Joe Biden became president-elect this Saturday after winning the pivotal state of Pennsylvania.  He defeated Trump in an election he made about character of the nation and the President. The former vice president had amassed 273 Electoral College votes after winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electors, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House and defeat President Donald Trump. Biden’s votes touched 290 as per the Associated Press.

Mechanism of electoral votes

The winner of the election is determined through a system called the electoral college. Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, is given a number of electoral college votes, adding up to a total of 538 votes. More populous states get more electoral-college votes than smaller ones. A candidate needs to win 270 electoral-college votes (50% plus one) to win the election. In every state except two, Maine and Nebraska, the candidate that gets the most votes wins all of the state’s electoral-college votes. Due to these rules, a candidate can win the election without getting the most votes at the national level. This happened at the last election, in which Donald Trump won a majority of electoral-college votes although more people voted for Hillary Clinton across the US.

Results reporting

The Associated Press (AP) calls out the election results. AP “call” the winner in a state when they determine that the trailing candidate has no path to victory. This can happen before 100% of votes in a state have been counted. Estimates for the total votes in each state are also provided by AP. The numbers update throughout election night, as more data on voter turnout becomes available.

After four years of Trump’s incessant lies, bullying and vilification of his political opponents, Biden said, he was running to restore the character of the nation and bring dignity back to the White House. Biden, who turns 78 at the end of this month, will become the oldest president when he is inaugurated in January in the midst of the worst public health emergency in 100 years, the deepest economic slump since the 1930s and a national reckoning on racism and police brutality, (which the nation witnessed in Minneapolis) that is still unresolved.

Biden’s victory capped one of the longest and most tumultuous campaigns in modern history, in which he maintained an aggressive focus on Trump’s widely criticized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. A majority of voters said that rising coronavirus cases were a significant factor in their vote.

Biden regularly criticized Trump as unfit for office of the POTUS and positioned his campaign as a “battle for the soul of America.” He promised from the outset of his run to heal and unite the country if he won, and made central to his closing message a pledge to represent both those who voted for him as well as those who did not when he got to the White House.

In a statement issued, Biden said that he was “honoured” by the news and reiterated the calls for unity that had been a hallmark of his campaign speeches in recent weeks.

“I am honoured and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect Harris,” Biden said.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal,” he said. “We are the United States of America. And there is nothing we can not do, if we do it together.”

His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, said in a tweet that “this election is about so much more” than Biden and herself. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started,” she said.

Biden will be sworn in as the 46th U.S. president on January 20. Harris will become the first female, first Black, and first South Asian American vice president.

As president, Biden will immediately be confronted with a bitterly divided nation in the throes of a pandemic that has already killed 236,000 Americans. Trump has exacerbated the split by minimizing the effects of the pandemic, and has not even said whether he would recognize the outcome of the election.

He will also have to corral a fractious Democratic Party with unresolved tensions between its progressive and centrist wings.

Biden, who turns 78 on November 20 and will be the oldest incoming president in U.S. history, first ran for the nation’s highest office more than 30 years ago. A longtime moderate, he has stressed bipartisanship for decades, and his long Senate career was typified by his willingness to work across the aisle with Republican colleagues.

Biden led Trump 253 to 214 in the projected Electoral College vote tally heading into saturday, as tracked by NBC News. Biden had higher vote totals in four key states, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. But all four had remained rated by NBC News Decision Desk as too close to call. In addition to the projected Electoral College vote, Biden also won the popular vote, and he set a record for winning the most votes by any candidate in U.S. history.

Trump has repeatedly and falsely declared victory, including in multiple states where Biden is the projected winner. The president has also repeated unfounded conspiracy theories and tried to cast doubt on the integrity of the tabulation process.

In a lengthy statement released after the race was called, a defiant Trump said, “We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they do not want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”

Trump added that, “Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated.” Trump’s motorcade was seen earlier Saturday morning pulling into the Trump National Golf Club, in Washington, D.C.

Biden had expressed clear confidence in a victory once all the votes were counted, speaking regularly since polls closed Tuesday as an anxious nation waited for states to complete their tallies.

With 92 percent of the expected vote across the country counted, Biden has led Trump 50.5 percent to 47.7 percent in the popular vote, a contrast to Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016 while winning the Electoral College. The 74,478,345 votes that have so far been counted for him is the largest number of votes won in the U.S. by any presidential candidate.

The Trump campaign, with the aim of asserting his re-election, has filed multiple lawsuits, several of which have already been thrown out, and more are expected. His campaign has also said that it would ask for a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden is the apparent winner.

Trump has continually generated unfounded fears about the vote tabulation process, firing off tweets demanding that officials halt counting and leave ballots uncounted in those places where analysts think that the remaining votes favor Democrats. In the early hours of November 4, Wednesday morning, with millions of votes still uncounted, Trump falsely claimed that he had won. On Thursday, he had held a press conference where he made a series of false election fraud claims.

Biden, who ran for president in 1988 and 2008, emerged victorious from a bruising Democratic primary earlier this year that at one point included more than 20 candidates, becoming the party’s apparent nominee just as a global pandemic was erupting. He was quickly forced to take his campaign virtual and did not resume campaign travel until the end of the summer. When he did, his events were largely in front of small, socially distanced groups of reporters, and live-streamed for supporters.

When the general election finally kicked into high gear after Labor Day, an avalanche of news events inserted historic chaos and urgency into the race.

What now

Usually, the losing candidate concedes but Mr Trump has vowed to contest the election results on several fronts. Responding to the Pennsylvania results, his campaign put out a statement saying that this election is not over.

A recount will be held in Georgia, where the margins are tight, and Mr Trump wants the same in Wisconsin. He has also vowed to take legal action to the Supreme Court, alleging voting fraud without any evidence. If the election result is challenged, it would require legal teams to challenge this in the state courts. State judges would then need to uphold the challenge and order a recount, and Supreme Court justices could then be asked to overturn a ruling.

Meanwhile, votes in some states are continuing to be counted and results are never official until final certification, which occurs in each state in the weeks following the election. This must be done before 538 chosen officials (electors) from the Electoral College, which officially decides who wins the election, meet in their state capitals to vote on December 14.

The electors’ votes usually mirror the popular vote in each state. However, in some states, this is not a formal requirement. The new president is officially sworn into office on January 20, after a transition period to give them time to appoint cabinet ministers and make plans.

The hand-over of power takes place at a ceremony known as the inauguration, which is held on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington DC. After the ceremony, the new president makes the way to the White House to begin their four-year term in office.

(Source: NBC News, BBC News, CNN News, the Guardian News)