What We Will And Won’t Know On Election Night In Pennsylvania
Things could get very, very weird on election night.
After polls close at
All this means we may or may not know who actually won
Don’t panic. Here’s how to understand what we will and won’t know on
The good news: We’ll have a lot of information
Winning the presidency requires winning enough states to get to 270
States generally move together, so the results from other states will help us understand Pennsylvania’s early results, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at
After months of anxiety about the potential for a days-long wait, Stewart thinks we might know the winner on election night, after all -- or at least the path to get there.
“We’ll know the path to 270 by midnight, I’m pretty confident, and I can even see the AP calling enough states for 270 by the time the sun comes up,” he said. But, he added, that depends on states like
Everything you need to know about voting in
So even if
The results from other states will also help show the difference between the mail and in-person vote. Some
The bad news: There are a lot of unknowns
There are some key questions we won’t have the answers to until votes start getting counted, especially if the election is close -- as it was in 2016, when Trump defeated
Here are some key things we won’t know:
How many mail ballots will arrive after
It will take days to count the votes
It’s the first year any
What we’re used to seeing hour-by-hour could happen day-by-day, said
Votes are counted in a specific order
There are three different methods for casting a vote, and that affects when they are counted.
The first ballots to be counted will be the mail ballots that were returned early on. These will be among the first votes reported after the polls close, which is why things could look very good for Biden at first.Then the in-person votes get counted. Because those votes are being put into electronic machines, getting their results is easy -- all the votes from a machine can be added to the county’s tally within minutes. Those results will likely skew heavily toward Trump.Then the rest of the mail ballots get counted, which will take days. Elections officials have to check the voter information on the outside envelope; open that outer envelope; pull out the inside envelope; open the inside envelope; pull out the ballot inside; unfold and flatten the ballot; and scan the ballot to count it.And finally, the last ballots to be counted are the provisional ballots, the paper ballots used at polling places when it’s unclear whether a vote should be counted.As these mail and provisional ballots are counted, they will likely continue what is known academically as a “blue shift” toward Biden. That’s not fraud, or the election being stolen, it’s just the votes being counted. How big that shift is could determine the winner.
We don’t know how quickly those ballots will be counted, and estimates have changed over time. Counties have spent millions of dollars buying new equipment to speed up the counting and have significantly increased their staffing, with
But then ballots can keep arriving until Friday.
How races are ‘called’
When a race is “called” on election night or soon after, it’s not an official declaration from elections officials -- it’s a determination made by news outlets that enough data has come in to know who won.
Those calls aren’t always right, including the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in the
The reason for the faulty call? The large number of mail ballots counted after
Still, the AP and other news organizations that call races have a strong record of accuracy, using sophisticated statistical models and a variety of data sources paired with on-the-ground reporting.
So what can we expect?
Remember: There’s a difference between knowing the final vote count and knowing enough to unofficially declare a winner.
How quickly news organizations like the AP can call the race depends on how close the margins are and how things play out in the rest of the country.
There very well may be enough information on election night to call the presidential race, especially if it’s a landslide.
But there’s also a real chance that it might take a day or two, though it shouldn’t take longer than the end of the week. If it does, it will likely be because something has gone wrong in the counting process or because litigation throws things into doubt.
A ton of votes will be counted on election night, and counties will be scrambling to count them all as quickly as possible.
As they do, the best course of action is patience.
The ultimate goal is to count every vote and have confidence in the system.
“However long it takes after
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