Kerry calls Bush, concedes the presidential election

President George W. Bush’s campaign team declared victory in the presidential elections yesterday morning, claiming that the remaining battleground state of Ohio would go its way. However, Senator John Kerry’s team was unwilling to concede defeat, insisting the 20 electoral votes up for grabs in Ohio could still be won after all the ballots had been counted. That could take up to two weeks.

Chief of staff Andrew Card said he believed Bush had won with “more votes than any candidate in history”.

“We are convinced that President Bush has won re-election with at least 286 electoral college votes. He also had a margin of three and a half million popular votes,” Card said. Candidates require 270 votes in the Electoral College to become president.

The Republicans based their projections on polls, meaning they also took into account the three states for which official results were yet to be released – Iowa (7 votes), New Mexico (5 votes) and Ohio (20 votes). Ohio was nicknamed “the election battlefield”, since whichever candidate now wins in this state will automatically secure the necessary majority in the Electoral College. According to the polls, Bush is leading Kerry by one percentage point in each of the three states.

Despite this, the Democrats are refusing to concede defeat, insisting that the 250,000 provisional and absentee ballots cast in the Buckeye State might change the outcome. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said the Kerry campaign would not concede anything. “We will fight for every vote,” he told cheering supporters in Boston. “We’ve waited four years for this victory. We can wait one more night.” A top adviser to Kerry said yesterday morning that the campaign team would determine its plan of action after looking closely at the results.

According to American electoral tradition, the winner must declare their victory and losing candidates admit their defeat. The Democrats are counting on the very close results in Ohio, New Mexico and Iowa.

So far Bush is projected to have taken 28 states and 254 electoral votes. A win in Ohio would assure him of at least 274 votes, more than the 270 needed for a majority in the Electoral College. Kerry has a projected 252 electoral votes, meaning that neither candidate has officially won the race yet.

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has issued orders for counties to report total numbers of provisional ballots. Counting these ballots will not begin until Thursday according to Blackwell’s directive, and it is not clear how long the ballot-counting will take. Initially, Blackwell had said that the counting of provisional and absentee ballots would not begin for 11 days. He also said he could not easily estimate the number of ballots to be counted but said a figure of 250,000 would not be unrealistic. Admitting that the exact number of provisional ballots was unknown, he said their number was “trending toward 175,000.”

The key turning point in Tuesday’s election came when Bush won in Florida, a state he won four years ago by a mere 537 votes and after a lengthy dispute. This time, however, there was no question as to the winner of the Sunshine State, which Bush won by a margin of more than 370,000 votes.
adelina.radulescu@zf.ro