# Blue Shift **Blue shift** names the observed tendency, in recent American elections, for a margin to move toward Democratic candidates as a count proceeds past election night; the mirror-image appearance on election night itself is called the **red mirage**. Where a state processes mail ballots on receipt and reports them first, the drift runs the other way, and the term used is a **blue mirage**. The mechanism is procedural, not partisan. A state's pre-processing law fixes the order in which its three piles — election-day in person, early and mail, provisional — can be reported. The piles lean differently, because how people choose to vote correlates with how they vote. So a legislative decision about when envelopes may be opened determines which way the visible margin drifts. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where no envelope may be opened before election morning, the mail count necessarily arrives last; in Florida and Arizona, where processing begins on receipt, it arrives first. The term is load-bearing in the disinformation literature precisely because the drift is predictable, explicable and legally ordinary, and is nonetheless the single most reliable raw material for claims that a count was altered overnight. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-01 ASCII map build for [[How a Ballot Is Counted]]. Expand with Edward Foley's original work on the phenomenon, measured shift magnitudes by cycle, and the state-by-state pre-processing table. ## See Also - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] - [[Mail-in Voting]] - [[Election Denialism]] - [[How a Midterm Election Is Certified]]