Despite Biden leading in Nevada and Pennsylvania and the remaining vote coming from Democratic areas, news networks refused to call the election for Biden for 4 days. Despite the whole world knowing Biden had already won.
Well, most of us. The delay caused widespread of false information. While an election night call might have been impossible, I would have called it Wednesday morning.
Americans are used to knowing election results early. And there are always people who want to dispute and delegitimize the election results, but are silenced when their guy concedes or the news networks call it.
CNN, AP, and others did something morally wrong by waiting. Those four days created a very tense atmosphere and I think it directly led to the events of Jan 6.
But of course, the news networks liked having high ratings for a few days....
The only reason that "Americans are used to knowing election results early" is that the vast majority of elections in our lifetimes haven't been very close. But, even if that weren't the case: Oh, well? Votes take as long as they take to count. No more, no less. I know we like to compare how some states take less time than others, which would matter if we had a national system all set up the same, all funded the same. But...we don't.
People want to get all over CA, but the reality is that 2 days later when people were ripping on CA's vote count, they actually had a way higher percentage of votes counted than MS. But, no one cares about MS. Vote counting happened in much the same way this election that it does in every other. Votes take a while to count. We just don't usually give a darn unless it's close.
