Looking back to 2020 for a Guide to How Fast the Votes Will Be Reported in 2024

The 2020 election provides some guideposts to what to expect in 2024, but be prepared for some changes.

As we approach Election Day, I’ve been getting lots of questions about what to expect as the election results are reported. Will we be seeing the same patterns as in 2020? Will Pennsylvania take forever to count its votes because of limitations prohibitions on pre-processing? Will Arizona slow-walk from a comfortable Democratic lead to a nail-biter?

The simple answer to all these questions is that we’re likely to see similar patterns to 2020 and 2022, although some states will be more similar than others. The reason for the similarities is simple: for many states, the rules governing the counting and reporting of votes will be quite similar to 2020.

I can hear you saying, “Wait a minute. Didn’t 2020 see a surge of voting by mail that won’t repeat in 2024? Surely, that will affect what the vote reports look like.” In some states, that will be undoubtedly true. However, for most states, the laws in 2020 that sped up the counting of mail ballots, notably allowing for mail ballot pre-processing, will remain in place. To the degree that mail ballots may slow down the count, the presence of fewer mail ballots in 2024 may speed things up a bit. In addition, in many states, the mail ballots are the first to be reported, not the last, because they’re available to be tallied centrally either during Election Day or as soon as the polls close.

The pace of counting in 2020

In 2020, the team at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) scraped the election results reported by the New York Times, which, in turn, were provided by Edison Research. This gives us a picture of how quickly states reported results in 2020 as a baseline for what to expect in 2024.

Also in 2020, MEDSL published a report that analyzed these data. One of the analyses we performed was on the velocity of vote reporting, measured in several ways. One simple way to illustrate cross-state differences was to show the percentage of votes reported 4, 8, 24, and 48 hours after polls closed in the state. A figure showing those numbers appears below, with the fastest-reporting state after four hours (Iowa) at the bottom and the slowest state (D.C.—I’ll call it a state for these purposes) at the top.

This figure helps to illustrate the frustration many voters and politicians felt on election night and beyond. While some states could get almost all their votes reported by the wee hours of Wednesday morning, only about half had reported 90% of their votes eight hours after polls closed. Among the seven battleground states this year, North Carolina was, by far, the fastest out of the shoot, trailed a long distance by Wisconsin, which was about in the middle of the pack. Michigan and Pennsylvania were among the ten slowest.

I invite the reader to study this figure (or look at the report) because it reveals all sorts of nuances about how states report their vote totals. Georgia, for instance, was a relatively slow-reporting state after four hours but quickly caught up after midnight of election night. After 48 hours, it was in the top half of states in terms of votes reported. On the other hand, Alaska reported about half its votes by Wednesday morning and then stopped for several days owing to the challenges in aggregating vote totals in that far-flung and road-poor state.

The role of pre-processing

One detail about vote reporting not evidenced in this figure is what the pre-processing of mail ballots does to the speed of voting counting. In the statistical analysis performed in the MEDSL report, the failure to pre-process did slow down the count, on average, but by a small amount. Within four hours of the polls closing, the average state with no pre-processing had reported 63% of its votes, compared to 78% that didn’t restrict pre-processing. At the twenty-four-hour point, the gap between states had essentially disappeared.

In a later academic paper written by me and two MEDSL colleagues, we also found that states with more mail ballots reported at a slower pace. However, the effect of mail-ballot load also declined over time.

Three thoughts for 2024

What does all this mean for 2024? I would highlight three things.

First, pre-processing make a difference, although it makes the biggest difference in the early hours of counting. In 2020, seventeen states prohibited processing of mail ballots before Election Day. In 2024, that number declined to seven. Unfortunately, three are battleground states: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (Michigan will allow pre-processing in 2024.)

Second, there will be fewer mail ballots in 2024 than in 2020 to be processed on Election Day in these states. At this point before Election Day in 2020, nearly 3 million mail ballots had been sent out in Pennsylvania; as of today, just over 2 million have been sent out for 2024. In Wisconsin, nearly 1.5 million mail ballots had been issued a week before the 2020 election; this year, the number is about 600,000. Thus, even though there will be a lot of mail ballots to process on Election Day, that number will be significantly less than in 2020.

Third, perceptions of vote-reporting speed in 2020 were heavily influenced by the closeness of the count. Georgia, for instance, got a reputation as a slow-counting state even though it was in the middle of the pack after midnight of election night. The long wait until Thursday for Georgia to be “called” for Biden wasn’t because Georgia was slow, but because of a small number of ballots—such as straggling UOCAVA ballots, provisional ballots, and damaged ballots—that needed to be processed before the count was all finished.

There are other things to say about the speed of vote reporting, especially about reporting in non-battleground states, but I will leave that for another time.

One last thing

I will end with this, however. It is important to remember that the reports of votes on election night are just that, reports. Once the initial unofficial reports are issued, localities and states begin the canvass, which confirms the results, resolves discrepancies, and moves toward official results. It is important to get the results reported quickly, but it is even more important for them to be accurate. In the days following the election, I hope the public will watch the canvassing process carefully, but also give election officials the room they need to make sure the results are correct.