Off The Editor’s Desk – 11-4-2020
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When will we know who won?
As I write this piece early Monday morning, just the day before America votes for president, I found myself wondering if we will know the winner of the election by midnight Tuesday.
Many years ago we printed our newspapers on Wednesday, and then we could have the election results printed for our readers when they received the paper in their mailboxes on Thursday. Now we print at noon on Tuesdays, so the results are in the newspaper the next week.
But, I wondered if the presidential results will be known by a week after the election. As I write this I have been informed by television news that the number of people that have already cast votes is more than 90 million, which is about three-quarters of the number that voted for president four years ago, so maybe the winner has already been decided.
Back when we printed on Wednesdays, I would stay at the office until the wee hours of the morning collecting election results from area municipal clerks so that we had the vote totals in the paper the day after the election was over.
I remember back when Ronald Reagan was trying to unseat Jimmy Carter as president. On election night at about midnight, I left my office and walked to City Hall in Glenwood City to see if the poll workers had finished counting the ballots.
Back then, all votes were casted on paper ballots and had to be counted by hand and it was time consuming. But, when I got to the polling place, which was city hall on Pine Street at that time, the workers were still counting ballots, and as I waited for them to finish, so I could get back to finishing the election story, one of the election officials, Einar Roe, questioned me if I had any information on how the presidential election was coming. My response was that Carter had already conceded.
If you remember back in 2000 when George W. Bush and Al Gore were running for president, even 19 days after the election, votes from Florida were not yet finalized mostly because of the punch card used to vote, and the Supreme Court made the final decision giving Bush the White House.
But, I feel that this time, we will not know for a long time who the winner is because of all of the mail-in ballots that need to be counted and I am sure that the election will end up in some court, like the supreme court and we could go past Christmas before we know who won.
The following information came to me by the way of the History Channel and I though it might bring some information to you about the way our president is chosen.
“Of the 58 presidential elections in our history, 53 of the winners took both the Electoral College and the popular vote. But in five incredibly close elections, including those for two of the past three presidents, the winner of the Electoral College was in fact the loser of the popular vote.
“Here’s how that can happen: The president and vice president aren’t elected by direct popular vote. Instead, Article II, section 1 of the constitution provides for the indirect election of the nation’s highest offices by a group of state appointed ‘electors’. Collectively, this group is known as the Electoral College.
“To win the presidential election, a candidate needs to capture 270 of the 538 total electoral votes. States are allotted electoral votes based on the number of representatives they have in the House plus their two senators. Electors are apportioned according to the population of each state, but even the least populous states are constitutionally guaranteed a minimum of three electors, one representative and two senators.
This guaranteed minimum means that states with smaller populations end up having greater representation in the Electoral College per capita. Wyoming has one House representative for all of its roughly 570,000 residents. California, a much more populace state, has 53 representatives in the House, but each of those congressmen and women represent more than 700,000 Californians.”
Wisconsin has ten electoral votes, eight congressional districts plus our two Senators.
Who won the White House without winning the popular vote? There are five presidents that lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College vote and they are: Donald Trump (2016), George W. Bush (2000), Benjamin Harrison (1888), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876) and John Quincy Adams (1824).
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton