Your Money, Election Headlines, and How Votes are Counted

Last night during election night in the United States, the DOW Futures market was low until about 9:30 PM Eastern when it began to rise and continued until President Trump gave his preemptive speech declaring he ‘won’ the election and called for all voting counts to cease. Once that aired across the news stations and online, the DOW Futures took a huge hit and dropped over 700 points from the high it was at.

Futures have been all over the place on #ElectionNight. President Trump's address to the nation sent Dow futures sliding. @TheDomino gives us a market update. https://t.co/wM1KgkpZgH pic.twitter.com/fFirOkIgzH

— CNBC (@CNBC) November 4, 2020

My advice is to sit back and relax. Let the votes be counted, and wait for the results, which hopefully should be finished sometime Friday afternoon. Now is not the time to be trading and gambling with your money.

Electoral Votes vs. Popular Votes

In 2016, Trump received 14,010,177 total votes in the primary. Clinton received 16,849,779 votes. If elections were based on popular votes – Hillary Clinton would be president right now.

In reality, it doesn’t matter one whit of beans who has the popular vote – who the American people want to be their president. It all is decided on who wins the most electoral college votes. There are currently 538 available electoral votes and a would-be president needs to secure 270 or more of these to win.

This is the reason why you see candidates campaigning in states with high electoral votes more often then say a state with only 3 electoral votes.

Hillary lost by just 74 electoral votes, even though she had the popular vote.

Real-Time Election Updates

The Associated Press can fairly accurately decide who the winner of the election will be based on the electoral vote count. You can read more about how the 4,000 workers located in every county report their findings work with local polling centers to obtain accurate information to report.

You can also keep checking this Google election tally in real-time to see who is at the front of the electoral votes and how the swing states are looking. As of this writing, Biden is leading with 238 electoral votes to Trump’s 213 votes.

If one candidate picks up any combination of wins in the swing states, it could potentially give them the 270 electoral votes to be declared the winner of the election. Even if the popular vote is higher, it is those electoral votes that determine who the next president is going to be.

To learn more about the swing states and how the electoral votes are counted as well as mail-in ballots versus in-person voting, check out this article from The Guardian, Mail-in ballot tracker: counting votes in the US swing states. They have done a phenomenal job of being impartial through their Fight to Vote project. They put voter suppression at the center of their coverage this year to ensure Black Americans and other disenfranchised groups were not blocked from casting their vote.

How to Cure Your Mail-In Ballot

The pandemic has played a huge role in people voting by mail-in ballot, I voted by mail for the first-time this year due to my concerns about voting at a polling location.

Some mail-in ballots may be rejected for whatever reason – you forgot to sign it, didn’t include pertinent information needed, etc. Your vote will still count if your state gives you the chance to ‘cure’ your ballot if you are missing information such as this.

• Missing or using voter signatures that don’t match official records
• Missing a witness signature or address
• Failing to place your ballot in a secrecy envelope when required
• Accidentally adding stray markings to your ballot.

To learn more about how to cure your ballot and the various requirements for each state, visit Our Count Voter Justice.

This election will impact every facet of American life. Make sure your voice is heard.

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