Waiting on election results? Here’s why it takes a while in Wake County
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Wake County Election Day results are expected after 10 p.m.
- Precinct officials bring tabulators to remote sites to be taken to elections office
- Security is top priority for uploading election results.
How long will it take for elections results to be posted in North Carolina’s largest county?
If history repeats itself, it will likely be a late night for Wake County folks waiting on Tuesday, March 3, primary results.
“We are doing everything we can on our end to expedite it, but not sacrificing custody or security in the process,” said Olivia McCall, Wake County’s Board of Elections Director.
What happens when polls close?
Wake County has 216 precincts, the most of any county in the state.
Once polls close, precinct officials take the voting tabulators to one of 10 remote sites throughout the county. The voting tabulators are then put on a truck, and escorted by the Wake County Sheriff’s Office to the Wake County Board of Elections office, located at 1200 N. New Hope Road, Raleigh.
“And those trickle in,” McCall said. “So it’s not like everyone gets here at the same time.”
Only then are they uploaded to the state’s portal with results usually appearing 30 to 45 minutes after they are uploaded to the state.
“Once we have results, we start uploading them as quickly as we can, because we know that everybody’s out there waiting for the results,” she said.
When will Election Day results come in?
Polls close at 7:30 p.m. on election night, but that doesn’t mean immediate election results.
If a person is still in line at 7:30 p.m. they will be allowed to vote. And, in rare cases, voting hours at a precinct or county might be extended due to unusual circumstances like a voting location losing power.
Wake County previously saw delayed results in 2018 and 2017 after high humidity caused ballots to have difficulty being accepted by the tabulators, The News & Observer previously reported. The ballots that couldn’t go through the tabulators were stored in secure “emergency bins” that were then tallied during slower periods or after polls closed.
Once polls are closed, the first batch of results that come in are absentee-by-mail votes that have been approved by the Wake County Board of Elections and early voting results. They are usually posted shortly after polls close around 8 p.m.
The first batch of election results from Election Day, driven to the board of elections office and uploaded to the state portal, usually start appearing between 9 and 10 p.m.
Wake County’s final batch of results uploaded to the state’s portal have recently been sent after 10:30 p.m. with the last batch sent at 10:59 p.m. during both the March 2024 primary and the May 2022 primary, according to date from the State North Carolina Board of Elections, or NCSBE.
It was closer to 11:30 p.m. when the last results were uploaded for the general elections in 2022 and 2024.
It can take anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes for results to appear for the public after Wake County sends the result to the state. And that process can take longer as more and more counties upload their election results, said Patrick Gannon, public information director for the NCSBE.
“The State Board and 100 county boards of elections work extremely hard on election night to get results to the public as expeditiously as possible from thousands of precincts, hundreds of early voting sites and absentee voting,” he said. “We also must be extremely careful that the unofficial results reported to voters and candidates are accurate.”
All precinct results are normally uploaded by midnight across the state, according to a NCSBE election night timeline.
