Presidential Election
Results continue to pour in from across the United States. Democratic Party candidate and former vice president Joe Biden is taking on Republican Party’s nominee and incumbent President Donald Trump. California Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence are their respective running mates. Biden is leading Trump in the overall Electoral College vote tally. But, things can change as the margins are narrowing in multiple battleground states. Yet, Trump has moved court in three states over the ballot counting process. Voters were urged to vote early this time, especially through mail-in ballots, to avoid queues amid the coronavirus pandemic. Thus, over 101 million votes were cast and recorded even before the Election Day. Voters had cast about 73.4 percent of the total votes counted in the 2016 presidential election, even before Election Day. But counting of mail ballots is more laborious and that is delaying the result.
The election results may take more time than expected even as Americans wait with bated breath to find out who will lead their country for the next four years. The US state of Georgia will hold a vote recount due to a razor-thin margin of votes between the two candidates. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said “with a margin that small there will be a recount.” He said that 4,169 votes remain to be counted, and that some 8,000 military absentee ballots are still in the mail and will only be counted if they arrive by the end of the day.
In Georgia, after the latest round of counting results, Biden edged past
Trump with a slender lead of 1096 votes, a remarkable development for the former vice president who until Wednesday night was trailing his Republican rival by more than 50,000 votes.
Republican incumbent President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden are locked in a tight contest to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. But neither candidate has reached the magic number needed to win the White House. But Biden eclipsed Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan, two crucial Midwestern battleground states, and holds a lead in Georgia and Pennsylvania early Friday, as per AP tally. Biden overtook Trump in the number of ballots counted in the state, which Trump must win to have a shot at reelection. Biden now holds a nearly 6,000-vote advantage.
At the moment, as per an AP tally, Biden has 264 Electoral College votes and Trump has 214. Thousands of still uncounted ballots – many in counties where Democrat Joe Biden was in the lead – are what’s making the Georgia contest between President Donald Trump and Biden too early to call. It was unclear when a national winner would be determined after a long bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is testing how far he can go in using the trappings of presidential power to undermine confidence in this weeks election against Joe Biden as he gained ground in tight contests in key battleground states. With his pathway to reelection appearing to shrink Trump on Thursday advanced unsupported accusations of voter fraud to falsely argue that his rival was trying to seize power. It amounted to an extraordinary effort by a sitting American president to sow doubt about the democratic process.
The high stakes election was held on November 3 against the backdrop of an unprecedented pandemic that has killed more than 2,30,000 Americans and wiped away millions of jobs. Both candidates spent months pressing dramatically different visions for the nations’ future, and voters responded in huge numbers with more than 100 million people casting votes ahead of Election Day.