Dont expect to learn the full results of the 2022 midterm elections on Tuesday night.

At least 11 states with highly competitive races will likely take 24 hours or more to report enough of their vote totals to declare winners. The races in Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin include four marquee Senate races and 33 competitive House races.

That means that its highly unlikely well know right away which party will control both chambers in Congress. It does not mean that something is amiss with the vote counting although Republicans in these 11 states are likely to say otherwise if they lose. In order to understand why the eventual lies spewed in the days after the election are wrong, its important to know how each states system for counting votes actually works.

There are varied reasons why these states will take longer to report results. In some states, including Arizona, California and Nevada, a large portion of voters will cast their ballots by mail on Election Day. This means election workers will need to go through the time-consuming work of processing these ballots before counting them.

In states including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republicans have refused to enact legislation to allow mail ballots to be processed prior to Election Day. And the ranked choice voting systems of Alaska and Maine require all ballots to be received before they can be tallied and voter choices distributed.

But the biggest reason why results may take 24 hours or more to count is that these elections are expected to be close. The closeness of the 2020 presidential election is what made it take four days after Election Day before Joe Biden was declared the winner. And the same has been true in other recent elections for House, Senate and governor.

There is nothing abnormal about this. When elections are close, it is important that all ballots be counted to know who wins.

That includes mailed ballots. States of all political persuasions, from Utah to Oregon to Colorado, have been running all-mail elections for years with no problem at all. States have always provided a post-election period to canvass and count all of the votes cast in their elections.

Still, Republicans are wedded to a lie that mail voting is inherently fraudulent and that votes must be counted on election night or not be counted at all. In 2020, Donald Trump called for states to stop tallying votes on election night when he held a lead in key swing states with millions of ballots yet to be counted. Countless lawsuits, audits and recounts found no widespread fraud. But Trumps corrupt effort to steal the election ultimately led to the failed attack he directed on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

Instead of being defeated, Trumps lies have only metastasized, becoming a pillar of the Republican policy agenda. Nearly 300 GOP candidates running in 2022 believe the lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud. Many of them refuse to say that they will accept defeat if they lose.

These 11 states are likely to report final tallies over the course of a few days and, possibly, have their results called into question over it. Heres how voting works in each of them.