This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Tuesday, Aug. 11, is Election Day in Wisconsin, and we will soon learn the results of the closely watched Democratic primary for governor and other important primary races. But how soon, exactly?
The unofficial winners of some close races may not be known until late Tuesday, or even early on Wednesday.
But results coming in late at night aren’t indicative of problems.
Over the past several years, Wisconsin voters have come to rely more and more on absentee voting. Absentee ballots take more time to process on Election Day than in-person ballots because they have to be removed from their envelopes and officials need to check that they have valid signatures and a witness address. That can add hours to poll workers’ nights on Tuesday, especially because election officials can’t process absentee ballots until Election Day.
Here are the answers to some common questions about when to expect primary election results.
When do polls close?
Wisconsin polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day and close at 8 p.m. Absentee votes must be received by election officials by that 8 p.m. deadline. But election officials aren’t done working when the polls close.
In-person polling sites will stay open past that time if any voters who were in line before 8 p.m. still have yet to vote. Additionally, election officials often process and count absentee ballots for hours after polls close.
When will results be released?
Municipalities start releasing vote totals shortly after polls close and continue to count throughout the night. How long it takes them to finish can depend on factors like how many ballots they have to count and how well staffed they are.
Many municipalities should be able to finish counting by around 9 p.m. But it’s common for some municipalities — like Milwaukee, the state’s largest election jurisdiction — to take a few more hours to count all their ballots and transmit their results.
Why do Wisconsin election results sometimes arrive late at night?
Wisconsin is one of only six states that don’t allow absentee ballots to be pre-processed. While other states’ officials may spend days before Election Day processing and verifying absentee ballots, Wisconsin officials have to do all of that on Election Day.
As of Friday, 235,000 absentee ballots were already returned statewide, and that number will surely grow by Tuesday. That’s a ton of ballots to go through in just one business day. So the count often has to stretch late into the night.
In addition, some municipalities, including Milwaukee, upload their absentee ballot results all at once, at the end of the night. Those tens of thousands of votes are sometimes enough to affect preliminary statewide vote totals. They’re sometimes critically referred to as “late-night ballot dumps,” but despite the lateness of when they’re reported, it’s important to remember that all those ballots were legitimately received before 8 p.m.
Where can I find Wisconsin election results?
Wisconsin’s elections are run at the municipal level, so it takes compiling votes from each of the state’s 1,850 municipalities to have a full accounting of results.
There’s no statewide system for reporting results on election night, but counties are required to post unofficial results on their websites. You can either navigate webpages county by county, or use media outlets like the Associated Press, which typically have landing pages with aggregated election results.
But regardless of what source you use, just remember that the data you see on Election Day is unofficial. It takes weeks to finalize an election.
When will election results be final?
Wisconsin has a multi-step process to certify elections. Municipalities certify their results and send them to the county. Then counties certify their results and send them to the state.
Those steps allow for weeks of double-checking: making sure the count is accurate and that the number of votes cast is equal to the number of checked-in voters.
Aug. 21 is the deadline for county clerks to send primary election results to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The commission chair must then certify the results by Aug. 26.
When should I expect to know the winners?
Several media outlets, like the Associated Press, may project race winners on election night. That may happen even before all votes are tabulated. Those calls are based on what the outlets know about the votes cast, the political makeup of the places where votes haven’t yet been reported, and more.
Don’t confuse those race calls with official results. Only government officials can officially declare winners, and that only happens weeks afterward. But reputable media outlets’ race calls are typically an accurate projection of the eventual winner.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
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