Milwaukee early votes likely will take until 2 or 3 am to count….

From my earlier Slate piece:

Well, déjà vu may be on tap for a week from Tuesday. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, alone among the swing states, have not updated their laws to allow for the precanvassing (or processing) of mail ballots before Election Day, and they won’t start checking those ballots and preparing them for counting until Election Day itself. Republican legislatures in both states have blocked bipartisan proposals to update their laws to be more like Florida’s, where election officials can report most of their vote totals by the end of the night on election night. I suspect that some Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have resisted making the change because uncertainty and the blue shift is a feature, not a bug: It allows for calling into question the legitimacy and fairness of the vote count if Democrats win.

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.”