US Election may extend for days as uncounted votes remain

The United States has no idea, yet, about who is going to be the next president as not enough votes have been counted yet for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden to claim victory. In fact, because of the time it takes to count the huge number of postal votes cast during this pandemic election, it could take days.

And if there are legal challenges to the results, it might even take weeks, which could make the situation more tricky, according to BBC.

To become president, a candidate doesn't actually need to win the popular vote. Instead, s/he has to win the majority in a system called the electoral college, where each state gets a certain number of votes or "electors" roughly in proportion to its population.

So if a candidate wins that state, s/he wins its votes. There are 538 of these state votes in total - the person who gets 270 will become president.

However, there a few key battleground states whose voters decide the election.

In those, so far this time:

• Biden and Trump are projected to win the states they were comfortably expected to win
• The race is still very close in a few crucial competitive states
• In some of those tight races, officials haven't even started counting postal votes, and those could change everything.

Among the key states, Florida is projected for Donald Trump, where many are pointing to Cuban-American support in Miami-Dade county.

Arizona has not voted a Democrat candidate since 1996 but looks like a potential gain for Mr Biden, who went after young progressive Latinos living there. Joe Biden flipped an electoral vote in Nebraska and expressed confidence to supporters that he would prevail in three Northern states and Arizona.

As for Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, these states haven't even started counting postal votes and that could take days.

Meanwhile, in the Senate races, Democrats faced an uphill battle to claim a majority, reports The New York Times.

Live results as of 15:20 BST (Bangladesh Standard Time)

Electoral votes (270 to win out of 538):

Senate votes (Tally includes 65 seats not up for election; 50 to win):

House of Representatives votes (218 to win):

(Data source: The New York Times)

Donald Trump is doing better than expected and Joe Biden has failed to win those battleground states which count votes quickly, which means more uncertainty as we wait for a few key states.