On November 3, 2020, almost 161 million Americans cast their ballots to determine whether President Donald Trump would stay in office or former Vice President Joe Biden would replace him. For the next five days, people counted votes across the nation.
Trump eventually accumulated about 73.5 million votes, but that was not enough to beat Biden’s record-breaking count of almost 79.5 million votes. However, this 6-million vote difference was far more significant than it seemed.
It was the difference between Biden’s 290 electoral votes and Trump’s 232 electoral votes. The distribution of all votes, regular and electoral, can be seen here on this electoral map.
This massive difference in regular votes and electoral votes has sparked protests and calls to recount votes or stop them altogether. With only Georgia left to be fully counted, however – and with them being almost finished now – this endeavor may be impossible.
President Trump wants votes to be recounted because he says that there may have been voter fraud in the election. Though voter fraud has indeed occurred in many prior elections, the percentage of fraud (less than 0.0009%) has been extremely small in the past, according to a 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Biden, a former resident of Pennsylvania, also won our state with nearly 82,000 more votes than Trump got.
But that is not to say that either candidate did a bad job or was completely corrupt during this process. While Biden won most of the Northeast and West – and also more often in urban areas – Trump claimed most of the Midwest and Southeast. Their distribution of states is equal at the moment, but with Georgia leaning in favor of Biden, it appears that Biden will eventually have a lead over Trump in both the number of states and the number of electoral votes received.
We now have only a few months until Biden officially enters office as the 46th president of the U.S., but Trump has yet to concede office to him. Regardless of whether the current President concedes office, he will still be ousted from office by the Constitution anyway. In January, we will then put our new president in office and once again renew the potential for a better America – one to make America great again.