Nov. 5 is just five days away, and as Election Day approaches, officials want to make sure everyone respects the process.

“Counting millions of votes takes time,” said Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt.

As tensions rise, false claims of election fraud raise suspicions, even right here in our backyard.

Authorities confirm that the man seen in a viral video being questioned for dropping off a mailbox full of U.S. Postal Service mail at the Northampton County Courthouse was, in fact, a postal worker simply doing his job.

“An acting postmaster who takes mail-in ballots to the Northampton County elections office literally just delivers the mail,” Schmidt said. “That video led to false accusations of vote harvesting.”

Millions of views later, that video is still online.

That’s why Schmidt wants to clarify a few things, starting with when we can see the final election results.

in your fourth installment of a video series Aiming to inform the public about everything election-related, Schmidt says Pennsylvania has never had final results on election night.

“…regardless of when the media and others have announced who they have declared the winner or loser on election night,” he said.

This is because Pennsylvania law is a little different than other states.

“There are a lot of other states — red states, blue states, even Florida — that start that process earlier,” Schmidt said.

However, different states have different rules. For example, another disputed state, Arizona begins counting votes once the ballot is received.

However, in this Pennsylvania battleground, mail-in ballots cannot be opened until the polls open on Election Day.

Once the ballots are finally ready to be read, it’s not as simple as opening an envelope: the envelopes are examined, in a lengthy process, to ensure proper identity.

“It’s a long assembly line,” Schmidt said.

In 2020, in the midst of COVID, when some 2.7 million Pennsylvanians mailed their ballots, that late counting generated distrust.

“The votes were changing, and in the middle of the night,” said Ed White, a retired political consultant.

White explains that in 2020, those ballots changed the results in some races, late in the game. Some called it electoral fraud. However, that was not the case.

“They didn’t bring in any trucks or boxes of votes overnight to change the vote,” White said.

Now that we’re past the pandemic, Schmidt says the number of mail-in votes is declining again.

“Our data shows that fewer voters so far, around 2.2 million, applied to vote by mail this year,” he said.

Schmidt adds that four years later, county officials have the experience of eight more elections, including large percentages of votes cast by mail.

Counties have also had access to $45 million in grants since 2022, earmarked for election integrity. The money has gone toward better equipment or hiring more people to open and process more ballot envelopes, Schmidt said.

So how long exactly will it take to see the final results here in Pennsylvania? Schmidt said there is no exact answer, but he said the closer the race is, the more time it takes to figure out who won and who lost. This race looks to be very close.