If the polls are correct, this is going to be an extremely close election and we might not know who won on election night. And that gap between the polls closing and waiting for a winner Can spark tons of misinformation or confusing data as you watch the results come in. So here’s a few questions and answers about what to look for on election night. Why are results taking longer than election night. There are a couple of reasons why we might not know who won the presidential race on election night. It could come down to voting behaviors, how close the election is in some states. And it could also just come down to the simple process of counting and processing mail ballots. Now, in the 2020 election, voters across the country in the pandemic shifted to mail, voting as a safe way to cast their ballot. That voting method has continued to be of wide preference this election, but in different states, there’s different laws governing how they can be counted. In Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin, two very important swing states. Election officials cannot start processing ballots until the morning of election day, and that can lead to a back up in ballots that need to be counted and tabulated. When news organizations look to make their call on election night in a really close race, that can come down to the final ballots. The second question is, what happens if I think I saw a vote total go down. We want to point out that this is an extremely rare occurrence, but there are times where mistakes can be made. They’re often caught. Within minutes, the New York Times’ gets its election night results from the associated Press, which combines data from state and County election offices with the work of thousands of correspondents across the country. The AP then checks those vote totals for any kind of inconsistencies. The times also does its own verification process to look for any other inconsistencies or problems in the posted results. It’s a meticulous process going through reporting results. But in the social media age, a simple screenshot of one of those errors can create a disinformation landscape and erode trust in the final results of an election. The last question is, why did one candidate appear to be ahead. And then a lot of votes come in at the last second for the other candidate. We can go back to Pennsylvania in 2020 to see what happened there. They were inundated with mail ballots that took a long time to count. And so on election night, most of the mail ballots from Democratic areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had not yet been counted. So it looked like former President Trump was winning Pennsylvania. But as those ballots were counted over the next four days from Democratic areas, President Biden eventually caught up and the race was called for him. This delayed reporting results can sometimes lead to what are known as mirages, which is when it appears that a certain candidate is leading simply because more of their area’s ballots have been counted and reported than the other candidates. The timing of results can sometimes simply come down to where votes were cast. In some states, rural areas are faster at uploading their results than urban areas. In some states, they report mail ballots instantly. In others, it could take well into the night or even in the coming days. And in some states, early in-person voting is all reported at once. So while it might be frustrating to not be able to know who won the presidential election or who controls Congress within hours of polls closing, this is just the system working as it should, and it’s important to know that you’re watching every vote be counted, and that’s critical to a healthy democracy.