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It is possible, even likely, that we will not have a projected winner of the presidential race on Nov. 5 – Election Day. And that doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious going on with the vote-counting.
Election experts say when a winner is projected will largely depend on how close the race is. The closer the race, the longer it is likely to take to declare a winner. Delays are also tied to counting mail-in ballots and the state rules about when and how they can be counted.
In 2020, the Associated Press and other major news outlets did not call the race for Joe Biden until Nov. 7 – four days after Election Day.
“This year, it could go either way,” John Lapinski, director of elections at NBC News, and Charles Riemann, the senior analytics manager for elections at NBC News, wrote on Oct. 30. “It may take as long as a week for the NBC News Decision Desk to project a presidential winner, or it could happen as early as Wednesday, even by Wednesday morning.”
But, they wrote, “The days of projecting a winner on election night itself are almost certainly over.”
Polling suggests the race is extremely close, particularly in a handful of swing states that may decide the election.
In 2020, not only was the race in some swing states extremely close — Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes and Arizona by 10,457 — but vote-counting took longer than usual because so many mail-in ballots were cast due to the pandemic. Nearly 70 million people voted via mail-in ballot in 2020, constituting 43.1% of the electorate and roughly 20 percentage points more than in 2016, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. As of Nov. 4, 67.2 million mail-in ballots had been requested for 2024, and 36.7 million had been returned, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
While states have taken steps to speed up the processing of mail-in ballots, Pennsylvania — arguably considered the most important swing state in this election — is one of the few states that still do not allow the pre-canvassing of ballots prior to Election Day. (Pre-canvassing means that outer envelopes are opened and ballots are extracted and flattened to prepare them for counting machines. In addition, an initial scan is performed to identify any ballots missing a signature. The actual counting of mail-in ballots doesn’t begin until Election Day.) As a result, if the vote counts are close after the tallies on Election Day in Pennsylvania, it could take an extra day, or even several days, to determine a winner as all of the mail-in ballots are counted.
On Election Day, “there are five or six or seven [counties in Pennsylvania] that are not going to be able to do that [finish counting mail-in ballots] because of volume,” Eric Kraeutler, chair of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based election watchdog, said at an election law forum sponsored by the Knight Foundation on Oct. 4.
Those include Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, both of which have a strong Democratic voter registration advantage. Pittsburgh, the state’s second most populous city after Philadelphia, is in Allegheny County.
“In an election as close as what is being forecast for Pennsylvania, that almost certainly means that by the end of Election Day, Donald Trump will be ahead in Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler said. “It is very important that the public understands” that vote counting is expected to extend beyond Election Day, “and that is a function of the volume of the votes.”
The New York Times mapped out when seven swing states are likely to finish counting votes, with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin likely expecting to finish after election night and Arizona and Nevada expecting to take several days. The Times also surveyed election officials in every state, and among those who answered, most expected to finish counting the day after the election. Officials in several states said it could take days to count all of their ballots. But again, all of that is expected.
In a CNN podcast, CNN Vice President and Political Director David Chalian said “given that Arizona and Nevada and Pennsylvania are likely to take some time to count all of their votes, I would say Tuesday night is not likely, but I don’t rule out a Wednesday resolution.”
‘Stop the Count’
It was widely reported in 2020 that it would take longer than usual to declare a winner, particularly because many states expanded mail-in voting due to the pandemic. When Trump repeatedly and baselessly suggested in the days before the election that counting mail-in ballots after Election Day would result in fraud, we wrote a story on Oct. 29, 2020, “Nothing Untoward About Counting Ballots After Election Day.”
Nonetheless, two days before the election, Trump insisted, “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3 — the evening of Nov. 3. That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be. What’s going on in this country? What’s going on?”
On election night in 2020, several of Trump’s campaign advisers warned him not to declare victory because the results were still very much in doubt.
In an interview he gave to the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump Campaign Manager William Stepien said he met with Trump and others at the president’s residence on election night and he recommended that Trump tell the nation that “votes were still being counted. It’s … too early to call the race.”
“The president disagreed with that” advice, he told the committee. “He thought I was wrong.”
Trump declared victory shortly before 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said of the ongoing vote-counting. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”
According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Trump’s decision to falsely declare victory on election night was “premeditated” and part of his strategy.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted at 9:12 a.m. on Nov. 5.
Even after Biden was projected the winner, in the weeks and months that followed, Trump continued to peddle the falsehood that votes counted after election night were somehow fraudulent.
“We were up by 293,000 votes in Michigan, 112,000 votes in Wisconsin, 356,000 votes in Georgia, and nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania, all swing states,” Trump said in late December of that year. “These numbers were absolutely impossible for Joe Biden to overcome, and the Democrats knew it and everybody forecasting knew it and understood it well.
