, I easily win.
Poll workers and election officials were put on the defensive and pressured to stop counting ballots.
We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We are going to continue to count the ballots until they're all done.
Networks called the election for Joe Biden the morning of Saturday, November seventh, but Trump released a statement that day saying that the election was far from over. That insighted a movement that ended when his supporter stormed the capitol.
Capitol Hill is in chaos with violent clashes as Congress gathered to formalize President elect Joe Biden's victory.
With early voting already underway an election day getting closer, the outcome of the twenty twenty four presidential race is on everyone's mind. But will we know the result right after polls close or could the election drag out again? Today?
On the show, we look at what happens if tallying the twenty twenty four election goes into overtime, what we can expect to know and what we might not by the time we go to bed on Tuesday, November fifth, and what the potential for uncertainty again could mean for trust in the election process. From Bloomberg's Washington Bureau, This is the Big Take DC podcast. I'm Sala Muson. Gregory
Cordy covers politics for Bloomberg. He's been in the newsroom and at local boards of elections on many election nights over the years, watching the results come in as votes get tallied and a winner is announced. I wanted to get a sense from him when and how that call is usually made. When on a typical traditional election night, does that usually happen?
I don't know that we have traditional predictable election nights anymore. The way that a winner is determined legally, is that in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, election officials count the votes. They wait for every single last vote to come in, they certify them, and that elects the electors to the Electoral College, which will meet on
December seventeenth. All of that takes many weeks, of course, and we don't have the patience for that, and so over the last century and a half, really the Associated Press has become kind of the unofficial but widely respected arbiter of sort of the real time vote count. They have a decision desk, as do the major television networks, that looks at the results that they come in, and when the trailing candidate no longer has a chance of
catching up, they will call the race. They will declare a winner in that race.
In landslide races where there's a clear winner, that ap call can come pretty early, like in twenty twelve.
That was when President Obama was running for a reelection against Mitt Romney. That race was called by the Associated Press at eleven thirty eight PM on election night.
But when a race is close, that vote count can stretch for days or even weeks.
Let's throw two thousand in the mix. Right where we had one state in Florida where just a couple one hundred votes separated George Bush and al Gore, and that went on all the way into December.
That race also went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Case was a highly politicized case where people started to kind of doubt whether the Supreme Court is really the best arbiter to decide these very political questions. At the time, people didn't really have that confidence because the reasoning seems so slipshod in terms of which votes were counted, in which we're not.
That's so interesting because a couple of weeks later they were confirming Bush's Treasury nominee State Department nominee and it wasn't quite as contentious as you think could be. At that time, well, al.
Gore conceded the election. That's the big difference is that not only do we have close elections, not only do we have the pandemic slowing down the vote count, but when you have a candidate that refuses to concede, that's frankly, what a lot of our democracy relies on is the good faith of actors on both sides to know when they've been whooped, and that didn't happen in twenty twenty.
Twenty twenty was something of a perfect storm. First, the race was historically close.
But then also the way that we vote has changed. People or worried that they get sick if they went into a crowded room with a bunch of their neighbors and cast their votes. So they like voting early, they like voting absentee, and they like mailing in their vote in. Those votes take longer to count.
And those votes don't just take longer to count. Each state has different rules dictating how and when they're allowed to be counted.
Some states allow those votes to be counted on election day or even before election day. Those counts are kept secret until the polls close, but it allows them to get a head start. If they don't get that head start, and this is what happened in Pennsylvania in twenty twenty is they did not open the ballot en votes until election day, and that takes a lot of work.
On Election night twenty twenty, Pennsylvania's count was too close to call.
That was the biggest prize twenty electoral votes, and that wasn't decided until Saturday morning.
After election Saturday morning. That was four days after the polls closed, four days to count enough of those mail in ballots to determine the scope of Biden's lead in the state and for ap to call the race nationwide.
That's usually enough for the losing candidate to concede, and of course Donald Trump didn't do that, which led to a whole series of events, the fake Elector plot January sixth, and we all know the history from there.
In twenty twenty, a record number of Americans did not cast their ballots on election Day. Seventy percent of voters voted either by mail or early. By the twenty twenty two midterms, that number was closer to half of voters. We can't know exactly how many Americans planned to vote in person on November fifth, but Gregory says those new voting habits people picked up during the pandemic won't disappear entirely.
People generally like the ability to vote in those non traditional ways, So we're sort of in between. We're never going to go back to sort of the pre pandemic days, just like we're not all going to go back in the office five days a week. But people are not quite as hunkered down as they were during the.
Pan Many states have also made it easier to vote in non traditional ways since the pandemic.
It used to be that the only way you could vote absentee was if you were over age sixty five, or you had a documented illness, or you were going to be out of town. There's been a movement towards what we call no fault absentee voting, basically a mailien option for any reason at all. That's really led to the popularity of that as a voting method.
