The final day of voting for the US elections is Tuesday. As with everything else involving elections in the US, the process is complicated by the fact that all 50 states and the District of Columbia have their own voting times and procedures. Also, each state has its own rules about how and when early and mailed ballots are processed and counted. As a service to those readers of this blog who live in other countries and may be bewildered by the complexity of the process, I thought that I would write an explainer so that those interested (and patient enough!) can follow the results as they slowly emerge on election day and the days following.

Note that while I emphasize the presidential race in this post, there are also a slew of important congressional and gubernatorial elections, as well as ballot initiatives such as ten abortion-related ones in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Nebraska and four other states . See here for a compilation of all the things that are up for votes and which ones are worth paying close attention to.

To start, this map tells you when polls close in each state (Note that the times are Pacific times. You can get similar maps for other time zones by going here.)

People outside the US are often bemused by the fact that media outlets are the ones who project winners because in many other countries it is a centralized governmental body that handles the vote counting and declares who is the winner only after all the votes are counted. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the large number of votes cast in each election by each person for a whole slew of races (I had to vote in 23 separate categories in my county in California) makes the vote tallying more complicated and as a result, at least for the major races, media outlets have stepped in to project results more quickly, using exit polls and early vote count totals.

During the day on Tuesday, an outfit known as Edison Research, on behalf of a consortium of major media (ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, collectively known as the National Election Pool), will conduct exit polls from people leaving polling centers, and combine that with those taken during the early voting period. But each media outlet analyzes that resulting data independently to see if there are any interesting trends that emerge.

The exit poll asks voters which candidates they supported for president and in other races. But a number of other attitudinal and issue-based questions are usually included, such as: “What is the most important issue to your vote?” The other key component of an exit poll is asking about a voter’s demographics such as age, gender, race, education. These types of questions help illustrate how different groups voted and what mattered to them, and they are also used to weight the exit poll – that is, to make sure that the exit poll properly reflects the demographic composition of the electorate as well as the election results.
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The national exit poll will include approximately 20,000 interviews in total, including in-person on Election Day, in-person during early voting and via telephone to capture other early voters, including those who cast their ballots by mail. For each state exit poll in Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, there will be sample sizes of 1,500 to 2,500 respondents per state.

In the past, some media reported exit poll results even before polls closed and got badly burned when the actual vote tallies differed substantially. So now they are more cautious.

No exit poll data that characterizes the outcome of a race is released until all polls close in that state on election night. Any data you see before election night is NOT exit poll data. Once exit poll data is released when the polls close on election night, it is then up to the media outlet as to how they report the findings.

As for the vote totals themselves, all the major media outlets have their own teams of data analysts and statisticians pore over the data as they come in precinct by precinct after polls have closed, and compare them with historical data. Using these and exit polls, they will project the winner if they feel confident enough to do so. In some cases, a result will be projected almost immediately after the polls close because they think it is clear who will win, even if it is based on less than 1% of the final vote count. This is where peril lies. In their effort to be first, they will sometimes jump the gun and make errors.

The Associated Press is the proverbial fat lady in this opera, and it is their projection that is considered definitive and ends the show. The AP uses vote counts as they come in as well as historical data and its own VoteCast survey to make the calls. While results only become official when all the votes are counted and the secretary of state in each state certifies who won, the AP has an enviable record of being correct and so its call is what is most watched for.

The AP’s election night role in counting the vote is unique, built upon the premise that while individual jurisdictions report tallies, there is no federal authority to pull it all together.

The process involves nearly 5,000 people and the data is widely used across the news industry. Stringers collect results directly from local authorities nationwide and transmit them to a vote entry center, where the numbers are compiled and checked against online sources. Separately, the news organization – like the largest television networks – calls individual races making use of actual results, exit polls and historical trends.

The rule for declaring a winner is simple: “We call the race when there is no way that the trailing candidate can catch up,” Pace said. In 2020, news outlets declared Joe Biden the winner over Trump on Saturday after election day.

The AP expects to make calls this year in 6,832 individual races, from the president down to local elections and ballot measures.
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The AP was correct in every one of its calls for president, Congress and governors in the 2020 race, a 99.9% accuracy rate overall.

Yet then-President Trump and his supporters were furious when Fox News Channel and the AP reported Joe Biden as the winner in the key state of Arizona well before other news organizations. The call proved correct but it fueled suspicions about the voting process. Fox, in particular, faced an enormous blowback from its viewers.

