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From delayed results to voter intimidation, 6 things that can go wrong on election night

US election security officials said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and a months-long analysis by the Associated Press found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud in the six key battleground states – despite former President Donald Trump's baseless claims a “manipulated” result.

But the extraordinary closeness of recent polling in the 2024 race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — and Trump's continued insistence that he “can only lose again” if Democrats “cheat” — means Election Day will be just as chaotic and chaotic could be just as confusing in 2024 as it was four years ago. Here are six key things that could go wrong on Tuesday:

According to the latest polls, the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are likely to be closest in terms of final results. And in both states, workers are not allowed to begin counting early ballots until Election Day.

In most states, early ballots are opened and processed (i.e., “prescreened”) as soon as they arrive – or no later than the week before the election. That's the main reason state officials can announce their results so quickly after polls close.

But that’s not how Pennsylvania and Wisconsin work. There, it is extremely unlikely that either Harris or Trump will provide an immediate, clear lead that will allow the media to predict and ultimately declare a winner, even though only a small percentage of counties are reporting it. So the count could continue well into the next day or even the next few days, depending on how tight the margins are.

If that happens, the entire election could be at stake.

Confusion about the rules – and challenges to the results

The longer it takes to determine a winner – and the closer the final result gets – the more chaotic things could get. Pennsylvania in particular looks problematic.

Generally, states have rules for counting mail-in ballots that apply statewide and can be used to resolve disputes. But in Pennsylvania, there are 67 different partisan county committees with different rules about which mail-in ballots they accept, how and when they notify voters of errors and even whether they allow voters to correct the mistakes they make.

This is a recipe for disaster. In the Bush v. Gore In its ruling after the 2000 election, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the use of different vote counting standards in Florida within the same state. So if the margin of victory in Pennsylvania is small (it was about 44,000 in 2016) and if the usual number of ballots are rejected (it was about 34,000 in 2020), local decisions about mail-in ballots will almost certainly end up in court.

In fact, any razor-thin result — in Pennsylvania or elsewhere — is likely to trigger litigation. Since January 1, 2021, the GOP and other Trump-aligned groups have filed lawsuits more than 50 times in the seven key battleground states. Claiming to be fighting voter fraud, Republicans have filed a lawsuit to purge the voter rolls; Strengthen signature and ID requirements; reduce the use of ballot drop boxes; and require that all ballots be counted by hand.

The party's goal, as voting rights expert Danielle Lang of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center recently told NBC News, is to “create confusion and chaos” — and to use that confusion and chaos as a pretext for post-election challenges.

“Many of these lawsuits, quite frankly, are not designed to be successful,” Lang said.

Democrats have also filed lawsuits. According to NBC News, they have focused primarily on “expanding voting access by seeking to extend registration deadlines or advocating for broader interpretations of absentee voting and voter identification laws.”

In 2020, Trump claimed long before the election that he could only lose if the election was “rigged.” When he did lose, he continued to spread this falsehood publicly while privately overseeing a plan to recoup his loss.

Unless Trump wins a clear victory on election night, he will almost certainly try to do the same thing again. “They are preparing to CHEAT!” he wrote in a Sept. 23 Truth Social post. At the same time, he has repeatedly dodged the question of whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

So if Pennsylvania or another state is too close to call on November 5th – and if the initial, incomplete vote count shows Trump ahead of Harris while the Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots are still being processed – Trump is likely to vote again Voters declare winners, regardless of what the final tally is.

From then on, according to reports from Politico and others, Trump and his allies would likely rely on partisan election officials in battleground states to refuse to certify the results (presumably citing the partisan lawsuits mentioned above). Since 2020, 35 of these embattled state officials have already done just that — despite lacking the necessary authority.

As the former president and his allies fail to prevail in close races in battleground states, they are unlikely to go as far as they did in 2020 as recently passed bipartisan legislation curbs attempts by bad actors to interfere in the results. block. However, according to Gallup, only 28% of Republicans now have confidence in the accuracy of US elections, down from 55% in 2016 – so it won't take much to divide and unsettle the country.

Driven by the former president's personal obsession with “election integrity,” Trump's campaign has reportedly recruited a network of more than 150,000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers “to go into the polls and watch very closely,” as the candidate himself recently put it.

“We need every able-bodied man and woman to take part [the] “Army for Trump’s election security operation,” Donald Trump Jr. said in an online video. “We need your help to monitor them. Not just on election day, but also during early voting and at the counting tables. President Trump will win. Don’t let them steal it.”

Voting rights advocates, election officials and Democrats fear that if such an “army” shows up outside or inside polling places, legal surveillance could turn into illegal intimidation – which could deter or deter people from voting.

Even violence is possible, including confrontations that close polling stations or ballot counting facilities. According to the New York Times, “Federal officials have not released data on the number of violent threats and intimidation incidents reported by local governments, but experts say it has increased significantly since the summer.”

Last week alone, the Justice Department lifted a complaint against a man in Philadelphia who vowed to skin alive and kill a party official who was recruiting volunteer poll watchers. Police in Tempe, Arizona, have arrested a man in connection with a shooting at a Democratic campaign office. Prosecutors have charged a 61-year-old man from Tampa, Florida, with threatening a poll worker. A blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox in Phoenix was set on fire, damaging about 20 ballots. (The suspect admitted to arson but claimed his actions were unrelated to the election.) And on Monday, mailboxes containing hundreds of ballots were also set on fire in Oregon.

This year, 98% of voters — including every single voter in battleground states — will cast their ballots on paper. Therefore, the likelihood of electronic election manipulation is low. But a cyberattack, for example, could still impact the election night reporting system that the media relies on. And “foreign disinformation about the reliability of the vote is even more pervasive in 2024 than in previous election cycles,” according to Time, with Russia, China and Iran acting online to further deepen Americans’ division over the election results. They “cause us to hate each other so much that we tear ourselves apart or make enemies of ourselves,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told the magazine.

Hurricane Helene has already upended the election in North Carolina, where the General Assembly unanimously passed special voting rules after the disaster to make it easier for 1.3 million registered voters in 25 storm-ravaged counties to vote in person and by mail. Any new weather accident could cause polling stations to close or affect voter turnout.

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