Don’t make the mistake of treating the delay in getting results this year as evidence of some kind of systemic problem that we urgently need to solve. This was a tight election held under extraordinary conditions, and yet we learned the outcome within a few days. That’s not bad.
The big lesson learned this year on election processes is that state legislatures need to provide more clarity (in advance) on how to flexibly handle voting in emergencies, in ways that better resist political gamesmanship during the emergency itself.
This was not the first election disrupted by a crisis. Sandy, for example, wiped out polling places and displaced voters. We generally handle emergency voting poorly, in a way that often needlessly confuses and disenfranchises voters. We can and should do better.
But this can (and should) be a slow and deliberate conversion. It can likely be addressed with relatively small tweaks to existing processes if we’re smart about it.
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