As soon as polls close on election night, everyone wants to know one thing: who is going to win.
But counting more than 100 million ballots — a conservative estimate of what turnout will look like in the 2026 midterm elections — takes time. It’s very possible, even likely, that we’ll go to bed on Nov. 3 without knowing who won the Senate, House, or other key races.
And we’ll have to wait longer for results in some states than in others. That’s because they all have different election laws, different resources, and different methods of voting — all things that can affect how quickly ballots are counted. For instance, states with a lot of mail voting tend to take longer to count because every mail voter’s signature needs to be verified and ballots need to be removed from their envelopes.
We don’t know exactly how fast each state will report its results this year. But we do know how fast states reported results in 2024, thanks to data from the Associated Press. The map below shows how much of each state’s final presidential vote was reporting as of various times on election night 2024. You can see how some states, like Florida, counted quickly, while others, like California, still had a large share of ballots outstanding even by midday Wednesday.
How fast each state has historically counted its votes
Share of the eventual final vote that had been counted every half hour on election night 2024 in each state. Click on a state to jump to more detail.
Based on the ballots cast in the 2024 presidential general election. Data courtesy of the Associated Press.
The states that are fast or slow to report results tend to stay the same from election to election, though updates to election laws and processes mean comparisons over time aren’t always perfect. Still, the 2024 data should be a pretty good guide to how fast each state will count ballots in 2026. Votebeat also reached out to each state election office to get an estimate of when it expects to report results on Nov. 3. You can get the intel for each state by clicking on its hexagon above.
One final word of caution, though: None of this is a guarantee of when a winner will be declared. Sometimes, unexpected issues can delay results. And of course, some races will just be too close to call on election night — meaning we may have to wait days for a recount to be conducted or for overseas and provisional ballots (which get tabulated later) to be added to the result. Remember, no result is truly final until the election is certified, which in most cases doesn’t happen until weeks after Election Day.