After months and months of an especially tight race, many of us are just ready for Election Day to be over — but getting the results could very well take some time.
As you might recall, due to the coronavirus, it took five days before most major outlets issued an official projection of Joe Biden’s win in 2020. Though the limitations of peak pandemic have since receded, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have results ASAP. Each state has its own rules about how and when election officials can tabulate ballots, and some of those rules have been in flux over the course of this campaign cycle. For example, Georgia passed a law requiring election workers to count ballots by hand after voting is completed, a potentially time-consuming requirement that was later struck down by a judge before voting even started.
We took a closer look at what you can expect on Tuesday — and whether you should be concerned about any post-election violence.
When will the election results come in?
We likely won’t know all of the election results the night of — and while that may be frustrating, it’s completely normal. State laws impact how quickly votes are processed and counted. For instance, Florida starts preprocessing ballots 22 days before Election Day, meaning the state can quickly turn around its results. However, other battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t allow election officials to start this until Election Day.
Once all that counting is complete, media outlets want to call the results quickly, but they also want them to be called correctly. Major media outlets typically don’t make a call until they’re positive the lagging candidate cannot win — a standard that social media users (or the candidates themselves) don’t typically hold themselves to.
Data specialist Ken Block is the author of Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections. He says the best-case scenario is that a winner is called by the end of the week, though he adds that requests for recounts could drag out the process in key swing states.
“I don’t know that we’ve had elections that have been this consistently close across so many different swing states,” Block tells us. “In 2020, less than 20,000 votes determined the winner in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. There were bigger numbers in other states: Pennsylvania had 80,000 votes, and Michigan had 150,000 votes. North Carolina is now a swing state that’s too close to call, and Trump won that state by about 70,000 votes. So I strongly suspect we’re going to see recount requests in each of those states.”
But the good news is that there is generally only one recount per state, and once those results are certified, there’s no constitutionally legal way to contest them. “Mercifully, what that means for everybody is that by the first week of December, any valid legal challenge to the deadline will have passed, so any challenges beyond that can’t possibly impact the results,” Block says.
What about legal challenges?
After losing the 2020 election, Trump’s allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results before a violent mob of supporters attacked the Capitol. Now, it looks like his campaign is already planning to fight the outcome once again if he loses, as seen by Republican lawsuits challenging state voter rolls and Trump’s continual claims of voter fraud
Block knows these allegations well because Trump hired him four years ago to find voting fraud — and Block debunked them instead. It all started a day after the 2020 election, when the Trump campaign called Block up and asked him to review fraud allegations in swing states, including Georgia, where Biden won. He ultimately concluded that every single claim the Trump campaign made was false.
That’s not to say voter fraud doesn’t happen — there have been individual cases. For instance, during the 2022 midterms, Block identified 45 voters in Arizona who voted twice, and 37 of those were cast by Republicans. But he also emphasizes that “we have never seen organized voter fraud on the scale that many Republicans are worried about, or claim is happening.”
“Many new claims of massive voter fraud have already been made. Every one of them I have looked at has been false,” he tells us. “Real voter fraud is detectable, quantifiable, and verifiable. Any claims that fall short of this are nothing more than words.”
For more on the legal issues that could pop up after a winner is called, catch Katie’s full interview with Neal Katyal below:
Will there be any post-election violence?
Amid these claims of voter fraud, federal officials are already sounding the alarm about potential violence after the election.
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence warned that extremist rhetoric could motivate people to “engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle.” In fact, election denialism alone jumped by 317 percent on the platform Telegram, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks such content.
Meanwhile, some pro-Trump activists have already been alluding to more violent chaos. For instance, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn said last week that he expects the former president would win all 50 states if there’s a fair election, but he offered a grim prediction if announcing the winner takes days.
“I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting, and there could actually be violence because people are so upset after 2020,” Flynn said.
While we’re seeing some disturbing trends, there are new guardrails to prevent another insurrection this time. In 2022, Congress passed a measure that makes overturning a certified presidential election harder. Plus, Trump isn’t an incumbent, meaning he doesn’t have the executive branch of the government at his disposal to try and sway the outcome.
“People didn’t go along with it last time. State officials resisted. The state legislators resisted,” UCLA law professor Richard Hasen told NBC. “And of course, some of the people that got involved have been charged with crimes. So that’s got to be a deterrent for some people.”
