People don’t trust election results because of influencers like ‘Catturd’

I would like to speak to Catturd about a very serious subject.

First of all, 42 years ago in journalism school, I had no idea that decades in the future a man who goes by the name “Catturd” would be a far more influential voice in the arena of public debate than I would ever be.

But alas, we are knee deep in this tantalizing litter box.

The aforementioned Catturd is actually a 60-year-old Panhandle Floridian who plays guitar in a country band. His inflammatory political posts have attracted more than 3 million followers on X, formerly Twitter.

He has established himself as an influential conspiracy theorist whose views are subsequently amplified on the political right by all kinds of people who should know better, including former President Donald Trump and mad scientist Elon Musk.

Catturd is what is known in the political trenches as a prolific social media ‘s-poster’. He posts something absurd, like the FBI planting national security documents at Mar-a-Lago to entrap Trump, and a day later it’s trumpeted by Trump’s lawyer and FOX News.

I usually ignore Catturd because I don’t see the point in making myself any more stupid.

But Catturd posted the following on X this week. And there’s just too much wrong here to pass up. He wrote:

“Florida is the third most populous state in the US and their votes will be counted and the results will be released on election night.

“Any secretary of state, in any state, who goes on television today and says it will take days to count the votes is an impostor, a traitor, and should be arrested.”

The overarching flaw of this view is that it assumes that any election official who does not release complete results on election night must be “cheating” to change the real election results.

What is going on in the counting of votes is not unfairness. It is that election workers are required to follow the procedures and timelines for counting votes as set forth by state legislatures and codified by state law.

Each state has its own election laws. There is no uniform method across the country for how vote-by-mail and early voting will be handled.

The only dishonesty here comes from those who exploit these differences as a way to undermine public confidence in voting.

If you are going to Florida, if you are a voter who votes by mail or in person during the 14-day early voting period that began on Monday, October 21, your vote will be processed and counted upon receipt by election officials.

This means that for your ballot, the ballot will be opened and the ballot will be removed. Your eligibility to vote is checked, your signature is verified, and the ballot is then displayed on the counting machines.

The early in-person votes are also immediately tabulated. The results of these early processed mail-in votes and early votes will not be released publicly until Election Day.

Florida is not a unicorn when it comes to acting quickly on early votes cast. Forty-three states allow early vote processing to begin before Election Day.

So yes, in Florida the majority of votes have already been mapped before Election Day.

In 2020, 4.7 million mail-in ballots and 4.3 million early in-person votes were tabulated before voters showed up at the polls in Florida to vote on Election Day.

So in an election where a total of 11 million Floridians cast ballots in 2020, more than 9 million of those were processed and tabulated before Election Day.

Trump’s margin of victory in the Florida election four years ago was about 371,000 votes — large enough not to change the outcome for the ongoing tabulations for ballots that were cured due to signature mismatches or received from state residents abroad and military personnel in the permitted period after the elections. Day.

So Florida achieved quick results because the race was partly not that close. Had it been as close as the 2000 presidential race, decided by a 537-vote margin in the state, the final results would not have been announced until several days after Election Day, as the small trickle of late votes would determine the outcome .

More: Opinion: Don’t ask me to understand the voting language in Florida’s constitutional amendment

More: Cerabino: Don’t tell Trump, but voting by mail was once considered “phenomenal” in Florida

The real problem with Catturd’s claim is that he picked the wrong villains. Republicans in some of the battleground states have changed state laws to ensure that the counting of early and mail-in votes extends beyond Election Day.

And then they use that delay they created to conclude that election officials are producing fraudulent votes to steal the election.

Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania changed state laws there to ban the opening of ballot envelopes until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

This guaranteed that voting would last for days in states where the outcome would be a narrow margin. In 2020, Biden’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania was about 80,000 votes; and in Wisconsin only 20,000 votes.

In other battleground states, Republican lawmakers changed laws this year to slow the counting of early votes, making it easier to file “stolen election charges” while election workers count legal votes after Election Day.

In Arizona, the collection of ballots cast in secure ballot boxes on Election Day — one-fifth of all ballots cast in the state’s largest county — was banned until after the polls closed on Election Day.

Georgia tried to pass a law allowing certifying officials to conduct their own “reasonable investigation” to stop the certification of votes.

And in North Carolina, lawmakers changed their election laws last year so that counties had to wait until polls close on Election Day before they could tabulate votes received before that day.

All of these changes are intended to make it easier for influencers like Catturd to level dangerous accusations of treason against election officials who are just trying to do their jobs.

“They are literally using early voting to find out how much they will cheat,” one of his followers wrote.

“Build the gallows,” replied another.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Election distrust starts on social media with influencers like ‘Catturd’