US Election Results Take Time. Be Patient.

(Bloomberg Opinion) --Be patient as election results roll in Tuesday night. Ignore any premature claims of victory by candidates or media outlets. Whatever the count is by the early hours of Wednesday will probably not be the final one. The tally will change, and the counting will continue. And if the Electoral College numbers are close, the outcome of the presidential race might not be known for days.

Trust me. I learned the importance of election night patience the hard way — along with most of America — during 36 days of anxiety in 2000. Only now do I realize why we should be glad we lived through Bush v. Gore when we did.

I was a statehouse reporter for the Palm Beach Post and exit polls showed a tight race between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, the brother of then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. It seemed like the night would go down like most presidential elections: The Associated Press and network news decision desks would use their computer models and exit polls to assess the results based on the early returns and declare a winner.

Instead, what transpired was five weeks of national angst. The world’s focus was on Florida and the flaws of an election system dependent on a patchwork of laws and ballot systems that were unprepared for a recount of such scale.

Things started to look bad early. After polls closed on the East Coast, NBC News was projecting Gore the victor in Florida. The state had 25 electoral votes and was key to putting either candidate in the White House. Other major television networks soon followed, but just hours later, when additional results showed Gore’s margins narrowing in the state, they retracted their decisions.

In the early hours of Nov. 8, the networks called it for Bush, but AP stayed with Gore. Florida was headed for a recount.

That’s when we learned how precarious Florida’s outdated election system was. Running on no sleep, I fielded the first call from my editors. They wanted me to head over to neighboring Gadsden County, a heavily Democratic enclave near the capital of Tallahassee, where the canvassing board was hand-counting 2,073 ballots that had been rejected by tabulating machines on election night.

Four county commissioners, all Democrats, sat around a conference table as election monitors and reporters waited in an adjacent room. Florida had few uniform recount standards in place at the time. Gadsden County used hand-marked optical scan ballots and the commissioners were examining each ballot to discern which were left intentionally blank and which they could decisively designate to a presidential candidate.

They decided to award an extra 170 votes to Gore and 17 to Bush — shrinking Bush’s 1,784-vote election night lead. My story hit the Bush campaign like a bullhorn. What standards were these election officials using, asked Bush’s election monitor, James A. Baker III? He warned of the dangers of “human error” being injected into the narrow margin by the hand-counting of the ballots.

But down in Palm Beach County, another drama was playing out. Voters there used what had become known as a “butterfly ballot,” which required them to punch out tiny bits of paper from the ballot cards to indicate their choice. However, those bits of paper — the so-called “hanging chads” — could close the punch holes when the ballots were fed into tabulating machines, leaving the voter’s intention unclear.

By Nov. 14, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris would reject any hand recounts and certify the state's presidential ballots in favor of Bush. She had been the ceremonial head of Bush’s statewide campaign and her overzealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls would become the source of a future civil rights investigation.

Legal challenges followed and, for five weeks, uncertainty reigned. There were hours of court battles over recount rulings and other legal issues. Satellite trucks from news stations across the globe camped outside the state capitol complex and the Palm Beach County Emergency Operations Center where the recount continued. Thanksgiving was a blur. Holiday preparations were put on hold.

The US Supreme Court finally put a premature end to the recount and Bush was declared the winner on Dec. 12. But it was an ugly way to resolve an election. And, until Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat in 2020 and incited an insurrection, it was the most tumultuous election of a lifetime.

But there also was an unseen benefit. After Bush was sworn in, a consortium of news organizations conducted a post-election review of the race’s uncounted ballots. The review concluded that if the undervotes had been counted, Bush still would have won, but if Palm Beach County hadn’t confused voters with its butterfly ballot, Gore would have been the victor.

In response, Florida spent years improving its election system. Other states learned from the calamity and adopted similar changes, streamlining both vote counting and certification processes. Today, more than 95% of all voters in the US are casting their ballots on verifiable paper. Florida has had close elections in which the winners weren’t known on election night, but the process is standardized, clear and the recounts fair.

Nonetheless, new kinds of election night angst have arrived. In 2000, only 1 in 8 ballots in the US were cast early or by mail. In 2020, more than 60% of all ballots were cast that way, making it difficult to know what Election Day turnout will look like.

In 2000, polling was done almost exclusively by phone and there were only 29 national pollsters. In 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, there were 78, and they used everything from online surveys to texts to live phone calls. Each has had varying degrees of accuracy and the prospect of a massive polling error this year has prognosticators across the board on edge.

Vote counting and validations take time and resources. It’s not a good fit for angst-ridden Americans obsessed with politics. It's especially bad for anyone hyped up by online misinformation or social media platforms that crave clicks.

But we should be thankful the 2000 recount happened at a calmer, less polarized time, and in an era when elected officials from both parties put country over party.

So, Tuesday night, let’s all take a chill pill. Be grateful most of America learned from Florida’s fiasco and trust the process. We’ll know the rightful winner soon enough.