First they will count the Trump and Harris votes that actually matter. Then they will quickly tally the rest of the ballots and easily conclude that no other candidate stands a chance, and then they will declare either Trump or Harris the winner.
Splitting the "other" category up into different third party candidates is a waste of effort since all of them will lose, and that outcome can easily be determined by tallying all the ballots not going to Trump or Harris. There are no 2nd or 3rd place winners.
In principle, under a First Past The Post system you can get vote splitting parties and those votes for those representatives should still be counted because if they got more votes than last time and are on an upward trajectory then those candidates can measure how well they're resonating with their voters.
But with the USA's FPTP and electoral college system, I'd agree with you, there's zero point in counting those votes before declaring the winner because ultimately the electoral college comes down to red or blue which is the only thing that matters in US politics.
This is a shame because a private continent like the US could be the greatest tapestry of all flavours of political candidates and ideologies with debate and compromise if it wasn't for:
The electoral college and FPTP making it into a two party system.
The hugely biased news media which has no obligation to report factually and fair.
That both sides (with the Republicans being the one that is objectively worse because of their abhorrent behaviour that's somehow only gotten worse of late) vying for that insider trading perk and getting to control the worlds largest military and therefore dictate history.
I feel bad for all 12 people who knowingly wasted their vote on stein, because now they've truly wasted their vote on an incompetent candidate who couldn't even do the very least expected from them and won't even be able to contribute to (and still missing) hitting a meaningful percentage of votes.
The green party is a fucking joke that only exists to be a spoiler party, and shit like this is why I mock the green party. They're fucking clown shoes on the best days.
In my voting booth there was a piece of paper taped up stating that though Jill Stein was on the ballot, votes for her would not be counted. Wish i could remember the actual language.
Wiki: reliable - The Associated Press is a news agency. There is consensus that the Associated Press is generally reliable. Syndicated reports from the Associated Press that are published in other sources are also considered generally reliable.
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
The "greatest democracy" ladies and gentlemen! Where they don't even bother counting your vote unless it's for two specific candidates so there's no way to know how many people voted for each other candidates!
Need an example of how it's done? Dozens of candidates that are there to protest the cancellation of the electoral reform, we can still tell how many votes they got:
the greatest democracy where when the candidate either knows the law and doesn't comply with them because of arrogance or doesn't know the law because her party and her candidacy were and always have been absolute unserious jokes, it's not the candidate's fault or the party's fault. it's the democrats' fault because to you people it's always the democrats' fault even though the democrats had zero involvement in stein fucking over her own campaign.