What We’ll Know, and When We’ll Know

This year, the rise of mail voting will make election night much harder to follow. In most states, the results will be heavily skewed at various points of the night, depending on when a state counts mail ballots, in-person early voting or Election Day voting. In other words, the results could be very misleading. And in some states, the count might take days.

More than anything else, keep these three tips in mind:

Be cautious. A lot of states are changing the way they’re administering the election, and even the experts don’t know exactly how all this is going to go.

If you want to dig into detailed results, focus on the right places. If you’re the kind of person who checks the results by county, make sure you’re focusing on counties where all of the votes have been counted. Partial results will be heavily skewed toward whatever vote method was counted first, so home in on the places where results are complete. One possible exception: if a candidate is beating expectations with results that were supposed to be strong for the other candidate.

Our results pages will offer an estimate of whether nearly all of the votes are counted. It’s just a guess, but train your eyes there.

Finally, focus on the states that count their early and mail votes before counting Election Day votes. Why? They’ll probably wrap up most of their count on election night — their counties will probably tell us that all of the vote is in. Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Texas are good examples. Pennsylvania and Arizona are not.

Here’s what I’ll be paying attention to, hour by hour.