This isn’t a column about the American presidential election.
So you can relax.
It is a column about local news, and the value of expertise. It just happened to have occurred during an election.
Late last week, as tensions rose about the changing fortunes for different presidential candidates in the state of Pennsylvania, a curious thing happened: on Thursday, Nov. 5, Allegheny County announced it was going to stop processing more than 30,000 votes for at least a day.
I remember thinking at the time that it was odd: Joe Biden’s fortunes were on the rise as mail-in ballots were being counted, and it seemed like a strange time to take a vote-counting hiatus. (That’s actually what journalists do. We spend a lot of time thinking, “That’s weird — I wonder why they did that?” Then, often, we try to find out.)
Late last week, as tensions rose about the changing fortunes for different presidential candidates in the state of Pennsylvania, a curious thing happened…
But if I thought it was odd, others thought it was outrageous. In the land of social media, the announced delay was all it took for unhinged conspiracy talk to take hold. Some announced it was proof the Republicans were trying to bury legitimate votes for Biden. Others were certain it was proof that Republican votes were the ones being stolen. (There was also, of course, the usual input from the “they’re a bunch of lazy workers just taking time off” set.) A little information truly is a dangerous thing.
Enter Chris Potter.
A former editor with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette now working in radio, Potter simply demolished the entire conspiracy in a handful of tweets. (I’m going to include a whole collection of them, so you can feel and appreciate the sweet, sweet step-by-step logic of them.)
Let’s start.
“Here I am going to try to address some confusion about why Allegheny County is not going to begin counting 30,000-plus ballots until tomorrow. People are going bonkers about this, or castigating hard-working employees on no sleep, and it is wrong.
“The ballots in question require special attention. The vast majority — up to 29,000 — involve a situation where a vendor sent the wrong ballots to voters, and had to reissue new ballots with the correct races. The challenge there is now voters have two ballots, one w/wrong races.
“So you have to give those ballots special scrutiny to make sure that a) people don’t vote twice, and b) if they just send in the old one, they don’t vote in races they aren’t eligible for. So you can’t just scan them with the rest.
“Other ballots in the pot include those that don’t scan for whatever reason — it’s like when the ATM won’t process the amount of the check you want to deposit, so you have to bring it into the bank office itself.
“When ballots require special scrutiny, the county records the vote through a return board whose members are sworn in for that purpose. The board reviews the results tallied up by election workers after polls close, but also addresses provisional ballots, military ballots, etc.
“... And the board’s members are set to be sworn in tomorrow, the Friday after E-day. I am told by the election department’s solicitor that this date is a requirement of the Election Code.”
It’s a wonder what a little expertise can do, hey?
But that kind of expertise and specialization isn’t found for free. Not only that, as issues shrink down to the point where they are important to a small area — but fly under the level where national news organizations pay attention — there are fewer and fewer places to find them. And if they’re gone?
They’re gone.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
