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What you need to know about ballot counting and election results in Pennsylvania

Because Pennsylvania is a very evenly split battleground state, close races — like the Senate race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz — will take longer to call.

Mail-in ballots are sorted and counted Nov. 8, 2022, at Lehigh County Government Center in Allentown.
Mail-in ballots are sorted and counted Nov. 8, 2022, at Lehigh County Government Center in Allentown.Read moreMatt Smith / For Spotlight PA / Matt Smith / For Spotlight PA

Polls close Tuesday evening, but election results may take days or weeks to call.

The Inquirer’s election results tracker will update as races are called, and our live coverage will remain up-to-date as vote counts trickle in.

A last-minute change will slow down the count of ballots

Philadelphia’s vote count will take longer than expected after the city’s three-member elections board voted 2-1 Tuesday morning to reinstate what is known as poll book reconciliation during an emergency 7 a.m. meeting.

By crediting voters who cast ballots in person at polling places, elections officials can confirm voter activity; make sure the number of voters, ballots cast, and votes counted line up in each precinct; and perform other data verification and clean-up work.

Poll book reconciliation, the process of scanning poll book pages to update information in the state’s voter registry, is a means of flagging mail ballots submitted by voters who also voted in person. It’s a practice all counties perform. Philadelphia made poll book reconciliation a part of the process for counting mail ballots after the expansion of mail voting in Pennsylvania in 2020.

Voters who request and return their mail ballots close to Election Day won’t be marked in the poll books as using mail ballots. Those voters, if they submit mail ballots and also show up in person, might slip through the cracks and be allowed to vote using both methods.

» READ MORE: Live updates: Voters will choose Pennsylvania's next governor and a new U.S. senator to represent the commonwealth

Reinstating the policy in Philadelphia means the few tens of thousands of ballots still left to count after Tuesday night will instead be counted and reported in a slow trickle over the rest of the week, in order to allow elections officials to flag and remove any double votes.

The decision was a sudden reversal of the commissioners’ vote last week to remove the reconciliation process this election, which they said was no longer necessary. It also came a day after a city judge, responding to a Republican lawsuit, said they could move forward without the process.

Reconciliation caught a few dozen double votes in 2020, but caught none in the last three elections in Philadelphia.

A delay in elections results is normal

Winners are official only after elections are certified, which in Pennsylvania happens 20 days after Election Day. But news organizations declare winners long before that. (The Inquirer relies on the Associated Press for that.)

Polls in Pennsylvania close at 8 p.m. on Nov. 8, and the vast majority of votes should be counted by midday Wednesday. Because Pennsylvania is a very evenly split battleground state, some races — like the Senate race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Ozwill take longer to call.

That’s because the sophisticated statistical models used by news organizations to make the call look at partial results to identify the winner. Partial results model the outcome of any particular race, and that requires having enough votes to clearly see voting patterns and how they play out across different places and demographics.

Staff writers Jonathan Lai and Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this article.