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US presidential election results announced: everything is complicated
For the past 25 years, Americans have routinely woken up on Election Day and waited for the media to make a major announcement about which states would be the final ones to decide who would win the White House and which would control Congress, The Guardian writes.
At a similar moment on election night in 2000, America watched Meet the Press host Tim Russert talk late at night on NBC about what was happening in Florida, with Republican states in red and Democratic states in blue.
With Kamala Harris and Donald Trump virtually tied in the polls and the race likely to come down to a handful of swing states, it is highly unlikely that a winner will be known on election night, The Guardian notes.
So when will we know who won the US election? Well, it depends on how close the election results are. Four states—Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have absentee ballot procedures that can take days to complete. But if Kamala Harris wins by a landslide in another state, that could be enough to declare her the winner. Other results take time.
Traditionally, the winner of a US election is announced by the news media. However, as TheGuardian points out, the news organizations do not call the winner, they just mention the name. The winner is determined by election officials who count the votes and certify the election results. This announcement comes days or weeks after the election.
News outlets are reporting the moment when election officials report that the mathematical results of the vote count indicate a winner.
“Our criteria is absolute certainty,” said David Scott, director of news strategy and operations for The Associated Press. “We won’t announce a winner until we are 100 percent sure that the candidates who are behind can’t catch up.”
How do news outlets reach their conclusions? AP and other election night news outlets like CNN, NBC, ABC, and Fox News maintain “decision frames” and use models to predict how the vote count will unfold state by state. Some of them now rely on a central decision-making unit, an independent organization created specifically for this task.
“News outlets are much more nervous about making early calls because they don’t want to have to answer the phone like they did in 2000,” says Mike Wagner, a professor who studies elections at the University of Wisconsin.
Because each network uses an independent model, messages from different networks can have different timings, meaning different analysts can come to different conclusions at different times, The Guardian points out.
This publication recalls how the 2020 US election results were known. Joe Biden was declared the winner on Saturday, November 7, four days after the election. The president crossed the threshold of the election on the day the press announced the results in Pennsylvania and Nevada. Results in Michigan and Wisconsin were announced the day after the election, but Arizona on November 12, North Carolina on November 13, and Georgia on November 19 after a recount.
Will the results be faster or slower than in 2020? It depends on the margins of each state, The Guardian explains. If a state’s margin is more than 0.5%, it’s likely to see results sooner than in 2020, according to the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. That’s because there will be far fewer mail-in ballots cast than in 2020, and states will be able to count them more quickly. Additionally, three states (Arizona, Georgia and Michigan) have expanded their pre-processing of mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day, and three states (Arizona, Georgia and Michigan) have moved up their deadlines for mail-in ballots compared to 2020 (North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania).
A recent report from Protect Democracy predicts that Michigan and Wisconsin will have their results out the day after polls close, the same rate as in 2020. The report also suggests that Pennsylvania will have its results out sooner than it did in 2020, when it took four days. Nevada is expected to have its nomination out the same or faster than it did in 2020, when it took four days, and Arizona is expected to have its nomination out the same or faster than it did in 2020, when it took nine days. The organization predicts that North Carolina and Georgia will have their nominations out the same or faster than they did in 2020.
Results may be extended if the margin of victory is less than 0.5% or if any state requires a recount.
In Arizona and Nevada in particular, “it’s very unlikely that anyone will have a primary on election night,” says expert Drew McCoy. “That’s the way these states have been run for a very long time, and that’s to be expected.” If another swing state comes close to winning, like Georgia did in 2020, “you’ve got to wait. It’s not something you can predict before you go in, but it’s so close to the mark. So you’ve got to wait and see what happens.”
The situation is particularly complicated in Pennsylvania, where local election officials are prohibited by law from opening envelopes and counting mail-in ballots until Election Day. Wisconsin, another state in between, has similar restrictions and may not report full results until early Wednesday morning.
Some states allow absentee ballots to be counted up to 10 days after Election Day. Of all the states that vote by absentee ballot, only Nevada has a significant backlog. Mail-in ballots postmarked by November 5 can be received up to the Saturday after Election Day.
If there is litigation over the counting of ballots, the results may be delayed. There are currently several lawsuits pending in several states regarding the handling of certain ballots, including ballots that arrive late and ballots received overseas.
If a state returns results in which two candidates are separated by three digits, as happened in Florida in 2000, the results could come down to military absentee ballots and early voting. Typically, only about half of the early votes are counted, but in highly contested cases, political groups can be seen working feverishly to find and “cure” the people who cast those votes. Register to vote, writes The Guardian.
Which state will report results first this year? News outlets will likely call a few East Coast states first, where one candidate has a clear advantage over another.
"It's clear that there will be several states called by the time voting closes," Drew McCoy said. "Some of them will be announced as soon as the first votes are cast, consistent with historical precedent."
What is a "Red Mirage" and a "Blue Shift"? The terms "Red Mirage" and "Blue Shift" refer to a phenomenon in which the Republican candidate appears to have an advantage in the early evening, but that advantage disappears as the evening approaches. More votes are to come.
In 2020, Democrats favored voting by mail, while Republicans were far more likely to vote in person. At midday on Wednesday, the day after the election, Donald Trump had 11% of the vote, and Joe Biden would surpass that lead over the next two days as voters counted 2.7 million mail-in ballots. The AP and other news organizations knew how many absentee ballots had been returned and how many registered Democrats had requested voters, so they delayed calling Biden’s nomination until those ballots were counted.
In Wisconsin, more than 1 million absentee ballots were received on the Friday before Election Day, with more expected to arrive in the coming days.
“In our two most populous counties, the vote counting doesn’t finish until 1 or 2 a.m.,” Wagner said. “So hundreds of thousands of votes are being cast in the dark, and it’s happening in two of the most liberal counties in the state. In Wisconsin, Democrats always get a huge number of votes in the middle of the night. Because by law, the vote counting can’t start before that time. “Even if everything goes exactly as expected, it’s just a petri dish for conspiracy theories.”
The opposite is true in Arizona, where mail-in ballots received before Election Day are counted and reported first. In 2022, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly led Republican Blake Masters by 20 points early in the evening. Kelly ultimately won by five points.
However, mail-in ballots received on Election Day cannot be processed until the polls close. In 2020, about 320,000 ballots were cast in Maricopa County alone.
Why is it so hard? Why doesn't the state count all the votes and see who got the most votes?
The Guardian reminded us that in US presidential elections, the results of the popular vote are not determined at the national level. Each state counts its votes separately. With two exceptions (Nebraska and Maine), the winner of the state gets all the electoral votes.
Each state has a number of electors based on the number of congressional districts it has, plus two additional votes representing its Senate seats. Washington, D.C., has three electoral votes despite having no representation in Congress.
When will we know who controls Congress?
Individual congressional elections will be called as votes come in, but with 435 elections taking place across the country, some will be held too close to election night. McCoy said it may not be clear from the numbers which party controls Congress.
“There are always one or two races that are ridiculously close and lead to a recount or some other process,” McCoy said. “It’s important to wait for the data and see what it tells you, rather than get ahead of it. Our number one rule is to not get ahead of the data.”