SOME time in the next few hours, Joe Biden will reach the 270 Electoral College votes needed to defeat President Donald Trump in what has been one of the most exhausting campaigns in US history.
Biden has won more popular votes – over 74 million – than any other candidate ever.
The election this year played out during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has affected millions of Americans.
It is a year when a record number of mail-in ballots were cast to assure that voting can be done safely, rather than the majority of the country going to polling stations on November 3.
Now, the real concern is, will Trump accept the outcome? Will there be a peaceful transition of power to president-elect Biden?
At a press conference on Thursday, Trump accused the Democrats of trying to “steal the election from us”, speaking just hours after Biden called for patience and “calm” amid the data-focused anticipation that ballot tallies in key states will put the Democratic nominee over the threshold of 270 electoral votes.
In a presser that was beyond US norms, four major television networks cut away from the White House feed after Trump made unsubstantiated claims about how he had vanquished his opponent – if “legal” ballots were counted.
He mentioned the states called in his favour, including Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, but asserted that Democratic officials in states that appear to be lining up for Biden are accomplices in a “corrupt system”.
Trump’s rant offered not a single bit of evidence as his rhetoric was so false and dangerous, that TV networks saw the need to cut away from the White House broadcast.
Never before in US history has a president attacked the democracy that has been the very centrepiece of all elections starting with George Washington.
In that press conference, Trump claimed he had no representation at vote-counting sites nationwide. But in fact, it is both state and US law that each site must have observers representing all candidates on the ballot.
Plus, in this age of Covid-19, many states livestreamed on their respective election websites so that the vote count can be observed worldwide.
Trump claimed that ballots were being frequently dumped in mostly Democratic states after the November 3 deadline.
Again, this is a baseless lie. There were only a handful of instances where votes were tossed, and in most cases, it was due to technicalities. So, there has been no report on any widespread voter fraud.
What the world has been seeing as the focus are the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where state laws do not allow for the counting of mail-in votes until after all ballots cast in person have been tallied.
So, that is the reason why each vote is being counted, slowly, and then reported. These ballots, for the most part, have been sitting in locked boxes, waiting to be counted for weeks.
Trump has only one path to win, and that is via the courts. But, even that path seems to be quickly fading away.
While railing against the US system of democracy, he has his team filing suits in courts across the country, with these challenges tossed out over lack of evidence.
His legal team will go to court to seek recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, but most legal scholars feel that the outcome will not change.
What comes next is the most unsettling part of the process, and that is Trump’s total rejection of a Biden presidency. This is something that has never happened before in the country.
We hope that there will be no one taking to the streets over this election, but that remains a chilling possibility.
The world is about watch the US try to navigate uncharted territory, where, for the first time, there will be no peaceful power transfer. – The Vibes, November 7, 2020
Jim Williams is an Emmy-winning broadcaster and producer who has covered every US presidential election since 1976. He is The Vibes’ US correspondent.
