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Here’s what happens if there isn’t a winner on Election Day

After a disastrous presidential election in 1876, the U.S. devised a system to resolve electoral disputes. Here's how that process works—and why it, too, has been controversial.

By Erin Blakemore

PUBLISHED November 3, 2020

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Young people watch news coverage of the 2016 presidential election results from a tavern in Seattle, Washington. Although the media often declares a winner on election night, it takes two months for states and Congress to formally confirm the next president.

Photograph by Jason Redmond, AFP/Getty

Every four years, presidential campaigns follow a familiar cadence of debates, speeches, rallies, and political ads leading up to the main event in early November. But the election doesn’t officially end on Election Day—even if the media declares a winner or a candidate concedes.

It takes two months for states and Congress to formally determine who really won a presidential election. And if it isn’t clear who should receive a given state’s electoral votes, a 133-year-old law kicks in to create an electoral pressure-cooker with tight timelines and convoluted processes that determine whose votes count in the Electoral College. More than a century since the Electoral Count Act of 1887 was passed, this year’s confluence of a deadly pandemic, extreme political polarization, widespread anxiety about the outcome on both sides, and an unprecedented level of mail-in voting could put the nation’s complex electoral system to the test.

Though states have five weeks to resolve contested elections, that process presents a variety of legal pitfalls. Political scientists have long called the Electoral Count Act everything from unintelligible to unenforceableto unconstitutional. Further...

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Here’s what happens if there isn’t a winner on Election Day

After a disastrous presidential election in 1876, the U.S. devised a system to resolve electoral disputes. Here's how that process works—and why it, too, has been controversial.

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