(Originally published by The Wall Street Journal on November 17, 2022) 

Large-scale voting fraud may be a chimera, but counting a rising number of ballots quickly will require investments in state and local election administration.

Last week’s election defied expectations. The predicted “red wave” didn’t overwhelm the Democrats in Congress, as historical precedent would have suggested for the party of a president with low approval ratings presiding over a fragile economy. Unprecedented, idiosyncratic state-specific patterns seemed to emerge instead, with Republicans doing well in Florida and New York, Democrats doing well in the Midwest, and election nail-biters unfolding in Arizona and Nevada.

But perhaps the most important surprise of this election was how normal it was.

(Continue reading the opinion essay on The Wall Street Journal’s page here.)