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The 2020 United States presidential election is turning out to be as close as predicted, a photographic finale where the winner will be decided by a handful of undecided states. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has led the state and national polls, and is widely favored to win. But no poll has predicted that President Donald J. Trump will definitely lose. And polls do happen – all forecasters were wrong in 2016.
Speaking at his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware in the early morning hours of November 4, Biden thanked his supporters and urged patience until all votes are counted. “We believe that we are on the way to winning these elections,” he said.
Moments later, from the East Room of the White House, Trump attacked legitimate vote-counting efforts. “They are trying to steal the elections,” he said. Trump claimed he “won” the election, despite millions of votes that have yet to be counted. All major networks carried the president’s speech at the beginning, but NBC News and MSNBC interrupted it to point out that he was selling falsehoods. “We are hearing the president speaking at the White House, but we have to dive in here because there have been several statements that, frankly, are not true,” said NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie.
Other US networks broadcast Trump’s speech in its entirety, but issued fact-checks after it was concluded. “Almost everything President Trump said in his victory declaration was not true,” said CNN host Jake Tapper. “This is an extremely flammable situation and the president threw a match at it,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said. “It has not won these states.”
On Election Day, November 3, more than 100 million Americans voted days or weeks earlier, a record number that far exceeded the more than 47 million who voted in early 2016. This deluge of mail-in ballots will put test the nation’s traditional voting system. . Early voters are also the reason why the 2020 polls did not produce a clear winner.
The tabs will take weeks to complete the count; in 2016, it took until December. Usually what happens on election night is that the major television networks and the Associated Press “call” the election in favor of one of the candidates, a projection based on exit polls, interviews with the voters and trends, a legitimate exercise and a necessity in the American system. Projections are not usually contested and the candidate who is projected to lose grants the choice.
As one observer put it, both candidates have essentially promised that the United States will crumble if they are not elected. So what happens if neither Trump nor Biden grant the election?
Hillary Clinton has urged Biden not to give up on election night “under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag on.” Biden has said he will only accept “the full results.” Trump has gone a step further and said he may not accept the results at all. He repeatedly warned of electoral fraud and electoral manipulation, something that is extremely rare in the United States. The Brennan Center for Justice said voter fraud rates in the elections it had studied ranged from 0.0003 percent to 0.0025 percent.
If Trump or Biden do not accept the election result, a recount could be required. But even a recount result is unlikely to solve the problem: Trump has said he believes the election result could end up in the Supreme Court. Experts said that several legal challenges could arise this year, from identification requirements for voting by mail to the legality of Covid-related changes to voting.
The Constitution of the United States has established inauguration day as January 20, or 21 if January 20 falls on a Sunday. Therefore, Wednesday, January 20, 2021, is considered the last strict deadline for solving problems. If the election result is not confirmed and accepted by then, the United States will be plunged into a deeply partisan constitutional crisis.
