AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
If the polls are right, this election is going to be a close one, especially in some key swing states. So what can we expect in terms of timing and vote tallies come Tuesday? Derek Tisler is an expert on election administration and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voting rights. Welcome to the program.
DEREK TISLER: Thanks so much for having me on.
RASCOE: So last presidential election, it took about four days after the polls closed for President Biden to be declared the winner. What can we expect this time around?
TISLER: I think voters should expect a similar timeline to what we saw in 2020. And if the margin is really, really close - you know, fewer than 1,000 ballots in some key states - it could take weeks before we actually know who won the presidential election.
RASCOE: Have any of the swing states gotten more efficient in the way that they process ballots?
TISLER: So when we talk about processing ballots, we're talking about mail votes. And mail votes take longer to count because there are all these steps that election workers need to perform before they're actually able to count those ballots. They need to confirm the voter's identity, their eligibility, everything that you need to do before it can be inserted into a scanner and then counted.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - they were not able to do this processing before Election Day in 2020, and that is once again going to be the case in 2024. The state that we've seen the biggest change is Michigan. In 2020, Michigan was just like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Since then, they passed a new law, and that means that election workers - they are able to preprocess those mail ballots. And it means we're going to see results from mail votes a lot sooner than we did four years ago.
RASCOE: Last election, we saw in some states, I think most sharply in Pennsylvania, what some people called a mirage, which is, you know, a seemingly sudden shift in who's leading one state once mail ballots began getting counted. Can you remind us of why that happened?
TISLER: The votes have already been cast at the end of Election Day. They are what they are. So when we talk about one candidate leading at one point, one candidate trailing, it's not actually true. We're just seeing the ballots revealed in a different order. We know that rural areas, smaller counties are more Republican. We know that large urban counties are more Democrat. We also know that smaller counties can report their votes faster because there are fewer ballots to count. Part of that is going to play into a higher share of Republican votes being released early and a higher share of Democratic votes being released later.
The second thing is in voting method. So we saw, especially in 2020, Democrats were a lot more likely to vote by mail, and Republicans were a lot more likely to vote in person on election day. In states where they can't begin processing those mail ballots early, they are going to release the ballots cast in person first, and then they are going to report results from mail ballots. There is no reason to think there is anything nefarious going on here. Again, it's just revealing the votes in a different order.
RASCOE: Do you have concerns about what could happen during that time? -because where there's a lack of information, people can kind of take advantage of that.
TISLER: Yeah, we saw this in 2020. We saw that there is a high risk of false information spreading in this period of time from when voters are done casting their ballots to when we know who won the election. And it's because everyone is really desperate to learn anything more about something that they are deeply passionate about But the problem is until those votes are actually counted, there's really no new information to provide to these people. And we see that bad actors seek to fill this information vacuum by pushing false claims. I encourage everyone to have patience. And again, understand the reason we're waiting for results is because election processes are designed to prioritize accuracy and security.
RASCOE: Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center's elections and government program. Thank you so much for being with us.
TISLER: Of course. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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