Get ready for a long election night — or nights.
The 2024 presidential race is likely to come down to the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Winners are most likely to be called in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina, but in the other four it may take some time, especially if the margins are close. In fact, thanks to a combination of new state laws and the inaction of legislators who could have made vote-counting more efficient — but didn’t — it may take even longer to declare a winner than it did in 2020, when news organizations called the race four days after Election Day.
A long lag between Election Day and the announcement of a winner would test the country. In 2020, misinformation and conspiracy theories flourished as vote counting dragged on in a handful of key battleground states. So for this Election Day it is critical that people know what to expect, the true nature of the likely delays and how some of them might have been prevented.
Since 2020, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have either added rules that could slow down their vote counts, or allowed existing rules that contributed to long tabulating times in 2020 to remain in place. Only Michigan and North Carolina have meaningfully changed their laws to speed up the process. (Fortunately, Georgia historically counts quickly; Trump-aligned members of the state election board recently tried to impose rules that would have slowed the process down, but Georgia’s courts rejected the attempt.)
The result is a patchwork of new developments and old laws — a few of which are encouraging, but many of which are troubling. It’s a recipe for delays and confusion if the race is close…..
This has some very helpful detail.
See also, along the same lines, my earlier Slate article, Why the “Blue Shift” Everyone Seems to Have Forgotten Might Be More Dangerous This Time.