By Steve Brawner, © 2020 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
Just as important as Election Day is what almost always happens on Election Night: The loser bravely congratulates the winner and accepts the people’s will, the winner congratulates the loser on a hard-fought campaign, and the rest of us turn off the TV, go to bed and continue going about our lives.
You should prepare for the likelihood that none of that will happen this time.
Instead, we won’t know who won on Election Night, or for days or possibly weeks afterwards. We’ll have to wait as states count absentee ballots, and then the loser likely will challenge the overall results in court.
In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson issued an executive order allowing county clerks to start counting ballots 15 days before Election Day, rather than on that day. Some states must wait until Election Day, or even after the polls close, to count votes.
That includes Florida, where 18,000 mail-in ballots weren’t counted for one reason or another after March’s primaries. If the general election is close, Democrats and Republicans won’t let that sort of thing slide.
Remember 2000, when vote counters inspected individual ballots one by one for “hanging chads”? That’s what happens when an election is decided by 537 votes. It took 36 days and a 5-4 Supreme Court decision before Al Gore finally conceded Dec. 13. Even then, the results have been disputed. A review sponsored by USA Today and other newspapers found that if only ballots with fully removed chads had been counted, Gore would have won Florida by three votes and become president of the United States. Continue reading Be prepared for a weird Election Night →