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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maanvi Singh (now), Joan E Greve and Martin Belam (earlier)

Biden addresses nation as election victory formally affirmed - as it happened

Summary

From me and Joan E Greve:

  • The US coronavirus death toll surpassed 300,000 as the country distributed its first doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Frontline healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine today, and many of them said they were “relieved” to get the treatment after months of treating coronavirus patients. Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse in New York, said shortly after receiving the vaccine this morning, “I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.”
  • Members of the electoral college formally cast their votes for president and affirmed Joe Biden as president-elect. Biden has won 306 electoral votes – the same amount Trump won in 2016.
  • Biden addressed the country on Monday night. “If anyone didn’t know it before, they know it now. What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: democracy” he said.
  • Paul Mitchell, a Republican congressman of Michigan told CNN that he is disgusted with Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to undermine and overturn the election results. He alerted the House clerk that he will be changing his party affiliation from Republican to independent, and has notified Republican leaders that he’s ending his “engagement and association with the Republican party at both the national and state level”.
  • Attorney general William Barr will be leaving his post just before Christmas. Barr’s loyalty to Trump seemed almost bottomless – but he recently angered the president by disputing systematic fraud in the elections.
  • The Wisconsin supreme court again rejected Trump’s bid to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. The conservative-leaning court ruled that the president had waited too long to file his challenge. Conservative justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in the decision, “[T]he [Trump] campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began.”
  • The US formally blamed Iran for the presumed death of former FBI agent Robert Levinson. The treasury department issued sanctions against two Iranian intelligence officers believed to have been involved in Levinson’s 2007 abduction.

Updated

Lamar Alexander, a Republican senator of Tennessee, who had previously said that it’ll be “over” once the electoral college affirms the election, has released a statement emphasizing that point.

“The presidential election is over,” he said. “States have certified the votes. Courts have resolved disputes. The electors have voted. I hope that President Trump will put the country first, take pride in his considerable accomplishments, and help President-elect Biden get off to a good start. Especially during this pandemic, an orderly transition of power is crucially important.”

Updated

As much as Biden has emphasized unity since winning the election – and even though he ended his speech with a call to unity, his speech tonight didn’t pull any punches.

Updated

Before concluding his speech, Biden gave his condolences to those who lost loved ones to Covid-19: “Today, our nation passed a grim milestone. 300,000 deaths due to this Covid virus. My heart goes out to each of you in this dark winter of the pandemic.”

Updated

Biden also called out the 17 Republican state attorney generals and 126 Republican representatives who signed onto the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn election results in other states. “It’s a position so extreme we’ve never seen it before,” Biden said. The effort “refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law and refused to respect our Constitution”.

Now, he said, “is time to unite”.

“There’s urgent work in front of us.”

Updated

“If anyone didn’t know it before, they know it now. What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: democracy” Biden said.

After thanking officials who carried out the elections, he also praised the judicial system. “The Trump campaign brought dozens and dozens of legal challenges,” Biden said. “And each of the times they were heard, they were found to be without merit.”

Updated

“Together, Vice-president-elect Harris and I earned 306 electoral votes,” Biden said, noting that he has won by the same margin as Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump called that a “landslide”, Biden noted.

“Nothing, not even a pandemic, or an abuse of power can extinguish that flame” of American democracy, Biden added, noting the contributions of election officials in carrying out their duty amid the pandemic, and amid threats and verbal abuse from detractors and Trump supporters. “We owe these public servants a debt of gratitude,” Biden continued. “Our democracy survived because of them.”

Updated

Joe Biden speaks after electoral college affirms that he is president-elect

“The will of the people prevailed,” he said.

Joe Biden is affirmed presidential election winner by electoral college

Members of the electoral college affirmed that Joe Biden is the president-elect, having won more than 270 electoral votes.

Hawaii was the last state to cast its electoral votes, awarding Biden a total of 306 votes.

US healthcare workers have faced devastating losses amid PPE shortages

Danielle Renwick reports:

The US death toll from Covid-19 crossed the grim milestone of 300,000 Monday, just hours after the first doses of a new vaccine were given to high-risk healthcare workers.

Frontline healthcare worker have shouldered an extraordinary burden over the last 10 months and represent a disproportionate share of the sick.

The Guardian, in partnership with Kaiser Health News, is investigating the deaths of nearly 1,500 healthcare workers who appeared to have died of Covid-19 after working on the frontlines. The number of dead is expected to climb significantly as new data sources are unlocked in the coming weeks. Our data shows that the majority of healthcare workers who have died are people of color.

