“It Could Be a Long Election Night; Amid the pandemic, several states will take a while to count ballots. This isn’t something nefarious.”

Jonathan Bernstein for Bloomberg View:

Kudos to the NBC News political team for a very good item about counting ballots in November’s elections. As the team explains, it’s going to take a week or more to get a complete vote tally this year. That’s simply the system that has evolved, and it is now even more complicated thanks to an expected surge in absentee voting during the pandemic. As NBC puts it, we’re likely to have “Election Week” rather than “Election Night.”

This is exactly the kind of media coverage that’s needed to educate voters. We’ve already seen one example of what not to do during this primary season, when a columnist wrote an analysis of the Pennsylvania vote that turned out to be wrong when more ballots were counted. State officials had put out word in advance that it would take a while, and those covering elections need to be aware of such things and help set public expectations….

The one thing NBC doesn’t mention is that in most slow-count states, the normal pattern is for Democratic votes to come in late. There’s nothing nefarious about this; it’s just that different groups vote in different ways and in many states Democrats tend to vote late and by mail, meaning that their votes are often underestimated on Election Night. Arizona and Pennsylvania usually exhibit this pattern. Both could easily show a small Republican lead after the initial count that experts know will disappear, and it would boost confidence in the process if more people knew that ahead of time….

One more thing: Another way that news outlets can mislead viewers on Election Night is by reporting the percentage of precincts that’ve been counted. This was always a dubious practice — precincts vary in size — but it amounts to misinformation in the age of vote-by-mail. As election-law maven Rick Hasen points out, it isn’t helpful when viewers are told that 100% of precincts are in but in fact many votes remain to be counted. …

 

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