The coronavirus pandemic has made mail-in balloting a national necessity, but that means votes will take longer to count come November.
WASHINGTON – Americans have come to expect that they will know who their next president is on election night, but that’s likely to change this fall.
“People are going to have to be able to be patient to wait for the results,” Gupta told Yahoo News. “That’s an uncomfortable position for a lot of people. The media’s not used to it. The public’s not used to it.” Story continuesThe coronavirus will remain a major presence in American life, no matter what, this fall, but what that will look like is hard to predict. The summer could see a downturn in cases followed by a major second wave of outbreaks. Or there could be a steady string of flare-ups in different parts of the country as the nation tries to restart economic and public life.
But two of the six swing states have very little experience with remote voting: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. They had 6 percent and 4 percent mail-in voting in 2018, respectively. Turnout in the Wisconsin primary was close to the record level set in 2016, even with the grave concerns most voters had about the risks to their health. That was a good test run for the state’s first time conducting an election mostly by mail. But in a general election, participation goes up exponentially, meaning a state like Wisconsin will likely have to count almost twice as many ballots this fall.
It’s not just swing states or those that lean left that are preparing for an increase in mail voting. A majority of states have already told the federal government that they plan to use their portion of the $400 million Congress set aside in March to help them prepare for changes to their elections.
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