WITH less than a week to go until the US election, voters and onlookers are eager to know when a winner will be announced.
During the 2020 election voters were forced to wait nearly five days after Election Day to find out if Joe Biden or Donald Trump would be their next president.
Donald Trump at a Q&A at the National Faith Advisory Summit on October 28, 2024[/caption]
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Hemlock Semiconductor during a campaign stop on October 28, 2024, in Michigan[/caption]
As the pandemic brought with it an influx of mail-in votes, it took longer than normal for key states to announce their results.
But this year, experts believe the process should be quicker, meaning voters will not be on the edge of their seats for long.
“Things will be different this year,” Quinn Yeargain, an associate professor of law at Michigan State University told The Hill.
“It may not be as quick as 2022. Famous last words I suppose, but I would be surprised if the process took as long as it did in 2020.”
However, the associate professor noted that in the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the outcome was “quite clear” before the announcement by networks on the following Saturday.
“There was no real question as to what was going to happen probably after Wednesday afternoon or Thursday,” he said.
Prior to 2020, it was not uncommon for election results to be called late Tuesday night or early on Wednesday morning by major news outlets.
One exception to this was the election in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore which had a 36-day wait as Florida recounted the ballots.
However, 2020 was different largely due to altered voting policies due to the pandemic.
Officials were largely unprepared to handle the new situation as last-minute changes were made in several states in order to ensure people could vote and follow health guidelines.
What followed was a historic increase in mail-in voting, with over 43% of voters opting for this method rather than in-person voting.
In the 2016 election, mail-in votes made up just a quarter of the ballots.
As a result of the sheer number of mailed votes in 2020, the counting process was much slower with some state laws dictating that mail-in ballots could not be opened or verified before Election Day.
“The volume was so high that it took a significant amount of time to fully deal with that, which is what opened up the possibility of more conspiracy theories about the election to proliferate,” Yeargain said.
In addition to this change in voting methods, the neck-and-neck nature of the 2020 race for the White House also made the race too close to determine even with many votes having been counted.
This is an issue that could similarly plague the 2024 election if current polls are accurate and any number of votes could make a difference to the outcome.
CHANGE OF PACE
What media outlets need to declare a definitive winner is for the uncounted number of votes to be too little to make a difference to the outcome.
This year, the majority of the states have altered their policies to ensure that mail-in votes can now be processed before Election Day, according to a report from the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
While this will not involve who the vote is for, it will mean that all signatures can be pre-verified, envelopes can be sorted, and ballots that have been completed incorrectly can be scrapped.
This part of the ballot counting process takes the longest and causes delays, Chris Mann the research director from the Center said.
“The important part that takes time is that processing to verify every ballot, to make sure that it is valid and completed, has all the information to verify the voter’s identity,” he explained.
According to the Center’s report, approximately half of all of the states allow for machines to scan the mailed-in ballots before Election Day as long as the results are not totalled.
This rule is in place in the major states of Michigan and Nevada, with the latter having the most mail-in votes of any state.
Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina have also ensured that ballots can be processed before Election Day.
However, mail-in votes from people in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cannot be processed ahead of time.
It is not yet known if mail-in votes will prove as popular as they were in 2020 but millions have already been received.
Currently, most polls show that Trump and Kamala Harris will be on a knife edge going into the final days of the gruelling election campaign.
A difference of just 1% between the two candidates is currently being reported by The New York Times.
Harris has a national polling average of 49% while Trump is close behind at 48%.
With polls as close as this, Americans will likely face a nail-biting wait to see who will be their next leader.
“We’re going to have to be patient, because it may not be as over as quickly as we want it to be,” Pete Seat, a former White House spokesperson told The Hill.