So how prepared are voting centers and courts to deal with the potential for delayed results and what's at stake if the count is called into question again. That's coming up. I've been talking with Bloomberg Politics reporter Gregory Cordy about the American voting system, why election experts expect the count to stretch into extra innings this year, and how the nation has been preparing for days or even weeks of uncertainty.
We don't really have national elections in the United States. Every state makes up its own voting rules, and in some places it even goes down to the county level.
Gregory told me in many ways. The system has actually improved over the years.
Elections are more accurate and arguably more secure than they've ever been. We use election technologies now that are better than the ones that we used a generation ago. If you remember again that Florida election of the year two thousand, you might remember Palm Beach County, the border elections, holding up those punch card ballots the light and trying to figure out how many corners of a chad were hanging from that punch out ballot. That was just a flaw
in that technology. So now it's a lot more systematized. It's a lot more easy and quick to count. The Constitution says that Congress can step in and have some uniform laws. That's why we all vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. We have an election day where everybody votes at the same time. Believe it or not, it wasn't always that way, But as long as we have this federal system, states do have a lot of of leeway in the voting rules and how they count the vote.
That doesn't just delay the race calling, it can also paint an incomplete picture of one candidate taking the lead. Let's go back to what happened in Pennsylvania four years ago when poll workers didn't start the time consuming process of counting mail in ballots until election day.
If you count those ballots late in the night, those tend to be more Democratic leaning votes, and if you count all of the in person votes, which tend to be more Republican leaning, first, you'll see a farm that we call the red Mirage. We saw former President Trump jump out to a very early and seemingly impressive lead, but as those provisional votes, as those mail in votes and absentee votes came in, Joe Biden slowly closed on that lead until Saturday, the AP had seen enough and
decided to call the race for Biden. But that's three or four days where people can come up with their own explanation for all sorts of alleged plots, of ballot bags being trucked in, or voter fraud, or all kinds of things that are would be really hard to pull off in our system of election administration, where every election is supervised by equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, it's really hard to do that. But that doesn't stop the conspiracy theories.
Since twenty twenty, Congress has tried to shore up the laws, in part to prevent that kind of election denial from happening again, but also to ensure clear vote counting and certification procedures are on the books.
They slipped in some amendments to the Electoral Count Act that formalized the process for electoral votes to be counted and then sent to the Congress to be ultimately certified. It has made clear that the vice president, as Mike Pence maintained all along in twenty twenty, does not have
the ability to decide who wins the presidential election. It increased the number of representatives and senators that need to object to the certification of the electoral vote for it to force some sort of a contingental election perhaps, And it also made clear that there's a process in the courts to resolve those disputes. So, in theory, the legal structures are a little better than we had in twenty
twenty to resolve some of these disputes. But if this election comes down to just one state and perhaps afford a like situation where it's a few thousand or even hundreds of votes separating the two candidates in just one state, there's going to be an awful lot of pressure be put to bear on local elections officials and.
When it comes to individual states with the power to shape the election. Pennsylvania hasn't changed the way it counts mail in vote since twenty twenty, so.
We could very well see another red mirage in Pennsylvania.
There are also concerns in some swing states about voting access being restricted.
We're looking at Georgia very carefully. The Georgia legislature recently passed a law that gave local election officials a lot of latitude in terms of decide which precincts they will certify after the election if they have evidence of voting fraud. No one's quite sure how that's going to work. The idea of disenfranchising every voter in a precinct because some election officials might have some concerns about an isolated case of voter fraud is something that ultimately, I think is
going to have to be decided by the courts. But in the meantime, yeah, there's going to be a lot of opportunity for partisan wrangling on both sides. There.
Recent weather disasters could also impact voters trying to get to polling centers. There's Hurricane Milton in Florida this week and Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last week.
We're still trying to wrap our heads around how that's going to affect turnout and vote counting in those areas, especially the rural you get and those tend to be Trump supporters. We just know nationally that there's a wide urban rural divide in our politics that the inability of some of those voters to vote could have an impact on the election.
Gregory says, the inability to call a winner on election night isn't an indictment of our electoral system. It's actually the process working as it should to ensure an accurate result. But in an age of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and government skepticism, the longer we go without a winner, the more the peaceful transfer of power could be at risk.
Election officials will tell you that the length of time it takes to count the vote has nothing to do with the integrity of the vote, but unfortunately that's not the way everybody sees it. The longer we go without having a clear winner, the easier it is for conspiracy theories to take hold. It's not inconceivable that we could go days or even weeks without knowing who the clear winner is.
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Salamosen. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Sarah Fordon. It was mixed by Alex Sugia in fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Naomi Shaven, who also edited this episode, is our senior producer. Wendy Benjaminson and Elizabeth Ponso provide editorial direction. Nicole Beemsterbower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
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