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

That’s because, hopefully, the pandemic won’t be a major factor the next time we have a national election. Hopefully.

Chad, I think one of the roadblocks for voters who have found they prefer to vote absentee will be the excuse requirement in many states: You need a “valid” reason to vote absentee, and while many states changed the rules to temporarily allow COVID-19 as an excuse, that (hopefully) won’t be the case next time around. They’d have to either expand the kinds of excuses, or get rid of the excuse requirement entirely, to recreate the absentee voting options in 2020.

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.