EXPLAINERUS states determine ballot counting procedures in federal elections, with varying count times fuelling misinformation.When will we know how many votes were cast for Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the United States presidential election on November 5?
It depends — and that’s normal.
In the US, there is no federal vote-counting process. Instead, counting procedures are left up to the states, and it potentially can take weeks for a final official tally to be released.
However, a clear presidential winner typically emerges within hours or days of polls closing on election day.
The lag between media organisations “calling” an election, and the official certification process can be confusing to voters.
It can also be fertile ground for election misinformation, including the false election fraud claims that Trump has continued to spread since 2020.
How do we know the winner before all the votes are counted?
News organisations have developed complex methodologies to estimate when a presidential candidate no longer has a path to victory in the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is the system that decides presidential elections: A candidate must secure at least 270 Electoral College votes – which are allocated by state based on the outcome of their respective vote – to win the White House.
News outlets effectively “call” each state for a presidential hopeful based on their methodologies, and those projections predict the overall winner.
Al Jazeera relies on The Associated Press, a news agency that has been calling elections for more than 170 years in the US, for this process.
Depending on how tight a race is, AP can sometimes determine a victor swiftly while other times it can ta …
