And the Votes Are In! ...Mostly

Election results have been trickling in since Tuesday night. Americans and, frankly the people of the world, have been on an emotional roller coaster waiting for their little red and blue maps to refresh and display up-to-date ballot counts. Memes have been circulating over the internet that personify the state of Nevada as that friend who waits until the party has already started to get ready to leave the house. In order to secure the presidency, candidates must capture a majority of the possible 538 votes within the electoral college. The winning threshold that a candidate must reach or surpass is 270. According to data from the Associated Press, Joe Biden currently sits at 264 (!) projected electoral college votes, while Trump has captured 214. By these numbers, Biden would only need to capture electoral college votes from one more state, literally any other state.

For several sleepless nights, the reported counts in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada have either trickled in or remained relatively static. Results from ballots cast in person on election night were tallied first, but many precincts in urban and suburban areas still had thousands of mail-in ballots left to count. As these votes were counted and reported, the numbers reflected Trump’s very narrow margin of victory shrinking steadily, until votes for Biden surpassed those cast in favor of Trump. The country is still awaiting a final tally in several states, and some ballots from uniformed service members and their families have yet to arrive from overseas posts. 

I’ve watched the mood among democrats and progressives on social media shift and bend from horror, to cautious (or nauseous) optimism, and now hopeful triumph that this fever dream of a presidency might really be ending. We may be reaching a clearing, but we aren’t out of the woods yet. Even though Biden has clearly won the popular vote, and will probably secure the 270 vote majority in the electoral college, official tallying will most likely still need to continue for several more days, and the electoral college doesn’t meet to cast their votes until December. In past years, we have celebrated victories for a president-elect in November, because the losing candidate usually concedes the race. That is unlikely to happen this year.

Donald Trump has been fanning the flames of conspiracy for years, even going so far as to say that he did in fact win the popular vote in 2016 and that voter fraud was rampant in the election that awarded him the presidency. For months, he has been teeing up to cast doubt on the legality of votes that favor Joe Biden, and has maintained that a Biden victory would not be possible unless the election is rigged. Early on Wednesday morning, after several states had been called for Biden and it appeared he was leading in electoral college votes, Trump made a public appearance declaring himself the victor of the election (with zero evidence to support this claim), essentially calling dibs on the presidency. This week, he has also said that all the ballots that weren’t cast in his favor were clearly not legal, as if wishing a thing to be so was the same as actual proof of something nefarious. 

Trump and his family are mischaracterizing valid mail-in ballots cast in urban areas as fraudulent, and making it seem like votes have been rolling in after election day, eroding Trump’s victory. The reality is that Donald Trump was never winning this election. The ballots that are being counted now were already cast in Biden’s favor, many of them WEEKS before the election. The only thing that is changing is that they are now being tallied and reported to the public.

Trump’s legal team is already preparing to contest the results of the election and take it to the courts. The fact that a majority of Americans chose someone other than Donald Trump doesn’t matter. If Trump refuses to accept that he’s lost the presidency, the nation could be poised for a constitutional crisis.