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Election Day in the United States is now often considered Election Week, as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots — not to mention the legal challenges — that can delay the results. But the truth is, nobody knows how long it will take for the winner to be announced this time.
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While it is not unusual for results to take time in a presidential race, there are some clues you can look to for how the contest might unfold.
Look to two East Coast battleground states, North Carolina and Georgia, where the results could come in relatively quickly. That doesn't mean we'll get the final results in those states quickly if the returns are close, but they are the first swing states that might offer a sense of what kind of night we're in for.
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To go deeper, look to urban and suburban areas in the industrial North and Southeast, where Democrats have made gains since 2020.
In North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much former President Donald Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.
In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she's also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city. She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43% of Pennsylvania’s vote.
Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan's key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin's Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.
Changes to voter ID laws and the early voting process in North Carolina could slow vote counts.
Meanwhile, laws in key swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania mean clerks are unable to process mail-in ballots prior to Election Day. In 2020, those states were decided by approximately 20,000 and 80,000 votes, respectively.
“In other states, they can open them up, they can verify them. They can flatten them out, so all they have to do is run them through the scanners. In Pennsylvania, they can't even touch them," Democratic strategist Peter Giangreco said. "So, we're probably looking at Friday or Saturday before we know Pennsylvania.”
How can you track live election results?
As votes are counted, you can track updated results on NBC10 Boston's live election results page.
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Voters looking for real-time election updates can also download the NBC10 Boston app for push notifications as major races are called and big moments happen.
When will we know who the next president is?
Delays aren't unheard of in a presidential race, according to Dr. Kevin Boyle, chair of the history department for Northwestern University.
“There are a lot of stories of presidential candidates just going to bed not knowing whether they had won the presidency or not," he said.
In 2020, it took four days before Biden was officially called the winner. In 2000, results hinged on just 537 votes in Florida, with networks calling the state for Al Gore, then George Bush before ruling the race "too close to call."
There are many elections throughout the 19th and 20th centuries that weren't called on election night.
“Even as late as 1960, John Kennedy wasn't announced as the winner of the presidency until the next day," Boyle said. "Richard Nixon wasn't announced as the winner of the presidency in 1968 until the next day. And then what happened was kind of the explosion of exit polls, which made it easier to pick a winner faster, to name a winner faster. And a lot of elections weren't very close until 2000.”
Beyond delays in vote counts, experts also say legal challenges are likely before a final announcement is made.
Sharon McMahon, a podcast host and former educator known as “America’s Government Teacher," said there are a "very, very large myriad of lawsuits that are already in process and are going to be filed."
"There are already over 100 lawsuits in the works related to the election, and there is absolutely more that are on the desks of lawyers. They're just waiting to plug in the right details and waiting to file those," McMahon said. "If we think there were 60-plus lawsuits in the post-2020 election, there's probably going to be double that in this election.”
So what would it take to find out results sooner?
Giangreco said there's one scenario where results could come in closer to Election Day.
“Only if [Donald] Trump wins Wisconsin or Michigan," Giangreco said. "If he wins either those states, it's probably over with. And if we know those states on Wednesday, that'll probably be it. I think the most likely path for Kamala Harris to the presidency is the blue wall states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.”
Whether that will happen is unclear.
“This is what it comes down to: If the polls are right and things are even, there's a massive advantage for Harris on the ground, especially in the blue wall states, and I think that's her ticket to win. If there's the response bias that we did see in 2016 and we did see 2020, where the polls undercount Trump voters, then you could be looking that Trump's really up four or five points in all these states, and it'll be an electoral landslide for Trump, and maybe even a popular vote win. So either the polls are right and Harris's field operation is going to win it or the polls are wrong, and it's going to be a good night for Trump.”
One other potential scenario looms this fall: the "contingent election" of the president and the vice president that would happen if no one can secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election.
That has not happened in the modern era, but there are a few conceivable (if unlikely) paths across the Electoral College map that could lead to Trump and Harris ending the race tied at 269 electoral votes.
In the event of a tie, Congress would decide the next president.
Could there be unrest?
Trump has been aggressively promoting baseless claims in recent days questioning the integrity of the election. He falsely insists that he can lose only if Democrats cheat, even as polls show that show the race is a true toss-up.
Trump could again claim victory on election night regardless of the results, just as he did in 2020.
Such rhetoric can have serious consequences as the nation saw when Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in one of the darkest days in modern American history. And unfortunately, there is still a potential of further violence this election season.
The Republican National Committee will have thousands of “election integrity” poll monitors in place on Tuesday searching for any signs of fraud, which critics fear could lead to harassment of voters or election workers. In some key voting places, officials have requested the presence of sheriff deputies in addition to bulletproof glass and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher.
At the same time, Trump allies note that he has faced two assassination attempts in recent months that raise the possibility of further threats against him. And police in Washington and other cities are preparing for the possibility of serious Election Day unrest.
