When elections are close, voters look to election officials for trusted information about who is winning. Voters expect their votes will be counted accurately and quickly, but the reality is that there are various steps and variables that impact when results are final. Those factors can affect how well informed voters are about how the votes are counted and when they are official.
Voting results are based on a complex process that involves collecting and checking multiple data sources, including the results of voter surveys (exit polls), the total number of early in-person and mail ballots, partial results collected as voting locations report them, and patterns from past elections. These data help to track the progress of each race and predict the outcome, and are used by news outlets to make “calls” about each race once they have enough confidence in their analysis. As the election day votes are counted, media outlets also compare their predictions with the actual final results to see how accurate they were.
This year’s election has been a graveyard for incumbent governments and political parties. Across the world, leaders like Kamala Harris in the United States, Shigeru Ishiba in Japan, and Emmanuel Macron in France have lost their governing mandates. In addition, voters are more dissatisfied with democracy than in previous years, with more than half saying they don’t think electoral results reflect the will of the people (ANES 2018).
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