Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5 — but that doesn’t mean we’ll know who won the election on that date. With each passing election, more and more Americans are casting mail-in ballots, which take longer to count than in-person votes because they need to be opened and verified. That means that finding out the winner on election night may be a thing of the past. In 2020, it took until the Saturday after Election Day for the networks to project a winner in the presidential race. In 2022, control of the Senate also took until Saturday to be projected, and control of the House wasn’t decided until eight days after Election Day.
So when will we know the winners this year? That depends on two things: how close the election is and how quickly states count their ballots. There’s no way to know the former in advance; the presidential election looks close right now, but we don’t know for sure if it will end up that way. However, we can make an educated guess at how long it will take states to count all their votes. The trick is, each state is different: Some count quickly because of laws that speed up the process or a low rate of mail-in voting; others count slowly because they don’t have such laws but do have a lot of mail-in ballots.
The pace of vote-counting in 2024 should be fairly similar in most places. That said, a few states have enacted new laws that could either speed up or slow down the release of results. To get a sense of when to expect election results this year, 538 compiled information from state election officials and Edison Research, which provides live election results to ABC News. Click here to see what we found out for every state.