Former President Donald Trump's allies around the country have laid the groundwork for more election fraud conspiracy theories when the votes are counted next month, Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday — largely by forcing states to count the ballots in ways that Trump can then spuriously proclaim "suspicious" to voters ignorant of the process.
"According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who’ve spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare — as soon as on election night — that the race is being 'rigged' or 'stolen' from him, by pointing to slow vote counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans afoot," reported Asawin Suebsaeng, Justin Glawe, and Andrew Perez.
The catch is, the ballot count is expected to be slow precisely because Trump-backing Republicans in those states' legislatures defeated efforts to modernize and expedite how mail-in ballots are counted.
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For example, many states do no allow mail-in ballots to be pre-tabulated before polls close on Election Night — a practice that makes counting votes extremely quick in states like Florida, and means late batches of votes are less likely to break for one party or the other. Michigan, with a Democratic trifecta, updated the law to allow this — but Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin blocked similar proposals there.
This is significant because a big part of Trump's conspiracy theory in 2020 was that states suddenly started "finding" Democratic ballots after midnight. Those votes had in fact been there and known about for days, but couldn't be tabulated because of laws the GOP is now refusing to allow to be changed.
In some states, the vote count may be even slower than 2020; the Trump-backed majority on the Georgia Election Board, for example, is trying to mandate more ballots be hand-counted, which will take considerably longer.
As he did in the previous two elections, Trump has refused to commit to accepting the election results, making it clear he'll only automatically endorse a result where he wins.
