Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: I'm Stephen Carol and this is Here's Why, where we
Speaker 2: take one news story and explain it in just a
Speaker 2: few minutes with our experts here at Bloomberg. This election
Speaker 2: season in the US, there's one question that keeps coming up,
Speaker 2: and it's not who's going to win, but how long
Speaker 2: will it take to get a result.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of concerns on Wall Street that
Speaker 1: we could go through several days of uncertainty, not unlike
Speaker 1: four years ago. And we know how much the markets
Speaker 1: love that.
Speaker 2: You're looking at a coin flip election and everyone wants
Speaker 2: to know who gets it if it lands on its edge.
Speaker 2: All this weight, we want the result we want to
Speaker 2: see after this really chaotic, tumultuous campaign and outcome. In reality,
Speaker 2: there are fifty one different elections, one in each state
Speaker 2: and in the District of Columbia. Each one follows its
Speaker 2: own rules on where, when, and how ballots are cast,
Speaker 2: which can affect when votes are counted and results are known.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, it took almost four days to find
Speaker 2: out who's been elected president. In two thousand, the decision
Speaker 2: from the Supreme Court didn't come until mid December. So
Speaker 2: here's why getting US election results is so complicated. Megan Crane,
Speaker 2: who's an editor in our Washington bureau, joins us now
Speaker 2: for more. Megan, great to talk to you. So different
Speaker 2: states have these different rules for the elections. How much
Speaker 2: divergence is there when it comes to counting.
Speaker 1: I would say there's fifty different ways of doing it
Speaker 1: really between the fifty states. Some count their ballots as
Speaker 1: they come in early, Some allow for ballots to come
Speaker 1: in after election day, and some don't. Some allow people
Speaker 1: to come in and do what's called curing of their ballots.
Speaker 1: We can talk about that more for quite some time,
Speaker 1: and many don't, so it just really is up to
Speaker 1: each and every state.
Speaker 2: So it's pretty different than depending on where you are
Speaker 2: talking about curing of balance. How does that work?
Speaker 1: A cured ballot is basically if you send in a
Speaker 1: mail ballot or an absentee ballot. Sometimes they don't get
Speaker 1: counted for a variety of reasons. Someone forgets to sign
Speaker 1: the envelope they come in, somebody doesn't get the right postmark,
Speaker 1: or for whatever reason they're not counted. You can actually
Speaker 1: track that online. I voted early and I was able
Speaker 1: to look and see that they had my ballot and
Speaker 1: it had been noted. So you can look at that
Speaker 1: and say, oh, I sent in my absentee belt, but
Speaker 1: they never got it or they rejected it for some reason.
Speaker 1: And then you can go in in most jurisdictions and
Speaker 1: say I want to do a new one and that
Speaker 1: will then count instead of the previous ballot. The reason
Speaker 1: that really impacts counting is, for example, some states have
Speaker 1: like days after the election where they allow people to
Speaker 1: do that. North Carolina is until November fourteenth, where someone
Speaker 1: can come in and check their ballot make sure it
Speaker 1: was counted. You can't really like change your vote, but
Speaker 1: you can make sure that the ballot that you sent
Speaker 1: was counted. You know. If we're down to the wire
Speaker 1: and North Carolina is as close as everyone says it
Speaker 1: might be, that's what several days for us to be
Speaker 1: even waiting until they can decide they have their last ballots.
Speaker 2: And that touches on the really key part that mail
Speaker 2: in ballots play in this election. And that's something that's
Speaker 2: changed over time as well.
Speaker 1: It has. Yeah, mail in ballots are new ish, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say they're a new phenomenon. And out West largely
Speaker 1: where they have really a history of clean elections is
Speaker 1: probably where that comes from. Like an Oregon, for example,
Speaker 1: there's only mail in ballots. There's one like very rural
Speaker 1: county where they still have polling places, but it's quite unusual.
Speaker 1: Washington State is almost exclusively mail in ballots. Arizona has
Speaker 1: a number of mail in ballots. People have that sort
Speaker 1: of tradition and expectation there. In other places it wasn't
Speaker 1: so common. And then, of course in twenty twenty we
Speaker 1: were in the middle of COVID and they change the
Speaker 1: rules in a lot of places making it easier to
Speaker 1: vote by mail or drop off your ballot off hours
Speaker 1: to keep crowds down and things like that, And so
Speaker 1: we really don't have that much to compare it to
Speaker 1: historically speaking, because those were new in twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: then people got used to it, right, so then they
Speaker 1: expected to be able to keep doing that. In some places.
Speaker 1: We have a huge turnout of early vote this year,
Speaker 1: much more so than expected.
Speaker 2: I think back in the last election, counting of the
Speaker 2: mail in ballots was one of the things that took
Speaker 2: so long in Pennsylvania for them to be able to
Speaker 2: declare a result how much has changed in that process
Speaker 2: since the last election, Right.
Speaker 1: So, Pennsylvania's process has been standardized in this election and
Speaker 1: is actually expected to be quite slow. They made a
Speaker 1: rule that they cannot even open the envelopes of mail
Speaker 1: in ballots until seven AM on election day, So that
Speaker 1: means they can't you get them ready, sort of verify
Speaker 1: the signatures, flatten them so they can go through the machines,
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff that would speed up that process.
Speaker 1: They cannot do that until the morning of election day.
