Days and even weeks after the polls close on Election Day, Hillary Clinton will gain votes — and it's all legal.
The Washington Post reports that Clinton's vote share will continue to climb because she's likely to take more of the mail-in and provisional ballots that won't be counted until days and weeks later. According to the Post, that's good news for the Democratic candidate if the race is particularly tight.
Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at MIT writes in the Post, "If Clinton is ahead by early Wednesday morning, expect her margin of victory to widen as more votes are counted in the weeks to come.
"If Clinton is behind early Wednesday morning, she might still catch up — especially if she is behind in battleground states likely to have large numbers of provisional ballots."
He noted more absentee ballots have been cast in this election than ever before. Stewart says only some are tallied on election night, but not all.
And he said resolving provisional voting, which allows people whose registration is questioned to cast ballots, can take days or weeks.
"Our most recent research shows that these 'overtime' ballots tilt in favor of Democratic candidates for president," he wrote in an article for the Post.
Stewart said President Barack Obama led on election night in 2012 by nearly 2.8 million votes. But by the time the states had finally finished counting all ballots, Obama's lead had grown to over 4.8 million votes.
"Since 2000, votes counted after election night have increasingly favored the Democratic candidate," Stewart wrote. "We call this the 'blue shift.'"
Meanwhile in Florida, one of the key battleground states, the Jacksonville Times-Union reported that as of Sunday about 800,000 vote-by-mail ballots had not be returned.
"Most had been requested by Democrats," the newspaper reported.
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