Counting the votes will extend beyond election night on Tuesday, and determining the outcome of the presidential race could, too. Even in states that count their ballots relatively quickly, if the race is as close as the polls say, it could take days before a winner can be projected (election results are never official until final certification).

In 2020, a record number of people voted by mail because of the pandemic, and many states were processing large numbers of mail ballots for the first time. While mail voting has dropped off in many states and others have made changes to speed up counting, these types of ballots are still more time consuming to count.

Democrats have been more likely to cast mail ballots, and variations in timing for counting them can contribute to so-called “mirages” in the reported results — cases in which the type of ballots reported first favor one party in a way that is unrepresentative of the eventual result.

Here’s what we expect from vote counting in each presidential battleground state:

The vote count in every state