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CNN
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The November 5 general election approaches, and Americans have some questions.
When CNN asked what was confusing about the system or what to expect in the weeks to come, submissions rolled in.
While many of the questions seemed more like vituperative venting about the presidential candidates, others were constructive and interesting. They ranged from questions about the Electoral College to specific inquiries about why ballots in some counties look the way they do.
I’ve taken the liberty of editing some of these questions for both style and length. I just included first names and state of residence based on the submissions. If we didn’t get to your question in this go-round, stay tuned or ask something new. We’ll add answers to new questions weekly until the election and also send them out to the What Matters newsletter audience.
How long after Election Day could we expect to know the final results, given the myriad of lawsuits that will be filed if Donald Trump loses?
Steve in California
It could take a while, depending on the number of mail-in ballots cast in some states and how close things are.
CNN did not project that President Joe Biden would win the 2020 election until four days after Election Day. If the election is close in one or more decisive states, it could be longer. In 2000, for instance, the disputed results in Florida carried on for 36 days until the Supreme Court ended a recount.
In 2016, on the other hand, things were relatively close in some key states and Hillary Clinton conceded the day after Election Day. Trump is unlikely to ever concede. Vice President Kamala Harris has talked about the importance of a peaceful transfer of power.
The 2000 example, in which Republican and ultimate winner George W. Bush was ahead after the initial count, brings up a good point. We can expect that if Trump loses he will contest the results since he has alleged voter fraud in every election in which he was a candidate. However, we should also expect that in the event of a close result in which Harris trails, Democrats will also explore legal avenues.
Rules on how and when a recount is triggered or can be requested vary from state to state. This year, according to a new law, states have until December 11 to ascertain a winner in order to guarantee their electoral votes are counted.
When I asked CNN’s director of election analytics Jennifer Agiesta about all of this, she noted that some states have taken measures since 2020 that will make their counting a bit faster. Her response is below:
Two of the states we projected last in 2020 are good examples: In Georgia, after changes to laws around preelection voting, a lot more people who vote before Election Day do so early in person rather than by mail, which means there are fewer mail ballots to count, which should speed things up.
In North Carolina, they no longer accept by-mail ballots after Election Day, so there is more known about what’s left to count there. And we expect a lot fewer people to vote by mail generally, since we’re not in the middle of a pandemic, so that also ought to speed things up.
The time it takes to process the by-mail ballots is the thing that slows it all down. Pennsylvania, of course, hasn’t made it easier for election officials to get those ballots ready to count before Election Day, so the count will likely keep going there for a while.
Why is it possible for noncitizens to vote in this election? It has never made any sense to me. Between that and no ID needed, it causes animosity and anxiety among the people.
– Bill in Missouri
It is not possible for noncitizens to vote in this election. Congress outlawed noncitizen voting in 1996.
If a noncitizen voted, the person would be breaking the law and probably would be deported. While Trump has alleged for years that there is an epidemic of noncitizen voting, there is zero evidence to back that up.
Every state except North Dakota requires voter registration. Each vote is paired with a registration. States routinely scrub their voter rolls. There are some few instances of people who are noncitizens becoming registered to vote, but it’s usually an error. When states identify noncitizens accidentally on their rolls, they are removed.
The conservative Heritage Foundation tracks prosecutions for noncitizen voting. There have been 25 in the past 20 years. Critics argue that Trump’s insistence there is noncitizen voting is a scare tactic.
While there are very few cities in California, Maryland and Vermont and in Washington, DC, that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, those are the exceptions to the rule. No noncitizen can vote for president.
RELATED: What the data actually shows about noncitizens voting in US elections.
Why in Ohio on the ballot do you have to scroll to the next page in order to vote for Harris? All the other candidates are on the first page of the electronic ballot. If a poll worker doesn’t tell you to scroll, you will not see Harris’ name.
– Sheila in Ohio
In order to answer Sheila’s question, I called Nicole Unzicker, director of the Board of Elections in Butler County, where Sheila lives.
It turns out that a paper version of the ballot used for mail-in voting shows all of the candidates in one line. However, for in-person voting on the Dominion system used there, the text for the first ballot question is large and long. That means in-person voters must scroll to see all of the presidential candidates when they get to the president question.
Unzicker said the order of candidates is always alphabetical, but the first listed candidate is rotated between the county’s roughly 300 precincts. So both Harris and Trump should be on the bottom half of the scroll for an equal number of voters.
With long and large wording for ballot initiatives, the scroll is a known issue, according to Unzicker. She said her office created a video that plays for voters in line and also has instructions at each voting station.
It’s important to remember that ballots are different within states and even counties depending on which offices are up for election. For information on your state, check out CNN’s Voter Handbook.
How can we eliminate the Electoral College?
– Linda in Washington
There were a lot of questions about the Electoral College, which should frustrate people on both sides of the aisle. There will be more Trump voters in California than in Texas and more Harris voters in Texas than in New York.
You’d need to change the US Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. And that’s not impossible. The 12th Amendment changed the process early in US history.
But enacting a constitutional amendment is a long, arduous, two-step process.
First, an amendment can be proposed by a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate, or two-thirds of states can propose an amendment by requesting a constitutional convention.
Second, once an amendment is proposed, it must be ratified by either three-quarters of the state legislatures or conventions called in each state.
It’s a difficult enough process that the most recent amendment, the 27th, was ratified 32 years ago. It focused on congressional compensation. The 26th Amendment, which made 18 the official voting age, was ratified more than a half-century ago, in 1971.
There have been multiple attempts to eliminate the Electoral College in US history, most recently in 1969, when a bill passed the US House with overwhelming support but was filibustered in the Senate.
