With the White House race inching towards its completion, the vote-counting tallies have left the world quite confused as different new agencies are showing the different count of electoral votes for the candidates, especially Joe Biden.
A total of 270 electoral votes are needed by any of the candidates to become the President. However, this is seemingly being judged by the number of popular votes coming near the court of either of the candidates.
Due to the lack of a centralized federal election system, “decision desks” of the US media outlets have long drawn the results, calling the victory of a specific candidate in a state when the majority of the vote-counting has been done.
However, this has hazed out the situation as media houses are stating a different count for Biden.
This is due to the fact that each set of news organizations collect their data from a different polling channel. The two major polling data providers include Edison Research and the Association Press.
Now the difference here is the CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS belong to the National Election Pool and these members form their results on the basis of information garnered from Edison Research. Even NDTV and BBC showed the electoral votes counted by ER.
On the other hand, Fox News, PBS, NPR, USA TODAY, Al Jazeera, and several other news agencies collect their data from Associated Press. Fox News though, has its own VoteCast system as well that also brings in details from the AP.
Why are we talking about the source of the data for the vote-counting?
The answer to this lies in the question we earlier sought.
The Associated Press called Arizona a victory state for Biden as the majority of the votes have been counted and they lean towards the Democratic candidate with a lead of 68,000. This led Biden to have an additional 11 electoral votes in his name, razor-thin close to claiming the White House as he according to AP, now stands with 264 votes.
However, Edison Research termed it too early to consider Arizona for Biden and did not include the votes, hence, NDTV shows 253, following the path of ER.
The two data sources also have a difference of one electoral vote for Trump as AO says 214 and ER show 213.
This happened as CNN did not count the electoral vote of Maine’s second congressional district, being the only state to be divided in terms of votes. AP considered Maine as a whole and counted the second electoral vote as well.
Arizona’s confusion as AP gave it to Biden on early Wednesday led to the discrepancy and rise of questions
Fox News too later in the evening of Wednesday termed Arizona as a win for Biden, irking the campaigners and supporters of Trump. The next morning, Fox News showed 264 votes with Biden, only 6 votes away from winning the election.
AP has also termed Wisconsin for Biden with a very small difference of 20,000 votes. ER has not followed suit as the 1% difference can make either of the candidates call for a recount.
However, things differ in Georgia as Trump leads there with a fraction of votes, 13,000. The state hasn’t been called yet.
Trump has gone on record to call the election “fraud” along with claims to stop the vote-counting. As such, his campaign has lodged lawsuits to cease the same with a promise of demanding the conduction of a recount for the particular states.
