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We've gotten used to unofficial projections of winners on Election Night. And we tend to conflate these unofficial projections by AP or CNN with official election results and certified winners. But the latter have always taken a long time to compile. And the former take longer the more competitive the contest is and the more ballots there are left to count.

There is good reason to expect Election Night unofficial projections will become less and less common.

In recent years, more of us are voting by mail, and these ballots can take longer to count. Many of us live in states with generous deadlines for ballot return. In some states, ballots postmarked by Election Day are counted even if they are actually received by election officials weeks after Election Day.

Proportionally fewer ballots are counted on Election Night than in the past – with many mail ballots still to arrive after polls close. Furthermore, the ballots that are counted on Election Day are not necessarily representative of the totality of ballots that are received.

This means it is getting trickier to call races.

Given the trend toward convenience voting shows no signs of reversing, delayed unofficial election projections will soon be the new normal.

By contrast, official certified election results take about the same time they always have, with certification happening weeks after Election Day.

Where does RCV fit in all of this? Pretty peripherally.

RCV can affect the official certification of election results – pushing back certification in places like Maine where the law prohibits the electronic transmission of voter data. But there are administrative processes that can prevent RCV from having this effect.

When it comes to Election Night projections, RCV can have a more significant delaying effect, but only in highly competitive contests that were unlikely to be called straight away anyway.

In races where no candidate has a significant plurality of the votes, projecting the winner is more difficult than it would be under plurality. This is because it's very difficult to predict preference flows in RCV races, and that difficulty is exacerbated by our total lack of data on how New York voters were likely to use RCV.

In the absence of a clear majority, no one could safely project Eric Adams as the winner in the NYC mayoral race. No one had any idea how he fared with voters of minor candidates Shaun Donovan, Dianne Morales, or even Andrew Yang. No one knew whether these voters preferred Adams to Maya D. Wiley or Kathryn A. Garcia or even ranked him on their ballots.

Plenty of other races could be called on Election Night, notwithstanding RCV.

But, in the mayoral contest we had no clear winner, with more votes for the second and third-placed candidates collectively than for the first-placed candidate.

That's an unusual occurrence.

But it’s also one of the rare situations in which RCV can produce different winners than plurality and find the candidate with the majority support. Only in rare situations like these does RCV seriously delay unofficial projections of winners until the vast majority of ballots – including mail ballots – are received.

The official results in NYC will be certified according to their usual schedule, with little fanfare and far away from the headlines.

In Georgia, numerous election law bills covering the full gamut of election administration are currently before the legislature, including restrictions on who can distribute absentee vote applications, allowing voters to vote at any precinct in their county, more regular reporting of deaths to keep voter rolls up-to-date, and ranked choice voting for overseas and military voters.

The proposals that have gained the most attention include a set of bills, introduced by Republican senators, that would eliminate "no-excuse" absentee voting and vote drop boxes, and require absentee voters to mail two copies of their ID: one with their application for an absentee ballot and the other with their completed ballot.

Ostensibly introduced to ensure “confidence and trust in the integrity of our election results” (in the words of state senator Larry Walker), these bills appear to be more a response to the changed partisan calculus of absentee balloting, in which 2020 mail ballots favored Democrats. Forcing millions of copies of ID into the mail at election time seems an odd way to increase confidence. ID theft is a massive problem; absentee voter fraud is not (being a little more common than death by vending machine).

Absentee voting was relatively uncontroversial in Georgia before 2020. Georgia has not required voters to provide a reason for absentee voting since 2005, when the Republican legislature and governor introduced “no excuse” absentee voting. About 5% of ballots were absentee in the 2016 presidential election, consistent with previous elections.

In the past, Republicans were better at getting absentee ballot applications out to their voters. Republican voters were more likely to return their ballots and their ballots were more likely to count. Democrats were slower to take up absentee balloting, in part because of suspicions that more absentee voting results in fewer polling places and long lines in heavily black urban areas (a problem especially severe in Georgia).

But 2020 turned that on its head in Georgia, as in the rest of the country. There was a mass expansion of absentee voting (around 25% of Georgian voters voted absentee in 2020), emergency laws allowed vote drop boxes for the first time, and former president Trump led a protracted campaign delegitimizing absentee voting.

Unsurprisingly, absentee votes in Georgia favored Democrats. Equally unsurprising, Georgian voters report less confidence in absentee voting than in-person voting.

While proposed restrictions on absentee voting is unlikely to result in the mass voter suppression Democrats claim, thinly veiled partisan attacks on absentee voting do little to advance voter confidence. Instead, they further politicize the minutia of election law, which is likely to further undermine rather than boost confidence in our institutions.

In all areas of election administration, balance – between security and access; speed and accuracy – must be achieved to ensure confidence in process and outcomes. This requires careful, calm assessments and clear thinking.

In the current environment, where both serious and nakedly political proposals to amend election law are coming thick and fast, we should be sure to pay attention to the full range of proposals.

Some of the bills introduced in Georgia advance the rights of voters and have a shot at passing. For example, Georgia HB 71, which would allow voters to cast their ballot at a convenient precinct – one on a bus route or near their work – surely is a sensible, low-cost way of increasing access to the polls. Similarly, Georgia HB 59, which would deploy ranked choice voting in presidential primaries, would likely prevent the disenfranchisement of serving military by allowing them to rank back-up candidates in the case their first choice drops out.

While there is the potential that in some states voter rights will contract in the aftermath of the 2020 election, a fuller view of state legislatures reveals many positive developments. Stay tuned.

From time to time, I will post content here exploring electoral issues of the day or sharing findings of my most recent research. I'll also provide updates about my pugs' travels to state capitols.