The very long night of November 5: When will the result of the presidential election be announced?

American election enthusiasts know the name Steve Kornacki well. The MSNBC political analyst turns every election into a media phenomenon on social networks through his late-night passion and his digital screen, with which he offers detailed interpretations of the votes that are being counted across the country. Kornacki has issued a warning for Tuesday, November 5: it will be a very long night. “If we are in suspense and the math of the Electoral College depends on Arizona and/or Nevada, it will take a long time [...] It will become a process of days,” Kornacki said on Sunday.

Five of the seven swing states that will determine the outcome of the election are in the east of the country. These will be the first to open the electoral packets to count the votes after the polls close. Georgia will start the process at 7 p.m. ET. With 16 votes in the Electoral College, there will be a good measure of certainty there because local authorities allow the advance processing of ballots from in-person voting and those sent by mail. Four million people have already voted in Georgia in the three weeks prior to November 5, which indicates that there will be a very high turnout. That vote has to be counted an hour later. It is expected that a good percentage will be counted in the early hours of Wednesday. Despite everything, there are other possible scenarios. In 2020, the vote count in Georgia lasted 10 agonizing days due to the large number of mail-in votes that arrived. This year, this form of voting decreased by 75% in favor of early voting, but in person.

There will be a very brief respite until the next state closes polls: North Carolina, at 7:30 p.m. ET, where there are 16 Electoral College votes at stake. The scenario will be similar to that of Georgia: early voting has also skyrocketed, with 4.4 million people already casting ballots. Throughout the night, the votes cast on Tuesday will be counted.

Georgia and North Carolina were the last to complete their vote counts in 2020. They did so on November 13, 10 days after the election. The huge influx of mail-in votes bogged down the process that gave Joe Biden the presidency after days of uncertainty. After that, several states undertook reforms to speed up the processing of ballots.

Pennsylvania — with 19 Electoral College delegates, the biggest prize at stake — has been the most-courted state by both candidates. Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have visited it 35 times during the campaign; Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have done so on 40 occasions. Democrats and Republicans held several events there on Monday, the last day of the campaign. The decisive results will have to wait until after the polls close at 8 p.m. Local laws indicate that electoral officials must wait until 7 a.m. on Election Day to begin processing the postal vote, which tends to favor the Democrats. This, just over two million votes, will be announced first after the closing of the polling stations. The updates in the hours after will be a mix between the counting of the mail-in vote and the in-person vote on November 5.

Compared to 2020, there are 500,000 fewer postal votes this year, which has generated some optimism that the counting could be faster. Pennsylvania was the state that ended up tipping the balance in Biden’s favor four years ago. The Democratic president had to wait until Saturday morning, four days after the election, to find out that he had won there.

Michigan is one of the states that has changed its rules since the last election. With 15 Electoral College votes, it will be decisive for a third consecutive time. Polls close at 8 p.m. ET and 9 p.m. elsewhere (the state spans two time zones). Officials changed laws to give poll workers eight days before Election Day to process mail-in ballots (an estimated 2.5 million have already been tabulated since Monday, October 28). This gives them a window to avoid the delay of 2020, when they received 3.3 million such ballots. These results, however, cannot be known until Tuesday evening. Local laws also indicate that an automatic recount will be conducted if the difference between the two candidates is 2,000 votes or fewer.

There will also be news from Wisconsin at 9 p.m. ET, where 10 Electoral College votes are up for grabs. Seventy percent of the 3.3 million votes cast in 2020 that gave Biden victory had already been counted and reported by midnight on Tuesday, November 3, Election Day. This year, results may take a few more hours because of changes made for the 2022 midterm elections. Some cities are now sending early in-person votes and absentee ballots to be counted at a single site after the state polls close. The designated site is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, where results are processed, which could happen around 2 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

The Western States

There are 17 Electoral College votes at stake between Arizona and Nevada. Harris or Trump could emerge as the winner if the high turnout pushes them to conquer four or five eastern states. But if the polls are right, the campaigns will have to wait to find out in the West, where the rush to find out the winner will be buried by a mountain of mail-in ballots and other local measures adopted to give certainty and security to the results.

Arizona (11 Electoral College votes) closes its polls at 9 p.m. ET, but doesn’t start issuing results until an hour later, after all voting precincts have reported to the Secretary of State, the election authority. This will be an especially long day. There are so many issues on the ballot that this time there are actually two, as it takes up two pages (Pennsylvania’s is also two pages, and they’ve calculated that it will take the average voter about 12 minutes to complete).

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has warned that it will take officials 10 to 13 days to count every ballot. “It’s always been this way,” Fontes said this week. What has changed, in his view, is the closeness of the election. Biden became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996 to win the state in 2020. He did so by 0.3% over Trump, less than 11,000 votes. Unless the Republican or Harris wins by a comfortable margin, which at this point seems far from certain, we will have to wait days — not hours — to know the result.

At 10 p.m. it is Nevada’s turn, the least populous of the seven states that will decide the name of the next president and where one million of its 3.2 million residents have already voted early. The state made permanent in 2021 a pandemic rule requiring a ballot to be sent to every registered voter. Eighty percent of those who participated in the 2022 midterm elections voted early in-person or by mail. Ballots postmarked by November 5 will be valid and counted up to four days later, on November 9. This can delay the outcome of the closest races by several days. Two years ago, it was necessary to wait four days to find out who won the Senate seat. Patience will also be vital in this election week.

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