For the past 25 years, Americans have regularly had to wait until the early morning hours for news organizations to make the decisive last-state call needed to put a presidential candidate in the White House, and to find out who controls Congress.

A moment like this on election night 2000 led to our common language of Republican states as red states and Democratic states as blue states, as the US watched late into the night as Meet the Press host Tim Russert spoke on NBC about what was happening happened in the US. Florida.

It’s extremely unlikely that we’ll know the winner of the presidential election on election night, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are virtually tied in the polls, and there’s a good chance the race will come down to a small number of swing states.

So when will we know who won the US elections?

Well, that depends on how close things turn out to be. Four swing states – Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – have absentee voting procedures that can take days. But if Harris has won the other swing states decisively, that will be enough to declare her the winner. Any other result will take time.

Why are American news organizations calling?

News organizations phone conversation a winner. They don’t determine a winner. Officials in election offices who count votes and certify election results determine the winner. That certification happens days or even weeks after an election.

News organizations are highlighting the moment when what those election offices have said has made it clear that the mathematical results of vote counting indicate a winner.

“Our standard is absolute certainty,” said David Scott, chief news strategy and operations officer at the Associated Press. “We will only declare a winner when we are 100% certain that the candidates behind them cannot catch up.”

The Guardian follows the Associated Press in calling elections.

How do news organizations make calls?

The AP and other election night news organizations such as CNN, NBC, ABC and Fox News maintain a “decision bureau” and use a model to project how the vote count will unfold, state by state. Some now rely on Decision Desk HQ, an independent organization created specifically for this task.

“News organizations have become much more nervous about calling early because they don’t want to get callbacks like they did in 2000,” said Mike Whener, a professor who studies elections at the University of Wisconsin.

The decisions about when to call are made by statisticians, not news anchors.

“It’s not Sean Hannity making that decision,” Whener said. ‘It’s not Rupert Murdoch who made that decision early on. It is the people in the room who do the analysis and decide whether elections can be called.”

Different networks’ calls may differ in timing because each network uses a model that is independent of others. Different analysts may draw conclusions at different times.

When did we know the results in 2020?

Joe Biden was declared the winner on Saturday, November 7 – four days after the elections. The president crossed the electoral threshold that day when the media mentioned Pennsylvania and Nevada. Michigan and Wisconsin were both called the day after the election, but Arizona was not called until November 12, North Carolina until November 13, and Georgia on November 19, after a recount.

Will results be faster or slower than 2020?

That depends on the margins in each state. According to Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group, if the margin in a state is greater than 0.5%, we will generally see results faster than in 2020. They draw this conclusion because there will be significantly fewer mail-in ballots than in 2020, and states will be able to count them more quickly. Three states have also expanded pre-screening of ballots before Election Day, which was not the case in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia and Michigan) and three states have an earlier deadline for when mail-in ballots must arrive than in 2020 (North Carolina, Nevada ). and Pennsylvania).

Protect Democracy said in a recent report that its best estimate was that results in Michigan and Wisconsin will be released a full day after polls close — at the same speed as in 2020. It also suspects Pennsylvania will be released faster than in 2020, when it lasted four days; Nevada will be called in the same time or faster than in 2020, when it took four days, and Arizona will also be called in the same time or faster than in 2020, when it took nine days. North Carolina and Georgia will both receive calls faster than 2020, the organization suspects.

What could prolong the results?

If the margin in states is less than 0.5% or if states require recounts, results may take longer. News media generally will not call states until the results of a recount are known.

For Arizona and Nevada in particular, it’s very unlikely anyone will call these races on election night, McCoy said. “That’s the way those states have been operating for a long time, and so that’s very much expected.” When a new swing state is as close as Georgia is in 2020, “you just wait. That’s not something you anticipate and make a projection that’s too close to call. And so you just wait for the votes.”

Pennsylvania poses a special challenge because local election offices are not allowed by law to begin opening envelopes and counting ballots until Election Day. Wisconsin, another swing state, has a similar restriction and may not report full results until early Wednesday morning.

