Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

Happy Election Day! This afternoon I’ve been tracking reports of technical glitches with voting equipment, and while there have been a handful, that’s to be expected.

A few technical difficulties happen every election. (I wrote a whole story about it!) As Lawrence Norden, director of the election reform program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me: “No election is perfect. There are always going to be some technical problems.” And no, it’s not evidence of a hack or some kind of meddling. It’s just the reality when we have 10,000 different jurisdictions, all using different technology on the same day, and some voters using new equipment for the very first time.

There have been timely, effective fixes in each of the cases I’ve found so far. In Franklin County, Ohio, election officials weren’t able to sync electronic poll books with an online database, so they switched to paper poll books to check in voters. A similar fix was made in Spalding County, Georgia after their voting machines went down — voters were able to cast ballots on paper until the machines were back up and running.

And these few examples are the outliers. The vast majority of polling places today have had no problems. Instead, there have been lots of reports of no lines and smooth sailing:

Even if Trump doesn’t win a second term as president, one crucial part of his legacy is already cemented: He reshaped the Supreme Court. In just four years, he’s successfully nominated three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. All three are relatively young and very conservative, and could anchor a conservative majority on the court for years to come.

Barrett’s ascent to the court this fall was one of the speediest Supreme Court confirmations in modern history, and also the closest to an election. We don’t know exactly how conservative she’ll be, but it seems very likely that by replacing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September, Barrett’s presence will dramatically shift the court’s center of gravity.

And her swift confirmation could make a difference very soon. That’s especially true if post-election litigation makes it to the Supreme Court. Either way, though, Barrett will be faced almost immediately with a docket of extremely consequential cases — and she and Trump’s other nominees will be shaping law in the U.S. long after this election cycle.

With turnout expected to be high this year, many voters who only vote sporadically are likely to cast a ballot. But in our survey with Ipsos that tried to answer why millions of Americans don’t vote, we found that people who voted only some of the time were most likely to have reported barriers to voting, such as they or someone in their household standing in line for more than an hour to vote. They were also likelier than those who always vote to say they’d faced trouble getting time off work to vote, and that they were told their name wasn’t on the list of registered voters.

These barriers were also experienced differently by race and age. Black respondents were the likeliest to say they’d had to stand in line for more than an hour, and Hispanic respondents were the likeliest to say they couldn’t get off work to vote or weren’t able to access the polling place. Americans under 35 were also much likelier than older Americans to face structural barriers like these, especially when it came to having trouble getting time off work to vote, missing voter registration deadlines, and not receiving absentee ballots in time.