It takes longer than 24 hours to count presidential election votes, despite claim to the contrary

How long does it typically take to count all the votes in a presidential election? According to social media influencer Andrew Tate, the answer is less than 24 hours.

Tate, who is on trial for human trafficking, was featured in a recent Instagram video, talking about the 2020 election. 

"Never in the history of an election in America has the results taken more than 24 hours to count," Tate said in the March 8 post. "Never in history. Here we are seven days later, they’re not finished." 

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The Instagram clip of Tate comes from a Nov. 21, 2020, podcast on Romanian fitness influencer Andy Popescu’s YouTube channel. 

The 2020 election did not represent the first time presidential election vote counting took longer than 24 hours. In fact, experts said, it has always taken more than 24 hours to count presidential election ballots.

Perhaps the most memorable example: The 2000 presidential election between then-Vice President Al Gore and then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, which was decided more than a month after Election Day when the Supreme Court stopped a manual recount and declared Bush the winner. 

"The United States has never counted all the ballots in a federal general election in 24 hours," David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that promotes trust in election security, told PolitiFact. "Every single state takes days or even weeks to certify official counts, by design, to ensure that the counts are final and accurate." 

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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that provides information on election administration, says on its website that the results reported on election night "are never the final, certified results." 

Media organizations often call the election winners before the official count is over based on early ballots and data on demographics and voting history. 

"Election night ‘winners’ are those that the media has projected will win based on the margin of victory of votes already counted versus the volume of bills outstanding," Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer of programs at the National Association of Election Officials, told PolitiFact. "There are always ballots still being processed — that is why EVERY state has their official canvass days, even weeks later." 

In the 2016 presidential election, The Associated Press called Trump the winner at 2:29 a.m. EST on Nov. 9, before the organization finished calling every state, based on Trump winning the necessary number of electoral votes. Congress met nearly two months later, on Jan. 6, 2017, to officially certify the election. "That’s to ensure the counts are complete and verified," Becker said. 

In 2020, it took four days to tally enough ballots for media outlets to call the election. That election took longer than the previous presidential election to call because pandemic restrictions led to a historic amount of mail and early ballots, which take longer to count than in-person Election Day votes. 

The counting process for mail ballots is not uniform across states. Fifteen states, including Maine, Minnesota and Virginia, do not allow absentee votes to be counted until after the polls close, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Michigan and Wisconsin did not allow mail ballots to be counted before Election Day 2020, Becker said. That is why the graphs in the Instagram clip show that Biden overtook Trump’s lead after the polls closed. 

More recent state elections have taken even longer to call. For example, Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race was declared eight months after Election Day, and a 2010 Alaska U.S. Senate race was called after two weeks. 

We rate the claim that the 2020 election was the only time in American history that an election took more than 24 hours to count False.