(Bloomberg) -- If the US electorate is as closely divided between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump as polls have suggested, Election Day will soon turn into Election Night, which could then become Election Week.
The process of translating the collective will of the nation’s voters into a mandate for the 47th US president is anything but simple, in part because there’s no such thing as a national election in the US. Instead, there are 51 different presidential elections held the same day, one in each state and the District of Columbia. Each one follows its own rules on where, when and how ballots are cast, which can impact when they count votes and report results. The way votes are tabulated can also produce so-called mirages, the appearance that a candidate has a lead somewhere which proves illusory.
Add in the peculiarities of the Electoral College and a close outcome could provide suspense through Dec. 17, or even beyond.
When do the polls close on Nov. 5?
Each state sets its own polling times. The first polls are scheduled to close in Kentucky and Indiana at 6 p.m. New York time. The final precinct is set to close on the Aleutian island of Adak, Alaska — the westernmost polling place in the US — at 1 a.m. New York time on Nov. 6.
Voters will be allowed to vote as long as they were in line as of closing time. And all of these times could be extended by court order under certain circumstances.
When do states start reporting results?
Most states can start reporting their running counts within minutes after polls close, but there are local complexities.
In Kentucky and Indiana, for example, counties in the Eastern time zone will start reporting vote counts even while voters in the Central time zone are still casting ballots. Other states — including Alabama, Alaska, Oregon and South Dakota — typically hold off on reporting any results until all counties have voted. And in Arizona and Idaho, state laws require officials to wait an hour after polls have closed before reporting any results.
How long will it take to determine who’s won?
If the last presidential election in 2020 is any indication, it could take days. That year, the Associated Press — the unofficial and yet widely accepted real-time scorekeeper of US elections — didn’t declare Joe Biden the winner until the Saturday after Tuesday voting. If this election is closer than that one, as many polls suggest, it may take even longer.
In 2020, Pennsylvania was the holdup. New voting laws instituted that year because of the pandemic expanded early and absentee voting, yet the state didn’t (and still doesn’t) allow local election officials to process those votes until Election Day, leading to delays in the vote count.
While those laws haven’t changed, Pennsylvania election officials expect the 2024 count to go faster. With the pandemic over, the state expects fewer mail-in ballots and has invested in updated vote-counting equipment. “The good news this year is that we’ve had four more years of practice,” said Kathryn Boockvar, who oversaw Pennsylvania elections in 2020 and now works on election issues for the Center for Internet Security.
But other states — notably the swing states of Arizona and North Carolina — have since enacted laws that could slow the vote counting by creating additional steps for tabulating votes cast before Election Day.
It could take even longer to determine who controls Congress than the White House. The division between Republicans and Democrats in the two chambers is historically close, and the election could come down to late-arriving votes in a handful of seats.
Why does it take so long to determine a winner?
Some votes require additional processing time. These include:
► Provisional ballots. A provisional ballot is cast by a voter when there’s some question about the validity of their vote on Election Day. It often requires more investigation about the voter’s registration status or precinct.
► Mail-in ballots. These are usually sent in by voters inside two envelopes — with the inner one containing the voter’s signature, which needs to be verified. Some states allow mail-in ballots to be preprocessed and then counted on Election Day or earlier (though in that case, the count is kept secret until all eligible voters have had a chance to cast a ballot). Others prohibit election officials from even opening the envelopes until the polls close. In either case, officials also need to check that the voter hasn’t also cast a vote in person. Some states require mail-in votes to be received by Election Day. Others allow votes to be counted as long as they’re postmarked by the time the polls close, making it difficult to predict how many ballots are outstanding and when they’ll arrive.
► Overseas ballots. US military personnel and American citizens living abroad are entitled to have their votes counted if they’re postmarked by Election Day and received within 13 days under a 1986 law known as UOCAVA — the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. That means the earliest any state can certify its results is Nov. 19. The latest, under a 2022 law intended to avoid a contentious replay of the 2020 election, is Dec. 11.
In a close election with high voter turnout, provisional and absentee ballots can strain election counting systems. That’s what happened in 2020, when seven in ten voters cast a ballot before Election Day, either in person or by mail.
How many people voted early this year?
Nearly 81 million voters already cast ballots before the polls opened on Election Day, either by mail, absentee ballot or at an early voting center, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. That’s more than half the expected total turnout, though short of the 70% who cast non-traditional ballots during the pandemic-shaped election of 2020.
