Provided there are no 2000-esque troubles with recounting and Supreme Court stuff, when can we expect to know who the next President is?
Honestly, both sides are planning on contesting the election regardless of the outcome. We’ll be lucky if this thing is over by January.
Well then, how would it work under normal conditions - how soon after voting closes is the result announced?
Cite?
More seriously, provided that nobody does contest the election, when can we expect it to be over?
Not American and I don’t claim to be even an armchair expert, but it would probably fairer to say both sides are making contingency plans (consulting with constitutional lawyers etc) just in case there is another Florida-style close call this time around.
I’m just looking forward to the whole thing being over.
You’re not the only one, TheLoadedDog, believe me!
In past elections, IIRC, it’s become apparent around midnight of Election Day (sometimes earlier) who the winner would be - typically once most states’s polls have closed and at least 90% of precincts have reported in. At that point, the loser delivers a concession speech and most folks would consider the election over, even though the members of the Electoral College don’t meet until December. Absentee ballots are often not counted by Election Day, so the final numbers take a while to compile. These never used to be that important for the final outcome, because none of the elections were that close.
Midnight in what time zone?
Midnight, EDT. The last election is the only one I remember in which the winner was not apparent by the time I hit the sack around 1 AM.
Are each candidates’ electors obliged to vote for their man come December? I ask because the US system has less party discipline than in Westminster derived systems. With this in mind, in the unlikely event Bush says or does something dumb before the College meets, could some of his guys dissent, cross the floor and vote for Kerry?
Just a bit more info to show that most elections in recent times have been clearly skewed toward the winner w/r/t Electoral College votes, and so were pretty easy to call:
1976 - Carter (297) defeated Ford (240)
1980 - Reagan (489) defeated Carter (49)
1984 - Reagan (525) defeated Mondale (13)
1988 - Bush Sr (426) defeated Dukakis (111)
1992 - Clinton (370) defeated Bush Sr (168)
1996 - Clinton (379) defeated Dole (159)
Contrast with:
2000 - Bush Jr (271) defeated Gore (266)
For the record, a total of 270 Electoral College votes is needed to win.
Don’t forget- most polls in this election indicate even a tighter race than 2000. Don’t expect it to go easy.
The electors are supposed to vote for their party’s candidate. By and large the situation is controlled by the fact that electors are hand-picked by the parties, typically as a reward for faithful service. Occasionally there are “faithless electors” that go against the flow, but according to this blurb on CNN, no one has ever been prosecuted for doing the unexpected, despite possible penalties.
I suppose it is possible that someone would try it in this election, but whether or not anyone cares that much will of course depend on the bigger picture. If it makes a difference in a swing state… I don’t even want to think about it.
Ah, it occurs to me I should clarify my post #10:
Winning the popular vote in a state usually leads to winning all the electoral votes for that state, so the popular vote count by the end of election night is (normally) enough to know who the winner is. The media outlets will show the projected winner based upon the assumed number of electoral votes going to each candidate (e.g., “with 95% of the precincts reporting in, Kerry leads Bush by 1,500,000 votes, and so Kerry has won New York”).
This is a classic “it depends” question.
It depends on how close the electoral college race becomes. It depends on how close individual states’ breakdowns are. It depends on whether absentee ballots or provisional ballots will determine the outcome in those states. It depends on the pattern of when the individual states results come in. It depends on smooth counting of the ballots in those states, which could affect announcing an outcome.
It depends.
For the national election of President/Vice-President, the sampling methods are sophisticated enough that news organizations should be able to get a pretty good handle on it using returns from bellweather precincts and their own exit polls (asking people who just finished how they voted). Sometimes, when the exit poll trends are overwhelming, they’re able to call the state as soon as the polls officially close.
Sometimes the state election board will warn that there is X% of the vote in absentee ballots or ballots that have to be hand-counted and the news organizations may decide to wait on a projection until they get an idea how those votes are going.
(The candidates have access to their own polling data, and they can usually take a good guess even before the polls close how things will turn out.)
Of course all this went out the window in the 2000 election with Florida, but that was a special (although highly embarassing) case. Gore’s margin of victory in New Mexico was only a few hundred votes, and the networks took a long time to call it, but they got it right.
At least once in every ten posts, someone should point out that these results are UNOFFICIAL PROJECTIONS. They aren’t required by law, they aren’t regulated by law, and they aren’t done by any government agency, federal or state. They’re just a best guess, and news organizations which have access to exactly the same data at the same moment sometimes make different projections, depending on their own analysis.
I only remember four Presidential elections where the winner wasn’t clear by about 11 p.m. (eastern time.)
1960 – Kennedy vs. Nixon
1968 – Nixon vs. Humphrey vs. Wallace
1976 – Carter vs. Ford (only because everyone wanted to wait for the California votes to be counted)
2000 – Bush vs. Gore
Edited title for clarity.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
EST. Daylight Savings Time ended this past weekend.
I believe in 1976 people were waiting for Ohio to get done. Ohio went to Carter. Ford won California and I don’t recall it being particularly close.
I think that there is a good possibility that it will be decided by midnight (Eastern) Tuesday.
Right now, based on polling, it seems like that the results from most states are fairly well established and there are a few “battleground” states where the vote is up for grabs. Somehow, it seems like this is the case, more or less, immediately before each Presidential election.
The major broadcast networks will conduct exit polling (or more accurately, subscribe to the exit polling consortium) that will track how well the reports of actual voters match the pre-election polls. Based on this, they will make a prediction about which way the state will vote (“call” the state) sometime after the polls close. Sometimes it is immediately after the polls close, sometimes it is after some large percentage of the voting precincts have been counted, and sometimes it is in between. Famously, in 2000, most of the networks called Florida for Gore early, and then un-called it, called it for Bush, again un-called it, and you know the rest.
Now, if the exit polling tracks the pre-election polling, with many states extremely close, the networks are not going to call many of the states, and the election as a whole, until almost all of the precincts report in. In this case, it will be a long night, and even if there there is a clear electoral college victor by the morning, the networks won’t call the until the wee hours.
On the other hand, there is a strong possibility that the early results will show a strong trend one way or another that varies from the pre-election polling. If, for example, a number of non-battleground states that are expected to go for Kerry go to Bush, or vice versa, the likely victor will become clear, even if the networks don’t actually “call” the election until most of the polls are closed.
This site idenitifies the poll closing times for each of the states, and the cumulative number of electoral votes that will be determined by each time. As it indcates, polls in all of the except for Alaska will be closed by 11:00 eastern time. This means that there is at least the possibility that the networks will “call” states with a majority of electoral votes just after 11:00, though this is not overly likely. However, if there is a big shift from the pre-election polling, it the eventual winner will quite possibly be pretty clearly determined by midnight.
You’re right. I plead insufficient caffeination at the time of posting.