Many states will not know the results of the presidential election on the night of November 5th, and military votes are partly to blame.

Last week, state election officials urged patience among voters awaiting the final count in this year's national and local elections, noting that it could be days after polls close before a winner is officially announced.

“Nuances in state law in this very close election could mean that on election night we don’t know who the president is or who controls the House or Senate,” said Trey Grayson, former Republican secretary of state of Kentucky and former director of the institute in Politics from Harvard University.

“But we should be confident that we can get through this in the next few days and get there.”

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Those nuances include how states handle mail-in and military elections abroad. Only 16 states allow election workers to begin counting votes cast by mail so they can be processed before Election Day.

Fourteen more – including the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – can begin counting mail-in ballots on Election Day, with some restrictions. In the remaining 20 states, no work on these ballots is allowed until polls close, typically after 8:00 p.m. local time on election night.

“I think we will probably have the overwhelming majority of ballots counted by Wednesday evening or Thursday morning,” said Kathy Boockvar, a former Democratic Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth who oversees election issues. “But it will take days, if not weeks, to call some races.”

Officials warned that stopping the process early or challenging the validity of those late-counted absentee ballots risked ignoring the votes of military personnel who are forced to participate in the process remotely because of deployments.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program estimates that about half of the 170,000 U.S. troops living or working abroad voted by mail in the 2020 election.

“Like all Americans, I want to have a voice in our elections,” said Nicole Meek, an Air Force spouse who works on voting rights issues at the Secure Families Initiative. “But I don’t have the ability to have my friends and family go to their local polling station and cast their vote in person.

“I have to plan well in advance and be aware of early deadlines for military voters. I update my address every time we move. I receive my ballot in advance and then send it back early in the hope that it arrives on time. And even if I do all of these things, even if the military voters do all of these things right, the military votes will still be among the last.”

Officials with the initiative said they hope educating the public about the election process — and the varying state rules for counting mail-in ballots — will help curb misinformation about the slow trend in vote counts on election night.

Republican groups have mounted challenges to the counting of mail-in ballots in several states in recent weeks, even as party leaders have insisted they do not want military members' votes to be disqualified as part of the reforms. Democratic opponents have accused them of doing just that with the legal action.

Boockvar noted that the state only received about 260,000 mail-in ballots in 2016. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, that number jumped to over 2.6 million. This year the total is likely to be even higher.

“You would think that if there were 10 times as many ballots, it would take 10 times as long to count,” she said. “That is not the case, thanks to the incredible dedication and around-the-clock work of our local poll workers. But it still took time.”