President Donald Trump expressed his displeasure Sunday over the likelihood that it might take officials over a week after Election Day to count votes in certain swing states.

At his campaign rally Sunday in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump discussed various factors that might undermine the integrity of the election and Americans' confidence in its integrity, including lax or absent voter ID requirements.

"There is only one reason you don't want voter ID. There's only one reason, and that's to cheat," said Trump. "And they do cheat."

Trump stressed that the expected failure of officials to count votes in a timely fashion is similarly suspicious.

"They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing," said Trump.

"We should have one-day voting and paper ballots. And I just heard that a couple of states may go an extra 12 days. How the hell do you have an election? You know, they spend all of this money on these damn machines — and paper ballots, you'd have the answer by 9 o'clock tonight."

'Not every state is created equal, right?'

Pennsylvania, the state with 19 Electoral College votes where Trump apparently has a slight edge, is expected to take several days to release its final results because it cannot begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day.

The official website of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania states:

Hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of mail ballots are cast in every election, and current state law does not permit counties to begin opening these ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That means county election officials cannot even remove the ballots from the envelopes and prepare them to be scanned until that time — on a day when those same officials are also running more than 9,000 polling places across the state. Then, under the Election Code, counties may not even begin to record and publish mail ballot results until after the polls close at 8 p.m. Election Day.

County election offices can also continue receiving completed military and overseas absentee ballots until Nov. 12, drawing the process out further.

Election officials anticipate that vote counting in certain larger counties could run into Wednesday or Thursday, reported Spotlight PA.

Barring a definitive landslide victory by one of the two candidates, it appears that Wisconsin — where Election Day 2020 ended up becoming "Election Week" — will similarly lag behind when reporting results, given that absentee ballots cannot be opened and counted until Nov. 5.

Wisconsin Public Radio indicated that Milwaukee, for instance, is expecting to process at least 80,000 absentee ballots on Election Day, which is supposedly a time-intensive process. Since the state has same-day voter registration, that number could grow significantly.

"Not every state is created equal, right? So if you're from Florida, you're going to get results a little quicker, simply because we have 22 days of pre-processing," Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, recently told USA Today. "If you're in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by law, they're not allowed to start until Election Day. So it's just a quick numbers game. It doesn't mean that Florida is more efficient or less efficient than some of their counterparts. It just means that the laws are a little different."

The New York Times suggested that Arizona and Nevada will likely also take days to finish counting votes.

In Nevada, where the Associated Press waited four days to call the election for Biden in 2020, postmarked ballots are allowed to pour in until Nov. 9.

Things are worse in Arizona, where Maricopa County deputy elections director Jennifer Liewer indicated at a press conference last month that it could take "between 10 and 13 days to complete tabulation of all the ballots that come in."

"It's a damn shame, and I'm the only one that talks about it because everyone's afraid to damn talk about it," said Trump. "And then they accuse you of being a 'conspiracy theorist. He's a conspiracy theorist.' And they want to lock you up, and they want to put you in jail."

Trump suggested that while it's unclear what will happen this time around, Americans should insist upon voter ID, paper ballots, and same-day results for future elections.

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