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On November 3rd, 2020, hundreds of millions of Americans will all make their way to their
local polling stations to cast their votes—deciding who will be the next President of the United
States of America.
That day will be the cumulation of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar election process, but
before that all truly ends, the votes need to be counted and the winner has to be declared.
As soon as the first polls close at 6:00 PM eastern time, there begins a massive overnight
exercise to count hundreds of millions of votes and, typically, declare who will next
lead the country by the early hours of the following morning.
While the true effort doesn’t start until the early evening of voting day, the first
results come in the early morning of election day, before most polls have even opened.
A few small towns on the East Coast—most famously Dixville Notch, New Hampshire—all
compete to be the first precinct in the US to report results.
New Hampshire state law allows polling places in the state to close early as long as all
registered voters have cast their ballots.
Given that the town only has a dozen or so registered voters, this process is typically
finished in minutes or seconds.
In front of a cluster of cameras from nearly every major news organization, the votes are
read out and tallied.
The process of counting a dozen or so paper ballots in a small town is not tough, but
a few hours later, the rest of the country’s polling locations will open—each of which
eventually has to accurately count up to thousands of votes.
What makes the US election so difficult to conduct right is that there are over 178,000
individual voting precincts, each of which can and does do things in a slightly different
way.
Some use paper ballots that have to be read and interpreted manually, some use paper ballots
that are scanned by a machine, some use electronic voting machines, and some even allow for absentee
voting over the internet.
The selection of a voting method is a difficult balancing act—hand-written paper ballots
are simple and cheap which means that a polling station can process loads of voters at once,
but they’re much more difficult to count.
Electronic voting machines are expensive and complicated meaning they’re often in short
supply, leading to longer lines, but counting and reporting the votes happens almost instantaneously.
Also a major concern in the selection of voting method is security.
The most secure ballot is no doubt a handwritten paper one, as submitting a fraudulent vote
involves physically acquiring and submitting a ballot—something that can’t be easily
done at a large scale.
Arguably the least secure method is electronic voting machines as anything electronic can
be hacked.
Almost every voting machine out there has been hacked in some way or another in controlled
experiments at hacker conventions such as Defcon.
In the real world, it’s impossible to know for sure how often voting security has been
compromised, but we do know that these machines can be hacked which is why still today much
of the US votes the same way it did hundreds of years ago—on paper ballots.
First to close their polling places will be parts of Indiana and Kentucky at 6:00 PM eastern.
The second that happens, everything shifts into counting mode.
Both states use a mix of optical scan and direct record electronic voting machines.
For example, the majority of Kentucky’s machines are Hart InterCivic eScan’s.
These are those optical scan electronic machines where a voter physically fills out a paper
ballot, shading in bubbles for their preferred candidates, then feeds the sheet into a machine
which scans the responses, and then records and tallies the votes.
In Indiana, however, the majority of their machines are Microvote Infinity’s, which
are examples of direct record electronic machines.
These are fully electronic machines where the voter selects their candidates of choice
on the screen before pressing a button to cast their votes.
Once 6:00 PM rolls around, though, the machines’ voting modes will be turned off, they will
print out a physical paper backup displaying the tally of votes for each candidate, and
the poll workers will remove a sort of memory device that stores the totals.
Every step of this process has to be witnessed by multiple people, usually of different political
parties.
These papers and memory devices are all then packed up in sealed envelopes and gathered
together.
From there, the votes need to make it to a central vote-counting location.
Usually, they’re driven there by the county’s police to assure there is no interference.
That works in most places, but not all.
For example, anyone who’s been in Los Angeles in the early evening, when their polls close,
knows that it would take hours to get a vehicle from Gorman, on the northern end of Los Angeles
County, to Norwalk, where votes are tallied.
Therefore, the county uses helicopters to fly voting records to Norwalk from across
the county, and therefore ends up spending many millions of dollars on each election
day.
Traffic is less of a concern in Indiana and Kentucky, though, and so, not long after 6:00
PM eastern, votes will start arriving at their central counting locations where all the memory
devices will be plugged into a tabulating computer that will record the results.
They’ll also add in the results from early and absentee voting as well.
Given the electronic nature of this count, once votes have physically arrived at the
site, the process doesn’t take long, but throughout it all, it will be observed by
a bipartisan grouping of poll workers and officials.
Of course, the way the world hears about the results of the election is not via the government
itself, but rather through the media.
Almost always, the media tells the public who will win the election before all the votes
have come in, and they make this call based off two key pieces of information.
The first is election-day polling.
There are two competing systems of polling.
The first is the Associated Press’ VoteCast system—a relatively new method where voters
are polled at home via the internet and phone in the days leading up to election day—and
the second is the National Election Pool system used by ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
This system uses the more traditional exit-poll method where individuals leaving polling stations
are asked who they voted for, in an attempt to gather a representative sample.
Both of these systems give media organizations an idea of how voters are leaning on election
day, and help them know where the results are likely to swing.
The second major data-point used to project election results are the results themselves.
A small sampling of results from a county should be roughly representative of the county’s
results overall.
The Associated Press stations about 4,000 of its reporters in vote-counting centers
all across the country, and as soon as these counties report results, the reporters call
them in to the AP’s office in Spokane, Washington.
There, one of hundreds of data entry personnel will answer the phone and put the information
into the AP’s system.
These data, which may at the time of entry be unofficial, are used by news organizations
all around the world.
Throughout the rest of the night, results will come in precinct by precinct and the
AP will call the results precinct by precinct.
The last polls close at 1:00 AM eastern time in Alaska, however, more than likely, the
country will already know who has won the election by that time.
The AP’s DC bureau is in charge of calling the race.
They’ll one-by-one declare each state won for one candidate or the other.
Some states they’ll know from the second polls close which way they’ll go.
For example, in 2016, the highly democratic states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware,
and Maryland along with the District of Columbia were all called for Clinton by the AP the
very minute polls closed in those places at 8:00 pm eastern.
The AP just knew off of historical voting trends and exit polling that they would certainly
go blue.
Meanwhile, battleground states, with a fairly even mix of democrats and republicans, tend
to be trickier to call and require a good proportion of actual results to come in.
For example, Minnesota’s results in 2016 weren’t called until 11:09 AM eastern and
Alaska’s not until 11:58 AM eastern on the day after the election.
Far before the last state is called, through, the combination of electoral votes designated
to the called states will exceed the required majority, 270, and at that time, the AP will
send out what they call a, “flash.”
These are the very highest tier of AP alerts, reserved for, as they describe it, events
they, “expect to be one of the very top stories of the year.”
The AP averages less than two flashes a year, and such an alert has been used for events
like the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the resignation of Pope Benedict, and the death of Nelson
Mandela.
It is not always the AP who is the first to call the race, but more often than not, they
are the first major news organization to declare a winner.
Historically, this tends to happen between 9:00 and 11:00 pm eastern, but sometimes much
later, and sometimes much earlier.
From there, tradition kicks in and the loser calls the winner, the winner throws a party,
and the next day the sitting President calls the President elect.
The true, official results might not come in for days or weeks as the states work to
tally every vote—not reliant on probability.
The moment that happens, though, the clocks reset and the US and world again begins the
four-year process leading up to the election of the next American president.
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