Despite the fact Americans went to the polls to vote on Tuesday, we still do not know the outcome of the US Presidential election. Usually, we would know who had won by now, however, this election is different from previous Presidential races.
Votes are still being counted in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, with officials urging the public to be patient as they count the final hundreds of thousands of ballots.
The primary reason it is taking so long to count the ballots is because of the record number of mail-in votes, which take far longer to process than regular ballots. This is because they have to be scanned, processed and verified before being counted for one candidate or another. This laborious process can cause errors, for example, voting centres around the country have reported issues with ballots being printed on the wrong paper, broken technology and ink shortages, all adding to the already tedious process of counting votes. In contrast, when you vote in person your ballot usually is immediately counted by a machine.
More than 100 million people voted early in the 2020 election, which represents 73% of the entire turnout of the 2016 vote. The coronavirus pandemic meant many Americans saw mail-in voting safer than turning up to busy polling stations on election day.
With the 2020 election being extremely close in several battleground states, with sometimes just 1000s of votes between each candidate, there is also pressure on counters to make sure results are legitimate.
Each state has its own laws and rules about how their elections are run, including how ballots are counted. Most states are able to count almost all of their votes on election night, however, some are unable to do so.
Some states were allowed to count their mail-in-ballots early, however, some like Pennsylvania were prevented from doing so by law, meaning all votes had to be counted on election day, leading to severe delays. Nevada is accepting postal ballots up until 10th November as long as they were postmarked before election day.
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