How pandemic can affect U.S. presidential election?

The whole process of U.S. presidential election starting from campaign and debates, is in the center of the world's attention as the USA is one of the powerful countries in the world and all are looking forward to see who the next president of the country will be.

In the sidelines of “Elections 2020: A Virtual Reporting Tour in the United States and the American Electoral Process” program Aysor.am will present to its readers a series about U.S. election process.

This year presidential election in the USA will take place on November 3. The nominees are Donald Trump (Republican party) and Joe Biden (Democratic party).

U.S. electoral system is one of the complex systems in the world.

Before Armenia passed to parliamentary governance system, one Election Day was being appointed when the whole Republic was electing a president. In the USA the election process lasts for a few months.

The president of the United States is elected indirectly through the United States Electoral College to a four-year term.

In the Electoral College system, each state gets a certain number of electors based on its total number of representatives in Congress. Each elector casts one electoral vote following the general election; there are a total of 538 electoral votes. The candidate that gets more than half (270) wins the election.

Before the general election, most candidates for president go through a series of state primaries and caucuses. Though primaries and caucuses are run differently, they both serve the same purpose. They let the states choose the major political parties’ nominees for the general election.

Expert of U.S. federal system of government Mark Rozell says historically almost without exceptions the midterm elections tend to put into office many more members of the opposition party.

“It is another indicator of how Americans don't want to centralize or concentrate power in the executive branch and in the national government. We like to surround the president with more officials of the opposite party in the middle of the four year term during which he had claimed that mandate to lead for four years, thus making it more difficult for the president to get his policy initiatives through,” he says.

Doctor Rozell also speaks about the effect the pandemic had on the election process.

"In the past, you put on your TV, watched the results coming in state by state, and at some point late night, the networks declare a winner, somebody who got 270 or above in the Electoral College. Because of the pandemic, we are having much more voting by mail this year and also early voting so that voting in person can be staggered over time, so we minimize the risk to people. Counting of the mail ballots will take a few, perhaps several days, perhaps even longer. I'm not sure. We've not done this before. Therefore, we will not know most likely the result of the election on election night itself as had always been the case. We will have to wait for the mail-in votes to be counted,” says the expert.

Another interesting fact is that Trump’s supporters prefer to vote on the Election Day in person, while Biden’s supporters prefer to vote by mail.

“It's strange that we're talking about the pandemic as having a political impact, but it is possible that the election results as they're coming in on election night will show Donald Trump winning and winning and winning all over the place, but that's based on more of his voters showing up to vote in person. Then as the results come in from the mailed in ballots, his margin is going to narrow, narrow, and perhaps be overtaken by Biden after several days. It may take some time to know who is going to win,” says Rozell.