A late burst of votes in Wisconsin from Milwaukee gave
Biden a small lead, but it was too early to call the race. Hundreds of thousands
of votes were also outstanding in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The two candidates, who have proposed dramatically
different visions for the nation, split territory across the U.S. after polls
closed Tuesday night. With neither candidate securing the 270 Electoral College
votes needed to win the White House, Biden urged patience and vowed that every
vote would be counted.
But Trump, in an extraordinary move from the White House,
called for outstanding ballots not to be counted.
Trump made premature claims of victories in several key
states and said he would take the election to the Supreme Court to stop the
counting. It was unclear exactly what legal action he might try to pursue.
Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day,
and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end. In presidential
elections, a key point is the date in December when presidential electors met.
That’s set by federal law.
Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after
Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes
Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov 3 can be accepted if they arrive
up to three days after the election.
Trump suggested those ballots shouldn’t be counted. But
Biden, briefly appearing in front of supporters in Delaware, urged patience,
saying the election “ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is
counted.”
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s
won this election,” Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted that his state had over
1 million ballots to be counted and that he “promised Pennsylvanians that we
would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Legal experts were dubious of Trump’s declaration.
“I do not see a way that he could go directly to the
Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes. There could be fights in specific
states, and some of those could end up at the Supreme Court. But this is not
the way things work,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science
at the University of California-Irvine.
Trump has appointed three of the high court’s nine justices
including, most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
Democrats typically outperform Republicans in mail voting,
while the GOP looks to make up ground in Election Day turnout. That means the
early margins between the candidates could be influenced by which type of votes
— early or Election Day — were being reported by the states.
Throughout the campaign, Trump cast doubt about the integrity
of the election and repeatedly suggested that mail-in ballots should not be
counted. Both campaigns had teams of lawyers at the ready to move into
battleground states if there were legal challenges.
The tight overall contest reflected a deeply polarized
nation struggling to respond to the worst health crisis in more than a century,
with millions of lost jobs, and a reckoning on racial injustice.
Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio,
where Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign. But
Biden also picked off states where Trump sought to compete, including New
Hampshire and Minnesota. But Florida was the biggest, fiercely contested
battleground on the map, with both campaigns battling over the 29 Electoral College
votes that went to Trump.
Wisconsin, which Trump narrowly won in 2016, was another
prized state. The president seems certain to request a recount. State law
allows for the apparent losing candidate to pay for a recount if the margin of
defeat is less than 1%.
The president adopted Florida as his new home state, wooed
its Latino community, particularly Cuban-Americans, and held rallies there
incessantly. For his part, Biden deployed his top surrogate — President Barack
Obama — there twice in the campaign’s closing days and benefitted from a $100
million pledge in the state from Michael Bloomberg.
Control of the Senate was at stake, too: Democrats needed
to net three seats if Biden captured the White House to gain control of all of
Washington for the first time in a decade. But Republicans maintained several
seats that were considered vulnerable, including in Iowa, Texas and Kansas. The
House was expected to remain under Democratic control.
The coronavirus pandemic — and Trump’s handling of it — was
the inescapable focus for 2020.
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