Everyone seems to be expecting Donald Trump to prematurely declare his victory on election night, regardless of whether news outlets call him the winner or not. NBC's Hallie Jackson even asked Kamala Harris about it in an interview on Tuesday. Harris responded: “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources, expertise and focus to do so.”

But despite Harris' assurances, and despite this country's experience with Trump in 2020 — when he declared, “We won this election,” at a 2 a.m. press conference right after the election, before anyone had any idea whether Trump or Joe Biden had won – there is good reason to believe that many of us are not prepared for what comes in the days after November 5th. It could well be that we are once again faced with a situation where Trump is ahead in the tally of announced results in key states like Pennsylvania, only to see Harris declared the winner the weekend after the election. The days after the election, when this potential “blue shift” occurs, could be filled with disinformation, confusion and even potential violence. It's up to the media and all of us not to let things get out of control.

It's possible that Donald Trump could simply win the election by losing the Electoral College on election night. If the razor-thin polls in seven battleground states deviate in his direction by just a point or two, it could well be an early victory for Trump. But from the year 2000 everything else is possible Bush v. Gore– type tremorbiter, to a pattern more like that of the 2020s, when it took days to count the ballots and determine that Joe Biden had decisively won the Electoral College battle, to the Harris disaster. None of these options would be met with a gracious concession or a call for patience from Trump. No, it is clear that Trump will declare that he won or say that there was fraud.

During our pandemic-stricken 2020 election, the public was abuzz with warnings about the blue shift (sometimes referred to as the “red mirage”). In 2020, many more people voted by mail because it was safer in the face of COVID-19. At the time, Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots were rife with fraud, which resulted in far fewer Republicans than Democrats voting by mail. In-person voting results are reported more quickly than mail-in ballots because these mail-in ballots must be checked for signatures and other measures taken to ensure they are acceptable. This meant that earlier reported election results favored Republicans and later favored Democrats. What's more, major Democratic cities are taking longer to announce their in-person results on election night than did redder, rural areas, with cities' results sometimes coming in in the middle of the night, something Trump and his allies scoffed at referred to as “ballot dumps.” ” At one point on election night, for example, totals reported in Pennsylvania showed Trump leading Biden by 700,000 votes, only to find days later that Biden was declared the winner by about 80,000 votes.

Well, déjà vu could be on the agenda for a week starting Tuesday. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the only swing states, have not updated their laws to allow pre-selection (or processing) of mail-in ballots before Election Day, and they will not begin reviewing and preparing those ballots for counting until Election Day itself. Republican legislatures in both states have blocked bipartisan proposals to update their laws to be similar to Florida's, where election officials can report most of their vote totals by the end of election night. I suspect that some Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin resisted the change because uncertainty and the blue shift are a feature, not a bug: they make it possible to question the legitimacy and fairness of vote counting if Democrats win.

So what can we do about it? First, there was surprisingly little coverage of the upcoming blue shift compared to 2020. This is true even if Democrats are much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. (Republicans have moved to more frequent in-person early voting this time, and the results are being announced quickly.) The word needs to get out so people have patience. In fact, a new academic study shows that prebunking – explaining why election results take time – can increase public trust in election results.

Second, the media and others must be careful in explaining the vote totals and the expected blue shift as the process moves forward. For us to have a fair and safe election in 2024, the message should not be that one candidate or another is “on,” according to a report from an ideologically diverse group of experts convened by the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law Instead, the most important justification is that the race is “too early to make a decision”.

Along with that message, election officials need to provide clear and transparent explanations about the likely timing of it all. When can we expect results from Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta? The more we know now, the better prepared everyone else will be.

Even with that improved messaging, you can expect a more organized and better-funded effort this time to sow doubt about the election results on election night itself. The Washington Post reports that over 230 Republican candidates have expressed doubts about the integrity of the upcoming election. We'll see grainy videos again, perhaps with the help of AI, purporting to show fraud or ballot dumps or poll workers fiddling with the counting. For example, we saw this in 2020 with two Georgia poll workers, Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman; They successfully sued Rudy Giuliani for $150 million for falsely accusing them of election fraud. They have initiated proceedings to take control of his Manhattan penthouse and Yankee memorabilia to pay the judgment he owes. But these defamation suits won't necessarily work in real time to deter bad actors.

The disinformation should be worse now. In 2020, Twitter had a strong trust and security team monitoring election lies. This time, Elon Musk Meanwhile, shocked by Republican political attacks on his trust and security measures in 2020, Meta has tried to withdraw from politics on Facebook and its other products. There's a lot that tech companies can do, but they probably won't do it. Downgrading political content will not prevent these platforms from being used to generate, spread and organize disinformation, as was the case in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th.

Nor can we discount the potential for violence that could occur in the period before news organizations have enough data on outstanding ballots to call the election one way or another. U.S. government officials said Russia and Iran could themselves try to foment violence and turn Americans against each other.

People are exhausted by politics. I don't blame them. But many will be in for a rude awakening when they wake up on November 6th. The election may be too close to call, Donald Trump may have declared victory again, and the uncertainty of not knowing who the next president will be in a few days may loom much larger problems.