In the morning of Wednesday – November 4 in Vietnam time (the night of November 3 in the US), initial statistics of the three states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin show that President Donald Trump has superior advantages over candidate Joe Biden. Even that night, President Trump made a very happy statement, announcing his early victory.
But in the end, that victory has yet to be seen. The numbers changed overnight, as pro-Democratic mail ballot ballots continued to arrive. And at this point, the results have yet to be announced.
According to CNN, the biggest reason for this delay comes from the differences in the laws of each state, where some places allow processing and counting of mail ballots after the closing time, as delay from Covid-19.
Like Pennsylvania, Republican Party officials have refused to allow ballot processing to begin before 7:00 a.m on Election Day (November 3, local time). This leaves the counting officials facing a mountain of absentee ballots, and only being able to tally the live votes that day.
In total, Pennsylvania received 2.6 million ballots in the mail – 10 times higher than normal. In Philadelphia alone, they have 350,000 absentee ballots to be processed, so they cannot begin tally until the polling stations open on November 3.
Michigan also received more than 3.1 million absentee ballots, facing similar restrictions on Election Day. New legislation in the state allows cities with at least 25,000 residents more time to process ballots (about 10 hours on November 2), but not for mailed ballots. The counting of votes can only be done from 7:00 am on November 3.
In Wisconsin, tally staff had to wait until 7:00 a.m. on November 3 to begin processing more than 2 million absentee ballots and early ballots. In which, in Milwaukee alone, there were more than 169,000 absentee votes.