The official results of the US presidential election will not be known until January 2025, due to the country's electoral system. The American media nevertheless give results from election day.
Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? While the date of the American presidential election is set for Tuesday, November 5, the official results of the vote will not be known immediately.
Initial results will be given by the American media, which will refine them over the days. A situation which can be explained in particular by the American electoral system.
The electors will not vote until December
In the United States, the presidential election is based on indirect universal suffrage in one round, via the electoral system. There are 538 in total. Mostly elected officials and local leaders of their party, their names do not appear on the ballot papers and the overwhelming majority of them are unknown to the general public.
Each state has as many electors as elected officials in the House of Representatives (number determined based on population) and in the Senate (two per state). For example, California has 55 and Texas 38. Vermont, Alaska, Wyoming and Delaware have only three. The candidate who wins the majority of votes in a state wins all the electors of that state, except in Nebraska and Maine which distribute their electors proportionally.
The electors will meet in mid-December in their state. On January 6, 2025, following the official count of the votes, Congress will solemnly announce the name of the president.
A role assumed by the media
But the result will be known long before. As the AP press agency, itself the provider of figures for the American elections, explains, citizens “don't want to wait until mid-December to know the results.” However, the American state is a federal state, made up of different states which organize the vote under different conditions and the federal authorities have never taken the initiative of compiling the results of the different states before those of the votes of the electors.
A role (and a cost) that only the media has decided to take on, Rick Edmonds, a media affairs analyst at the Poynter Institute, an American research organization specializing in the study of media, told AP in 2020.
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As AP and NBC explain, the media that give results do so from several sources: investigators present across the country, teams of statisticians and analysts, data from the states…
Data collection occurs through multiple sources on Election Day, with reporters and pollsters across the country reporting results in a timely and continuous manner throughout the day. Voting data is also collected through state and county websites and feeds.
Results that can come later
However, it is possible that the American media will not announce a winner from November 5, as a precautionary measure in a very tense political context. In 2020, Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election was announced after four days of intense suspense.
This year, “it's all going to come down to seven hotly contested states, and in many of them we won't have enough data to make a projection until late this evening, early the next day, or, in some cases, several days after the election”, anticipated to AFP Joe Lenski, executive vice-president of Edison Research, the institute which supplies a consortium of channels (ABC, CBS, NBC News, CNN) exit polls, projections and counts.
