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It was to be expected, and it happened. There is no result on the night of the US presidential election. It may take several days, worst-case scenario even weeks, until we know who the next president of the United States is. A record number of voters took the opportunity to cast their votes early on.
Voting by mail was possible in all 50 US states and in the capital district of Washington DC; however, some states made it difficult for voters to take advantage of them. In 20 countries, for example, you had to give a valid reason why you couldn’t vote in person on Election Day. Such reasons are, for example: The voter is out of the country, ill or disabled, is already very old, has to work or is a helper at the polling station and therefore is not allowed to vote at the place. You can also see in this table where these reasons are needed and what are others.
However, most of those states have suspended this requirement in light of the corona pandemic to make voting as easy as possible. Health concerns or fear of infection are now also legitimate reasons to vote by mail. In Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, however, this is not the case. In Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington State, it is again only possible to vote by mail.
Most states also offered early personal voting at the electoral college., the so-called early or absentee vote. Since the number of polling stations is significantly less than in the previous presidential elections in 2016, in recent weeks, queues of hundreds of meters long and more have formed. Some voters queued for hours long before November 3. It can be assumed that this will not improve on Election Day.
When it is counted it is sometimes very different
More than 99 million Americans have already voted by mail or by early voting. For comparison: four years ago a total of almost 136.5 million valid votes were cast. A nationwide view shows that the early voting option was used primarily in the most populous states, especially Texas, but also California and Florida. This was less the case in the more rural areas of the central United States. The graph below shows how many people in each state had voted on Election Day. As a percentage of 2016 total voter turnout.
Statistics also show that a particularly large number of Democratic supporters made use of “early votes.” According to an assessment by the US Election Project, 48 percent of early voters are registered for Democrats, 29 percent for Republicans, and 22 percent for neither party. Of course, to whom these voters cast their votes is a secret, but at least some political party preference can be inferred from the values.
This could also explain why Donald Trump and numerous Republicans continue to emphasize the fraud-prone postal voting system, although there is no evidence for this.
However, each state has different rules on when to start counting these votes. This will mean that some results will be available at different times, possibly days or even weeks after Election Day.
In some places, poll workers were able to begin evaluating ballots weeks before November 3. This means they can review voter information and remove ballots from envelopes so they are ready to be counted on Election Day.
However, in some of the most controversial swing states, laws prohibit the early evaluation of ballots. As a result, on November 3, officials had to hold an election and fight their way through an unprecedented number of vote-by-mail ballots. This is likely to delay the final results. In addition, the results of the personal vote could be reversed by counting the vote-by-mail ballots.
Here’s another sticking point: Nationwide delays in mail delivery raise concerns that election documents won’t arrive in time to be counted. Republicans, including President Trump’s campaign team, have filed a lawsuit to prevent ballots that arrive after Election Day from being counted.
A few days before the elections, the Supreme Court made decisions on the matter, some with reservations. In North Carolina, the electoral authority had extended the deadline for the arrival of ballots from three to nine days. In the Pennsylvania case, the Supreme Court initially only rejected a Republican motion to expedite their claim against the three-day deadline. But that means it remains in effect for now. Three conservative judges expressly kept it open to take up the case after the elections.
Pennsylvania and North Carolina are among the disputed states that could make the decision. Pennsylvania has about 20 voters; North Carolina has about 15.
In Michigan, another highly competitive US state, an appeals court granted a 14-day extension of the count, prompting election officials to ask voters to vote in person rather than by mail. Courts have also rejected similar extensions in Wisconsin and Indiana.
Postal votes are allowed to arrive particularly late in Washington; votes that arrive on November 23 are also counted here. The situation is similar in California (November 20), Illinois (November 17) and parts of Ohio (November 10-17). It has an overview of when and how long mail-in votes can arrive so they can still be counted. New York Times collected.
An electoral system and its pitfalls
The electoral system of the USA differs significantly from the German one. Citizens elect the president only indirectly, in fact, the decision is made by the so-called voters who send the states to the so-called Electoral College. If one of the candidates has more than 270 voters, it is the president-elect.
The number of voters that each state sends depends on the total number of representatives it has in Congress, that is, in the Senate and in the House of Representatives combined. Since each state sends two senators, but the number of representatives in the House of Representatives is only partially proportional to the population, each individual voter has a very different voting weight. For comparison: while in California there are over 675,000 votes for an elector, in Wyoming this is just a little less than 188,000. Although the two states also send significantly different numbers of electorates (California: 55, Wyoming: 3), this is shown here that individual votes have a different value. The US average is around 573,000 votes per voter.
In addition to passive voting, there are also differences between states as to whether all voters are counted for one candidate or in proportion to their votes within the state. Most states have the above rule (winner takes all), while Michigan and Nebraska have some form of proportional representation: there the electoral votes could be divided between different candidates.
This system can lead to the fact that not the candidate with the most votes (also known as the “popular vote”) wins the election, but the one who can win voters in the right states. The last time this happened four years ago, when Hillary Clinton was able to win nearly three million more votes across the country, but incumbent President Donald Trump triumphed in the particularly contested “battlefield states.”
All these quirks of the American electoral system could mean that there was no final decision on the night of November 3. Above all, the fact that in states like North Carolina or Pennsylvania it is still allowed to count mail-in votes that arrive several days after the actual election date makes this possible.
