in 2020 media Outlets weren’t able to declare the winner for four days after the election and this year we expect it’s going to take even longer polls are showing that this is likely to be one of the closest elections in US history between Donald Trump and kamla Harris there are seven states that are considered Battlegrounds every single one of those States is essentially tied according to the polls with very small margins in One Direction or the other there are a lot of people who vote by mail in Pennsylvania uh the most important swing state by consensus um almost 2 million voters have requested mail ballots and mail ballots take longer to count in a couple of the the swing States uh particularly Pennsylvania and Wisconsin state law doesn’t allow election officials to touch those votes until election day so because of a host of reasons the historic closeness of the election the number of uh mail ballots that voters are using to cast their votes and the different procedures that these various Battleground States use to tabulate those votes after election day all of those are going to contribute to what’s going to be a long time before we can actually say who won this election