OK, let’s talk about how things are going to go down tonight.
First and foremost: Somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose. We may not know that tonight (details to come), but the whole nature of elections is that some candidates win and some don’t. As they say in football, in reference to a showboating player who crosses the goal line, act like you’ve been there before.
We’ve done all this before and unless some people out there screw this up, we’ll keep doing this for many years to come.
With that, let’s go over some basics.
1. When will we know who won?
Good question. Long answer.
Here’s as short as I can make it: If Donald Trump wins, we should know tonight (and by tonight, I mean the night of darkness that ends at dawn, not the night on the clock that ends at midnight). In 2016, it wasn’t until 2:29 a.m. that Trump was projected the winner. If Kamala Harris wins, we may not know for days yet. That’s because she may need to depend on the counting of mail ballots in some states and, as we saw four years ago, that takes a while.
I counsel patience to all sides, which I realize is like counseling my cat not to jump on the table. My advice is frequently ignored.
I’m also optimistic that we’ll know the results of all our state and local races in Virginia sometime tonight — unless some are super close, in which case we, too, will be waiting on those mail ballots to get counted.
Let’s dig in a little deeper on this.
2. Why does it take so long to get the results lately? We used to get them right away.
We’ve changed election laws and election technology. Both have meant slower returns. In Virginia, we have “no excuse” absentee voting — what we usually call early voting. That also includes a lot more mail voting than we used to have. Plus, we now have same-day voter registration, and we also accept mail ballots after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked in time. It takes longer to count all those mail ballots and verify all those provisional ballots (which is how same-day registrants are counted), plus wait until Friday for those final mail ballots.
We’ve also changed the machinery we use to count the votes. We used to cast our ballots on those old-fashioned lever machines. At the end of the night, poll workers unlocked the machine and read off an odometer-like series of vote totals. That was it.
Now we have optical scanners. They just work differently. For those feeling nostalgic, don’t. Those old lever machines didn’t produce a ballot. That means in the case of a recount, there was nothing to recount — a recount was simply reading the odometer again. With optical scanners, we have actual paper ballots that can be recounted, if necessary.
Philosophically, we have traded convenience on the front end for slower reporting on the back end. If you can wait two years between Season 7 and Season 8 of “Game of Thrones” to find out who got to sit on the fictional Iron Throne, you can stand to wait a few days to find out who will sit behind the Resolute Desk.
3. What should we look for in the early returns?
Now we get to the fun part. Well, fun for me, maybe not for those who want instant answers.
In Virginia, the first returns to report are typically from rural areas where there are fewer votes to count. Those are also typically Republican areas. In last year’s General Assembly races, the first numbers came out of Henry County. In the 2022 congressional midterms, the first numbers came out of Orange County. In the 2021 governor’s race, the first numbers came out of Buchanan County.
The biggest localities come later, with Northern Virginia usually among the last to complete reporting.
That means the first numbers we see will skew Republican and then likely become more favorable to Democrats through the night.
There is absolutely nothing nefarious about this. This is simply a function of smaller localities tending to be Republican, bigger ones Democratic and, surprise, surprise, it takes longer to count more ballots.
On election night, we’ll get the numbers for the day-of voting and early voting and, ideally, mail ballots (assume they aren’t so numerous that it takes more time to count them). More on this shortly. What we won’t have on election night are the numbers from provisional ballots (anyone who registers on Election Day gets counted as a provisional ballot, which must be verified later) and late-arriving mail ballots (Virginia counts mail ballots that are postmarked by 7 p.m. on Election Day but don’t arrive until noon on Friday). This is where things get tricky. If an election is close, it’s possible those provisional ballots and late-arriving mail ballots will make the difference. (Other states may do things differently, so I can’t speak to, say, Pennsylvania, which took days and days four years ago to get through all their ballots.)
We also need to remember that Democrats like voting by mail a lot more than Republicans do, so mail ballots almost always skew Democratic, even in strongly Republican areas. Case in point: Last year, state Sen. Travis Hackworth, R-Tazewell County, won re-election with almost 67% of the vote — a landslide by any standard. However, the mail balloting, even in his home county, was almost even.