You can read hundreds of their stories in our interactive database. A few of their stories are below:

The president-elect will address the electoral college vote count in a speech to the nation later tonight. According to excerpts released by his transition team, Biden will say: “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed ... And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.”

Traditionally an afterthought, the meeting of the electoral college has taken on added importance this year because of the president’s refusal to concede the election. Despite an extraordinarily unsuccessful legal campaign to challenge the results in state and federal court, Trump has continued to claim without evidence that the vote was corrupted by fraud and irregularities.

In his speech, Biden will seek to put the election firmly to rest by looking ahead to his presidency and the challenges facing the country.

“As I said through this campaign, I will be a president for all Americans. I will work just as hard for those of you who didn’t vote for me, as I will for those who did,” Biden is expected to say.

He will add: “There is urgent work in front of all of us. Getting the pandemic under control to getting the nation vaccinated against this virus. Delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today – and then building our economy back better than ever.”

Biden is scheduled to deliver his speech at 7.30pm ET tonight, after every state has held its meeting of electors. Hawaii will be the last state to start its meeting, at 7pm ET.

Election results from November show Biden won 306 electoral college votes, exceeding the 270 needed to win, after four tumultuous years under Trump. The president-elect and the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, are due to take office on 20 January.

Trump’s refusal to accept reality has been embraced by a significant share of Republican elected officials, including the House leader, Kevin McCarthy, and much of the party’s base. Tensions over the election result, stoked by Trump, erupted in Washington over the weekend, when violence broke out amid a “Stop the Steal” rally.

Read more:

Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican of Missouri, is yet another Republican to break with the president by – accurately – calling Joe Biden the president-elect.

He told the Senate press poll that “we’ve now gone through the constitutional process and the electors have voted so there’s a president-elect”.

Throughout his tenure, William Barr went to great lengths to back Donald Trump:

  • He undermined the findings of the Russia investigation, issuing a summary that a judge later said twisted the findings of Robert Mueller.
  • He had the justice department intervene in a defamation lawsuit E Jean Carroll, an author who has accused Trump of raping her, in an extraordinary move that helped the president fight a private legal matter with taxpayer-funded resources.
  • He authorized the justice department to investigate unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud – even though he eventually broke with the president in saying that no evidence of systematic fraud was found.

Updated

William Barr’s resignation letter is dripping with praise for Donald Trump.

“You built the strongest and most resilient economy in American history,” Barr writes. “You have restored American military strength.” Barr praises the president’s Covid-19 response, and Middle East policy while repeating Trumpian grievance rhetoric about how the president faced a “partisan onslaught” that was “abusive and deceitful”.

Updated

From Guardian staff:

William Barr has been seen as a loyalist to the president, facing accusations throughout his tenure that he had turned the Department of Justice into an obedient servant of the White House.

Deputy attorney general Jeff Rosen, who Trump said was “an outstanding person” will take Barr’s post as acting attorney general.

Barr – whose fealty to Trump had seemed almost bottomless – had surprised many observers by telling the Associated Press in an interview published on 1 December that he disputed the idea, promulgated by the president and his re-election campaign, that there had been widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Trump has attempted to undermine the victory of his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, by pointing to routine, small-scale issues in an election – questions about signatures, envelopes and postal marks – as evidence of widespread voter fraud across the nation that cost him the election.

Trump and some of his allies have also endorsed more bizarre sources of supposed fraud, such as tying Biden’s win to election software created in Venezuela “at the direction of Hugo Chávez” – the former Venezuelan president who died in 2013.

“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DoJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Barr said in the interview with the AP.

Barr said some people were confusing the role of the federal criminal justice system and asking it to step in on allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits and reviewed by state or local officials, not the justice department.

Barr added: “There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and, people don’t like something – they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate’.”

Those comments probably infuriated Trump and his supporters as they have tried – and failed – to find any meaningful way, via the courts, requested recounts, or pressure on officials, of overturning his defeat by Biden.

Updated

Attorney general William Barr will be leaving his post just before Christmas, per Donald Trump.


Cheers erupted in the chamber where California’s electors were meeting, after they formally elected Californian Kamala Harris.

