2018: An election pre-mortem.

I’m writing this on November 5th, 2018, the day before Election Day. You, dear reader, might be reading this on Election Day, or perhaps later, looking back. I can already tell you about some of the things will go wrong on Election Day. The first thing that went wrong in the 2018 elections was that Election Day was November 6th. That is to say … a Tuesday, and not a national holiday.

The election is on Tuesday because the date was fixed back in the 1800s. At the time, Tuesday was a convenient day for farmers to travel to polling places in town. Now, however, there is no good reason for having elections on a Tuesday.

In some states, this isn’t a big problem, because voters could and did vote early, but millions of citizens will fail to vote because the election was held on a workday rather than either being on a weekend or a national holiday.

Not all of the votes will be counted.

Out of those who turn out to vote tomorrow, a significant number — probably over 1 million — will cast a provisional ballot, because it is not clear if they are eligible to vote. Some, but not all, of these provisional ballots will be counted. Almost all of these would-be voters will be citizens eligible to vote, but who showed up to the wrong polling site or failed to register to vote on time. Fourteen states automatically register eligible voters to some limited degree; thirty-six do not.

Some of the votes will be questioned. We will not have answers.

In an era where concerns about the legitimacy of elections are high on both ends of the political spectrum, we will not know how many votes were not counted correctly. There are fifteen states that use electronic voting machines that do not leave a verifiable paper trail. Five of those states only use paperless electronic voting machines. With these machines, there is no effective method of conducting a recount to insure that votes were counted correctly. Allegations of hacking — or malicious misuse by election officials — cannot be addressed.

The states with unverifiable vote totals. This is a problem, because we need to know that votes are being counted correctly — both so that we carry out elections correctly and so that people will have faith in our election process.

In two of those states, the state official in charge of the election is running in a hotly-contested race for governor. If Kris Kobach becomes governor of Kansas or Brian Kemp becomes governor of Georgia, there will be allegations that the election was stolen — allegations that can neither be easily proven nor easily disproven.

We won’t decide the presidency, but we will decide who counts the votes in 2020.

Most states elect governors for four year terms … in midterm years. (This is bad, but has been the case for a while.) Most states also elect state legislators on a two or four year schedule. This means that midterm elections tend to determine control of state-level governments — even more than the presidential-year elections. That lays the foundation for an argument that voting in midterm elections is (in many states) more important than voting in presidential year elections.

States in yellow have off-year elections, which is very bad. States in light blue elect one chamber of their state legislature this year (state House but not state Senate). States in violet elect their state legislatures but not governors this year. For all of the other states, both governors and state legislatures are up for election.

Turnout will still probably be lower than in 2016. Midterm elections usually have significantly lower turnout, even big “wave” elections with dramatic shifts of power (like 1994, 2006, and 2010). Early voting numbers suggest that turnout will be higher than 2014.

If turnout tops 2016 turnout, this will be a really big deal. It’ll mean we have reached a genuinely new phase of American political activity.

The polls were right. And the polls were wrong.

One of many plausible sets of 2018 election results (governors + senators). Speaking as someone from a state colored gray with no gubernatorial or senatorial race, there’s still important things on the ballot wherever you are — just not the highest profile races.

It is very likely that the polls are mostly accurate in gauging the sentiment of the voters, but it only takes a small error for that mostly to mean a big difference in who gets elected and which party controls the levers of power. It’s most likely that tomorrow, the United States will elect a Democratic majority to the House of Representatives, but the Republicans will hold the Senate by a narrow margin.

However, it’s reasonably likely (just not as likely) that either Republicans will hold the House or Democrats will take over the Senate — and a lot of the important action, as I said, is happening at the state level.

There will probably need to be a few run-off elections and recounts here and there — and everybody will make some mistakes. We don’t know. We can’t know. Because that hasn’t gone wrong — or right — just yet. It depends on what people decide to do tomorrow.

So go vote.