President Donald Trump is ignorantly ranting against the basic democratic processes of the American electoral system — again. In a Friday morning post on Twitter, he sounds furious over a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed an extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to be counted in North Carolina to remain in place. Ballots must still be postmarked by Election Day, but with the deadline extension in place, the ballots can arrive up to nine days after Election Day and still count. On Twitter, Trump called the decision upholding the extension “CRAZY and so bad for our Country,” and he insisted that the “Election should END on November 3rd.” The problem is: counting valid ballots after Election Day is something that states have already done for awhile!
Trump ranted on Twitter as follows, in direct response to a post about the North Carolina deadline extension:
‘This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period. The Election should END on November 3rd.’
This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period. The Election should END on November 3rd. https://t.co/Hkftv9Jp56
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020
Trump’s insinuations that post-Election Day shifts in vote tallies automatically imply some kind of fraud are baseless — and they’re also stunningly ignorant, as if the president of the United States is unaware of the long precedent of counting some ballots after Election Day, as long as those ballots are valid and were submitted on time. Trump seems prone to seeing some kind of grand conspiracy behind just about anything that he doesn’t particularly like. The problem is: this time, his ignorant crusades threaten the security of the election, because what if he decides to take his nonsense to court in the event of uncertainty about the results in the immediate aftermath of Election Day? States take weeks to officially certify their election results; media organizations and third-party experts provide the familiar feeling of clarity about the results in the immediate aftermath of the election.
Trump has already openly threatened to reject the results of the election if he doesn’t like what he sees, although nobody appointed him to be the arbiter of democracy! His baseless conspiracy-mongering about the election hearkens back to his claims after the 2016 election that millions of illegal votes had been cast. Those claims were deranged nonsense.
View Twitter’s response below:
