With constant pressure from liberal activists, some states now dispatch mail-in ballots 45 to 60 days before Election Day and allow the counting of such absentee votes as many as three weeks afterward, creating an election trimester that causes vote tallies to wildly fluctuate days after polls close and increasingly erodes Americans’ trust.

But conservatives are now fighting back, first with an executive order by President Donald Trump requiring all ballots to be counted on election night, followed by a challenge to Mississippi’s counting process that has not reached the U.S. Supreme Court and then the Ohio legislature’s vote to require all its ballots to arrive on election night to be tallied.

“It’s common sense that ballots should arrive by Election Day,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose told Just the News this week after his state became the 35th to require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Night in order to be counted. Previously, the state had a four-day grace period for ballots to arrive after Election Day.

“I think that trying to reduce complexity should be our goal in government, and certainly when it comes to the rules for how elections run,” LaRose said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast. “If you were to stop the average person on the street last year and say, what’s the deadline for your ballot to get back to the board of elections, they would not know that it’s four days after. It’s kind of an arbitrary date.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures reported that many states now mail out ballots as early as 45 days to two months before Election Day and about a dozen states allow them to be counted days later — as long as three weeks afterward in Washington state, 14 days in Illinois, 10 days in Maryland and seven days in California and New York.

The overtime counting causes wild fluctuations in vote tallies that can string out days after polls close and even cause major lead changes.

The latest example occurred in the 2025 off-year elections, where Seattle’s incumbent Democrat Mayor Bruce Harrell held the lead on Election Night only to see Democratic Socialist candidate Katie Wilson be called the winner more than a week later as late-arriving mail-in ballots shifted the tally her way.

The shifting sands have become the norm in Seattle. “Early results in Seattle elections are often illusory,” the web-based publication “Governing” recently noted.

“Ballots only have to be postmarked by Election Day, so they continue to trickle in for days after the voting stops,’ it added. “New results are posted each day, and in the last several elections, there’s been a distinct leftward shift in the voting results with each passing day. The final tally shifted nine points in favor of the more progressive candidate in the 2013 race, 10 points in 2017 and 12 points in 2021.”

Trump’s 2020 leads evaporated days later

Trump saw a similar trend in the 2020 election when his supporters went to bed on Election Night thinking he had won major battleground states only to see his leads evaporate in the days afterward until he lost the election.

That’s why Trump made one of his early major executive orders when he returned to office in 2025 a requirement that all ballots be counted by Election Night.

“Federal law establishes a uniform Election Day across the Nation for Federal elections,” Trump’s order stated. “It is the policy of my Administration to enforce those statutes and require that votes be cast and received by the election date established in law.”

Trump explained why returning to Election Day counting was important, comparing the United States to other countries that now ensure a winner can be declared when polls close and not days later.

“The United States now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections employed by modern, developed nations, as well as those still developing,” his order noted. “India and Brazil, for example, are tying voter identification to a biometric database, while the United States largely relies on self-attestation for citizenship.

“In tabulating votes, Germany and Canada require use of paper ballots, counted in public by local officials, which substantially reduces the number of disputes as compared to the American patchwork of voting methods that can lead to basic chain-of-custody problems,” it noted.

“Further, while countries like Denmark and Sweden sensibly limit mail-in voting to those unable to vote in person and do not count late-arriving votes regardless of the date of postmark, many American elections now feature mass voting by mail, with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after Election Day.”

The same issue is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in November agreed to hear a case brought by the Republican National Committee challenging Mississippi’s law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after polls closed.

A federal judge upheld the law, but the Court of Appeals for the 5th U.S. Circuit reversed that decision, concluding that federal election law, which sets the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the federal election day, requires all ballots to be received by that day. The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case after that ruling.

Meanwhile, Ohio’s legislature worked with LaRose to become the latest state to mandate all ballots be counted by Election Night, in compliance with Trump’s order. Liberals howled over Ohio’s move, but LaRose said the state’s new approach resonates positively with most voters.

“When we passed this, the hand wringing and the pearl clutching from all the liberals was that, ‘oh, you’re going to disenfranchise thousands of people.’ Well, nonsense,” he said. “What we’ve done now is set a much easier to know, easier to comply with deadline.

“You can vote early in Ohio, show an ID, vote early. You can vote absentee by mail, bring it back, drop it in a drop box, or mail it back. And then, of course, you can show up on Election Day,” he added. “So there’s no good excuse for not making your voice heard.”

More here

Tagged: Partner BACK TO HOMEPAGE