Election Season 201

From the precinct to your screen

Election administration is not a standardized process in this country. It’s often not even standardized within a given state. As a result, there is no one way that ballots are counted and counts are reported.

Ballots can either be counted by hand or by machine. Most states have machines, either for voters to cast their vote through, or to scan ballots that voters fill out. For in-person, election day voting, precincts that report early are the ones without lines when polls close, and which can count ballots with machines. Other precincts will have collected paper ballots throughout the day and will then have to count them after polls close, which takes much longer.

Each state has its own way of reporting the results to the public once they’ve finished the counting process. In some cases, it’s directly uploaded to an easily accessible state website. In other cases, the counties update their websites first, and the state websites then grab the results from the counties.

It can get even more decentralized in ways that make it difficult for individuals to track on election night. Fortunately, this is where the Associated Press (AP) comes in; they have spent decades as the pre-eminent source for compiling election returns. As a news cooperative, the AP, instead of displaying these results directly to consumers, sells a live feed of the data to other news organizations, where most people see it.

How is this election different?

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a large number of people have opted to vote using some method besides the traditional in-person, election day voting. Unfortunately, our state and local reporting systems were not designed to accommodate such a large shift towards alternative methods of voting, so understanding the reporting process and calling races will be much more difficult this year.

For instance, take the “precincts reporting” metric that most official sources use. In previous election cycles, if a media outlet stated that that 150/200 precincts in a state had reported their results, then it was safe to assume that about ¾ of the votes were counted. But this cycle, in most states, a precinct “reporting” could mean it has only reported in-person, election day votes, which won’t be close to all the votes cast–in some states, far less than half of them.

This leads to the first new rule of interpreting election results: don’t rely on the percentage of precincts reporting to guess how much of the vote is left to count.

Types of ballots

The new major division in election returns is ballot types, so it’s important to understand the different terms and what they mean.

• Election day ballots, sometimes shortened in writing to “eday”: These are the traditional style of ballots most voters have interacted with. They are cast on election day and counted immediately after polls close. In previous years, the vast majority of ballots cast in most states would be election day ballots, but that’s no longer the case this election.
• Early in-person ballots: In many states, polling places will open for a period of days or weeks before election day for voters to cast their ballot. Depending on the state, these ballots may either be counted with or before election day ballots.
• Absentee ballots: Ballots which are not cast in a polling place, but are instead sent directly to voters. In some states, voters need an approved reason to receive an absentee ballot, but most states with that requirement have waived it for this election.
• Mail ballots, aka mail-in, vote by mail, and VBM: In some western states, the polling place model of voting had already been replaced by a system where every registered voter was simply mailed a ballot. These are called mail ballots.
• Provisional ballots: Special ballots which are given to voters at polling places when it’s not clear whether that voter is allowed to vote. There aren’t many of these and they are not counted on election night. Instead their validity is decided on by the Board of Elections a few days later.
• Military ballots: Some military members vote using a special kind of universal ballot if their state can’t get them an absentee ballot in time. Like provisional ballots, these are small in number.

Aren’t absentee and mail ballots similar?

They are similar. The difference between the two is mostly about which state the voter is in. If a state has a vote-by-mail system, such as California, then the default voting method entails mailing voters ballots called mail ballots. Absentee ballots, on the other hand, are part of a system where voting by mail is not the default, and where sending ballots in the mail is an exception. The process usually involves an application to receive ballots by mail because, otherwise, the state will assume the voter will vote in person. While the difference is often just in terminology, some states that offer vote-by-mail are generally more prepared to process high volumes of mailed in ballots.

Who’s voting how?

It would be nice and simple if the different voting methods were used equally by all types of voters. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a simple world. Owing to a variety of factors, in-person ballots–both early and election day–are expected to be much more Republican than absentee and mail-in ballots.

It would also simplify things if we had a clear fraction of each party voting in each way. That way, we could do a little math to find a rough estimate of what absentee votes should look like based on what in-person votes look like, or vice-versa. Unfortunately, that kind of information won’t be available before the complete counts are reported; however, we do know that it’s going to vary by state.

How to watch

There are three things to keep in mind while watching election results come in:

1. Results that seem extreme, even absurd, probably are.
2. Do not assume a race is over before knowing what ballots are left to count.
3. It’s never a bad idea to withhold judgement while waiting to see how things roll out.

Often, it’s not difficult to tell how most races are going to go. While not an exact science, results are based on two predictors: past results and polling. It’s true that polling can be off. In fact, most polling averages will be off by a few points, and every year there’s a race or two where polling misses by 10 or even 15 points. But, if the results in a race are really, really off from the polling average, it’s likely because the results that are in are skewed in favor of one candidate or party as a result of which precincts or vote type report first, and will normalize as more ballots are counted. Similarly, while large shifts on the presidential level do occur, a swing of 20 or 30 points in a single state is unlikely to stick as more results come in. In short: an early result that seems too crazy to be true probably is.

What’s out?

Setting aside states with vote by mail systems, the three categories of vote that could be counted separately will be election day in-person, early in-person, and absentee.

Some states will tabulate early in-person votes before election day, and then release them immediately or soon after polls close. If a state suddenly goes from no votes counted or only a few hundred to tens of thousands, it’s likely that it released all of the early votes. In other cases, early in-person votes will be tabulated with election day in-person votes throughout the night.

As for absentee ballots, it may take days or even weeks after election day before they’re fully counted in some states, for reasons ranging from logistical difficulties in the counting process to rules, in states like North Carolina, that allow officials to accept ballots post-election day if they’re post-marked by a certain date. In such states, there’s nothing to do but embrace the fact that a race may take longer than usual to call. Moreover, while in previous elections, given accurate information about the ballots yet to be counted, such as their composition and how large a party’s margin in them is, we could make assumptions about the likely outcomes in some races. However, since voting and reporting processes are different this election from previous cycles, good information about ballots will be harder to come by, meaning any assumptions we make are likely to be incorrect and ineffectual. Thereofere, all there would be to do is wait, which, realistically, is not a bad strategy at all compared to jumping the gun and calling a race with insufficient information.