Here’s how Harris’ hometown, the San Francisco Bay Area, celebrated Harris’ victory after she and Joe Biden were projected the election winners:

California awards Joe Biden its 55 electoral votes, cementing his presidential victory

California – which has more electoral votes than any other state – seals the presidency for Joe Biden. By casting their electoral votes, California’s electors pushed Biden and Kamala Harris’ tally to 302 – well above the 270 needed to win.

After Hawaii casts its electoral votes today, Congress will meet on 6 January in a joint session to formally accept the results.

The electoral college voting today has so far gone as expected. After several electoral college delegates ignored the popular will and cast ballots for a candidate other than the one they’d pledged to support, the US supreme court has made it easier for states to remove rogue or so-called “faithless” electors.

Confused about how the whole system works? Here’s a review:

How does the US electoral college work?

Updated

Here’s the letter from Representative Paul Mitchell, breaking with the Republican party before he retires this year:

Fauci praises African American scientist at ‘forefront’ of creating Covid vaccine

Anthony Fauci has praised the work of Kizzmekia Corbett, an African American scientist who the leading US public health expert said was “at the forefront” of the development of a leading coronavirus vaccine.

In a conversation about mistrust of Covid-19 vaccines among Black people in an online forum with the National Urban League, Fauci said Corbett was one of two leaders of the team which created a vaccine found to be 94% effective.

Corbett’s team at the National Institutes of Health worked with pharmaceutical company Moderna to develop the vaccine – one of two found to be more than 90% effective – which is expected to be authorised for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration this month.

Asked to talk about the involvement of African American scientists in the vaccination effort, Fauci said: “That [Moderna] vaccine was actually developed in my institute’s vaccine research centre by a team of scientists led by Dr Barney Graham and his close colleague Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, or Kizzy Corbett. Kizzy is an African American scientist who is right at the forefront of the development of the vaccine.

“So, the first thing you might want to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman. And that is just a fact.”

Research by the Covid Collaborative, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and UnidosUS found that just 14% of Black Americans trust that a vaccine will be safe and 18% trust it will be effective.

The study found that many concerns were based on America’s racist history of medical research, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment between 1932 and 1972, in which more than 100 Black men are estimated to have died.

Fauci said he fully respected scepticism around the vaccine and said it was important to address the historical reasons behind it. He also emphasised that scientists, not politicians, are in charge of approving coronavirus vaccines.

Read more:

Oregon awards its seven electoral votes to Joe Biden

As expected, Oregon’s electors awarded the state’s electoral votes to Joe Biden, bringing the electoral vote tallies to 247 for Biden and 232 for Donald Trump.

In the end, Biden will win 306 electoral votes.

California and Hawaii will be awarding their electoral votes this afternoon.

Updated

Representative Paul Mitchell quits Republican party over efforts to overturn elections

Paul Mitchell, a Republican congressman of Michigan told CNN that he is disgusted with Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to undermine and overturn the election results.

He has reportedly alerted the House clerk that he will be changing his party affiliation from Republican to independent, and has notified Republican leaders that he’s ending his “engagement and association with the Republican party at both the national and state level”.

Mitchell is retiring from Congress, so has less to lose by making this move. Meanwhile, 126 of his Republican colleagues in Congress signed a letter in support of the Texas attorney general’s long-shot attempt to overturn election results in other states.

Updated

Today so far

That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • The US coronavirus death toll surpassed 300,000 as the country distributed its first doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Frontline healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine today, and many of them said they were “relieved” to get the treatment after months of treating coronavirus patients. Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse in New York, said shortly after receiving the vaccine this morning, “I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.”
  • Members of the electoral college are meeting to formally cast their votes for president. As of now, Joe Biden has won 240 electoral votes, and Donald Trump has received 229 votes. By the end of the day, Biden is expected to have been awarded 306 votes total, bringing him one step closer to his January inauguration.
  • Biden will address the electoral college vote count in a speech to the nation tonight. According to excerpts released by his transition team, the president-elect will say, “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed. ... And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.”
  • The Wisconsin supreme court again rejected Trump’s bid to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. The conservative-leaning court ruled that the president had waited too long to file his challenge. Conservative justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in the decision, “[T]he [Trump] Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began.”
  • The US formally blamed Iran for the presumed death of former FBI agent Robert Levinson. The treasury department issued sanctions against two Iranian intelligence officers believed to have been involved in Levinson’s 2007 abduction.

Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Updated

In his speech tonight, Joe Biden will seek to put the election firmly to rest by looking ahead to his presidency and the challenges facing the country.

