To Stop the Counting or to Recount, Trump’s Real Question
This week, Georgians were not alone in experiencing election anxiety: Americans are still going through it, and perhaps they have it even rougher. The presidential elections took place in the United States on Tuesday, November 3, and as of early Thursday, the vote counting process had still not finished. At the time of writing, there are six battleground states where the ballot counting continues: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Alaska. In a tight race, the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden is leading with over 50% of the votes, and 253 of the electoral votes. However, these last two days have shown that the tables can turn any minute: both of the candidates have declared that they have won at different times, and then the polls change. Some politicians warned this would happen.
Bernie Sanders, the former Democratic Presidential candidate in the 2016 and 2020 elections, in an interview taped well before the elections, shared his fears with Jimmy Fallon. “You're going to have a situation, I suspect, in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and others, where they are going to be receiving huge amounts of mail-in ballots,” he said.
President Trump has never been in favor of mail-in ballots. A few months back, when more and more states started giving people the option to vote via mail because of the pandemic, Trump and his supporters raged that the mail-in ballots could easily be rigged. That is why more of the mail-in votes would “probably belong to the democrats.”
“Democrats are more likely to use mail-in ballots: Republicans are more likely to walk into polling booths on Election Day. It is likely that the first votes that will be counted will be those people who came in on Election Day,” it was said.
“It could well be 10 o'clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he's winning in Pennsylvania, he's winning in Wisconsin and he gets on the television and he says: 'Thank you, Americans, for re-electing me. It's all over. Have a good day.'” Sanders said in his interview. “But then the next day, and the day following, all of those mail-in ballots start getting counted and it turns out that Biden has won those states. At which point, Trump says: 'See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And, you know, we're not going to leave office’.”
As you would expect from any interview with Jimmy Fallon, it will be humorous, and the humorous thing about this October 23 interview with Sanders is that it predicted today’s reality almost to the election polls we have at the time of writing.
On early Wednesday morning, the President addressed a crowd of people from the White House, most not wearing masks. He had already won, according to him, and announcing his will to refute millions of votes, cast legally, he said: “We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
This came after the former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Michigan and Wisconsin, the two battlegrounds of a tight race where Trump actually won in 2016. Commenting on his party’s win, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told MSNBC on Thursday that “it’s really been the ‘every vote counts situation’ in this state.”
After losing Michigan and Wisconsin, the Trump campaign announced they would be demanding a recount in Wisconsin, and then proceeded to take legal measures to halt the ballot counting in Michigan. Other lawsuits of Republicans included challenging the extension of ballot deadlines in Pennsylvania, and seeking to segregate the late absentee ballots in Georgia. Trump, ever conflicting, wants the counting to stop and the recount to happen at the same time.
Biden is closing in on Trump in Georgia, while the Democratic candidate’s lead narrows in Arizona. The contrasting protests are already hitting the US streets, while some are demanding every vote be counted, some see fraud in the counts. Around 150 Trump supporters, many of them with guns, in Arizona took to the streets to support their candidate. “At several points, protesters contended that Adrian Fontes, the county official who oversees elections in Maricopa County, was improperly failing to count some ballots and costing Mr. Trump votes in Arizona’s most populous county, although there was no evidence that any ballots had been improperly tossed,” wrote the New York Times.
The election updates are not scheduled until later on Thursday or even Friday. While the democrats are looking at higher chances (even if Biden only wins Arizona and Nevada, where he is slightly ahead, he will have the needed 270 presidential votes), the polls can still change.
Keep up-to-date with the results on georgiatoday.ge.
By Nini Dakhundaridze
Image source: newsx.com