Alejandra Yañez | THE RIDER
President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden continue to battle for the presidency with an intriguing turn of events since election night.
As of 7 p.m. today, unofficial results for the presidential election showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden ahead of Republican incumbent Donald J. Trump with 73,130,377 votes to 69,375,751. Biden leads with 264 to 214 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press.
To win the election, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes.
In Cameron County, with all 103 precincts reporting, Biden and vice presidential running mate Kamala Harris led Trump and incumbent Mike Pence by a vote of 63,732 to 48,834.
With all 255 precincts reporting, Biden led Trump in Hidalgo County by a vote of 127,391 to 89,925.
Asked for his assessment of this year’s presidential election, UTRGV political science Associate Professor, Daniel Chomsky replied, “While people have the sense that this was a cliffhanger, and it’s going into extra time before we find out the decision, it only appears that way because we have a completely archaic and undemocratic system. By any rational measure, the election for president is not even close. Biden will win the national popular vote by a substantial margin.”
Chomsky said it is only because of these bizarre anti-democratic constitutional arrangements that the United States pretends that the outcome hangs in the balance.
“Furthermore, even in the system that we have, the way we went about collecting the votes, counting the votes is still backwards and a century out of date,” he said. “The entire notion that there is confusion or controversy about the count is entirely a product of this backwards system.”
Asked why the counting process is taking so long, Chomsky replied, “In some sense it’s not even taking that long. We don’t get results from the states until well after the fact. … That has always taken longer than we think it takes to actually count votes. But this here is taking particularly long, or it seems to be taking particularly longer, because a whole bunch of states for some obvious reason switched to mail-in ballots instead of in-person ballots.”
He said the obvious reason for a higher rate of mail-in ballots was due to COVID-19. Because of the virus, states such as Pennsylvania, which usually do not use mail-in ballots, had a large number this year.
Despite the concerns of the public, Chomsky said, “It’s not something that undermines the integrity of the vote.”
He said the outcome, even in the states that are currently contested, will be clear.
“Pennsylvania, which will put Biden over the top, will give Biden his electoral vote margin,” Chomsky said. “It’s not even gonna end up being that close. He’ll win by large once they finally get around to counting the votes.”
Asked what most stood out to him, Chomsky replied, “What stands out is how this election doesn’t actually stand out. If you look at the states and where they will end up, it’s as if it’s a replay of all the elections this century. … In other words, the states that normally vote Democratic are voting Democratic, the states that normally vote Republican are voting Republican.”
He said the only outliers this year are Arizona and, possibly, Georgia, depending on the outcome.
Chomsky said the issue with this election is that voters are not always fully informed.
“The connection between ordinary citizens and their elected leaders is extremely weak,” he said. “Voters have very little information about candidates. The information they have isn’t very accurate or reliable and, so, they vote as they normally vote and politicians take advantage of that fact.”
Asked who he projects will win the election, he replied that Biden will win.
“Biden’s gonna win because, it’s not 100% certain but, it’s pretty clear that even under the rules of our undemocratic process, Biden’s gonna win and he’ll win because he’s gonna run up margins in the large cities, in the North and on the West Coast,” Chomsky said. “He’s gonna do that in part because it’s almost by default that the Republicans have abandoned these large urban areas as their population and, so, the voters are gonna vote Democrat.”
Asked why some states appeared to flip after election night, he replied that this is predictable due to the way the ballots are counted.
“The day-of-vote ballots were counted first and Republicans were more heavily represented on the day of the election, and Democrats in those states tended to vote early by mail,” Chomsky said. “We all knew this was happening.”
He said the nation is in an awful place and regardless of the winner, he believes the next administration will fail to address issues, such as climate change and the coronavirus recession.
Asked what state he thought had the greatest impact on the election, Chomsky replied that all states are important due to the electoral system. However, at this point he believes Pennsylvania is the most important since it is likely to flip Democrat.
Chomsky said the Trump administration’s tactic behind boarding up the White House before Election Day was to frighten the public.
“Washington, D.C., is quiet as can be, there’s nothing going on,” he said. “The boarding up of the White House is in an effort by the Trump administration to depict America as on the precipice of some massive civil war so that they can pursue their extralegal efforts to suppress popular dissent and to fire off their own voters with strongly racial images about the nature of society.
“But it’s completely fanciful. There’s no reason for a gigantic fence around the White House. There’s no reason for stores to be boarded up in the Northern cities that the Trump administration and Trump himself have depicted as war zones. They’re about as peaceful as can be; it’s just an image they constructed to manipulate people.”
Chomsky was asked if the president has the power to “stop the count.”
“The president is not in control of the vote counting process, but here all sorts of mischief could go on,” he said. “In one state, they say they shouldn’t count the vote. In another state, they say they should count the votes that haven’t been counted. Their argument for stopping the vote count has no legitimacy whatsoever.”
Chomsky said efforts to stop vote counts are not likely to happen but does not rule out the possibility that they could.
Asked if he believes the country is greatly divided, Chomsky replied that the election appears to be close due to the electoral system.
“But that is not the case,” he said. “Biden is going to run up quite a substantial popular vote.”
