Fox Host: Don’t Believe “Lies” About Delayed Results

“Don’t listen to the lies they’re spewing that this could take days or days, you know, to know who won. This is total B.S. A wave like this, we should know that night, basically, who won the Senate and the House. Anything that happens Wednesday into Thursday is gravy.” – Fox News host Jesse Watters, last night.

From the Brennan Center for Justice:

The slow pace of counting mail ballots in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin was a key source of election disinformation in 2020. The delays provided President Trump and his allies with a pretext to claim that the election was being stolen from them as mail ballots, which overwhelmingly went for Biden, were counted and added to vote totals. “We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump complained. “This is a fraud on the American public.”

Far from being a fraud, a conspiracy, or even an accident, the slow count of mail ballots is a deliberate choice that lawmakers in key battleground states have made — and with disastrous consequences for public trust in elections. By building these delays into the system, lawmakers give oxygen to false claims of “ballot dumps” and other nonsense that has been used to sow distrust and has led to threats and violence against election workers.

In those states, election workers are, with few exceptions, prohibited from opening mail ballots before Election Day. Election officials in these states have begged their state legislatures for increased flexibility over the past few years and have been repeatedly rebuffed, including by many legislators who criticized slow counting in 2020 or backed claims that the vote count showed evidence of fraud.