#USelection: When will we know the result?
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From 12 Midnight in Nigeria, the first ballot count will begin and we’ll start to get an idea of who’s going to be the next president.
Some states will be called straight away, thanks to the media’s use of exit polls.
Exit polling is the process of quizzing people as they leave voting stations to ask who they voted for. It’s just a batch of people with clipboards, but when there’s enough of them, it’s possible to judge who’s in a winning position.
So if a candidate is in a clearly dominant position in exit polling, networks and news channels in the US will be comfortable calling a state the moment polls close. There’s nothing stopping them from calling them earlier, but a sense of collective propriety and caution stops them doing so.
If this year is going to be anything like the last few elections, the first state declared will be a Trump one. Kentucky is the first state to close all its polls, and it has become a solid Republican state in recent decades.
From there we’ll get a real sense of how the election is panning out when polls close in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. If Donald Trump can’t win all three of them, his path to the White House is nearly impossible.
Despite that, we won’t have a confirmed result for a few more hours. While the western states like California and Washington are seen as foregone conclusions, it may be necessary to wait until polls close there until a call can be made. If it takes about the same amount of time as last election, we should have a winner by 5am, Wednesday.
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