Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Let's go back in time to the twenty twenty US election.
Speaker 1: The fate of the presidency is still in the balance.
Speaker 1: After election day, there is no White House Wintery yet.
Speaker 2: Days after polls closed on November third, Americans were left
Speaker 2: wondering who had won the presidential election. At the time,
Speaker 2: Donald Trump promoted conspiracy theories, questioning the legitimacy of the
Speaker 2: votes that had been counted.
Speaker 1: The Trump campaign wants to recount in Wisconsin and is
Speaker 1: suing to stop the counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If
Speaker 1: you count the legal votes, I easily win.
Speaker 2: Poll workers and election officials were put on the defensive
Speaker 2: and pressured to stop counting ballots.
Speaker 3: We will not let those debates distract us from our work.
Speaker 3: We are going to continue to count the ballots until
Speaker 3: they're all done.
Speaker 2: Networks called the election for Joe Biden the morning of Saturday,
Speaker 2: November seventh, but Trump released a statement that day saying
Speaker 2: that the election was far from over. That insighted a
Speaker 2: movement that ended when his supporter stormed the capitol.
Speaker 1: Capitol Hill is in chaos with violent clashes as Congress
Speaker 1: gathered to formalize President elect Joe Biden's victory.
Speaker 2: With early voting already underway an election day getting closer,
Speaker 2: the outcome of the twenty twenty four presidential race is
Speaker 2: on everyone's mind. But will we know the result right
Speaker 2: after polls close or could the election drag out again? Today?
Speaker 2: On the show, we look at what happens if tallying
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty four election goes into overtime, what we
Speaker 2: can expect to know and what we might not by
Speaker 2: the time we go to bed on Tuesday, November fifth,
Speaker 2: and what the potential for uncertainty again could mean for
Speaker 2: trust in the election process. From Bloomberg's Washington Bureau, This
Speaker 2: is the Big Take DC podcast. I'm Sala Muson. Gregory
Speaker 2: Cordy covers politics for Bloomberg. He's been in the newsroom
Speaker 2: and at local boards of elections on many election nights
Speaker 2: over the years, watching the results come in as votes
Speaker 2: get tallied and a winner is announced. I wanted to
Speaker 2: get a sense from him when and how that call
Speaker 2: is usually made. When on a typical traditional election night,
Speaker 2: does that usually happen?
Speaker 3: I don't know that we have traditional predictable election nights anymore.
Speaker 3: The way that a winner is determined legally, is that
Speaker 3: in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, election
Speaker 3: officials count the votes. They wait for every single last
Speaker 3: vote to come in, they certify them, and that elects
Speaker 3: the electors to the Electoral College, which will meet on
Speaker 3: December seventeenth. All of that takes many weeks, of course,
Speaker 3: and we don't have the patience for that, and so
Speaker 3: over the last century and a half, really the Associated
Speaker 3: Press has become kind of the unofficial but widely respected
Speaker 3: arbiter of sort of the real time vote count. They
Speaker 3: have a decision desk, as do the major television networks,
Speaker 3: that looks at the results that they come in, and
Speaker 3: when the trailing candidate no longer has a chance of
Speaker 3: catching up, they will call the race. They will declare
Speaker 3: a winner in that race.
Speaker 2: In landslide races where there's a clear winner, that ap
Speaker 2: call can come pretty early, like in twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: That was when President Obama was running for a reelection
Speaker 3: against Mitt Romney. That race was called by the Associated
Speaker 3: Press at eleven thirty eight PM on election night.
Speaker 2: But when a race is close, that vote count can
Speaker 2: stretch for days or even weeks.
Speaker 3: Let's throw two thousand in the mix. Right where we
Speaker 3: had one state in Florida where just a couple one
Speaker 3: hundred votes separated George Bush and al Gore, and that
Speaker 3: went on all the way into December.
Speaker 2: That race also went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: Case was a highly politicized case where people started to
Speaker 3: kind of doubt whether the Supreme Court is really the
Speaker 3: best arbiter to decide these very political questions. At the time,
Speaker 3: people didn't really have that confidence because the reasoning seems
Speaker 3: so slipshod in terms of which votes were counted, in
Speaker 3: which we're not.
Speaker 2: That's so interesting because a couple of weeks later they
Speaker 2: were confirming Bush's Treasury nominee State Department nominee and it
Speaker 2: wasn't quite as contentious as you think could be. At
Speaker 2: that time, well, al.
Speaker 3: Gore conceded the election. That's the big difference is that
Speaker 3: not only do we have close elections, not only do
Speaker 3: we have the pandemic slowing down the vote count, but
Speaker 3: when you have a candidate that refuses to concede, that's frankly,
Speaker 3: what a lot of our democracy relies on is the
Speaker 3: good faith of actors on both sides to know when
Speaker 3: they've been whooped, and that didn't happen in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty was something of a perfect storm. First, the
Speaker 2: race was historically close.
