Unpredictability tries Americans’ souls.
By tomorrow night, tens of millions of us will be watching TV or following the election results on line, and you can bet that every one of us will be asking the same question:
“WHO WON?” “When will we know?”
Sorry, folks. In 2020, that’s probably not going to happen — unless Joe Biden pulls off a landslide victory for the history books.
As a people, we Americans share (or at least believe we share) some fundamental characteristics, like the belief, or hope, that individual freedoms yield benefits for all, that hard work for a worthy goal usually pays off, and so on.
But another American characteristic is impatience.
We may wait in the early-voting line for hours, holding our frustration in check, then wait days more for vote-counting to begin.
But the ferocity of this year’s campaign, both at the presidential level and down-ballot, means vote-counters and their tallies will be intensely scrutinized — by the rival parties, the deeply divided electorate and journalists of every stripe.
There’s also the very real possibility that Donald Trump, if he loses, will press his campaign to delegitimize the election and bog everything down in the courts.
Add to this the widespread black-cloud anxiety over Covid-19 and the resulting surge in early and mail-in voting, and you get a lot of uncertainty, which means it will likely take time — days, weeks, who knows? — to resolve.
“As a result, while many Americans are accustomed to voting on Election Day and learning results that night, Election Day 2020 in fact marks the end of a lengthy voting period and the start of a potentially lengthy counting period,” reports the Washington Post.
This points to an additional threat: what the Reuters news agency calls the “red or blue mirages.”
“Early vote counts in the most competitive, battleground states can be particularly misleading this election because of the surge in mail-in or absentee ballots, and the different ways that they are processed,” Reuters says.
For example: states that count mail-in votes before Election Day are likely to give Biden an early lead, since opinion polls and early voting data suggest those ballots favor the former vice president. But states that don’t count mail-in votes until Nov. 3 may well swing initially for Trump.
For either side, these scenarios could prove to be illusions that vaporize the moment they brush the reality of hard numbers.
On this election eve, Joe Biden does appear to have a significant edge over President Trump, even in some of the key battleground states that contributed to Trump’s 2016 victory. But the memory of that stunning upset has many Democrats rubbing their political worry-beads.
Which is where the impatience part comes in.
“Even once the early and in-person ballots are counted, a significant number of votes could still be outstanding,” reports the New York Times. “Only eight states expect to have at least 98% of unofficial results reported by noon the day after the election. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia allow postmarked ballots to arrive after Election Day, so the timing will depend on when voters return them.”
And that’s not even the half of it, once you start looking at the battleground states that are likely to decide the presidential winner, and some significant number of Senate and House races, as well.
“We will probably get earlier results in states with two key traits: voters who have widely embraced early in-person or mail voting, and rules that let officials process and count mail ballots before Election Day, says the Post.
Much depends on how quickly votes are counted in the swing states with Electoral College power.
“Arizona, Florida and North Carolina could provide information quickly, experts say, while states including Pennsylvania and Michigan could lag behind,” the Post says.
Here’s how the Post describes the ways those five key states process and report Election Day results, particularly mail-in ballots — if everything goes according to plan.
Arizona and Florida allow mail ballots to be processed and counted before Election Day, which means voters can expect to see more advanced results on election night.
In North Carolina, ballots can be processed before Nov. 3, but not counted until that day. Still, the heavy volume of early in-person votes this year means voters can expect to see more advanced results on election night.
Mail ballots in Pennsylvania may not be processed or counted until Election Day. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state predicts that “the vast majority of ballots will be counted ‘in a matter of days’ or ‘by the weekend’” following the election.
In Michigan, jurisdictions with more than 25,000 people, mail ballots can be processed starting Nov. 2 [today]. Smaller jurisdictions must wait until Election Day. But statewide Michigan results may not be finalized before Friday.
So — barring that Biden landslide — patience will be required.
[NOTE: for a detailed look at when to expect election results in every state, go to the political website FiveThirtyEight.]
