More than 100 million voters cast their ballots before Election Day, smashing previous records and indicating that 2020 will see the highest voter turnout in decades despite the coronavirus pandemic. With tens of millions of these advance votes coming by mail, election officials face unprecedented pressures to count votes in a timely manner. Those of us watching the results as they come in on election night must be prepared to wait for final returns. Below, we’ll explain what to expect in key states.
Daily Kos Elections' map of poll closing times shows when in-person voting ends in each state, but votes cast on Election Day will represent a minority of all votes for the first time in U.S. history. As shown on the tile map at the top of this post (see here for a larger version), roughly half of the states require mail ballots to be received by Election Day or earlier in order to count, but the other half accepts ballots so long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received within a specified timeframe—anywhere from one day to almost three weeks after. States also each have different deadlines for certifying their own vote totals, and federal law gives states until Dec. 8 to finalize their vote counts for the Electoral College.
But despite what Donald Trump thinks, no state finalizes its vote totals on election night. That will be especially true this year in states that will count a large number of mail ballots after Election Day. These delays could matter if races are close in the Electoral College, the battle to control the Senate, and further down the ballot.
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Three swing states in particular—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—are among the rare states where state law prevents election officials from preparing mail ballots for counting until just before or on Election Day. That's because Republicans in each of these states used their gerrymandered legislative majorities—which they hold despite Democrats winning more votes in each state in 2018—to reject pleas by each state's Democratic governor and lawmakers to allow election workers to begin processing such ballots in advance.
Because of these restrictions, these three key states likely won’t conclude their mail ballot counts until after many others do. Combined with Trump's demagoguery against mail voting, which led to many more Democrats voting by mail than Republicans, Trump and the GOP will likely lead on election night in each of these three states, even in the likely event that Joe Biden and Democrats ultimately prevail once all ballots are counted.
Trump has repeatedly signaled that he will try to overturn an election loss by falsely claiming victory on election night based on incomplete returns in these three Rust Belt swing states. They’re in fact already waging lawsuits in which they might seek to have the Supreme Court to throw out valid mail votes that haven’t been counted by Election Day.
Fortunately, Trump's scheme to corrupt the election outcome is not assured of success. Importantly, several major swing states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, expect to have the vast bulk of their votes counted by election night. Trump cannot afford to lose Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina and have any realistic hope of winning the Electoral College, and a loss in Arizona would require that he run the table in the Midwest. So keep a close eye on these four swing states on Tuesday evening.
For additional information on the timeline of what to expect with vote counting on Election Night and the coming days, see this state-by-state guide from FiveThirtyEight.
