I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

Everyone seems to expect that Donald Trump will prematurely declare victory on election night, whether or not news organizations project him the winner. NBC’s Hallie Jackson even asked Kamala Harris about it during a Tuesday interview. Harris responded: “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that.”

But despite Harris’ assurances, and despite this country’s experience with Trump in 2020—when he declared, at a 2 a.m. press conference right after the election, “We did win this election,” before anyone had any idea whether Trump or Joe Biden had won—there are good reasons to believe that many of us are not prepared for what’s coming in the days after Nov. 5. We could well once again face a situation where Trump is ahead in the tally of announced results in key states such as Pennsylvania, only to see Harris declared the winner by the weekend after the election. The days after the election, as this potential “blue shift” materializes, could be fraught with disinformation, confusion, and even potential violence. It’s on the media, and all of us, not to let things spin out of control….

So what can we do about all this? First, compared with 2020, there has been surprisingly little coverage of the upcoming blue shift. This is true even though Democrats, again, are much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. (Republicans have transitioned this time to more in-person early voting, and those results will be reported quickly.) The word needs to get out for people to have patience. Indeed, a new academic study reveals that prebunking—explaining why election results take time—can encourage public trust and confidence in election results.

Second, the media and others need to be careful with explaining the vote totals and the expected blue shift as the process unfolds. In order for us to have a fair and safe election in 2024, according to a report from an ideologically diverse group of experts convened by the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law, the messaging should not be that one candidate or the other is “in the lead.” Instead, the key framing is that the race is “too early to call.”

Along with that message, there need to be clear and transparent explanations from election officials about the expected timing of it all. When should we expect results from Detroit and Philadelphia and Atlanta? The more we know now, the more prepared everyone else will be….

The disinformation should be worse now. In 2020 Twitter had a robust trust and safety team policing election lies. This time around, Elon Musk has turned X into a cesspool of electoral disinformation, which he regularly shares with his 200 million followers as part of a much larger effort to elect Trump. Meta, meanwhile, stung by Republican political attacks on its trust and safety measures in 2020, has tried to retreat from politics on Facebook and its other products. There’s a ton that tech companies can do, but they likely won’t. Demoting political content won’t stop these platforms from being used to generate disinformation, spread it, and organize, as happened with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Nor can we discount the potential for violence that could crop up in the period before news organizations have enough data on outstanding ballots to call the election one way or the other. U.S. government officials have said that Russia and Iran may themselves seek to foment violence, setting Americans against one another….