Was waiting to Saturday, Nov 7 to call the election morally wrong?

[Roll Roons]

This has actually been the standard practice by networks to call races only after they are >99% confident of its expected outcome. I can cite numerous examples of races being called well after seasoned observers had a good general sense of its expected outcome - one such example is the Montana Senate race in 2020, where the AP called it almost four hours after polls had closed, even though (thanks to a certain poster's information on key county benchmarks) I had a good general sense of which candidate was on track to win as soon as the first few counties started reporting results.

In that case, AP shouldn't have called AZ or NJ-07 when they did. Although Biden and Malinowski both did end up winning, there was a reasonable chance based on ballots counted after election day that Trump could have taken AZ or Kean could have won NJ-07.

[Roll Roons]

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.

I agree, its very irresponsible for California and New York to allow all the time in the world for local offices to count votes. Of course elderly volunteers are going to take their time, if allowed. Hell, both states had extremely close house races that could have decided control of the house!

Since these states contribute heavily to the national raw vote total, they are important. The national popular vote was fairly close for about a week. Had it been obvious Biden was going to lead by 4.5 points/ 7 million, Trump's claims would get less traction.

I think HR 1 really should have included some sort of provision about timeliness of results. If you're going to expand mail-in voting, allow ballots to be counted ahead of time and require them to be received by poll closing. Florida does it really well.