On Election Night in 2012, I first noticed the phenomenon that I termed the “blue shift” and since 2020 has often been called “the red mirage.” While watching the returns coming in, I was attempting to calculate what size lead would put a state outside the margin of litigation–recognizing the possibility that Election Night leads might shift in subsequent days depending on the counting of provisional ballots, valid absentee ballots not previously counted, and other adjustments during the canvassing process. As a result of doing those calculations, I realized that for elections since 2000 the changes in vote totals during the canvassing period tended to favor the Democratic candidate significantly. Hence, the “blue shift” term.

I reported these findings in a blog post on December 17, 2012, and then published the first “blue shift” law review article the following year. With Charles Stewart, I continued to do research on the “blue shift” phenomenon. I’m pleased that Charles and other political scientists continue to conduct significant “blue shift” research using statistical methods that are far beyond the capacity of this election law professor. I, too, used this “blue shift” research to predict in 2019 (before Covid occurred) that Trump would attempt to discredit valid ballots counted after Election Day, with with possibility that he might extend his effort to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election all the way to the January 6, 2021 joint session of Congress.

I engage in this reflection on a decade of “blue shift” scholarship, not as an exercise of self-promotion, but instead to ask this question: what will it take for the public as a whole to be inoculated from conspiracy theories aimed at using the “blue shift” to discredit election outcomes? In the last few days, as the media prepares for what might happen tomorrow night and its aftermath, there is renewed fear that another reiteration of the “blue shift” in significant races will cause candidates to wrongfully claim fraud and for the supporters of those candidates to distrust the valid results of those races. (Today’s Washington Post editorial is one example among many expressing this fear.)

I’m cautiously hopeful that, as the “blue shift’ phenomenon becomes increasingly familiar to more and more voters (because it occurs election after election), it becomes understood and accepted by the average citizen in the same way as it is by election administrators (and now journalists): just the routine operation of our nation’s vote-counting process insofar as it relies more heavily on absentee and provisional ballots, with counting rules that inevitably cause those ballots to be counted after Election Night.

But if this acceptance of the “blue shift” phenomenon does not take hold among ordinary voters, regardless of their partisan leanings, and instead the “blue shift” continues to foster conspiracy theories that further erode public confidence in the electoral process, those of us who care about the ongoing operation of the democratic process will need to come up with a different solution. We can’t continue to have a huge chunk of the electorate not believing in the validity of the election, because they do not understand–and thus do not accept–that large numbers of ballots, which potentially could make the difference in the election, are entitled to be counted after Election Night.

We need to solve this crisis-of confidence problem one way or another. I’m less concerned with the specific way in which we solve it. I just worry that if we don’t solve it, we will cause the cancer of election denialism to become ever more malignant, to the point where the body politic can no longer function as a democracy.