Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his calls for the winner of the presidential race to be declared shortly after polls close on Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.

Trump set the pattern in 2020when he declared victory in the early hours of the morning after election day. That prompted his allies to call on officials to “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the last four years falsely claiming that fraud cost them that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the US.

But one of the many reasons we’re unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws delaying the count. Another is that most indications are that this will be a very close election, and it takes more time to determine who won close elections than blowouts.

Ultimately, election experts note, the priority in counting votes is making sure it’s an accurate and safe count, not ending the suspense moments after the polls close.

“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”

Trump’s request also doesn’t seem to take into account the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.

David Becker, election expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunks Trump’s 2020 election liessaid it was unrealistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”

During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump called for the race to be decided shortly after some polls began to close.

“They have to be decided by 9, 10, 11 o’clock Tuesday night,” Trump said. “Lots of crooked people. These are crooked people.”

It was not clear who he was referring to with the “crooked people” remark.

The timing is an example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of the US election. By 11:00 p.m. ET, polls will close in the two western states of Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has prompted conservatives to complain that the US is not counting elections as quickly as France or Argentina, where the results of the latest races were announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries only hold one election at a time. The US’s decentralized system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.

Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That’s why the US takes longer to count votes.

The Associated Press call races when there are no possibility that the next candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if a candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be named quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could count. It takes a while for every vote to be counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.

In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a conservative state regularly praised for its rapid turnout. But the AP didn’t call Scott a victory until after a recount was completed on Nov. 20 because Scott’s margin was so slim.

It also takes time to count each of the millions of votes because election officials must process contested or “provisional” ballots and see if they were legitimately cast. Abroad ballots of members of the military or other US citizens abroad may appear at the last minute. Mail-in ballots usually arrive sooner, but there is a lengthy process to ensure they are not sent fraudulently. If that process doesn’t start before Election Day, it can back up the count.

Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected because the signatures didn’t match up to five days to prove they actually voted. That means the final numbers simply may not be available on Tuesday night.

Part of the slowness is due to state-specific electoral rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsintwo of the most important swing states, election officials have been asking Republican lawmakers for years to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail-in ballots before Election Day. That means mail-in ballots are counted late, and results often don’t begin to be reported until after Election Day.

Democrats have traditionally dominated mail-in voting, making it appear Republicans were ahead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail-in ballots were finally added to the tally. Experts even have names for it from past elections – “red mirage” or “blue shift”. Trump exploited this dynamic in 2020, when he had his supporters call for an abrupt end to the vote count — the ballots that remained uncounted were mostly mail-in ballots for Joe Biden. It’s unclear how that will play out this year, since the Republicans have changed as well voted in large numbers during early voting.

Michigan had similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022, they removed the ban on early processing of mail-in ballots. That state’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most of the results available by Wednesday.

“At the end of the day, the chief election officials are the people who have the ability to deliver those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they are saying and not what a particular candidate or people on the campaign are saying,” said Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency.

Some of Trump’s allies say he should be even more aggressive in declaring victory this time.

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated a similar strategy during a recent news conference after his release from federal prison , where he is serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 loss.

“President Trump came in at 2:30 in the morning and spoke,” Bannon said. “They should have done it at 11 o’clock in 2020.”

Other Trump supporters took a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing podcast American Truth Project that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “simply they will not stand for it. “

Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump victory, the former president and his supporters have touted early voting data and favorable polls to argue that the election is over. Republicans have returned to early voting after largely staying away from Trump’s direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outnumbering Democrats in early voting.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful way. Early voting data doesn’t tell you who will win the election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign explicitly targeted Republicans disenchanted with Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans voted, there are also large numbers of early voters who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris were to win just a fraction of those votes over Trump, it would wipe out the small advantage Republicans have.

There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: wait until enough votes are counted, whenever.