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

I think, depending on how successfully this election goes off, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see some of these expansions stick around. In some ways, the 2020 election is a radical real-time test of new systems. After states like Colorado and Washington spent multiple cycles slowly transitioning to all-mail elections, four states, plus Washington, D.C., decided to automatically mail ballots to all active voters for the first time. Two of those states, Vermont and New Jersey, did so despite casting less than 50 percent of its total ballots early or absentee in 2016. And another handful of states mailed absentee ballot applications to all voters for the first time, essentially inviting the crush of absentee ballots we’ve been hearing about for weeks.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, Chad! The fact that things are running so smoothly today has to be due at least in part to the massive early voting we’ve seen — turns out, when fewer people vote on Election Day, lines are shorter! I do have a feeling that the convenience of being able to vote early — whether it’s in-person or by mail — may outweigh the thrill of voting in person on Election Day for many people going forward.

And for some people, it could make voting possible in a way that it literally wasn’t before — a not-insignificant share of respondents in our recent survey with Ipsos said they couldn’t vote in a recent election because they couldn’t get off work, for example. But I am curious to hear from folks like Maya, who has been tracking the rules and how difficult or easy it would be to just carry over some of the COVID-19 precautions into normal election administration. Does that mostly rely on Democrats being in control in statehouses, since they’ve been much more likely to make changes that ease the voting process?

Dayshifters: We’ve seen record early voting numbers this year, in part because of the record number of people who could vote early. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states expanded their mail-in ballot programs to include more voters, and many states also expanded early voting in order to ensure safer in-person voting on Election Day. But how likely do you think these expansions are to last?