At the time of this writing, most midterm races that could tip the balance of power are too early to call. Some races could take days for votes to be counted. But it’s never too early to call out election disinformation. And sadly, we’re seeing a lot of that already.
A couple of weeks ago, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) began running the GOP’s 2020 election denial playbook. Cruz tweeted: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take “days” to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.” Of course, this is not true, but more on that later.
On Monday night, Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb said on the pro-Trump conservative media outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network: “There should absolutely be a result no later than the middle of the night, early Wednesday morning. I think those areas that don’t have a result, it’s gonna look very suspicious.” Conservative commentator Michael Knowles added to this false sentiment: “The longer it takes to tally the votes, the less you should believe the result.” Elsewhere, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Democrats “are already preparing the rest of us for election theft.”
As Election Day was underway, a technical issue in Arizona gave Republicans another opening. Twenty percent of vote tabulators were experiencing malfunctions in Maricopa County. Officials stated that it was a printing issue and they quickly rolled out fixes to the impacted locations. According to those officials, no actual vote tabulations were impacted. But amid the confusion, Arizona gubernatorial candidate and bombastic election-denier Kari Lake sent out a tweet that an Arizona reporter deemed “misinformation.” Michael Knowles went on the Daily Wire to say: “Do not take your right to vote for granted because there are people who live in places like North Korea and Afghanistan and Maricopa County who don’t have that right.”
“Cheating” trended on Twitter. Maricopa County began tweeting out fact-checks from its own account, pushing back on far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s claims that the election was being run by Democrats and the county had instituted deliberate wait times. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is actually run by Republicans by a 4-1 margin.
Trump posted on Truth Social about the Arizona voting machine issues among other election-related issues, falsely claiming: “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY.” The former president then added: “Pennsylvania just announced that it could take days to determine the winner. This is outrageous!” He followed up with: “Same thing is happening with Voter Fraud as happened in 2020???” The answer is no, because there was never any widespread voter fraud in 2020. But there was a lot of consternation among Republicans in 2020 about why numbers kept changing as more votes were counted across the country. Few will forget that Trump infamously said election officials should “STOP THE COUNT” when it looked like he was winning.
Let’s address this grand conspiracy theory about how delays in ballot-counting are part of an effort to steal the election. Such wait times are normal. In a system where large amounts of mail-in ballots are being counted, it takes time to accurately parse the results. Ironically enough, these delays in some key states were actually engineered by Republicans themselves.
Republican-controlled legislatures in key battleground states like Pennsylvania prevented election workers from pre-canvassing mail-in ballots. Under the law, they have to wait until Election Day to begin counting mail-in ballots. And just this week, Philadelphia City Commissioners voted to reinstate a lengthy process called Poll Book Reconciliation in response to a Republican lawsuit. In other words, Republicans are causing the delays they’re complaining about.
Here’s where it gets even more nefarious.
In 2020, Trump attacked mail-in ballots as fraudulent while encouraging his base to vote on Election Day. This led to a partisan divide where Election Day votes leaned more Republican and mail-in ballots leaned Democratic. At the same time, Republicans implemented rules that delayed the counting of mail-in ballots. This caused the phenomenon known as the red mirage, where early vote counts appear more Republican as same-day votes are counted, and then turn more Democratic as mail-in ballots are counted. It was under this pretense that Trump claimed Democrats “made up” votes. That’s exactly what Republicans appear to be hoping for now.
This is why the January 6 Committee made a point to focus on this part of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In one of their summer hearings, the committee had former Fox News editor Christopher Stirewalt as a witness. Stirewalt said Trump had no basis to declare victory and explained the reasoning behind the red mirage that happened on election night. Indeed, we learned in that hearing that Trump’s team made him aware of the red mirage. The then-president’s advisors urged him to encourage mail-in ballots from his voter base so that it wouldn’t happen. Instead, Trump used normal mail-in vote delays as a guise to declare victory.
It seems Republicans are once again creating the delays they’re exploiting as the basis for their voter fraud lies — just like in 2020. While the results of some of these races are unclear at the moment and may take days or weeks in the case of a runoff, one thing is clear: Republicans have laid down the groundwork to cry fraud anywhere they lose. What else can we expect from a midterm election where hundreds of election-deniers are running for office?
