2020 Election: Do We Have a Winner?

A week after the Presidential Election and the complete results are still up in the air in the states of Georgia and North Carolina. Others may argue that there truly are more undecided states due to the claims of voter fraud and illegal ballots. 

These claims have yet to be substantiated, but are being fought with litigation by the Trump campaign. There were certainly claims of viruses, which had been caught, that had swapped votes from the president over to the former Vice President (and now President Elect Joe Biden). 

All this to say: The election and voting may be over, but the electors within the Electoral College have yet to cast the votes for the presidency. 

The Electoral College, in essence, is the point system that decides the presidency. Each state has a number of electors based upon the number of seats they have in Congress (two senators per state, and representatives based upon population). 

However, there are actual people who are called “electors.” In December, these electors will meet in their respective capitals and cast the votes to the candidate who won their state. While the media currently has “called” states for certain candidates, the electors haven’t cast their votes. 

Now, in normal election years, it seems as though we always know who wins either on election night or the day following. That did not happen this year for a handful of reasons. 

The biggest reason was COVID-19. There was an overwhelming push this year, mainly by the Democrats, for voters to register and then vote by mail to try to limit the spread of the virus at the polls. 

Being that there was a new wave of ballots being sent in by mail, the counting process took much longer. The claims of votes being cast by dead people, or wagons of votes, again have yet to be substantiated but are being investigated on the state level and will be seen in court. 

One of the other main reasons is that this race was extremely close. An outpouring of new voters took to voting in this election in support for either candidate. Several states were decided by mere percentage points. 

With that being said, the candidate who appears to have lost rather closely has chosen not to concede. This is another reason it appears as though it takes so much longer in this cycle. 

In 2016, Hillary, clearly having lost the electoral college, called the Trump campaign and conceded the following morning. Being that there are ongoing legal battles it does not appear President Trump and his campaign have any intention of conceding the election. 

This has been a wide divide since the election was called this past weekend, with supporters of the current president have taken to protest the results. Supporters of Biden have taken to celebrating the end of the campaign by dancing in the streets and bursting with joy. 

In the coming weeks these court cases will be decided and will either side with the results as they stand or call for vote flips. Historically speaking, no vote recount has ever flipped thousands of votes from one candidate to another, and in many of the swing states that went the way of President Elect Biden were decided by several thousand. 

Let us hope that despite the outcomes of these cases, the losing candidate may actually use their platform to heal, rather than continue to divide.

Header photo: Supporters of President Donald Trump stand outside of the Clark County Elections Department in North Las Vegas, Nev., Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/John Locher)