“As I said through this campaign, I will be a president for all Americans. I will work just as hard for those of you who didn’t vote for me, as I will for those who did,” the president-elect is expected to say.

Biden will add, “There is urgent work in front of all of us. Getting the pandemic under control to getting the nation vaccinated against this virus. Delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today — and then building our economy back better than ever.”

Biden is scheduled to deliver his speech at 7:30 pm ET tonight, after every state has held its meeting of electors. Hawaii will be the last state to start its meeting, at 7 pm ET. As of now, Biden has already won 240 electoral votes, and he is expected to end up at 306.

Biden addresses electoral college vote count: 'It is time to turn the page'

Joe Biden’s transition team has released excerpts from his speech tonight, when the president-elect will address the electoral college vote count.

“If anyone didn’t know it before, we know it now. What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: democracy,” Biden is expected to say.

“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing – not even a pandemic or an abuse of power – can extinguish that flame.”

Echoing his other recent calls for the country to unify, the Democratic president-elect will urge Americans to move on from the election.

“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden will say. “We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. ... And so, now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.”

Updated

Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, blamed the country’s high coronavirus death toll on Donald Trump’s “bad leadership”.

Perez released a statement criticizing the president shortly after the US coronavirus death toll surpassed 300,000.

“This wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t the result of bad luck. It was the result of bad leadership,” Perez said. “Donald Trump’s mishandling of this pandemic will be remembered as one of the worst and deadliest blunders in presidential history.”

Perez promised that Joe Biden would provide the necessary leadership to see the country out of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We still have a lot of work to do to make sure vaccines are swiftly and effectively delivered to every corner of the country. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will lead the way as we rebuild our economy and our nation back better,” Perez said.

Updated

US coronavirus death toll surpasses 300,000

The US coronavirus death toll has now surpassed 300,000, representing the highest death toll of any country in the world.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, 300,267 Americans have now died of coronavirus.

The grim milestone comes on the same day that frontline health care workers in the US began receiving the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

Public health experts expressed joy about the rollout of the vaccine, but they emphasized that the country must continue to take precautions like wearing masks and socially distancing to limit the spread of the virus until the vaccine is widely distributed.

Speaking to MSNBC earlier today, Dr Anthony Fauci predicted that the average healthy American with no preexisting conditions may have access to the vaccine as soon as late March.

John Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, mocked the state’s Republican party for trying to circumvent the electoral vote count that took place earlier today.

As the state cast its 20 electoral votes for Joe Biden, the Pennsylvania GOP said it had conducted a “procedural vote” in favor of Donald Trump in an effort to keep the president’s legal challenges alive, even though dozens of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have already been withdrawn or dismissed.

Fetterman responded by joking that he would also be carrying out a procedural reenactment of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ game yesterday against the Buffalo Bills. (The Bills won that football game by a score of 26-15.)

One White House official who contracted coronavirus was hospitalized for three months and had a toe on his left foot and his lower right leg amputated, according to a new report.

Bloomberg News reports:

Crede Bailey, the director of the White House security office, was the most severely ill among dozens of Covid-19 cases known to be connected to the White House. Bailey’s family has asked the White House not to publicize his condition, and President Donald Trump has never publicly acknowledged his illness.

Bailey’s friends have raised more than $30,000 for his rehabilitation through a GoFundMe account. The White House declined to say whether Trump has contributed to the effort.

‘Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated,’ Dawn McCrobie, who organized the GoFundMe effort for Bailey, wrote Dec. 7.

The White House has experienced several outbreaks of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, but that has not stopped the Trump administration from holding Christmas parties in recent weeks.

Photos of those parties have shown many maskless attendees and little social distancing, raising concerns about another potential outbreak among White House staffers.

Updated

The battleground state of Michigan has cast its 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden, who won the state by about 3 points.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer presided over the electoral vote count, and the Democrat called on the country to come together now that the election is over.

“It’s time to move forward together as one United States of America,” Whitmer said. “Now is the time for us to put this election behind us and to focus our efforts together to defeat our common enemy, Covid-19.”

The Michigan capitol in Lansing was closed to the public today due to credible threats of violence in the days leading up to the electoral vote count.

US imposes sanctions on Turkey over Russian air defense system

The US has imposed sanctions on Turkey, a Nato ally, over its purchase of a Russian air defense system.

