Paper ballots
Almost all of the roughly 160 million ballots that will be cast in this year’s election will be made of paper. And almost all will be counted by machine. Election officials say without such machines, counting those ballots by hand would take much longer, cost taxpayers far more and result in errors that would then take even more time and money to fix. “Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Charles Stewart. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.” Still, the desire to have humans involved in the process lingers. Officials in Georgia passed a rule in September requiring poll workers to count paper ballots by hand, but on Oct. 15 a judge blocked its enforcement, citing it as “too much, too late.”
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‘Too close to call’
At The Associated Press, a race is “too early to call” if election officials are still tabulating votes and there is no clear winner. Regardless of how tight the margin may be between the leading candidates, AP won’t say a race is “too close to call” unless election officials have tallied all outstanding ballots — save for provisional ballots and late-arriving mail and absentee votes — and the winner still remains unclear. In those cases, it’s likely AP won’t be able to say who has won until election officials certify the results — a process that may take up to several weeks after Election Day.
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Here’s the thing about recounts: They might be required by law; they might be requested by a candidate; they might be ordered by a court. But they’re not very likely to do anything but drag out the inevitable. “Recounts are shifting a very small number of votes,” said Deb Otis of the nonpartisan organization Fair Vote. “We’re going to see recounts in 2024 that are not going to change the outcome.” They almost never do. In the 36 recounts of a statewide general election since America’s most famous recount in 2000, none moved the margin by more than a few hundred votes. The average change? Just 0.03 percentage points. The biggest? A move of 0.11 points in the 2006 race for Vermont state auditor — a rare race that did flip as a 137-vote lead in the initial count for Republican Randy Brock became a 102-vote recount win by Democrat Thomas Salmon.
Estimated vote
Looking for “precincts reporting” when watching as results are reported in this year’s election? Chances are, you’ll find an estimate of “expected vote” instead. The Associated Press and other news organizations have moved away from precincts reporting as a measure of election turnout for several reasons — the fact that well more than half of voters no longer cast their ballot in person at a neighborhood “precinct” on Election Day chief among them. Instead, AP will estimate how much of the vote election officials have counted — and how many ballots they have left to count — based on a number of data points, including details on advance ballots cast, registration statistics and turnout in recent elections. Those estimates will change as votes are counted and more information about the exact number of ballots cast becomes available.
When we’ll know
More often than not, in a nation as evenly divided as the United States, not on Election Day — or, at the least, not on Election Day on the East Coast. Since it took 36 days for George W. Bush’s win in the 2000 presidential race to play out in Florida and before the Supreme Court, only in Barack Obama’s two victories has AP declared a White House winner before midnight Eastern Time. Donald Trump didn’t win until 2:29 a.m. ET in 2016, and he didn’t lose in 2020 until the Saturday morning after Election Day — that’s how long it took for Joe Biden to claim 270 electoral votes by emerging as the clear winner in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the sheer number of U.S. representatives from California — a state where officials will be counting mail ballots for weeks — could make for a long wait to know which party will control the House.