It was just before 9 p.m. on that first Tuesday in November of 1980 on the east coast. President Jimmy Carter of Georgia was seeking a second term, against his opponent, Governor Ronald Reagan of California. Based on Exit Polling data, and a poor showing by Carter in several southern states, all the Big Three news networks projected Reagan as the winner. Polls would not close in California and the west coast for several more hours, but based on the news that Reagan had won, millions of voters never trekked to the polls. The down-ticket damage for Democrats in other contested races was devastating.
Exit polling will still take place on Election Day 2020, but much of the rest of the logistics and landscape of holding the election is significantly altered. Nearly 220,000,000 Americans voted on Election Day in 2016. As of October 29, more than 80-million ballots have already been cast, via early voting, mail-in voting/absentee ballots. In Georgia, more than 3.8 million have already cast ballots, and as of October 22nd, by emergency order of the State Board of Elections, local election superintendents and their staff have been opening, logging, and scanning in those absentee ballots already received. On Election Day, as soon as the polls open, they may also begin the tabulation of those several million ballots, while the polls are open.
Across the nation, a variety of standards and timelines are in place for ACCEPTING ballots as valid and for tabulation. Some states will accept ballots post-marked and received as late as 7 days after the election...meaning in close contests it may well come down to those mail-in ballots not arriving for tabulation until as late as November 10th. Polling data from across the country also indicates that roughly 65-70 percent of Joe Biden supporters and Democrats have either voted early or plan to vote prior to Election Day. The reverse is true of supporters of the President. This will skew two other significant aspects of reporting and projecting winners on Election Day. Voters in the field that day may well be disproportionately Republican and supporters of the President, which would then show up in Exit Polling data...and then when ACTUAL returns begin to be tabulated, there will be a huge BLOB of early and tabulated mail-in ballots, predominantly cast by Democrats, which will likely show a commanding lead for Democrats early in the evening.
I don't share all this to scare you, but instead to prepare you to settle in for a long period of tabulation and ballot certification. Not unlike many other aspects of 2020, and quite like this pandemic, this is the election that will linger on, and on...and on.
We have yet had only ONE Election which could not be settled in the Electoral College, and that was the 1800 re-match of President John Adams and his then Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, who each held very different views of the future direction of the federal government and our United States. At that time, Electors voted for the offices of President AND Vice-President, decided by first, and then second-place finish. Jefferson had lost to Adams in 1796 and then became his Vice-President. Adams was a Federalist, Jefferson championed the newly created Democratic-Republican Party. Jefferson and Aaron Burr (yes that Burr) received a tie vote of 73 Electors each, Adams and Charles Pinkney each received 65 and 64 votes respectively (at the time the U.S. was essentially our modern east coast).
Failing a majority in the Electoral College, the contest between Jefferson and Burr moved to the outgoing U.S. House of Representatives. There were 35 ballots with no winner and repeated tie ballots, with all Federalists and northern states backing Burr (an abolitionist) and Democratic-Republican states remaining firmly with Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton, a federalist and Treasury Secretary under President George Washington, and author of The Federalist Papers, preferred his friend and colleague, Jefferson, Hamilton convinced several Federalists to shift their ballots to Jefferson, who won the Presidency on the 36th ballot by the U.S. House. Spoiler alert for those who have not yet seen, "Hamilton."
Jefferson, who favored a smaller federal government, would later make the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, expanding the landholdings of our nation by 828,000 square miles, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Proof yet again that in choosing and making election selections you don't always GET what you think you just bought. And again, our nation not only survived that Constitutional crisis, we thrived. And we shall again.
