When will we know the U.S. election winner? Maybe a minute past midnight

Many millions of eyes around the world could find themselves glued to data emerging from Pennsylvania sometime around midnight Eastern time on U.S. election night. It comes down to the math of presidential elections — and how the pandemic has permanently altered it by popularizing mail-in voting, especially among Democrats. Nowadays, predicting the winner requires factoring in results from both mail-in and in-person ballots, along with how many of each remain uncounted.
It so happens that Pennsylvania, the state that’s probably most critical to crowning the winner, has a law requiring the vast majority of its counties to publish some mail ballot statistics by 12:01 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Nov. 6.
News organizations’ number crunchers will then plug those stats into spreadsheets and calculate the likelihood of either candidate emerging victorious in that vital state. By that point, we should already have a sense of who the frontrunner is, courtesy of two southeastern swing states: Georgia and North Carolina…
Source: cbc.ca/news/