Still, another 67.2 million voters have requested mail-in ballots voted that they haven’t yet returned. In most states, voters need to return those ballots by the time the polls close — or else cast a vote in person — although 18 states will count mail-in ballots as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.
How likely is a ‘red mirage’?
It’s called a mirage when one candidate jumps out to a quick lead based on an unrepresentative sample of the first votes counted. If it’s the Republican candidate getting a deceptive early lead — which is often but not always the case — it’s called a “red mirage.” When results swing the other way in such a case, it’s called a “blue shift.”
There can be a number of causes for mirages. Votes aren’t counted in random order, and the sequence of counting can produce misleading early results. Precincts closest to county election offices can get their ballots in first, electronic votes can be counted quicker than paper ballots, and smaller precincts report faster than bigger ones. Weather, poll worker fatigue and other factors can also affect the pace of vote counting in some places and not others.
Then there are those mail-in votes, which tend to favor Democrats. The different state rules about how mail-in votes are processed can lead to mirages of different types.
Pennsylvania provided a stark example of a mirage in 2020. At midnight on election night, then-President Trump held a 13-point lead over Joe Biden in the state, with 43% of the vote counted. But Biden slowly eroded that lead as officials slowly processed the mail-in vote. The Associated Press finally called the state — and with it the presidency — for Biden four days later.
This pattern led to some conspiracy theories in 2020, as Trump questioned the provenance of ballots that were counted late. Trump attributed them to “surprise ballot dumps,” but election officials and even some Trump campaign staffers had been warning for months that mirages were likely. And a Trump-appointed federal appeals judge found that his campaign never alleged — much less proved — that votes for Biden were handled any differently than votes for Trump.
Who calls the winner?
Results aren’t official until they’re certified by election officials, a process that can take as long as five weeks — or longer, if there’s a court challenge. But most people want to know the winner long before that — no one more so than the president-elect, who needs time to prepare a transition to power.
The Associated Press has called every presidential election since Zachary Taylor in 1848, and has since become the most widely accepted authority on who’s winning which race.
The AP, a news cooperative of which Bloomberg News is a member, is able to do that by positioning 4,600 correspondents at boards of elections across the country. In past decades, those reporters would watch the ballots being counted and call in the results as they came in.
Nowadays, the AP collects data both from correspondents and from state and local election agency websites. Because that process is less labor-intensive, the AP has competitors such as Decision Desk HQ. A private company founded in 2012, DDHQ boasts of providing earlier race calls but has a shorter record of doing so accurately.
Collecting real-time returns is only part of the challenge. A team of experts at the AP and at each of the US television networks — known as “decision desks” — separately combine those returns with historic voting patterns and exit polls to call a winner. That’s why they’re able to call some races as soon as the polls close, even before a single vote is counted.
Calling the results in the closely contested swing states — which this year are considered to be Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — could take especially long.
Bloomberg News relies primarily on the Associated Press but will also “call” a state if two or more established TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN or Fox) announce a winner.
One curiosity, of course, is that the Nov. 5 election actually determines not who is president but which so-called electors get to cast a vote in the Electoral College. Those electors are scheduled to meet on Dec. 17 in their state capitals to cast their votes for president and vice president.
Even then, the race isn’t over. An elector has, on rare occasions, cast a vote for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector was pledged. If no candidate gets a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives would determine the presidency in a so-called Contingent Election. The presidential contest won’t be final until Jan. 6, when Congress is scheduled to meet to receive the electoral votes and certify the winner.
Could the race calls be wrong?
The Associated Press says its calls are not projections or predictions; winners are declared only when it determines there’s no way the trailing candidate can win.
Still, bad data sometimes leads to errant calls. The AP has had to retract a small number of the thousands of race calls it makes on election night, for an accuracy rate of more than 99.9%. Most retracted calls happen in low-profile races, but in an exception, the AP had to retract its call that Representative David Valadao of California had defeated Democratic challenger TJ Cox in 2018.
In 2020, Fox News and the AP called Arizona for Biden early on the morning after Election Day, a call widely seen as premature but ultimately correct.
Four television networks called Florida for Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000 before quickly backtracking. Bush eventually won the state — and the election — after a weeks-long court battle ending in the US Supreme Court.
And in perhaps the most famous race-call blunder, early editions of the Chicago Tribune picked the wrong winner of the 1948 election, giving then-President Harry Truman an iconic photo op.
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