It occurs to me that we’re kind of spoiled these days: I was actually expecting to already have a new president by the time I emerged from Defensive Driving Tuesday night, mostly because ballots get tabulated and counted and information gets sent these days, we get our results almost instantaneously.
So, I got to wondering… it’s taking us 3 days to figure out who the prez is in 2000. How long did it used to take? Like, in 1960, 1920, 1880, 1840, and 1800? (Just to pick a few arbitrarily-placed benchmarks.)
In 1960, the California election was called at about 4:15 in the morning (7:15 on the East Coast.)
In 1916 Charles Evans Hughes went to bed thinking he was elected and woke up to find out he lost to Woodrow Wilson.
Don’t know about the 1800s, although the process would have been to count the ballots at the precinct level, forward the results to the county seat, where they would combine them with the other precincts and forward the results to the state capital. That may be why the Electoral College doesn’t vote until mid-December.