Polls close between midnight and seven, Berlin time. The count takes weeks, by law

Today Americans vote for all 435 seats in the House, 35 Senate races and 36 governors, by the tally of poll-closing times kept by 270toWin¹. When you open this at breakfast in Berlin, the polls on the East Coast have not even opened. Nothing has been counted, and for a few hours more nothing can be. That makes this the right morning to look at the machinery rather than the mood.

Start with the clock. US clocks went back on Sunday, so Eastern time is now six hours behind Berlin. The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern, in the eastern parts of Indiana and Kentucky. In Berlin that is midnight¹. The last close at 1 a.m. Eastern in Alaska’s far west, 07:00 CET on Wednesday, as you reach for the coffee again¹. In between, the night comes in waves. The biggest is at 02:00 CET, when 161 House seats close, including Pennsylvania, Maine, most of Michigan and most of Texas¹.

Desk arithmetic: by 03:00 CET, polls will have closed for 352 of the 435 House seats (81%) and 31 of the 35 Senate races¹. Then comes the West: California and Washington alone close 69 House seats at 05:00 CET¹. If you go to bed at midnight and wake at seven, the shape of the night will be clear. Almost none of it will be official.

That is because there are two clocks, and only the first one is fast. The first is the media’s: projections drawn from unofficial returns, made when a margin is wide enough. The second is the law’s. Ballotpedia’s survey of state rules shows that only four states have a state certification date within a week of the election; 25 certify between 11 and 30 November; 16 states and the District of Columbia certify in December; and five set no date in statute³. Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming come first, on 10 November³. California’s secretary of state has until 11 December, and Mississippi’s last declaration falls on 31 December³. Pennsylvania’s counties must finish their computation by 19 November³. If a race is still “uncalled” on Thursday, the institutions are not late. They are on schedule.

The machinery has also had a busy weekend in court, and it held. On Monday the Supreme Court turned down the Justice Department’s request to make California set aside mail ballots from about 20,000 people on a federal list of alleged non-citizens². The order was one line, unsigned, with no noted dissents². A district judge had already called the government’s process “rife with uncertainty and errors”, and a divided appeals court had refused the same request². The 9th Circuit panel wrote that there was “no feasible way” to separate individual ballots “without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system”⁴. More than 6 million mail ballots had already been returned across California². On Sunday a federal judge in Anchorage dismissed a separate suit that sought to stop Alaska certifying its Senate result in certain circumstances^2,4. On Friday a judge in California issued a temporary restraining order, sought by election workers’ unions among others, that bars the Justice Department from threatening to prosecute election officials who do not follow its demands on alleged non-citizen voting⁴.

You do not need a view on the politics to see what this means for the count. The ordinary procedure was challenged in court three times in four days. Each time, a court left it alone. Confirmed cases of non-citizen voting are rare, CBS notes, and it is already a federal crime². The counting, in short, goes ahead under the same rules as before.

Then there are the ballots already in. Newsquawk, summarising the University of Florida tracker, put early ballots at 54.8 million on Monday, 56% of them cast in person⁴. Registered Democrats led registered Republicans among those voters by 46% to 35%⁴. That is a measure of who has turned up, not of how anyone voted. A party label on an envelope is not a vote in a box.

So here is a way to read tomorrow morning’s screens without being pushed about by them. For each state, ask three things. When did the polls close? What share of the expected vote has been counted? And when does the law say the count must be done? The first answer is in the chart above. The third is in a statute. The second is the only one that changes overnight, and it will rise in fits and starts as counties report in their own order and different states add different kinds of ballot at different times.

None of this needs heroics. It needs about a week of clerks in rooms with tables, envelopes, observers and logs. That is less exciting than a victory speech and much more reliable. The speeches tonight will come in Eastern time. The results will come in county time, and county time is what decides.