This is mostly good news for the thousands of election officials across the country tasked with ensuring a timely and accurate vote count, says Michael McDonald.
In this pandemic election year, there were more than
80 million mail-in ballots sent to voters in anticipation of the November general election. That created the potential for a late deluge of mail-in ballots that could overwhelm election officials and lead to a drawn-out vote-counting process after November 3rd
. But with so many ballots cast weeks ahead of time, election officials in states with more up-to-date laws have time to process all those ballots.
Several key battleground states have not modernized their laws for processing and counting mail-in ballots in time for the 2020 election. Whereas in Florida we should expect to know 99 percent of the total vote to be reported on election night, McDonald says, that almost surely won’t be the case in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which don’t start processing mail-in ballots until the day of the election. Michigan’s secretary of state
has said she expects to finish the vote count by the Friday after election day.
