Experts: Don’t necessarily expect to know the winner on Election Night

28 October 2024

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Anybody who lived through the 2020 election probably doesn’t want to hear this, but a panel of expert last Thursday said it’s likely that we won’t know who our next president is going to be on Nov. 5.

Results announced on Election Night are far from official. Those don’t come for weeks.

Rather, they’re projections made by media organizations once they’re confident that the trends they’re seeing will hold. In a close election, that can take a while.

For four agonizing days after the last presidential election, the networks hesitated to project the outcome because it was so close. With Republicans more willing to vote in person during the pandemic, the votes counted first tended to favor then-President Donald Trump, who declared victory while repeating false claims of fraud at 2:30 on the morning following Election Day.

Trump continued the lies right up to Jan. 6, 2020, when a mob he summoned to Washington, D.C., attacked the Capitol as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Regardless of the harm it does to public faith in our democracy, the former president and many of his followers continue to repeat lies about the outcome of the last election.

Hopefully, we’ll avoid the violence this time around, but it’s unlikely that we’ll avoid the initial uncertainty, a panel convened by the National Task Force on Election Crises said on Thursday.

“We need to make sure that the public are aware that we may not have results for one race, for multiple races in a given state on Election Night, or even Wednesday, or maybe even Thursday,” said Tammy Patrick of the Election Center, a national group representing election officials. “It all remains to be seen.”

Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, was even more definite.

“We likely will not know the winner of the election on Election Night,” she said. “And we should be skeptical of candidates who claim victory before there’s a clear picture.”

Part of the reason is that certain swing states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don’t allow early votes to be processed before Election Day. Michigan also didn’t allow the practice in 2020, but it does now.

Because so many Democrats voted early in those states, it created a “red mirage” and then a “blue shift” as votes for Biden overtook those for Trump in battleground states as early votes were counted, they said. Trump continues to exploit the phenomenon as part of his election falsehoods.

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Stewart warned the public not to pass along dubious information until a clear winner can be projected.

“Being patient and staying calm and being careful not to share information that is false is really important,” she said. “I think we have a heightened responsibility in 2024 based on things that happened recently.”

A huge concern is that uncertainty and disinformation about the outcome of the election will exacerbate political violence that is already happening. Stewart called on the media to raise awareness that clear projections of the winner are not likely to be known on Nov. 5.

“I think there is a clearer role for media this round to contribute to maintaining calm by not calling for results too early, but waiting until there’s a better picture painted,” she said.

Patrick, of the Election Center, said everybody should just take a deep breath.

“Everybody wants the results to be in as quickly as possible,” she said.

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