Citizen Journalism & the 2020 Election
The main questions that I believe everyone will be able to answer are: How confident are the voters that their vote has counted? Are there any concerns that people have with the delay of the battleground states still counting ballots? Are people okay with having a President that they may not want?
After waiting until the end of the first week of the election, I have found that there is way more anxiety involved in finding out who the next President of the United States will be. With Donald Trump’s tirades of misleading information of the overall situation, as President Trump demanded a very late stop to the election. According to a late-night interview on NBS, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro stated that, “As the supreme Court received the case of Trump attempting to stop the count of the votes specifically in Pennsylvania, all of these votes are valid and they will be counted. The Supreme Court’s decision to rule that the votes will continue to be counted was a progressive move into adding more data into the vote count.”
To what the General Public had to say about the overall results of the General Election, I’ve asked some co-workers who have asked to not use their full names to share their thoughts to only one of the questions that I’ve been wanting to ask.
For a co-worker named Alex, he was able to respond to the ‘How confident are the voters that their vote has been counted?’ with, “I know my vote has been counted since I dropped off my ballot at one of the ballot-Dropbox locations back in mid-October. Me personally, I don’t care who wins, all I care about is how I know that my vote will count.”
Next, I asked another co-worker named Daniel, “Are there any concerns that you have with the delay of the battleground states still counting the ballots?” He responded with, I’m only concerned that because of how thin the overall gap between both Donald Trump and Joe Biden is in between all of the states that haven’t finished counting such as Alaska, Philadelphia, Nevada, and Georgia, I find it nerve-racking that this type of election is taking place since a lot of us want to officially know who will become the President for the next Presidential term. Me personally, I’d like to see Biden win the election and win all 4 of these states but, there are still too many ballots that haven’t been counted. It may seem like this election is close to coming to an end, but I know that it is far from over.”
After talking with Daniel, I interviewed my co-worker Jackson and asked him “Are you okay with having a President that you don’t want?” He responded with, “Yeah, I’m more confident that Biden isn’t going to win the election, I’m not saying that I want Trump to become President, I’m just saying that there is a bigger chance of him winning in the end. I’m looking at it more as an inevitable end to the election.”
