Compared with some states, Illinois has a relatively speedy vote-counting process. Voters can expect to see results late Tuesday evening, though the counting might spill into Wednesday.
The state has a bottom-up election structure, meaning that local authorities, rather than the Secretary of State’s office, register voters, run elections and oversee ballot counting.
The polls close at 7 p.m. local time, 8 p.m. Eastern. Then election authorities will begin counting the mail-in ballots and early votes they received before Election Day — usually about 35 to 40 percent of the vote, according to election officials. These stored early votes are often the first to be counted and will be posted on the state’s local election websites, followed by votes cast in person on Tuesday. You can find your local election authority and see how they will share unofficial election night totals here.
Voters are casting ballots to nominate major party candidates for the U.S. Senate and in all 17 of Illinois’s House districts.
To expedite the vote-tallying process, many jurisdictions — including Cook County, where many of Illinois’s voters are concentrated — transmit votes electronically from polling places so election officials won’t have to wait for the physical ballots. Those will be delivered later, when officials start to compile the official tally that will be verified by the state Board of Elections.
Illinois allows an additional two weeks for all mail-in ballots to arrive and be counted, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. After that, the Board of Elections will hold a statewide canvass to compile and certify the results it received from the local election authorities. The official certification of the statewide vote totals will take place on April 17.
Taylor Robinson is a Times reporter covering the New York City metro area.
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