PolitiFact: Not all results will be known on election night 2022. That’s normal

In 2020, it took four days for enough votes to be counted in Pennsylvania for media outlets to declare with confidence that Joe Biden had won the presidential election.

During those days, armed protesters showed up outside Philadelphia’s vote-counting center, and Rudy Giuliani, an ally of then-President Donald Trump, held a press conference outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping to level accusations about voter fraud. Misinformation circulated on social media about “ballot dumps.”

However, the pace of the count in Pennsylvania and other states did not signal fraud. Instead, it was a sign of how time-consuming it was to tally a flood of mail ballots, prompted by the pandemic. The coronavirus vaccine was not available then, and many Americans were afraid of catching COVID-19 while standing indoors in lines with lots of strangers, so they turned to mail ballots.

There are a few reasons to hope that the 2022 midterm elections will produce a faster count than 2020 did.

Mail ballots, which tend to take longer to count, may not be used to the extent they were in 2020. That year, about 43% of voters cast their ballots by mail. Now, people have resumed many activities indoors. Overall, there’s less fear surrounding COVID-19, given the availability of vaccines and therapeutics and given that many people have gotten sick with COVID-19 and recovered.

Also, this year is a midterm election, and voter turnout for midterms tends to be significantly lower than for presidential elections.

Finally, election officials have learned something about running elections amid a pandemic. …

Some states, including Arizona, have for decades offered mail ballots to any voter who wants one and have well-developed policies for handling them. But other states are newer to the process.

Pennsylvania since 2019 doesn’t require an excuse for voting by mail. But the state is unable to provide results instantly because it doesn’t have enough people and other resources to handle the process, said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, a group supporting voting rights.