While the November 2024 presidential election campaign appears to be one of the closest in contemporary US history, its outcome may not be known until days after the voting. Just like in 2020, when Joe Biden’s victory was announced three and a half days after the polls closed, the future president’s identity is unlikely to be known on the night of November 5-6. The prevalence of absentee voting can explain this delay, as mail-in ballots usually take longer to count than traditional ballots.
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Absentee voting is expected to remain high
In the last two national elections (2020 and 2022), absentee voting has taken on a dominant role in the American electorate, not least because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the 2020 presidential election, 65.64 million votes were cast by post, almost double the quantity for 2016 (33.5 million).
With health risks now being significantly lower, the number of absentee ballots has been predicted to fall this year, as observed in the 2022 mid-term elections. However, it is expected to remain high in several states where it has become common practice over many years.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: Long vote counts and the ‘red mirage’
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are two of the seven swing states that will determine the presidential election’s outcome. They are also states for which the final results are likely to take the longest to announce. In these two states, the electoral rules require officials to wait until polling stations open – 7 am, on Tuesday morning (local time) – to start counting absentee ballots.
In Pennsylvania, in 2020, most of the national media waited three and a half days before being able to confidently attribute the state’s 19 electoral college votes to Joe Biden, confirming the Democrat’s victory at the national level. In this state, the share of postal votes, which was very marginal in 2016 (4%), had increased tenfold four years later (39%).
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While the ratio of Democratic to Republican absentee voters should be a little more balanced than it was in 2020 and 2022, Pennsylvania is very likely to see a so-called “red mirage” play out. This phenomenon occurs when the first half of the vote count puts the Republicans in the lead, before the final results cement a Democratic victory.
This is what happened in 2020, leading Donald Trump to accuse his opponents of having tampered with the election results. The real explanation, which has been known for decades, is a rather different matter: The Republican vote is classically concentrated in rural areas, whose results become known more quickly; while the Democratic vote holds the majority in large urban centers, which take longer to count. This disparity was further exacerbated in 2020 by the fact that absentee voting in that election was much more popular among Democratic voters than Republican ones.
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