When we will know the results
Americans may not know the results of each race on Election Day, or even the following day.
"It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner," President Joe Biden advised last week.
Elections in the U.S. are decentralized, and each state has different systems for regulating races. Some, such as Arizona and Colorado, allow officials to start processing mail-in ballots before Election Day. Others, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, can’t begin counting these ballots until Election Day.
FiveThirtyEight has created a sliding scale estimating how long it may take each state to count ballots based on when each state reported results in its primary elections earlier this year.
More information can be found here.