Marshall Cohen for CNN:

While election officials across the country try to prepare Americans for the chance of a prolonged vote-counting process this year, President Donald Trump and his allies have drawn a line in the sand and say they want to see a winner declared on election night.

As a result, Trump and his allies are setting unrealistic expectations, and undermining warnings from bipartisan state and local election officials and experts that a slower vote-count doesn’t always indicate a problem.Relying on an inaccurate and misleading interpretation of how US elections are conducted, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said last Wednesday that the Trump administration wants to see a presidential winner projected on election night this November.

“What we want election night to look like is a system that’s fair, a situation where we know who the President of the United States is on election night. That’s how the system is supposed to work. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking for and what we’re hoping for,” McEnany said in a Fox News interview, where she criticized Democrats for expanding access to mail-in voting.

In recent months, Trump has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the election, refused to say if he’ll accept the results and spread false information and conspiracy theories about mail-in voting. He has a long history of rejecting election results and levying baseless accusations of widespread fraud when he sees election results that he doesn’t like.

He and his team have also attempted to suggest that any delay in the announcement of results is somehow improper, and that, despite Covid, 2020 Election Night should look and feel like any other election — even though the pandemic has drastically transformed how people vote and how states count those ballots. McEnany’s implication that a clear winner be determined on Election Night is rules- or law-based is part of that effort, one that experts say is not grounded in any reality.

“There is no legal requirement that states announce the winner of their popular vote on election night,” said Franita Tolson, a CNN contributor and law professor at the University of Southern California, who pointed out that the legal framework to formally select the next president largely revolves around Electoral College proceedings that take place in December and January.