Delays in Knowing Who Won
“What keeps me up at night,” she said in a phone interview, “is that reporters want to know why they can’t have results on election night. The candidates too.”
In the past, Underhill said, there’s been no difference in the percentage of votes cast by Republicans and Democrats on Election Day versus those mailed in.
“If there should be a partisan difference in who is casting on Election Day and who is casting ballots by mail, it just doesn’t look right,” she said. “Up until now there hasn’t been a significant difference. Will that be the same this year?”
More than 550,000 absentee ballots were rejected in this year’s presidential primaries, far more than the 318,728 rejected in the 2016 general election, NPR found. With many more voters expected to vote absentee this year, many for the first time, that number is expected to rise, NPR said.
The kinds of mistakes on absentee ballots that lead to their rejection are the ones made by more first-time absentee voters, the analysis said, including failing to sign the envelope or sending it in too late to be counted under a state’s rules.
All of this means a close election may not be decided until weeks after election night, and the projected “results” announced by media outlets, based on partial returns, may not be the final word.
“These are valid votes cast by eligible people,” said Justin Levitt, election law professor at Loyola Law School in California. “Ballots that come in later are counted later,” he said, and should not affect the public perception about the validity of the count.
“It’s like predicting the results of a sports contest based on the first three minutes of the game. Nobody screams ‘fraud’ when the results turn out differently at the end of the game than in the first three minutes.”
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