How Republicans have prevented mail ballots from being counted earlier

Recent days have brought a bevy of complaints about how long the vote-tallying process could take. Former Trump administration official Richard Grenell said flatly, “Any state which doesn’t count all the votes and announce the winner Tuesday night is incompetent.” (Trump ally Bernard Kerik responded: “Incompetent or crooked!”) When Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state said the vote-counting could take days in that state, Trump ally and Judicial Watch head Tom Fitton declared it was “UNACCEPTABLE.” Many pointed to the speedy results in Brazil’s recent election to suggest there was something wrong with our system. And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) asked suggestively, “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes?”

Many of the complaints didn’t specifically invoke the prospect of fraud. But it should escape nobody that Trump used the slow vote-counting process — and the fact that slower-counted and heavily Democratic mail ballots swung the 2020 race for President Biden — to make exactly that false claim. He misleadingly labeled the votes “ballot dumps.”

It’s not difficult to see where certain supporters of his will take this if the 2022 results don’t pan out for Republicans — because they already went there two years ago, despite the lack of evidence that called the results into question.

To the extent they’re complaining about the pace of vote-counting, though, they should take it up with their own party.

The first thing to note is that Cruz is wrong to say that only big urban areas take days to count their votes. Mail ballot processing is slow in many places (for reasons we’ll get to); it’s just more pronounced in big cities because there are many more ballots. And very few places actually counts all votes on election night; you just don’t notice because the margins in less-competitive races allow for a winner to be declared earlier.

But the bigger point is that, despite having two years to address the underlying causes of slower vote-counting since Trump baselessly cried fraud about “ballot dumps,” Republican-controlled legislatures in key states have taken a pass on allowing counting to start earlier.

In Wisconsin, past supporters of such a change have included the GOP state House speaker, the former GOP lieutenant governor, the GOP state Senate majority leader and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). And the state assembly even passed a bill this year allowing the count to begin a day early. But despite Gov. Tony Evers (D) indicating his support for the measure, the GOP-controlled state Senate declined to take it up amid a conservative backlash.

State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R) baselessly said that the extra day would just provide “an extra day to cheat,” and that “counting the ballots should be driven by security, not speed.”

In Michigan, the GOP state legislature in late September did do something: It passed a bill allowing for some of the processing of mail ballots to begin two days earlier. But the counting still must wait until Election Day, and the bill came so late that many jurisdictions haven’t been able to put it into practice. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) has called the change insufficient and warned that it is unlikely to make much of a difference in when Michigan receives election results next week.

Benson has been pushing for more time since before the 2020 election. She cautioned as far back as that summer that people would use the slow counts to “spread false information about the integrity and security of our systems” — a warning that proved extremely prescient, but hasn’t spurred extensive action from the legislature.

The other major swing state where this has been at issue is Pennsylvania. But despite years of pressure to allow the processing to begin earlier, the GOP state legislature has resisted passing a stand-alone bill and instead tried to package pre-canvassing changes with other measures that were non-starters for Gov. Tom Wolf (D).

The state legislature in 2019 passed a law — known as Act 77 — that significantly expanded the availability of mail-in voting. But it did not give election officials more time to count those votes.

Anticipating an influx of mail ballots, the secretary of state and county commissioners requested three weeks of pre-canvassing in the 2020 election — something Wolf and Democrats said they supported. Republicans responded by proposing three days, but they packaged it with legislation that would have, among other things, banned ballot drop boxes. Wolf vetoed the package.

In 2021, the state legislature included five days of pre-canvassing with more changes that Democrats didn’t like, like stricter voter ID and signature verification and moving the voter registration deadline earlier. Wolf again vetoed it, and he has continued to push for a stand-alone pre-canvassing bill.

But that hasn’t been forthcoming, despite repeated requests. The state legislature this year did pass a bill, which Wolf signed, providing counties funding if they agree to count ballots round-the-clock starting on Election Day, but it’s unclear how much difference that will make.

The GOP state lawmaker who spearheaded the 2021 package that Wolf vetoed has said the votes simply aren’t there for a stand-alone bill allowing earlier pre-canvassing. And another key Republican said this summer that there was just no consensus on such a bill, despite his efforts to find one.

These delayed vote counts aren’t unusual. The vast majority of states restrict the actual counting of mail ballots to Election Day. But around three-fourths allow processing to begin earlier and, most significantly, earlier than Michigan does.

And to the extent the vote counts are slow in these states next week, there was plenty that Republicans could have done about it over the last two years, given how it was exploited to sow distrust in the system in 2020.