Mozambique: Nyusi congratulates Biden and Harris

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Mozambique: Nyusi congratulates Biden and Harris

6:14 CAT | 08 Nov 2020

File photo: Noticias

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Sunday morning congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for their election as President and Vice President-elect of the United States.

In a message published on his Facebook page. Nyusi said “we forecast a Presidency full of successes for you”.

He noted that Kamala Harris has become the first woman to be elected Vice-President of the US, which he described as “a historic fact which strengthens the need to bank on the promotion of women”.

The United States, said Nyusi, “is a strategic partner of Mozambique, and we are sure that our cooperation will remain firm, and, as always, will work in favour of our two peoples”.

Nyusi’s message did not so much as mentioned the losing candidate, outgoing President Donald Trump, who is still claiming that the election was fraudulent and is threatening legal action. Trump has produced no evidence for his claims, and the clear consensus of US opinion is that Trump stands no chance of overturning the result.

Biden’s victory became clear on Saturday afternoon (southern African time) when it became clear that he had won more than the necessary 270 delegates in the Electoral College.

When reputable news media, notably the Associated Press, called the state of Pennsylvania, with its 20 Electoral College votes, for Biden, it was clear that the game was over. An additional six votes from Nevada, gave Biden 290 Electoral College votes, compared with only 214 for Trump.

The outcome in two states remains uncertain, but Biden looks set to take Georgia where, with 99 per cent of the vote counted, he has a slim lead of slightly more than 10,000 votes over Trump. There is an outside chance that Biden will also take North Carolina. But the latest results available give Trump a 75,000 majority in this state.

If US elections were fought on normal democratic principles, in which a vote is worth the same, whether cast in Wyoming or in California, then Biden would easily have beaten Trump by several million votes.

The Electoral College, which discriminates in favour of states with small populations, allowed Trump to win in 2016, but not this time.

In term of the popular vote, as of Sunday afternoon, Biden had a lead of well over four million votes. He had 75.2 million votes to Trump’s 70.8 million. That gap can only widen since most of the states with large numbers of votes still to be counted are strongholds of Biden’s Democratic Party.

Thus in California, so far only 66 per cent of the vote has been counted, and in New York only 78 per cent. Most of these missing votes are likely to be for Biden. He already has the largest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in a US election.

Source: AIM