Canvass and certification

Certification is the step where election officials attest that the results are a true accounting of the votes cast in that election. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission uses that definition and draws a bright line under it: results on election night are unofficial, even if a newsroom has already called the race. Only the officials the state names can certify. This website is not one of them.

The canvass is the work before that signature. Officials add every valid ballot — polling place, early, mail, military and overseas, and provisional — and they reconcile the number of ballots with the number of voters who participated. The reconciliation is how a county explains a gap between check-ins and counted ballots. A gap can be lawful, for example a voter who checked in and did not cast a ballot, or it can be a problem the canvass is designed to find. The canvass document is the place that explanation lives.

Who signs depends on the state and sometimes on the office. A county board, a single elected clerk, a secretary of state, a governor, or a legislature may have a role. Local certification and state certification are often two steps. A statewide total is not final merely because one county has finished. The state hub links the office that publishes that state’s calendar. Dates differ by weeks. A federal law does not set one certification day for every governor, senator, and representative.

Audits sit beside the canvass in most states. They check that the voting equipment counted a set of ballots the way a person would. The timing and the sample are statutory. An audit is not a recount, and a recount is not a court case. All three can affect the calendar. The Commission notes, for example, that some states will not issue the state certificate until the recount window has closed. That is a deadline rule, not a hint about who is ahead.

After certification, the certificate is what other institutions use. The House and Senate receive returns for their members. Presidential electors are a separate track, with deadlines in federal law described on the Electoral Count Reform Act page. A midterm has no electoral college, but the same canvass habit matters, because the officials who certify a governor certify a presidential canvass two years later. Readers should treat a certified PDF from the election office as the result, and treat every earlier number — including numbers this site copies from an unofficial file — as provisional.