It's Saturday: The Fourth Morning After!

by Pa Rock
Anxious Citizen

It's Saturday, and still we wait.  Many pundits predicted that the final vote would take several days, and possibly longer, to reveal itself.  As of 6:00 p.m. yesterday evening  Joe Biden had a comfortable lead in the popular vote.   At that time CNN had Biden with 74,039,941 votes (50.5%) and Trump trailing with 69,927,649 (47.7%) - meaning that 4,112,292 more individuals had voted for Biden than had cast their ballots for Trump.

But our presidential elections are not run by popular votes.  In the United States presidential elections are won by weighted votes from each of the fifty states, a system written into the Constitution are popularly referred to as the "Electoral College."  The states generate a total of 539 electoral votes, and whichever candidate receives a majority of those votes (270 or more) will become the next President.  If no one receives the majority, the election goes to the House of Representatives which will then select the winner.  That has happened once in our nation's history, in 1824, when John Quincy Adams was elected by the House over popular vote leader Andrew Jackson.  Jackson won the presidency outright four years later.

State electors meet on December 14th and cast heir votes for president, usually in line with how their citizens voted, but every now and then there are a few exceptions.  Also, two states determine electors by votes of the congressional districts rather than by the votes of the entire state.  The state results are transferred to the President of the Senate by December 23rd.  Those results are then transferred to the new Congress on January 6th where the winner of the presidential election is officially announced.

Whew!  That's quite a process!   A popular vote sounds so much simpler.  

But for now we are stuck with the archaic Electoral College, and that is why no one seems willing to predict a winner four days after the election - even though Joe Biden is comfortably ahead in popular votes and is the country's clear favorite to become President on January 20th.

Currently Joe Biden has either 253 or 264 of the 270 electoral votes needed for election - depending on whether one counts Arizona (11 electoral votes) in Biden's column, which some national news sources have and others have not.)    Of the remain four states - Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, Biden in leading in three, and his majorities are currently expanding in each.  Trump has the edge in North Carolina.

Joe Biden is calmly and wisely waiting to claim victory until more states have been decided, but the numbers are leaning strongly in his favor to win the thing.  Donald Trump, meanwhile, sees the writing on the wall is is attempting to sow confusion with baseless claims of vote fraud and ballot manipulation - without any evidence to back up his claims.

And so we wait, relatively secure in the notion that slow and steady wins the race.  But at this point it certainly feels like the citizens of the United States are on the verge of placing an intelligent and presentable adult back in the White House.

The election of 2020 was not all that many of us wanted, and certainly not a "big blue wave," but it does look like we will succeed in cutting the core of the rot out of the government.   And with Trump gone, hope and decency may once again flourish across our nation!

(Post Script:  As I finished typing this post, an old college friend phoned to say that CNN and MSNBC have just called Pennsylvania for Biden.  That would make Joe Biden the next President of the United States, and Kamala Harris the first female Vice-President of the United States!  Woo hoo!)