Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
I'm Stephen Carol 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 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 weight, we want the result we want to see after this really chaotic, tumultuous campaign and outcome. In reality, there are fifty one 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 twenty twenty, it took almost four days to find out who's been elected president. In two thousand, 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 fifty different ways of doing it really between the fifty 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 for quite some time, and many don't, so it just really is up to each and every state.
So it's pretty different than depending on where you are talking 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 belt, 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 fourteenth, 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 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, mail in ballots are 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 an 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 twenty twenty we were in the middle of COVID and they change 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 twenty twenty, 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 seven AM on election day, So that means they can't you 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 eight PM 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 what 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 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 two thousand, which was, you know, twenty four 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 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 weeks 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 twenty sixteen. Hillary Clinton didn't concede, but he had won that night. We knew that by then that was true. In twenty twelve was maybe one day, if I'm trying to remember exactly. Two thousand and eight we
knew on election night. So you know, it's kind of hard to.
Say when we just have shorter our attentionspons, 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. Yeah.
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 rules. It can be quite difficult to reach a consensus.
Briefly, Megan, has anyone ever thought about harmonizing this process across the US to perhaps fed 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 twenty twenty election and really found that it is essentially impossible to steal a national election in the United States.
Thanks to Meghan Crane from Bloomberg's Washington, DC bureau. For more explanations like this from our team of twenty seven hundred journalists and analysts around the world, search for Quick Take on the Bloomberg website or Bloomberg Business app. I'm Stephen Carol. This is here's why. I'll be back next week with more. Thanks for listening.