SALT LAKE CITY — The waiting is the hardest part.

Tom Petty’s famous lyrics certainly hold true if applied to the 2018 election. Whether it’s in Georgia, Florida or even here in Utah, some race results still haven't even been unofficially called more than a week after the election.

That wait has given Utahns a chance to see how much results can shift back and forth before the final results are certified two weeks after an election. For example, Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering initiative, shifted from the majority voting in favor of it as of Nov. 6, to the majority voting no as of Tuesday, after 50,000 new votes from Utah County were counted.

When other county numbers filed later in the day on Tuesday, “for” shifted back into the lead, but then “against” had a 922-vote lead at the end of the day. It reversed again on Wednesday, with "for" regaining a 2,250-vote lead. "For" had a 4,267 vote lead after Thursday, but ballots are still coming in.

The same can be said of the Provo bond for a new police station, which had a slight lead in favor of it after election night. That shifted on Friday when Utah County released new results, but those in favor of the bond regained a 34-vote lead after more ballots were counted Tuesday.

Then there’s the District 4 race. Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams has maintained a lead from election night through the first week of post-Election Day results, but his lead was trimmed to 1,002 votes after more results came Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

All three races remain too close to call more than a week after the election.

Why is it taking so long to find out who won?

That’s because it takes time to count all of the mail-in ballots, Utah Elections Director Justin Lee said. While that’s not a new process for election officials, a giant spike in mail-in ballots over the years means a longer wait to be able to count those ballots.

Since the postmark deadline for the ballots was the day before the election, many ballots don’t arrive until days after the election. County clerks then have to process the ballots. It’s a lot of work crammed into a small window of time.

“(That) involves verifying the signature that’s on the ballots, separating the ballot from the envelope, which has to be done, for the most part, manually,” Lee said. “Then those votes, after that, are run through a tabulation machine.”

There are also provisional ballots, which are ballots submitted by those unsure if they are properly registered, that have to be determined valid after the election. Those include ballots from day-of registration voters, something new to the state in 2018.

All of that results in a longer wait for Utahns to know which politicians, bonds and initiatives officially won.

Weren’t previous election results determined on election night?

No, and that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Lee argues residents have grown accustomed to news agencies making projections based on results calculated on election night. Those typically come from the results collected that night, exit polling and an understanding of how many votes are left.

That has changed as the way to vote has changed. State election officials said there were 281,000 ballots still to be counted after this year's election night, which meant many of the races were too close to call on Election Day. Some of those have been unofficially called since, but others remain undetermined as thousands of additional votes still need to be counted.

“It’s the volume of people voting by mail now that makes it so much harder to call,” Lee said. “The other interesting thing with a close race, no matter how often you update the results — you update results daily or you wait two weeks from election night until canvass — if a race is really close, it’s going to be really close no matter how often you update results.”

Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox tweeted on Tuesday that other states using vote-by-mail systems are seeing similar delays. In short, the state's top two election officials expect this isn't a once-in-a-lifetime situation. This will likely happen again in the future.

“We are used to election night results, but we have to reset those expectations,” Cox said in the tweet.

When do we know who won, then?

Next week, in some cases and possibly after Thanksgiving in others. That’s when officials certify election results through one last review, known as canvassing.

What does canvassing involve? It starts with election officials at a polling place counting votes and sending those vote totals to a county canvassing board, according to Thomson Reuters. The board counts and verifies each vote to make sure it's accounted for and everything was properly completed.

"The purpose of the canvass is to account for every ballot cast and to ensure that each valid vote is included in the official results," the U.S. Election Assistance Committee explained.

Once officials are done completing a proper review of the votes, they issue a certification of the vote and declare the official winners, Reuters added. In Utah, counties are set to certify results on Nov. 20, and the state will certify all of the numbers on Nov. 26.

“The ballots have to be processed. Provisional ballots also have to be processed until after Election Day, so nothing has ever been official until the canvass which, for the counties, is one to two weeks after the elections,” Lee explained. “We’ve never called races or said anything was official on election night.

"Nothing is official until we get to the statewide canvass for the multicounty and statewide races.”

Related topics