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The US presidential election was more than three days ago, but officially there is still no winner. In many cases, Republicans are trying to delay impending defeat in court. Interested states prefer to count accurately, not quickly.
It sounds like a joke in bad taste: In West Chester, a small suburb of Philadelphia in the beleaguered state of Pennsylvania, votes in the US presidential election will not be counted again until Monday. The helpers are simply exhausted, the responsible election official said in an interview with local television. He gave them the weekend off to relax from hard work.
It is understandable that since Tuesday morning local time, aides have been wearing masks and gloves in many places under fluorescent lighting in sports and multipurpose halls or underground garages, opening voting envelopes, sorting and stacking ballots, loading them into an optical scanner that finally counts the votes. All under the watchful eye of lawyers on both sides and around the world: more than one counting device transmits the tough procedure via live streaming on the Internet for the sake of transparency. There are hardly any people who want the elections to end as much as election officials.
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But there still seems to be a long way to go: not only in Pennsylvania does it still count, even in Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina the result is not yet official, even if the Trump Fox News affiliate station the Las Arizona voices hit Democrat Joe Biden three days ago.
Many demands, many rules
Two things are to blame for this snail race. Joe Biden’s supporters in particular voted by letter because of the coronavirus, which more than 65 million Americans across the country did. In many states, however, the count is regulated in such a way that Election Day votes are evaluated first. Only then are votes cast in advance, for example by letter. To speed up the foreseeable long process, the Pennsylvania Democratic state government had tried to adapt the election laws in the run-up to the vote; local Republicans blocked this initiative in state parliament.
The Trump party was not only noticed before the vote with its resistance to the count, but also afterwards. In almost all highly competitive states they have tried to influence the process in court. The Trump camp has filed nearly a dozen lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania to stop counting or invalidate votes, writes the New York Times. No success so far.
However, the lawsuits lengthen the count, as do the distance rules that apply due to the coronavirus. For example, in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, Republicans had complained that their observers could not get close enough to individual counting stations to confirm the authenticity of the envelopes. A judge agreed with them and decided that the observers do not have to be three meters away as required by the city, but only 1.80 meters away. The electoral leadership then ordered that the barriers in the corridors be re-erected in accordance with the resolution. Only then was he allowed to continue counting.
And again from the beginning …
States like Nevada, where the count has been going so slowly for days that the Internet only knows what to do with black humor, ask for your understanding in the face of such obstacles. “The amount of absentee votes is certainly something we’ve never seen before,” said the election authority for Washoe County’s second-largest county. He noted that each vote had to be verified in a multi-step process to ensure the accuracy of the election result. In this case, precision is more important than speed. Votes can be counted in Nevada through November 12.
And then the drama will likely start again in several states: For example, Joe Biden’s leadership in Georgia is so tight that Trump in the southern state may demand a recount. In the former Republican stronghold, nearly five million people voted in the presidential election. After counting 99 percent of these votes, Biden has a very fine lead at 7,248.
