Early Voting in Texas Already Exceeds All Votes in 2016 Election | 2020 U.S. elections

Four days after the presidential election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, the number of early votes in the state already exceeds the total of the 2016 elections (100.4%).

Texas has the second largest electoral college in the country (38 delegates) and was the second state to pass 100%. Hawaii already has 4.5% more votes than in the last presidential race, but it is much smaller (there have been 457,000 votes so far) and only has four delegates in the Electoral College.

• KNOW MORE: How the US Presidential Election Works
• DECISIVE STATEMENTS: Know which are the main ‘battlefields’ of the elections

Early voting has broken records and been expressive in several other states, such as Montana (91.2%), Washington (88%), New Mexico (87.9%), Georgia (86.9%), North Carolina (85.6%), Tennessee (82.9%), Oregon (82.4%), Nevada (82.2%), Florida (81.6%) and Arizona (80.4%).

Five of these states are decisive, considered “battlefields” in the race for the White House: Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Texas. Democrats have voted more in these states, but Republicans have been closing that gap in recent days.

Across the country, more than 84.6 million have already voted in person or by mail.. The number is equivalent to 61.4% of the total number of votes in the last US presidential election.

Texas hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1976, and research shows that Trump is numerically ahead of Biden in state, within the margin of error (50.6% versus 48.5%). According to the FiveThirtyEight website, the Republican has a 66% chance of winning in the state.

Harris County, which includes the city of Houston and is the largest in the state, has become a Democratic stronghold in recent years. The county opened eight polling stations for 24 hours on Thursday (29), which helped increase the number of early voting.

In 2016, Trump beat candidate Hillary Clinton by a margin of 9 percentage points in Texas. At that time, 8,969,226 voters went to the polls.

• Republicans Reduce Gap with Democrats in US Early Voting

Kamala Harris, candidate for vice president of the Biden ballot and senator for California, has the agenda set this Friday (30) in the state.

According to the Reuters news agency, billionaire Michael Bloomberg plans to spend $ 15 million in the state and Ohio in a last-minute attempt to convert the two states into Republican biases.

In the US presidential election, it is not necessarily the candidate who receives the most votes who wins the election. (This has happened at least five times in history, including Trump’s victory in 2016).

In the Electoral College, each state has a number of delegates and the state vote operates on a “winner takes all” system: The candidate who wins, regardless of the advantage, takes the votes of all the delegates of the state.

There are 538 delegates, divided between the 50 states and the District of Columbia (where the capital Washington is located).

Little Vermont, for example, has just three delegates, while California, the most populous state, has 55. Texas is the second largest (38), followed by Florida and New York (with 29 delegates each) and Illinois and Pennsylvania (20).

Thus, the candidate needs a strategy to win from state to state until reaching the minimum of 270 of the 538 votes of the Electoral College. and be elected president. It happened four years ago: Trump had fewer votes than Hillary, but he won 276 delegates and won the election.

• SANDRA COHEN: What if there is a tie in the Electoral College?

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