Voters may need to wait until after Election Day to know who won the presidential election, according to experts.
Maurice Cunningham, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said voters will know the results in Massachusetts on election night because the state has the capacity to count the votes in time. However, “battleground states” may have to wait to hear results.
“Nobody’s waiting up all night long to see how Massachusetts will vote,” Cunningham said. “It will vote for [Joe] Biden without any question.”
Jeff Gulati, a political science professor at Bentley University, said ballot counters can begin tallying mail-in votes before election dates in some states but not in others.
Massachusetts officials have already begun counting mail-in ballots, so results should be in the night of the election, Gulati said. In battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, however, ballots aren’t counted until Election Day.
Cunningham said some states are seeing a record number of mail-in ballots.
“Texas is already having huge amounts of ballots come in by mail … more so than they have in history,” Cunningham said. “There’s a deluge of these mail-in ballots coming in, something we’ve never seen before.”
Many polling locations need more workers, which could slow down results, Gulati said. He added that election officials are careful to maintain fair and accurate ballot counts.
“There’s also a lot of pride that the state and local officials take in managing our elections,” Gulati said. “They’ll be very careful in the count and trying to be as transparent as possible.”
The results in Florida — which has already begun counting ballots — may be an early indicator of who will win the election, Gulati said
The presidential candidates may “frame the narrative” by naming themselves the winner if they are ahead on Election Day, Gulati said, thus forcing the other candidate to contest the results.
For instance, he said Republicans will likely not trust the election results if Joe Biden wins.
“Republicans will be feeling that they’re calling it too soon,” Gulati said. “The president is already sort of priming them for that kind of view by calling to question mail-in balloting and the election results in general.”
Democrats, he said, would also distrust the results if the media declares President Donald Trump the winner because Biden is currently ahead of Trump in the polls.
Any legal action questioning the results’ legitimacy would likely be resolved by December, Gulati said.
Cunningham said Trump’s attempts to delegitimize mail-in voting are dangerous.
“There’s no question that these ballots are legitimate,” Cunningham said. “He’s fostering the idea that unless he wins, it’s illegitimate. So, this is really a threat to democracy we’re facing.”
