Election Day is one week away, but Virginians have been voting for a while. Almost two million votes have already been cast.
Here’s a preview of what voters can expect on election night and potentially the days following.
Unlike some other states, Virginia law allows localities to start processing absentee ballots prior to Election Day. That’s good news for those wanting speedy returns. But just how speedy those returns will be depends on how much pre-processing a local registrar’s office has done, as well as how large the influx of absentee votes is the final days of voting.
Even still, results from absentee and early votes will likely show up later in the night, after in- person votes. Election experts, like Loyola University’s Justin Levitt, says that people watching the results roll in shouldn’t be surprised if they start to skew Democratic later in the night.
Levitt points to what’s called the “blue shift,” a documented empirical phenomenon. Data since the early 2000’s show that votes coming in later - provision ballots, mail-in ballots, votes from densely populated urban areas - are more likely to be Democratic.
“That’s likely to be quite extensive this year because of an unprecedented partisan split in preferring mail ballots by party,” Levitt says, pointing out that polling shows Democrats preferring to vote by mail this year by large margins. A poll out last week from the Washington Post found that of the more than 1 in 5 Virginia voters who have already cast their ballot, 69-percent say they voted for Democrat Joe Biden.
Levitt cautions against predicting a winner in a race before all the votes are counted.
“It’s a little bit like a sports contest and just taking a two minute slice of the sports contest - whatever sport it is - that’s not necessarily going to be representative of the game as a whole,” Levitt says.
And in Virginia that game will last for days. Local registrars will accept absentee ballots that are postmarked before or on Election Day until November 6th, the Friday following Election Day, at noon.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
