[ad_1]
More than 65 million Americans voted by mail in the elections with the most participation in the history of the United States, and everything indicates that the majority did so for the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, who became president-elect this Saturday after being clear which will be imposed in sufficient states.
The avalanche of ballots stuffed in envelopes won the pulse of Trump’s tweets, who had used Twitter dozens of times to warn, without any proof, that voting by mail would favor electoral fraud.
The millions of Americans who follow his messages daily on the social network listened to him and chose to vote in person, supporting him even more decisively than in 2016, with a record of more than 70 million ballots in his favor that only Biden surpassed, with its more than 74 million votes.
Aware that high turnout would diminish his chances of remaining in the White House, because it tends to benefit Democrats, Trump declared war months ago on plans by most U.S. states to expand options. voting by mail due to the covid-19 pandemic.
“The 2020 elections will be totally rigged if votes by mail are allowed,” Trump claimed on Twitter on July 26, despite the fact that there is absolutely no proof that voting by post can lead to fraud. .
In June, the president installed one of his allies, Louis DeJoy, at the head of the US Postal Service, who began to implement a series of tough cuts, which he later partially reversed, given the strong controversy they generated.
Ultimately, delays at the Postal Service meant that more than 150,000 ballots across the country – thousands of them in key states – were not delivered in time for Election Day, a relatively small but significant number, according to official data. .
Meanwhile, Republican leaders in several hinge states went along with Trump and hindered the postal vote: in Texas, the number of positions where ballots could be deposited in advance was restricted to just one per county, even in the one that includes Houston , where more than 3.4 million people live.
In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled state legislatures refused to allow mail-in ballots to begin processing before Election Day, which partly explains why the country had to wait nearly four days. to know the winner of the elections.
However, the process otherwise ran smoothly, without the chaos that Trump was trying to stir up and Democrats feared, and officials and volunteers in key states turned a deaf ear to the outgoing president’s exhortations to “stop the count.” of ballots issued by post.
“The challenges and obstacles were perhaps the greatest in history, or at least since the ‘Spanish flu’ epidemic of 1918,” said a Stanford University professor and expert on the US voting system, Nathaniel Persily, to The New York Times.
“And yet we saw fewer problems than in any presidential election since (George W.) Bush vs. (Al) Gore” in 2000, which sparked a dispute that ended up in the Supreme Court, Persily added.
The process demonstrated that the vote-by-mail system is fragile and needs reform in the US, a country where there is no automatic voter registration and where multiple obstacles to the right to vote have been imposed in recent decades that tend to harm women. more marginalized or poorer populations, such as Latinos and blacks.
But the move went wrong for Trump, who failed to freeze in time the “red mirage” (Republican) that reflected the electoral map on the night of November 3, nor prevent the votes by mail from being counted that would end up giving victory to your rival.
That fact was reflected in the hundreds of demonstrations to celebrate his defeat in cities across the country, where attendees cheered Postal Service trucks, disguised themselves as mailboxes and thanked that old mechanism that allowed their Will.
[ad_2]
