That’s A Wrap. Follow Along On Our Election Live Blog.
If there’s one theme of the 2020 election, it’s the race’s remarkable stability. But that definitely hasn’t been the case when it comes to election laws and procedure. Because of COVID-19, states have changed guidelines ranging from when applications for absentee ballots must be received to early voting hours to when election officials can begin processing ballots.
We’ve spent the last two and half months tracking these changes, which have emerged from statehouses, court rulings, governors’ mansions, secretaries of state and legal settlements.
If they’re not on this live blog, you can find them in our guide on how to vote — anything underlined in orange is new due to the pandemic.
It’s hard to summarize the current state of the American elections system, because it’s designed to give states a lot of latitude. (What states do with that latitude is a whole other story — voter suppression is, and remains, a real issue in this country.) That said, there’s generally been a trend toward making it easier to vote absentee this year. States like California, New Jersey, Nevada and Vermont mailed ballots to all active voters for the first time; some, including Arizona, Minnesota and Wisconsin, sent all voters an application for an absentee ballot; and still others, like Kentucky, New York and South Carolina, permitted anyone to vote absentee, rather than requiring an excuse as they had in previous elections.
Not all of these changes will exist beyond the 2020 election, but for at least this cycle, we’re seeing a new election administration system piloted in real time. And by most measures, it might be working: Almost 97 million people have already voted early or absentee, a record-breaking number. And with nearly 160 million people eventually expected to cast a ballot in the 2020 election, participation in American democracy could reach new highs — partly thanks to some of these changes to election law, partly despite others.
Issues of voting rights and election administration will, of course, continue to be relevant — both on Election Day itself, as voters pack into the polls, and in the days after, if there are difficulties with the vote count or legal challenges to the results. While we’ll continue to follow those stories on our election night live blog and in articles after the election, this is the end of the road for this particular live blog. Thanks for joining us!