The fate of the U.S. presidency was at stake Wednesday morning as President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden battled for three well-known battle states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – that could prove crucial in determining who wins. the White House.
A late flurry of votes at Milwaukee’s Wisconsin gave Biden a slight lead, but it was too early to call the race. There were also hundreds of thousands of votes pending in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The two candidates, who have proposed dramatically different visions for the nation, divided territory in the United States after the polls closed Tuesday night. Since neither candidate got the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, Biden asked for patience and promised that all votes would be counted.
But Trump, in an extraordinary move by the White House, asked that pending ballots not be counted.
As of early Wednesday, neither candidate had the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win. Trump made premature claims of victories in several key states and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the count. It was not clear exactly what legal action it might try to take.
Vote tabulations routinely continue after Election Day, with states largely setting the rules for when the count must end. In presidential elections, a key point is the December date when the presidential voters met. That is established by federal law.
Several states allow votes sent by mail to be accepted after Election Day as long as they are postmarked Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked Nov. 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.
Trump suggested that those ballots should not be counted. But Biden, who appeared briefly in front of his supporters in Delaware, urged patience, saying the elections “don’t end until all the votes are counted, all the ballots are counted.”
“It is not my place or Donald Trump’s to declare who won this election,” Biden said. “That is the decision of the American people.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted that his state had more than 1 million ballots to count and that he “promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we are going to do.”
Legal experts doubted Trump’s statement.
“I see no way that I can go directly to the Supreme Court to stop the vote counting. There could be fights in specific states, and some of them could end up in the Supreme Court. But this is not the way things work, ”said Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine.
Trump has appointed three of the nine superior court justices, including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
Democrats typically outnumber Republicans in voting by mail, while the Republican Party seeks to regain ground in turnout on Election Day. That means that initial margins between candidates could be influenced by the type of votes (early or on Election Day) that states reported.
Throughout the campaign, Trump questioned the integrity of the election, repeatedly suggesting that mail-in ballots should not be counted. Both campaigns had teams of attorneys ready to move into battlefield states if there were legal challenges.
The close general contest reflected a deeply polarized nation struggling to respond to the worst health crisis in more than a century, with millions of jobs lost and a recognition of racial injustice.
Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign. But Biden also selected states in which Trump sought to compete, including New Hampshire and Minnesota. But Florida was the largest and most fiercely contested battlefield on the map, with both campaigns fighting for the 29 Electoral College votes that went to Trump.
See: Donald Trump Claims Voter Fraud, Criticizes Joe Biden Amid Tight Race
Wisconsin, which Trump narrowly won in 2016, was another treasured state. The president seems certain that he will request a recount. State law allows the seemingly losing candidate to pay for a recount if the margin of defeat is less than 1%.
The president adopted Florida as his new home state, courted his Latino community, particularly Cuban Americans, and held rallies there incessantly. For his part, Biden deployed his top replacement, President Barack Obama, there twice in the final days of the campaign and benefited from a $ 100 million pledge in the estate of Michael Bloomberg.
Control of the Senate was also at stake: Democrats needed to win three seats if Biden took over the White House to take control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. But Republicans held several seats that were deemed vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas and Kansas. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.
The pandemic, and Trump’s handling of it, was the inescapable focus for 2020.
For Trump, the election was a judgment on his four years in office, a period in which he bent Washington to his will, challenged faith in its institutions, and changed the way America was viewed around the world. Rarely has he tried to unite a country divided by race and class, he has often acted as an insurgent against the government he led while undermining the nation’s scientists, bureaucracy and media.
The push for early voting carried over to Election Day, when an energetic electorate generated long lines at polling places across the country. Turnout was higher than in 2016 in numerous counties, including all of Florida, nearly every county in North Carolina, and more than 100 counties in both Georgia and Texas. That count seemed certain to increase as more counties reported their turnout figures.
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Voters defied coronavirus concerns, threats of intimidation at polling places, and expectations of long lines caused by changes to voting systems, but appeared unfazed when it appeared that turnout would easily exceed 139 million votes cast. four years ago.
No major issues surfaced Tuesday, outside of the typical technical glitches of a presidential election: some polling places opened late, robocalls provided false information to voters in Iowa and Michigan, and machines or software malfunctioned in some counties. in the battle states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Texas.
The cybersecurity agency of the Department of Homeland Security said there were no external signs of malicious activity at noon.
With the coronavirus now rising again, voters ranked the pandemic and the economy as the top concerns in the Trump-Biden race, according to the AP VoteCast, a national poll of the electorate.
Voters were especially likely to rate the public health crisis as the nation’s biggest problem, with the economy closely following. Less healthcare, racism, law enforcement, immigration, or climate change
The poll found that Trump’s leadership featured prominently in voters’ decision-making. Nearly two-thirds of voters said they were voting for Trump, either for him or against him.
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