States have also changed the system by moving to pick their electors as proxies for the popular vote in states rather than as a group of electors who can vote however they wish.
There is an effort to simply ignore the Electoral College and honor the popular vote winner. Multiple states have agreed to a National Popular Vote compact, whereby they would award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. The agreement only kicks in when states representing a majority of electoral votes sign on. They’re still about 61 electoral votes short.
Will we ever move past the Electoral College? The Electoral College makes my vote for POTUS irrelevant. I’m from a traditionally blue state. Regardless of how I vote, I’m blue. If I don’t vote, I’m blue. I understand the past points which bred the Electoral College, but I’d argue irrelevancy or disempowerment today to Democrats, or to 43 out of 50 states. Will we ever be able to remedy this constitutional disenfranchisement?
— Terry
I’m certainly not going to be the person who defends the Electoral College here. But I will point out your vote only seems irrelevant because there is a strong majority in your state. States change.
Remember when Florida was THE swing state? It wasn’t that long ago.
Remember when Ohio was a major swing state? Both are now essentially red.
Democrats have been salivating over Texas and North Carolina for years, trying to turn them blue. While two of the past six elections ended with a Republican getting fewer votes but winning the White House, there is some serious conjecture that this year could see Trump win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.
That would be a plot twist to drive his conspiracy theories.
None of this is to endorse the Electoral College or justify using something from the era of slavery in today’s America. But it is also true that politics is always changing.
There is a lot of talk about Trump’s following being uneducated. WHAT PERCENTAGE OF AMERICAN VOTERS are UNEDUCATED STARTING WITH (WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF UNEDUCATED)?
— Harvey
Let’s not use the term “uneducated,” which is pejorative. Harvey’s use of all caps is evidence that term is loaded.
There is a definite divide in this country between voters on the basis of what level of education they attained. Those with college degrees may be more likely to support Harris. Those without college degrees may be more likely to support Trump.
I wrote recently about the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik’s argument that education level is the best predictor of how a person will vote. We will have to see if that plays out on Election Day.
A recent report by the Lumina Foundation found that about 14% of Americans have a graduate or professional degree and about 23% stopped after earning a bachelor’s degree. About 9% have an associate degree, and about 8% have a post-high school certification of some kind.
Congress should also set term limits for members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The current system allows for people to stay in power and control who have outdated opinions and an inability to be objective and work with members who have new perspectives.
— Patricia
This is more of a comment than a question, but it’s worth exploring. Presidents are limited to two terms, so why not members of Congress? Because of the Supreme Court.
The court ruled in 1995 that imposing term limits on members of Congress would require a constitutional amendment. The decision barred states from imposing their own term limits on their members of Congress.
There is talk of lawmakers passing a law to reform the Supreme Court and impose term limits on justices, but that is in its early stages and currently lacks overwhelming support.
When Congress tried with a Republican majority in the mid-’90s to propose a term limits amendment for members of Congress, it failed repeatedly.
What was the closest result of all elections in the US?
Unsigned
There are a few ways to look at this, either in the popular vote or the Electoral College.
In the Electoral College, the closest election was relatively recent, in 2000. Bush got 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed to win the White House. Al Gore got a little more than 500,000 more total votes. The tightest possible margin in Florida, 537 votes, essentially decided the election. But there was also a narrow Bush win in New Hampshire too. Every state counts!
The election of 1876 between eventual-winner Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was decided by a single electoral vote, but only after the electoral votes of three states were disputed. A special commission ultimately awarded them to Hayes even though Tilden got more popular votes.
There are closer popular vote margins. These include 1960, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by about 119,000 ballots in the popular vote, and 1880, when James Garfield defeated Gen. Winfield Hancock despite getting fewer than 2,000 more popular votes. But neither of those was close in the Electoral College.
I’m not including the election of 1800, even though it resulted in a tie in the Electoral College. For starters, many state legislatures picked electors in early American elections, so it’s hard to say who got more popular votes. Second, the tie was between two running mates. They simply did not coordinate in the Electoral College.
What have the Republicans put into place to take a Trump loss to the courts? The same cheating chants they rolled out four years ago? This time, they do not have the power of the presidency from which to negate the voters’ choices.
— Sandra
Not only do Republicans not currently hold the presidency, but Congress actually passed a law in 2022 making clear that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is only ceremonial. They also changed the bar by which lawmakers can challenge a state’s electoral votes.
That said, CNN has reported that much of what special counsel Jack Smith accused Trump and his campaign of engineering after his 2020 loss is still in play for 2024. These include unfounded allegations of large numbers of undocumented immigrants casting ballots, something for which there is no evidence. They are also filing many preelection lawsuits, setting the groundwork to file lawsuits challenging the results if they don’t go Trump’s way. Read more about GOP challenges to mail-in voting.
Why aren’t the Democrats touting how well the economy is doing now – jobs , inflation coming down, interest rates coming down, unemployment down – prices are still a bit high but the government doesn’t control all of that – it’s a good recovery story since the pandemic mess that Trump left – right?
— Julie from Michigan
Trump supporters have a different view, but this is a good question about strategy. While the general mood about the economy has improved, it’s still quite dim. More than half the country, 52%, said in a recent Gallup poll that they feel worse off than they did four years ago.
It might be bad politics for a candidate to tell people who are having trouble affording things that they’re wrong about the way they feel. If you listen to Harris, she does say a lot of the things you suggest above, that inflation is coming down, but she also clearly wants to appeal to the Americans who are having trouble affording groceries, who can’t afford to buy a house and who feel like there’s a lot more work to be done.
