WAIT FOR US PREZ POLL RESULTS

EACH STATE HAS DIFFERENT RULES OF COUNTING - Some have revised rules to speed up process, tallying ballots by mail will take time as some allow postal ballots time to arrive after poll day

Counting the votes will extend beyond election night on Tuesday, and determining the outcome of the presidential race could, too, according to a report by The New York Times. Even in states that count their ballots relatively quickly, if the race is as close as the polls say, it could take days before a winner can be projected (election results are never official until final certification).

In 2020, a record number of people voted by mail because of the pandemic, and many states were processing large number of mail ballots for the first time. While mail voting has dropped off in many states and others have made changes to speed up counting, these types of ballots still take more time to count.

Georgia Polls close at 7 p.m. E.T.

Most Georgia voters tend to vote early in person, and vote reporting is usually relatively fast. The share of ballots cast by mail is expected to be small. The mail voting rate returned to the state’s usual level of around 6 per cent in 2022 after growing to about 25 per cent in 2020.

The state could still be counting corrected mail ballots, overseas ballots and provisional ballots in the days after the election.

It took more than two weeks to call the state for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 as the presidential race was so close that a hand-tallied audit of ballots was initiated. The state audit confirmed Biden’s victory by about 12,000 votes.

North Carolina Polls close at 7:30 p.m. E.T.

Early, in-person voting is very popular, and votes are typically counted very quickly. In the last two polls,98 to 99 per cent of votes were reported by midnight Eastern time.

New rules mean that early voting results will no longer be reported immediately at poll close time, but mail ballots are now due on Election Day (in 2020, ballots postmarked by Election Day had nine days to arrive).