खबरें पाने के लिए व्हाट्सएप पर जुड़े
Seoni (Madhya Pradesh) : After four months of complete perplexity and chaos, the United States of America has finally chosen its next Head Of State. The Electoral College announced the official results of the US Presidential Elections on Monday, where the Democratic candidate Joe Biden won against the Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump with a decisive score of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. The results will be tallied in a joint session of Congress presided by the current Vice-President Mike Pence on January 6 at Washington. A public ceremony for the Presidential Inauguration is scheduled on January 20, at the West Front of the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC.
This election is remarkable. Not only is it the first time a national election has been held amidst a global pandemic, but it’s also the most expensive election in the history of the US. The total expenditure on this election including both Presidential and Congressional campaigns surpassed a whopping 14 Billion USD, which is even higher than the expenditure combined in the last two election cycles. The fear of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic was conspicuous as an unprecedented 100 million Americans opted to vote via mail-in ballot or early voting. But all this isn’t to say that there were no disruptions during the event. One of the biggest challenges for the election was the reduced number of in-person voting polling stations, which resulted in long waiting hours at polls. In some places such as Georgia, thousands of people had to wait for as long as 10 hours before they could finally cast their ballot during early voting. Some attribute this to voter enthusiasm but other factors such as understaffing or computer glitches certainly didn’t help. The fewer polling stations also meant that many people had to take an hour-long journey to reach the nearest polling station. In Nevada, for instance, people of Pyramid Lake Paiutes had to drive 160 km round-trip to cast their vote at the nearest early voting polling station. In Navajo Nation, Arizona, people couldn’t cast their
ballot even through mail-in ballot because there was only 1 post office every 707 square miles in the region. Not to mention the numerous disputes over naked ballots, ID laws, roll purges, prison voting bans, and voter suppression that only escalated the contention between the Republicans and Democrats. But the most prominent controversy arose after President Trump accused that the election results were heavily manipulated. His accusations revolved around three major themes- the process of casting and accepting mail-in ballots, pre-election poles “extensively favoring Biden to discourage Trump voters” and republican observers not being allowed to do their jobs in democratic-ruled states. Although no evidence has been provided by Trump or his supporters favoring these allegations, he continued to call this “Historic Election Interference.” He went as far as asking his supporters to gather outside the ballot-counting centers and ask the officials to stop counting the votes.
Many videos have gone viral on social media platforms where Trump supports gather outside the centers and chant the slogan “Stop the Count.” He even refused to commit a peaceful transfer of power. Perhaps, Trump’s reaction to the result can be best encapsulated in the words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides who in 400 BCE said, “In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.” Nonetheless, Democrats are savoring their historic victory. Biden tweeted after his victory stating, “I will be a President for all Americans – whether you voted for me or not.” The Vice-President candidate for the Democratic party, Kamala Harris; who will be the first female and person of color in the post, also stated that there is a lot of work ahead.
The US has never been so segregated and vulnerable in recent history: It has been devastated by the pandemic whereas, it should have been the one leading the global fight against the virus; it has failed to amalgamate its people in the times of crisis, in fact, the situation reached a tipping point when people’s distrust on the system turned into violent protests against
racial discrimination all over the country; its economy has been struck badly with a 32.9% annual decline in its GDP in the second quarter of 2020, the worst in American history, surpassing that of The Great Depression of the 1930s where the US GDP shrunk by 30%. This historic victory is not the end but rather the starting of a long-term challenge to stabilize and ameliorate the current state of affairs in the US that the Biden Administration has to undertake.
