Three questions about the election results

If the polls are correct, it will be an extremely close election and we may not know who won on election night. And that gap between the end of the election and waiting for a winner can lead to a lot of misinformation or confusing data when the results come in. Here are a few questions and answers about what to look for on election night. Why is it taking longer than election night? There are several reasons why we may not know who won the presidential race on election night. How close the elections are in some states could depend on voting behavior. But it could also boil down to the simple process of counting and processing mail-in ballots. Now, in the 2020 election, voters across the country have switched to mail-in voting during the pandemic to cast their ballot safely. This method of voting continues to be popular this election, but different states have different laws governing how it can be counted. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two very important swing states. Election officials cannot begin processing ballots until the morning of Election Day, and that can create a backlog of ballots that need to be counted and tabulated. As news organizations try to make their decision on election night in a really close race, the final votes may come down to the wire. The second question is what happens if I believe the vote total has gone down. We would like to note that this is extremely rare, but there are times when mistakes can be made. They often get caught. Within minutes, The New York Times receives its election night results from its affiliated press, combining data from state and county election offices with the work of thousands of correspondents across the country. The AP then reviews these vote totals for any discrepancies. The Times also conducts its own review process to look for other inconsistencies or problems in published results. Reporting results is a careful process. But in the age of social media, a simple screenshot of one of these errors can create a disinformation landscape and undermine confidence in the final results of an election. The final question is: Why did one candidate seem to have the edge? And then at the last second there are a lot of votes for the other candidate. We can go back to Pennsylvania in 2020 to see what happened there. They were inundated with mail-in ballots that took a long time to count. And so on election night, most mail-in ballots from Democratic areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had not yet been counted. So it looked like former President Trump would win Pennsylvania. But as those ballots were counted from Democratic areas over the next four days, President Biden finally caught up and the race was called for him. This delayed reporting of results can sometimes lead to so-called mirages, when it appears that a particular candidate is in the lead simply because more ballots were counted and reported in their area than the other candidates. The timing of results can sometimes simply depend on where the votes were cast. In some states, rural areas upload their results faster than urban areas. In some states, they report mail-in ballots immediately. In other cases it could last until late at night or even in the coming days. And in some states, early in-person voting is reported at the same time. While it can be frustrating not to know who won the presidential election or who controls Congress within hours of the polls closing, the system simply works as it should, and it's important to know that you vote every time observation counts, and that is crucial for a healthy democracy.