OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — Oklahoma state election officials say the way Oklahoma counts votes on election day differs from some other states where it takes a while to know the results, and they’re confident Oklahomans will know the results of every race in the state on election night.
Oklahoma voters already turned out in droves before election day, surpassing 2020’s entire early voter turnout by just halfway through the third day of early voting this year.
If you’re getting flashbacks to the days-long wait it took for the nation to learn who the next president would be in 2020, Oklahoma election officials have some good, and bad news for you.
The good news: they say Oklahomans will know most statewide and local results shortly after polls close on Tuesday.
“Here in Oklahoma, you'll know before you go to bed if you stay up late enough, you know who's won all the elections here,” Oklahoma Election Board Secretary Paul Ziriax said.
Ziraix is confident Oklahoma’s vote-count should only take a matter of hours, if that.
He credits that largely to the fact that your ballot gets counted before you even leave the polling place in Oklahoma.
“If you're voting in person, like whether it's during the early voting period or on Election Day, the scan tabulator that counts the paper ballots, as soon as you insert your paper ballot, it counts it,” Ziriax said. “And so that's very efficient.”
In fact, he’s confident Oklahomans will know more than just city and county results on election night.
“And you'll know who carried Oklahoma as far as the presidential race also,” he said.
Now, the bad news: when it comes to knowing which presidential candidate won the nationwide vote, that could still take a while.
That’s because each state follows its own, different vote counting rules.
For instance, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, they cannot begin counting mail-in votes until polls have closed on election night.
It’s why President Trump held the lead in that state on election night, but the lead flipped to President Biden by the time the state was able to count all those mail-in ballots several days later.
Ziriax says, typically, Oklahoma does not start counting mail-in ballots until election day too, but there are options to get it started sooner if needed.
“But during big elections like this, county election boards can request permission to start that process earlier,” he said.
And with the massive early voter turnout Oklahoma has already seen, Ziriax says those requests to begin the count early have already been flowing in to his office.
“If you look at the larger counties, in particular, and even medium sized and small counties, they're beginning to have public meetings of their county election boards in order to process absentee ballots,” Ziriax said one week before Election Day.
