Despite Pres. Trump’s claim, there is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about counting mail-in ballots after an election

As we enter the last few days before the U.S. Election, President Donald Trump has been ramping up his attacks on mail-in ballots and suggesting that counting them after Nov. 3 will cause fraud. At a rally in Nevada on Oct. 28, Trump said he hopes that “the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots … won’t be allowed by the various courts.” There is nothing unusual about counting mail-in ballots after an election. It happens every election.

As reported by Eugene Kiely at FactCheck.org…

“Counting doesn’t ‘often’ go on past Election Day. It *always* does,” Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said in an Oct. 28 tweet. “Results on election night are preliminary, even in states that do relatively quick counts. Electoral college votes are not even cast until mid December, and the Congress counts the votes in January.”

The reason: Most states don’t start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, and 22 states— including 12 won by Trump in 2016 — accept postmarked mail-in ballots after Election Day. (Over Trump’s objections, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that allowed North Carolina to accept and count mail-in ballots up to nine days after Election Day and Pennsylvania up to three days.)

The process is expected to take even longer in some states this year because concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a sharp increase in the use of mail-in ballots.

As of Oct. 29, more than 80 million voters already have cast early ballots, including 52.4 million mail-in ballots, according to the U.S. Elections Project, an early-voting project maintained by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor.

The 52.4 million mail-in ballots returned this year already dwarf the 33.4 million that were returned in 2016, and there are still nearly 38 million mail-in ballots that had been requested but not yet returned. (For the 2016 data, see page 25 of a U.S. Election Assistance Commission report on the 2016 election.)

And, quite simply, “mail ballots tend to take a long time to process,” as stated in a March study that was coauthored by Charles Stewart, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Moritz College of Law.