Your guide to US election night: Key times and what to look out for
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From the first states to call the results to when we will know a clear winner, here is everything to keep an eye on during election night.
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Read time: 5 minutes
In brief…
- The News Agents tell you which states to keep an eye on in the early stages of the US election night coverage.
- They discuss how votes are counted, and whether early voting and postal votes will have an impact.
- Emily, Jon and Lewis discuss how counts are called, and how this has changed in the era of Donald Trump.
What’s the story?
Today is the day Americans decide the next president of the US. But before we know whether it will be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, we are in for a long night.
Make sure you get a good night’s rest as there is plenty to look out for across the 52 states.
From determining early voting patterns to getting decisive answers, Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall take you through what to keep your eyes on throughout the night and when.
Which states should you focus on first once the polls close?
From about 6:30 US Eastern Coast time and 11:30pm GMT, polls in certain states will close on every hour, or sometimes half an hour, throughout the night.
“It literally goes from right to left… from east to west according to the timing”, Emily says.
“The first states that are going to shut are places that are actually deep red, like Kentucky and Indiana”
“Nothing there is going to make you spit out your wine at this point, but you can start looking at voting patterns”
Emily says counties like Davies and Kenton in Kentucky will indicate how well Harris is performing in the suburbs.
“This is somewhere you can start looking and say ‘Is she outperforming what happened in 2020”
If so, what could this tell us about other suburbs in the state?
In Indiana, Emily recommends looking at Boone County, Hamilton County, and Lake St Joseph. to see how they voted in 2020.
These are places where Harris is “never going to win”, Emily says, but if Harris is pushing up the Democrats from 2020 and “getting her own constituency, her own voters coming out”, then it could offer the first indication of the direction the results are heading in.
Which early result will matter most?
Next comes Georgia, Emily says, which shuts half an hour later, at midnight (UK time).
If the small deep red counties Indiana and Kentucky offer a slight hint at which way the election could go, Georgia is where we will really start to understand how things will pan out.
“Georgia is the key one. If we get a quick result from Georgia and a quick result from North Carolina, and they go for Kamala, I think you can start suggesting that the election is done”, Emily says.
But there is another reason why Georgia could be crucial to watch from early on, and that’s because of how quickly it counts the votes.
How are the votes counted?
One thing to bear in mind, says Lewis Goodall, is how fast votes are counted in each state.
Lewis says: “They all have different mechanisms of counting the votes. Machine-use, hand-counting, all sorts of different things.”
Lewis points out that Florida, for instance, also counts the votes very quickly.
“Back in 2016, it was clear that Trump had won Florida, and won it handily. And you can see the direction it's going.”
Now it is a different story, with Florida voting solidly Republican in the last two elections.
But Lewis notes that this year, with abortion on the ballot, there could be some surprises.
“If we see big turnout among women and young women in particular, that is making that state close, maybe even in the Democrats' wildest dreams in contention, but very least close, then it might give us some tantalizing differences into what is going on in other states.”
Where could it all come down to?
Harris or Trump need to hit 270 Electoral Eollege votes to win the election. The Electoral College is made up of electors, with each state having a slightly different number depending on its population size.
There are 538 Electoral College votes in total. As most states tend to vote the same way, the swing states with the most Electoral College votes could be where it really comes down to the wire.
Jon says: “If you accept that broadly, 43 states are already in the bag for either Republican or Democrat, you have got roughly 226 Electoral College votes for Kamala Harris that look safe and you've got about 219 for Trump.
“They've each got to, from those seven swing states, get themselves up to 270. That's why we talk a lot about Pennsylvania, because that is the biggest of the swing states with 19 Electoral College votes.”
How will early voting and postal voting play a role?
Back in 2020, Jon Sopel points out that the results from the key swing state of Pennsylvania came later than expected due to one state, Lehigh County, taking longer to count postal votes.
But this year, Jon says, there's been higher numbers of early voters where people have gone to cast their vote.
While the final result l might take a while if it's a really close election, Jon says it won’t be anything like when the 2020 election was taking place at the height of COVID, and “everyone was trying to mail in their ballots as fast as possible.”
Not only could this speed up the count and give us a clear picture of the winner faster, but Jon argues it also gives Trump less basis on which to claim electoral fraud, the allegation he made in the previous election.
How are the results called?
Unlike in UK elections, the first place US election results are called are on the TV networks and news platforms.
This, Emily says, is a “totally unfathomable and huge responsibility”.
And sometimes, although rarely, different networks can come to different conclusions.
According to Emily, the networks are only meant to call the result when there is a “98% probability that the loser has no chance of victory.”
She adds: “They have to be really, really, really, really, sure, but it still means that you'll hear some of the networks going earlier than others and there won't be a consensus.”
Lewis notes that each of the networks has a big team of statisticians who work on the results and crunch the numbers.
They tend to herd pretty closely and typically don’t call results independently, but it has happened in the past, such as when Fox in 2000 called Florida for George Bush.
In fact, counties usually do not have their results certified until a few weeks after the election.
Lewis points out this has only become an issue since the last election.
Something that was previously a formality, he says, has become “deeply contested” in the era of Donald Trump after he accused Georgia officials of electoral fraud in 2020.
'The News Agents will be bringing you coverage from Washington as the results roll in'
Listen to the full discussion here.
