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She writes: “We were greeted by Ms Christina Montague herself in the parking lot. She expressed her cross-party lines and is looking to bring more public input into the larger decisions being made in our city. Furthermore, she described herself as a fiscal conservative who supports families.”

Short answer: I’d guess about an hour after polls close.

Longer answer: Polls close at 8 p.m. The “unofficial” results get posted on the Washtenaw County clerk’s election results website reasonably quickly after they’re physically turned in to the clerk’s office – but the time lag between implementing the shutdown procedure at the precinct and submitting the information to the clerk’s office probably means that final complete results for countywide race like the judicial contest won’t be available there for at least a couple hours. They do load them incrementally, though, so as the results get turned in, they load them right on up to the website.

Faster preliminary results are usually obtained by different campaigns by having someone on the ground at each precinct to report in results to campaign headquarters from the voting machine paper tapes. (They resemble cash register receipts.) You don’t need to be affiliated with a campaign or some publication to wait in the public area at a precinct where the result tapes are posted and look at them. So if you want to be the first to know how things turned out in a particular precinct, go there at 8 p.m. and wait – just make sure you stay in the the public area and don’t get in the poll workers’ way – physically or verbally.

When I’ve watched poll workers shut down the polls, I’ve noticed that they really are focused on following the steps, doing the various cross checks, pausing and rechecking when something doesn’t seem right – so they’re goal is not to be fast, but rather accurate. Still, if things go reasonably smoothly a precinct can get shut down and result tapes generated in 20-30 minutes. For at least some precincts, it inevitably won’t go perfectly smooth. I’d expect that campaigns will start to have an idea of how they did starting in the window between 8:30-9 p.m.

We’ll try to share preliminary results as soon as we have something sensible to report. We’ll be monitoring results with a couple of different campaigns. If readers want to venture out to the precinct they voted at 8 p.m. and share the results right here in this comment thread, that would be welcome. One year we attempted something more organized involving a shared Google spreadsheet, and experienced mixed results. Ultimately we’re talking about the difference of a couple hours – and the marginal benefit to eking out that half-hour earlier report doesn’t seem like an efficient allocation of resources.

Note that the absentee ballots are counted at the precincts this time around – because precinct delegates are on the ballot. When they’re counted as a separate batch across an entire ward, you can get a decent read on an entire ward based just on the absentees – but not for today’s election.