US Elections 2024: Key dates, timeline for vote counting, and when final results are expected

Published by Protothema on Tue, 11/05/2024 - 10:27

It will, in any case, be an outcome of historic importance: America decides today whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the new occupant of the White House, after an incredibly tense campaign that remains in doubt until the last minute.

Polls open at 06:00 local time on the east coast of the United States (13:00 GMT) and millions of people will add their votes to the more than 80 million ballots already submitted through the early voting process or sent in as absentee ballots.

It is impossible to know whether it will take hours or days of counting to determine the winner between the 60-year-old Democratic vice presidential nominee and the 78-year-old Republican candidate, whose personalities and visions could not be more different.

At their campaign rallies in recent weeks, two seemingly incompatible parts of America have flocked to each other’s rallies, each camp declaring itself convinced that the other will lead the country to disaster. “If this one doesn’t win, we’re screwed. Completely. Donald Trump will destroy everything. It’s out of control,” says a concerned Robin Matthews, a 50-year-old co-op executive who went to hear Kamala Harris last Monday night in Philadelphia.

But for Ruth McDowell, Trump “is the one who will save this country”. This 65-year-old administrator, who went to attend the Republican’s last campaign rally in Michigan, assures that she “will be very sad for her grandchildren” if the vice president wins.

Kamala Harris called her opponent a “fascist”. Donald Trump reiterates that his opponent is “stupid” and will “destroy” the country.

The verdict of the ballot box will in any case be of historical importance. Either America will send a woman to the White House for the first time, or it will send to the presidential mansion the populist orator, convicted by a criminal court and the target of numerous prosecutions, whose first term (2017-2021) had dragged the country and the entire world into an unending sequence of turmoil.

The latest polls put the two rivals nearly tied in seven crucial states, those that will give the Democrat or Republican the sufficient number of electoral votes to reach the threshold of 270 out of a total of 538, synonymous with victory in this presidential contest conducted by indirect vote.

To try to persuade in just three months of campaigning, Kamala Harris has staked herself on a message of protecting democracy and the right to abortion that appeals to women as much as to moderate Republicans.

The Democrat, whose father is Jamaican and whose mother is Indian, is holding her election night at her old university, Howard in Washington, D.C., also known as “black Harvard.”

Donald Trump will be in Palm Beach, Florida, the state in which he makes his home.

The billionaire has again played the same game in this campaign that he played in 2016 and 2020, portraying himself as an anti-systemic candidate who is close to the people, the only one capable of saving a country that is being destroyed, according to him, by immigrants and galloping inflation.

Today’s Tuesday concludes a race full of twists and turns, marked by the vice president’s sudden entry into the campaign in July when she replaced President Joe Biden, and by two assassination attempts against the Republican former president, who has four indictments against him in criminal courts. The follow-up remains unknown.

The two camps have launched dozens of legal challenges, with two out of three Americans expressing fears of violence erupting after the vote. Some polling stations have been turned into fortresses, monitored by drones and snipers have been deployed on rooftops.
Election officials have also been trained to learn how to barricade themselves inside a room or use a fire hose to repel potential intruders.

In the federal capital of Washington, D.C., metal fences surround the White House, the Capitol, and other sensitive locations. An impressive number of downtown stores have covered their storefronts with boards.

The images of January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters had attacked the US Congressional headquarters, linger in everyone’s mind. Nothing foreshadows that the country will be overwhelmed by similar violence. Donald Trump has, however, already set the stage for a new contestation of the result, accusing at one campaign rally after another the Democrats of “stealing like devils”. And the Democratic camp says it “expects” the Republican to declare an early winner, as he did in 2020.

The complicated process of counting votes

Once polling stations in the US are closed, the vote counting will begin, a process that varies by state and could take days, especially if there are appeals to the courts.

In a country as large as the US, which spans six time zones, polls begin to close at 1:00 a.m. Wednesday morning GMT and the last polls close at 8:00 a.m. GMT.

More than 80 million Americans have already voted, either by mail-in ballot or in person. States cannot begin counting those votes before polling places close, but most allow for an initial preparation to facilitate the count. But some, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – two of the more controversial states – don’t even allow that preparation to begin before Election Day.

In the majority of states, ballots are first run through a visual scanner, which gives a preliminary result, before being hand-counted for confirmation. The result is then certified by polling place officials and forwarded to county and state authorities and local officials of both parties.

In the event of a small difference between the two candidates, which is likely to happen in the seven key states, one or more recounts of the votes will be needed.

In 2020 Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was announced by the media four days after Election Day.

In 2016 Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was announced the following day.

In 2008 and 2012 Barack Obama was able to celebrate his victory as early as election night.

But in 2000 the name of the winner, George W. Bush, was announced on December 12, five weeks after Election Day and after a lengthy recount process and many appeals in Florida before the Supreme Court ruled.

In 2020 and the 2022 midterm elections, election officials in many counties refused to certify the results, a necessary step–which is usually a formality–before they are released.

A possibility is looming in this year’s elections in some key states, where Republicans are on the warpath to appeal the results to the courts.

In addition, judicial appeals, which have been filed by both parties even before Election Day and mainly concern election rules, may also complicate the process.

The Kamala Harris campaign predicted yesterday, Monday, that final results, particularly in Pennsylvania and Nevada, would not be known until “many days” and warned the Trump camp against any attempt to “sow doubt and chaos” about the election process.

U.S. law requires that all appeals involving the election be decided before the 538 Electoral College meets on Dec. 17. The outcome of their vote will be certified by Congress on January 6, 2025.

 

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