Even though Donald Trump is considered the next U.S. president, the election is still ongoing. The final result will only be confirmed after the electors meet to certify the vote, usually in December.
Depending on the country you live in, you may be used to the amount of time it takes for the U.S. to officially elect a president. Here in Brazil, for example, we get the results by the end of election day. There are a few differences between voting methods around the world, for us, voting is mandatory, and we have a specific day to do it. Also, we use electronic voting machines, while in the U.S., each state can organize the voting process as they see fit. Even though most of them choose the paper ballot.Â
A long voting periodÂ
As mentioned before, the U.S. allows voters to vote over a period of time. The official month is November, but some states offer early or mail-in voting. In other words, it is a decentralized process, and if the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates is less than 1%, it can lead to a manual recount. This is the first item we can list to explain why the United States declares a winner slowly
Each state can decide how to proceed
Imagine that they need to gather results from 50 different state elections, each deciding its own voting method, security rules, and vote counting system. It’s a lot! The responsibility for vote tallying falls to media outlets, with the first one to take on this job being the Associated Press.Â
About that, Anna Johnson, head of the AP office in Washington, explains ,“We have 4,000 people in the tallying centers in each county across the country. These are the places where election officials tabulate the votes. We receive the information directly from the counting sites and check it three times. Then, we recheck it several more times until we’re sure it’s correct. We only declare the winner when there is no chance for the second-place candidate to surpass the leading one”.Â
Indirect electionsÂ
To wrap up this system, the election is indirect, which means that the voter chooses an electoral college representative. The winning party in each state earns points, represented by the total number of electoral representatives. To clarify, if a candidate wins in Florida, they will take all of the state’s electoral representatives to the national electoral college (except in Maine and Nebraska, where the representation is proportional to the number of votes). Then, these representatives will vote for president.
After the new president is elected, in January the Congress also certifies the results during a joint session. The president’s inauguration is scheduled for January 20th.Â
If you still have any doubts, take a look at this video.
So, yeah, the U.S. voting system is not the simplest or most efficient one.
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The article above was edited by Camila Lutfi.
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