Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.
Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared during the early morning hours after Election Day that he had won. That led his allies to demand officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the United States.
But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine the winner of a close election than a blowout.
In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it's an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.
“There's nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”
Trump's demand also doesn't seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of "The Big Truth," debunking Trump's 2020 election lies, said it's not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to "instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them."
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Trump wants the race decided Tuesday night
During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.
“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” he said. “Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”
It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.
Shortly after 1 a.m., Trump cast doubt on vote-counting machines clerks routinely use to tally results, the Detroit News reported. He contended it would be more secure and faster to ditch the machines and for votes to be cast only on a single Election Day.
“Maybe it will take these machines we paid so much money for two weeks,” the Detroit News reported Trump saying. “Can you believe it? ...
“Something’s going on with this. … We don’t want to wait 10 days, or two days. ... We want the answer tonight,” he said.
Timing is one example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn't count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that's because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.
Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That's why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.
Declaring a winner can take time
The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes awhile before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.
In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn't call Scott's victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott's margin was so slim.
Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn't match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.
Trump allies urge him to declare victory swiftly
Some of Trump's allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss that year.
“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked," Bannon said. "He should have done it at 11 o'clock in 2020.”
Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots Wednesday because people “are just not going to put up with it.”
Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump's direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.
But that doesn't mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.
There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.
