ST. LOUIS — Some rural Missouri counties are predicting 90% of eligible voters will turn out for the 2020 presidential election when all is said and done.
St. Louis city expects 80% turnout according to local projections collected by the Missouri Secretary of State's office.
A lot of them will be in-person or mail-in absentee ballots, which can be more tedious to count.
So, how long could it take before we know who won? It depends on the state.
As news organizations like NBC prep for one of their biggest nights of the year it's worth remembering that there is nothing in the Constitution that requires election results on election night.
"No state ever reports their final results on election night and no state is legally expected to do so," said UMSL assistant professor of political science and 5 On Your Side Political Analyst Anita Manion. She said we can expect some states to take several days to count all of their votes with millions voting by mail.
"Those mail-in ballots do take a lot more time to process because we do have security protocols," explained Manion.
But in Missouri, Secretary of State Jay Aschroft told 5 On Your Side he is "confident" that the 116 election authorities across the state "will have the unofficial results on Tuesday night."
Ashcroft said while mail-in ballots do take more time to process, most of Missouri's early voting has been in the form of in-person absentee. Which, he said, means the counting shouldn't take that much longer than any other year even with nearly 900,000 early votes — three times the number in 2016.
"What I can't tell is how many people of those roughly 900,000 how many of those are people that weren't going to vote. But because we made it so easy for them to vote, they did," versus typical voters who would have voted on Election Day anyway Ashcroft said.
Illinois has nearly doubled its early vote total from 2016 from more than 1.8 million to more than 3.5 million statewide.
But early voting was already more common there and the Illinois Secretary of State's office said it should also have preliminary results Tuesday night.
If the count does take longer than expected, it won't be the first time for the St. Louis region. In 2008, Missouri had the closest presidential race in the country between then-senators John McCain and Barak Obama with roughly 3,000 votes deciding the race that wasn't called until mid-November. The wait was even longer in 2000.
