The long U.S. presidential election campaign finally came to an end on Tuesday, Nov. 3 as millions of Americans cast their ballots to either re-elect Donald Trump or choose Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. But the winner may not be known for days.
The road to the winning 270 Electoral College votes remains tight: a running tally from the Associated Press projected Biden had won 215 electoral votes, while Trump had claimed 174 as of 12 a.m. ET. The contests in key swing states remained too close to call.
In 2020, more people are voting by mail due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. Also, each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Nearly 100 million Americans took advantage of the ability to vote early or to mail-in ballots.
Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading, according to FiveThirtyEight, a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics and economics. The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied.
As of 12 a.m. ET, President Donald Trump has won the state of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Democrat Joe Biden has claimed victory in the District of Columbia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont and Washington State.
Arizona, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin are among the states that will help determine which candidate gets the 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
Several hundred people have gathered in Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C., just one block from the White House, holding signs and chanting about democracy. It was a generally festive atmosphere Tuesday night as election results came in, with a few scuffles along the edges.
In the meantime, New York where Biden claimed victory, remains on high alert with businesses bracing for potential unrest. Oleksii Prokopenko, who lives in the city, told the Kyiv Post that the situation remains calm but many stores were boarding up their windows for potential unrest tied to a bitterly contentious presidential race.
“This election night is truly historic, exciting, and there are a few unpredictable days ahead of American people and the entire world. We are not sleeping and waiting for at least tentative results, as the final ones may be different due to mail-in voting and early voting as a result of pandemic,” says Prokopenko, who is a member of Razom for Ukraine Board, a non-profit Ukrainian-American human rights organization.
However, no matter the election outcome, Prokopenko is hoping that the United States and Ukraine will remain strategic partners in the geopolitical context. “We have a lot in common, and it is especially important that the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States is one of the most influential in the world.”
