Thousands of people went to the polls to vote on Nov. 3, but no one expected to wait so long for the results.  The race looked like it was very close with

During the 2020 election there was a higher percent of mail in ballots than in other recent years, which played a big part in why it took so long to announce the winner.

In places like Nevada they were severely understaffed which was one reason they took so long to announce the winner of that state. In other states there were  even protests taking place outside the counting centers from people that wanted to stop the counting of the votes.

In that case of previous elections, the popular vote does not determine the outcome of the election, the electoral college is the decider as to who wins. In  the electoral college each state gets a set number of electoral votes, these votes go to whichever candidate wins that state. To win one of the candidates must get 270 electoral votes. The number of electoral votes each state has is dependent on the amount of representatives they have in the house and senate.

On the election map during the race it looked like the majority of America was in red; seeing this many people assumed that the Republican party would take the lead.

“You’ve got to keep in mind that it’s people that vote not land,” Darren Nighswonger a history teacher at Southeast Highschool said, “So a lot of those red states that you see are not heavily populated, so you get the impression… that the red state is winning.”

Many states also had a red majority on the map, even though it looked like almost all the state was republican leaning those states ended up in favor of the democratic party. This happened because the few states that were blue were also very heavily populated. Another factor in why the election took so long was heavily populated counties, for example Georgia who was red leaning for the majority of the time had a couple of heavily populated counties that took the longest to count, but also tipped the election in Biden’s favor.

This year’s presidential election has been filled with many twists and turns, and there will be more in the coming months leading up the Inauguration in January.