Speaker 3: But then also the way that we vote has changed.
Speaker 3: People or worried that they get sick if they went
Speaker 3: into a crowded room with a bunch of their neighbors
Speaker 3: and cast their votes. So they like voting early, they
Speaker 3: like voting absentee, and they like mailing in their vote in.
Speaker 3: Those votes take longer to count.
Speaker 2: And those votes don't just take longer to count. Each
Speaker 2: state has different rules dictating how and when they're allowed
Speaker 2: to be counted.
Speaker 3: Some states allow those votes to be counted on election
Speaker 3: day or even before election day. Those counts are kept
Speaker 3: secret until the polls close, but it allows them to
Speaker 3: get a head start. If they don't get that head start,
Speaker 3: and this is what happened in Pennsylvania in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: is they did not open the ballot en votes until
Speaker 3: election day, and that takes a lot of work.
Speaker 2: On Election night twenty twenty, Pennsylvania's count was too close
Speaker 2: to call.
Speaker 3: That was the biggest prize twenty electoral votes, and that
Speaker 3: wasn't decided until Saturday morning.
Speaker 2: After election Saturday morning. That was four days after the
Speaker 2: polls closed, four days to count enough of those mail
Speaker 2: in ballots to determine the scope of Biden's lead in
Speaker 2: the state and for ap to call the race nationwide.
Speaker 3: That's usually enough for the losing candidate to concede, and
Speaker 3: of course Donald Trump didn't do that, which led to
Speaker 3: a whole series of events, the fake Elector plot January sixth,
Speaker 3: and we all know the history from there.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, a record number of Americans did not
Speaker 2: cast their ballots on election Day. Seventy percent of voters
Speaker 2: voted either by mail or early. By the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two midterms, that number was closer to half of voters.
Speaker 2: We can't know exactly how many Americans planned to vote
Speaker 2: in person on November fifth, but Gregory says those new
Speaker 2: voting habits people picked up during the pandemic won't disappear entirely.
Speaker 3: People generally like the ability to vote in those non
Speaker 3: traditional ways, So we're sort of in between. We're never
Speaker 3: going to go back to sort of the pre pandemic days,
Speaker 3: just like we're not all going to go back in
Speaker 3: the office five days a week. But people are not
Speaker 3: quite as hunkered down as they were during the.
Speaker 2: Pan Many states have also made it easier to vote
Speaker 2: in non traditional ways since the pandemic.
Speaker 3: It used to be that the only way you could
Speaker 3: vote absentee was if you were over age sixty five,
Speaker 3: or you had a documented illness, or you were going
Speaker 3: to be out of town. There's been a movement towards
Speaker 3: what we call no fault absentee voting, basically a mailien
Speaker 3: option for any reason at all. That's really led to
Speaker 3: the popularity of that as a voting method.
Speaker 2: So how prepared are voting centers and courts to deal
Speaker 2: with the potential for delayed results and what's at stake
Speaker 2: if the count is called into question again. That's coming up.
Speaker 2: I've been talking with Bloomberg Politics reporter Gregory Cordy about
Speaker 2: the American voting system, why election experts expect the count
Speaker 2: to stretch into extra innings this year, and how the
Speaker 2: nation has been preparing for days or even weeks of uncertainty.
Speaker 3: We don't really have national elections in the United States.
Speaker 3: Every state makes up its own voting rules, and in
Speaker 3: some places it even goes down to the county level.
Speaker 2: Gregory told me in many ways. The system has actually
Speaker 2: improved over the years.
Speaker 3: Elections are more accurate and arguably more secure than they've
Speaker 3: ever been. We use election technologies now that are better
Speaker 3: than the ones that we used a generation ago. If
Speaker 3: you remember again that Florida election of the year two thousand,
Speaker 3: you might remember Palm Beach County, the border elections, holding
Speaker 3: up those punch card ballots the light and trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how many corners of a chad were hanging
Speaker 3: from that punch out ballot. That was just a flaw
Speaker 3: in that technology. So now it's a lot more systematized.
Speaker 3: It's a lot more easy and quick to count. The
Speaker 3: Constitution says that Congress can step in and have some
Speaker 3: uniform laws. That's why we all vote on the first
Speaker 3: Tuesday after the first Monday in November. We have an
Speaker 3: election day where everybody votes at the same time. Believe
Speaker 3: it or not, it wasn't always that way, But as
Speaker 3: long as we have this federal system, states do have
Speaker 3: a lot of of leeway in the voting rules and
Speaker 3: how they count the vote.
Speaker 2: That doesn't just delay the race calling, it can also
Speaker 2: paint an incomplete picture of one candidate taking the lead.
Speaker 2: Let's go back to what happened in Pennsylvania four years
Speaker 2: ago when poll workers didn't start the time consuming process
Speaker 2: of counting mail in ballots until election day.
