Oregon is still counting, with a little under 90% of ballots counted by the latest numbers I can find.
> The same was true of California when I lived there.
It hasn't been in the 40+ years I've lived here, so I don't know what you're on about. Yes, since California did a quick flip between being a Republican lock and a Democratic lock in Presidential elections, you usually have a projected Presidential winner immediately. But the actual vote count usually takes quite a few days.
That's just California being noncompetitive in Presidential elections, not especially fast at vote counting.
> Why are the rules suddenly changed?
To the extent rules were changed for this election, it was because of a major public health emergency that raised concerns about the danger to both individual voters and the wider community from the usual level of in-person voting in places that don't already have predominantly mail-in elections.
> Did no one foresee that this would cause one of the worst elections in American history?
Nothing about the actual election itself, other than the abuse of the Postal Service in an attempt to prevent delivery of lawful votes, has been particularly bad. Yes, the fact that results are close in a number of states means that there isn't a projected electoral college winner yet. That's not a big deal.
In PA, for example, the legislature (which is GOP I might add) forbid counting mail-in ballots until election day. That basically guarantees delays.
Have you been around for Gore vs Bush? I'm not sure why you're claiming this is one of the worst elections. Most close elections aren't called on election day. Almost every state continues counting past election day. It's just you're only hearing about the ones that are close.
The difference between PA and OR is that PA could not begin processing its mail-in ballots earlier than Election Day. Additionally, Oregon has had decades to perfect its mail-in system. Other states are processing the most mail-in ballots they’ve ever gotten, so we should expect that it won’t be very fast or smooth yet.
Additionally, if CA was a swing state, we’d be in the same position here. It’s still counting ballots and still releasing updates. It just doesn’t have a razor thin margin like the rest of the states, so it was projected to go blue very early.
What we’re seeing is expected given how tight the races are in each state, as well as how many more people voted by mail this year!
Did you sleep through 2000?
This really isn't anything all _that_ unusual; the previous one was over quickly because the electoral college happened to fall that way (though the count went on for ages afterwards, and IIRC it took a day or so for the popular vote to flip), and the two before that weren't close enough for it to be an issue. It's still by any reasonable measure a lot less of a fiasco than 2000; it's pretty unlikely to rest on a couple of hundred votes or anything like that.
Additionally, there were some lawsuits to prevent states from counting received ballots before Election Day, so some of this "confusion" is the direct result of efforts by the people filing those lawsuits to create it.
