8 Things You Were Too Afraid to Ask About the Electoral Process

Everything you need to know about the electoral college, swing states, counting absentee ballots, and declaring a winner.

We are officially less than a week away from Election Day, and nearly 70% of Americans are saying that the election is a significant source of stress for them, amid all the other anxiety-inducing horrors that 2020 has brought us. (BTW we have some specific tips for dealing with election stress here.)

Maybe most stressful about this whole situation is just how much uncertainty there is around the election process -- both in general and in the context of this particularly...unique year we’re having. That’s why we’ve got you covered with answers to your most pressing election questions, like how the electoral college works and when we’ll be able to declare a winner.

And transparently, we don’t actually have ALL the answers either because, well, nobody really does. As with everything else that this year has thrown our way, we’re just going to have to be patient and prepared to tackle whatever goes down on November 3. Keep reading to have a better understanding of it all heading into Election Day.

1) How does the Electoral College work?

When you cast your vote for president, you’re actually voting for electors who will then elect the president -- a group known as the Electoral College. These electors are chosen by your state’s political parties, and they commit to voting for that party’s candidate, so a vote for them is essentially a vote for that candidate within the Electoral College (except when the rare “faithless elector” decides not to follow their pledged vote, but most states have laws in place to prevent it, and it’s never swayed the outcome of an election before).

Each state gets as many electors as they do representatives in Congress, and Washington, DC also gets three. That means that right now, there are 538 electoral votes in total. In 48 states and DC, the winner of the state’s popular vote gets all of the electoral votes for that state (Maine and Nebraska are the only states that assign electoral votes proportionally). A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win.

And yes, because of this system, a candidate can lose the popular vote and still win the election. It’s what happened in 2016 when Donald Trump earned a majority of the electoral votes while losing the popular vote by about 3 million votes.

2) Why is the Electoral College even a thing?

This system was a compromise that came about when drafting the US Constitution in 1787. Some wanted Congress to choose the president, and others wanted a popular vote.

Keep in mind, this was before the internet or TV or phones or really any kind of tech that would make it possible for the average person to stay informed of politics outside their immediate area. And letting Congress decide would be detrimental to the founders’ vision of separated powers of government. What they eventually settled on was the Electoral College -- a mix of both!

Things are obviously very different now centuries later. We have infinitely better access to news and information to stay politically informed. Plus, the discrepancies between popular and electoral votes in several past elections have called into question whether this system actively works against the majority-will, leading some to call for its abolition.

3) What are “swing states”?

Swing states are states where either major political party’s presidential candidate has a competitive chance of winning. You may also hear these referred to as “battleground states,” and they can certainly feel like it because candidates will usually focus most of their attention on these states. Things like more moderate politics or shifting demographics can influence whether a state is considered a swing state or not.

Most states consistently vote along party lines, and those “safe states” don’t usually require as much investment from presidential candidates to secure their vote (though some states previously thought to be safe have surprised us in the past).

In the 2020 election, there are about a dozen states considered either complete toss-ups or with only a slight political lean (meaning they have the potential to swing). Folks are keeping an eye on Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina especially since polling there hasn’t revealed a particularly strong lean one way or another. A candidate’s path to victory will have to include several swing states, as their electoral votes are crucial to getting to 270.

4) When will all the absentee ballots be counted?

Each state handles their elections differently, and that includes their timelines for receiving, processing, and reporting ballots. When it comes to absentee ballots, some states process them as they arrive in the weeks before Election Day, and others don’t even start the process until the day of.

There’s also a distinction between processing ballots (opening envelopes, verifying signatures, etc.) and counting ballots (actually tabulating votes for each candidate). According to NPR, six states won’t start processing ballots until Election Day, and 37 states won’t start counting their votes until Election Day.

And that’s just when the states will start processing and counting. Given the record-smashing amount of absentee ballots submitted this year, a lot of states are unable to give a solid time estimate for their unofficial results, and The New York Times reports that only eight states expect to have at least 98% of unofficial results reported by noon the day after the election. We should be prepared to wait at least a few (if not several) days to get final numbers from every state.

5) Will we know who won on Election Day like we usually do?

Maybe not, unless one side just absolutely blows it out of the water.

Remember those swing states we talked about? Some of them, including Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, are expected to be pretty quick counters (less than a day). Others, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan….not so much. We’re almost certainly not gonna have election night results from all of the crucial swing states -- and we potentially won’t have them from several other states either, considering the unprecedented number of ballots they’ll need to process.

Theoretically, a candidate could win over enough fast-counting states (and their subsequent electoral votes) that they reach 270 before the slow-counting swing states even produce their results. But that would require 1) enough states to get it together and count their in-person and absentee votes quickly and 2) an absolute landslide victory, in which one side flips states that weren’t projected to do so.

6) At what point can a candidate declare a victory?

Here’s the thing. Results are never official until their final certification, which happens anywhere from a week to over a month after Election Day, depending on the state (because each state handles their own certification). That means a candidate is never truly confirmed as the winner until around December.

Which may have you wondering why we’ve seen presidents declare victory on election night in the past. Turns out, those election night calls are usually just projected winners that the media feels confident enough to declare based on the (often incomplete) info they already have.

When you see the media reporting on results coming in on election night, they’re reporting a mixture of absentee and in-person votes, based on data provided from the precincts (or voting districts). These results are always considered unofficial. As we know, all of the absentee ballots won’t be counted that night, so these unofficial results won’t include all of them.

In previous elections, the number of absentee ballots was low enough that they rarely majorly swayed a state’s popular vote, so the unofficial results painted a pretty accurate picture of that state’s numbers. However, because of the historic number of absentee ballots cast this year, they have the potential to make a real impact on the outcome, so we can’t take the reported unofficial results at face value in the same way we’ve tended to do in the past. If a candidate declares victory before all of the results are finalized, they could still end up losing after all the votes are counted.

And to be clear, the unofficial results on election night have gotten it wrong before too -- like in 2000 when networks prematurely called a Florida victory for Democratic candidate Al Gore.

7) Is voter fraud happening?

Voter fraud is super duper rare in the US. In fact, The Heritage Foundation, “the nation’s largest, most broadly-supported conservative research and educational institution,” has only reported about 1,300 proven cases of voter fraud in the US since 1982.

There’s a lot of talk going on this year about voter fraud related to vote-by-mail methods in particular. Not only have studies found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare in general, fraud related to vote-by-mail is even rarer (think, <5 nationally each year). You can learn more about this and other mail voting myths here.

You know what’s actually a much bigger problem? Voter suppression. In fact, some recent Supreme Court rulings over election procedures in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin are disqualifying absentee ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but that arrive after the day of.

8) What happens if a candidate doesn’t accept the results?

In short, lawsuits would probably happen and the Supreme Court may get involved.

If a candidate feels that state law has been violated in a state’s election procedures, then they can file a lawsuit against that state, which will probably reach the state supreme court -- and then potentially get up to the US Supreme Court if a federal constitutional right is believed to be violated. (If it’s any indicator, when it came to confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump said that he wanted all nine justices on the court because he anticipated an election dispute would be settled by them.)