With just over one month left before the 2024 election, a watchdog group has warned that the election results in numerous crucial battleground states could be delayed for several days after November 5th.

According to Just The News, the claims came from the Honest Elections Project, through a statement by Executive Director Jason Snead, who said that such delays could prevent America from knowing the winner for several days due to the close nature of the 2024 election.

One example is the number of states that accept ballots that have been submitted after Election Day, with 18 states allowing this: Alaska, California, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Washington, D.C. also accepts ballots after the election.

This rule already caused the results of primary elections earlier this year to be delayed significantly. In the city of Baltimore, the primary election in May was not certified until two weeks after Election Day, due to the long process of counting all of the mail-in ballots, as well as provisional ballots that were cast at polling stations.

Another issue is the role of third-party vendors that are being utilized when it comes to voting machines. In several counties in Florida, including Broward and Palm Beach Counties, the servers provided by such vendors were incapable of processing the amount of traffic to the counties’ election websites, and the public was unable to view the results in real-time.

On the litigation front, more than 100 lawsuits have been filed by Republicans over certain election rules leading up to November 5th. At the same time, the legal team for the Harris-Walz campaign claims to have increased to 10 times the size of the Biden-Harris campaign’s legal team in 2020.

Snead explained that the results could ultimately be “delayed because of a rules change,” since “you’ve just created a dynamic where either side can claim the election has been stolen.”

“Democrats and their allies rewrite the rules and change practices, while Republicans intervene to defend those rules,” Snead continued, describing how while there may be an “aggressive push by Republicans in the courts, it’s very different from Democrats. Both sides are obviously wanting to win, but one side wants to win by changing the rules, while the other side wants to win by following them.”

Voter fraud remains a top concern among many voters, after widespread and credible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and shifted in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Unlike in 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Trump campaign are now actively encouraging Republican voters to vote early and vote by mail, after previously trying to keep their base focused on in-person voting on the day of the election. Early voting trends in a handful of states have already suggested that the Republicans have vastly improved their early vote ground game compared to 2020 and 2022.