Election night in the newsroom is always chaotic and unpredictable. After eating a lot of pizza and a little salad, we sit back and wait. Reporters and photographers, after hitting a few polling places earlier in the day, head out to be at campaign headquarters, where runners bring back voting tallies from near and far. They send the numbers and their stories, and photographs, to the newsroom remotely. News of winners and losers are posted on the web immediately and the copy desk hustles to meet the print deadline.

This year, like everything in our lives during the pandemic, will be different, however.

If we eat pizza it will be at home, where we have been working since March because of COVID-19. Masked reporters will still interview voters at the polls and we'll be wherever we think we can gather vote tallies. Our staff will be tweeting what they see and hear all day. You can follow them on Twitter or read the tweets on www.theday.com.

But how quickly we'll be able to get the results to you is in question. Connecticut voters have returned more than 600,000 absentee ballots, compared to about 125,000 in 2016. The numbers of early voters across the country has been a staggering 91 million.

When those early ballots will be read and how quickly will vary state by state, meaning it's unlikely a presidential winner will be declared on Election Day. In print, we will give you the most up-to-date Associated Press article, one that might present hints at which way the election is falling between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

But if we learned anything from 2016 it's how early indicators can be mirages. I'll never forget watching the New York Times needle move from a 90% likelihood of a Hillary Clinton presidency all the way over to Donald Trump. The Times thankfully has retired the needle.

Hopefully, we'll fare better with local races but there's still boxes of early ballots to be tabulated. Poll workers can start counting the absentee ballots Tuesday morning. In some cases, they'll get counted and added to the live votes and everyone will know who the winners are. But that's the best-case scenario, and things rarely go perfectly on Election Day. Towns have 96 hours to send final results to the Secretary of the State's office, so a few races could be in doubt for days.

Getting the newspaper to you every morning is a series of handoffs that starts with our copy desk electronically sending pages to the printing press and ends with the paper arriving in your box or on your porch. Many things can go wrong in the process and too often they do. But the best guarantee of you reading the paper with your morning coffee is if the newsroom makes its nightly deadline and the press starts on time. We will have a later-than-usual deadline on election night but this year there might not be a deadline that could be late enough.

This all makes the internet even more important. We will have editors who stay past deadline to update our stories, particularly on the presidential race, where some results are expected after midnight. You're welcome to stay up with us or, after reading the morning paper, check out www.theday.com for the latest.

One New England newspaper editor told readers that they will not have any election results in Wednesday's edition. We hope to do much better than that but this year the clock is working against us.

Timothy J. Cotter is The Day's managing editor. He can be reached at t.cotter@theday.com.