The process was changed, in the states where it changed, to prevent voters --- who tend to be significantly older than the general population --- from dying alone in isolated hospital rooms.

> but didn't anyone foresee that this will call into question the legitimacy of the election.

Those people were derided for questioning the legitimacy of the election.

Also some of the states were monumentally stupid in the way they designed their vote counting schemes regarding mail-in.

>There is no landslide, as everyone expected. This is the worst possible outcome.

I agree. A landslide in either direction leaves no doubts. Even if it was a mail-in landslide. An election of questionable legitimacy is how wars start. But that would be very in character for 2020.

> To recap, both candidates have claimed victory at this point,

No, they haven't. Only one has. The other has expressed confidence that they will win. but candidates do that all the time before votes are counted, or even cast, its not the same thing as claiming victory.

> This could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute.

There's almost no evidence that that is the case.

> Instead, we've set the stage for an extremely contested, ugly election.

What set the stage from that is the fact that its extremely close in lots of swing states. Short of abolishing the electoral college or disregarding the will of voters (depending on whether you prefer the more or less democratic approach, compared to the status quo), I'm not sure what you think can be done about that.

> This could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute.

No. For all the coverage that late arriving pre Election Day postmarked ballots are getting, they're a pretty minor factor; probably in the hundreds, not thousands, in PA so far, say. PA already had a rule that they couldn't start counting mail in ballots until polls closed; that's not new, and that's essentially what's causing the delay here, along with similar rules elsewhere. States which didn't have rules like this finished quicker, but these rules aren't new.

A very important thing to remember - The only thing that can "call into question the legitimacy of the election" is evidence of wrongdoing. None has surfaced.

If someone tries to tell you otherwise, demand evidence. And no, Twitter and Facebook conspiracy theories are NOT evidence.

BTW "both candidates" have NOT declared victory. Only Trump has.

> this could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute

I don’t think this is true, though. The main change is that more people voted via mail. That isn’t a last minute thing. More people want to vote by mail this year, and many states allowed them to already. The problem is that states just aren’t used to processing this many mail ballots. One could argue that there weren’t enough last minute changes! For example, if PA had made a last minute change to begin processing mail ballots earlier than Tuesday, then they’d have finished much more quickly.

> didn’t anyone foresee that this will call into question the legitimacy of the election

In my opinion, the only reason we’re seeing so many people question it is because Trump has been baselessly claiming for months that the election would be stolen from him and that mail in voting is fraudulent. So yes, everyone was aware that Trump would call its legitimacy into question, but I haven’t seen a shred of evidence for it. In fact, two of his lawsuits were thrown out because there was no evidence onto back up his claims.

And to be completely fair, Biden hasn’t called the election, he just said that the path to victory seems clear. And that much is very obvious, since Biden does have more options for winning than trump does at this point, just because Trump’s only path to victory is by winning every state left, and Biden only needs one or two.