Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Presidential Election looked very different this year compared to other elections. A total of 161 million American citizens voted in America with a little under 100 million American citizens deciding to vote early by mail. The early voter turnout heavily increased in critical swing states compared to the last election. For example, in Florida, 8.9 million people voted early, along with 9.7 million in Texas. However, this meant that 61 million Americans did not vote early, meaning that they most likely voted at the polls where many votes would need to be counted by hand.

In the 2016 Election, the American population found out President Trump won the presidency conventionally on the day after the election. Due to the hand-counting of about 100 million votes in this election, Americans were anxiously waiting and watching the polls report numbers on President Trump and Former Vice President Joe Biden which only differed in the thousands for much of last week. This worry was evident even on social media as many people, Republican and Democrat alike, spoke about how they anxiously refreshed the same tab on their phone for four days. Finally, this nail-biting wait concluded on November 7th when the media reported that former Vice President Joe Biden had reached 270 Electoral Votes.

However, due to the amount of mail-in ballots and early voters, President Trump has called for a recount in close states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania. These states are critical swing states that favored him at the beginning of the election but slowly turned to President-Elect Biden. These critical states flipped last minute because poll workers counted votes in Atlanta and Philadelphia or other areas that tend to lean towards Democratic candidates. President Trump declared this voter fraud and expressed on Twitter how he believes that the election has been concluded unfairly. One tweet, which has been marked “This Claim About Election Fraud is Disputed” by Twitter, reads, “Nobody wants to report that Pennsylvania and Michigan did not allow our Poll Watchers and/or Vote Observers to Watch or Observe. This is responsible for hundreds of thousands of votes that should not be allowed to count. Therefore, I easily win both states. Report the News!” However, all places where votes are being counted, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, already have two Democratic and Republican Parties representatives to monitor the poll workers’ actions. Even if the United States of America decided to recount the votes, the outcome might only change by a few hundred, possibly a thousand votes. However, President Joe Biden has a total of 5 million votes more in the popular vote, making him the next and 46th President of the United States.

Works Cited

Twitter, Twitter, twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author.

Kevin Schaul, Kate Rabinowitz. “2020 Turnout Is on Pace to Break Century-Old Records.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 6 Nov. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/voter-turnout/.

“Presidential Election Results.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html.

“US Election 2020.” BBC News, BBC, www.bbc.com/news/election/us2020.