Here’s what to know when the election numbers start coming in

We journalists love internal documents.

We love it when tipsters leak us something. We love to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get government documents and emails.

Today, I’m going to leak a document to you. This column started as a memo to Cardinal’s news staff, going over key things to know about how Virginia elections work — a useful reminder on state procedures before election night. Somewhere along the way (well, as soon as I got ready to start typing), I realized that many readers might benefit from the same information. So here goes.

Where to find election results

The internet is going to be full of numbers. The internet is also full of a lot of, um, stuff. The only source we should consider valid is the Virginia Department of Elections (which gets its numbers from the local registrars around the state). As the ads used to say, “accept no substitutes.” Conveniently, this year we’ll have a feed on our site directly from the Department of Elections. If you don’t want to sit there and hit refresh all night, you can sign up for our text alerts, and we’ll let you know when something important has happened.

I’ll be posting analysis through the day and all through the evening on our Election Live post.

All the numbers are unofficial until Dec. 7

The numbers you’ll see on election night are unofficial and will stay that way until the State Board of Elections meets Dec. 7 to certify them.

Here’s the process: The votes are counted Tuesday night. On Wednesday, local electoral boards in each county and city meet for a “canvass” — to go over the results. Typically, very little changes, but every now and then in the haste of calling in late-night returns, 3s become 8s and 8s become 3s and so forth.

Even then, there are still some votes yet to be counted — we’ll get to those next. Local electoral boards have until Friday, Nov. 13, to certify their results and send them to the state to await the official statewide certification on Dec. 7.

The Tuesday night numbers won’t include two types of ballots

Virginia allows same-day voter registration. Those ballots are listed as “provisional” ballots; part of the canvass is to verify that those voters were, indeed, eligible to vote. There are always some odd personal circumstances that lead to some ballots being listed as “provisional,” but the main reason we see provisional ballots is same-day registrants — and those are typically college students who, under Virginia law, are allowed to vote where they go to school. We should expect to see a lot of those in college towns.

Virginia also allows mail ballots to be counted if they’re postmarked before the polls close — and arrive before noon on Friday. The philosophy is the same as tax returns: You don’t have to have your tax returns in the hands of the IRS by April 15; you just have to get it mailed by then.

The number of these post-election mail ballots is quite small. In last year’s governor’s race, they accounted for just 0.8% of the statewide total. It would have to be a very close race indeed for those post-election mail ballots to matter. The provisionals are a different matter. Last year, just 1.2% of the votes were provisional ballots. The catch is, as noted, that they tend to be clustered in college towns, so could make a difference in specific races.

The Tuesday night numbers also don’t include write-in votes

This won’t matter in our big races — congressional races, city councils, school boards and such. However, it may well matter in many towns, where often there are more seats available than candidates listed on the ballot. There are also some towns in Virginia where it’s the custom for candidates not to put their name on the ballot; that’s considered being too eager. Sometimes we may hear a specific number of write-in votes cast on a Tuesday night; sometimes we don’t. Either way, those won’t get tallied until the local electoral board meets for its official canvass.

The results don’t come in evenly

This point can’t be stressed enough: Some places are quicker at counting votes than others. Typically, small localities are quicker, for the obvious reason that they have fewer votes to count. Those small localities also tend to be rural, and rural localities tend to be Republican. That means the first votes you see posted often tend to favor Republicans, while the bulk of Democratic votes comes in later as bigger localities — particularly those in Northern Virginia — start reporting.

There is absolutely nothing nefarious about that; it’s just a reflection of the physical act of counting votes. It does mean that vote share often shifts through the night as different localities report in. This is all perfectly normal. 

Different localities also count the votes in different order

Some report the early votes first, some last. This makes a difference because the early voting electorate tends to be more Democratic than the overall electorate. That means in close races, and swing localities, we really need to know which votes are being reported: Have the early votes been reported? Which precincts have reported and what’s their election history? Take Roanoke, for instance: There’s a big difference between the Eureka Park precinct (strongly Democratic) and the Eastgate precinct (strongly Republican). If one or the other precinct hasn’t reported yet, that means the final results are likely to shift one way or another. 

