Germany’s election this week marked another reminder that most industrialized democratic countries tend to call the results of their elections on election night, unlike the United States, where some congressional, state legislative, and statewide contests ran for days or months after Election Day in November.
While the worst predictions about a prolonged 2024 presidential outcome in the U.S. didn’t come true, down ballot races were delayed.
It’s not just the often-cited California, where eight races were not called on election night—two U.S. House races, five state legislative races, and one statewide ballot measure. A North Carolina state Supreme Court race is still unresolved.
“Most European countries don’t have mail-in elections where election officials are counting ballots for two weeks,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “These countries have in-person voting at the polling place and have the results on election night.”
As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” almost three-fourths of the countries in the European Union don’t allow mail-in voting without specific reasons, while every European country except Britain has voter ID requirements.
Two major factors decide how quickly individual states can determine election outcomes, said Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation. One is counting ballots that arrive after Election Day. The other is refusing to count ballots that arrive before Election Day.
“California allows absentee ballots to continue to come in after Election Day. So, Election Day isn’t Election Day,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “States that say your absentee ballot has to be in the hands of election officials by the end of Election Day are going to be much faster.”
Currently, 18 states—including three of the top four most populous states: California, Texas, and New York—continue counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Texas only allows the ballots to arrive one day after, white it’s seven days for California and New York.
The other issue is when those mail-in ballots can be processed, von Spakovsky said. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 43 states allow election officials to begin counting absentee ballots before the election.
Battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina don’t allow mail-in ballots to be counted until Election Day or after. State legislatures in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Wisconsin are considering legislation to expedite the tabulation process.
“It takes a lot longer to process an absentee ballot than a regular ballot,” von Spakovsky said. “You have to open up the envelope. Check all the information on it. Did they sign it? Did they date it? Etc. Then you open up the second envelope, which actually has the ballot. And you have to unfold it. And you put it in a stack. You do all that processing ahead of time, then when Election Day closes, you already have the ballots there.”
It also should be noted that many countries have much simpler ballots than those used in United States elections, von Spakosky said.
“Our ballots are much longer than European ballots,” he said. “In parliamentary systems, they just vote for the party. There may be some other offices. Their ballots are very short and very simple. Germans voted for the party.”
“In Georgia, a typical ballot may have 60 races on it: president, Congress, state house, county commissioner, city council, school board. Just go down the list,” von Spakovsky added. “American ballots are much longer, and we also are a much larger country. So, I don’t think anyone can say Europeans somehow do things better than us. Their elections are much less complicated.”
One head-to-head comparison is the United States and India, the world’s largest democracy. Before the 2024 presidential election, the Times of India did a comparison explaining why the United States tends to take longer tabulating results than India.
The news outlet determined that America’s decentralized election system was one reason for slowing down the certification of a presidential election or statewide elections, compared to India and many other countries that tend to have a more centralized standard. In the U.S., the states individually run the elections and create many of the election rules.
The paper further noted the U.S. has an “extensive legal framework” that allows challenges and recounts. Further, according to the analysis, the United States has a higher voter turnout, which takes longer to count.