Speaker 1: They cannot start counting those votes until eight PM on
Speaker 1: election day. So if they're all prepped and ready, I
Speaker 1: suppose that process could go pretty quickly through the machines.
Speaker 1: But that does make sort of a big open question
Speaker 1: as to what will happen this year as far as
Speaker 1: how long it takes to count in Pennsylvania, especially considering
Speaker 1: that it's expected to be so close.
Speaker 2: What are the other things that can make counting some
Speaker 2: of these votes quite complicated? Is the fact that you
Speaker 2: have so many races on the same ballot, and in
Speaker 2: some places there are other voting initiatives that are happening
Speaker 2: on election day as well. How does that affect the
Speaker 2: overall process of counting the results.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what counting necessarily gets delayed by that,
Speaker 1: but certainly like verification of the results gets complicated when
Speaker 1: you have a lot of vote splitting, for example, and
Speaker 1: the results don't really seem logical to an outside observer,
Speaker 1: Say the top of the ticket goes heavily to one
Speaker 1: party and everybody else goes heavily to a different party.
Speaker 1: That can sort of raise questions about, you know, how
Speaker 1: things work. There's also questions about like long lines on
Speaker 1: election day, and then the rules I think in every
Speaker 1: jurisdiction is that if you're in line when the polls close,
Speaker 1: you have to be allowed to vote. Well, if the
Speaker 1: lines are really that can be hours before the polls close,
Speaker 1: And if the rules in that particular state are that
Speaker 1: they can't count the votes until the polls close, you're
Speaker 1: pushing things back by hours and hours.
Speaker 2: Is it just a feeling or is the wait for
Speaker 2: results actually getting longer from election to election.
Speaker 1: I think on the presidential level it's not necessarily getting longer.
Speaker 1: Of course, we didn't have a result in two thousand,
Speaker 1: which was, you know, twenty four years ago, until December.
Speaker 1: That result came after a long court fight, but we did,
Speaker 1: in fact have those results pretty quickly. I think the
Speaker 1: results have actually started to come faster in some ways
Speaker 1: because we have all these mechanical ways to count votes,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're looking at a long historical trend,
Speaker 1: but the country is so divided and the process is
Speaker 1: so meticulous that it does feel I think it feels
Speaker 1: like it's taking longer, partly because we want immediate answers,
Speaker 1: and also because the stakes are so high and people
Speaker 1: just feel so entrenched and everybody wants to get it right,
Speaker 1: and it feels like it takes weeks longer. You know,
Speaker 1: it took several days last cycle, but before that, it didn't. Right.
Speaker 1: We had a winner pretty much the night of election
Speaker 1: night on twenty sixteen. Hillary Clinton didn't concede, but he
Speaker 1: had won that night. We knew that by then that
Speaker 1: was true. In twenty twelve was maybe one day, if
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember exactly. Two thousand and eight we
Speaker 1: knew on election night. So you know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to.
Speaker 2: Say when we just have shorter our attentionspons, and that's
Speaker 2: why it might feel like, Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1: That might be some of it. Yeah, we sort of
Speaker 1: expect an immediate result. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In advance of this election, we've been talking about both
Speaker 2: campaigns preparing lawyers in case of legal challenges. What should
Speaker 2: we be thinking about in terms of what challenges might
Speaker 2: delay a result.
Speaker 1: When you're thinking about delaying a result like an actual
Speaker 1: sort of inauguration, what would be the most interesting are
Speaker 1: the lawsuits that are basically fighting each county or each
Speaker 1: state's ability to certify their count. You know, we all
Speaker 1: learned a lot about that in the last process, about
Speaker 1: how certification works. You never get a perfect count a
Speaker 1: perfect there is no perfect process. There has to be
Speaker 1: some official system in which you say, okay, we're done now,
Speaker 1: this is the time. We have done enough counting, enough
Speaker 1: looking through this to decide that this is our result.
Speaker 1: And there will be legal challenges to that, probably from
Speaker 1: both sides. Those people who make those decisions are often partisan.
Speaker 1: They're elected as partisans to nonpartisan rules. It can be
Speaker 1: quite difficult to reach a consensus.
Speaker 2: Briefly, Megan, has anyone ever thought about harmonizing this process
Speaker 2: across the US to perhaps fed it up. Oh, people think.
Speaker 1: About that a lot. But I would say if you
Speaker 1: really talk to election experts, the messiness of our process
Speaker 1: is in some ways its genius in that it is,
Speaker 1: in fact, some would say, impossible to steal a United
Speaker 1: States election. You cannot change the vote in so many
Speaker 1: different places, using different technology, different ballots, different processes to
Speaker 1: decide who certifies what. That becomes essentially impossible to fix.
Speaker 1: And that is in some ways it's genius. Right. It
Speaker 1: can be messed with on the corners. It certainly probably
Speaker 1: used to be more when there was less sort of
Speaker 1: transparency in the process. But Bloomberg did a lot of
Speaker 1: reporting on this after the twenty twenty election and really
Speaker 1: found that it is essentially impossible to steal a national
Speaker 1: election in the United States.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Meghan Crane from Bloomberg's Washington, DC bureau. For
Speaker 2: more explanations like this from our team of twenty seven
Speaker 2: hundred journalists and analysts around the world, search for Quick
Speaker 2: Take on the Bloomberg website or Bloomberg Business app. I'm
Speaker 2: Stephen Carol. This is here's why. I'll be back next
Speaker 2: week with more. Thanks for listening.