How to View Election Results
First, you are in no way required to watch the election results arrive late at night. You don’t have to watch them. Once you’ve voted, you’ve contributed, and hours of exit polls and live coverage from cities across Pennsylvania won’t win your chosen candidate. If watching today’s coverage seems too long and / or brings back memories of 2016, skip it – we probably won’t have a winner tonight anyway. Watch a movie instead .
But if you’ve been counting the days until giant red and blue touchscreen cards take over the network and cable news again, tonight is your night. If your plans for this evening involve inadvertently memorizing the location of certain Florida and Wisconsin counties, and you can’t wait to swallow even the smallest morsels of preliminary results, here’s how to watch election coverage.
How to view the results of today’s elections
It will be relatively easy to find election coverage tonight, even if you don’t have cable. If you have an antenna and can watch your local radio stations, you will be able to track the results coming in onABC ,CBS ,NBC, and PBS , although each network will also provide free live streams of their broadcasts via YouTube .
Those with cable TV will also have their own choice of networks, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN, some of which will also be available via streaming services, although you may need to have a cable login to access them. (FWIW: C-SPAN votes for Lifehacker Associate Editor Jordan Calhoun, who recently voiced his opinion that all your political messages will be broadcast through the ever-boring but ultimately better cable channel. )
In the meantime, if you want to watch something related to the election that has nothing to do with this year’s race, here are 10 electoral films worth watching instead of real results .
When will we receive the election results?
Barring a massive landslide in one direction or another, it’s unlikely we’ll find out the winner of the presidential election tonight – and the same goes for some state races. This is not unusual. As presidential historian Michael Beschloss recently pointed out on Twitter , we didn’t know the winner of the presidential race until midnight 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, 2004, or 2016.
As for timing, this depends on many factors, including whether state voting laws allow counting of ballots mailed before Election Day ( more on that here ). Likewise, it depends on when the polls in each state close. According to CNN, the first polls start closing at 6:00 PM ET on the East Coast, and the latest polls close at 1:00 ET in Alaska.
For example, in Florida, polls close at 7:00 pm ET. They have also counted mail-in ballots over the course of several weeks, so we can get results there much sooner than in states such as Pennsylvania , where early ballots will only be counted today.
What does each candidate need to do to win?
Here we remind you of the depressing reality of the Electoral College. Since it’s all about the “270” vote in the Electoral College, a handful of “key battlefield states” such as Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (among others) are receiving special attention – both during the campaign and tonight. Therefore, when we look at potential paths to victory, they are usually based on how a candidate can achieve this magic number of 270.
What Trump needs to do to win
Right now, CNN predicts that Trump will have an almost guaranteed 125 electoral votes. From there, the easiest way to secure your re-election bid is to win Pennsylvania and another battlefield state like Arizona.
What Biden Needs To Do To Win
CNN has not provided any predictions for the number of electoral votes that Biden (likely) has firmly received in his column. But given that he was ahead in the polls – most notably Trump’s 2016 Rust Belt announcement – the cable network defined his path to victory as “don’t screw it up.”
What if there is a tie?
Equality of votes of electors is not excluded. One possible option, CNN reports , is if Trump wins Florida, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio alongside Pennsylvania, Maine’s second congressional district and Nebraska’s second congressional district.
In this situation, both candidates will have 269 electoral votes, and the members of the House of Representatives elected today will choose the winner, and each state will receive a vote. But it’s a little more complicated (this explanation from Brookings goes into detail).
What about our mental health?
Great question that we’ve been thinking about a lot. Start by making a plan for how to deal with election stress today. At the very least, this should include a set time to go to bed (for yourself) and some rules about when you finally go downstairs, such as putting your phone in Do Not Disturb mode and turning off any other notifications.
Your sound mind should also be kept in mind when you watch the election reports yourself . Reduce your anxiety by strengthening your basic understanding of how things will work out tonight, which includes a realistic timeline for announcing results and not reading too much polls or early voting numbers.
And remember, if at any point while viewing the election coverage you decide that this is too much, you can and should turn it off. If you want to watch something else, we have already noted that we have selected electoral films . There’s also a live stream of polar bears and previous listings we’ve compiled to give you the opportunity to view alternatives to both presidential debates . Good luck.