As in 2020, Republican votes are more likely to be reported first in key states, giving the party’s candidates deceptively large early leads that will probably diminish later on.
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A satellite voting center in Detroit. In Michigan, election officials are given just two days of advance time to process ballots, which means that results are sometimes delayed past election night.
If election night in 2020 was clouded by a so-called red mirage that misleadingly suggested Donald J. Trump was headed toward a landslide victory, early results on Nov. 8 may have a similarly exaggerated hue — distinctly pink, if not crimson.
For the second straight election, Republican votes are more likely to be counted and reported first in several battleground states, giving the party’s candidates deceptively large early leads that will probably diminish as counting continues.
The pattern is the result of both a partisan divide in voting methods — Democrats continue to cast far more mail ballots than Republicans do — and state rules governing how votes are counted. In some states, mail ballots take longer to tally and are increasingly reported in the days after the election.
Although this has zero impact on the final results, Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the phenomenon two years ago to fuel false claims that the election had been stolen. Election experts are worried that some candidates and their allies might make similar false or premature assertions this year.
“In 2020, it had a big impact on the way that the election was perceived and sort of provided a window for disinformation and conspiracy theories,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And I think that there’s a risk of that happening again in some places in 2022.”
In many places, Republican strength is likely to be very real in the election results. Polls nationwide show the party gaining momentum in the final stretch of the midterms, as anxiety about the economy dominates voters’ thinking. But in close races in some states, misperceptions about what the early results show will almost certainly persist.
ImageMail-in ballots being prepared for distribution in Phoenix. Democrats have continued to embrace absentee and mail voting, while Republicans tend to avoid it.Credit…Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
As in the 2020 election, Democrats have continued to embrace absentee and mail voting this cycle, while many Republicans have eschewed those methods, swayed in part by claims that they are less secure.
In many states, this disparity is not a problem when reporting results, because election officials are allowed to process ballots well before Election Day. But in critical states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, officials are not allowed to begin work on ballots until polls open on Election Day. In Michigan, officials are given just two days in advance to process ballots.
In Wisconsin and Michigan in 2020, the winner of the state’s presidential election could not be called until the day after Election Day, when large numbers of absentee ballots were added to each state’s overall total — in what Mr. Trump conspiratorially called a “dump” of votes as he sought to overturn the results. In Pennsylvania, the race was not called until four days after Election Day.
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
- Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.
- Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.
- G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.
- Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.
Other states are able to report results quickly: Florida, which allows officials to begin processing ballots as early as 40 days before Election Day, had no delays in reporting in 2020.
Delays in the counting of mail ballots this year could again give a misleading impression of a large Republican advantage in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on election night, even if it is not as skewed of a picture as it was in 2020.
“It’s a red hue,” said John Couvillon, a pollster who has worked with Republican candidates. “It does create that possibility. I don’t think to the same extent as 2020 because for one thing, you’re talking about midterm volume, as opposed to presidential election volume.”
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Although there may not be as many absentee ballots to process compared with the level in a presidential year, they are being requested at a much higher rate than in the 2018 midterms. In Michigan, more than 1.8 million absentee ballots had been requested as of Tuesday, and more than 770,000 had been returned. In the 2018 midterms, which set records for overall turnout, just over one million ballots were requested and 447,000 were submitted.
The partisan split among absentee ballots is again distinct. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats have requested more than 941,000 ballots and returned 534,000, while Republicans have requested 275,000 and returned 144,000.
Election officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have signaled that counting may go beyond election night.
“We won’t have unofficial results from all parts of the state and all valid counting done until Wednesday night,” said Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office. “There may be counties that report far earlier than that, and there may also be races that, you know, therefore, are called prior to that.”
Election officials also note that it does not have to be this way: The legislatures in these states could simply allow officials more time to process absentee ballots, as is the case in many other states.
But the Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have repeatedly brushed aside bipartisan entreaties from local election officials to change the law.
In Pennsylvania, election officials began asking in August 2020, well before the general election, for time to process ballots before Election Day. Republicans in the Legislature blocked such a move by tying any processing changes to limits on drop boxes, which Gov. Tom Wolfe, a Democrat, opposed. Pennsylvania, of course, ended up forcing the nation to hold its breath while absentee ballots were counted for days, inadvertently bolstering Mr. Trump’s false claims.
In 2021, Republicans in the Legislature again tied any processing changes to other conservative-backed voting measures, drawing a veto from Mr. Wolf. Bills addressing the processing of votes as a stand-alone issue went nowhere. But election officials are still sounding the alarm.
“It’s something that we support at the Department of State and the Wolf administration supports,” said Leigh M. Chapman, who as the state’s acting secretary of the commonwealth is Pennsylvania’s top election official. “We are supportive of having at least two weeks of precanvassing time so counties aren’t stressed on Election Day and in the days following, and that’s something that has bipartisan support from the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.”
She added that this year, state officials again expect “results to take at least a few days.”
“That doesn’t mean anything bad is happening,” Ms. Chapman said. “It’s just the election process playing out. Election officials are ensuring that every single vote is counted.”
ImageAbsentee ballots were counted in Detroit during Michigan’s primary in August. Election officials in the state have signaled that counting of results next month may go beyond election night.Credit…Emily Elconin for The New York Times
In Michigan, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a law this year that allowed for two days of processing ballots before Election Day, but many jurisdictions are unable to take advantage of the additional days.
“The law came so late in the game that clerks had already hired their staff and done their trainings,” Mr. Rollow said. “It’s a very busy time for clerks, and so reorganizing their plans to take on preprocessing just wasn’t something that was feasible.”
In Wisconsin, Riley Vetterkind, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said that “given that unofficial results in both the 2018 and 2020 general elections weren’t largely complete until the early morning hours after Election Day, it would be reasonable to assume it may take until then for unofficial results to be tabulated and posted this year.”
In a midterm year without presidential candidates on the ballot, the importance of any red tint to the results on election night will depend greatly on how the overall outcome is shaping up.
“If the balance of the U.S. Senate ends up hinging on a race that doesn’t get decided until a few days later and there’s a shift in the results over the course of those days,” Mr. Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center said, “that will be very different than if there’s a couple of congressional seats that aren’t impacting the balance.”
Source: nytimes.com
