Voting in the tumultuous presidential race between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will come to a close on Tuesday. Then the waiting game begins.
Spurred both by a high-interest election and the restrictions surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented number of Americans have voted early this year — an estimated 90 million as of Saturday evening, according the U.S. Elections Project — breaking records across the country.
But the massive expansion of early voting, coupled with the varying rules states have for counting absentee ballots, could delay the results on election night — casting even more uncertainty over an already turbulent election.
“If one candidate has won fairly easily, we’ll have a good idea of that relatively early in the evening because states like Florida and North Carolina and Arizona are counting their absentee ballots now,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Election Reform Program.
But in the event of a tighter contest that falls to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — key battleground states that Trump carried by just 80,000 votes in 2016 — different rules for ballot processing mean “it’s going to take at least a few days to have most of the unofficial count complete,” Norden said.
Election night will likely focus early on Florida, which is accustomed to a large number of mail-in ballots and where processing has already been underway for weeks.
“Basically by 10 o’clock on election night, we’ll have a pretty good idea of where Florida stands,” said University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman.
Analysts say the Sunshine State, always a key swing vote, could be even more of a key indicator this year, because “if Trump loses Florida, it’s basically over,” Coleman said. “He doesn’t have a lot of realistic paths to re-election if he loses Florida.”
The closer the race is, the more the focus will shift to the swing states in the Rust Belt — and the longer it will take to get a clear picture of the results. Absentee ballots can’t be processed until Monday in Michigan and Tuesday in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, potentially dragging out the count for days.
“We’re not going to have final results on election night,” said Marian Schneider, a former Pennsylvania deputy secretary of state in charge of elections.
Schneider said county election supervisors have brought in more scanners and hired more workers to help speed things up in the general election after a problematic primary election.
But while the results should come in “reasonably quickly,” Schneider said that could still take about a week.
And it’s not just when ballots can be processed that could affect the timeline for getting results. The order in which ballots are tallied also varies by state — leading experts to warn about skewed results early in the night.
A “red mirage” could emerge in some states that count the ballots cast on Election Day first, giving Trump an early lead that experts say would eventually narrow. But the opposite could hold true in states that tally early ballots first — a scenario that’s likely to favor Biden until more in-person results are processed.
“The blue mirage at the very least should work itself out late Tuesday or early Wednesday,” said John Lappie, a political science professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. But the red mirage “could last for days.”
Trump has signaled that he wants courts to stop states from counting ballots past election night — but experts say that’s not how American elections work even in a normal year.
“We’ve been counting ballots after Election Day if not for decades, for centuries,” said Tammy Patrick of the Democracy Fund, adding that anyone who says otherwise “doesn’t understand how American elections work” and is seeking “to undermine the confidence in the integrity of our elections.”
And it’s not just the influx of mail-in ballots that could delay the results. Legal battles and automatic recount triggers could also protract the process in a narrow race.
“Both sides are loaded to the hilt with lawyers,” said Todd Belt, director of George Washington University’s political management program. “The longer this draws out, the more of a chance there is to call into question the process and open up the path for legal activity.”
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November 01, 2020 at 07:05AM
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