We'll know in about 48 hours.  Or maybe not. For some very odd reason that we're being conditioned to accept as routine – so that it can be routinized – it now takes days or even weeks to determine which of two candidates received the most votes. This is particularly off-putting given most of these votes are collected electronically. Isn't the whole point of electronic vote-collection to make the process more efficient?

Of course, all it has done is make the process more opaque.

The Great Gripe many have about the last selection is that no one really knows who won.  Well, no one outside the ambit of the rather undemocratic entities – the private companies – who have a lock (literally) on the workings of the voting machines, over which they assert a proprietary claim. This, too, is odd – yet accepted – because it has been routinized. Like the appalling (to those who remember when it was not routine) business of having to submit to being physically touched in intimate areas – to being touched, at all – for absolutely no reason specific to you by a government worker in order to be allowed to board a commercial flight. Once upon a time, people who weren't criminals or suspected of being criminals were free to travel unmolested, if you can imagine that. It was kind of like being free to speak.

You had to be there.

There were, of course, attempts to find out who won. These were styled "insurrections" and a "threat to our democracy"- an interesting construction. These were summarily dismissed as well as disparaged – not on the merits but rather because (said the courts) the complainants lacked "standing." This is also an interesting construction in that everyone who is a voting age citizen arguably has "standing" – to know whether an election outcome that directly affects them was or was not legitimate.