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Former President Donald Trump is increasingly demanding that the winner of the presidential race be declared soon after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.
Trump set the tone in 2020, when he declared he had won early the morning after Election Day. This led his allies to demand that the authorities stop the count! He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him this election and bemoaning the length of time it was taking to count ballots in the United States.
But one of the many reasons we're unlikely to quickly know the winner on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another reason is that most indications are that this will be a very close election and that it will take longer to determine who won in close elections than in blowout elections.
Ultimately, election experts note, the priority in counting votes is to ensure an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after the polls close.
There's nothing nefarious about that, said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The delay is intended to protect the integrity of the process.
Trump's request also doesn't appear to take into account the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of The Big Truth, debunking Trump's 2020 election lies, said it's unrealistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million of multi-page ballots with dozens of races in progress. them.
Trump wants the race to be decided Tuesday night
At a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls closed.
They are to be decided Tuesday evening at 9 p.m., 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., Trump said. A bunch of crooked people. They are crooked people.
It was not clear who he was targeting with this remark about crooked people.
The timing is an example of why Trump's demands don't match the reality of how elections are conducted in the United States. At 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just close in the two western swing states, Arizona and Nevada.
Trump has led conservatives to lament that the United States does not count elections as quickly as France or Argentina, where recent election results were announced hours after polls closed. But that's because these countries only count one election at a time. America's decentralized system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.
Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own elections for the state Legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to be tabulated at the same time. This is why it takes longer for the United States to count votes.
Declaring a winner can take time
The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can close the gap. Sometimes, if a candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be quickly determined. But if the margin is narrow, then every vote could count. It takes a while for every vote to be counted, even in the country's most efficient jurisdictions.
In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state that conservatives regularly praise for its quick count. But the AP didn't call Scott a victory until after a recount concluded on Nov. 20 because Scott's margin was so slim.
It also takes time to count each of the millions of votes, because election officials must process contested or provisional ballots and verify whether they were legitimately cast. Ballots from military personnel or other U.S. citizens abroad may arrive at the last minute. Mail-in ballots usually arrive early, but there is a lengthy process to ensure they are not cast fraudulently. If this process does not start before Election Day, it may save the count.
Some states, like Arizona, also give voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match up to five days to prove they actually voted. This means that final figures simply cannot be available on Tuesday evening.
Election rules are to blame in some states
Part of this slowness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials have for years begged Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail-in ballots before Election Day. This means mail-in ballots are counted late and often results don't begin to be released until after Election Day.
Democrats traditionally dominate mail-in voting, making it seem like Republicans are in the lead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail-in votes are finally added to the tally. Experts have even given names to this phenomenon in past elections, the red mirage or the blue shift. Trump exploited this dynamic in 2020 when he asked his supporters to demand an abrupt halt to the vote count. The uncounted ballots were largely mail-in ballots intended for Joe Biden. It's unclear how that will play out this year, since Republicans have shifted and voted in large numbers in early voting.
Michigan once had similar restrictions, but after Democrats took control of the state Legislature in 2022, they lifted the ban on early processing of mail-in ballots. Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she hoped to have most of the results available by Wednesday.
Ultimately, it is the chief election officials who have the ability to deliver accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say, not what a specific candidate or person on the campaign says, said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Trump's allies urge him to declare victory quickly
Some Trump allies say he should be even more aggressive this time around when it comes to declaring victory.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who predicted in 2020 that the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, argued for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after his release from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.
President Trump arrived at 2:30 a.m. and spoke, Bannon said. He should have done it at 11 a.m. in 2020.
Other Trump supporters took a more somber tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing podcast American Truth Project that violence could erupt in states that are still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people just won't stand for it.
Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump victory, the former president and his supporters have touted early voting data and favorable polls to argue that the election is all but over. Republicans returned to early voting after largely following Trump's lead in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in early voting.
But that doesn't mean Republicans are significantly ahead. Early voting data doesn't tell you who will win an election, because it only records who voted, not how they voted.
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign explicitly targeted Republicans disillusioned with Trump. In each of the states where a greater number of Republicans voted, there are also a very large number of early voting voters who are not registered with either major political party. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more votes than Trump, it would erase the small lead Republicans have.
There is only one way to find out who won the presidential election: wait until enough votes are counted, when the time comes.