To learn more about KLCC’s coverage of the 2024 elections, visit our Elections page.

First things first: here in Oregon you have until 8 p.m. Tuesday to return your ballotif you haven’t already. There is ballot drop boxes in most Oregon communities. Technically, you can also mail your ballot if it is postmarked by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, but many election officials say the safest thing today will be to use an official ballot box .

Of course, many people are eagerly awaiting the results of the election, whether it’s the hotly contested presidential election or one of the many local elections on the Oregon ballot. Election results for many state and local elections will be posted here on the KLCC website shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday evening. THE Oregon Secretary of State website will also release results from statewide races and legislative elections.

KLCC Morning Edition host Love Cross invited KLCC News Director Chris Lehman into the studio to talk about when Oregonians might find out who won local and national races.

Love: When will we have real results? Something that takes us beyond mere speculation?

Chris: I think that’s what interests us all. Nationally, we’ll start hearing results from the East Coast states starting around 5 p.m….and over the next few hours, as you probably remember from past presidential elections, the results are coming in fast and furious as they go. as polls close in more states and in different time zones.

In Oregon, of course, we can turn in our ballots until 8 p.m. on Election Day, so we won’t have local results until then.

That said: Many counties release a large number of results very shortly after 8 p.m. That’s because election officials are allowed to tabulate votes before the voting deadline…they’re just not allowed to release totals until everyone has had a chance to vote. .

So… what will we learn in this first batch of results? Potentially, a lot. The results of some races will be very clear from the start. In some cases, the margin will be so wide that candidates will declare victory or admit defeat based solely on the initial release of vote totals.

Love: But this is not always the case. Sometimes it seems like we don’t have a solid winner for days.

Chris: RIGHT. And there are several reasons for this. Firstly, if you turn in your ballot in the last hours of polling day, for example if you pass the polls at 7 p.m. – firstly, there may be a long queue – but if you that won’t work. be included in the first batch of results. Of course, election officials must collect the ballot, bring it to the election office, and pass it through the counting process.

So if half the residents of Lane County (and any county) wait until closing hours, we won’t have enough data to determine who wins, if the totals are close.

Second, because Oregon allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to a week after the election – as long as they are postmarked by Election Day – this means that an unspecified number of Valid ballots will arrive several days after Election Day itself.

And a third reason we might not have definitive results right away is that there are always a handful of ballots that have problems that voters have the opportunity to fix… this usually means that a signature on the ballot does not closely match the signature on the ballot. file…it could be because someone’s handwriting changed with age, or maybe you signed your voting envelope on the hood of your car and that affected things. This is a process called “healing.”

We spoke with Lane County Clerk Dena Dawson about how this could affect the timing of results.

Déna Dawson: “If we end up with 2,000 ballots that need to be cured…people in a close race are going to cure those ballots. Our results will therefore change until the week before the certification of the election.

Love: So, in a way, it all comes down to this: the smaller the margin, the longer it will take to determine the winner.

Chris: That’s right, and the deadline for Lane County to certify the results is not until December 2. For all intents and purposes, we will indeed know the outcome of most local races well before then, but in a very close race it could take weeks. .