Speaker 3: If you count those ballots late in the night, those
Speaker 3: tend to be more Democratic leaning votes, and if you
Speaker 3: count all of the in person votes, which tend to
Speaker 3: be more Republican leaning, first, you'll see a farm that
Speaker 3: we call the red Mirage. We saw former President Trump
Speaker 3: jump out to a very early and seemingly impressive lead,
Speaker 3: but as those provisional votes, as those mail in votes
Speaker 3: and absentee votes came in, Joe Biden slowly closed on
Speaker 3: that lead until Saturday, the AP had seen enough and
Speaker 3: decided to call the race for Biden. But that's three
Speaker 3: or four days where people can come up with their
Speaker 3: own explanation for all sorts of alleged plots, of ballot
Speaker 3: bags being trucked in, or voter fraud, or all kinds
Speaker 3: of things that are would be really hard to pull
Speaker 3: off in our system of election administration, where every election
Speaker 3: is supervised by equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, it's
Speaker 3: really hard to do that. But that doesn't stop the
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: Since twenty twenty, Congress has tried to shore up the laws,
Speaker 2: in part to prevent that kind of election denial from
Speaker 2: happening again, but also to ensure clear vote counting and
Speaker 2: certification procedures are on the books.
Speaker 3: They slipped in some amendments to the Electoral Count Act
Speaker 3: that formalized the process for electoral votes to be counted
Speaker 3: and then sent to the Congress to be ultimately certified.
Speaker 3: It has made clear that the vice president, as Mike
Speaker 3: Pence maintained all along in twenty twenty, does not have
Speaker 3: the ability to decide who wins the presidential election. It
Speaker 3: increased the number of representatives and senators that need to
Speaker 3: object to the certification of the electoral vote for it
Speaker 3: to force some sort of a contingental election perhaps, And
Speaker 3: it also made clear that there's a process in the
Speaker 3: courts to resolve those disputes. So, in theory, the legal
Speaker 3: structures are a little better than we had in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty to resolve some of these disputes. But if this
Speaker 3: election comes down to just one state and perhaps afford
Speaker 3: a like situation where it's a few thousand or even
Speaker 3: hundreds of votes separating the two candidates in just one state,
Speaker 3: there's going to be an awful lot of pressure be
Speaker 3: put to bear on local elections officials and.
Speaker 2: When it comes to individual states with the power to
Speaker 2: shape the election. Pennsylvania hasn't changed the way it counts
Speaker 2: mail in vote since twenty twenty, so.
Speaker 3: We could very well see another red mirage in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: There are also concerns in some swing states about voting
Speaker 2: access being restricted.
Speaker 3: We're looking at Georgia very carefully. The Georgia legislature recently
Speaker 3: passed a law that gave local election officials a lot
Speaker 3: of latitude in terms of decide which precincts they will
Speaker 3: certify after the election if they have evidence of voting fraud.
Speaker 3: No one's quite sure how that's going to work. The
Speaker 3: idea of disenfranchising every voter in a precinct because some
Speaker 3: election officials might have some concerns about an isolated case
Speaker 3: of voter fraud is something that ultimately, I think is
Speaker 3: going to have to be decided by the courts. But
Speaker 3: in the meantime, yeah, there's going to be a lot
Speaker 3: of opportunity for partisan wrangling on both sides. There.
Speaker 2: Recent weather disasters could also impact voters trying to get
Speaker 2: to polling centers. There's Hurricane Milton in Florida this week
Speaker 2: and Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last week.
Speaker 3: We're still trying to wrap our heads around how that's
Speaker 3: going to affect turnout and vote counting in those areas,
Speaker 3: especially the rural you get and those tend to be
Speaker 3: Trump supporters. We just know nationally that there's a wide
Speaker 3: urban rural divide in our politics that the inability of
Speaker 3: some of those voters to vote could have an impact
Speaker 3: on the election.
Speaker 2: Gregory says, the inability to call a winner on election
Speaker 2: night isn't an indictment of our electoral system. It's actually
Speaker 2: the process working as it should to ensure an accurate result.
Speaker 2: But in an age of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and government skepticism,
Speaker 2: the longer we go without a winner, the more the
Speaker 2: peaceful transfer of power could be at risk.
Speaker 3: Election officials will tell you that the length of time
Speaker 3: it takes to count the vote has nothing to do
Speaker 3: with the integrity of the vote, but unfortunately that's not
Speaker 3: the way everybody sees it. The longer we go without
Speaker 3: having a clear winner, the easier it is for conspiracy
Speaker 3: theories to take hold. It's not inconceivable that we could
Speaker 3: go days or even weeks without knowing who the clear
Speaker 3: winner is.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News. I'm Salamosen. This episode was produced by Julia Press.
Speaker 2: It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Sarah Fordon. It
Speaker 2: was mixed by Alex Sugia in fact checked by Adriana Tapia.
Speaker 2: Naomi Shaven, who also edited this episode, is our senior producer.
Speaker 2: Wendy Benjaminson and Elizabeth Ponso provide editorial direction. Nicole Beemsterbower
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