The hosts of election night parties may want to book a room for more than just one night.
For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.
Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump appears extremely close.
If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots.
Election officials across the country are trying to telegraph to voters that waiting long hours or even days for a result is not unexpected in a close election. They are eager to counter conspiracy theorists who may seize on the uncertainty as evidence of fraud or malfeasance.
“I keep objecting to the term ‘delays,’” said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania. The ballots, he said, would be counted “as expeditiously as possible, and counting votes takes time.”
Counting mail ballots takes more time because there are more steps involved. A variety of security measures, including signature verification and ensuring that voters did not also try to vote in person, are required. Election officials must open the ballots and flatten them out before they can be put in a tabulator to be counted.
In 2020, the prolonged tabulation of ballots after election night was falsely seized on by Mr. Trump as evidence that the election was rigged against him. He pointed to early returns that showed him ahead in battleground states, well before all the votes had been counted. By the time they were completely counted, he falsely claimed that Democrats had “flipped” votes away from him and in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr.
None of this happened, of course. It was instead the result of what Democratic operatives called “the red mirage,” the result of far more Democrats than Republicans opting to vote by mail, leading to Democratic votes being recorded later.
The 2024 results are not expected to be as protracted as in 2020, when the race was not called for Mr. Biden until the Saturday after the election. Some states have improved their procedures for tabulating mail ballots, and election officials across the country have more experience with the process. And mail voting rates, though still much higher than before the pandemic, have declined in some states since 2020, when many voters fearful of the coronavirus saw mail voting as the only option.
Another ‘mirage’
With early voting only just underway, it is too early to glean any partisan patterns in voting by mail. But Republicans have narrowed the gap in vote-by-mail use.
In the 2020 election, Democrats returned 18 million mail-in ballots compared with roughly 10 million from Republicans in the 20 states that reported party registration by ballot, according to the Election Project, a margin that was even greater in some swing states. But by the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans had made up a significant deficit. Democrats returned 7.6 million mail-in ballots in those same 20 states, compared with 5.1 million from Republicans.
This year, Republicans are aiming to close the gap further. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have begun a program titled Swamp the Vote meant to encourage voters to cast early ballots, including by mail. Turning Point Action, the sprawling Republican organization, has a multistate “Chase the Vote” program, aimed at turning irregular voters into early voters.
Mr. Trump, however, has sent conflicting signals on mail voting, both encouraging his supporters to embrace the method while also continuing to denounce it and raise doubts.
“We want to go back to one-day voting and paper ballots,” he said at a rally last month in Montana.
Nonetheless, last week, the Trump campaign released a memo seeking to temper any conclusions from early mail ballot request data, warning of a “blue mirage” and that “early Democrat leads in absentee and vote by mail are not at all predictive of victory on November 5th.”
The newfound focus by Republicans on voting by mail, plus improvements in ballot tabulation in key battleground states, is likely to lessen some perception of bias in results by the end of election night.
However, in two critical battleground states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the red mirage may persist. Lawmakers in both states have refused to pass legislation allowing local election officials to open and flatten out ballots — a process known as “preprocessing” — before the polls open on Election Day. This puts election officials in a difficult position, churning through both mail ballots and in-person votes at the same time.
“It is a technical challenge with a technical solution, that everyone has known about since 2020, but legislation was never passed to address it,” Mr. Schmidt said.
While the vote-counting process will be slower statewide, major population centers like Philadelphia and Milwaukee — both home to many Democratic voters — may take longer to get through all of their votes than other counties simply based on volume, potentially creating the impression that Mr. Trump has a larger lead than reality for days following the election. Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said she estimates 80,000 mail ballots in the city alone (by comparison, Milwaukee received around 30,000 in the midterms), and that she will “prioritize the security and the integrity of the election over speed any day.”
“Wisconsin will not have full results on election night,” said Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Election Board, anticipating Milwaukee to finish counting at 3 a.m. or later.
The perception on election night, experts contend, will come down to specific states.
“It will depend on to what degree they’re going to allow election officials to process mail ballots before election night,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who tracks voting. Arizona, for example, will most likely show Democratic votes early as Republican voters there have traditionally cast ballots later in the process. But in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania “that’s where we’re going to see the potential for this red mirage and the ballot dumps and all of those conspiracy theories that will arise from it.”
Arizona and Nevada
The two western battleground states — Arizona and Nevada — are predominantly mail voting states, and they have historically taken multiple days to count full results, meaning it can take considerable time for a call to be made in a close race.
In the 2020 presidential race, networks called Nevada for Mr. Biden four days after the election; most news organizations didn’t call Arizona for nine days. (Mr. Biden won close races in both states.) In 2022, the Arizona Senate race and Nevada governor’s race were called three days after the election, and the Arizona governor’s race was called six days after the election.
Though both states allow local officials plenty of time to preprocess and prepare ballots, the sheer volume takes time. And if this year’s race in either state is close, officials expect another wait.
“This gaslighting that some people are doing about the way we count — ‘Oh, it takes forever’ — it’s nonsense, that’s absolute nonsense,” said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona. “We’ve always had 10 to 13 days till we saw some official results, and we’re still doing it that way.”
Secretaries of state in both states have sought to assist local officials where they can. In Nevada, Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state, announced in June that county officials may begin tabulating early voting returns and mail ballot returns when polls open on Election Day, rather than when polls close, providing for a large tranche of results posted once polls close in the state.
The policy could help offset a pronounced voting behavior in Nevada, where tens of thousands of mail ballots arrive either on Election Day or the day after (mail ballots in Nevada can arrive up to four days after the election and still be counted). In Clark County, home to Las Vegas, more than 36,000 mail ballots arrived on the day after Election Day in 2022, roughly 20 percent of the mail ballot total for the county.
One battleground state did change its laws to help local election officials deal with the influx of mail ballots: Michigan. In 2022, voters there passed a referendum that made a host of changes to the state election code, including allowing election officials to begin processing mail ballots eight days ahead of Election Day. In 2020, votes tabulated by election night appeared to show Mr. Trump in the lead, but he ultimately lost when all the votes were counted the next day. This year, the state will most likely be able to report more complete results sooner, resulting in an earlier call.
As voters await the results in states across the country on Nov. 5, officials are urging them not to be distracted by premature declarations of victory from any candidates.
“Candidates don’t get to decide who wins elections, voters do,” said Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan. “So pre-emptive statements that candidates may make declaring themselves the winner are not as reliable as the actual results themselves, which our professional elected officials will be working to transmit as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
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