Slow results on election night can cause public worry and fuel concerns about fraud. But experts say that's not what's happening.
As polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, news organizations may project winners before all votes have been counted.
Reputable outlets, including the Associated Press, base those projections on what has been reported so far, the historical voting patterns of locations that have not yet reported, and other election data.
In very close races, news organizations may wait to make a projection until more votes are counted. Generally, if a race is very close, it can take longer to determine a winner.
A decentralized system
Michigan has one of the country's most decentralized election systems.
More than 1,500 city and township clerks count and report their own results, then send them to county clerks, who consolidate and pass totals on to the state. That means the state can't receive a county’s totals until every precinct in it has reported. These results can get to the state at vastly different times.
Stephanie Leiser directs the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan. She told Michigan Public's Stateside that decentralization can actually protect against election interference.
“I's a natural limit on how much things can go wrong,” Leiser said. “We hear a lot of stories and a lot of suggestions that there's going to be manipulation or that there's going to be tampering … It's very hard to imagine how that would be feasible.”
Michigan also has four Upper Peninsula counties in the Central Time Zone – Dickinson, Gogebic, Iron, and Menominee — where voting ends an hour later than in the rest of the state.
Early and absentee voting
In 2022, Michigan voters passed a constitutional amendment that expanded voting rights across the state, which:
- Guaranteed eight days of in-person early voting
- Required military or overseas ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day
- Required the state to pre-pay return postage on absentee ballots
- Guaranteed access to at least one state-funded ballot drop box per municipality, or one for every 15,000 registered voters
The growth in absentee voting would have made it impractical to wait until after the polls closed on Election Day to begin processing absentee ballots, as Michigan had traditionally required. In response, a 2023 law allowed municipalities with populations of 5,000 or more to pre-process and tabulate absentee ballots before Election Day during the early voting period.
But many voters still drop off absentee ballots on Election Day. Those ballots must be verified, processed and counted after the polls close, which can keep election workers busy late into the night.
The combination of local reporting, absentee ballot processing and other administrative steps can delay unofficial results. Even so, Michigan counts ballots as fast as or faster than, many other battleground states.
So, when might we get results?
Because the state doesn’t get any information from a county until all that county’s precincts are in and fully reported, Michigan's statewide results page is often the last to get updated.
Some local clerks and many of the bigger counties will post results on their websites intermittently.
Those projections are not official, though. Election winners are certified only after county and state boards of canvassers complete their reviews, a process that could last until mid-August.
You can find election results on our homepage or at michiganpublic.org/election.
