WASHINGTON – A chaotic election season isn’t likely to end on Election Day as challenges, slow counts and other problems are predicted to thwart a speedy decision on who has won the presidential race and other close races.
Elections are run by individual states, and there’s always been a difference in how quickly ballots are counted. California, for instance, is the slowest to tally results, and Florida the quickest.
But on Election Day 2024, other hurdles are expected in a presidential race that many analysts say is too close to call right now.
“Our work is not going to be done on election night,” predicted Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, president of the National Association of Secretaries of States (NASS).
Besides post-election legal challenges to results, which Simon and many of his NASS colleagues expect, there are a host of other issues that threaten to unleash chaos on Nov. 5.
“The post-election period is going to be key,” Simon said. “It will be as fraught or more so than 2020.”
Simon said he is planning for litigation but “kind of shadowboxing” because he and his fellow secretaries of state do not know what kind of challenges they will face.
“We’re hoping for the best and planning for the worst,” Simon said.
In the 2020 election, won by President Biden, there were 62 legal challenges by the Trump campaign to election results. Sixty-one of them failed.
Still, Donald Trump, who is again the GOP nominee for president, was able to sow doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections, and he continues to dispute the 2020 results and claims at his campaign rallies that the only way he can lose is if the other side rigs the election.
Yet it is virtually impossible for anyone to rig a U.S. presidential race because of their decentralized nature – they are run by municipal or county electoral jurisdictions.
Slowing the count
Another thing that is likely to cause confusion is the number of new election laws states have approved since 2020, said Andrew Garber, counsel on voting rights and elections at the non-profit Brennan Center for Justice.
“Quite a few voters are going to rely on what they did in the past, and that’s not going to work anymore,” Garber said.
Many new laws are in key swing states that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential election and in states where control of the U.S. House and Senate will be decided. Many make it harder for some to cast a ballot or have a ballot counted.
That’s especially true in Georgia, where a series of election rules have been implemented by the state’s Republican-controlled election board. One gives county boards power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify.
Another new voting rule in Georgia and Arizona requires all counties to perform a hand count of ballots cast on Election Day to check machine tabulations.
Florida has made it harder to obtain a mail-in ballot, and 10 states have curbed the availability of ballot drop boxes, whose availability and popularity grew during the pandemic.
Related: Wisconsin and other states are making late changes to election rules
Iowa and Ohio, for example, now allow only one dropbox per county, and Georgia restricts counties from having more than one dropbox per 100,000 voters.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania failed to update its election law, so poll workers can’t start counting mail in ballots until Election Day.
Garber said efforts to slow down the tally on election night “make it very likely that we won’t know who won.”
“People make more mistakes (counting votes) than machines do,” Garber added.
Conspiracy theories and disinformation
Not all new state voting laws are restrictive. In the past two years Minnesota has instituted automatic voter registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, eased voting on college campuses, and restored the right to vote for felons who had been barred from the ballot box.
Minnesota also begins to count absentee and mail-in ballots 18 days before Election Day. “That gives us a head start,” Simon said.
Another concern is reports that intimidation has scared some poll workers into quitting their jobs. A 2024 survey of 928 local election officials conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice found that more than one-third, 38%, said they had experienced “threats, harassment, or abuse” because of their jobs.
Simon said Minnesota “is really in good shape” when it comes to poll workers. But he is concerned about intimidation at polling places and has plans to beef up security in partnership with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, he is doing what he can to restore confidence in the state’s voting system and counter “conspiracy theories” on the integrity of voting machines. He said that before the election, all voting machines in the state are tested by local officials. Then, one machine in every city, county and town is tested publicly, with efforts made to trick the machine into changing a vote. (The efforts fail because a vote can’t be changed.)
“This seems like an administrative process and mainly it is, but it’s important,” Simon said.
He also said he and other state officials in charge of voting are addressing another “corrosive” plague that threatens the election: “the growing cloud of election disinformation that has spread over the country and our state.”
Yet Simon said there is a way to fight back against this misinformation. He gave as an example the robocalls that were made, with the use of AI, in New Hampshire’s presidential primary. Those calls featured the AI-generated voice of President Biden telling potential Democratic voters they did not have to show up at the polls.
Simon said the state, and the media, moved quickly to discredit those fake robocalls.
“We have to lead with the truth,” Simon said. “Not just say something is untrue, but say what is true.”
NASS has implemented a bipartisan initiative, #TrustedInfo2024, which aims to counter disinformation.
