Politics
Trump Allies Plan To Unplug The Scoreboard At Halftime If They Are Losing
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Election security experts are warning that allies of Donald Trump may use the days immediately following November's midterm elections to contest results in key states before counting is complete, a strategy that experts say exploits the gap between when polls close and when anyone is legally required to accept what they find.
The window in question, sometimes called the counting window, is the period of 48 to 72 hours after Election Day during which mail-in ballots are processed, provisional ballots are reviewed, and votes are tabulated. It has existed, in this form, for decades. It is new only in the sense that someone has apparently only recently noticed you can stand inside it and scream.
Former federal officials say the approach involves stationing loyalists in county canvassing boards in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, four states that have the distinction of being swing states and also of having been swing states the last time, which was the time that did not go the preferred way.
"The counting window is a period of significant democratic vulnerability," said Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who participated in the January 6th planning calls and has since pivoted to what she describes as "election integrity education," which is a continuing education program for people who want the education to stop before the counting is finished.
The theory, as reconstructed from public statements, court filings, and a podcast that should not have 800,000 subscribers, is that local Republican officials can refuse to certify results, demand hand recounts they are not entitled to demand, and generate enough procedural noise during the counting window that the question of who won gets referred to a legislature controlled by people who already know who they want to win. It is less a legal strategy than a Yelp review left before you have eaten the food.
Trump, who spent the 2020 counting window on Twitter and the 2024 counting window in considerably better spirits, has not publicly detailed a midterm strategy. His political action committee did, however, send a fundraising email last Tuesday with the subject line "THEY ARE COUNTING VOTES RIGHT NOW" which was, at the time of sending, not true.
Critics of the strategy note that it requires an extraordinary number of things to go right, including winning enough local races to place loyalists in canvassing positions, those loyalists being willing to break state law, those state laws being challenged in courts that have spent the last four years dismissing these challenges at a rate that suggests the judges have a template, and the whole effort being completed before the press calls the race, which the press tends to do regardless of what anyone in a county building is doing.
Supports of the strategy note that it worked once, in the sense that the 2020 effort, while failing to overturn any result, did succeed in making a significant portion of the country believe that counting votes is a form of cheating.
State election directors in three of the four targeted states confirmed they are aware of the strategy. One, who asked not to be named because her state legislature is currently reviewing her budget, said the appropriate response is to "count correctly and quickly and then lock the door."
The counting window closes, in every state, when the count is done.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/27/trump-midterms-counting-window