It is important to have a one-day election and have results announced on election night

The argument

An increase in the number of early and postal votes cast creates greater scope for counting errors and fraud in voting. It also means that the election will drag on for longer than necessary. The more votes cast in-person on election day, the more accurate the count will be and the better the results will provide a snapshot of American opinion. Widely expanding mail-in vote means that voting could continue for “months or for years” according to Trump, as you will never know when the election is over. With some states accepting mail-in ballots for weeks after election day, it is unknown when the winner will be declared. Trump said that mail-in voting will “make our country the laughing stock of the world” for the delays it will cause. It is also important to have a result to announce on election night, otherwise the nation will be left in a limbo where people will not know what their future will look like. In order to avoid the chaos and uncertainty that this will produce, all votes should be counted on election day so the outcome is achieved clearly and quickly. The democratic process is only legitimate and proper when it takes place over a short period of time and is not vulnerable to delay and uncertainty - the system is supposed to decide the next president in one day.

Premises

Counter-arguments

It is only a convention that the results are announced on election night. Legally, the election of the next president also involves Electoral College meetings which do not take place immediately after the popular vote. The official results are always released up to weeks after polling day - the outcome was only clear in 2016 due to the way states decided their Electoral College votes. This stance is taken by leading Republicans, including Donald Trump, and is politically motivated. Democrats are expected to do better from mail-in votes, whereas Republican voters prefer to vote in person. The Republicans are trying to deter early and postal voters so that they have a better chance of winning the presidency. Trump also requested a mail-in vote for the Florida Republican primary election - this is clearly a political issue, not one of principle.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Greater scope for error and fraud is asserted rather than shown. No measure is offered of how often postal ballots are miscounted or fraudulently cast, and clerical error and deliberate fraud are folded into a single category. [Rejecting P2] Nothing in the argument connects how a ballot is cast to how accurately it is counted, and a "snapshot of American opinion" is not a criterion by which an election is judged valid. [Rejecting P3] The election-night result is a media convention, not a legal deadline. As the counter-argument notes, certification and the Electoral College meetings take weeks in every cycle, so the interval the premise describes as limbo is the ordinary timetable rather than a delay introduced by postal voting.