The U.S. presidential election is shaping up to be extremely close, with potentially even tighter margins than Joe Biden’s narrow win in 2020. Reuters Correspondent Joseph Ax explains. - REUTER
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00:00In 2020, media outlets weren't able to declare the winner for four days after the election.
00:08And this year, we expect it's going to take even longer.
00:12Polls are showing that this is likely to be one of the closest elections in U.S. history
00:17between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
00:19There are seven states that are considered battlegrounds.
00:22Every single one of those states is essentially tied, according to the polls, with very small
00:26margins in one direction or the other.
00:29There are a lot of people who vote by mail.
00:31That's a trend that's accelerated since the pandemic.
00:33In Pennsylvania, the most important swing state by consensus, almost two million voters
00:40have requested mail ballots.
00:41And mail ballots take longer to count.
00:44In a couple of the swing states, particularly Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, state law doesn't
00:50allow election officials to touch those votes until Election Day.
00:56That's when they start checking the envelopes to make sure that they've been properly sealed,
01:01checking signatures to make sure that they match what's on file, making sure that the
01:04voter's name matches registration.
01:07And only after they've done all of those things, all of which takes time, can they then finally
01:11tabulate those ballots and add them to the count.
01:14Even in states like Arizona and Nevada, where workers are allowed to start processing and
01:19tabulating mail ballots before Election Day occurs, it still takes a really long time
01:25just because of the sheer volume.
01:26So in both those states, a majority of voters vote by mail.
01:30So because of a host of reasons, the historic closeness of the election, the number of mail
01:36ballots that voters are using to cast their votes, and the different procedures that these
01:41various battleground states use to tabulate those votes after Election Day, all of those
01:46are going to contribute to what's going to be a long time before we can actually say
01:50who won this election.