What I did on election nights
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
The 2020 US election is something that everyone has been waiting for four years. The election will not only affect our neighbours down south but it will impact Canada and the rest of the world too. When the coronavirus pandemic came to the United States, it created an uncertainty of who would win the election and changed the course of time.
The entire world was watching the coverage of the election—even the major channels in Canada were covering it. This year’s election coverage might be more exciting than the 2000 US election. Before I began watching the coverage of the election at 1 pm, I watched the update of the coronavirus pandemic in Canada to find out how the country is handling it. I watched CNN’s coverage of the election because I think is the least biased of all the cable news channels in the country.
As the night progressed, I found out that other news organizations had different results so I had to change between several channels including PBS, C-Span, and even Canadian news channels including CBC. While some channels called Arizona for Joe Biden early, including surprisingly Fox News, CNN did not call it because they said it was too close. At the end of the night, Joe Biden won in Washington but Donald Trump declared that he pretty much won the election in the White House despite the fact that there were still more votes to be counted over the next few days.
I took a rest from watching the election for an hour and when I woke up, they had just called Hawaii for Joe Biden and he was in the lead in Wisconsin where he would win later. As I was watching the coverage, there were a lot of mathematicians explaining the vote and if you are very good at math, you could get what they were talking about. I hope that the election showed the electoral system works and that the vote counters are doing their job of counting every legal vote to make sure that there is no voter fraud.
Supposedly because the in-person votes were counted first before the mail-in votes in some states, Biden caught up in Michigan and Wisconsin, and that changed everything. I thought that Biden would win the election if he won Arizona and Nevada. There were still more votes to count and Trump supporters were outside a vote-counting facility in Arizona protesting that they should stop counting the votes; there were even some videos showing them singing “Y.M.C.A.”
While no one won the election at that point, Biden told everyone to keep the faith and wait until every vote was counted while (in my opinion) looking like a president. On the other hand, Trump still thinks that Biden is stealing the election away from him because of voting fraud. CNN’s Jake Tapper said that the following day was a sad day for America.
The 2020 US election is probably the greatest US election of all time because it caused everyone to be engaged more in government.
