The Headlines - Election Day Decisions, and Why the Count Could Take Awhile

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Plus, how astronauts vote from space.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Election Live Updates: A Caustic and Turbulent Race Is in Voters’ Hands, by Adam NagourneyA Grim Trump and an Upbeat Harris End the Race Hitting Opposite Notes, by Katie Rogers, Jonathan Weisman and Michael GoldThese Uncommitted Voters Finally Made Their Choice for President, by Jack Healy, Clyde McGrady, Eduardo Medina and Campbell RobertsonWhat We’ll Know and When We’ll Know It: A Guide to Election Night, by Nate CohnWhere Voters Will Decide on Abortion in November, by Allison McCann and Amy Schoenfeld WalkerInside Five of America’s Strangest Polling Places, by Helen I. Hwang

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, November 5th. Here's what we're covering. So, Bob, can you start by telling me who are you going to vote for and why? I intend to vote for Donald Trump because I feel he'll have a different direction for our country to go into.

I supported Kamala after doing a little bit of soul searching. My daughter was happy that I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Today is election day. Tens of millions of Americans are making their final choice, and The Times has been talking with voters in swing states as they've weighed their options. I feel like she is predictable. She seems to have, you know, stable values.

I think it'll help us out on gas prices. I think it'll help us out on inflation. I am voting for Trump, but it's a reluctant vote. I'm not going to sit here and be like, oh, like he's the man, you know? I feel like around here, truth be told, the names of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are basically cuss words. It's been heartbreaking because I wish we could have a more calm, thoughtful public discourse like I've been used to before.

Whether I'm going to vote for Trump or not cast a ballot for president at all, it's still kind of up in the air. So when do you plan to make the decision? It could be as late as when I walk into the polling section. Meanwhile. So America comes down to this one more day, just one more day. This is it. This is the last one that we're going to have to do.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump made the final speeches of their campaigns last night in a last minute push to keep the votes rolling in. The two candidates hit opposite notes. -"Camilla has delivered soaring prices." -"Oh!" -"And true economic anguish at home, war and chaos abroad, and a nation destroying invasion on our southern border."

Trump painted a picture of the country on the brink of collapse, while Harris closed out with a message of unity. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor. Now the candidates are off the campaign trail and getting ready to watch the results start rolling in. Harris is holding an election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington,

D.C., while Trump will host his watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida. For years, it was an American tradition to watch the news or log on to a new site and follow along with results until some point in the night where we knew who won the presidential election on Election Day. That has changed. Nick Kourosoniti covers voting for the Times. He's been talking with state and local election officials who have been urging one thing today, patience.

There's only a small chance results will be clear by the end of the night. In the last presidential election, it took four days until Saturday morning for an official call to be made. Results have shifted later because of the rise of mail-in voting, which surged during the pandemic and has continued to reshape American elections. Millions and millions of voters now cast a mail ballot. And mail ballots take a lot longer to process than an in-person ballot. Election officials need to open the ballots, check for their eligibility, flatten them,

get them ready for tabulators or however they're counted. It's a time consuming process. And two very critical states to determining who is going to win the presidency, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, don't allow their election officials to begin processing mail ballots until the morning of election day. That creates a pretty long backlog. Aside from mail ballots, this race is expected to be extremely close, and extremely close elections sometimes automatically triggers a recount. Or, state law allows a losing candidate to request a recount. That will also delay when we would know who won the presidential election. And amid all of this uncertainty, the prolonged period before we have a call has proven to

be pretty ripe for a flood of disinformation about the security of our elections, false claims about who might have won a state or the overall election. And it's in this period before we know that we've really seen disinformation spread like wildfire, even though this is the election process working exactly as it should. Beyond the presidential race, today's election will be a critical test for abortion access across the U.S. Voters in 10 states are deciding whether to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. That includes several states where the procedure is currently restricted or banned—Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Most of the ballot measures would allow abortion until about 24 weeks of pregnancy, effectively

going back to what was allowed under Roe v. Wade. In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, voters have sided with abortion rights in every state where the question has appeared on the ballot. A survey earlier this year from the Pew Research Center found that 63% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And finally, for anyone voting today, that mostly means heading to a high school gym, town hall, library. The Times has been looking at some of the more unusual options.

In Chicago, you can cast your vote and get your laundry done. They've got polling booths set up at a laundromat. In San Francisco, there's a bakery slash polling station that apparently sells a lot of almond croissants on election day. And Ames, Iowa has a polling location in an arcade for a side of pinball with democracy. And for astronauts on the International Space Station, who are obviously a little far from their usual polling spots, they can still vote. They fill in their ballots and beam the encrypted data to an antenna in New Mexico. From there, their ballots are sent directly to the voting

clerks in their hometowns. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, The Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn on how election night will unfold state by state. And throughout the day and into the night, The Times will have live coverage of every development, from what's happening in the battleground states to which party will take control of the House and Senate. That's all at nytimes.com or in the NYT app. I'm Tracy Mumford. The headlines will be back tomorrow with the latest on the election results.