The future of the presidency hangs not on some errant Florida chads this time, but on the absentee and mail-in ballots of several battleground states. Millions of those ballots remained untallied Tuesday and early Wednesday, leaving the nation unclear on where the presidential race and balance of the Senate stand. It will be days before the final numbers are all sorted out. No one likes this uncertainty, but voters across the country were forced into this voting option by a pandemic that rages out of control because President Donald Trump turned it into a political issue.

Try as Trump has to minimize the coronavirus threat, it was the factor behind voters' extreme reluctance to venture to the polls. By an overwhelming margin, Democrats opted more than Republicans to exercise their absentee voting rights, which means Trump is now a victim of his own pandemic mismanagement.

The huge absentee count means he must sit patiently — never one of his strong suits — and await the painstaking process of opening envelopes, sorting ballots and processing the votes. Since Trump won't wait for democracy to take its course, the nation once again must grapple with his unfounded claims of fraud. Then there's his ridiculous assertion early Wednesday that he had won even though the popular vote and Electoral College count both placed him behind Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Twitter removed at least three of his tweets because they contained misleading content.

Trump has demanded that ballots not be counted if the postal service delivered them after the close of polls Tuesday, despite state laws in some swing states that determine ballot eligibility by the postmark date, not the delivery date. It was Trump who imposed funding and staffing cutbacks that led to postal service delays.

Either way, the vote-counting process was never the president's call. In heavily contested Pennsylvania, election officials estimated more than 2.5 million ballots were cast by mail, including votes from military service members. Under Pennsylvania law, those votes count every bit as much as a vote cast in person, and if it requires additional days for them to be tallied, so be it.

The heaviest absentee balloting was in cities like Philadelphia, where the number of still-uncounted ballots threatened to overturn Trump's Pennsylvania lead. The demographics don't bode well for Trump, which probably is why he advocates extraordinary measures, including Supreme Court intervention, to stifle the count.

The thing Trump seems to fear most is that his fate rests in the hands of American voters. Why Republicans aren't troubled by his democracy-defying maneuvers will remain a question for historians and political scientists to analyze for years to come.

This is a mess of Trump's own making. If the result upsets him, he has only himself to blame.

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