Voters may not have to wait quite as long after Election Day as they did four years ago to know who the next president will be.
The public had to wait nearly five days in 2020 for most major news outlets to release a forecast, the longest wait since the infamous 2000 election. A key reason was a historic surge in mail-in voting in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to which several vital states were unable to react quickly.
But experts say some changes in state policy since then and an expected decline in mail-ins this year are likely to speed up the process, even if the final result is not yet known on election night.
“Everything will be different this year,” said Quinn Yeargain, an associate professor of law at Michigan State University. “Maybe it won’t happen as quickly as 2022. Famous last words I suppose, but I would be surprised if the process took as long as it did in 2020.”
“At the same time, the final result in 2020 was pretty clear before the broadcasters announced it this Saturday,” Yeargain added. “There was no real question about what was likely to happen after Wednesday afternoon or Thursday.”
By 2020, Americans had largely become accustomed to relatively quick poll calls, typically no later than delayed Tuesday or early Wednesday after the election. Of the races in recent decades, all were announced by major media outlets by early the next morning, except for 2000, when a recount in Florida caused weeks of delays.
But a clear difference emerged four years ago when the pandemic led to health guidelines to minimize in-person interactions indoors as much as possible. As the election approached, many voters turned to mail-in voting to avoid voting in person, and several states changed their policies to allow more voters to cast their ballots that way.
That led to historic levels of absentee ballots, accounting for more than 43 percent of all votes cast, up from just a quarter of all votes in 2016 and 2018, according to a federal agency Report published afterwards the election evaluation voting methods used in 2020.
However, this left states unable to process and count all ballots at the speed many had become accustomed to.
Yeargain said state laws vary, but many do not allow mail-in ballots to be opened or checked for signatures until Election Day.
“The volume was so high that it took a lot of time to process the whole thing, opening the possibility of further conspiracy theories about the election spreading,” they said.
Chris Mann, the research director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also emphasized the closeness of the race, making it challenging for the media to call races.
Biden only had a lead of about a percentage point at most in the key states that gave him victory, and that could be repeated for this year’s winner, with polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
“The process that the news media decision-making division could go through is to get to a point where the remaining uncounted ballots are not enough to potentially make a difference, and given that the polls are essentially a tie show and if this is the case To be correct, and these elections are decided with very narrow majorities, it will take quite a while again,” said Mann.
However, some states have changed their guidelines for processing ballots before Election Day to speed up the process and reduce the likelihood of a delay heading into 2020.
The center, which works with election officials to build confidence in elections, released a report this month Gathering vote processing policies for all 50 states. According to the report, almost all states allow mail-in ballot envelopes to be processed before Election Day.
This includes processes such as verifying signatures and other information on the outside of the ballot, sorting envelopes, rejecting incorrectly completed ballots, and preparing them for scanning by a device.
“The important part that takes time is that the processing to verify each ballot to make sure it is valid and complete has all the information to verify the voter’s identity,” Mann said.
“Tabulation is the technical term that election officials use and it is separate – much quicker and easier – in this process.”
It will take time to know whether mail-in votes this year will resemble 2020’s total, although they may be fewer now that the pandemic is not dominating daily life. But millions of mail-ins have already been submitted, and Republicans appear to be using the method more than in the past.
About half of all states also allow ballots to be scanned by machine before Election Day, as long as the results are not aggregated, according to the report.
The current rules for two of the key battlegrounds, Michigan and Nevada, include changes to their policies for the 2020 election that allow early processing of their ballots. This could be particularly critical in Nevada, a state where most voters cast their ballots by mail.
Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina will also enable processing before Election Day, although the situation in North Carolina could be complicated by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Georgia in particular is likely to be faster on the battlefields.
But a quick call to the race could be impossible if the election is particularly close and falls in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – both states do not allow processing of envelopes to begin before Election Day.
Mann emphasized that the rules for how the process works were set long before the election, but are vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation that affects public perception.
“The same process used in Pennsylvania is used in other states. The same process used in Wisconsin is used in other states,” he said. “The states where doubts are expressed are crossed by people who spread misinformation and disinformation about it. The same system does not raise doubts in other places because it is not attacked and no disinformation is spread about it.”
And as the race approaches, temperatures on both sides are likely to rise as the process progresses, said Pete Seat, a lecturer at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy and a former George W. White House spokesman .Bush.
“The closer the election gets and the longer it takes to figure this out – especially if you get into a situation where you go to court to have the outcome decided in some way – half the country is going to be unhappy,” said he said. “It just depends on which half it is.”
Analysts generally expect the race to be close even if one candidate wins most of the key swing states, but how close and in which states may determine how long the country holds its breath. Seat argued that people should remember to be patient, even though impatience is a “function” of society.
“I know a lot of people who just want the election to be over so we can move on, but we have to be patient because it may not be over as quickly as we would like,” he said.
