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US Presidential Election 2020: Postal ballots can play a crucial role in final outcome
Some 239 million people were eligible to vote this year. The mail-in ballots could take days to be counted, which would delay the declaration of results.
Americans woke up on Wednesday not knowing who the next United States president would be as votes were still being counted in six battleground states that could swing the election. A large part of that had to do with the counting of postal ballots that was underway for most of Tuesday night (and is expected to take several hours, if not days longer, with Pennsylvania set to receive mail-in ballots till Friday).
Former United States assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts on Wednesday said that the mail-in votes are likely to favour Democratic candidate Joe Biden. “Polls indicated that Democrats were using mail-in voting more heavily,” he said.
US President Donald Trump fired off allegations of election fraud on the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, setting the stage for a potential legal battle, as Biden took a slim lead in key states that could decide the bitterly contested White House race.
As Trump vented his frustration on Twitter over the slow vote count, the Biden camp expressed confidence it was on track to win enough of the remaining close state races.
Some 239 million people were eligible to vote this year. The mail-in ballots could take days to be counted, which would delay the declaration of results.
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Trump has spent months denouncing mail-in ballots, making unsubstantiated claims that they are liable to fraud.
As of 11am (1600 GMT), Biden had slim leads in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin while Trump was ahead in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. But state election officials cautioned that with tens of thousands of ballots outstanding in some states — millions in others — the leaderboard could shift.
As of Wednesday morning in the US, Trump had a roughly 500,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania with an estimated 78% of the vote counted, but votes were awaited from heavily Democratic parts of the state.
“We have to be patient,” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said. “We may not know the results today. “There are millions of mail-in ballots,” he said. “They’re going to be counted accurately and they will be counted fully.”
The Democratic governor shrugged off criticism from the White House over the slow vote count and said “our democracy is being tested in this election.”
