Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair.
“I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.”
Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said. “There are a few states out there that we still have problems with and we’ve got to be careful and they bent the rules and they tried things and we’ve got to make sure that we continue to press those states to do it the right way because integrity in the election process matters.”
She has said in the past that the election was not stolen. Now she’s hedging. Of course. These people are the worst cowards politics has ever produced.
Nobody “bent the rules.” This has all been litigated. There were dozens and dozens of court cases, many of which were heard before right wing judges and none of them found any lack of integrity. We did see a president try to “bend the rules” by strong arming Republican officials into “finding” him the votes he needed to win. We saw him establish a Big Lie that the election was stolen. And we saw him incite an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power. We saw all that. But, no there wasn’t any “bending of the rules” that “we need to keep an eye on” in the states unless she’s talking about Republicans trying to steal more elections.
And adopting the fatuous Trump line that we can always tell the results of the election night is such an enormous pile of nonsense I hardly know what to say. States never “produce results” of an election on election night. It takes weeks to certify elections and she knows that. Media call elections on election night most of the time based on projections — unless they are close. When they are, as ours often are these days, they have to wait for all the votes to be counted — which is not possible between the hours of 8pm and 12 midnight on election night.
This is a Trump line that she’s flogging. He says that no votes should be counted after midnight because Democrats to go out and manufacture votes in the middle of the night to beat him. That’s where this is coming from. And Haley knows it.
These cynical GOP candidates are worse than Trump. They are lending their “moderate” imprimatur to his worst ideas.