[jcranmer]

> Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.

The main reason the counting took much longer was three-fold: many more votes were cast by mail than was typical, several states were quite close in their vote count (three states within 1%), and a few states were prohibited from taking any preparatory steps to counting mail ballots prior to election day. And this was known--and heavily reported on!--well before the election.

Counting mail-in ballots is intrinsically harder than in-person ballots. Indeed, very rarely is it ever actually completed on election night (not least of which is that in many states, the votes need not be received by election day to be counted). However, usually mail-in ballots aren't enough to decide the results of an election. But when 2/3 of the ballots are via mail, and especially when there was an expected partisan difference between in-person and mail-in ballots, it takes a lot longer to develop a good consensus as to when one of the candidates is highly likely to have won.