As they wait for the results, Americans need to take a cue from the Brits: keep calm and carry on. We all want election results tonight. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been glued to your television (or laptop or phone) watching the returns roll in. Election day, in recent memory, has (mostly) brought a winner. This election has been unlike any other – more contentious, higher stakes, more stressful. It feels profoundly unfair that this year, of all years, would be the one that leaves us hanging. But here we are. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are still hot off the starting line. And the course is unbalanced. If we were simply counting votes, this would all feel far less stressful – it seems overwhelmingly likely that Biden will win a majority of the popular vote. Instead, the electoral college system means that we’re all doing the math to calculate the “race to 270”. And that means that the handful of toss-up states suck up a disproportionate share of election resources from both parties. In the lead-up to the election, that means campaigning time and ad dollars. After election day, it means that these hyper-competitive states with relatively large numbers of electoral college votes are the likeliest to see protracted litigation as the candidates and their huge legal teams duke it out over which votes count. Remember Bush v Gore and the hanging chads of 2000? That could be nothing compared with what is coming. Plus, the race will just take a while to calculate, with early and mail-in voting increasingly the norm across the nation. Millions of early votes haven’t been counted yet, and won’t be counted for several days. We have no idea yet what the results are from highly competitive states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. We will not know on Tuesday night, and we probably won’t know on Wednesday, either. And the early results, which over-represent in-person election day votes, may very well be skewed toward Trump voters. We must be patient, as much as patience begets frustration. But even Buddha-level patience does not keep us out of the danger zone. We know that the current president lies without hesitation and seeks power at all costs. Will he declare victory before victory is fairly declared? It seems terrifyingly possible. The worst response is to panic (as much as I feel extremely panicked at this moment). If the president says he won and the response is: “Oh my God, he says he won!!!”, that hands him control of the narrative. Instead, the narrative must align with the truth: that we just don’t know yet. That anyone who says otherwise is lying, and those lies should not be publicized or given credence. Trump’s biggest accomplishment – if you can call it that – is how effectively he has undermined public trust in democratic institutions, in the media, and in the government itself. He’s probably banking on that right now. And too often, Democrats and media outlets have presumed normalcy from this president, and played into his hand. This is not a normal election. This is not a normal president. There is no reason to think he will behave normally and await the real results like the rest of us. There is every reason in the world – “preserving democracy” at the top of the list of reasons – to demand that every vote is counted, even if that takes days or weeks. This is all very dissatisfying. And it fuels significant cognitive dissonance for those of us who intellectually knew that we wouldn’t get results on Tuesday night, but were nonetheless following along as though maybe we could divine some outcome from the electoral tea leaves. The temptation now – at least among those of us who care about fairness and closure, not just power at all costs – is to accept the conclusion as soon as it comes. The danger is that the president will exploit that desire in his favor, and away from what the American people actually want. The only bulwark against that is steadied stamina, and willingness to wait. Trump has already obliterated so many democratic norms. Don’t let him destroy our free and fair elections, too. No one likes to be told the answer is “wait and see”. But the answer is: wait and see. Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind