This year’s US election vote count will be faster, but it still might take time to know who won

Ballots will be counted faster this year than in 2020 — but everyone should still be prepared for a long night, if not a couple days of waiting.

Fewer votes will be cast by mail compared with during the pandemic, and some states have tweaked their laws to speed up the count. The single biggest factor that will determine when Americans know the winner is, however, out of the control of election workers: the margin of victory in key states.

And this year’s close election means the last ballot could be determinative — which means waiting.

“It should be sooner, but also be patient,” said Barb Byrum, the Ingham County, Michigan, clerk. “It takes time to make sure that we are still following our security and our procedures.”

Here are the three biggest factors that will decide when the next president could be known.

We’re not in a pandemic anymore

The 2020 election was unprecedented on many fronts — but none more so than the fact that it happened right in the middle of a global pandemic.

It had a dramatic impact on voter behavior: For the first time in modern American history, the majority of voters cast a ballot before Election Day, either early in-person or by mail, according to data compiled by the federal Election Assistance Commission.

Mail voting shot up to a 43 percent plurality of all votes cast four years ago, up from under 26 percent in the 2018 midterms.

That surge contributed significantly to the dayslong wait for definitive results. Mail ballots are much more labor intensive to tabulate than in-person votes. Each individual mail ballot must be verified, removed from envelopes and loaded into a tabulator. That process happening millions of times quickly adds up.

But as the pandemic receded, the number of mail ballots fell.

Many voters who voted by mail returned to in-person voting, either on Election Day or during early voting. In 2022, 32 percent of Americans voted via the mail — a significant jump from 2018, but far lower than 2020. And this year, mail ballot requests are down in some key swing states.

That’s not to say processing mail ballots this year won’t take time. But the lower number of mail ballots — combined with the additional four years that election officials have had to refine their vote-counting processes — should make results available faster.

“The overwhelming majority of ballots were counted by Thursday afternoon or evening in 2020,” said Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania’s secretary of state in 2020, “and my guess is the overwhelming majority of ballots will be counted by Wednesday evening.”

Some big law changes — and some notable exceptions

The unprecedented rush of mail ballots four years ago was compounded by the fact that many battleground states didn’t allow for election officials to do a deceptively simple process: preparing mail ballots to be counted before Election Day.

Some states allow election officials to begin that time-consuming preprocessing — such as removing ballots from envelopes — before Election Day, while others require officials to wait. Having preprocessing or not could be the difference between getting results within hours, or the process stretching out over days.

Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin did not allow for any meaningful preprocessing of ballots in 2020.

This year, the vast majority of states do allow for ballot preprocessing, according to a tracker from the Voting Rights Lab. That now includes Michigan, which has a robust preprocessing timeline after voters overwhelmingly approved a 2022 ballot measure that overhauled election laws in the state.

But, to the frustration of election officials, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin still do not.

“Not every state is created equal, right?” said Carolina Lopez, the executive director at the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions and a former Florida official. “If you’re from Florida, you’re going to get results a little quicker, simply because we have 22 days of pre-processing. If you’re in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, by law, they’re not allowed to start until Election Day. It’s just a quick numbers game.”

Other things can slow down the count, too.

Sometimes, delays are inevitable thanks to voter behavior. Many Arizona voters, for example, receive their ballots via the mail. If they’re mailed back (or otherwise returned) well ahead of the big day, officials can run them through preprocessing and have them included in the first batch of results that are released shortly after polls close. Those typically make up the majority of votes cast in any given election.

But state law allows voters in Arizona to drop ballots off on Election Day or the day prior, something that not all states do. Those so-called “late early” ballots can’t go through preprocessing, and often aren’t reported until after Election Day because election officials often count them after polls close.

Officials are working to speed things up, even along the margins. Results from people who vote on Election Day often need to be rushed from individual polling places to a central counting location so they can be reported out.

“We’ve implemented having police escorts of our memory cards so that they get in faster from [polling] locations,” said Nadine Williams, the Fulton County, Georgia, elections director. “I think voters will expect to see our results up pretty early, compared to years before.”

It is all about the margins

The single most important thing that will determine how quickly the world will know the president is the margin. And particularly close elections mean a longer wait.

As election officials stress repeatedly, results have never been official on the night of any election. In fact, states will by law be counting at least some ballots after Election Day — certain military and overseas voters’ ballots that were in the mail by the election but received after are still counted.

But media outlets’ decision desks use the unofficial vote totals being reported, along with historical trends, exit polling and how many votes are outstanding, to project winners.

Many outlets, including POLITICO, rely on The Associated Press’ race calls. POLITICO may also declare a victor if three television networks, which all have their own decision desks, project a winner in a state.

Decision desks want to call elections quickly, but they also want to call them correctly. The major media outlets typically don’t make a call until they’re certain the trailing candidate cannot win — a responsibility social media users (or the candidates themselves) aren’t held to.

“We start with the fact that we’re not calling races until we’re certain that there is a winner,” David Scott, the executive who oversees The AP’s decision desk, told NPR recently. “If that means that we have to wait for all the ballots to be counted and a race to go all the way to certification, we wait.”

And tight margins — like the ones expected this year — mean desks are going to wait longer to make a call.

Just take Pennsylvania for example: In 2020, the AP declared that President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania — and, thus, the presidency — on the Saturday morning after the election. Two years later, the AP called Josh Shapiro’s gubernatorial victory a bit past midnight on Wednesday, just hours after polls closed.

The big difference? Biden won by just over a point — and Shapiro won by nearly 15.