The hosts of election night parties may want to book a room for more than just one night.
For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.
Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump appears extremely close.
If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots…..
The 2024 results are not expected to be as protracted as in 2020, when the race was not called for Mr. Biden until the Saturday after the election. Some states have improved their procedures for tabulating mail ballots, and election officials across the country have more experience with the process. And mail voting rates, though still much higher than before the pandemic, have declined in some states since 2020, when many voters fearful of the coronavirus saw mail voting as the only option….
Nonetheless, last week, the Trump campaign released a memo seeking to temper any conclusions from early mail ballot request data, warning of a “blue mirage” and that “early Democrat leads in absentee and vote by mail are not at all predictive of victory on November 5th.”
The newfound focus by Republicans on voting by mail, plus improvements in ballot tabulation in key battleground states, is likely to lessen some perception of bias in results by the end of election night.
However, in two critical battleground states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the red mirage may persist. Lawmakers in both states have refused to pass legislation allowing local election officials to open and flatten out ballots — a process known as “preprocessing” — before the polls open on Election Day. This puts election officials in a difficult position, churning through both mail ballots and in-person votes at the same time.
“It is a technical challenge with a technical solution, that everyone has known about since 2020, but legislation was never passed to address it,” Mr. Schmidt said….