After polls close, voters receive their “I Voted” stickers and ballots are securely transferred to election officials for processing. Unofficial local results are made public shortly after 7:00 p.m. on Election Night, then compiled and reported to the state for State and Federal offices (including President). Once all votes have been counted and verified, election winners are certified by state and federal election officials. This process can take days or weeks after Election Day to ensure every vote is counted correctly and accurately.
We know that perceptions of electoral integrity are important to citizens and their confidence in democracy. However, the data we currently have is not able to fully account for why some people believe that electoral results are less “fair” than others. In particular, we do not know how much the delay in announcing results has to do with perceptions of fairness.
This is a crucial area of study as it can help inform the work we do to promote transparency, accountability, and accuracy in elections and the policies that are supported by those elected. In the future, we hope to expand on this work by examining how the timing of results may influence how people perceive the fairness of the system. Our analysis will also examine the impact of a variety of variables on these perceptions, including state-level partisanship and population trends, individual-level mental health and support network dynamics, cultural taboos and the level of national party identification.