Philip Bump: “When polls close on the West Coast on Election Day, it’s unlikely that we’ll know who won the presidential election. That itself is not uncommon; while we can generally predict that California will give its electoral votes to the Democratic candidate, that doesn’t mean that, say, Florida has counted enough of its vote to project the outcome. But this year will be different, as you’re no doubt aware. The coronavirus pandemic is leading to the greatly expanded use of absentee ballots, meaning that results in some states will take days to tally.”

“There’s little question, barring an overwhelming victory for either of the candidates, that President Trump will use those days to call into question any result which erodes the margins he saw on Election Day. He’s repeatedly insisted that there’s necessarily something suspect about votes counted after the fact and, in Florida in 2018, repeatedly insisted that the counting of absentee ballots in heavily Democratic counties was somehow fraudulent. (A later review established what was obvious at the time: the tally was legitimate.) That the sitting president will attempt to shape the results is a problem for obvious reasons. But it’s also clear that Trump has effectively persuaded some sizable part of his base to think that a victory is a near-certainty, establishing a toxic and potentially dangerous situation in which a legitimate election is viewed by many voters as invalid.”