By james art 
Trump, RNC ramp up voter fraud claims in key Pennsylvania counties
“They cheated.” Donald Trump is already ramping up unconfirmed claims of voter fraud in key Pennsylvania counties.
While the nation’s eyes will be on a handful of swing states Tuesday night that are expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, it may not be known for days who won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. State laws governing when ballots can be processed in those states could mean a repeat of 2020, when it wasn’t until the Saturday after the election that results in Pennsylvania gave Democratic nominee Joe Biden the votes needed to secure a majority in the Electoral College .
In response to these days-long waits, many states revised their election laws to make it faster to count mail-in, absentee and overseas ballots. While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are often placed together with Michigan in the “blue wall” of swing Rust Belt states, they now differ in one important way: Michigan is allowing election officials to begin sorting mail-in ballots more than a week in advance election day, although the results cannot be revealed before the polls close.
But state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have made no such changes to election procedures, and experts expect their results to come later than Michigan or the other states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
Keystone and Badger say they bar election officials from starting to open and count absentee ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, when they should also be handling in-person voting.
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office describes it this way on its website: “Hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of ballots are mailed out each election, and current state law doesn’t allow counties to begin opening those ballots until 7 a.m. on the day of the election.” the elections. That means county election officials can’t even take the ballots out of the envelopes and prepare them for scanning until that point — on a day when those same officials also manage more than 9,000 polling stations across the state.
No pre-processing of vote-by-mail or absentee ballots
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 43 states allow pre-processing of mail-in ballots, which includes checking the voter information and electability of the mail-in ballot envelope, opening the envelope and removing the ballot.
Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Major Election Jurisdictions, said the inability to do pre-processing does not mean Pennsylvania or Wisconsin are slow, there is fraud or that there is any problem with their procedures.
“Not all states are created equal, right? So if you’re from Florida, you’re going to get results a little faster, simply because we have 22 days of pre-processing,” she said. “If you’re in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by law they’re not allowed to start until Election Day. So it’s just a quick numbers game. That doesn’t mean Florida is more efficient or less efficient than some of their peers. It just means the laws are a little different.”
“People should be patient”
Local elections officials in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have repeatedly urged state lawmakers since 2020 to allow preprocessing, said Lawrence Norden, vice president of the Program on Elections and Government at the Brennan Center for Justice.
In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, election officials have been begging for years, and certainly since 2020, to be allowed to process mail-in ballots earlier, as they do in most other battleground states, so on election night they they just push a button and there can be results, state legislatures wouldn’t,” he said.
As state legislatures failed to act, local governments tried to solve the problem themselves.
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate could not agree on a bill that would allow early processing. Republicans wanted to tie it to expanded voter ID requirements, Democrats refused. When Republicans controlled both houses in 2021, they expanded voter ID requirements and the Democratic governor vetoed it.
Pennsylvania has made improvements since 2020 and isn’t expected to count all ballots this time around until the weekend. County election directors have already had several cycles operating mail-in ballots and received millions of dollars through a state-funded grant program that allowed some to purchase machines to help more quickly open and sort mail-in ballots. mail newsletters.
Abigail Gardner, a spokeswoman for Allegheny County government, said officials are expecting up to 250,000 absentee ballots and about 450,000 in-person votes. She said the vote count could be faster than in 2020 because they expect fewer absentee ballots and have hired more staff and purchased high-speed envelope openers.
In Wisconsin, where Republicans control both houses of the legislature, a Republican-led effort to allow early canvassing stalled in the Senate in February. The state Assembly passed a bill in November that would allow election officials to begin processing absentee ballots the day before the election. The Democratic governor had said he would sign the bill if it made it.
Local election officials may choose to count mail-in ballots either at polling locations or at a central location. Most of the larger jurisdictions have chosen central locations and purchased high-speed machines to speed up processing, Marge Bostelman, a member of the Wisconsin Board of Elections, told USA TODAY.
“It might be a little faster, but it really all depends on how quickly the ballots can be entered and how quickly the machine will read them once they’re placed in the machine,” Bostelman said.
In Wisconsin, more than 1.2 million absentee and vote-by-mail ballots had already been received as of Oct. 31, according to the state Board of Elections. In 2020, the Wisconsin results were announced by the Associated Press around 2:00 PM the day after the election. Multiple state election officials warned it could be midnight or sometime Wednesday before mail-in ballots are counted.
Jay Heck, executive director of the Wisconsin government watchdog Common Cause, said in-person voting in his state is expected to be counted before midnight on Election Day. But absentee ballots for the combined unofficial results could take up to 2 a.m., he said.
“People have to be patient,” Heck said.
In 2020, Trump declared victory before all the votes were counted
The last time then-President Donald Trump, who is up for the Republican nomination again in 2024, didn’t wait for mail-in votes to be counted: He declared victory while he was ahead because his supporters were more likely to vote personally. He then made false accusations of late-night “ballot dumping” of illegal votes, when mail-in ballots were counted and added to the totals, something that in many states happened in the middle of the night.
When the final vote count showed Biden winning Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the election had been stolen from him in the state. Trump also charged fraud when Biden won Wisconsin by 20,700 votes.
Polls consistently show a very close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in every swing state, including Wisconsin, where Trump leads Harris 48% to 47% according to a late October USA TODAY/University Suffolk poll, and Pennsylvania, where Trump leads by less than 1 percentage point c FiveThirtyEight average survey.
Trump told his rallies to expect a big victory on Tuesday, saying he could only imagine losing on Oct. 30 “if the election was rigged.”
“If there are tens of millions of people who believe this election can be won by just one candidate, you can imagine the shock if that candidate loses and the way that can turn into anger and potential violence in office election period,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“I just don’t have the money or the staff”
In Pennsylvania, there is an added wrinkle that some people vote by mail instead of early in-person voting. Many counties without early voting allow people to apply in person to vote by mail, and then they can fill it out and go immediately.
As of Oct. 31, nearly 2.2 million absentee and vote-by-mail ballots had already been received, according to the state.
Data from Pennsylvania shows that while Republicans are increasing mail-in voting, they are still vastly outnumbered by Democrats.
Widener University political science professor Wesley LeCrone, an expert on Pennsylvania politics, said he expects larger population centers to process those ballots quickly because they have the money to hire staff. His concern is that surrounding suburban counties with large populations, which are key to determining the winner, will not be able to process results on Tuesday and it could be later in the week before the result is known.
“There are a lot of counties that just don’t have the money or the staff to be able to do this,” he said. “Trump may be up at 10 o’clock Tuesday night, but not all the mail on the ballots has been delivered.”