Voting in the American presidential elections ends on Tuesday night – early Wednesday in Greece – and the counting begins. Everything shows, however, that this time too the results of the elections will be delayed for a long time to be announced. Besides, there is time, since the Joe Biden will hand over the baton to his successor on January 20, 2025.
US elections and postal voting
The main reason for the almost certain delay in the announcement of the name of the new president is the fact that some American states and large cities in the country have not taken care to incorporate in some short time way in the final result the postal votes of those who had exercised the their right to vote before November 5.
The electoral process in New York
In New York, for example, a megacity of 5.2 million voters, 140,000-plus voters have already cast ballots, 50% more than in 2020. Because early voting is now an established institution in past presidential elections and in this contest it seems that he has won the preference of many voters throughout the country, as “Les Echos” correspondent Solveig Godelik reports from New York.
“Early voting at record levels”
“Early voting has reached record levels and the trend does not seem to be slowing down,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, told the French newspaper. According to information from the Al Jazeera network, by October 31 a total of 62 million Americans had already chosen a president by postal vote, while on Monday, November 4, American media estimated that the postal votes had exceeded 73 million.
Organizational chaos
In New York the results of the vote of the “hurried” voters will be known very quickly. “Everything is automated, digitized. The ballots have already been scanned, which will allow us to have the first results on election night between 21:15 and 21:30 (ie Wednesday at 4:15 and 4:30 Greek time). We will have reliable aggregated results, since about 90% of the ballots will be counted,” notes Michael Ryan.
America is not just New York
But America is not just New York. There are states that will take several days to announce the final result of the vote. There are some Counties, more precisely, which for various reasons (organizational, regulatory and institutional not related to the postal vote) need a week or more to count the “cuckoos”.
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, for example, which includes the state capital, Phoenix, in the 2020 election it took 5 business days to count 99% of the ballots and 13 days to reach 100% because it had to to check that the voters actually had the right to vote and that the counted votes were valid.
Five days for the estimated exit polls
After all, some American media, having been burned repeatedly in the past election contests, in 2020 took almost five days to announce even the estimates of the exit polls.
Controversial proceedings
Who doesn’t remember Florida‘s “show” in the 2000 election, when then-governor Jeb Bush’s services counted and recounted ballot holes until the end of December to see if the governor’s brother, Republican George W. Bush, had the most? Jr., or the Democratic candidate Al Gore who ultimately lost. We are talking about a delay of almost two months after the vote, which is traditionally held in the US on the first Tuesday of November.
Gore then lost the election having secured at the state level almost half a million more votes than Bush. But Donald Trump also beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, even though the Democratic candidate had garnered almost 3 million more votes nationwide.
And it is surprising the fact that the country that has emerged after the war and is considered as the model of operation and the embodiment of the virtues of the Western system of democratic governance, neglects to ensure that during the process of the direct election of the supreme ruler, the constitutional principles of representativeness and equality of the popular vote.
Settings box
“In the US there survives a patchwork of election laws and regulations that differ from State to State, from County to County. Sometimes, under the guise of fighting fraud, time-consuming practices have been adopted and implemented, such as banning the processing of postal votes before election day. When you have to open a lot of files at the last minute because of a postal vote, it takes a lot of time,” reports the “Les Echos” correspondent.
The “Les Echos” correspondent returns to the example of Phoenix, Arizona, where the Republican-controlled local Assembly passed a law last February that added new delays to the counting of votes, as it forces election commissions to count all mail-in ballots. then open them to verify the identity of each voter and then do the final count.
The referendums
The issue with US presidential elections – and a major source of delays in counting – is the fact that at the same time as choosing a president, voters are asked to answer various referendum questions about various local issues. In Phoenix, for example, voters will have to choose answers to referendum questions that span two double-sided sheets!
“Consequently, the queues inside the polling stations are expected to last well after 7pm when the doors close,” writes Solveig Godelik of “Les Echos”.
The issue of the electoral process would not be so critical if Arizona were not one of the seven key states for the election of the new president. In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona by just 10,000 more votes than Donald Trump.
“That didn’t stop the Associated Press from declaring him the winner of the election in that State on election night, just before 3 a.m. On the contrary (s.s. after this crime) for the announcement of the election of the new Governor of the State Katie Hobbs in 2022, the AR waited six days”, writes Godelik.
As everything shows, this year’s election will turn into a close battle. Counting will be done in many cases two and three times, while “the cameras installed in the polling stations will not so easily relieve the local paranoia of conspiracy theorists and will not dispel suspicions of fraud and cooking”, writes the correspondent of “Les “Echoes”. But hasn’t Trump himself already decided that only by cheating will he lose?
Source: ot.gr
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