Why don’t we immediately know the results of American elections right after polls close on election night?

The answer is simple. American elections are highly decentralized, and highly complex. The laws, procedures, and technologies used for our elections are not designed to produce quick results. Rather the way we administer elections in America requires patience, as we want to get the numbers right, not rely on guesswork.

In America we pride ourselves on our federalist system. One important principle of our democracy is that states many rights under the U.S. Constitution, and important state rights is running elections. States have wide authority to determine the conduct of their elections, and that’s one reason that we see such vast differences in how elections are run in America.

But the decentralization goes further, because in most states elections are largely run by counties or even municipalities. This means that we don’t have a single federal election, nor do we have fifty elections in the states. Rather we have thousands of elections in the November of each even-numbered year, with very different procedures and technologies.

The reality of this extreme decentralization of election administration in America, which is largely unique in the world, is that we have to rely on under-resourced local governments to run elections with integrity. That’s a big ask, because elections are complex administrative tasks.

At Caltech, we’ve been working in collaboration with the Orange County Registrar of Voters here in Southern California, and studying various methods to help audit their election administration practices. When you look under the hood, and see exactly how elections are administered in Orange County, you see quickly how complicated it is.

In the elections this fall, Orange County had over 1500 polling locations, and had to recruit thousands of poll workers to service the polling locations. They have about 1.5 million registered voters, with at least 8,000 of them living abroad or serving in the military. 1.1 million ballots were sent to voters in the mail before the election.

Our research group spent time observing voting in five of Orange County’s early voting centers, and in 35 polling places on Election Day. Seeing how poll workers do their jobs, how the technology works, and witnessing voter experiences directly, is an invaluable experience. We observed just how diligent polling place inspectors and clerks about about trying to provide a good experience for voters.

But we also saw how complicated the process is for poll workers, and saw first-hand why it takes so long for final election results to be tabulated and certified in places like Orange County.

In every Election Day polling place we visited, we saw many voters bringing in their completed and sealed mail ballots, depositing them in the ballot box. Many voters who had received a by-mail ballot brought them along, and surrendered them at the polling place, preferring to vote at the polling place instead. Some of the by-mail voters forgot to bring their ballots to surrender, and others could not be found in the registration books, leading many voters to cast provisional ballots.

All of these ballots have to be confirmed and reconciled after the polls close on Election Day. Despite what people may claim, election officials count every valid ballot — but they must first determine which ballots are valid, and they need to reconcile the vast array of ballots coming from different sources: from in-person early voting, absentee ballots sent by mail, ballots from overseas voters and military personnel, Election Day ballots, provisionals, and mail ballots dropped off on Election Day.

Keep in mind that this process happens in every election jurisdiction in America. The exact procedures and voting technologies used differ across states and counties, but every one of those jurisdictions is doing this very process to come up with a final and accurate tally of all valid votes that were cast in this midterm election. Some jurisdictions do it quickly, others will be slower, but in every single election jurisdiction in America, it takes time to count all of the votes.

This process isn’t pretty to watch, but it’s vital for the health of our democracy. And this process just takes time, because election officials want to get the most accurate count of the vote as is possible.

Not having final election results just after the polls close is not an indication of fraud, or any necessary indication that there was something wrong with the election. Instead, the delay in reporting final results is generally a good thing, as it means that election officials are working hard to make sure that all valid votes are included in the final tabulation.

So why don’t we have final results in many places, a week after the election? Because American elections are decentralized, and complex. Election officials are working to get the results right. We need to give them the time to do that, free from political pressure.

My advice?

Be patient, let the process continue, and make sure that every valid vote cast in the midterm election is counted.

By Nicholas Adams-Cohen

This is a guest essay, written by Nicholas Adams-Cohen, a Ph.D. student at Caltech, who is working on the Monitoring the Election project.

Nearly half of the American public turned out to vote on November 6th 2018, representing more ballots cast in a midterm than in the last 50 years. As is often the case in a closely contested election, concerns about voter fraud and suppression were broadcast by various media institutions, with journalists and pundits concerned about the ways the democratic process might have been compromised. What if there was a way to detect problem areas in real-time, gauging how voters react to problems in the voting process as incidents occur? Detecting these issues early might allow us to troubleshoot areas where voting procedures break down, ultimately improving the democratic process.

With these goals in mind, the California Institute of Technology’s “Monitoring the Election” project has built a social media election monitor aimed at pinpointing problem areas through social media discussions. If we can determine how the intensity of discussions about various instances of voter fraud correlate with the severity of issues in the voting process, it becomes possible to detect and address voting issues as they occur.

Historically, if social scientists wanted to study whether or not voters had concerns about the voting process, they might rely on voter satisfaction surveys. While useful, survey methods suffer from numerous issues, including non-response biases that are increasingly difficult to correct and a lag between when citizens vote and when they eventually fill out a survey. Our method instead tracks social media streams, specifically Twitter, to discover when, who, and how voters discuss problems in real-time. By collecting all messages mentioning keywords related to potential problems in the voting process, we can extract a signal about where and when the voting process breaks down.

This monitor ran throughout the November 6th, 2018 election, and with the data we collected we can analyze how conversations concerning voter fraud evolved throughout this historic midterm. One of the most insightful ways we can use these data is by determining which areas of the United States faced the most criticisms about voter fraud and suppression. To that end, we used various natural language processing methodologies to determine which messages about fraud and suppression were directed at specific states. The results of this analysis is found in the following map, where we use a gradient the highlight the number how many messages about voter fraud mention a specific state. As shown in the plot below, which charts the number of tweets, we find an unusually high number of messages concerned with Georgia, where the Governor’s race between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams was inundated with concerns about voter suppression. For examples of news reports, you can see the articles here and here.

As shown in line plot below, which plots the number of tweets concerned with voter suppression in Georgia over time, our monitor detected a potential issue with Georgia as early as 12pm PST, before many media groups could widely broadcast these concerns.

As voters become more vocal about the electoral process on social media platforms, these maps and monitors serve as an important and powerful prognosis tool for officials to solve problems and citizens to discover disturbances in the voting process. Ultimately, we hope to continue developing tools to provide transparency, increase efficiency, and help understand the American electoral process.