Jonathan Bernstein: “Kudos to the NBC News political team for a very good item about counting ballots in November’s elections. As the team explains, it’s going to take a week or more to get a complete vote tally this year. That’s simply the system that has evolved, and it is now even more complicated thanks to an expected surge in absentee voting during the pandemic. As NBC puts it, we’re likely to have ‘Election Week’ rather than ‘Election Night.'”
“The one thing NBC doesn’t mention is that in most slow-count states, the normal pattern is for Democratic votes to come in late. There’s nothing nefarious about this; it’s just that different groups vote in different ways and in many states Democrats tend to vote late and by mail, meaning that their votes are often underestimated on Election Night. Arizona and Pennsylvania usually exhibit this pattern. Both could easily show a small Republican lead after the initial count that experts know will disappear, and it would boost confidence in the process if more people knew that ahead of time.”
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