By Giuseppe LoPiccolo

With fewer than 20 electoral votes to go for Former Vice President Biden to reach 270, the race for the White House had come to a complete crawl by Thursday evening, 48 hours after polls first closed. By 6:00pm on Nov. 5, there were still six states left to be called, five of which were swing states that all had reported 85% of their expected votes. In North Carolina, ballots are not expected to be fully counted until Nov. 12. In Arizona, 285,000 ballots, possibly more, remained to be counted according to election officials. In Pennsylvania, 250,000 ballots remain to be counted, with 72,000 of those ballots in Philadelphia county.

The delay is mostly due to the influx of mail-in ballots, due to the potential risks that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic posed to voters congregating at polling places. Processing mail-in ballots takes more time to count than those cast in person. A ballot’s eligibility needs to be verified, which in some states involves matching the voter’s signature to what is on file, and contacting voters if there are ballot issues.

It takes a prodigious amount of time for mail-in ballots to be counted, a process that is only exacerbated by laws in some states that kept processing from starting early.

Laws in a number of states barred officials from processing and counting an enormous number of mail-in ballots ahead of election day. For example, Pennsylvania’s legislature, which is GOP-controlled, didn’t allow a change to state law that would have given county election officials permission to start processing mail-in ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. Pennsylvania is estimated to have received upwards of 2.6 million mail-in ballots, 10 times the number of absentee ballots the state would have received during a normal election. In many cases, mail-in ballots cast on election day aren’t even in the hands of officials that are tallying the results.

The election process is expected to be delayed even further by litigation and court battles. As the counting of mail-in ballots continued and more swing states were declared democratic victories, particularly in the Midwest, the Trump administration threatened to bring the courts into the process. On Nov. 4, it had been declared that both Wisconsin and Michigan had been secured by Biden, pushing his total electoral vote count to 264, just 6 votes from the required number of 270. The Trump campaign said that they would request a recount in Wisconsin, and sued for access to Michigan ballots. The same is expected in Georgia and Pennsylvania, where the race has tightened. The Trump reelection campaign has sought a recount in Wisconsin, although this request has since been recanted, and the campaign has also attempted to halt vote counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Litigation filed in individual states could end up in the Supreme Court, much like the 2000 election, when Republican George W. Bush prevailed over Democrat Al Gore by just 537 votes in Florida after the conservative-leaning high court halted a recount.

Updated 11/6/2020 - 1:30am

At this hour, the results of the election are still up in the air, with democratic swings seeming likely in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada due to the high volume of mail-in ballots that have yet to be counted in major urban areas. Some journalists and political analysts are dubbing the process as an election week, as opposed to an election night. Whatever the results may be, the fight for the most powerful position in the world is left in the hands of uncounted ballots and the U.S. legal system.