Keep Calm and Count All the Votes

In America, every vote counts. Voters, not politicians, decide who wins elections. And that means the winner can only be known when every vote has been counted.

The Red Mirage

Different states count ballots differently. In California, we've embraced mailing every voter a ballot and giving them a whole month to cast it by whichever means they choose. Counties start counting ballots as early as 29 days before Election Day, and continue counting as the last few days’ worth of mailed ballots arrive.

By the time Election Day is over, we have a good—but not complete—idea of how our state has voted. We should still wait and see on tight races, but if a margin of victory is big enough, it'll probably hold.

In states where Republicans have held power, they've worked to prevent certain groups of people from voting, discourage them from voting, and sow doubt and confusion about the vote count. One way that they do this, in states like Pennsylvania, is by prohibiting counties from opening and counting mailed ballots until Election Day. The in-person ballots cast on Election Day get counted first, and other ballots, most of them mailed ballots, get counted later.

This shouldn't matter, but it does, because claiming victory on Election Day is part of the MAGA Republican election-overthrow playbook, pioneered by Trump and his cronies in 2020. With the pandemic building, Americans turned to voting by mail as the safest way to vote, so—among other tactics—MAGA Republican operatives and Trump himself began calling vote-by-mail “rigged” and “fraud,” and told Republican voters to vote in person. That created a “red mirage” of Republican leads on Election Day, which evaporated as the rest of the ballots—the mailed ballots—were counted. Manufacturing suspicion of mailed ballots counted after Election Day is how MAGA Republicans built the Big Lie.

Trump’s coup attempt failed, but MAGA Republicans are still working from the same playbook. We’ll see early Republican leads, and we can expect MAGA Republicans to claim victory on that basis and claim that any votes counted afterward are fraudulent. It’s the Big Lie all over again. Remember, nobody has won until all the votes have been counted.

Ignore the red mirage—wait for the real results

We've seen a red mirage before. We remember illusory Republican victories that turned into Democratic triumphs in 2018's Blue Wave. The effect was even more pronounced in 2020. The MAGA Republicans are planning to claim a red mirage again this year.

News media will call races on the basis of early Republican leads and expected outcomes from prior elections (“a state Trump won in 2016”). Some of the early calls will turn out to be right, but we’ll also see red mirages that fade as the rest of the votes are counted. There will be recounts and court challenges, some bogus and some legitimate. Save yourself the anguish of premature grief and the rollercoaster of mercurial outcomes. Ignore the horse-race coverage and wait for the real results to settle out.

In summary: Ignore the preliminary results and races called early on. Good work takes time—keep calm and wait for the real results.

Historical note: The Blue Mirage

The Republicans weren't always so hostile to voting by mail. For decades, Republican politicians tried to make it easier for likely Republican voters to cast their ballots, so they encouraged voting by mail, in order to get seniors—who lean conservative—to vote. This, as you might guess, created a Blue Mirage. It was normal to spend hours, sometimes days, waiting for all those Republican “absentee ballots” (as they were then called) to be counted before we knew who actually won.

Republicans gained so much power in state legislatures in large part because of their party’s concerted efforts to make “absentee voting” easy for their voters so they would be more likely to participate in all elections, especially midterms. Democrats appreciate and support voter participation, too, so of course we embraced voting by mail, especially once the pandemic hit. But now that their own voters aren’t the only ones voting by mail, Republicans have turned against it. Where they have power, they aim to keep power by preventing us from voting them out.

So we must vote in every election—by mail, or in person, whatever works for you—and then demand that every vote be counted.