This means there’s some skill involved in interpreting the results, which brings us to …

When a news organization “calls” an election, that has absolutely zero force

The Associated Press is considered the gold standard of election night calls. Just remember that this is a public service, not something that has the force of law. If a new organization “calls” an election, it’s simply that news organization saying, based on their analysis of the numbers, then such-and-such candidate is going to win. Likewise, a candidate declaring victory has no legal force, either. Ditto a candidate who refuses to concede. Perhaps not very sporting, but it doesn’t change anything.

Officially, the only body that calls an election is the Department of Elections — when it certifies those results. All the department will say Tuesday is “here’s what the current vote totals are” — it’s not going to “declare” a winner for weeks yet.

For those curious, here’s how those “calls” work: We look at how this year’s returns are stacking up against historical standards. An example: Roanoke is a predictably Democratic-voting city. However, when the returns start coming in, we can’t go by the citywide totals. We need to drill down to see which precincts are being reported, to make sure we’re not seeing some “mirage” of Republican precincts being counted first. Let’s say things go as they usually do and we see Democrats winning by their usual margins, then it’s safe to conclude that Democrats will win the city. If we see Republicans starting to win some Democratic precincts, then we need to be more cautious and wait to see how strong this trend is. Is this just a fluke of a few precincts or something bigger and stronger? (You can just flip all this around in a predictably Republican-voting community).

It’s also good to look at some bellwether communities that often swing back and forth between the parties. These sometimes change over time, but for now, the three best ones in Virginia are Montgomery County, Radford and Virginia Beach. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won all three by narrow margins, which pointed to a fairly weak performance statewide. She won Virginia with just 51.8% of the vote — we could have predicted that simply based on what we saw in Montgomery (50.6%), Radford (49.1%) and Virginia Beach (50.4%). Last year, Abigail Spanberger won all three by much larger margins, which matched her statewide performance. She took 57.58% statewide, which mirrored her 58.34% in Montgomery County, 56.08% in Radford and 55.62% in Virginia Beach. Prince Edward County is another good one to watch; it tends to go Republican but can flip to Democratic in a strong Democratic year, as it did last year with Spanberger. To some extent, every community’s returns can tell us something because they all have a voting history that we can compare the returns against. If a locality with a strong partisan tradition one way or another starts to deviate from that pattern, we have a good sense of how things are trending overall.

I’ll be posting live analysis tonight on our Election Live post; part of what I’ll be doing is looking at what numbers are coming from where. If there’s a close race, I’ll be looking at what localities are still outstanding and what their voting history is.

How recounts work

Virginia law allows recounts if the apparent winning margin is 1 percentage point or less — although there’s a catch. If the apparent margin is 0.5 percentage points of less, the locality involved pays for the recount. If it’s higher, but still under 1 percentage point, then the candidate seeking a recount must pay. As a practical matter, that rarely happens, so the key figure is 0.5 percentage points or less.

Recounts can’t happen until after the State Board of Elections certifies results on Dec. 7 — because until then there’s nothing official to recount. When there are recounts, they are judicial affairs. A three-judge panel is appointed to oversee the process. The state lays out a strict process for recounts. The key thing to remember is this: The ballots are run through the voting scanners again, and whatever number comes out is accepted as final. The only time the judges get involved is if a machine spits out a ballot and the election workers can’t agree on what the ballot is supposed to say. I’ve been present at three recounts and have yet to see a disputed ballot that went to the judges (although there have been some at recounts I didn’t cover).

I’m a big fan of recounts: If the results are that close, the public ought to be reassured the results are accurate. But based on what I’ve seen in Virginia over the years, don’t count on a recount to produce a different result.

The election will give us lots to write about. Besides whatever we publish online, we’ll have more in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday afternoons. Sign up here: