2024 U.S. election: Will faster ballot counting prevent a 2020-style meltdown?

A young state senator in Michigan foresaw trouble before the last U.S. presidential election, warning of looming chaos in the counting of votes.

In fairness, this hardly required clairvoyance: the potential for problems was apparent, even months before the 2020 vote, with analysts, including CBC News, predicting near-certain bedlam.

It would take days to properly count Democrats' votes because they tended to vote more often by mail, especially during the pandemic, and those mailed ballots would take longer to process; and Donald Trump would exploit that delay to delegitimize the election.

"We raised these flags over and over again," said Jeremy Moss, a Democratic senator from Michigan who was then in his first term. He recalls pleading in vain for his opponents to pass a law that would let election administrators start processing mail-in ballots earlier, as is allowed in dozens of states.  

"All of this was predictable, and indeed predicted."

In an interview with CBC News this week, Moss insisted those delays had consequences, helping Trump whip up unrest, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In Nevada, Cisco Aguilar describes his scare-scenario for this year: The electoral count is tied 266-266, and an entire nation awaits the count from his state, where he's the top election official. 

"That is my biggest fear that keeps me up in the middle of the night," Nevada's secretary of state said during a panel this year, hosted by the voting-access group Campaign Legal Center.

One thing Moss and Aguilar have in common: they've worked to change things.

In Michigan, Moss sponsored a bill letting cities start processing mail-in ballots eight days before election day. It's one of several voting laws enacted by Democrats after they won control of certain state legislatures in the 2022 midterm election. In that same election, Aguilar won office in Nevada; he has informed state officials they can start counting mail-in ballots 15 days before voting day.

The bottom line is that this year, delays are no longer guaranteed. There's a chance an election winner will be declared on election night.

And it's not just because more people might vote in person rather than mail in their ballots like they did at the height of the pandemic; the rate of absentee voting surged from one-quarter of the electorate in 2016 to nearly one-half in 2020. 

It's also because there are new rules in several states that give election workers a head start on the time-consuming process of opening envelopes, checking IDs, confirming matching signatures and feeding ballots into machines.

In 2020, about five swing states lacked rules for early ballot handling. This included Nevada, where it took four days to declare a winner and Georgia which took even longer.