As the votes are tallied on election night, The Baltimore Banner will report real-time results for a number of local, state and national races and ballot issues.

Here’s a guide for what you can expect.

What election results can I find in The Banner?

The Banner has removed the paywall for all our election results pages. You can find results for the following races:

When will we start seeing results?

Election officials started counting mail-in ballots Oct. 15, as allowed by state law, and will release what they have counted so far after polls close Tuesday.

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We’ll see the tallies from mail-in ballots already counted, early in-person voting and in-person Election Day votes. Nearly 1 million Maryland voters cast their ballots during eight days of early voting, representing more than 1 in 5 of the state’s registered voters. As of Sunday night, more than 343,000 mail ballots had been received out of more than 880,0000 sent to voters.

Where The Banner gets its results data

The Banner is getting election night vote counts from the Associated Press and the Maryland State Board of Elections. The AP covers data for U.S. president, congressional, statewide races and the Baltimore mayor’s race. For others, like Baltimore City Council, city ballot measures and various school board races, we get election night data from the Maryland State Board of Elections. The Banner pulls live updates to create and update charts for each race we are covering. On election night, The Banner will publish new tallies within 10 seconds of when they are posted on the state site.

Will The Banner call any local races?

The Banner does not typically call races. We will report when a candidate has claimed victory or conceded an election. For most races, including Maryland’s U.S. Senate race between Larry Hogan and Angela Alsobrooks, The Banner will rely on the AP to make the call.

When does the AP call a race?

In almost all cases, races can be called well before 100% of the votes have been counted. The AP’s team of election journalists and analysts will call a race as soon as a clear winner can be determined. That may sound obvious, but it is the guiding principle that drives the organization’s election race-calling process.

The AP’s race calls are not predictions and are not based on speculation. They are declarations based on an analysis of vote results and other election data that one candidate has emerged as the winner and that no other candidate in the race will be able to overtake the winner once all the votes have been counted.

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Why might the AP not declare a winner?

The AP may delay calling a winner if the vote results go against the expected outcome of the contest as indicated by the available election data. In other words, if the vote results show a large lead for one candidate, but some combination of the past vote history, demographic data or other AP data point to a different outcome, the AP would carefully review the vote results before making any determination.

In competitive races, AP analysts may need to wait until additional votes are tallied or to confirm specific information about how many ballots are left to count.

The AP may declare that a race is “too close to call” if a race is so close that there’s no clear winner even once all ballots except for provisional and late-arriving absentee ballots have been counted.

Competitive races where votes are actively being tabulated — for example, in states that count a large number of voters after election night — might be considered “too early to call.” The “too close to call” designation is not used for these types of races.

The AP may also decide not to call a race if the margin between the top two candidates is less than 0.5 percentage points, unless it determines that the margin is wide enough that it could not change in a recount.

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