No one asked for vote counting before Election Day. All that needed to happen was the preprocessing that mail-in ballots require. They need to be verified against voter lists, sorted by voting place etc. None of this even touches the actual ballot, but it requires substantial amounts of time.
That by itself reveals A LOT of meta information that could be used to gauge outcomes and for a campaign to react accordingly. A campaign that knew which voters had returned ballots could look up their party registration and district and then use that for highly targeted voter turnout or suppression on the day of the election. Enough to turn the tide of a close election like this.
Is there any evidence any of this data has been available - let alone been used - for a campaign in any of the states that do preprocess mail-in votes? Because doing so in order to shift a few ten thousand votes would leave quite a bit of a trace.
How would we know? But ultimately it doesn’t matter. This is the first election with near universal mail-in ballots, so no prior election would have had the coverage necessary to make this data useful. Secondly, just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. The point is to proactively prevent possible election manipulation, not merely react to demonstrated problems.
