The United States does not have its new President yet. In the morning following the nail biting race to the White House on election night, millions of Americans woke up in utter disbelief that the winner had not been declared.
As of now current US President Donald Trump is trailing with 213 electoral votes while his Democratic challenger Joe Biden is leading with 238 electoral votes. Biden, at present, is ahead in the race to the magic number, 270.
Stirring up a storm, Donald Trump said he will go to the Supreme Court to dispute the election count and proclaimed victory over Democratic challenger Joe Biden despite incomplete results from several battleground states that could determine the outcome of the White House race. Biden’s campaign has said that its legal teams are “ready to deploy” if Trump presses ahead with his “outrageous” threat to move the Supreme Court to stop election counting.
But election results from some battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, were still not clear and projections from major networks showed Trump is still short of the 270 electoral votes need to win re-election.
But it had become increasingly evident in the days leading to November 3 that there might be a delay in declaring the winner. There was also a possibility that Americans would not know who won on election night.
The main factor slowing things down is the fact that millions of Americans voted by mail owing to the coronavirus pandemic. And in general, those mail ballots take longer to count.
Election workers must remove the ballots from their envelopes, check for errors, sort them and flatten them all before they can be run through scanners the moment polls close and be tabulated. In states with well-established vote-by-mail programs, this processing happens weeks before Election Day. The results are often released quickly.
Without a head start, there’s virtually no way to process and count all the mail votes on Election Day, while also counting all the in-person votes.
In fact, in the history of US Elections, all votes are never counted in one day. It is literally impossible to count some 150 million votes in a matter of one day. Media organizations, including The Associated Press, declare winners in thousands of races on election night based on the results that are in, voter surveys and other political data. But this year, it is not certain when US media houses will have data required to declare the results.
While there is a perfectly logical explanation for why the US is yet to know who the new President shall be, Americans who have been waiting with bated breaths seemed to be running out of patience:
What time do we find out who the president is
— blake (@blakeps) November 4, 2020
Do we still not know who our president is???
— kari (@funnkari) November 4, 2020
We aint never seen no shit like this where we wake up and still no president. Lmaoooo so now what we doing people??
— red (@Red_Mac6) November 4, 2020
I woke , late for school , late for breakfast , late to even tell my girl gooodmorninggg….. N THERE STILL NO PRESIDENT
— Kenny Deluxe (@KingKenboi) November 4, 2020
Good morning :)Oh, still no president? Thats fine. We’ll just participate in all out death match until the strongest victor emerges and they will be our Supreme leader.
— happy holidays (@orcrights) November 4, 2020
So I stood in line to vote for about 2 hours to still not know who the president is . I hope Biden wins, I know I didn’t stand in the cold for no reason.. Rs
— A (@___AJxM) November 4, 2020
According to a CNN report, many election officials called it a night on Tuesday and paused the processing of votes in important states like Michigan and Nevada. Some counties in battleground states like Pennsylvania aren’t planning to start the tabulation process until later on Wednesday morning.
(With inputs from Associated Press)