Here's Why Getting US Election Results Is So Complicated
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Learn more about the benefits at ai.meta.com slash open. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. I'm Stephen Carroll and this is Here's Why, where we take one news story and explain it in just a few minutes with our experts here at Bloomberg. This election season in the US, there's one question that keeps coming up and it's not who's going to win, but

But how long will it take to get a result? There are a lot of concerns on Wall Street that we could go through several days of uncertainty, not unlike four years ago. And we know how much the markets love that. You're looking at a coin flip election and everyone wants to know who gets it if it lands on its edge.

All this wait, we want the result. We want to see after this really chaotic and tumultuous campaign an outcome. In reality, there are 51 different elections, one in each state and in the District of Columbia. Each one follows its own rules on where, when and how ballots are cast, which can affect when votes are counted and results are known. In 2020, it took almost four days to find out who'd been elected president.

In 2000, the decision from the Supreme Court didn't come until mid-December. So here's why getting US election results is so complicated. Megan Crane, who's an editor in our Washington bureau, joins us now for more. Megan, great to talk to you. So different states have these different rules for the elections. How much divergence is there when it comes to counting?

I would say there's 50 different ways of doing it, really, between the 50 states. Some count their ballots as they come in early. Some allow for ballots to come in after Election Day and some don't. Some allow people to come in and do what's called curing of their ballots. We can talk about that more later.

for quite some time and many don't. So it just really is up to each and every state. So it's pretty different then depending on where you are. Talk to me about curing of balance. How does that work? A cured ballot is basically if you send in a mail ballot or an absentee ballot, sometimes they don't get counted for a variety of reasons. Someone forgets to sign the envelope they come in. Somebody doesn't get the right postmark or for whatever reason, they're not counted.

You can actually track that online. I voted early and I was able to look and see that they had my ballot and it had been noted. So you can look at that and say, oh, I sent in my absentee ballot, but they never got it or they rejected it for some reason. And then you can go in in most jurisdictions and say, I want to do a new one. And that will then count instead of the previous ballot. The reason that really impacts counting is, for example...

Some states have like days after the election where they allow people to do that. North Carolina is until November 14th where someone can come in and check their ballot, make sure it was counted. You can't really like change your vote, but you can make sure that the ballot that you sent was counted. You know, if we're down to the wire and North Carolina is as close as everyone says it might be, that's what happens.

what, several days for us to be even waiting until they can decide they have their last ballots. And that touches on the really key part that mail-in ballots...

play in this election. And that's something that's changed over time as well. It has, yeah. And mail-in ballots are, you know, new-ish. I wouldn't say they're a new phenomenon. And out west, largely, where they have really a history of clean elections is probably where that comes from. Like in Oregon, for example, there's only mail-in ballots. There's one, like, very rural county where they still have polling places, but it's

quite unusual. Washington state is almost exclusively mail-in ballots. Arizona has a number of mail-in ballots. People have that sort of tradition and expectation there. In other places, it wasn't so common. And then, of course, in 2020, we were in the middle of COVID.

And they changed the rules in a lot of places, making it easier to vote by mail or drop off your ballot off hours to keep crowds down and things like that. And so we really don't have that much to compare it to, historically speaking, because those were new in 2020 and then people got used to it. Right. So then they expected to be able to keep doing that in some places. We have a huge turnout of early vote this year, much more so than expected, I think. Back in the last election,

counting of the mail-in ballots was one of the things that took so long in Pennsylvania for them to be able to declare a result. How much has changed in that process since the last election? Right. So Pennsylvania's process has been standardized in this election and is actually expected to be quite slow.

They made a rule that they cannot even open the envelopes of mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. So that means they can't, you know, get them ready, sort of verify the signatures, flatten them so they can go through the machines, all that sort of stuff that would speed up that process. They cannot do that until the morning of Election Day. They cannot start counting those votes until 8 p.m. on Election Day.

So if they're all prepped and ready, I suppose that process could go pretty quickly through the machines. But that does make sort of a big open question as to what will happen this year as far as how long it takes to count in Pennsylvania, especially considering that it's expected to be so close. What are the other things that can make...

counting some of these votes quite complicated is the fact that you have so many races on the same ballot and in some places there are other voting initiatives that are happening on election day as well. How does that affect the overall process of counting the results? I'm not sure that counting necessarily gets delayed by that, but certainly like

verification of the results gets complicated when you have a lot of vote splitting, for example, and the results don't really seem logical to an outside observer. Say the top of the ticket goes heavily to one party and everybody else goes heavily to a different party. That can sort of raise questions about, you know, how things work. There's also questions about like long lines on election day. And then the rules, I think in every jurisdiction is that if you're in line, when the polls close, you have to be allowed to vote.

Well, if the lines are really long, that can be hours before the polls close. And if the rules in that particular state are that they can't count the votes until the polls close, you're pushing things back by hours and hours. Is it just a feeling or is the wait for results actually getting longer from election to election?

I think on the presidential level, it's not necessarily getting longer. Of course, we didn't have a result in 2000, which was, you know, 24 years ago, until December. That result came after a long court fight, but we did in fact have those results pretty quickly. I think the results have actually started to come faster in some ways because we have all these mechanical ways to count votes. You know, if you're looking at a long historical trend, but the country is so divided and the process is so massive

meticulous that it does feel, I think it feels like it's taking longer, partly because we want immediate answers and also because the stakes are so high and people just feel so entrenched and everybody wants to get it right. And it feels like it takes longer. You know, it took several days last cycle, but before that it didn't, right? We had a winner pretty much the night of election night on 2016. Hillary Clinton didn't concede, but he had won that night. We knew that by then.

That was true in 2012, was maybe one day, if I'm trying to remember exactly, 2008, we knew on election night. So, you know, it's kind of hard to say. Maybe we just have shorter attention spans and that's why it might feel like... Yeah, I think that might be some of it. Yeah, we sort of expect an immediate result. In advance of this election, we've been talking about both campaigns preparing lawyers in case of legal challenges. What should we be thinking about in terms of what challenges might delay a result?

When you're thinking about delaying a result, like an actual sort of inauguration, what would be the most interesting are the lawsuits that are basically fighting each county or each state's ability to certify their count.

You know, we all learned a lot about that in the last process about how certification works. You never get a perfect count, a perfect, there is no perfect process. There has to be some official system in which you say, okay, we're done now. This is the time we have done enough counting, enough looking through this to decide that this is our result. And there will be legal challenges to that, probably from both sides. Those people who make those decisions are often partisan. They're elected as partisans to nonpartisan roles, but

it can be quite difficult to reach a consensus. Briefly, Megan, has anyone ever thought about harmonizing this process across the U.S. to perhaps speed it up? Oh, people think about that a lot. But I would say if you really talk to election experts, the messiness of our process is in some ways its genius.

in that it is in fact, some would say impossible to steal a United States election. You cannot change the vote in so many different places using different technology, different ballots, different processes to decide who certifies what. That becomes essentially impossible to fix. And that is in some ways, it's genius, right? It can be messed with on the corners. It certainly probably used to be more when there was less sort of transparency in the process, but...

Bloomberg did a lot of reporting on this after the 2020 election and really found that it is essentially impossible to steal a national election in the United States. Thanks to Megan Crane from Bloomberg's Washington, D.C. bureau. For more explanations like this from our team of 2,700 journalists and analysts around the world, search for Quick Take on the Bloomberg website or Bloomberg Business app. I'm Stephen Carroll. This is Here's Why. I'll be back next week with more. Thanks for listening.

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