Senate Republicans push Election Day deadline for California's marathon ballot counts

FIRST ON FOX: A pair of Senate Republicans are bursting through a crack in the door left by the Supreme Court to force blue states like California to vastly cut down on how long it takes to count ballots.

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, are introducing legislation that would create a federal deadline for states to accept ballots received by the time polls close on Election Day across the country.

Lankford pitched the bill, called the Ballots by Election Day Act, as a bid to build more trust in the country’s elections.

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"I have made fun of other states for years because there's quite a few states around the country that can't seem to figure out how to be able to count," Lankford told Fox News Digital in an interview. "In Oklahoma, our election ends at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night."

"Usually by 9 p.m., all of our thousands of precincts are all in and counted," he continued. "We start the verification process. We do an audit after that. We have great trust in our elections because we know. We all vote. But we get them all in on that."

Lankford and Lee’s bill would create a nationwide deadline for counting absentee and mail-in ballots, meaning that if those ballots aren’t in by the time polls close across the expanse of time zones in the nation, they won’t be counted.

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It targets states, like California and Washington state, where ballot counting can take days, sometimes weeks, beyond when polls close.

"States counting late ballots are inviting fraud and sowing doubt in their own election results," Lee told Fox News Digital in a statement. "Our bill will clarify protocol and restore trust by counting only ballots received before the polls close on Election Day."

Lankford contended that those states, "like California and others, New York," breed distrust in the system.

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"When you vote you may not know for weeks to months what the final election count is," he said. "That shouldn't be in the United States of America."

Their push comes after the Supreme Court’s decision to allow mail-in ballots post-marked before Election Day to still be counted if they came in later.

While the court contended that mail-in balloting could continue, it didn’t explicitly address that there could be no deadline for when the ballots could be counted.

"Once the court made their ruling, as that came out, they left a clear door open to say this could be defined by the United States Congress," Lankford said. "So I said, let's step in and actually do that. Let us provide some real clarity for that. This shouldn't be controversial. This should just be something to build trust in our elections."