What's taking so long with the last few election results?

[StealthPolarBear]

Don't shout at me I am sure this is a really stupid question
I don't think the results have changed since I first saw them, earlier on today.whats the delay in the states that haven't sorted it yet? Why aren't they trickling in?

No worries, there's a tonne of postal votes, loads more than usual.

Some states laws don’t allow them to start counting until the polls close and they had an unprecedented amount of votes to count including a huge number of postal votes due to Covid.

Oh and in one state their electronic counting machine ran out of ink and they had to send a guy to city hall for some more

Thanks. Suppose I just expected to see an initial flood followed by a trickle. I don't think there's a trickle

I get the feeling that Americans are not very good at organising elections. Wasn't it hanging chads last time? You can't beat a sheet of paper and a blunt pencil on a piece of string.

It will be to do with the absurd number of postal votes in some areas. The last 24 hours has made me feel better about British politics.

Thanks everyone. Will be interesting to see what tonight brings

Postal votes, as others have said, because people were worried about going to the polling stations, either because of threats of violence or because of Covid.

But why do postal votes take longer to count than normal votes?

They have sent the counters home to sleep and they will resume counting tomorrow lunchtime.

You're talking about tens and tens of millions of votes over there. An unexpected deluge of postal votes would take a while to count.

@ButNotYet

They have sent the counters home to sleep and they will resume counting tomorrow lunchtime.

This sounds like I was being sarcastic but it’s true!

I get what people are saying about postal votes but it’s not exactly unexpected that there were going to be loads of postal votes given the current situation with the virus. I can’t understand why they couldn’t get a system in place to ensure that they were able to count them all in time?

@SocialBees I don't know about US, but in the UK postal votes are in two envelopes. The outer envelope contains the voter's signature which has to be matched, by eye, to the signature on file to prevent fraud. Then the second envelope is opened and the vote counted separately (to preserve anonymity).

Unlike UK elections they don't count through the night. They stopped counting aroud 7am our time.

In the West Midlands apparently pencils aren’t good enough and people took their own pens to vote in the referendum

I do vote counting in UK elections - takes ages with our much smaller numbers so must be a mammoth task in the States!

@SocialBees

But why do postal votes take longer to count than normal votes?

There are extra verification steps on the postal votes. Some states allowed them to start verification before 3rd November but others had to wait until polls closed to start verifying. Some states also allow postal votes postmarked 3rd November even if they arrive late (think N Carolina has a really late final deadline). It is crazy because states and even counties within states vary so much. Americans I know in the UK were discussing that one of them got to distance vote really easily (possibly even online) while another had to have their vote witnessed by another US citizen before they posted it back.

@Sunshine1235

I get what people are saying about postal votes but it’s not exactly unexpected that there were going to be loads of postal votes given the current situation with the virus. I can’t understand why they couldn’t get a system in place to ensure that they were able to count them all in time?

Some states did by verifying advance but others waited until 3rd (I assume because of different rules written in those states that couldn't be changed)

There are approximately 234 million people who are eligible to vote in the USA- even if only half of the number actually votes then that is still a heck of a lot of votes to be counted!

Also the outstanding states include the really close ones so they will be checking and double their numbers really closely (I think Wisconsin said triple checking).

It is mad though that one of the BBC pieces said that whilst in some areas the local polling station data can be emailed to be the town hall collators, in others it has to be hand delivered on memory stick or telephoned over.

Like many people, we voted by mail. It’s a lot more work to count those votes.

One polling place had an internet outage. I read another had a burst pipe.

With the race this right, these little things matter.

@SocialBees

But why do postal votes take longer to count than normal votes?

Because you have to take them out of an envelope individually rather than it just being pieces of paper in a box?

I honestly don’t know, but that’s my guess!

It's a lot more votes to count, but there are a lot more people to count them!

If they recruited enough counters, each counter would only have to count the same number of votes as a U.K. counter.

But they don't do it that way.

After validation (which takes a while) they have big machines that do most of the counting. Many states have multiple items to count on the same vote so needs to be a big machine. My (1 page) USA ballot had at least 12 races and 8 propositions to decide about.

Someone mentioned that Florida does the simple task of opening & validating the ballots before vote day, and this speeds up their result reporting enormously. But some states literally don't open & validate mail-in ballots (much less get votes tallied) until after the in-person vote count has finished.