Don’t Expect to Know Who Won the Presidential Race on Election Day

Steelton, Pa. — Most election forecasters predict that this year’s presidential election will come down to Pennsylvania. But don’t expect to know the results on Election Day, thanks to an election law that bars officials from processing mail-in ballots until the morning of November 5.

The closer the margin, the longer results could take. In 2020, Biden won Pennsylvania by roughly 80,000 votes and the state wasn’t called until Saturday morning — four days after the election. Four years later, a post–Election Day call in the Keystone State could fuel doubt in the results. 

“If the mail-in ballots aren’t counted the day of the election, I don’t care who wins — the other side is not going to accept it, and it will lead to more division in our country,” Cambria County GOP chair Jackie Kulback said in an interview. “And I am scared by the level of divisiveness we’re dealing with right now.”

She’s not the only Republican who’s sounding the alarm. Sitting with National Review aboard his campaign bus here in Steelton, Pa., last Thursday, Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick expressed concern that it may take days for election officials to call the presidential election here — arguably the most competitive presidential battleground in the country, which Donald Trump won narrowly in 2016 and lost narrowly in 2020.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” the ex-Bridgewater CEO said in a wide-ranging sit-down interview with NR. He pointed to recent comments made by Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt about the possibility that mail-in ballots won’t be fully counted on Election Day.

Like other Republicans in the state this cycle, McCormick is encouraging GOP voters to “close the gap that the Democrats have had with mail-in ballots to be able to win the election.” Even Donald Trump — who has spent the past several years claiming mail-in ballots are a recipe for fraud — is urging his own supporters to “swamp the vote” by casting ballots early and by mail, even as he continues to claim on the campaign trail that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But as both parties work to juice vote-by-mail turnout, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle here have been enmeshed in infighting in recent months over how to avoid a repeat of the ballot-counting delays the commonwealth experienced in 2020, a pandemic election year that saw many voters casting ballots by mail for the first time.

Because elections are administered on the state level, different states have different rules about when they can begin processing and counting early and mail-in ballots. While some states will begin processing ballots upon receipt or in the days leading up to Election Day, a handful of others, including Pennsylvania, cannot begin processing a single mail-in ballot until 7 a.m. on November 5.

Democrats in the legislature sought to pass legislation that would allow the processing of mail-in ballots to begin one week before Election Day but were stymied by Republican opposition, exacerbating frustration from Democratic officials who say that it’s better to kickstart this process well before November 5. Republicans argue that voter confidence in the election process requires waiting until Election Day to do so. Now midway through September, the General Assembly is unlikely to change the state pre-canvassing laws before Election Day.

“Plenty of other states, again, Republican states like Florida and others, allow this process to begin in advance, and what that means is, in those states, you know the mail — the mail vote by around midnight on election night, except for the ones that maybe came in that day or that evening,” Schmidt recently told the Washington Post. “It is acutely frustrating to have a technical problem with a technical solution that is nonpartisan, nonpolitical, does not benefit any candidate or any party.”

Allegheny County GOP chairman Sam DeMarco struck a less alarmist tone than some Republicans in the state. He said that a state grant has given his own county ample resources to complete the process day of, and that far fewer voters have requested mail-in ballots this time around now that there’s not a pandemic.

DeMarco says he would have been supportive of a rule allowing for processing of mail-in ballots to begin, say, 48 hours before Election Day. “But what the Democrats had asked for was too much. They wanted a week in advance,” he said. 

“I didn’t like the idea behind it, because I don’t trust their ability to keep it confidential and to not allow results to leak,” DeMarco said in an interview. “This is the same reason why you don’t report results before polls close, because you don’t want to suppress the vote. So what happens if you allow these folks to count the votes and then they tell you, ‘Hey, 500,000 vote lead going into Election Day.’ Does that suppress the vote? Does that keep people at home that might vote?”

But David Becker, executive director of Center of Election Innovation and Research, predicts we won’t know who won the presidential election on Election Night — and he says that’s okay.

“The reality is, this is the way it’s always worked. We have very complex ballots in the United States, more complex than any other country in the world. Multiple pages, dozens of races. And we don’t want a single nationalized election. We run 10,000 little elections all over the country with counties having control over those elections and a process run by hundreds of thousands of election workers and millions of volunteer poll workers,” he said, “They’re not going to count ballots instantaneously on Election Night.”

Meanwhile, a statistical analysis conducted by MIT political science professor Charles Stewart III found that Pennsylvania’s lack of pre-processing only slowed down the state’s count by a couple of hours in 2020. 

“By midnight or so, states without preprocessing were, on average, reporting election results at roughly the same pace as states that allowed it,” Stewart tells NR. “We didn’t know who won PA in 2020 until Saturday after Election Day because the election was so close, not because of the lack of preprocessing. There’s a chance PA will be even closer in 2024 than in 2020.”

“If you have a really, really close election in a state, it’s going to take days to know for sure who the winner is,” he said.

Around NR

• Despite Kamala Harris’s lead in national polling, the race is a near-even split when broken down by Electoral College votes, writes Jim Geraghty, taking a look at Trump’s advantages as we inch closer to Election Day: 

On the map, if we give Trump the red states he’s expected to win, as well as Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, he’s at 262 electoral votes. If we give Harris the blue states she’s expected to win, as well as Wisconsin and Michigan, she’s at 251 electoral votes. Nevada’s six electoral votes aren’t enough to put either one over the top; the election comes down to Pennsylvania.

• In a separate piece, Geraghty looked at the advantages Harris has heading into Election Day:

The Harris team has a plan, and she and her campaign staff are executing it. Harris appears to have sufficiently distanced herself from President Biden with her slogans, “It’s time to turn the page,” and “a new generation of leadership for our country” and her relative youth, compared to Biden and Trump. (In what is likely to be the lone presidential debate, Trump didn’t focus on Harris’s having been vice president for the past three-and-a-half years until his closing statement.)

• Audrey Fahlberg recently caught up with Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who acknowledged he’s the underdog in his contest against three-term Democratic senator Bob Casey, who currently has a 3.5 point lead in the RealClearPolitics Senate polling average. But McCormick insists he can defy the odds and defeat the longtime incumbent. 

“Every dynasty ends,” McCormick insists. As the presidential race continues to look like a jump ball, Casey continues to have an edge in surveys in this post-Labor Day crunch to November 5. The reason the Senate polls are growing tighter, he tells NR, is that Casey “has been such a bad senator, he’s not been a leader on anything, he can’t point to a record of accomplishment, and his votes have increasingly been out of step with Pennsylvania.”

• In Ohio, incumbent senator Sherrod Brown is cautiously optimistic that he can win reelection against a challenge from Republican Bernie Moreno, a car dealer, according to new reporting from Fahlberg:

“I think we’re going to win. I’m pretty sure — well I’m sure of it,” Brown said on a campaign Zoom call with Ohio Democratic officials, activists, and volunteers earlier this week, according to a recording shared with National Review. Declining to mention the 2024 Senate map, which election experts say narrowly favors Republicans, Brown went on to express optimism about Democrats’ chances this fall on the presidential and congressional level: “I think we’re going to win the White House. I think we’re going to win the House.”

To sign up for The Horse Race Newsletter, please follow this link.