Nothing Changes at the Stroke of Midnight Tonight
Counting ballots takes time—and the process isn’t required to arbitrarily stop at the end of Election Day.
When the clock strikes midnight tonight, nothing will magically change. The president seems to think otherwise. In a tweet last Monday, which Twitter blocked as potentially misleading, Donald Trump proclaimed: “Must have final total on November 3rd.” He said that “it would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3 instead of counting ballots for two weeks,” an alternative he deemed “totally inappropriate” and not “by our laws.” On Wednesday, Trump said at a press conference in Las Vegas, “Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”
There would be no legal basis for this. There is no
