US election 2020: when can the result be expected? Delays of more than a week possible

If there is voting in the USA, the result will not be known until early the next day according to German time.

It may take a long time again for the 2020 US election.

• When Donald Trump became president, the

  result

  was not known until 8:30 a.m. German time

  .

• State schedules have a major impact on when there will be a result in the

  2020 US election

  .

• The

  swing states

  , in which the election results can be tight, are

  unpredictable

  .

• With our free US election newsletter you are always well informed.

Update from November 5, 5:55 p.m.:

The final results from Georgia are still

, where the vote count promises a close race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

As the dpa reports, around 60,000 votes still have to be counted, which can influence the presidential election.

However, as Gabriel Sterling, an employee of the State Secretary in Georgia, said it was impossible to determine when the final results would be available.

According to Sterling, the open votes come mainly from counties that have so far voted for Biden with a large majority in some cases, such as the metropolis of Atlanta.

Trump is currently ahead with around 20,000 votes and could therefore lose his lead.

US election: No winner has yet been announced - final results from Georgia are still a long time coming

Update from November 5, 7.50 a.m.:

In Georgia, the results are expected in the early morning hours of Central European Time.

A result is expected there by around 9 a.m.

However, the results of other states have to be awaited before the decision of the tremendous game over the US presidency in the USA.

Update from November 4, 10:45 p.m.:

In five states that are considered swing states, it is still open who won the 2020 US election.

Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania can get very short.

When the official result of the 2020 US election will be available differs significantly, because the problems with the counting are not the same everywhere.

The station

has identified the following possible dates (local time) for each state:

• Georgia:

  Almost the entire state is counted on Wednesday after the US election, but individual counties are delaying the overall result.

  An official statement from Fulton County says that

  the full results should be available

  no later than

  Friday

  , November 6, at

  5 p.m.

  A burst water pipe in Fulton County delayed the count.

• Michigan:

  A result could be

  available

  here by

  Wednesday evening

  .

  However, the Trump camp has tried to stop the court count.

  It is quite possible that the result will be further delayed as a result.

• Nevada:

  The state wants to provide

  an update on the status of the count

  on

  Thursday morning

  .

  It remains to be seen whether the results of the US election in Nevada will be available on the same day.

• North Carolina:

  There can be an official final result of the US election

  on

  November 12th

  .

  The background to this is a legal regulation, according to which postal ballot papers that were postmarked on November 3rd must also be observed - even if they are received much later.

  If things get very tight, these votes can still make the difference days later.

• Pennsylvania:

  Here the city of Philadelphia could become the bottleneck for the count.

  It can take

  several days

  for the large number of election letters to be processed there.

  Up to 400,000 voters are said to have cast their votes in this way.

Update from November 4, 2020, 1:42 p.m.:

had declared himself the

winner

hours ago

, although there was no result.

Still nothing has changed about that.

The counting of votes will probably continue into the night (CET).

There is still no winner of the

.

US election: No result yet - Trump declares himself the winner anyway

Update from November 4, 2020, 8:51 a.m.:

Even if Trump has just crowned himself the winner - everything is still open in the 2020 US election. There is still no result.

And when is it that time?

Nobody knows that right now.

Many states are still counting out.

And some will not be able to finish counting today (our time) either.

A result could come

from

today.

The rest?

Counts and counts.

In Pennsylvania alone, 1.4 million postal votes have not yet been counted according to the current status. The situation is similar in North Carolina and Wisconsin.

In addition, there are postal votes that still travel by post.

Because every vote that still bears the postmark from

and

reaches

the election offices in

counts.

At the same time, Trump announced that he wanted to force an

So when will there be a result in the 2020 US election?

Three scenarios, first:

One of the two candidates can win the open states for which we can still expect a result today.

Then the states that keep counting would no longer be so important.

But hardly anyone believes in that anymore.

Second possibility:

The race remains open, it may not be decided until the course of the week - or on November 12th at the latest -

both candidates stand still and wait and accept the result.

Third

: The legal dispute will already start on Wednesday (November 4th), the two camps overwhelm each other and the election result with lawsuits - then the courts have to decide.

And that can go well beyond November 12th.

If Georgia delivers a result later in the day, we'll see more clearly.

Recently there have been various mishaps, in Fulton County, Georgia *, the counting was completely interrupted because of a burst water pipe, now there are five election workers.

It should take even longer in

.

By the way, some of them are currently pausing and will only start counting again in several hours.

