Every four years, Americans gather in front of their TVs or computers to watch the results of the presidential election come in. Overcaffeinated cable news hosts zoom in and out of battleground state maps projected from towers of screens to fill time before any real news is reported. The polls close in state after state as the Western Hemisphere rotates away from the sun. Eventually, your preferred TV personality yells Breaking news and announces the projected winner of individual states.

Election night 2020, as everyone should know by now, will be different. And watching election results will be different, too.

The biggest reason: It is entirely possible that a winner will not be known on election night .

Stressful as it is and as much as President Donald Trump hates it thats actually normal. Officially, the election results are never finalized on election night. When cable news hosts project that Trump won Alabama or that Democratic nominee Joe Biden won Massachusetts, for example, they do so based on unofficial results. Not a single state reports its final, official results on election night. Every state certifies its official results days after Election Day.

This happens every single election, but Trump has falsely claimed that it is illegal to count valid votes once the scheduled programming block called election night is over. It isnt . Regardless of what Trump says, the final result and the winner of the presidential election will be decided when all of the validly cast votes are counted whether that takes hours, days or weeks.

This nonsense is particularly dangerous in the 2020 election because of how the coronavirus pandemic has altered voting. Far more people will cast mail-in and absentee ballots than in any previous election due to the pandemic. Some states will not be able to open, process or count those ballots until dawn on Election Day, or even until after the polls close. Results in some key swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, will not and cannot be projected by the end of Election Day.

But there are a handful of critical battleground states that do allow election officials to process and count mail-in ballots prior to Election Day. These ballots will be reported when the polls close. That leaves just in-person votes and ballots returned on Election Day to be counted. If these states are not too close, the winner could be called early. And if the right swing states are called early, it may be possible to project that Biden or Trump will have won the presidency.

Those are the key states to follow. Below is a guide on what to watch on election night, and how to know whether there will be a winner Tuesday night or early Wednesday, or whether youll have to stay glued to your screen for for days to come. (For simplicity, all times are EST.)

7 p.m.: Florida, Georgia