Polls are closing and election results are rolling in. Here’s what you need to know.
Editor’s note: This story will be updated throughout the night as results come in.
And now we wait.
After a contentious and chaotic sprint of an election season, the first polls have closed and early results are beginning to roll in as America waits to find out who will be the 47th president of the United States.
As of 7 p.m. EST, the key swing state of Georgia has closed its polls, along with Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Virginia. We’ll soon have an early sense of what this election will look like and whether polls that predicted a coin-flip race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump were accurate.
North Carolina, another key swing state, wraps up voting at 7:30 p.m., along with Ohio and West Virginia.
At 8 p.m. comes a flood of poll closures – 16 states, including the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. And by 9 p.m. EST, sixteen more will be done voting, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
We should get some telltale signs indicating whether the polls were generally right about the race being close – or if they missed badly and we’re looking at one candidate winning the presidency with relative ease.
Three big swing states may give an early sense of where the election is headed: Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. All three are expected to count their ballots fairly quickly, while other key states are likely to take longer.
Georgia in particular should move fast. State law requires counties to report all early votes by 8 p.m. EST, and 4 million people voted early – 80% of the entire 2020 turnout in the state – so we’ll know a lot at that point (though it will still take hours to tally the state’s Election Day votes, which could skew towards one party or the other).
If former President Donald Trump sweeps Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, he’s all but guaranteed to be heading back to the White House.
If Vice President Kamala Harris carries two of those three states, she’ll have a much easier path to an election win at that point than Mr. Trump.
But if Ms. Harris is winning one of the three, while losing the other two, we’re likely looking at a drawn-out process where it could take days for the remaining states to count their results.
Depending on how close it is, Wisconsin’s result might be clear by the morning, once Milwaukee reports its vote. Pennsylvania will likely take a bit longer. Arizona and Nevada, the remaining swing states, will likely take days to get their results counted because of their heavy use of mail voting.