Update from November 4, 2020, 5.40 a.m.:

Is there a

at all on the day after the US election

?

Two states are having

counting all votes in a timely manner.

On the one hand, this affects the state of

, because in the city of Milwaukee the postal vote will probably not be counted until Wednesday noon (local time).

It is quite possible that there will be no winner for Wisconsin by then.

On the other hand, the postal vote count has been delayed in the important swing state of

.

There too, no result will be available on Tuesday (local time).

270,000 postal votes are only counted on the following day.

When is there a result considering these issues?

If a candidate gets the majority of the electorate without the two states being counted, the result should be available on November 4th.

If not, the presidential election will not be

decided

until late

German time

at the earliest

.

US election 2020: when can the result be expected after German time?

First report from October 28, 2020:

Washington - On November

the Americans elect their next president.

By the time the result is certain, it will be

in Germany for a long time

.

We show the schedule according to which

and

results can be expected.

You can find all current developments on election night in our live ticker for the 2020 US election.

When will the first projections and results for the 2020 US election be available?

In contrast to elections in Germany, there is no uniform time in the USA at which the polling stations close.

The "

", as they are called there, have

different opening times

not only due to the different

in the

.

The

at which the polling stations close also differ.

When will the first results of the presidential election be available after German time?

Initial indications of the outcome of the 2020 US election are therefore only gradually

possible

for individual

.

In the course of election night, the complete picture for the whole country emerges.

In the US state of Florida,

close

at 7 p.m.

The time zone is closest to the German one, so the results are counted from 1 a.m. our time.

Alaska lets vote until 9 p.m. and belongs to one of us with the most distant time zones.

The ballot boxes are not counted

until 7 a.m.

.

When Donald Trump won the election against Hillary Clinton, the result was only known around 8:30 a.m. German time.

Barack Obama secured his second term at 5.15 a.m.

Check out this post on Instagram

There's too much at stake for anyone to sit this election out.

We need to learn from 2016 and not let history repeat itself.

Make your voice heard.

Make your plan to vote now.

A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden) on Oct 10, 2020 at 2:34 am PDT

Projections provide information on the outcome of the 2020 US election

As a rule, voters in the US do not have to

wait of the last state.

The next

can be determined long in advance.

The result of the individual states is always important, as the US presidential

are based

on the system of

.

Each state is allowed to determine a fixed number of voters for the "Electoral College" - the number of which will again depend on the size of the state in the 2020 US election.

Strictly speaking, only the assembly of electors finally elects the president.

In almost all states, the candidate with the most votes wins all of that state's electorate.

For some states, it is largely clear whether the Republican or Democratic candidate will win the majority.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden can therefore largely work out the number of safe electors with which they will start the election night.

The decisive factor is rather the “swing states”, which cannot be clearly assigned to a political trend.

There elections in the USA are won and lost.

Therefore, on

lot revolves around the question: When will the next result of a swing state come?

The magic number for the majority is

.

When do extrapolations become results?

Since every US state is only about the electors, the exact result is not directly decisive.

Above all, there has to be a majority for one of the candidates.

Whether the lead is large or small does not matter as long as the electors are distributed.

There will also be

at the polling stations

for the US election in 2020

, which are known as "

".

The extrapolations based on this can show a clear victory for a candidate long before the count is complete.

In such a case, the US media already rate the state as the victorious candidate.

It looks different when the majority is too tight for something to be decided.

"Too close to call" is what is called in the USA and in the statistics of the election night no candidate is initially assigned the number of electors.

When will the official result of the 2020 US election be available?

In the last election in 2016, it took over a month for the last votes to be officially counted.

This time, too, there may be some

that at least put the

the result behind.

Due to the

, which has also hit the USA, there are likely to be many more

than before.

The "

" has become popular due to the corona risk.

In the USA, the counting of postal votes sometimes takes much longer than in Germany.

It is therefore difficult to predict when the outcome of the 2020 US election will be certain.

If the projections in important swing states are very tight, the presidential election could only come after days of waiting for its result.

When will the candidates agree on the result on election evening?

In fact, nothing is certain until all of the official election results are announced.

But that does not prevent a clearly victorious candidate from declaring himself the next US president before the final results.

Depending on the course of the election evening, very clear projections may be sufficient.

However, it is customary in

for candidates to telephone to agree that the election has been decided.

The content of this private phone call is the so-called "

".

What is meant is that the defeated candidate admits his defeat.

On the night of November 3, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will also have this conversation.

* Merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network.

List of rubric lists: © Evan Vucci / dpa