Prior to Midnight, the polls will have closed in forty-eight states and the District of Columbia.  All that is left to close are Hawaii and Alaska.  Hawaii closes at midnight Eastern (7;00 p.m. local).  Polls close at 8:00 p.m. local time in Alaska.  For most of the state, that is midnight Eastern.  But the Aleutian Islands are in a separate time zone and will close at 1:00 a.m. Eastern.

In Hawaii, the first big chunk of returns will be the early votes, but those are not reported until all polling places have actually closed.  As such, it may be an hour or more before results are released.  The release of results will be a little bit slower than Alaska.

The biggest race out of these two states is the congressional seat for Alaska, currently held by Democrat Mary Peltola.  One factor that will delay a projection in this race is that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting.  The Republicans in Alaska have pretty well demonstrated that they do not know how to run a race with ranked choice voting.  Thus, rather than running two strong candidates and having the candidates encourage their supporters to rank the other candidate second, the Republicans have had their second candidate withdraw.  Not having two candidates attacking Representative Peltola is a strategic mistake.  But because the Republicans have cleared the field, it is unlikely that there will be many votes for the remaining candidates on the ballot.  A good rule of thumb for ranked choice voting is that a candidate who finishes in second on first preferences is unlikely to have a net gain more than 1% for every 2% of the vote that went to the eliminated candidates.  Representative Peltola received a majority of the vote in the primary, but that is now guarantee that she will get a majority of the first preference votes in the general election.  It is entirely possible that we will not know the winner until after all counts are voted and preferences are applied, but the history of ranked choice voting in Australia is that, in most races, there is a clear winner with a sufficiently large margin in first preferences that the second-placed candidate can’t realistically catch-up. Continue Reading...