Wisconsin and Pennsylvania May Take Longer to Count Ballots: Here’s Why

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Both battleground states are considered key to winning the presidency.

While Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are considered key battleground states for Tuesday’s General Election, both may take longer to count mail-in ballots because of state laws.

Election officials cannot open or count mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day in either state. About 40 states allow for the preprocessing of mail ballots, including opening the envelope and removing the ballot in some cases.

In Pennsylvania, the release of mail voting results cannot even begin until after polls have closed at 8 p.m. ET.

Because of the overall volume of mail ballots—they comprised almost a quarter of Pennsylvania’s total vote in the 2022 midterm elections—and the varying amounts of time it takes the state’s 67 counties to tally these votes, determining a winner in a highly competitive race could take several days, as it did in the 2020 presidential election.

The Pennsylvania state secretary’s office says on its website: “Hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of mail ballots are cast in every election, and current state law does not permit counties to begin opening these ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

“That means county election officials cannot even remove the ballots from the envelopes and prepare them to be scanned until that time—on a day when those same officials are also running more than 9,000 polling places across the state.”

As of Monday morning, Pennsylvania voters appear to have requested and returned fewer mail-in ballots in 2024 than in 2020, the top state election official, Secretary of Commonwealth Al Schmidt, said in an interview with a central Pennsylvania news station.

When it comes to counting ballots, it “always comes down to how close an election is, but a few things have changed” this year, he said.

“Counties have acquired additional equipment to help process mail ballots. They have a lot more experience than they had in 2020, when none of us had hardly any at all processing that volume of ballots,” Schmidt said. “And there are fewer voters voting by mail in Pennsylvania.”

A Wisconsin election official said in a news conference that the Badger State’s results could be expected in the wee hours following Election Day.

“I just want to assure the American public that it will happen, but it will be sometime after midnight,” Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, said on Monday. “Even if we were to finish counting at a reasonable time, we have a very formal exporting, transportation, and uploading process to ensure the safety and security of those results.”

She added: “I mean, I hope we won’t go past the early morning hours like we did at the pandemic, but it’s just the reality of counting on under hundreds of thousands of ballots.”

During the 2020 election, The Associated Press declared then-presidential candidate Joe Biden the winner on a Saturday afternoon, about four days after that year’s polls had closed. In Wisconsin, Biden was declared the winner by AP on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election.

AP also proclaimed Biden the winner of Pennsylvania at 11:25 a.m. ET on Nov. 7, 2020, three days later. Meanwhile, the news outlet called North Carolina for then-President Donald Trump about 10 days after Election Day, and Georgia for Biden 16 days after Election Day.

As of Monday afternoon, more than 1.5 million people had voted early in Wisconsin, according to a running 2024 election tracking website, Election Lab, by the University of Florida. About 561,000 mail-in ballots had been returned out of about 645,000 that had been requested across the state.

For Pennsylvania, about 1.78 million had cast early ballots, according to the Election Lab.

Unlike Wisconsin, Pennsylvania reports ballots by party affiliation. So far, Democrats have an approximately 400,000-vote registration lead over Republicans. About 9 million people are registered to vote in the state.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.