Releasing Vote Totals Early and Not Changing the Results
Releasing Vote Totals Early and Not Changing the Results
The US congressional hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection established one thing clearly – Donald Trump distrusted the election count. Trump expressed charges of widespread fraud with paper ballots similar to paper ballot fraud charges that drove Thomas Edison in Chautauqua NY and Jamestown NY to build the mechanical voting machine in 1870.
Delayed election counts are not trustworthy. Donald Trump is right, it is not fair to hold a delayed count and then announce that the other guy won, it does not feel right. He is not crazy, though it felt that way to the people around him. This delay in vote counting and suspicions around that is why so many voters backed Donald Trump’s charges of election fraud. Delayed results showed Trump’s opponent winning when Trump had been ahead in the early count. Delayed counts of paper ballots were the focus of the hearing that focused on Trump’s false claims of 2020 election victory,
Though Attorney General William Barr and members of the former president’s inner circle repeatedly told him he had lost the election, he would not believe them.
In its second public hearing, the House committee presented testimony from former Attorney General William Barr and former campaign advisers challenging Donald Trump’s claims regarding the 2020 presidential election. “If he really believes this stuff, he has become detached from reality,” Mr. Barr said. Donald Trump was told repeatedly by top Justice Department officials and members of his inner circle that he hadn’t won the 2020 election but continued to pursue his false claims of victory.
What Thomas Edison did when faced with a similar situation was to take the best technology of the day and invent the mechanical voting machines that ruled the election process for over 100 years, machines used by voters in 95% of the elections throughout the 1900s and into the 2000s, replacing paper ballots.
The answer to the elections dilemma now is to take the best technology of the day and apply it to voting, that is what the GBA voting working group is portending to do - develop comprehensive next-generation elections standards for elections systems. While former Attorney General William Barr held a series of meetings with the former president after the election in which Barr argued against claims of widespread voter fraud, his arguments were not deemed credible by President Trump.
If you take the path of reasoning that makes the most sense, you arrive at the conclusion that Mr. Trump is a student of history and he knows that a lot of elections are stolen during the delay in counting that occurs. Absentee paper ballots continued to be a serious problem in voting throughout the 1900's. While the Verified Voting Group has done a commendable job in getting people to mark paper ballots in response to voter fraud with electronic voting machines, the group forgot that the fraud that occurs in elections is often during the delayed vote-counting process.