The 2020 presidential election is six-months away — but officials in the key swing state of Pennslyvania is already warning that they’re completely unprepared.
And it may take weeks to find out who will win the presidential election.
Election officials throughout the Keystone State are warning that they’re completely unprepared and underfunded to handle and count mail-in ballots that will be distributed throughout the state.
“My nightmare is that on Election Day in November, you’re waiting for Montgomery County’s results to declare Pennsylvania to declare who wins the White House,” Montgomery County Commissioner Ken Lawrence, a Democrat who chairs the Board of Elections there, told Politico. “The reality is that all of our counties are going to be in that same situation, and it will take a while to actually count the ballots.”
A Democrat-led effort to conduct the election through mail-in ballots has been underfunded and understaffed, election officials say.
Experts have warned the process could be overwhelmed by election fraud.
The situation is so bad, officials say, that Pennsylvania can’t even handle the uncontested Democratic primary vote being held in two weeks.
“I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me so far. They got the wrong party ballot sent to them. They got the wrong district ballot sent to them. And now I’m having people getting multiple ballots sent to them. These are the things that are inevitable when you rush the implementation of mail-in voting like we did here,” Allegheny County Democratic Councilwoman and election board member Bethany Hallam told Politico.
President Donald Trump carried the state by only 44,000 votes over then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Polling indicates the upcoming 2020 contest between Trump and presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden could be an even tighter contest.
The Democrat-led mail-in voting effort is going to overwhelm the system, one official warned.
“We don’t just have a perfect storm. We have perfect storms,” Republican Al Schmidt, who helps oversee Philadelphia elections, warned. “We have new voting technology. We have an election reform that pushed back all the deadlines. And we have mail-in ballots and the pandemic.”
That means in the 2020 general election, the results from the critical swing state could take days — or even weeks — to be tallied and a winner declared.
If Pennslyvania is the deciding factor in a close presidential election, that means it could be late November before a winner is declared.
And mail-in ballots could result in the election being stolen from Republican voters, the president warned.
“The United States cannot have all Mail-In Ballots,” Trump said. “It will be the greatest rigged election in history.”
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
The Horn editorial team