COLUMBIA, S.C. — With election night just a few weeks away, election officials are preparing to count millions of votes. Finalized results usually take several days or weeks, and it may take days to declare an unofficial winner.
While local and state election commissions certify race results, they do not 'call' a race on election nights. If you hear a race has been called on election day, those are unofficial results from media outlets, who declare a winner with 99% certainty from tabulations made during election day.
Once you cast your vote—those unofficial results are tabulated on a machine, and that data is released publicly. Those results are what media outlets use to “call” a race. T.J. Lundeen with the South Carolina Election Commission said those results are unofficial but almost always accurate.
"The results that you see on election night likely will be the results. We rarely have any instances where, especially on the statewide races, where anything changes," said Lundeen. "Those results are results you can trust."
While those tabulated results are available instantly, once polls close, county and state-level election officials still have to count each vote to certify the results. They can start counting absentee ballots and early in-person votes on election day, but Lundeen said many don't start counting those early ballots until polls close and they count the rest of the votes.
"The counties then certify results after the election; they send their certified results to us at the state level, and then we also certify results, and that's when you get your official winner. That takes a couple of days or could be a couple of weeks," said Lundeen. "Every vote loads onto that flash drive at that polling place. When they close it down, that flash drive is transported to the county office, where it's loaded into a secure workstation to transmit those votes to us here at the State Office. So every county is doing that."
Counties must provide the state with results by Nov. 7 and certify the vote a day later, on Nov. 8. The state then meets to certify the races on Nov. 14, but challenges and protests can happen well after that date.
Media outlets that unofficially "call" a race do so with 99% confidence. That can take time, so while the official certification of the votes can be days or longer, it's likely that an unofficial winner will take a while, too, said Dr. Chase Meyer, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina.
"The closer the race, the longer it's going to take to make a call," Meyer said. "If this was a landslide election, we know it would be over by 10:00 pm, and everyone would know who the winner is going to be."
Meyer said this presidential race is expected to be close, meaning it will take even longer for a winner to be declared unofficially. There's immense pressure on the outlets that call races to get them right, and it will likely be a day or more after election day for any outlet to be confident calling the race.
"If it's going to be a close 50/50 race, for you to get that threshold to be 99% confident who's going to win that state, they need to have counted almost every single vote so far, which takes time," said Meyer.
For the presidential race, electors in South Carolina and all other states meet on Dec. 17 to cast their votes. Then, those votes are passed to Congress, which counts them on Jan. 6.