Some states allow absentee ballots to be counted up to ten days after Election Day. Of the swing states, only Nevada has seen a meaningful slowdown; it can accept mail-in ballots until the Saturday after Election Day, provided they are postmarked by Nov. 5.

If legal battles arise over which ballots should be counted, that could also delay the results. There are currently numerous lawsuits pending in a number of swing states regarding the collection of certain ballots, including late-arriving ballots and overseas ballots.

If a state has results like Florida in 2000, where a three-digit number separates two candidates, the result could come down to military absentee ballots and possibly provisional ballots. Normally only about half of provisional ballots count, but in a close race we’ll see a mad scramble by political teams to find the people who cast those ballots to “cure” them, which usually involves providing proof of identification and registration must be brought to an election office.

Which states will be the first to return results this year?

It’s likely that news organizations will first call several East Coast states where one candidate has a clear advantage over the other.

“It’s clear that there are a number of states that are basically going to be called for a full shutdown,” said Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk HQ. “There’s going to be some that get called, you know, once you start to see the first votes coming in and that’s consistent with historical precedents.”

What is the ‘red mirage’ and the ‘blue shift’?

The phrases “red mirage” and “blue shift” refer to the same phenomenon in which a Republican candidate appears to have a lead early in the evening, only to have that lead disappear as more votes are counted.

In 2020, mail-in votes strongly favored Democrats, while Republicans were much more likely to vote in person. As of noon on Wednesday the day after the election, Donald Trump had an 11% lead, which Joe Biden overcame over the next two days as election workers counted the mail-in ballots of 2.7 million voters. The AP and other news organizations knew how many voters had returned with absentee ballots, and knew how many ballots had been requested by registered Democrats, and did not hold off on the race for Biden until those ballots were counted.

By the Friday before Election Day, Wisconsin had received more than 1 million absentee ballots, with more to come.

“In the two most populous counties, they don’t finish counting until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.,” Whener said. “And so several hundred thousand votes are coming in, you know, under the cover of darkness, and that’s happening in the two most liberal counties in the state. In Wisconsin, the Democrat always gets a lot of votes in the middle of the night, because by law they can only start counting then. It’s a petri dish for conspiracy theories, even if they do things exactly the way they’re supposed to do.”

The opposite phenomenon is happening in Arizona, where ballots received before Election Day are counted – and reported – first. In 2022, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly had a 20-point lead over Republican Blake Masters early in the evening. Kelly ultimately won by a five-point margin.

But the ballots were received in the mail on Election Day can only be processed after the polls close. In 2020, that was a significant number: about 320,000 ballots in Maricopa County alone.

Why is this so complicated? Why doesn’t the country just add up all the votes and see who has more?

As a reminder, in presidential elections the people vote at the national level does not determine the result. Each state counts its votes separately. With two exceptions – Nebraska and Maine – the winner of a state gets all its electoral votes, regardless of whether the state was won by 537 votes out of approximately 6 million cast, as in the 2000 Florida presidential election, or the 1.5 million votes cast. -voting margin Reagan won California in 1984.

Each state has a number of electors based on the number of congressional districts it has, plus two additional votes representing the state’s Senate seats. Washington DC has three electoral votes, despite having no voting representation in Congress.

It takes 270 voters to win.

Biden won in 2020 by a margin of 51-47, a margin of about 7 million votes. The electoral vote was 306-232, winning about 57% of the voters.

When will we know who controls Congress?

Individual congressional races will be called as votes come in, but with 435 races across the country, some will undoubtedly be too close to happen on election night. Depending on the numbers, it may not be clear for a while which party controls Congress, McCoy said.

“There’s always one or two races that are ridiculously close, and then it just goes to a recount, or whatever the process is,” McCoy said. “The main thing is that you wait for the data and see what it tells you, and that you don’t worry about it. That is our biggest rule: never access the data.”