Election Day Eve

As I write this, it’s the night before the completion of one of the the most contentious presidential elections I can remember. Here are a few thoughts to take you through till we know the official results.

It will be a night where we all need patience.  As the AP reports in this story, the television studios will be full of fancy sets and graphics, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are all going to have to wait for ballots to be counted.  And unless it’s a blowout for one candidate or the other, we may have days or even weeks to wait for the results.

Vote counting takes time.  Here’s some great details from journalist Ari Berman (BTW, Ari writes for Mother Jones. He really is “the liberal media” you’ve been warned about):

As singer/actor Leslie Odom Jr. (Burr from Hamilton) sings in this public service announcement, we need to be “willing to wait for it…”

(As a side note, Nebraska, my red state home, does a great job of running elections. We all got postcards well before the election to allow us to request mail-in ballots. We could mail them in or return them to drop boxes. We have easy early in-person voting. And we count early ballots starting the day before the election. Making it easy for people to vote should not be a partisan issue; it’s good civics that we practice here in Nebraska.)

Not knowing who won on election day is more common than knowing, according to presidential historian Michael Beschloss:

President George W. Bush’s first win as president wasn’t settled until Dec. 12, 2000. That was more than a month after election day.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep has good advice to follow before sharing stories on social media that might not be of the highest quality.

One thing you can’t do in this election is vote for the candidate you would want to have a beer with – Neither of them drink.

BTW, Asma Khalid is a great national political correspondent for NPR. Imagine working at the pace she has been … with a baby due in December!

Love or hate Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she did a great job this election cycle in engaging with young potential voters by doing a video game stream on Twitch.  My friend (and social media guru) Jeremy Littau tells the story with an extended thread:

And finally, there’s a vital national story that just get’s too little coverage as we talk about every last detail of the presidential race: