Former President Donald Trump is pushing his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all votes are counted.
Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared he had won in the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and complaining about how long it takes to count ballots in the US.
But one of the many reasons we’re unlikely to know the winner anytime soon on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. This will make it appear as if Trump is in the lead initially, even if that changes as more votes are counted later. Another reason is that most indications are that this will be a very close election, and it will take longer to determine who won the election than the blowouts.
Ultimately, election experts note, the priority in counting votes is to ensure it is an accurate and secure count, not to end moments of tension after the polls close.
“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” 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 requirement also does not appear to take into account the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
These claims have nothing to do with election integrity and everything to do with making him president again, said David Becker, an election expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” which debunked Trump’s 2020 election lies.
‘When he is behind, he says: keep counting. If he’s ahead, he says stop counting,” Becker said. “But that’s not how it works.”
Becker said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “immediately snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”
Trump wants the race to be decided Tuesday evening
At a rally on Sunday in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded the race be decided shortly after some polling stations began closing.
“They have to be decided on Tuesday evening at 9:00, 10:00 and 11:00,” Trump said. “Bunch of corrupt people. These are corrupt people.”
It was not clear who he was targeting with the comment about “crooked people.”
Timing is an example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the US. Polls close in the two western swing states of Arizona and Nevada at 11 p.m. Eastern Time. It’s a big country and there’s simply no way to know who won those states immediately.
Trump has prompted conservatives to complain that the U.S. does not count elections as quickly as France or Argentina, where the results of recent elections were announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries only map 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 races in which the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures must be drawn up simultaneously. That’s why it takes longer for the US to count votes.
Declaring a winner may take some time
The Associated Press calls races when there is no chance the trailing candidate can close the gap. Sometimes, if a candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be quickly identified. But when the margin is small, every last vote can matter. 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 conservatives regularly praise for his quick score. But the AP did not call Scott’s victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott’s margin was so small.
It also takes time to count all the millions of votes, because election officials must process disputed or “provisional” ballots and see if they were cast legitimately. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad may trickle in at the last minute. Mail-in ballots usually arrive early, but there is a lengthy process to ensure they are not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn’t begin before Election Day, it could support the count.
Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because the signatures did not match within five days to prove they actually voted. That means final numbers may simply not be available Tuesday evening.
In some states, election rules are to blame
Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the key swing states, election officials have been pleading with Republican lawmakers for years to change the law that prevents them from processing their ballots before Election Day. That means mail-in ballots are counted late, and results are often not reported until after Election Day.
Because the Democrats dominate mail-in voting, it appears that the Republicans are in the lead there until the early hours of the next morning, when votes for the Democrats are finally added to the count. Experts even have names for this: the ‘red mirage’ or the ‘blue shift’. Trump tapped into that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counting — the ballots that weren’t counted were largely mail-in ballots destined for Joe Biden.
Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022, they lifted the ban on early processing of ballots. That state’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes most of the results will be available by Wednesday.
“Ultimately, the most important election officials are the people who are able to deliver accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not on what a specific candidate or people who are part of the campaign are saying,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Trump allies are urging him to quickly declare victory
Some Trump allies say he should be even more aggressive in declaring victory this time.
Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally who predicted in 2020 that the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated a similar strategy at a recent news conference after being released from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for contempt of Congress’ conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 loss.
“President Trump came at 2:30 in the morning and talked,” Bannon said. “He should have done it at 11 a.m. in 2020.”
Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “just won’t tolerate it. ”
In an effort to convey a sense of inevitability about a Trump victory, the former president and his supporters have touted early voting data and favorable polls to claim the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to early voting after staying away in 2020 and 2022 largely at Trump’s direction. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are out-voting Democrats in early voting.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. 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 those states where more Republicans voted, there are also huge numbers of early voters who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris were to win just a fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would wipe out the Republicans’ slim lead.
There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: wait until enough votes are counted, whenever that is.
