What Time Do Polls Close in New Jersey? 8 P.M. Tuesday — and the Count Runs Well Past Election Night
Eight o'clock is the hour that matters: polls close, mail ballots are due, and then the counting moves to the counties — with postmarked mail ballots still arriving until November 9.
The answer is 8 p.m. New Jersey's polls, which open at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, November 3, close at 8 p.m. Eastern — the state sits in the large 8 p.m. closing group in the national closing-time guides published for this election, and the state's own 2026 general election timeline lists Election Day polling hours as 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. The same 8 p.m. deadline governs mail ballots: an in-person return — drop box or county Board of Elections office — must be in by 8 p.m. Tuesday. One deadline has already passed: the in-person mail-in ballot application deadline at the county clerk was 3 p.m. today, Monday.
Closing is not the same as counting. The New Jersey Division of Elections does not post running results on election night; the unofficial numbers come from the counties, which post their own periodic reports on their own websites. Voters checking for a statewide tally on a single state page on Tuesday night will not find one — the count is a county-by-county file, and this station will report it that way.
And the count legally runs past the night. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day still count if they are received within 144 hours of the polls closing — by November 9 — and cure forms for ballots with fixable defects are accepted until November 14. A close race in New Jersey on Tuesday night is therefore a race in progress, not a result: 8 p.m. closes the voting, not the election.
