Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent — Yes, and I’d want the worry stated carefully, because the strong version of the argument is weaker than people think and the moderate version is quite strong.

The Constitution assigns the manner of choosing electors to state legislatures. There’s a live dispute about how exclusive that assignment is, and reasonable jurists disagree — the argument surfaced in 2000 and has never been settled. Anyone claiming it’s obvious in either direction is overselling.

What isn’t in dispute is that a great deal changed this year through litigation, consent decrees, and executive discretion, and that a pandemic made some of that unavoidable. Ballots had to be requested, printed, mailed, and counted at a scale nobody had planned for, on a timeline set by a virus.

My concern is procedural rather than partisan. A rule adopted in September by a court has no legislative record, no hearing, and no opportunity for the losing side to have argued it in advance. That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it fragile, because the only people who reviewed it were the parties to a lawsuit that most voters never heard about.

Legislatures should have settled these questions in 2019. They didn’t, and the vacuum got filled by whoever was available.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — It’s worth worrying about and I’d start by conceding the obvious: somebody had to do something. You couldn’t run an April primary the way you’d run any other April.

But the emergency was known by June. There was time to legislate, and in most states the legislature either didn’t meet, didn’t agree, or preferred not to own the decision.

That’s the part that irritates me. A legislator who declines to vote and then complains that a judge decided is describing a situation he arranged. The branch that abdicates doesn’t get to be the injured party.

What I’d want going forward is simple and unglamorous. Write the emergency election procedures now, in an ordinary year, when nobody knows who they’ll help.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — We didn’t have this problem, which I think gives me a useful vantage.

Our legislature and our secretary of state handled the adjustments through normal channels, in public, before the election, and nobody sued anybody. It was boring. It’s supposed to be boring.

So when I hear that this was unavoidable, I’d push back slightly. It was avoidable in states that started early and had a functioning relationship between the branches. Where it wasn’t avoidable, that’s usually because the relationship had broken down beforehand.

Yes, it’s a precedent worth worrying about. It’s also a symptom of something that was already true in those states.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — I’ll offer the outside view, since this is the aspect of American elections that foreigners find hardest to follow.

In Australia elections are run by a single independent commission. It draws the boundaries, maintains the roll, administers the vote, and counts. It is not partisan, no candidate appoints its officers, and it is unremarkable enough that most Australians could not name who runs it. Voting is compulsory and takes place on a Saturday.

I’m not proposing you adopt that. It fits our system and it wouldn’t fit yours.

What I’d observe is narrower. When an election is administered by officials who are themselves elected on a party ticket, and when the rules can be altered by courts on a partisan lawsuit weeks before the vote, you have built a structure in which every procedural question is also a factional one. That’s not a failure of any individual. It’s a design that guarantees the argument you’re now having.

The precedent is worth worrying about. So is the arrangement that made the precedent available.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — Worth worrying about, and I want to be precise about which part, because the argument is being made badly by people who agree with me.

Take Pennsylvania. The state’s supreme court extended the deadline for receiving mail ballots past what the statute said, reasoning from the state constitution. That is a genuine legal controversy. Justices of the United States Supreme Court wrote separately to say the question deserved argument. It has not been resolved and it will come back.

That’s a real dispute about who holds an authority. It is not evidence that anything was falsified, and the two keep getting welded together in a way that damages the serious argument.

Here’s why I’d separate them. The procedural claim is strong, it has judicial support, and it will probably be vindicated eventually in some form. The fraud claim was brought roughly sixty times and lost almost everywhere, including in front of judges appointed by the president whose campaign brought it, generally because no evidence was offered. Attaching a strong argument to a failed one is how you lose the strong one.

Fix it in the statute. Legislatures should write the emergency rules themselves and make them hard to move. That’s a reform available right now and it doesn’t require anyone to relitigate November.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Yes, and I’d say it would still be yes if my side had been the beneficiary, which is the only test that matters for a question like this.

Here’s how it looked from my county. In the spring, the rules for how you’d vote in November were one thing. By September they’d been changed in a dozen states by people who weren’t on any ballot, and the changes were being fought over in courtrooms while ballots were already being printed.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that proves anything about the count. It doesn’t, and I’ve read the rulings.

What it does is guarantee that half the country will believe the game was arranged, because the rules were rewritten during the game by the officials keeping score. That’s true whether or not a single ballot was wrong. Process is what people can see. They can’t see a tabulation and they can never verify one personally, so what they judge is whether the thing looked straight.

It didn’t look straight. Fix the statute so it does.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — I’ll answer this as somebody who administers procedures for a living.

In public works, when we change a bid rule after the invitation goes out, we re-advertise. Not because the change was wrong, but because a rule altered mid-process cannot be defended afterward, and every losing bidder will spend a year saying so. We learned that expensively.

Election administration ran that experiment at national scale this year and got the predictable result.

The defense is that a pandemic forced it, and that defense is real. My response is the same one I’d give a county that skipped re-advertisement because of a deadline: the emergency explains the decision and doesn’t repair the damage. You still have to live in the year afterward.

So write the procedures now. Emergency provisions, adopted by the legislature, triggered by defined conditions, published before anyone knows who benefits. That’s the whole fix and it’s available to any state that wants it before 2022.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — Legislatures write election law. That’s the plain reading and it’s been the plain reading a long time.

An emergency doesn’t move that. It obligates the legislature to convene, which most of them declined to do.

I’d worry about the precedent regardless of who won. A rule that can be changed by whoever gets to a courthouse first isn’t a rule.

Write it down. Vote on it. Do it in an odd year when nobody has a stake.