With mail-in ballots being one of the biggest factors in who will be the next U.S. president, some San Jose State political science professors said it’s normal to not know the results on election night.
Moreover, SJSU political science professor Matthew Record said over Zoom that it’s especially hard to determine a winner during close elections.
“Really since the 2000s, only 2008 and 2012 have been essentially certainties on election night, and therefore we had the results on election night,” Record said.
He also said there have always been votes counted after Election Day. However, Record said some political figures such as U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh have implied that votes counted after Election Day are illegitimate.
According to an Oct. 20 USA Today article, Trump has repeatedly stated that mail-in ballot fraud poses a threat to the 2020 election. There is no evidence to prove this claim.
Record said there is tension surrounding this possible transition of power. “Trump has a small but extremely fervent fan base, and that engenders a backlash of a comparatively larger and almost equally fervent group of people that despise him,” Record said. “There's really no telling how people are going to react to results, and violence is not out of the realm of possibility.”
He added that battleground states also referred to as swing states, are the most competitive and will ultimately determine this election’s outcome.
“This year all eyes are on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Record said.
According to a Tuesday New York Post article, only 76,000 of the 350,000 mail-in ballots have been counted in Philadelphia so far. Pennsylvania will resume counting on Wednesday morning.
“[Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] have laws that say they cannot even start counting absentee votes until today, so they started counting this morning,” Record said.
SJSU political science professor Garrick Percival explained that the voting certification process could vary from state to state and county to county.
“California, for example, as long as the [mail-in ballot] is postmarked by Election Day, [it] can show up at the voter registrar's office seventeen days after the election,” he said.
This indicates that election results will not become available until all ballots are counted.
“So it can be three to four weeks before the ballots are fully, legitimately counted,” Percival said.
During a news conference late Tuesday night, President Donald Trump claimed victory and said he wants all vote counting to stop, saying he will go to the Supreme Court over certain ballots, according to a Wednesday 9News article.
