Election Day guide: What you need to know as you wait for results

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For more 2024 election coverage from the NPR Network head to our live updates page.

The turbulent 2024 campaign has reached its end.

Tens of millions of voters have already cast general election ballots, and millions more will do the same on Tuesday’s Election Day, before polls close and the reporting of results begins.

Here are some things to keep in mind throughout Election Day and beyond:

First ... do you still need to vote? More than 20 states offer same-day voter registration on Election Day. You can double-check your polling place and any identification requirements before heading out to cast a ballot.  

You may still have time to fix mail ballot errors. Almost all states offer online ballot tracking, and for voters who are alerted to issues with their mail ballots, many states allow voters to fix those errors beyond Election Day.

Be mindful of rumors and baseless claims. It’s a charged political atmosphere, and rumors about election malfeasance and fake videos can take off online before trusted sources have a chance to correct the record. Here are some tips to avoid sharing election misinformation.

Remember also that elections are run by humans — many of whom are volunteers — and humans sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re under pressure and scrutiny. Every Election Day, there are isolated issues at polling places; they likely don’t mean anything nefarious is going on.

Campaigns are focused on seven swing states. Polling averages have shown a dead heat in the seven states that are likely to decide the presidential election. Here are the final poll closing times for those states, in chronological order:

• 7 p.m. ET – Georgia
• 7:30 p.m. ET – North Carolina
• 8 p.m. ET – Pennsylvania
• 9 p.m. ET – Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin
• 10 p.m. ET – Nevada

For all poll closing times, head here.

Also remember that while Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump battle for the top of the ticket, there are independent and third-party presidential candidates on the ballot in these seven swing states whose tallies could affect the outcomes.

As results start coming in, patience is needed. It takes a while to accurately count millions of ballots with many contests on each. Election officials will always stress that the results that are reported on election night are unofficial and that it is media organizations who are calling races.

NPR relies on The Associated Press for race calls, and the AP has a long track record of accuracy. Here’s more on how the AP makes those decisions. The single biggest factor in a race call is how close a contest is.

A candidate who appears to be “leading” can be overtaken by another candidate. A number of factors affect how quickly votes can be tallied.

Mail ballots, for instance, come in envelopes that need to be opened, and have signatures or other identifying information to verify. Some states, including the swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t allow these mail ballots to be preprocessed for tabulation until Election Day, further slowing down counting. And Arizona’s massive Maricopa County is expecting hundreds of thousands of mail ballots to be dropped off by voters on Election Day.

Since there are partisan divides in voter methods and the geographic locations those votes come from, results will shift. Of course, all votes are of equal value; some just get added to the overall tally later.

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The terms “blue shift” and “red mirage” really entered the lexicon in 2020. Those describe a phenomenon that played out on the Electoral College map — when mail ballots, cast primarily by Democratic voters, were added to tallies in places like Pennsylvania, eroding an early Republican advantage in the presidential election (and becoming a key source of misinformation from Trump).

There have been fewer requests for mail ballots this year, compared with the pandemic election of 2020, so many experts think these partisan shifts will be less pronounced. The nonprofit Protect Democracy released a useful report with its vote count expectations for each of the seven top swing states. The group cited earlier mail ballot deadlines and expanded preprocessing in certain places as other reasons why results may be faster in 2024.

But again, the closeness of a race is the real determining factor in how long it takes to find out who wins.

Just because a candidate declares victory doesn’t mean they won. In 2020, Trump came out on election night and, citing baseless claims of fraud, said, “Frankly, we did win this election.”

Trump has not committed to accepting the results of the 2024 race either.

Already, there’s been a surge of litigation around voting rules, with many experts seeing lawsuits from Trump’s Republican allies as setting the groundwork for potential election challenges.

Elections aren’t done yet. Again, the results reported on election night are unofficial. Election officials will verify and finalize those tallies before certification. For the presidential race, the Electoral College process has several steps leading to Inauguration Day.

And what about recounts? Each state has its own rules — and Arizona, for instance, has raised its threshold for automatic recounts from 0.1% to 0.5% for statewide contests. (For context, in 2020, Trump lost Arizona by 0.3%.)

Recounts are very rare, though, and it’s rarer still for recounts to reverse an outcome.