Election experts raise fresh alarms about vote counting delays – and chaos – in battleground states

Election observers worry that delays in counting mail ballots in several battleground states this year could lead to the same chaos that plagued the 2020 election.

In Pennsylvania, officials are bracing for another presidential election in which the state could once again be the decisive battleground and take days to determine the winner. Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in vote-rich Philadelphia, put the odds of knowing the winner on election night at “almost zero.” In battleground Wisconsin, meanwhile, a final tally isn’t likely until the morning after the election, said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the state’s election commission. While several other states have moved to speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020’s post-election chaos, political gridlock in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has prevented a change that could have paved the way for earlier projections: the ability to begin opening and processing mail-in ballots before Election Day. Election observers worry that delays in counting mail ballots could give the public a false sense of who’s winning the election. That could create a potential “red mirage” – showing GOP candidates ahead initially before more Democratic-leaning absentee ballots are processed and added to the tally – and leave an opening for false narratives about election fraud to flourish as the country awaits results. In Georgia, a controversial rule change approved Friday that requires workers to hand-count the number of ballots cast at precincts on Election Day could delay the results of the presidential election in another key swing state. “It’s obviously a concern,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said of the time lag in the Keystone State. “That period of uncertainty is something that is exploited by bad-faith actors to undermine the confidence in the outcome.”