As can be seen from the map above, the earliest polls to close are at 3:00pm (PT) in most of Indiana and Kentucky, both reliably red states that I expect to be called quickly for creepy Trump. But since polling stations in some parts of those two states only close at 4:00 pm (PT), the results for those states will likely be folded in with the next set of poll closings also at 4:00pm (PT), consisting of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Of the six, it is Georgia that will be watched most closely since it is an important swing state. Next up at 4:30 pm (PT) are Ohio, West Virginia, and North Carolina, with the last one being a swing state that both Harris and creepy Trump have focused heavily on.

Six of the above nine states are deeply red whose projected winners should be released almost immediately after polls close and will be creepy Trump. Virginia has been leaning towards Democrats but is not as strongly blue as the other six are red and so a result there will likely take a bit of time to emerge. The remaining two (Georgia and North Carolina) are expected to be close and thus results will take a long time to come in. As a result, because the six early results heavily favor creepy Trump, you can expect the projected Electoral College vote soon after 4:30 pm (PT) to be possibly 79-0 in his favor. It is around this time that he will likely declare that he has achieved a landslide victory, thus setting the stage for claiming fraud if the later states go against him and he ultimately loses.

Next up in terms of swing states will be Michigan and Pennsylvania that have their polls close at 5:00pm (PT), Wisconsin and Arizona close at 6:00pm (PT), with the last swing state to close its polls being Nevada at 7:00pm (PT).

It will be interesting to see what happens in Iowa where the polls close at 6:00pm (PT). This is considered a solidly red state and normally no one would pay much attention to it (and it has been ignored by both candidates and the media during the entire election) but the state’s largest paper the Des Moines Register has, as is its custom, posted its final poll by veteran pollster Ann Selzer on the Sunday before election day. It was a shocker, showing Harris leading creepy Trump 47%-44%. The internals were also interesting.

The court’s opinion has likely produced what Selzer called a “jaw-dropping” result: Women age 65 and older, a typically Republican group, favor Harris over Trump 63 percent to 28 percent. Women overall favor Harris by 20 points, while Trump has a 4-point lead among men.

Most political observers have dismissed this poll as an outlier since Selzer’s own poll from September showed creepy Trump with a four point lead over Harris, and an eight-point swing in one month seemed improbable. Also creepy Trump beat Joe Biden by 8 points in Iowa in 2020. But even allowing for the fact that this may be too large an effect, it does suggest a swing towards Harris in even a deeply red state. Creepy Trump and his campaign are clearly upset by this news and have attacked Selzer as being a ‘Trump hater’ who has rigged the poll but Selzer is not backing down.

Selzer responded to Trump’s post in an email to Newsweek, saying, “These are the kinds of comments seen for virtually any poll, including mine. The Des Moines Register includes a methodology statement with each story they publish. It’s the same methodology used to show Trump winning Iowa in the final polls in 2016 and 2020. It would not be in my best interest, or that of my clients-The Des Moines Register and Mediacom-to conjure fake numbers.”

Selzer lives in Iowa and knows the state well. Her work focuses only on Iowa and she is highly respected by her peers for the accuracy of her past polls. Even if she turns out to be wrong, she deserves credit for not succumbing to the herding pressure and adjusting her methodology so as to get results more in line with others. She is sticking her neck way, way, out.

If the polls projecting a very close race are correct, when we get projections from the AP for the ultimate winner will be long after poll closing times and in some cases may be days away. For comparison, in the 2020 election held on Tuesday, November 3rd, the results for the swing states were called by AP as follows:

Arizona: 11:51 pm (PT) on Tuesday, November 3rd
Wisconsin 11:16 am (PT) on Wednesday, November 4th
Michigan : 2:58pm (PT) on Wednesday, November 4th
Pennsylvania: 8:25am (PT) on Saturday, November 7th
Nevada: 9:13am (PT) on Saturday, November 7th
North Carolina: 12:49pm (PT) on Friday, November 13th
Georgia: 4:58pm (PT) on Thursday, November 19th

You may recall that it was the early call for Biden for Arizona by both Fox News election analysts and the AP that made creepy Trump and Fox News TV personalities apoplectic, since it portended bad news for them. They demanded that the Fox News analysts retract the call, with creepy Trump even calling Rupert Murdoch and asking him to order the change. But the analysts stood firm and were ultimately vindicated.

In 2020 Biden won all of the swing states except North Carolina. But that election was effectively over when Pennsylvania was called for Biden on the 7th because that gave him 284 Electoral College votes, more than the minimum of 270 needed. The later wins in Nevada and Georgia about two weeks later boosted his total to 306.