This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.
Back in the old days, kids would go to bed on election night as votes were still being counted and wake up to a new president-elect of the United States. But during the last presidential election, in 2020, things got a little more complicated because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of people voted by mail, and because those votes take more time to count, Joe Biden wasn’t declared the winner until four days after the election. Things are a little different in 2024, but experts still expect that we may need to wait a bit before we get this year’s results. Here are four ways it could go down.
Scenario 1: The winner is determined on election night.
For this to happen, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would have to be far ahead in important states. It comes down to pretty simple math: If Candidate A is leading by 50,000 votes, and there are only 20,000 mail-in ballots left to count, Candidate A can be declared the winner — because even if Candidate B got every single one of the mail-in ballots, it wouldn’t be enough to catch up. That scenario isn’t impossible: In the 2022 congressional elections, even several competitive swing states were able to call their outcomes on election night. But presidential elections usually get a lot more voters, and right now polls show that the race is very close in a lot of states.
Scenario 2: It takes a few days.
Counting mail-in ballots is a more intense process for election officials. Some have to perform more security checks, like matching a voter’s signature to one on file with the government. They also have to physically open ballots from the mail, check that they’re filled out properly, flatten them and scan them. This all takes much more time than counting in-person votes. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, aren’t allowed to start opening and processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. Other states, like Nevada, even allow mail-in ballots that arrive a few days after Election Day to count. If the election is close, we could be waiting a few days for all those ballots to be counted.
Scenario 3: A really close race takes more than a few days.
Polls show that this race is basically tied, which means some states could be won by just a few thousand votes. When it’s that close, many state laws require a recount to be extra certain they got it right. Officials will also look at provisional ballots, which are votes that need some more fact-checking to make sure the people who cast them are legally able to vote. And in close races, candidates might even file an official request to have the votes recounted again. Recounts don’t usually change the results, but they can take a week or two to sort out. In 2020, the State of Georgia and a few counties in Wisconsin conducted recounts.
Scenario 4: Legal battles continue after the election.
Some people are worried that even after all the votes are counted and recounted, the election results could be challenged by lawsuits and court battles. This is in part because after the 2020 election, Donald Trump refused to accept the results and claimed that the election was “stolen.” Ninety lawsuits have already been filed across the country about how this year’s election is being conducted — which experts think could lead to long court battles. If that’s the case, we may still know who officially won, but it could take a while before everyone accepts it.
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