Polls open for a decisive election in the second half of Biden’s term
Legislative elections have already begun in the United States. Except for the more than 44 million Americans who voted early (by mail or in person), polls in many states opened at 6 a.m. local time, noon, Spanish Peninsular Time. At that time, voting was active in Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.
Little by little, more states will join the long election day. Polls in Alaska close 17 hours later. By then the counting will already start in the eastern states and the results will start to be known. However, exploration is slow. In some swing states for the Senate, it could take days to know. In Pennsylvania and Nevada, for example, results in 2020 are not known until a few days later. In Arizona and North Carolina, there is also competition, which took more than a week. In Georgia, not only did it take more than two weeks, but if no candidate crossed 50%, a second round had to be held. If that senator is decisive, control of the Senate won’t be known until mid-December. In the House of Representatives, a Republican victory won’t necessarily wait that long, but if things are even, it could be days or weeks.
In addition, both the AP agency and the television stations have experts who calculate when the result is good, rather than waiting for the count to close, acting with extreme caution to avoid errors subject to political interpretation.
At stake in the elections is the renewal of more than a third of the Senate, the House of Representatives and many state and local offices, including 36 governorships. They represent the second half of Joe Biden’s term and the future of America.
Cheney Orr’s photo from Reuters shows a neon-lit sign of Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia.
