The election results are coming in. This is where things stand.

• Polling stations close on Tuesday evening, but it is unclear when we will know the results of the 2024 election.
• Some states’ election laws allow some votes to be counted before polls close; others don’t.
• Here’s where things stand – and what to watch for on election night.

After nearly two years of campaigning, two assassination attempts and an unprecedented decision by the incumbent president to drop out of the race, the 2024 US presidential election is coming to an end.

Polling stations are closed in some places and results will be coming in soon.

The last week of the vice presidential race Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump it was all about outrage, with every candidate trying to do that amplify controversial comments from the other’s camp to try to shake up a race in which the polls remained incredibly close until the end.

The election is expected to come down to just seven states where polls show either candidate can win: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Each state has different election laws, and some are expected to take longer than others to count votes. If the race is as close as the polls suggest, there’s a good chance we won’t know who won the election until sometime after Tuesday night.

Here’s the latest news – and what to look out for.

When we will know the results in each state

In some states we may know the results quite quickly. In other cases, counting can take days. The poll closing times listed below are in Eastern Time.

7:00 PM — Polls close in Georgia, where a winner could be declared late Tuesday evening. Although it took the state days to process mail-in ballots in 2020, a new law allowed election officials to begin tabulating those votes Tuesday morning, speeding up the process.

7:30 PM – Polls are closing in North Carolina, where votes have historically been counted quickly. A winner could be declared Tuesday evening.

8 p.m – Polls close in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Michigan is expected to count ballots relatively quickly and could announce a result Tuesday evening or early Wednesday.

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But the count in Pennsylvania is expected to take days. That’s because the election in the Keystone State is expected to be so close and because much of the electorate votes by mail, and officials can’t begin counting those votes until the polls close.

In 2020, most news media didn’t call Pennsylvania until Saturday — after which Joe Biden was elected president.

9 p.m — Polls close in Wisconsin and Arizona. We may not know the name results in Wisconsin until Wednesday, a state election official told CNN in September, partly because of the amount of time it takes to count absentee ballots in the heavily Democratic city of Milwaukee.

As in Pennsylvania, vote counting in Arizona is expected to take days as most of the electorate is expected to vote by mail. The first results probably won’t be available until 10 p.m

10 p.m – Polls are closing in Nevada, which could also take days to count as most of the state is expected to vote by mail.

How to Read the Electoral College Math

The US uses the Electoral College to choose a president. Each state gets a certain number of votes that correlates with its population – if a state has two U.S. Senators and three members of the House of Representatives, it has five electoral votes.

The winner must receive at least 270 electoral votes – a majority of the total of 538. In the vast majority of states, Harris or Trump are widely expected to win, leaving the campaigns to compete for the 93 electoral votes in the seven battleground states up for grabs lie.

If Harris wins Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan on Tuesday night or early Wednesday, she is expected to have 273 electoral votes – enough to make her the winner.

If Trump wins these states, he is projected to have 266 electoral votes — not enough to be declared the winner, but it would put him in a very strong position to win.

Harris’ easiest path to victory would be to win the traditional “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – a result that would put her at 270 electoral votes. She generally performed better in these states than the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.

For Trump, one path to victory would involve keeping all or most of the Sun Belt states while winning Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.