On The Trail: The fallacy of a conclusive election night

President Trump’s hostility toward mail-in voting in the midst of a global pandemic and a new Supreme Court decision blocking extended ballot deadlines in a battleground state have elections officials worried that two branches of government are undermining confidence in an election Trump is poised to lose.

Trump has increasingly demanded on Twitter that results be known on election night, a ploy apparently designed to exclude millions of people who vote by mail and whose ballots may not be counted immediately even if they arrive long before the polls close.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin could only count absentee ballots that arrive by Election Day, spurning a Democratic request to extend the deadline.

Elections experts caution that counting millions of ballots, especially in a year in which turnout is projected to set a modern record, takes time. Established rules are in place to ensure a count that favors accuracy over speed, and recent history shows those rules take time.

“We’d rather get it right than fast,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) told The Hill in an interview Tuesday. “We shouldn’t confuse election night with results night.”