All the votes must be counted

Hours after polls closed on Tuesday, President Donald Trump began casting doubt on results and spreading misinformation about the process of counting the votes cast in a presidential election.

• Trump Wednesday evening tweeted he had "claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," along with Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Candidates can’t claim election wins. State officials count and certify results.
• Trump tweeted that his leads in some states had "started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted." That’s not what happened. State laws govern when the processing of mail-in ballots can begin, and in some crucial battleground states that didn’t start until Election Day. Millions of people across the country chose to vote absentee due to the dangers of COVID-19, causing the backlog of paper ballots.
• Trump tweeted that "They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan." This is alarmist and wrong. It’s also unsurprising that absentee votes might lean Democratic in urban areas.
• Trump tweeted a leading question criticizing the mail-in system and asking why "every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?" Mail-in ballots are not destructive. They have been used in some form at least since the Civil War and are particularly necessary to keep vulnerable people safe during a pandemic. Take the word of the right-leaning Cato Institute: an August legal bulletin on the group’s website argued that "Changes to our voting systems to safeguard public health, such as by allowing mail‐​-in voting, are sorely needed."

In an often incoherent early-morning appearance Wednesday at the White House, the president said about the vote, "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country." It is neither. Fraud in mail-in balloting isn’t a significant problem, although it is a trope of GOP politics. Trump’s own voting integrity commission, which was disbanded in 2018, was unable to find evidence of widespread fraud. And the handling of American elections is commonly seen as a standard around the world.

Trump also said incorrectly, "We did win this election," and, "We want all voting to stop." Trump could certainly win the election, but the final tally still remains unclear as votes continue to be counted across the country. No matter what the president claims, the voting has already ended. We’re in the counting phase now.

The counting phase is routine and will continue for a while — even in states where the top-line presidential results are clear, like New York. County boards of elections here won’t even begin to tally their thousands of absentee ballots for a few days, and that means down-ballot races, including some on Long Island, will remain in flux.

"We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court," Trump insists. It’s expected that his campaign, like others before, will pursue lawsuits to protect its interests in tight states. But to prevail in litigation you need facts and a plausible legal argument. Trump has yet to articulate either.

Social media companies are beginning to catch on to the Trump misinformation problem, labeling some of his tweets with the message: "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process." That didn’t stop the president from continuing the fact-free deluge, and some of his top supporters from joining in.

Words have consequences. Trackers of far-right rhetoric soon saw neo-Nazis and white supremacists amplifying Trump’s election messages online and some accounts gesturing toward violence. Free and fair elections leading to peaceful transitions of power distinguish our nation from others. That stability is why we are the world’s financial center.

Counting all the legally cast votes means counting all the legally cast votes. It will take time, especially in this pandemic year, and the results as of now are by no means certain. Trump says he won the election. Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested Wednesday that once the count is over he expects he’ll have won. But it’s not up to either man. And the only way to find out the result is to count the votes.

— The editorial board