This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14big win, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.
Back in the old days, kids would go to bed on election night as votes were still being counted and wake up to a new president-elect of the United States. But during the last presidential election, in 2020, things got a little more complicated because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of people voted by mail, and because those votes take more time to count, Joe Biden wasn’t declared the winner until four days after the election. Things are a little different in 2024, but experts still expect that we may need to wait a bit before we get this year’s results. Here are four ways it could go down.
Scenario 1: The winner is determined on election night.For this to happen, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would have to be far ahead in important states. It comes down to pretty simple math: If Candidate A is leading by 50,000 votes, and there are only 20,000 mail-in ballots left to count, Candidate A can be declared the winner — because even if Candidate B got every single one of the mail-in ballots, it wouldn’t be enough to catch up. That scenario isn’t impossible: In the 2022 congressional elections, even several competitive swing states were able to call their outcomes on election night. But presidential elections usually get a lot more voters, and right now polls show that the race is very close in a lot of states.
Scenario 2: It takes a few days.Counting mail-in ballots is a more intense process for election officials. Some have to perform more security checks, like matching a voter’s signature to one on file with the government. They also have to physically open ballots from the mail, check that they’re filled out properly, flatten them and scan them. This all takes much more time than counting in-person votes. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, aren’t allowed to start opening and processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. Other states, like Nevada, even allow mail-in ballots that arrive a few days after Election Day to count. If the election is close, we could be waiting a few days for all those ballots to be counted.
Scenario 3: A really close race takes more than a few days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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