The AP reports:

The extraordinary step against a treaty ally comes at a delicate time in relations between Washington and Ankara, which have been at odds for years over Turkey’s acquisition from Russia of the S-400 missile defense system, along with Turkish actions in Syria, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in the eastern Mediterranean.

The sanctions, which were required under U.S. law dating to 2017 if the administration deemed there to be violations, add another element of uncertainty to the relationship as Trump winds down his term. The move is the first time that law, known as CAATSA, has been used to penalize a U.S. ally.

Prior to Monday, the U.S. had kicked Turkey out of its F-35 stealth fighter development and training program over the S-400 purchase, but had taken no further steps despite persistent warnings from American officials who have long complained about that the system is incompatible with NATO equipment and a potential threat to allied security.

In a statement, secretary of state Mike Pompeo said the US warned Turkey “on numerous occasions” about the national-security threats posed by the purchase.

“Turkey nevertheless decided to move ahead with the procurement and testing of the S-400, despite the availability of alternative, NATO-interoperable systems to meet its defense requirements,” Pompeo said.

“I urge Turkey to resolve the S-400 problem immediately in coordination with the United States.”

It had been previously reported that Donald Trump was opposed to the sanctions because he did not want to anger Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s authoritarian president.

Hillary Clinton offered some criticism of the electoral college after casting her electoral vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in New York.

“I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office,” the former secretary of state said in a tweet.

“But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she added in the tweet, which included a photo of her flashing a thumbs up in the New York state capitol.

The criticism is quite notable given that Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the 2016 popular vote by about 3 million votes. However, Trump won the election because he received more electoral votes.

Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, both cast their electoral votes for Biden and Harris in Albany this afternoon.

Leaders of Operation Warp Speed, the White House’s efforts to distribute a Covid-19 to Americans, held a press briefing this afternoon detailing specifics of the upcoming distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Distribution is well underway for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that the US Food and Drug Administration approved for emergency use on Friday. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that 2.9 million doses of the vaccine will be sent out over the course of the week.

ER nurse George Biddle receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
ER nurse George Biddle receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Photograph: Adam Cairns/AP

The 2.9 million doses will be sent out to 1,217 sites over the course of the week, with 636 sites receiving the vaccine by Wednesday and another 581 receiving doses by the end of the week, barring no disruptions in transit.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires a second booster shot, administered at least 21 days after the first dose, and Azar confirmed they will ship out 2.9 million more doses for second doses.

The federal government has ordered 6 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to be shipped once it is approved by the FDA for emergency use, Azar said, which could happen as early as Friday.

Gustave Perna, who oversees logistics for Operation Warp Speed, noted that severe snowstorms coming into the Northeast and north Midwest could potentially cause disruptions in transit. But, he said, there is a “constant flow of available vaccine” being shipped out.

Dr Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific officer for Operation Warp Speed, confirmed that they believe 100 million people will have gotten the first dose of the vaccine – Moderna’s vaccine also requires a second dose – by the end of March.

Azar said that the federal government has “enough vaccines purchased for every American who wants it by the second quarter of 2021” and said the government can purchase more if necessary.

But the leaders of Operations Warp speed alluded to the fact that such a timeline relies on the approval of the vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and AstroZeneca, which are still in the middle of the last clinical trial stage.

Johnson & Johnson is expected to go into committee review with the FDA in February, while the timeline for AstroZeneca’s vaccine is unclear as the trial has paused multiple times for safety review. Both vaccines only require one dose of the vaccine.

The leaders of Operation Warp Speed plan to hold briefings every Friday to update the number of vaccines that have been distributed and administered.

US formally blames Iran for death of Robert Levinson

The US has for the first time formally blamed Iran for the presumed death of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing more than a decade ago.

As world affairs editor Julian Borger reported for the Guardian in March, when Levinson’s family said they believed he was dead:

Levinson disappeared 13 years ago on Iran’s Kish island. The US initially claimed he was there on his own initiative, but in 2013 the Associated Press revealed he had been sent on a mission there by CIA analysts who had no authority to run espionage operations. Levinson was a specialist on Russian organised crime and had not had much previous involvement in Iran.

Tehran denied knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts until November last year, when it acknowledged that there was an ongoing case involving him before its revolutionary court.

Levinson, who suffered from diabetes, was last seen in a hostage video sent anonymously to the family in 2010, and then in still photographs three years later in which he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, of the kind used in the US detention camp on Guantánamo Bay. The images did not make clear who was detaining him.

