Some states had weeks before
Election Day to sort, prepare
and tabulate absentee ballots as they
received them from the U.S. Postal Ser-
vice or picked them up from drop boxes.
The lead time mattered on election night
for Florida, which fi nished processing
all the votes it had in hand and quickly
declared a winner. In the battle ground
of Pennsylvania, however, offi cials were
not allowed to begin counting until Elec-
tion Day, and the process played out
over long days while the country waited
to learn who its next president would be.
Arizona had two weeks to count ballots
before Election Day but still found itself
one of the last states to report results;
several hundred thousand votes came in
by mail and from drop boxes on Election
Day and the day before.
In October, the photographer Dina
Litovsky took pictures of the count-as-
you-go process in counties in Florida
and Arizona. She also documented the
count in counties in Pennsylvania on
Election Day. Her images captured the
fi nal stage of the vote-by-mail election.
Voters deposited as many as 1,480 ballots a
day in this drop box in Orange County, Fla.
Previous page: Sherrie Hepburn-Sands, an election
worker in Broward County, Fla., examining a
ballot that a scanning machine could not read.