Here’s what to expect as votes are counted on election night.
As polls close in the 2026 midterm elections and vote counting gets underway, it’s important to stick to trusted sources and to understand the process and the facts. In the early hours of election night, the results posted to The New York Times’s website and elsewhere represent an unofficial running tally and are therefore incomplete. The Times also includes an estimate of outstanding votes to give readers a sense of how many remain to be counted.
The most definitive moment on election night is when a race is called. The Times relies on The Associated Press for most of its race calls, and may make some calls of its own. A race call happens when there is no viable path to victory for the trailing candidate.
While waiting for those calls, The Times produces a series of election forecasts, sometimes represented by the Needle, which account for the outstanding vote and the likelihood of either candidate’s victory.
In almost every instance, the vote totals reported early in the night are accurate. But on very rare occasions, mistakes happen. If small changes in results appear on election night, they are likely to stem from administrative errors. Times reporters and editors work to understand any anomalies. Partisan actors on social media, on the other hand, may try to exploit errors to back up their claims about election integrity.
It’s also important to remember that counting votes is a lengthy process and sometimes leads to delayed results. A late update from a city or county is not evidence of foul play; it is nearly always the consequence of the time it takes to verify, tally and report results.
States that take longer to count votes, such as Alaska, Maine and California, could dominate the conversation in the days after the election, especially with the balance of power in both chambers of Congress at stake.
President Trump and some of his allies have aggressively questioned the integrity of the country’s voting system, but the reality is that U.S. elections are very decentralized and are typically run by counties or even cities and towns. That structure makes it difficult to disrupt the elections on a mass scale and helps protect the voting process.
Similarly, voter fraud in the United States is exceptionally rare. Recent investigations into fraud — especially those targeting noncitizen voters — have found no widespread illegal voting.
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