I was thinking about the situation with paper ballots and not knowing the results of the election on the night of Election Day in the USA. When all the ballots had to be tallied by hand, how long did it take to figure out who got elected? I know we've gotten used to electronic results and watching the results come in live on TV or the Internet, but it can't possibly have been that fast in the past.
Isn't it generally OK for results to take a while as long as it's figured out prior to Inauguration Day?
Someone asked almost the same question about a week ago, which I answered here, which links back to more info as well in a previous answer.
The TL;DR is: because Election Day wasn't uniform in the early presidential elections in the United States, returns from many states would have already trickled in before November. In a landslide, winners could be projected in the first half of November. In closer elections, it would take longer, but most people would likely know the results within 1-6 weeks after the last polls closed. The main exceptions are 1800 and 1824, which were disputed elections decided by Congress. By 1840, most people would know even the results of close elections within two weeks, and by the 1850s, it was usually the next day or two. Of course, people who didn't care and lived in very remote areas might not find out the news until much later.
That, of course, is taking it for granted that you are asking about when news outlets could project a winner with some certainty. If you're asking about actual certification, that's a different process and is dictated by law. Even now, the winners are only projected on Election Night. The results don't become official until January. It wasn't any different back then, although in some of the early elections, the day of counting the Electoral Votes in Congress was set as a day in February.