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Aside from perhaps a few voting stations ordered by courts to remain open past their scheduled close, voting in America ended in all fifty states (plus Washington, DC) by 1 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, November 6. Less than an hour later FOX News was the first major media outlet to call the presidential election for Donald Trump, and at 5:34 a.m. the Associated Press likewise announced that it believed Trump had won.

Numerous other outlets projected Trump as the winner around the same time. For Americans who hadn’t stayed up late to hear the earliest announcements, by the time they woke up in the morning it was obvious who the next president would be. Enough was known about the outcomes in enough states that, barring some highly unlikely events, the outcome of the Electoral College vote in December could be determined. That’s a big plus provided by the Electoral College, especially in an era where delays in election results breed suspicion and conspiracy theories.

So we know who will win the Electoral College and become president, but who won the ‘national popular vote’ contest?

We don’t know. And we might not know for several weeks, not until California and New York (and a few other states) finish counting their votes. Right now Trump leads the mythical national vote count by just under five million votes, but there are somewhere around fifteen million votes that haven’t yet been counted. And given that most of the slow-counting states were won by Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s almost certain that the current margin will be whittled down to something more like one- or two-million votes. It could even be eliminated, though the Harris margin of victory in these late-reporting states doesn’t appear large enough to erase entirely the Trump lead.

This delay and uncertainty isn’t a problem under the Electoral College, of course. The national vote count doesn’t determine the winner. But if we had the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV), instead of waking up the day after the election to learn the winner – or perhaps just a few days later, as happened in 2020 – it could be several weeks before the American people would learn who the next president would be. Several weeks in which suspicion and conspiracy theories would have plenty of time to fester, fueled by massive vote dumps late in the process that heavily favor one candidate over the other, or perhaps even selective recounts or other more nefarious attempts to ‘massage’ the numbers.

The Electoral College has many benefits, one of which is that it usually makes the winner clear within hours of the polls closing. Not always – the 2000 election was an obvious exception. But for the most part, if they don’t know who won by the time they go to bed, Americans find out the winner when they wake up the following morning. Under NPV, we’d likely have another three or four weeks of waiting, with all the chaos and confusion that would bring. That doesn’t seem healthy for our democracy.