Late Arriving Mail-In-Ballots Could Swap Conclave Lead in the Middle of the Night

"It's normal for Parolin mail-in ballots to arrive in the middle of the night"

May 08, 2025

The conclave to elect the next Pope is going on right now in Vatican City.

But although we’re used to getting results out of the conclave within two or three days and knowing who the next pope will be, bureaucrats at the Vatican’s HR department are telling us that “it could take three or four weeks to count all the votes as the college of cardinals will have to wait on a bunch of mail-in ballots to come in.”

“It might seem odd or perhaps even canonically irregular,” Giuseppi Biridonio, the head of the Vatican HR department, admitted, “But His Holiness Pope Francis adjusted the voting laws for the conclave to be more open and inclusive. He okayed our sending out a whole bunch of ballots around the world. We’ll have to wait to see if any cardinals who aren’t in Rome decide to use them.”

“If we get some votes in the middle of the night, even if they end up, for example, giving Parolin a lead over, say, Cardinal Sarah, don’t worry, it’s just the way things are,” he added. “Pope Francis left the cardinals several video messages. He told them that if a conservative, or even scarier, a rad-trad, is in the lead, to ‘keep counting’ till you get the answer the liber—, err, he meant, the Holy Spirit, wants.”

“According to the polling we’ve done, Parolin votes are very likely to come in by the truckload in the middle of the night, especially, by complete chance, right after a conservative happens to be in the lead. Total coincidence. No need to worry, just the way it is with people who want Parolin,” Giuseppi Biridonio added.

“Worst case, if Parolin dies in the middle of the conclave or something,” Birodonio Mirificavi, an assistant to Biridonio, was overheard by an IIT reporter saying, “we can always just print out a few hundred Zuppi votes. It’ll be hard convincing the Africans that this was all legal and above board, and Tagle might get angry about getting passed over, but we can always just buy him off by paying off his gambling debt.”

Conservative Catholics worry that this all feels sketchy, like a repeat of what happened in the 2020 election.

“The DEEP CHURCH wants to steal the conclave from Cardinal Sarah,” Tim Gordon angrily shouted on his podcast today. “We need to STOP the STEAL! Why don’t we hold our own conclave to ensure that they don’t succeed?”

And yes, the conservatives are right, mail-in ballots are an anomalous novelty, contrary to canon law, even though many liberals like Fr. James Martin S.J., claim they’re necessary to “ensure that every cardinal’s vote matters, even cardinals we don’t know about.”

The process is “completely secure,” Fr. Martin added. “No one who’s not a cardinal would ever be able to fill out one of the thousands of mail-in ballots and return it. And who would ever want to influence or rig a conclave? That’s absurd. That’s as absurd as me ever telling someone to practice chastity!”

Leaks from inside the conclave are also now warning us that Dominion voting machines are being used to count the in-person votes of the assembled cardinals.

President Donald Trump, who, according to recent leaks, “expects” to win the conclave, thinks that the polls “are vastly underestimating his support” as most of the cardinals “are shy Trump voters” and “fake news CNN would never want to show me on top.”

“We got Marco Rubio to resurrect USAID in order to use their typical means to rig the conclave in my favor in case things go south,” Trump asked an aide late this evening, “Right?”

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