Election Day in the U.S.: What happens & how the votes get counted

Discover what happens on Election Day and why it takes so long to count the votes

Today's expression: Pull off
Explore more: Lesson #723
October 31, 2024:

When the sun rises on Election Day, about half of Americans will have already voted. But here's what the experience is like for the tens of millions of people who cast their votes in person on the first Tuesday of November. Plus, learn why it takes so long to count the votes.

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What Election Day is like in the U.S.

This story is about what Election Day is like in the United States, specifically on the big ones, the even-numbered years when we elect a new Congress and the presidential cycle , which happens every four years.

Election Day is a day like any other. It’s not a holiday . People go to work; children go to school. Unlike in Latin America, there are no prohibitions on alcohol sales . By the time the sun rises on Election Day, many Americans have already voted. Most states allow some form of early voting, either by mail or in person .

The percentage of voters who choose an early option —that percentage increases every year. This year, 2024, about half of people are expected to vote before November 5. That still leaves tens of millions of people who go to vote on Election Day. Election Day is always the first Tuesday in November.

Every person has a specific polling place ; you have to go to the place you are assigned based on your address. Your polling place is near your house. It’s usually a school, but it can also be a church, a meeting room , or a community center.

There’s a perimeter outside the polling place where campaigning is not allowed. But just outside that perimeter, you’ll see people handing out flyers and stickers and such.

Every state has different laws, but most states open their polls at 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning and polls stay open until between 6:00 and 8:00 in the evening. When you check in , they cross your name off the list . The ballots are sometimes electronic , but they’re often paper . The ballots are secret . If you fill in a paper ballot, you get a covering that keeps your choices private and an election worker helps you feed your paper ballot into a machine that scans and registers your vote.

There are election workers at the polling place. They do good work. They get paid a very little bit, but they are very important to how this all works. Both political parties are entitled to observers at polling places to make sure that the rules are being followed and applied fairly.

After you vote, you get a prize—not a big one. As you walk out, the tradition is that you get a sticker to put on your shirt or your jacket that says, “I voted today.” A lot of people post pictures of these on their social media.

This is what happens if you’re motivated to go vote. But a lot of people don’t feel that intrinsic motivation and they need a reminder or a push to get to the polls—maybe they even need a ride .

In big races, candidates have volunteers that knock on doors and make phone calls, reminding their supporters to vote and making sure they have a way to get to their polling places.

As for the candidates themselves, this is typically a day off. In the big races, the candidates will have done two, three, maybe four events the day before. On Election Day, they typically go home and vote at their polling place—the media is of course there to film it and, jokingly , ask whom they voted for.

There is no blackout period ; there is no prohibition on campaigning on Election Day or in the days prior. But most candidates recognize the campaign is over when Election Day arrives. They might do a little bit of handshaking on the day of, but there are typically not big events on those days.

Once everyone has voted, the time comes to watch the results come in. This part, I think, is very different from other countries. First of all, in a national election, the results come in gradually over many hours. We have four time zones in the continental United States, so when the first polls close at 6:00 on the east coast , that’s still only 3:00 on the west coast. So, at the moment the earliest polls close in the east, there are still several hours of voting left in the west.

And another key difference is that the counting happens at a hyper-local level . Individual voting precincts —these are small, small districts of maybe 1,000 voters each—these precincts count the votes at the polling places and report the results up to state election officials . The state officials release results to the public in a steady stream as they come in. The Associated Press, a nonprofit news organization , aggregates the totals and releases them at the same time to all other news outlets .

So we have thousands of precincts, reporting up to fifty different states. And that’s why if you watch TV on Election Night, you see a slow drip of results come in. It’s a very fragmented process. You might see vote totals for a state early in the night, but only 5 percent of precincts have reported their results—those early results mean nothing. Depending on how the vote goes, once you get up to 50 percent, 70 percent, 90 percent of results tallied, then the outcome becomes clearer .

And the tradition is that, at some point, news outlets will “call” a race. And what that means is, they will say who they think the winner is, when they believe there is enough information to confidently predict the winner. I would say, in an average year , the media will have called the results of the biggest races by about midnight in New York, 9 p.m. in California.

But the news media does not determine the winner. Just because you see it on the screen, doesn’t mean that it’s official. The media does sometimes get their predictions wrong; they “call a race” prematurely ; that means, they project a winner that turns out not to have won in the end.

And some races are just really close; some races are so close that the winner is not known on Election Night. Most states allow mail-in votes to arrive up to 14 days after the election, so those last votes could be the ones that make the difference . The state governments take a few weeks to certify all the in-person and mail-in votes . There are sometimes recounts ; this can take a while. So it can be a few days or weeks before you know for 100 percent sure who the winner of any given race will be.

Jeff’s take

This year, 2024, I’m living outside the U.S. and I have the right to vote in the district that I most recently lived in, which is Chicago. I filled this out and sent it back a few weeks ago. I mentioned before, votes come in after Election Day. If you live outside the U.S., you just have to postmark your ballot by Election Day. So you have to send it in before the election; the states will count the mail-in ballots as they arrive for another 14 days. That’s what I did this year, although I voted well in advance.

This is not a joke or an exaggeration : there were 107 things to vote for on my ballot. Every place is different, but that was my ballot. Most people don’t vote on every single question; but regardless , there’s a lot of counting to be done. This is a lot of work for a lot of people.

So whenever a race is close, people around the globe ask, “How can the world’s economic superpower not count votes on Election Day like a normal country?” And the answer is, it’s hard! A hundred fifty million people—plus—are going to vote. And there are lots and lots of races, lots and lots of questions, lots of polling places. So much of this is done at the state level, which means fifty different systems. This is just a massive project . So have a little patience if it takes a while to get it 100 percent confirmed.

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Expression: Pull off