Margaret Sullivan for WaPo:

If Election Day 2020 turns into a full-blown disaster, no one can say there weren’t plenty of warning signs.

There were the Iowa caucuses, when glitches with an untested new app delayed the state’s election results for havoc-filled days that turned into weeks. Or the Texas Democratic primary, where some Super Tuesday voters waited in line to vote for more than six hours while others simply gave up. Or the California primary that same day, when faulty new touch-screen voting equipment triggered hours-long waits in Los Angeles County.

If comparable disaster in November robs well-intentioned voters of their chance to be heard — or worse, gives bad-faith partisans an excuse to undermine the credibility of the vote — then the news media will bear a share of the blame.

Unless we move quickly.

As it stands, journalists aren’t paying enough attention to this huge story in front of their eyes. Instead, news organizations are obsessed, as always, with horse-race coverage.

Political reporters scrutinize every public-opinion poll as if it were the I Ching. Cable pundits blather about the potential impact of the candidates’ latest gaffes, despite how notoriously bad they are at such prognostications. 

What they are not obsessed with, sadly, is the very core of Election Day: voting itself.

“The media has a huge role to play in helping things to go well,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”