From a piece on the upcoming South Carolina Republican primary in the Friday, 2/23, edition of the Times:
Barring unexpected snags, the first results should start coming in soon after the polls close at 7 p.m., and full results should arrive within a few hours.
When the Democrats held their primary in South Carolina on Feb. 3, the first results arrived within minutes, and The Associated Press was able to call the race for President Biden within half an hour.
U.S. voters have been conditioned by the press (now known as "the media," but I'm an old-school guy), over years, to expect this kind of election reporting.
But in 2020 COVID caused a sudden dramatic increase in multiple forms of remote voting and saw election results returned not in hours, but in days.
I've been saying since before the event — and still do — that single phenomenon made the election vunerable to hacking. And hacked it was.
I don't mean hacked as in falsifying the results. I'm completely satisfied the results were correct. Of course Biden won.
The hack was in convincing an inordinate number of people the results were not correct. Many seem to still be convinced.
Yet here we are, heading into another round of it.
We don't need to go back to single-day, at-the-polls voting. In fact, there's no back there. We have always permitted absentee balloting — at least as far as I can remember and I'm, as I may have mentioned, old school. But what we do need to do is foster a more realistic understanding of just how the process works and how secure, the way it is, it really is.
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