A recurring situation in the United States. Far from the traditional French announcement at 20:00 o’clock, the wait for results often drags on.
Those announced the same evening are also estimates by the media, which invent them with the help of statisticians.
The country had been marked by the presidential duel of 2000, the outcome of which was known only after 36 days.
At the end of an ultra-tight match in Florida against George W. Bush, Al Gore had asked for a manual count, the start of a battle decided by the Supreme Court in December.
At the center of the controversy were often old machines, used to read punch cards, whose holes had sometimes been badly punched.
Without reaching such a cheating, history tends to repeat itself. In 2020, the presidential election results between Joe Biden and Donald Trump were only known after four days.
Georgia, a special case
The same year, the wait to find out which party would win the majority in the Senate lasted weeks, due to the second round in Georgia.
Do you like déjà vu? Also this year the control of the upper house is likely to take place in the same state, which has become a hot spot on the American electoral map, during a new round organized on December 6, none of the three candidates made it to the stand. 50%.
The origins of this system are controversial.
The elected official who, in the 1960s, had proposed its adoption by the state, saw it as a way to “circumvent the growing political force of blacks,” according to a report by the Interior Ministry.
The process was widespread in the segregationist southern states. Some still use it for the primary, but only Georgia and Louisiana use it for their elections.
Ironically for this legacy of a racist past, the two candidates in Georgia this year – Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker – are African Americans.
mosaic of rules
This is one of the points that make these votes so complex: each of the 50 states has its own rules.
“If Florida can count 7.5 million ballots in 5 hours, how can some states take days to count 2 million?” Republican Senator Marco Rubio tweeted.
In the United States, a land of ultra-urban areas and extremely rural regions, each state can adapt the way its people speak their voices.
Some Americans vote for machines, others with paper ballots. Some vote on the spot, others remotely, weeks in advance or on election day.
The mail-order vote, spread by the 2020 presidential election, organized in the midst of a pandemic, complicates matters.
American ballots are already long to count: citizens answer a multitude of questions, to elect representatives, prosecutors or participate in referendums.
But the votes cast by correspondence are even more so because they require preparation and can arrive several days after the election. Ohio and Alaska even count those who arrived up to ten days later.
However, in many states, election officials are not allowed to start counting them in advance.
The extra time needed to take them into account regularly feeds conspiracy theories, as was the case in 2020.
These votes, which tend to lean towards Democrat, can swing a seat if the candidates are close.
Errors and unexpected events
Organizing elections in a huge country with some 333 million inhabitants is, one can imagine, a logistical challenge.
The process rarely goes smoothly. In Arizona, a county’s voting machines then encountered malfunctions that disrupted Tuesday’s voting.
Some Republicans saw this as evidence of fraud, a claim immediately rejected by the authorities.
Even without a technical accident, the races can simply be extremely close together, as George W. Bush and Al Gore experienced.
And if in doubt, a recount is a must.
Twenty states have laws that automatically order this if the margin between two candidates is too small.
In 2008, an election for a Senate seat in Minnesota resulted in an epic legal battle. The results were known … eight months after the election.