If an election tonight tilts slightly Republican, but close enough that provisional ballots and late-arriving mail ballots might make the difference, then there’s a good chance that race will ultimately go Democratic. That’s not fraud, that’s just voter preference in terms of how they choose to vote.
Once again, patience is the order of the day — and, perhaps, several days. I fully expect that we’ll know the winners in Virginia tonight, with a few possible exceptions in some local races. As for the presidential race nationally, that might take a while, depending on how long it takes to count the votes in some of the key swing states.
4. How many votes come in after Election Day?
In last year’s General Assembly elections, there were 9,082 mail ballots that came in on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after the election and were counted. This accounted for 0.03% of the statewide vote total. If counting ballots after Election Day troubles you (and it troubles some, particularly Republicans), I offer two pieces of context: One, this is how tax returns work. You just need it postmarked by the deadline, not actually delivered. Same here. Two, the actual number of ballots we’re talking about in Virginia is so small as to be likely inconsequential.
Here’s a more significant figure and one that should worry Democrats instead: Last year, Virginia had 92,304 applications for mail ballots that weren’t returned. What happened? Who knows? Some people may have decided to vote in person, after all. Some may have decided not to vote at all. Some may have mailed in their ballot, and it’s still stuck in some postal machine somewhere. Unlikely, but I’m not a fan of mail voting simply because I’m not willing to trust my ballot to the post office. The point here: When Democrats are trailing slightly, I often hear them say: “Oh, we’ve got a lot of mail ballots yet to come in.” Don’t count on that. Last year, 25.1% of mail ballot applications never turned into a vote. Whatever the number of mail ballot applications may be, the actual number of votes out of those is going to be smaller.
The old saying is: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Here it should be: Don’t count your mail ballots before they arrive.
5. How many provisional ballots are there?
Last year, in the General Assembly races, Virginia had 26,053 provisional ballots cast, of which 15,908 were same-day registrations. Total turnout last year was 40.96%. Four years ago, in a presidential election, it was 75.08%. This will also be the first presidential election in which Virginia has had same-day registration, so, just based on that math, it’s possible we’ll see close to 52,000 provisional ballots, with 30,000 same-day registrations, this year.
These provisional ballots are not evenly distributed. Not surprisingly, the biggest number came in the biggest localities — Fairfax County last year had 4,098 provisional ballots, of which 2,066 were same-day registrations. Galax had the lowest number — just 1 provisional ballot, a same-day registration. Augusta County, Lunenburg County and Smyth County had no same-day registrations but had provisional ballots cast for other reasons.
However, as a percentage of the total vote, provisional ballots are highest in college towns. Last year in Williamsburg, they accounted for 7.3% of the votes cast in the city, by far the highest percentage in the state. In Charlottesville, they accounted for 2.2% of the total; in Montgomery County, 1.6%; in Harrisonburg, 1.1%; in Fredericksburg, 0.9% with everybody else below that.
Here’s another way to visualize provisional ballots: Montgomery County and Roanoke have about the same population. Montgomery, though, has Virginia Tech and Roanoke does not. Roanoke last year had 234 provisional ballots; Montgomery County had 996 provisional ballots, of which 895 were same-day registrations. Of those provisional ballots, 875 were in the House of Delegates race between Republican Chris Obenshain and Democrat Lily Franklin — she had a lot of Virginia Tech students register and vote for her. It took until the following Monday for all those provisional ballots to get verified and counted. As they were, Obenshain’s election night margin of 943 votes shrank to 183 votes.
The takeaway: The election statewide would have to be razor-thin before provisional ballots make a difference. However, in a super-close race, they could make a difference in some local races. For instance, in last year’s House of Delegates race, Lynchburg had 216 provisional ballots. Since those have now been “cured” — that’s the technical term for verification — and assigned to whatever precinct they belong to, we don’t know exactly where they are. For the sake of argument, let’s say they were evenly distributed among the city’s four wards, although they probably weren’t. That means if the margin in, say, the three-way Lynchburg Ward I council race comes out of election night with a margin of about 50 votes, we probably want to withhold judgment until we see how the provisional ballots go.
