Voting continues across the country this Election Day morning. But early and absentee votes are counted and locked away at boards of elections as well. After all the Republican lawsuits over states extending deadlines for accepting mailed ballots, in many places those votes are just waiting to be posted once polls close. In North Carolina, that’s shortly after 7:30 p.m. EST:
The North Carolina State Board of Elections says it expects that it will have processed 97% or more of all ballots cast in the general election on Nov. 3 and that the unofficial results will be reported by the end of election night.
The announcement is in line with election watchers’ predictions about which states will release their results earliest. North Carolina is one of the states where mail-in ballots can be processed as the state receives them, easing the burden of tallying votes on Election Day.
Vote counting in North Carolina will be done except for late-arriving absentee ballots. The early vote here in the Cesspool of Sin was a record 68% and could reach 75% turnout by tonight. Word on the street is that a “Count Every Vote” rally scheduled here for Wednesday has been cancelled.
Seven of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, however, will not count mail-in ballots until Wednesday:
Pennsylvania allows for counties to begin processing mail-in ballots the morning of Election Day, but officials in Beaver, Cumberland, Franklin, Greene, Juniata, Mercer and Montour — all counties which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 — said that concerns over staffing and resources led them to delay when they will count mail ballots.
It is unclear what impact this could have on the timing of the results. The counties range in population size, but roughly a combined 150,000 voters in these areas have requested mail-in ballots according to state data.
None of this will keep the scammer-in-chief from declaring his eternal rule tonight:
Grifter Donald Trump is determined to try to con his way into serving a second term in office or, more likely, attempt to make it appear as though he was robbed of another four years if he is defeated when all of the votes are counted.
According to three Axios sources, the president has told some in his inner circle that he plans to declare victory come Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead.” The report goes on to explain that the president’s plan, which has been in the works “for weeks,” relies on Trump being ahead in several swing states and then declaring victory before states like Pennslyvania count their mail-in ballots.
The report says that the Trump campaign will make the false claim that mail-in ballots counted after election day are illegitimate and “are evidence of election fraud.” And because there is a chance that prior to the mail-in ballots being counted, Pennslyvania may show Trump with a lead on election night, triggering the president’s dishonest plan to go into effect.
Dishonest plans are the only kind he has.
He is certainly confident in them. A “non-scalable” wall went up around the White House complex last night, “a metaphor for the last four years,” Eric Lutz writes at Vanity Fair. The acting president will throw a private watch party behind it tonight, evoking again parallels with Poe’s classic cautionary tale of wealthy hubris and denial in a time of plague.
With luck, his misrule will soon pass and Joe Biden’s nascent presidency will defeat the plague and restore some semblance of normalcy.