Battle on the Ballot: What Americans Can Expect following the Unprecedented 2020 Presidential Election

Election night is tense for all parties involved. Candidates and viewers watch the votes coming in late in the night, waiting for the call and the speeches. This year has been full of surprises and election night will be no exception. With millions of mail-in ballots sent in to avoid the ominous Coronavirus, it could be over a week until all the votes are counted.

The country will only see true results within the first couple days by about half the states. According to FiveThirtyEight, some states won’t have results until later this week, while others won’t have results until the end of November, with New York concerned it may not have an official count until mid-December.

In states like Pennsylvania and Michigan – two big swing states,  mail-in ballots aren’t even counted until the day of the election, with some of those states allowing mail-in ballots to continue to be sent in, as long as they’re postmarked on Nov. 3.

Seventeen states accept ballots that come after election day, as long as they are postmarked on or before election day. Some of these states only allow about three days to count the ballots, whereas some states, like Illinois and Utah, still count mail-in ballots 14 days after election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

Seven of the 12 projected swing states should have official counts pretty fast, most of them coming in Wednesday morning at the latest, according to FiveThirtyEight. Another five states will not have results until almost the next week, while Pennsylvania could take longer than a week with its deadline for vote counts lasting until Nov. 23. According to NPR, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are all up for grabs by either candidate, and together account for a huge 101 combined electoral votes.

The key to winning the election is to garner 270 of the 538 electoral votes that are allotted depending on who wins the state. California holds a whopping 55 electoral votes thanks to its large population. Other states, like Vermont and South Dakota, only carry three electoral votes, gains the candidates won’t focus on as much. As explained by the National Archives, a ballot doesn’t vote for a Presidential candidate, but rather, indicates which candidate an individual wants their state to vote for when the state’s electors meet. The electors are the ones that choose the next President and Vice President as urged by the people they represent.

In 2016, projections started rolling in around 7 p.m. with a steady back and forth between the candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Once Trump won Ohio around 10:45 that night, however, some watchers went to bed, considering the win in the crucial swing state as a sealed deal. His gain in more swing states over the following hours made the Trump campaign more comfortable, with him crossing the 270 electoral votes threshold at around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton called the Trump campaign to concede shortly after, and he made his victory speech a mere 20 minutes after the phone call. 

The same speedy results should not be expected this year. While the candidates may attempt to call the results that night or the following day, the amount of swing in uncounted votes is too much to truly know the winner until possibly the following week. 

Detroit, Michigan’s City Clerk Janice Winfrey mentioned in a press conference last week that things should be viewed more as an “election week” rather than a single day.  

“Time is not a real concern of ours,” Winfrey said. “We want to make sure that every voter and every ballot … has been properly processed, received and tabulated on Election Day.”

In anticipation of the results of Nov. 3, major cities have begun boarding up their businesses in preparation for possible riots in wake of results. The tense anticipation follows months of street violence and riots in response to the death of George Floyd earlier this year. In the streets surrounding the White House in Washington, D.C., more and more retailers and storefronts have covered their vulnerable windows with plywood and other safety precautions. According to USA Today, George Washington University in the heart of D.C. warned students to stock up on food and supplies “as you would for a hurricane or snowstorm that would prevent you from going outside for several days to grab food or order takeout.”

Many businesses have already planned to shut down on Election Day or the week following. ABC News believes that if Trump wins, the protests and violence that followed his first election win will resume. The New York Times reported “windows of select stores in key cities will be boarded in anticipation of potential election related  activities.”

Avid watchers on election night can expect initial projections that may not include mail-in ballots that night, giving the country a soft idea of who will fill the Oval Office in January. However, watching closely will bleed into the following days, with the candidates’ reactions being something worth taking note of as counts pour in.

Indiana and Kentucky will be the first states to close their polls at 6 p.m. EST. The first swing states will close the polls at 7 p.m., strapping the country in for a turbulent final week in this election cycle. 

Savanna Graves is the News Editor. Follow her on Twitter at @SavannaLeigh.