There as not been as much education this year as there was in 2020. That’s probably because midterm elections get a lot less attention, even though they’re almost as important and there are more gubernatorial elections this year than there were in 2020. And it’s probably a safe bet to expect the same complications in election returns reporting this year. The media and voters should be ready for it.
The basic story is pretty simple: Some states count faster than others. Some states count votes from different sources at different speeds — absentee ballots, for instance, or votes from big cities or rural areas. Most of this is predictable from historical patterns, but there are always surprises. For example, until 2018 Republicans in most states were at least as likely to use absentee ballots as Democrats. Trump’s demonization of absentee ballots in 2020 changed that.
Overall, Democratic votes are counted somewhat more slowly than Republican votes — meaning that election-night totals are generally more Republican than the final results. But there are variations, and some states tend to shift toward Republicans as the count goes on. Political scientist Charles Stewart III has great charts of how state results vary over the first few hours and the first few days.
The media’s most important job in these last remaining weeks before Election Day is to prepare everyone for this, to emphasize that it’s an entirely expected result of perfectly reasonable procedures. Anyone who cries fraud over this process is at best ignorant and at worst dishonest.
Unfortunately, staying one step ahead of those falsely claiming fraud is difficult. In 2020, for example, Trump and his allies made much of votes coming in late on election night from some Democratic-heavy areas in states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. None of it was even slightly suspicious to anyone familiar with the normal patterns; after all, just four years earlier the same reporting patterns did not prevent Trump from narrowly winning Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
There are small things on-air reporters can do, such as avoiding the word “dump” when new votes come in. (Trump made much of “vote dumps” for the entirely normal practice of counts arriving one area at a time.) But the main thing they can do is to remind their audience that this is exactly how proper vote-counting works. And prepare them for the inevitable claims of fraud in any election Trump’s allies lose, because that’s what he and his allies do when they lose (and even when he wins; Trump made false claims of fraud in 2016).
Even without claims of fraud, vote-counting in the decentralized US system, with thousands of jurisdictions, is just plain confusing. Someone somewhere is going to mistakenly invert digits, or double-count a precinct, and then correct it. That’s not nefarious; it’s human nature. Remember too that there’s a fog-of-war effect to any live reporting. There will be rumors of improper practices and other complaints by both political parties, at the very least on social media. Most of them will turn out to be either false or minor incidents that were quickly corrected.
Of course, actual fraud, while rare, is not impossible. Actual voter suppression certainly happens. Indeed, there are lots of election rules and practices that make voting harder than it could be.(1) Election administrators should certainly take any Election Day reports of suspicious activity…
Read More: How to Avoid Confusion on Election Night
