I want to address Catturd on a very serious matter.

First of all, when I was in journalism school 42 years ago, I had no idea that decades later a man who went by the name “Catturd” would become a much more influential voice in public discourse than I was.

But unfortunately, we sank our knees into this pungent-smelling garbage bin.

The aforementioned Catturd is actually a 60-year-old Panhandle Floridian who plays guitar in a country music band. His inflammatory political posts have attracted more than 3 million followers on X (formerly Twitter).

He has established himself as an influential conspiracy theorist whose views on the political right have been amplified by all sorts of people who should know better, including former President Donald Trump and mad scientist Elon Musk.

Catturd is known in political circles as a prolific social media “poster.” He publishes something absurd, like the FBI planting national security documents at Mar-a-Lago to incriminate Trump, and a day later it’s blown out by Trump’s lawyer and FOX News.

I usually ignore Catturd because I don’t see the point in trying to make myself stupider.

But Catturd posted the following on X this week. And there is too much wrong here to ignore. He wrote:

“Florida is the 3rd most populous state in the USA and their votes will be counted and the results will be available on election night.

“The Secretary of State of any state who goes on television today and says it will take days for votes to be counted is a fraud, a traitor, and should be arrested.”

The major flaw in this view is that it assumes that any election official who does not release full results on election night is “cheating” to alter the actual election results.

The purpose of vote counting is not fraud. Election workers are required to follow vote-counting procedures and timelines established by state lawmakers and codified by state law.

Each state has its own election laws. There is no uniform method across the country for how mail-in ballots and early voting will be handled.

The only fraud here comes from those who use these differences as a way to undermine public confidence in voting.

Once you arrive in Florida, if you are a voter who votes by mail or in person during the 14-day early voting period that begins Monday, October 21, your ballot will be processed and counted once received by election officials.

This means the ballot has been opened and removed for you to vote by mail. Your eligibility to vote is checked, your signature is verified, and then the ballot is entered into the counting machines.

Early in-person votes are also tabulated immediately. The results of these early-processed mail-in ballots and early ballots are not made public until Election Day.

Florida is no unicorn when it comes to moving quickly on early voting. Forty-three states allow early voting to begin before Election Day.

So yes, in Florida the majority of votes are already tabulated before Election Day.

In 2020, 4.7 million mail ballots and 4.3 million early in-person votes were tabulated before any voter arrived at the polls in Florida to vote on Election Day.

So in an election where a total of 11 million Floridians voted in 2020, more than 9 million of them were processed and tabulated before Election Day.

Trump’s margin of victory in the Florida election four years ago was about 371,000 votes; this was large enough not to change the outcome of ongoing tabulations for ballots that were corrected for mismatched signatures or received from overseas state residents and military personnel within the allowed window after the election. Day.

So Florida got quick results, in part because the race wasn’t that close. If it were as close as the 2000 presidential race, which was decided by a 537-vote margin in the state, final results would not be announced until a few days after Election Day because tiny trickles of late votes would be decisive in the outcome.

More: Opinion: Don’t ask me to understand the ballot language in the Florida Constitutional Amendment

More: Cerabino: Don’t tell Trump, but voting by mail was once considered ‘extraordinary’ in Florida

The real problem with Catturd’s argument is that he picks the wrong villains. Republicans in some battleground states have changed state laws to allow counting of early and mail-in votes to extend beyond Election Day.

They then use the delay they created to infer that election officials produced fraudulent votes to steal the election.

Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania changed state laws to ban mail-in ballot envelopes from being opened by 7 a.m. on Election Day.

This guaranteed that voting would be extended for days in states where the result would be narrow. In 2020, Biden’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania was about 80,000 votes; and Wisconsin has only 20,000 votes.

Republican lawmakers in other battleground states this year changed laws to slow the counting of early votes and make it easier to charge a “stolen election” as election workers count legal votes after Election Day.

In Arizona, withdrawals of ballots cast in secure ballot boxes on Election Day (one-fifth of the votes cast in the state’s largest county) are prohibited until the polls close on Election Day.

Georgia attempted to pass a law that would allow certifying officials to conduct their own “reasonable investigation” into delaying the certification of votes.

And in North Carolina, lawmakers changed election laws last year to require counties to wait until polls close on Election Day to begin counting votes received before that day.

All of these changes are designed to make it easier for influencers like Catturd to level dangerous accusations of treason against election officials who are just trying to do their jobs.

“They are literally using early voting to figure out how much they will cheat,” one of their followers said.

“Build the gallows,” replied another.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspaper chain.

This article was first published in the Palm Beach Post: Election distrust begins with influencers like “Catturd” on social media