It appears highly likely now that Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States, with nearly all of the major news outlets in the United States so declaring.

Many people in a handful of states are still counting votes, a handful of days after Election Day, partly because of an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. That some states prevented the tallying of those ballots before Election Day led to some delay in that tallying.

The President is the candidate who receives the most votes in the Electoral College. The total number of votes there is 538, and the winner needs one more than half, so 270, in order to win. Projections are that Biden will exceed that total, perhaps by three dozen, when all votes have been counted. Biden was the clear winner already in the national popular vote–which, not technically the mechanism of electing the President, is still often a predictor of the outcome in the Electoral College. Exceptions do occur, however; for example, Trump himself won the electoral vote in 2016 despite not winning the popular vote. The same was true of John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000.

As of today, November 7, elections officials are still counting votes in most states. That is the norm. However, most of the final tallying occurs long after the general result is known. The race was especially close in a handful of states, in most of which the vote-tallying took longer than normal.

The Electoral College will meet on December 14 to cast the final votes. Projections are that Biden will have the requisite number to unseat the incumbent, President Donald Trump.