ORLANDO, Fla. – 'Twas the day after elections and all throughout the U.S., Americans were still waiting to find out who would lead the country for the next four years.
Polls closed Tuesday night and yet on Wednesday, hours later, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden had the 270 electoral votes needed to secure a win in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
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As of 6 p.m., Biden was leading in electoral votes with his 264 compared to Trump’s 214.
Election Day is over, so what’s the holdup? Well, while each candidate has been able to pull out a win in some key battleground states -- Trump won Florida’s 29 electoral votes, Texas’ 38 and Ohio’s 18; Biden flipped and won Arizona’s 11 votes, Minnesota’s 10 and Virginia’s 13 -- the race was still too close to call in a number of states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania and Alaska. Biden was declared the winner of Michigan by the Associated Press around 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
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It was unclear when or how quickly a winner could be determined. A late burst of votes in Michigan gave Biden a small lead, but it was still too early to call the race. The Associated Press declared Biden the winner in Wisconsin by Wednesday afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of votes were also outstanding in Pennsylvania.
Vote tabulations routinely continue beyond Election Day, and states largely set the rules for when the count has to end. In presidential elections, a key point is a date in December when presidential electors met. That’s set by federal law.
Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted that his state had over 1 million ballots to be counted and that he “promised Pennsylvanians that we would count every vote and that’s what we’re going to do.”
While the country waits on those ballots to be counted, many Americans are trying to do the math on their own to see which states each candidate still needs to win in order to declare victory in the U.S. presidential election.
Put those calculators away, because the interactive map below, provided by CNN, does the math for you.
The embed allows you to map your own road to 270, which shows you all the different ways Trump or Biden can still secure a path to the White House. Click on different U.S. states to see how they typically vote and what role they have the potential play in the presidential election. Clicking an individual state will change who is winning its electoral votes.
NOTE: Now that polls have closed, live race results are fed to ClickOrlando.com from the Associated Press, which means their data could differ from the information provided above by CNN. This embed is meant to serve only as a preview of what outcomes America could in the U.S. presidential election.
Could there be a tie?
As much as it pains me to write this, it’s possible this presidential election could end in a 269-269 Electoral College tie.
The interactive infogram below, created by News 6 special projects producer Donovan Myrie, breaks down what Americans could expect in the event of a tie:
Visit ClickOrlando.com/Results2020 for all live race results, including our live Electoral College tracker.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.