Regardless of whether you support Vice President Kamala Harris or Former President Donald Trump, you’re probably more than ready for this election to be over. Ads are flooding the airwaves. News stories are inescapable. And your texts, mailbox, and voicemails are being inundated with messages urging you to vote for one or both candidates. But when will we know who won the 2024 election? Unfortunately, your wish for peace and quiet is unlikely to be granted on Nov. 5.
In 2020, major networks did not call Biden the winner until four days after ballots were cast. This election year, the polls show an even tighter race. Laws in critical swing states could slow the process as well. And, regardless of what the election counts show, there are certain to be recounts and lawsuits. Here’s a look at what could keep Americans waiting to hear who their next leader will be in the days (and maybe even weeks) to come.
Will we know on Nov. 5 who won the presidential election?
Anything’s possible, but it’s unlikely. Polls have consistently shown that Harris or Trump will need to win some combination of the seven battleground states in order to win the White House. If those polls turn out to be wildly wrong, however (as they were in 2016) and one candidate wins several states that were assumed locks for their opponent, networks could confidently declare a winner in the early morning hours of Nov. 6.
The more likely scenario, though, is that it will be a day or two, at least. That’s because vote counting rules in some critical states, where Harris and Trump are virtually tied, could slow down the process and delay how soon we will know who won the presidential election.
When can a candidate declare victory?
A candidate can declare victory whenever he or she wants to, but that doesn’t mean they’ve actually won. Trump, in 2020, famously declared victory on election night, despite millions of votes having not yet been counted. Even when the evidence disproved his claims, he continued to insist he had won and spun theories of election fraud.
When can states begin counting ballots?
That depends on the state. This year, 43 states allow county election officials to begin pre-processing mail ballots before Election Day. (Alabama, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin do not.) That involves ensuring the ballots are valid and removing them from envelopes/preparing them for tabulating machines, which speeds up the vote count on Nov. 5. Not all of them can count those votes before Nov. 5, though.
Just 23 states are allowed to scan ballots before Election Day, but they are not allowed to be aggregated before Nov. 5. The other 20 let officials begin counting on election day, though four states—Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota and Mississippi—do not scan them until after polls close on election day.
What rules do battleground states have for counting votes?
When we will know who won the presidential election depends a lot on how the ballots get counted in battleground states. The rules, as you might expect, vary by state.
Arizona
While almost 90% of the votes cast in this state are submitted early, officials cannot release any results from the tabulation of those until an hour after the polls close. And mail ballots that are dropped off on election day won’t be processed until after the polls close, which can slow things down considerably, sometimes by days.
Georgia
Officials say they expect up to 70% of votes to be cast early. Officials can process those, but can’t begin counting until Election Day. Early votes must be reported by 8:00 p.m. ET according to state law. And state officials have said they hope to have all votes counted before midnight on Nov. 5. That doesn’t mean the results will be final, though. Overseas ballots and votes from military personnel, which could number more than 20,000, will be accepted through Nov. 8, and that could shift the balance for candidates.
Michigan
Michigan is allowing early in-person voting for the first time this year and those votes can be processed and tabulated before Election Day. That should make the turnaround time for results much faster than 2020.
Nevada
To speed things up this year, Nevada has changed its rules and now will allow officials to process and count absentee votes earlier than in 2020. And in-person votes can be tabulated before polls close, as well. Mail-in votes, however, will be accepted until four days after the election (if postmarked before Nov. 5), which could hold things up.
North Carolina
Absentee ballots will also be key here, as absentee, overseas, and military ballots are counted in a 10-day period after Election Day. In 2020, North Carolina did not declare a winner until Nov. 13. Republican poll watchers are also being told to “be aggressive,” which could cause some disruption.
Pennsylvania
Election workers aren’t permitted to process or count mailed ballots until 7:00 a.m. on Election Day, so that could mean delays on knowing who won the state, which could be frustrating for voters, given how critical Pennsylvania is this year. A new law, however, will require most counties to announce on midnight of election night how many mailed ballots remain to be counted, in hopes of discrediting conspiracy theories before they spread.
Wisconsin
Milwaukee has new vote-counting machines that can tabulate 100 ballots a minute, compared to the old machines in 2020 that could only process seven ballots a minute. The bottleneck will come, as it does in Pennsylvania, from mailed ballots, which can’t be touched until the morning of election day. Many large cities also sent their mailed ballots to a centralized location, which processes and tabulates them. That can result in a big number of votes being reported all at once after polls close.
What vote count improvements have taken place since 2020?
Two years ago, voters in Michigan approved a proposal that enabled in-person early voting for the first time. And Georgia courts have struck down proposed election rule changes, including one that would have forced poll workers to hand-count the number of ballots cast in every county on Election Day. North Carolina, meanwhile, no longer accepts mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
What is the red mirage and the blue shift?
Those two terms mean the same thing. They came about in recent elections when it initially appeared Republicans were leading after polls closed, but the counting of mail-in ballots later in the evening or the following days shifted the tide in favor of Democrats.
This year, we could just as easily be talking about a blue mirage or red shift, though, as Trump has encouraged his supporters to vote early.
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