6. Will the purge of voter rolls make a difference?
On this question, I’m pretty emphatic. The answer is “no.” There are some big principles at stake here with when and how voter rolls get “cleaned up,” but the practical effect here is so small as to be almost inconsequential. I dealt with this in more depth in a previous column, but the short version: Yes, some actual citizens have gotten inadvertently struck from the list — but they can register on Election Day and still cast a provisional ballot. That’s a hassle, that’s potentially even traumatic. But there is a recourse. In any case, the number of people here is so small — about 1,600 — that it’s not going to have any impact statewide one way or another. Both sides should just take a deep breath.
7. Who gets to “call” an election? And how does that work?
This is one of my favorite questions; I’m glad I asked myself! The only “call” that matters is the one from the State Board of Elections, and that won’t come for weeks yet, when the results get certified. All the election board will do on election night is report the numbers. That won’t stop news organizations from “calling” the election, though.
These “calls” have absolutely no force whatsoever. They certainly carry no legal weight. You can sit at home if you want and post on social media that you’re calling the election. These calls simply reflect the judgment of that news organization about who they think is likely to win, based on the voting trends they see.
Let’s take some absurd examples. I mentioned earlier that the first numbers we see in Virginia will be from rural — and Republican — areas. If we see those places going Democratic, the first thing I’m going to do is make sure the mushroom on my election night pizza wasn’t a hallucinogenic one. More seriously, if we see strongly Republican areas turning in a “soft” Republican vote, or strong Democratic localities doing the same on that side, then that probably signals a bad night for that particular party. Some localities are good bellwethers. In my weekly newsletter last week, I identified six localities whose 2020 totals nearly matched the statewide percentages — Northampton County, Radford, Staunton, Surry County, Sussex County and Winchester. There’s no guarantee they will be bellwethers this year, but all those are good places to look for spot trends, up or down.
(That’s why you should sign up for West of the Capital, which you can do right here and now:)
I’ll be looking at those localities again tonight for trends. Other analysts may be looking at other localities. All of us need to look at both percentages and also raw vote totals — is a particular locality producing a higher or lower turnout than it traditionally has? We also need to look at what’s still unreported. If, say, one candidate has a slight lead but the localities still out tend to vote for the other party, best to hold off. If, on the other hand, the localities still out tend to vote for that candidate’s party, he or she is probably in good shape.
The gold standard for media calls is the Associated Press. AP, to its credit, tends to be quite cautious. For instance, it didn’t call the 5th District Republican primary between Bob Good and John McGuire at all because the margin was so thin. By contrast, we at Cardinal looked at the numbers and concluded — correctly — that McGuire was likely to win by a small margin because he was ahead and the precincts still out were in localities where he was winning by significant margins. It seemed highly unlikely that those remaining precincts would be any different.
I’m not hung up on making calls. Usually, the numbers speak for themselves. It’s only when a race is close and we’re examining the voting trends in places that haven’t reported yet that things really get exciting.
8. What happens if one candidate declares victory?
Absolutely nothing. It might have some psychological impact, but it has no legal force, just as media calls have no legal force.
9. What happens if a losing candidate refuses to accept defeat?
As long as they don’t send their supporters to riot in the streets, absolutely nothing. At one time, losing candidates had the grace to concede. Sadly, those seem to be different times. Some people haven’t followed enough sports. Sometimes your side loses. Get used to it. Whichever way this thing goes, we’d be better off as a country if the loser called up the winner to offer congratulations and urged everyone to move on. We’d also be better off if we had unicorns prancing through the woods.
10. What can we expect from Cardinal News tonight?
We’ll have an Associated Press feed of election results from all over the country. You can get a sneak peek at what the page will look like. The polls in Virginia close at 7 p.m.; with luck, we’ll start getting some numbers sometime after 7:30 p.m. but be patient. In the past, it’s taken until 11 p.m. or so for some localities to get through all their results.
I’ll be posting live commentary on the results as they come in, with emphasis on the state and local results. And, once we get results, we’ll be posting stories from those state and local races. If you don’t want to sit on your phone all night hitting refresh, you can download our app from wherever you get your apps, and we’ll send out a “push” whenever we have a new story posted.
Now’s also a good time to talk up our members-only post-election Zoom on Thursday at noon where I’ll talk about the election results. If you’re not a member, here’s how to become one.
Still not sure who to vote for in some of the local races? You can see who’s running and compare them in our Voter Guide.
