Mail-in voting Photograph:( Reuters )
Trump has been questioning every mail-in vote but election officials have chosen accuracy over speed.
The mail-in ballot has delayed the US election results.
It is like a form, you fill it in seal it in an envelope and mail it. Clearly, this is not an EVM machine. These are paper ballots have to be counted by hand that's the reason why it is taking so much time for America to get a result.
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There is a considerable number of votes that still need to be counted. Five states are yet to announce their results.
Georgia could wrap up soon. It has over 10,000 votes to count, Arizona needs to count 263,000 ballots. In Nevada over more than 190 thousand ballots are outstanding....
In Pennsylvania, 160,000 votes need to be counted and in North Carolina more than 116,000 ballots are outstanding. This was the estimate just a few hours back, the actual numbers, however, may vary as the votes are being counted.
Georgia may be in a position to announce a result, other states may take some more time since the process to count the ballots, verify them and announce the result is an elaborate exercise.
The process may slightly vary across states but it goes like this: first, the ballot is verified, it goes to a bipartisan team of election officials who scan the sealed envelope into the computer system, then they verify the signature on the envelope with the signature on the voter database, if they don't match the whole ballot is declared invalid but if the signatures match then the envelope is unsealed.
The ballots are put into a box and fed into a machine that tabulates them. Now the vote is both available on a computer database as well as the physical copy - both are stored for verification purposes.
Election officials then combine the counts and report it to the county and the state board of elections. Members of political parties sit on the state boards and no party is allowed to have a majority on these boards.
There scrutiny at every step and it takes time. It may appear like forever, but election officials say they're moving at breakneck speed.
An overwhelming number of Americans have voted via mail. Now, under usual circumstances, the result would have been out on the election day itself but the pandemic is still on, so American voters were given four options to cast their votes - if they wanted to vote in person, they could vote early or on the election day otherwise they had the option to choose the ballots, fill them up and send them by mail or drop it off at the dedicated drop off points.
A large number of voters picked the mail-in ballot. 64 million postal ballots were sent before the election day itself which is a record number.
Trump has been questioning every mail-in vote but election officials have chosen accuracy over speed.