Managing expectations in the new vote-counting environment

At long last, we find ourselves at the eve of Election Day, and this year more than most, I am drawn to reflect on how different our expectations have to be regarding when we will know the results.

As far back as my experience takes me into the early 1970s, a newspaper’s Election Night deadlines have been a precarious moving target requiring precise coordination with the pressroom to get later-than-usual press times based on imprecise guesswork about when results might be available. With each election, improving technology helped make the coordination more comfortable and the guesswork less imprecise — though even as late as the 2000 presidential election, we barely dodged a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment related to deadlines.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, Nov. 8, the news services were beginning to declare Al Gore the narrow leader in his contest with George W. Bush. Our editors had prepared a front page with that expectation and were just sitting down at an all-night bar for a traditional post-election nightcap when we heard reports that the Florida results were uncertain and suddenly it was looking like Bush might win. Editors raced back to the newsroom to rework the front page and related inside pages and we managed, barely, to get a more up-to-date and more accurate report into our first editions and those that followed.

That election would not finally be decided for another month until a Supreme Court decision stopped a Florida recount with Bush just a little more than 500 votes ahead, giving him Florida’s electoral votes and victory by a single vote more than the 270 needed to win.

But 2000 was an outlier. For the next two decades, as technology improved, Election Night in the newsroom gradually began to end earlier and earlier, with clerks managing to tabulate results within a couple of hours of poll closing times. We began surprising ourselves with Election Night finishes of even our latest editions edging backward closer to midnight instead of the 2 or 2:30 a.m. we had become accustomed to.

Then, situations changed that tested the limits of technology’s advances. State governments began developing more and varied rules designed to make democracy more convenient to voters. We now see a diverse range of regulations regarding early and mail-in voting and how and when those votes will be counted.

These have imposed changes in our expectations that we haven’t all yet become comfortable with. Whereas we had once come to believe we would know by the end of the evening, or at worst by early the next morning, who the winners of various races would be, we now were seeing that in close races — the presidential campaign most prominently, but many state and local races as well — final answers might not be known for days or weeks.

Considering these new circumstances, it seems wise for us all to realize that we may not immediately know the results of the presidential race or any other we care about. That doesn’t mean the system is less reliable than in the past, but it does mean we all need to be more patient in our expectations of the results.

That’s not a comfortable proposition at a time when much has been said and done to shake faith in our election system. One shudders to consider the impact on the nation if the flagrant distrust and divisions of today were prominent in 2000. But comfortable or not, it does emphasize our need for patience — and trust. We may have become spoiled by the ability to get election results by dinner time on Election Night. Now, we can take heart in the fact that voting has become easier, more accessible and more common.

For those of us who love and value democracy, that is not such a bad tradeoff.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.