“I spent most of the night clenching so hard I have six pack abs now,” Late Night host Seth Meyers said on Wednesday.
Election Day in the U.S. has come and gone, but global stress and anxiety has only intensified. Though Democratic candidate Joe Biden is currently leading, President Donald Trump has already made an extremely premature victory declaration and is calling for the ballot counting to stop, stating he intends to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
As Meyers explained in a whopping 21-minute Closer Look segment, this is “deeply dangerous authoritarian behavior” that severely undermines America’s democracy. These are not fraudulent votes that Trump wants to discard. They are legitimate votes from registered U.S. voters that were submitted before the voting deadline and just need to be counted. Yet the president is actively fighting to ignore these ballots because they may not be favorable to him.
“If he had his way he’d get to personally sift through every ballot and cross out Biden’s name,” said Meyers.
“We need to count every vote, and there are still mountains of mail ballots to count — which is what always happens… This is how it’s been since the nation’s founding. You think 250 years ago they stopped counting votes at 11:59 p.m. on election night?”
“The people claiming now that counting votes the morning after an election is somehow a scandal are just bad faith soulless ghouls,” continued Meyers. “When the Constitution was written it took weeks to count all the ballots. That’s why the Electoral College meets in December and the inauguration was originally in March. Hell, it probably took weeks just to fill out the ballot because you had to use a quill and inkwell.”
Meyers also stressed that it didn’t have to be this way. Election officials could have easily begun counting early mail ballots weeks ago, instead of having to wait for Election Day. Unfortunately, Republicans didn’t allow them to do so, with state GOP lawmakers refusing to allow pre-Election day counting in Pennsylvania and allowing only one day’s head start in Michigan instead of the requested three, resulting in the current backup and delay.
“They’re the ones who said ‘no’ to counting mail ballots before Election Day, and now they’re the ones claiming a delay in counting mail ballots is somehow suspicious,” said Meyers. “That’s the con they’re running.”