For more of KLCC's coverage of the 2024 elections, visit our Elections page.
First things first: Here in Oregon, you have until 8 p.m. today to return your ballot, if you haven’t already. There are ballot drop boxes in most Oregon communities. Technically, you can also put your ballot in the mail if it’s postmarked by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, but many elections officials say the most sure thing today is going to be using an official ballot drop box.
Of course, many people are eagerly anticipating the results of the election, whether it’s the hotly contested presidential contest, or one of the many local races on the Oregon ballot. Elections results for many state and local races will be posted here on the KLCC website starting shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday evening. The Oregon Secretary of State's website will also post results for statewide races and legislative races.
KLCC's Morning Edition host, Love Cross, invited KLCC News Director Chris Lehman into the studio to talk about when Oregonians might find out who won local and statewide races.
Love: When we’ll get some actual results? Something that takes us beyond mere speculation?
Chris: That’s what I think we’re all interested in. On a national level, we’ll start hearing results from east coast states starting around 5 p.m. or so…and over the next couple of hours, as you probably recall from previous presidential elections, the results come in fast and furious as polls close in more states in different time zones.
In Oregon, of course, we can return our ballots right up until 8 p.m. on Election Day, so we won’t have any local results before then.
That said: a lot of counties release a large batch of results very soon after 8 p.m. That’s because elections workers are allowed to tabulate votes prior to the voting deadline…they’re just not allowed to release any totals until everyone’s had the chance to vote.
So…what will we learn in that first batch of results? Potentially, quite a lot. The outcomes of some races will be very clear from the get-go. In some cases, the margin will be so wide that candidates will declare victory or concede defeat based solely on that initial release of vote totals.
Love: But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes it seems like we don’t have a solid winner for days.
Chris: Right. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Number one, if you turn in your ballot in the closing hours of Election Day, like if you drive by the ballot box at 7 p.m. – first of all, there might be a long line – but if you do that, it’s not going to be included in the first batch of results. Because of course, elections workers have to pick up the ballot, take it to the elections office, and run it through the counting process.
So if half the people in Lane County—on in any county—wait until the closing hours, then we won’t have enough data to figure out who wins, if the totals are close.
Second, because Oregon allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to a week after the election–provided they’ve been postmarked by Election Day–that means there will be an undetermined number of valid ballots arriving for several days after Election Day itself.
And a third reason why we might not have definitive results right away is because there are always a handful of ballots that have issues that voters are given a chance to resolve…typically that means a signature on the ballot doesn’t closely match the signature on file…that could be because someone’s handwriting has changed as they’ve grown older, or maybe you signed your ballot envelope on the hood of your car and that affected things. That’s a process called “curing.”
We spoke with Lane County Clerk Dena Dawson about how that might affect the timeline for results.
Dena Dawson: “If we end up with 2,000 ballots that need to be cured…people in a close race are going to be curing those ballots. And so we’re going to be having changes to our results up until the week before we certify the election.”
Love: So in a way it all comes down to: the closer the margin, the longer it might take to figure out the winner.
Chris: That’s right, and that deadline for Lane County to certify the results is not until Dec. 2. For all practical purposes we’ll effectively know the outcome of most local races long before then, but in a very tight race, it could be weeks.
