Good morning (and apologies for the delay; there were technical issues). It’s very likely going to be another long wait before we know the winner of the U.S. election – more on that below, along with Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to scrap the GST on new homes and the hunt for a whole bunch of missing cheese. But first:
Today’s headlines
- The NDP is set to form the government in B.C. after the final count of absentee ballots
- Saskatchewan residents have given Scott Moe a fifth mandate as Premier, but with a slimmer majority
- Israel passes two laws to restrict the work of a UN agency that is a lifeline for Gaza
- For a Quebec woman with Alzheimer’s, the choice to request assisted dying in advance offers a sense of relief
Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania, the swing state with the most Electoral College votes in play.Hannah McKay/Reuters
U.S. Election
Countdown to uncertainty
There’s just one week remaining until the U.S. election, but the likelihood that you or I – or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump – will go to bed next Tuesday night knowing the winner is practically nil. Back in 2020, the Associated Press called 26 states as soon as their polls closed, and another 19 within 24 hours. In several key swing stages, though, razor-thin margins and complicated ballot-counting rules delayed the results by days, even weeks (looking at you, Georgia). Joe Biden was declared president on the Saturday after the election, leaving plenty of opportunity for conspiracy theories, protests and violence to creep in.
“That window of time between the polls closing and races being called, I think, has shown to be a real vulnerability, [which] people seeking to undermine confidence in those results have really exploited,” Republican Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official, said recently. With the 2024 presidential contest shaping up to be a similarly drawn-out affair, let’s take a look at a few of those swing states to see what could hold up the calls.
North Carolina (16 Electoral College votes)
North Carolinians are dependably early voters: In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, advance voting was the most popular way for people to cast their ballots. Interest is even higher in this race – the state has seen record turnout since polls opened 12 days ago. So far, nearly 2.7 million votes have been cast in person, which is more than a third of North Carolina’s registered voters, and early-voting sites will stay open until next Saturday.
Here’s the catch: North Carolina’s boards of elections used to be able to count those early votes before polls closed on election night, which meant they could report the results once 7:30 p.m. rolled around. But a new law now requires boards to wait until polls close to start their tabulations. In another close election – Trump won North Carolina by barely 75,000 votes, his smallest margin of victory in any state – the outcome could be unclear for at least a week.
A Harris-Walz rally in Wisconsin this summer.Barbara Davidson/The Globe and Mail
Wisconsin (10 Electoral College votes)
If the words “vote dumps” ring a strange bell, that’s because Trump has spent the past four years railing against a late-night surge of Democratic votes from Milwaukee – which he claims allowed Biden to “steal” the state. The truth is less nefarious: Wisconsin is one of the rare states that can’t process mail-in ballots before the morning of the election. In 2020, the pandemic prompted a spike in those ballots, which dragged out tabulation; this year, roughly 450,000 ballots have already been returned in Wisconsin by mail.
Another headache is that many of the state’s largest cities – including Democratic stronghold Milwaukee – must transport their mail-in ballots to a centralized location in order to be counted. That can lead to sizable batches of votes getting reported all at once in the early hours after polls close, which is precisely what happened in 2020. As a result of those “vote dump” conspiracy theories, Wisconsin’s legislature considered a bill allowing local officials to process absentee ballots the day before the election, but it died in the state senate earlier this year.
Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes)
Like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania must wait until Election Day to start counting its mail-in ballots. That wasn’t a huge problem before 2020, when only 4 per cent of the state’s votes were cast by mail – but in 2020, due to new rules and COVID fears, that number swelled to 39 per cent. It took officials four full days to sift through the huge mail-in backlog before they could declare Biden the winner of their state (and, as a result, the election). That didn’t put Pennsylvania voters off mail-in ballots, though: So far, nearly 1.3 million have been sent in for this year’s race.
But how many of them will actually count come Nov. 5? That hinges on the decisions of 67 separate election boards. Each partisan board makes its own rules about notifying voters of mistakes on their mail-in ballots – like messing up a date or failing to seal it in a second envelope – and whether they get a second chance to cast their votes. In 2020, Pennsylvania election officials rejected more than 34,000 mail ballots in a state that came down to just 80,000 votes. Next week, experts anticipate even more rejected ballots in an even tighter race – which means we should probably all get ready for a long series of anxious nights.
Follow The Globe’s latest updates on the U.S. election here.
The Shot
‘The porch went and the trees went and then the windows blew.’
A major 2020 storm in Ontario destroyed houses and downed hydro poles.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
As extreme weather wreaks costly damage in Canada, a new lab at Western University is working to understand the science – and the future – of our storms. Read more about the project here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he’ll remove the GST on new homes priced under $1-million and cut $8-billion from the Liberal government’s existing housing program.
Abroad: Growing concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour has led Japan to build up its military presence on remote islands near Taiwan.
Big reveal: Timothée Chalamet crashed his own look-alike contest in New York City after police shut down the crowded event.
Major stink: Thieves stole more than $500,000 in fancy cheddar from British cheese maker Neal’s Yard Dairy, and now Jamie Oliver is on the case.