Politicians and people around the world are holding their breath to see who wins Tuesday’s US presidential election. Will there be a second term for Republican Donald Trump? Or victory for Democrat Kamala Harris, who would be the first female POTUS and only the second person of color?

Unlike in Britain, where a prime minister can be kicked out of Downing Street overnight after a general election, there will be a transition period. The next president will not take office until Inauguration Day – January 20, 2025.

But when will we know who will be the next president? Recent precedent suggests we may not know the night after the polls close, but days or even weeks later – especially if the result looks close this time, as has been widely predicted.

Recent delays – and what was happening before

In 2000, election day was November 7th, but George W Bush did not become president-elect until December 13th. That’s when his Democratic opponent Al Gore conceded, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Florida Supreme Court 5-4 to stop the recount in what was then a swing state.

We’ll never know who really got the most votes in the Sunshine State – there were probably several hundred votes in it.

It is a matter of record that Florida gave Bush the Electoral College victory 271 to 266, even though Gore got half a million more votes than him nationally.

In the last election of 2020, it wasn’t until the Saturday after Tuesday’s vote, four days later, that I was able to “call” the election for Joe Biden on Sky News along with other major news networks.

Donald Trump still insisted he won. His supporters have launched multiple legal challenges to try to overturn the results in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. They failed, but on January 6, 2021, a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol in an event to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from officially certifying the result as a victory for Biden.

Despite these examples in recent years, in modern US elections, the winner has most often been known within hours of counting.

By convention, the result is accepted throughout once one of the two candidates concedes defeat and the Associated Press (AP), America’s 170-year-old nonpartisan television service, “declares a winner.”

AP will call a total of 5,000 election results next week. It is estimated that there could be evidence of a clear presidential winner around seven hours after counting begins on the east coast – around 1am in Washington DC and 6am in London on Wednesday 6 November. This will only work if Harris or Trump are comfortably ahead of the statewide election.

If it looks like Trump won outright, expect Kamala Harris to cave in the wee hours, just like Hillary Clinton did in 2016. A shocked Mrs. Clinton phoned an equally surprised Trump to congratulate him and then made a formal concession speech to his supporters. a few hours later.

Close race could end up as ‘disputed election’

Trump said this time “I want a landslide.” He also promised: “If I lose (lose) and it’s free and fair, I’ll accept the results.” We will see. He didn’t budge in 2020 and still insists, falsely, that he won then. Amazingly, most Republican voters say they agree with him.

All polls suggest it will be a very close election. If Trump appears to be narrowly losing because one or two swing states go his way, he will do everything he can to spread mistrust, delay declaring Harris the winner, and ultimately, perhaps, reverse his defeat at the polls.

That’s why insiders call it “litigious elections.” Both sides are building massive legal teams ready to do battle. The Trump campaign is recalling conservative advocates who campaigned for him in 2020. It claims it has 230,000 volunteers on the trail in swing states.

To lead his legal team, Harris recruited Dana Remus, a former White House aide, and Marc Elias, a tough litigator who won cases, opening the door for Democrats to have their own “dark money” for the cases legal to counter the money. from pro-Trump billionaires like Elon Musk.

Of course, if Harris is narrowly defeated and Democrats suspect foul play, Democrats could challenge some results as well. Unlike the Republicans, however, they have not openly discussed this as a backdoor tactic.

Trump and his supporters are laying the groundwork for no confidence in this year’s outcome. They are already advocating “cheating” and “voter fraud” in early voting. They claim in advance that this is a “rigged election” against them.

More than 200 lawsuits have been filed involving voter ID, mail-in voting, voting machines, foreign interference, and intimidation.

Voters must be US citizens. This year, complaints from Trump supporters have focused on allegations that illegal immigrants are getting to vote.

2020 was a chaotic and improvised dry run that exposed the tactics that could be used to challenge another Trump defeat. The Republicans are better organized this time.

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The obstacles between the election and the inauguration

There are options to overturn or stop the process at every stage in the weeks leading up to the inauguration.

Each state has until December 11 to certify the results. Stopping this could be done either by successfully arguing that the vote was not properly conducted or that the ballots were cast by people ineligible to vote. But none of Trump’s complaints about voting irregularities were upheld in 2020.

Local electoral councils could also refuse to certify the results. This was unknown in America, but has happened over twenty times in eight states since 2020.

However, federal law was reformed so that state governors alone had the final power to certify unless a court ruled otherwise, with Congress bound to treat their certifications as conclusive. So far, even Republican governors have moved forward with certification.

Read more:
Six paths to power – and why a state matters most
The real Harris: Her powerful ex and run-in with the police
Is Biden’s trash blunder as bad as Clinton’s 2016 mistake?

Technically, the votes cast by the electorate matter because they determine state by state who makes up the Electoral College that “elects” the president. It has 538 members – so a candidate needs 270 to win. All but two states allocate their electors on a winner-take-all basis, to the candidate who receives the most votes in their state.

If none of the candidates achieves a score of 270 and the Electoral College as a whole cannot complete the certification, the result of the general election is void. The House of Representatives elects the president in so-called contingent elections.

This is done on a one vote per state basis. Republicans now control several state delegations and will likely do so after next week’s election. In a contingent election, the 100-member US Senate chooses the vice president — who could come from the other party.

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Then comes the fateful date of January 6th when the Vice President and the newly elected Congress meet to certify the new President. Assuming that Harris, say, had avoided the contingent election, it’s still possible that a Republican-majority Congress would refuse to certify his victory, even though as the incumbent vice president he would be in the seat. That’s probably what Trump was referring to during his Madison Square Garden rally when he said he and Republican Speaker Mike Johnson have “a secret… I’ll tell you what it’s about when the race is over.”

If the election result is contested, legal proceedings at every level are a certainty.

If the argument reaches the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court, all indications are that Trump will get a sympathetic hearing; appointed three of its members.

Meanwhile, if uncertainty about the outcome lingers, there is a risk of widespread civil unrest.

This is the best reason to hope that the US presidential election will be settled overnight or very shortly thereafter.