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.
…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.
…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, Vermont, and Florida. Of the seven, 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 ten states are deeply red whose projected winners should be released almost immediately after polls close and will be creepy Trump. Vermont is blue and should be called early too. 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 six early results heavily favor creepy Trump, you can expect the projected Electoral College vote soon after 4:30 pm (PT) to be possibly 79-3 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.
Thanks, Mano…a great summary.
For our friends who live outside the Americas, Pacific time is UTC−8:00; so the earliest poll closings in Mano’s map will be 23:00Z. The latest, Hawaiʻi and the western Aleutian Islands, will be 06:00Z on Wednesday.
Other than actual official counts, any other exit polls or projections are based on models of who is likely to vote. Most years, it is always similar to previous years, so it is not much of an issue.
But this year, women and the young and Puerto Ricans may all be voting in different patterns from usual. That means that all projections may be meaningless. So there is no substitute for actual official results, and only after both regular and early votes have been somewhat counted.
In Arizona for example, the ballots mailed back early are counted and ready by the time the polls close. But people who vote with a mail ballot that they only turn in tomorrow will not be counted for a few days, so most results will probably take some time.
Bruce,
I was under the impression that mailed-in ballots can be processed before Election Day (i.e., they can be checked to see if they were properly sealed and signed and so forth) but that actual counting only begins on election day.
I thought that this was the case everywhere. Is Arizona different?
…!
What an amazing statement!
@Holms:
It’s a relic of the original Constitutional design of the U.S. as a confederation of states which each operated largely independently. (The Second Amendment is another such relic, where the idea was that there would be no standing army, but militias would be called up when necessary.) Unfortunately while the ‘loose confederation’ concept was already dying before the Civil War put a stake through its heart, there are lots of bits and pieces of that idea still stuck in the constitution and difficult to remove as a result, even if it weren’t for a number of states actively hanging on to their control of the election process to try and skew things.
The situation was worse up until the 2000 election, when the public disaster that was Florida and Bush v. Gore resulted in some federal creation and enforcement of better standards, along with money to implement them, so we wouldn’t have to deal with ‘butterfly ballots’ or ‘hanging chads’ ever again.
Mano, I believe mailed in votes are processed differently by different states. Some count early, some only after the polls close (and after all other votes are counted). This is one way The GOP argued an unfair election in some states in 2020 because Trump was ahead before the mailed-in ballots were counted, but in general democrats dominate the republicans in mailed-in votes. So once the mailed in ballots were being counted, the total moved into Biden’s column. The GOP imagined (aka lied) that the mailed in ballots would reflect the in person ballots.
I looked into the question and my own understanding was incorrect.
There are now 12 states which allow counting (beyond processing) ballots prior to election day:
Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, Virginia, and Utah.
Connecticut allows local officials to decide when to start counting absentee ballots, so they conceivably be counted ahead of time. Neither Puerto Rico or the the U.S. Virgin Islands specify whey counting can begin. This is from an NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/04/nx-s1-5178029/mail-in-absentee-ballots-counted
As I mentioned a few weeks ago that ballots were not counted until election day, as I know is the case in Michigan, I apologize for my mistake in case anyone was misled by my misunderstanding. We have a very confusing system, and when looking for this information I found a lot of outdated information. That’s not to excuse my mistake, only explain it.
Arizona will apparently release most of the results of early tabulation at 8:00PM local time (Mountain Time, GMT-7). But not all absentee votes will likely be counted by then, absentee ballots delivered on election day may not be counted until the next day according to the Arizona SOS.
All of California is mailed a VBM.
Los Angeles County’s Registrar/Recorder County Clerk’s Election Division counts them as they come in. I don’t think they reveal the count-so-far until today, mostly because we’re a huge county and we’re too dang busy to do otherwise. We use Dominion.
Who actually has voted and who has not voted (but not the tally of who voted for what) is publicly available at all times, hourly, the instant the polls open. I think the earliest was 27th October.
Strangely, Obama won Iowa in his first election, in 2008.
Odd, because McCain, Obama’s opponent, was just the kind of respectable, honorable, and sane republican of the old school, whom Iowa voters would have been thought to like.
You never can tell.
Also, since Fox’s analysts who correctly called Arizona in 2020 were vindicated, they were promptly fired. I wouldn’t think that their replacements will be very accurate this time.
Mano:
Australia has a statutory federal body whose responsibilities include setting federal electoral boundaries and conducting federal elections (and Australia’s states and mainland territories have similar bodies for their own elections).
But there are still monthly “how would you vote if a federal election was called now” polling and analysis reported in the media, becoming more frequent and more voluminous in the leadup to an election, and broadcast TV channels having election night panels discussing the counts and the likely outcome as the counts come in.
It’s just that the frenzy of campaign reporting is concentrated in the few weeks leading up to the election, rather than most of the preceding year.