The good news coming out of Tuesday's election is clear: No matter which presidential candidate you supported, our free and fair system of collecting and counting mail and polling place ballots worked as designed.
As Wednesday dawned we knew who had won and could be confident in the results, even if the winner just spent more than a year lying about how elections are run in this country.
The bad news here is also perfectly clear: The "Fraud Industrial Complex" that has grown up and prospered around President-elect Donald Trump's ceaseless stream of election disinformation is here to stay. There's money to be made in those lies. So you'll hear more of them.
The unknown going forward is this: Republicans have long embraced the state-centric system of running elections. But they also just spent the year suggesting ways to federalize elections, based on the false claim that noncitizens vote in ways that tip federal elections – they don't – and pushing for voter identification requirements that potentially disenfranchise eligible voters.
The good news rang out Wednesday morning when 11 political science and law professors gathered virtually to talk with journalists about what happened in the past 24 hours.
Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said people trust elections most when they have a good experience while voting and the candidate they support wins.
"I used to quip that the easiest way........