BE PATIENT: WE MIGHT NOT KNOW WHO WON THE ELECTION RIGHT AWAY
AMERICANS HAD TO wait more than a month after Election Day to learn that George W. Bush had beaten Al Gore in 2000. Declaring a winner involved recounting about 62,000 votes in a single state and a ruling from the Supreme Court.
If this year’s election also seems to stretch out longer than it should, it won’t be due to butterfly ballots or hanging chads. The election controversy is likely to revolve around—indeed, it already is revolving around—the expanded use of absentee ballots and mail-in voting as an alternative to having millions of people line up at polling places in the midst of a pandemic.
The tradeoff that comes with safer voting options is that absentee ballots typically take days or sometimes weeks to be counted.
