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Election Results: When will Wisconsin’s ballots be counted by?

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At this point, it is common knowledge that the full results of the 2020 presidential election will not be known on Election Night. The pandemic has pushed voters to overload state election systems as well as the United States Postal Service with tens of millions of postal ballot (both “mail-in” and “absentee”) requests, something which nearly all states were unprepared for. It’ll all come down to the swing states, as per usual. This time, however, it’s a question of when we’ll get these results.

We’ve talked about when Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan‘s election results might be released—now let’s look at another swing state: Wisconsin.

For an explanation about the difference between mail-in and absentee ballots, check out this piece here by Ben Wilson: The Difference Between Absentee and Mail-In Ballots.

Like Michigan, Wisconsin is (or was) considered part of the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” of support in the Great Lakes region. Here, blue-collar support has traditionally been strong and well-organized, with this bloc of voters having voted Democratic for decades. That changed in 2016, when a certain Donald Trump became the Republicans’ nominee for president. Trump won the state with less than 23,000 votes.

Ordinarily, 6% of Badger State voters cast absentee ballots, according to The Wisconsin State Journal.

“But this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, a record-high number of ballots are being cast absentee,” said The State Journal. “As of Tuesday, more than 915,000 absentee ballots had been returned out of 1.4 million requested. That is 30% of the total ballots cast in 2016.”

Additionally, for a ballot to be counted, it must be received by the election clerk by 8 pm (Central Time). However, that could change. The State Journal reports that the U.S. Supreme Court is contemplating “a lawsuit that seeks to extend the deadline for counting absentee ballots received by Nov. 9.”

This law could severely delay the results for quite a few days by creating a backlog of ballots that, on Election Day, election workers have to count on top of the votes from polling stations that very day.

Further complicating matters, Wisconsin has a specific rule which mandates that the vote count cannot be paused, even for an evening, until all the ballots are counted. According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this law “doesn’t allow local officials to stop their count and reconvene the next morning, so many of them will have to pull an all-nighter.”

Assembling all these details together, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that most of Wisconsin’s results will be revealed within a week after November 3. Regardless, so many variables are up in the air and, as I’ve said previously in this series, anything can happen—especially in 2020.

You can follow Douglas Braff on Twitter @Douglas_P_Braff.

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Report: Beijing’s military hacked U.S. nuclear firm before Hunter Biden aided Chinese bid to acquire it

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A bombshell report by Just the News explains that “U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America’s premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts.”

Hunter Biden attempted to assist CEFC China Energy to acquire Westinghouse, one of America’s most famous electricity and appliance brands, as well as its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor.

Hunter began his work with the Chinese company in early 2016 – while Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President – memos show. According to a copy of the indictment, just 20 months earlier, his father’s Justice Department charged five members of a Chinese military hacking unit for breaching the company’s computer systems in search of intellectual property and internal strategy communications.

Just the News reports:

In May 2014, the five operatives of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 were charged with hacking into the systems of six U.S.-based companies across different industrial sectors, including Westinghouse Electric Co., SolarWorld, United States Steel Corp., and a union. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called the breach a classic case of “economic espionage.”

One operative gained access to Westinghouse’s computers in 2010 and “stole proprietary and confidential technical and design specifications related to pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing” pertaining to the company’s advanced AP1000 nuclear reactor design, according to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice.

“Among other things, such specifications would enable a competitor to build a plant similar to the AP1000 without incurring significant research and development costs associated with designing similar pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing systems,” the indictment reads.

Just the News notes that while there is no evidence at the moment that Hunter Biden was aware of or involved in the hacking efforts by the Chinese, documents previously released by Congress in the Biden impeachment inquiry show Hunter Biden wrote in one text message in 2017 that he believed one of the CEFC officials he worked with, Patrick Ho, was the “f—ing spy chief” of China.

Ho was later indicted in the U.S. and charged with corruption. Joe Biden’s brother James told the FBI he believed CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming had a relationship with China’s communist president.

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