Big Difference From 2020 Election Count Compared to November's Mid-Terms

Wednesday, November 16th, 2022 -- 12:00 PM

(By Shannon Bond, Miles Parks, Huo Jingnan, Wisconsin Public Radio) In the days following the 2020 election, chaos erupted at the main absentee ballot counting center in Detroit, according to Shannon Bond, Miles Parks, and Huo Jingnan of Wisconsin Public Radio.

"Stop the count! Stop the count!" people yelled as they banged on the windows that stood between them and the people trying to tally votes. Social media teemed with false claims of ballots being wheeled in under the cover of night.

This year's midterms couldn't have looked more different. "What we had in 2022 [at that counting center] was smooth, organized, serene even," said Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's Democratic secretary of state.

On the Wednesday after voting finished, Republican candidates for governor and state attorney general, who had denied the 2020 election results, conceded their races.

And it was at that moment, Benson says, she realized the nation's election workers were on their way to passing their first real test since former President Donald Trump's sustained attack on democracy.

"I got choked up a little bit because to me that was like the affirmation that we did it," Benson said. "We ran a smooth election. There were folks who were ready to pounce on anything. ... But it didn't work."

To be sure, the counting is not done in many races, and it will be weeks before the entire country's election results are officially certified. Some candidates and online commentators, and Trump, have seized on Election Day glitches and the slow pace of vote counting in certain states to sow suspicion and claims of malfeasance.

But so far, that chatter has not yet incited the chaos that many had feared would ensue, stoked by a mythos of election fraud that has become a core belief for many Americans on the right. Many candidates who lost have conceded, even some who questioned the results of the 2020 election.

And in the cases where Republican candidates have chosen not to concede, like Benson's own opponent, who rose to prominence by claiming fraud in 2020, their cries of malfeasance seem to have fallen flat this cycle.

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