Business Insider: The key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin could take longer to report election results. Here’s why.

In 2016, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were important swing states that President Donald Trump narrowly won, handing him the election.

In 2020, all three states, which allow absentee voting without an excuse, are seeing record levels of mail voting in addition to high-stakes litigation over election and voting rules. After the November 3 election, these states are potentially poised to be hotbeds of post-election legal cases and disputes.

That’s due to a combination of courts extending the timelines for when ballots can be received, and those states limiting the ability of election officials to process absentee and mail ballots and prepare them for counting prior to Election Day.

All three states prohibit election officials from processing absentee ballots until the day of the election or, in Michigan’s case, the day before, putting them among just a handful of states who don’t permit pre-canvassing, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  …

The three states stand in contrast to the Republican-controlled swing states of Georgia and Iowa, which have moved to give clerks more time before Election Day to pre-process ballots, and states like Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, which did so before the pandemic and include mail ballots in the vote totals released on election night.

Experts emphasized to Insider that votes taking a little longer to count does not mean that the process is broken, but rather that officials are taking the necessary steps for a fair and accurate count.

“It’s more important to ensure that every vote counts than knowing the results on election night,” Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, told Insider. “We do expect that part of [Trump]’s playbook is to question the integrity of mail-in voting, which we know can be done safely…we need to be giving time for those votes to be counted.”