Trump supporters promote conspiracy to explain Pennsylvania’s slow election count. The actual reason is much simpler

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At a hastily called rally outside the Pennsylvania Convention Centre, a small group of Donald Trump supporters gathered with signs and banners. Polls had closed less than 24 hours earlier and the votes were being counted inside.

The crowd was summoned by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was due to appear any minute to make unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. When Mr Giuliani didn’t show, they were left to make the case on their own.

“I’m a little concerned about Philadelphia and the counting of the ballots. It’s been notorious for over a hundred years that the counting in Philadelphia has been a little sketchy,” said Matthew B., a 27-year-old resident of the city who wore a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.  

“Some of the laws that were put in place before the election were very odd to say the least. Why did they do that in this election compared to other elections? They were given ample time to vote early, so there’s definitely some things that are of concern there,” he added.

There has been no evidence of voter fraud in Philadelphia, or anywhere in Pennsylvania. And yet it is a claim that is increasingly being taken up by Donald Trump’s supporters after months of the president and his team pushing the same unsubstantiated claims.

Mr Trump famously declared “bad things happen in Philadelphia” during a presidential debate with his opponent Joe Biden, implying that the city would try to rig the election.

He has frequently suggested without evidence that mail-in ballots — a record three million of which were used by voters across the state in this election — are used to commit fraud, and promoted debunked stories about missing ballots cast in his name.

Mr Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, came to Philadelphia on Wednesday to allege that “rampant corruption” had occured in the city’s vote count, without providing any evidence.

As the task of counting millions of ballots has continued beyond election day, those allegations have taken on an added weight in Pennsylvania.  

Some of Mr Trump’s supporters have now taken up the claims. They have grown suspicious after watching their candidate start off with a huge lead here in Pennsylvania, only for it to fall off dramatically to a point where it is now likely to soon disappear.

“I think the mail-in ballot system is absolutely ridiculous,” said Matthew B, the Trump supporter. “I also think when you look at the way news stations called certain states, how Arizona got called so early yet we won’t call Georgia and North Carolina early. Alaska is not called yet, that’s absolutely absurd.”

The reality is much simpler. Mr Trump’s disappearing lead has little to do with fraud, but with the way in which mail-in ballots are counted. Mail-in ballots take longer to count than in person votes — signatures must be matched, more details checked.

More than three million people across Pennsylvania opted to vote by mail, the vast majority of them Democrats. For that reason, election observers have long warned that results would display something referred to as a ‘red mirage’ at first — that is a temporary lead for Republicans which would fall or disappear as the Democrat-heavy mail-in ballots are counted. That is precisely what happened in Pennsylvania.

Election integrity advocates also warned that Mr Trump might try to take advantage of that temporary lead to unilaterally declare victory, and try to block the counting of mail-in ballots. That is also what appears to have happened in Pennsylvania — several campaign officials unilaterally claimed victory in statements to the press on Wednesday.

But the delay in counting ballots in Pennsylvania is largely the fault of the Republican Party. In the months leading up to the election, Democrats tried to pass legislation that would allow mail-in ballots to be processed before election day. Many other states made similar rule changes to avoid a rush of ballots in one day. But Republicans in Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled state legislature blocked those efforts.

J.J. Abbott, a former press secretary to governor Tom Wolf and currently director of a progressive advocacy group called Commonwealth Communications, said the request to start counting was bipartisan.

“We had Republican and Democratic county election officials who made clear they needed more time in order to process these votes so they could be counted on election night,” he told The Independent.

“Republicans in the legislature in Pennsylvania tried to leverage the request of the county election officials to implement the exact demands the Trump campaign was making in federal court,” he said, which included rule changes that would limit people’s ability to cast their vote more easily, such as removing ballot drop-off boxes and early voting centres.

“What we’re seeing now is a direct result of the Republican refusal to allow for that pre-canvassing,” he added.

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania was contacted for comment.

On Thursday, the head of an international delegation monitoring the US election said his team has no evidence to support Mr Trump’s claims about alleged fraud involving mail-in absentee ballots.

“We looked into this. We found no violations of the rules whatsoever,” Michael Georg Link, a German lawmaker who heads an observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told German public broadcaster rbb.

He added that while some error had been made on ballots,  there was “no systemic interference or even manipulation with the postal ballots whatsoever.”

Pennsylvania election officials said they expected to finish counting most of the votes by the end of Thursday, at which point a winner might be declared.