A polling location in Jefferson City (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
If the 2020 presidential election is an indicator, determining who the next president will be may not be clear on election night.
Local election officials as well as Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft said that voters should be assured that elections in Missouri are secure even if vote counting takes time.
“I trust our elections,” Ashcroft said. “I was on the ballot in August, I lost, and sadly I trust that I lost.”
It could take days after polls close before the final results become clear. The same is true for control of the U.S. House and Senate and other close contests.
The reasons are largely procedural.
Accurate vote counting takes time.
According to Ashcroft’s office, there were just under 4.4 million registered voters in the state who could potentially cast ballots in this election. Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said 134,000 voters are registered in the county.
In addition to counting this volume of votes, legal challenges, audits and recounts can also extend the period needed to determine the outcome.
Election officials, like Lennon, caution Americans to be patient. What might look like delays are part of the normal process and not a sign of something nefarious.
“We do also remind people that Election Day results are still considered unofficial because there is still a certification process that has to happen,” Lennon said.
Lennon said this certification process includes things like confirming provisional ballots and counting military and overseas ballots that must arrive by 12 p.m. Friday, as allowed under state law.
Even when enough votes have been counted to allow media outlets to project a winner, those results are not final or official. They still need to be certified by election officials, a process that usually occurs over several weeks following Election Day.
The official certification deadline for presidential electors in Missouri is Nov. 20, and Dec. 10 — the second Tuesday of the month — for other federal offices.
These dates, as well as the rules and procedures for how elections are conducted, vary by state. To Lennon, this is a strength of the system.
“It is part of the way that we are decentralized in elections in this country. Overall, I feel that it makes us stronger because we have so many local election officials that are conducting the election in their own communities,“ Lennon said.
Ballots cast by voters on Election Day are tabulated relatively quickly, usually by machine, but even those results need to be double-checked. In Missouri, counties must recount by hand votes from 5% of polling locations as a check that counting by machines was correct.
There are 60 polling places in Boone County for this election, Lennon said. Three polling places will be selected at random and recounted to meet the 5% requirement.
Mailed absentee ballots can take longer to count. Each ballot must be reviewed for accuracy and to ensure that it comes from a legitimate voter. The process of removing the ballot from the envelope, confirming its validity and preparing it to be counted, either by hand or machine, takes time.
Some states prohibit officials from beginning this process before Election Day, all but guaranteeing that the count will be extended. In Missouri, absentee ballots are prepared and placed in a secure ballot box beginning five days before the election. They are not counted until the polls close at 7 p.m. on Election Day.
Two battleground states, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, prohibit the opening, preparing and counting of ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. Results from these states may take more time than other presidential battleground states as a result.
There are other factors that could lead to a longer wait for final results.
Most states, including Missouri, require mailed ballots to be received by the close of polls on Election Day. However, a few states, such as Nevada, California and Maryland, allow ballots to arrive several days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Some states give voters a few days to “cure” or fix errors on their mail ballots so they can be counted. This is not the case in Missouri, but for national races outside the state, this can make a difference.
Close races can also trigger automatic or candidate-requested recounts or attract legal challenges that can drag the contest out even further.
This complicated and extended counting process can lead to false claims of election fraud or interference, as was the case in 2020. In that election, it took four days for The Associated Press to unofficially declare Joe Biden president. The votes were not officially certified until weeks later, as is normal procedure.
Despite this, former president Donald Trump demanded that the counting be stopped hours after the polls closed, and declared himself the winner, falsely accusing Democrats of finding ballots to manipulate the outcome.
“We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” Trump said. ”As far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”
But what Trump and his allies were denouncing was the normal vote-counting process.
Officials had warned repeatedly that the count would take time, especially with the expanded use of mail balloting by Democrats during the pandemic. That created what became known as a “red mirage” favoring Trump on Election Day, something that disappeared once all the votes were tallied.
As secretary of state, Ashcroft is the man in charge of securing and certifying the results of the election.
“Missouri leads the nation in making sure we have accessibility, security and credibility,” Ashcroft said. “It’s easy to vote, it’s hard to cheat, and if you do we’ll come after you so that when all is said and done we can all understand the results are what the people of the state desire.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.