The lawmakers who cry “voter fraud” are the same people who cling to power because of racial gerrymandering
By David Daley
Election officials in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have distributed more than 4 million mail-in ballots to voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. State legislators in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, however, have deliberately refused to give those administrators any extra time to open, process, and tabulate all of those ballots. And now Republicans in those states are insisting that a quick result ought to be announced on election night to guard against “fraud.”
There is a wild and intentional contradiction at work here: Republicans in these swing states maintain that they can’t count late-arriving mail ballots because a winner needs to be declared on Tuesday night.
But they have also used their ill-won, gerrymandered majorities in these states to block every nonpartisan attempt to produce a faster tally and provide election officials with the same head start that 40 other states allow for the long hours of removing those millions of ballots from security sleeves, verifying the signatures, and preparing them for tabulation.