“Our nation’s greatest political professionals were calling to congratulate me on our victory,” Trump said. “Then suddenly everything started to disappear. Everything started to change. The vote counting abruptly stopped in multiple states. In the middle of the night, a series of massive and statistically inconceivable vote dumps overturned the results in state after state.”
But what Trump called “vote dumps” were just the routine reporting of the results of mail-in ballots. And experts say if the election is close enough this time around, it could again take days to count enough votes to declare a winner. (It will take weeks for states to officially certify results.)
This election, Trump has said he’ll immediately accept the results “if it’s a fair election.” But he is also falsely suggesting there is something wrong with counting votes beyond election night. At a Nov. 3 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said he had heard it would take weeks to determine a winner. “They’re going to say we may take an extra 12 days. … And what do you think happens during that 12 days? What do you think happens? These elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 on Tuesday night. Bunch of crooked people.”
“What we saw in 2020 is … that window of time between the polls being closed at 8 p.m. on election night and the race being called as a period of vulnerability where people were seeking to undermine confidence in the results,” Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt told NPR.
If the result in any particular state is essentially tied, nearly all the votes need to be counted before a winner can be confidently projected, Lapinski and Riemann of the NBC News elections team wrote. And that can take days.
States That Could Hold Up Projecting a Winner
As was the case in 2020, Pennsylvania could again tip the scale for one candidate or the other. Lapinski and Riemann said they expect 98% to 99% of the vote in Pennsylvania to be counted by Wednesday morning. Whether that is enough to call the race remains to be seen.
“It’s difficult to predict when there will be a projected winner in Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler told us via email. “I expect we will know the results of in-person voting no later than 1:00 or 2:00 am on Wednesday. The canvassing of mail-in ballots is likely to go on throughout the early morning hours and possibly into the next day or two days. The timing of any projected result will depend not only on the number of ballots counted, but also the closeness of the margin. The closer the margin, the more votes will need to be counted to project a winner.”
Nearly 2.2 million mail-in ballots have been requested and nearly 1.8 million of them have been cast as of Nov. 4 in Pennsylvania, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
Part of the delay in counting mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania is that it is one of only seven states — Wisconsin is the only other considered a swing state — that cannot begin processing early ballots before Election Day. Michigan changed its laws after the 2020 election to allow large counties to begin processing mail-in ballots eight days before Election Day, although the counting of ballots cannot start until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
The Pennsylvania House, which is controlled by Democrats, passed legislation in May to allow pre-canvassing, but the bill stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Republicans blocked a similar effort in Wisconsin.
“If you’re ever wondering why Pennsylvania takes some time to come up with the results, if you have millions of ballots that you can’t start [preparing and counting] until Election Day, guess what, that’s going to take some time,” Kathy Boochvar, who served as the secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the 2020 election, said in an election law webinar with reporters last month.
Since 2020, Philadelphia and Allegheny counties among others in Pennsylvania have increased their workforce and acquired new processing machines that will make counting of mail-in ballots go quicker, Kraeutler said. “But so long as Pennsylvania law does not allow the canvassing process to start until Election Day, there is a possibility that election results will not be known until one or two days later,” he added.
“There’s also a real possibility that the entire national election comes down to getting vote totals for Pennsylvania,” Kraeutler said.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Trump and Harris are virtually tied in Pennsylvania.
But Pennsylvania isn’t the only state that could hold up media companies from projecting a winner. Lapinski and Riemann warn that if the election comes down to very close votes in Arizona and Nevada, “forget any thoughts of a Wednesday resolution.”
“Typically, Arizona has as much as 20% of its vote still to count after election night — mainly late-arriving mail ballots,” they wrote. “And there are very substantial differences between Republicans and Democrats in terms of who votes when (early versus on Election Day). This makes it nearly impossible to project a winner in Arizona on election night.”
Indeed, in Maricopa County, where more than half of the state’s residents reside, Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer told KPNX 12News election officials expect it will take “between 10 and 13 days to complete tabulation of all of the ballots,” in part because of a high voter interest in the race and because of a lengthy ballot that will take more time for election workers to tabulate.
That doesn’t mean it will take that long for media companies to declare a winner, but it could if Arizona’s electoral votes end up deciding the race and the results are exceedingly close.
As for Nevada, it is “a state that has a large amount of early voting, both absentee and in person, that is not counted on election night,” Lapinski and Riemann wrote. “In the past, nearly a quarter of the vote is still not counted by the Wednesday morning after Election Day. Given that the state has been historically close in presidential elections, the probability of calling a close race with a large amount of uncounted vote is very low.
“The bottom line: In Arizona and Nevada, it will likely take a few days, perhaps longer, to know the winner.”
None of that is indicative of voter fraud.
“When [we] will know has nothing to do with vote tampering, it has to do with how close the election is,” Lapinski, who also is the director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told us via email.
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