Tomorrow night, slow is not suspicious

Tomorrow, Tuesday 3 November, Americans vote for all 435 members of the House and for the Senate seats on the ballot; Republicans defend a 218-214 House majority². The polls close tomorrow evening US time, which is the small hours of Wednesday in Berlin. Here is what to expect from the count, so that you are not surprised by the most ordinary thing in a democracy: waiting.

“States are neither fast or slow, they all count and certify the results in accordance with the laws passed by their state legislature,” the election technology expert Ryan Macias told PolitiFact¹. What is fast or slow is how soon the media has enough evidence to project a winner, and that depends mostly on the margin¹. No state is required to finish its official count on election night; certification deadlines are often weeks away¹.

The detail is in the rules. California accepts ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to a week later, and counties must report most results by the 13th day after the election¹. Alaska accepts ballots mailed from abroad for 15 days¹. Maine and Alaska both use ranked-choice voting, so a close race there can run into extra rounds¹. “There are always a handful of really close Senate and House races in which the winner will not be determined for several days or, in the cases of Alaska and California, as much as a week or two,” said Joe Lenski of SSRS, which runs a national exit poll¹.

Watch Michigan as a model of the dull machinery. Detroit, with more than half a million voters and 38 drop boxes, expects to report about 95% of ballots on election night¹. “It is an estimate, not a statutory deadline or guarantee,” said Daniel Baxter, the city’s elections chief of operations¹. A truck collects ballots from the boxes after polls close; that takes hours, and it is not a “ballot dump”¹. In 2020, a lead in Wisconsin flipped after Milwaukee finished its mail ballots around 3:30 a.m. local time, which was expected¹.

One thing already settled: a federal judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that sought to block certification in Alaska’s Senate race if the incumbent lost². So the instruction for Wednesday morning is simple. Read the count, not the claims about it. A late-night change in the lead is arithmetic arriving, not fraud.