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Poll: About 6 in 10 voters don't expect to know who won on election night – and they're OK with that

The expected high volume of mailed-in ballots in the presidential election could mean Americans won't know who won on election night – and more than 60 percent of likely voters are OK with that, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday. 

The poll found only 29% of likely voters expect to know on election night if President Donald Trump won a second term or if his Democratic challenger Joe Biden succeeded in unseating him. Another 20% said they expected to know by the next day, 19% said it would probably be two to three days before a winner is declared and 27% said it would be longer than three days. 

When asked if they were "comfortable" with not knowing the result on Nov. 3, 27% said they were "very" comfortable and 34% said "somewhat" comfortable. Overall, 36% were not comfortable with the idea (21% "not very" and 14% "not at all"). 

The last time voters did not know the winner of a presidential election on election night, or at least in the early hours of the following day, was in 2000 when Al Gore and George Bush spent over a month in legal battles as Gore pushed for a recount of Bush's razor-thin lead in Florida. 

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Experts believe it is possible this year's results could be delayed due to an expansion of early and absentee voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those mailed-in votes can take poll workers longer to count and verify than traditional in-person ballots. 

Democrats (41%) were more than twice as likely to say they planned to vote by mail than Republicans (15%). And nearly twice as many Republicans (56%) said they plan to vote in person on Election Day than Democrats (29%). 

Those numbers have Democrats worried about a potential election night scenario where Trump appears to hold a large lead based on in-person votes but ends up falling behind based on mail-in ballots, which take longer to count.

Because Trump has already claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud and that Democrats plan to use them to "rig" the election, Biden's backers fear Trump will try to cast doubt on the results if that scenario were to play out. In 2018, Trump claimed – again, without evidence – that fraud was at play when several races flipped in Democrats' favor as absentee and provisional ballots were counted. 

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There was generally bipartisan agreement that it is unlikely the winner will be known on election night. Twenty-seven percent of Democrats and 33% of Republicans said they expected the results on election night, while 26% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans thought it might take longer than three days to determine the winner. 

But the poll found Republicans were more likely to have concerns about a delayed result, though a narrow majority was comfortable with not knowing the winner on election night. Overall, 70% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans were comfortable with waiting for the votes to be counted. But only 8% of likely Democratic voters said they were "not at all" comfortable with a delay, compared with 22% of GOP voters. 

Nearly two-thirds of voters said they favored giving everyone the option to vote by mail but the result fell on sharply partisan lines. While 83% of Democrats favored universal vote-by-mail, only 43% of Republicans did. And while 72% of Democrats said they were confident those ballots could be counted accurately, just 36% of GOP voters shared their confidence. 

The poll found Biden leading Trump among likely voters 51%-46%, though 51% said they expected Trump to emerge the winner. 

Contributing: Joey Garrison 

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