As we all remember, it took four days for the 2020 presidential election to be “called” by media outlets, and nearly two more months to make the results stick after an attempted insurrection. So when will we know whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump won the 2024 election?

It’s complicated. Of the seven 2024 battleground states, Georgia closes its polls first at 7 p.m. ET. It’s followed by North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and, finally, Nevada at 10 p.m. ET (7 p.m. local time). Obviously, it will take longer to get a call if the results are close, and the final 2024 polls show an incredibly tight race. Two factors that slowed the count in 2020 — a big jump in turnout and voting by mail — should have less of an impact this year. Most experts doubt 2024 turnout will be as high, and states are not hastily implementing mail voting due to a pandemic. But it still seems extremely likely that, as in 2020, Trump will declare victory before all the votes are counted and challenge the results if Harris wins.

Here’s what time the polls close in the battlegrounds on November 5, when each state is likely to be called, and a few scenarios for how the results could play out on Election Night and beyond.

When Polls Close in Georgia: 7 p.m. ET

Vote-Counting Process: Georgia was the closest state in 2020; Joe Biden carried it by just 0.23 percent. That’s why it took the normally efficient state election machinery so long to tally enough votes to be certain that Biden had won. The state has had heavy in-person early voting this year, but since Georgia has no registration of voters by party, it’s not easy to tell which side that will benefit. Its mail ballot system is not as permissive as it was in 2020, when every registered voter was sent a mail ballot. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has promised that all but a handful of ballots will be counted on Election Night.

There had been a lot of talk about Georgia’s vote count being delayed on Election Night due to the state election board’s highly partisan decisions to require hand counting of all ballots and to enable open-ended “inquiries” about the authenticity of ballots. But the courts, with Raffensperger’s support, struck these provisions down. So there should be a relatively straightforward count.

When Georgia Will Be Called: If the state isn’t extremely close, we could see a call late on Election Night. But if it is a virtual tie again, there’s no telling when we’ll know who won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. As of November 2, Trump leads Harris in the FiveThirtyEight polling averages for Georgia by 1.5 percent, well within the standard margin of error.

When Polls Close in North Carolina: 7:30 p.m. ET

Vote-Counting Process: Like Georgia, North Carolina has a history of relatively efficient vote counting. However, the entire electoral machinery is in the hands of a state Republican Party that’s more systematically MAGA than its Georgia counterparts. Republicans have instituted a rule that could slow down and skew the results: Mail ballots received before Election Day are the only ones that can be tabulated before polls close, which means in-person early votes will be counted later in some jurisdictions. Whether that matters depends on how close the results are, as WTVD reports:

The State Board anticipates that the unofficial results reported by the end of election night will include about 98% of all ballots cast in the election. On election night, after all ballots available to count at that point have been tabulated, the county........

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