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In recent days, several Italian newspapers have written that during the presidential elections in the United States, still ongoing in the most uncertain states, close to 300 thousand votes sent by mail were lost: a figure that seems to suggest a problem of enormous dimensions, that could potentially affect the final outcome of the elections. In reality, the matter is more complicated than it seems, and there is good reason to believe that the cards involved will not be decisive in the final count.
It was the same post office, on Election Day, that told a federal judge that 300,000 mailed ballots had been received by the post offices but had not been “scanned”: that is, they had not been marked as invited to the electoral offices that should have scrutinized them. However, this does not mean that the 300,000 were lost.
In a press release, Correos announced that “the statement that unsolicited ballots remain in the postal network is not true”: in fact, they argue that to expedite the delivery of ballots to the electoral offices, many of them have been delivered “directly” by hand by post office employees, without being “scanned on departure”.
This was also confirmed by the postal manager in charge of managing postal votes, Kevin Bray, who during testimony before a federal court in the District of Columbia said that his office had already considered that some cards had not been “scanned.” outgoing “to be delivered on time to the electoral offices (the states that do not accept votes by mail arrived after Election Day are 28, according to a Washington Post). Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein also confirmed a CNN Such a large number of unregistered outgoing cards probably indicates that some steps have been skipped to deliver them on time.
Not everyone is convinced by the post office explanation. “We have no way of knowing whether these files should concern us or not,” said Allison Zieve, an attorney for the NAACP, one of the largest civil rights associations in the United States, responsible for calling the post office to explain in court. .
According to an analysis of the Washington Posthowever, “even in the worst case where all missing ballots in a given state have been lost,” the election outcome is unlikely to be affected.
Most of the cards that have not been scanned on exit come from states where the margin between the two candidates is very large, such as California (90,000 cards between Los Angeles and San Diego alone) and Utah, two states won with great distance by Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.
Based on estimates of the Washington Post About 81 thousand of the 300 thousand ballots come from states still in the balance: it seems a considerable number, but it must be distributed in seven states whose results were still pending on Wednesday afternoon, when the Washington Post had done the math, and where today Biden was the winner by a very large margin (this is the case in Michigan, about 150 thousand votes) or is given the advantage of tens of thousands of votes: as in Pennsylvania, where the cards Unscanned postcards are about 11 thousand but according to the latest estimates Biden should win with a gap of between 70 thousand and 100 thousand votes.
In Georgia, perhaps the most balanced state of all, 6,624 unscanned postcards were 6,624 – a number that might indeed cause some concern, given that Biden’s lead right now is roughly 7,200 votes, but you have to consider that based on the information we have a lot, among the 6,624 ballots they were probably delivered to the corresponding electoral offices.
But if, as it seems, in the end the winner of the election will be Joe Biden, it will be very difficult for a few hundred votes to reverse the situation, since according to the trends in voting by mail observed by analysts, the possibility has been exploited above all of distance voting. by Democratic voters.
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