Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, September 23, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
The established pattern has long been that major media, not election officials, have declared the outcome of presidential elections, traditionally on election night.
That was before the advent of the Wuhan, China virus. In 2020, panic generated by major media resulted in new laws, and the U.S. postal service was literally paralyzed by a tsunami of mail-in ballots giving rise to a chaotic voting process that would extend far beyond the Nov. 3 Election Day.
In 2024, Covid is no longer a factor but the legacy of dubious mail-in ballots still is.
Who benefits?
While former President Donald Trump has vowed to follow France’s lead and restore paper ballots and same-day voting, the Democrat Party and many Republican elected officials and statehouses are inclined to keep in place a system that polls show is not trusted by large segments of the voting public.
“Election officials are fretting about potential problems with mail delivery and warning that counting every vote could take days following Nov. 5,” The Washington Post Editorial Board exclaimed on Sept. 20.
The New York Times declared on Sept. 14: “It is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.”
Thus the powerful political-media forces are in synch and setting the table for a repeat of 2020.
The Post pointed to Georgia, where the State Election Board on Friday voted to require counties to hand-count every ballot.
The new rule “could delay reporting by weeks. Local election workers warn it will almost certainly produce more errors and that they won’t be able to comply with a requirement to complete counting by the day following the election, especially in large jurisdictions that tend to favor Democrats,” the Post wrote.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has assured American voters that the Post Office has improved its training to expedite delivery of election-related material.
That’s not good enough for the Post, which proclaimed: “Even if USPS excels, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots until Election Day, no matter when they arrive. This slowed down the count in 2020. Divided governments in both states failed to fix this quirk in how they count. Arizona and Nevada have often taken multiple days to fully count, too. Elections officials say they’ve hired more workers to process ballots, but it will probably still take longer to tally the high volume of ballots in urban centers such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee than the lower number in redder, rural areas.”
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As it was in 2020, it’s the Democrat urban centers that major media insist must be expected in 2024 to take more time to count the ballots, or, as others see it, to get in enough ballots to “catch up.”
Does legacy media actually believe election workers in urban centers can’t count ballots as efficiently as other areas? Is it the same reason so many of those outlets believe a large number of minorities are incapable of obtaining identification?
Both the Post and Times — who, by the way, have yet to return Pulitzer Prizes they were awarded for their false reporting on Trump-Russia collusion — referred to what they termed a “red mirage.”
That refers to Donald Trump claiming victory after building leads that it did not seem possible could be overcome in several swing states. But, legacy media claimed, somehow predicting the end result, there were just so many Democrat ballots that were coming in late that Trump was premature in his declaration.
The New York Times cited Jocelyn Benson, the Democrat secretary of state of Michigan, as saying: “Candidates don’t get to decide who wins elections, voters do. So pre-emptive statements that candidates may make declaring themselves the winner are not as reliable as the actual results themselves, which our professional elected officials will be working to transmit as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
That, of course, means, “we will declare a winner when we’re good and ready.”
Six weeks from Nov. 5, Washington Post and NY Times are already in synch: It’s 2020 all over again added by Editor Two on
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