As the Associated Press reports, “two Iranian intelligence officers, identified as Mohammad Baseri and Ahmad Khazai, are alleged to have been involved in [Levinson’s] abduction. Under sanctions announced on Monday, any property or assets that they hold in the US would be blocked. Though it’s unlikely that they have bank accounts in the US, the sanctions could also limit their movements or financial dealing outside of Iran. The men have met with intelligence officials from other countries and also led delegations, US officials say.”

US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said: “The abduction of Mr Levinson in Iran is an outrageous example of the Iranian regime’s willingness to commit unjust acts.”

Levinson’s family issued their own statement, saying: “This is just one step in a long road toward achieving justice, but it is an important one.”

The move from the Trump administration is part of hardline actions towards Tehran including withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal meant to stall Iran’s progress towards a viable weapon.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants to re-enter the deal, a prospect potentially jeopardised by such moves from the Trump administration. Biden takes power on 20 January.

Today so far

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • The first doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine in the US were distributed to frontline health care workers. Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse in New York, said shortly after receiving the vaccine this morning, “I feel hopeful today, relieved. ... I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history.”
  • Members of the electoral college are meeting to formally cast their votes for president. As of now, Joe Biden has won 146 electoral votes, and Donald Trump has received 97 votes. By the end of the day, Biden is expected to have been awarded 306 votes total, bringing him one step closer to his January inauguration.
  • The Wisconsin supreme court again rejected Trump’s bid to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. The conservative-leaning court ruled that the president had waited too long to file his challenge. Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in the decision, “[T]he [Trump] Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began.”

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Wisconsin supreme court rejects Trump's attempt to overturn Biden's victory

The Wisconsin supreme court has once again blocked Donald Trump’s effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

The conservative-leaning court issued a 4-3 decision rejecting the president’s attempt to invalidate more than 200,000 votes in two Democratic-leaning counties.

Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, who joined three of his liberal colleagues to uphold Biden’s win, wrote in the decision that Trump had waited too long to file this challenge.

The president’s objections “come long after the last play or even the last game; the [Trump] Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began,” Hagedorn wrote in the decision.

The decision is the latest in a series of legal defeats for the Trump campaign, which has already had dozens of its lawsuits dismissed or withdrawn.

Wisconsin’s ten electors are schedule to meet in about five minutes to cast their votes for Biden and Kamala Harris.

Updated

Stacey Abrams presides over Georgia's electoral vote count

Moments ago, Stacey Abrams presided over Georgia’s electoral vote count, as the state awarded its 16 votes to Joe Biden.

Abrams, a former Democratic gubernatorial candidate whose voter registration efforts were seen as key to Biden’s victory, opened the proceedings by praising the electors as “servants for a better Georgia.”

“We come together today to cast our votes for Joseph R Biden and Kamala Devi Harris,” Abrams said at the Georgia state capitol in Atlanta.

“It is for them, the people of Georgia, that I say today we are electors, but we are also servants -- servants of a better Georgia, servants of a better future and servants of the United States of America.”

After completing the vote count, Abrams said, “I am pleased to announce that Joseph R. Biden has received 16 votes for President of the United States.”

The announcement was met with a robust round of applause from the electors gathered in the capitol.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, two of New York’s electors, just cast their ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The former president and former secretary of state cast their votes by paper ballot and placed them in a ballot box at the New York capitol in Albany.

Hillary Clinton, who was defeated by Donald Trump in 2016, previously said she was one of New York’s 29 electors, and she expressed excitement about getting to cast her vote for the first woman to serve as vice-president.

As of now, 97 electoral votes have been cast for Biden, and 56 votes have been cast for Trump.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the distribution of the first coronavirus vaccine doses to frontline health care workers in New York.

“I’m proud to see New York frontline workers leading the way,” the New York Democrat said in a tweet.

This morning, critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay in New York became one of the first Americans to receive Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine.

Lindsay received the vaccine live on camera, and she said she was “relieved” to receive the treatment after months of treating coronavirus patients.

Nevada’s electors cast their votes for Joe Biden over Zoom, after state officials opted for a virtual format due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Nevada’s deputy secretary of state informed the electors that they were legally required to vote for Biden, who won the state by 2.4 points last month.

The electors then cast their six votes for Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris without any disruptions.

As of now, 36 electoral votes have formally been cast for Biden, and 56 votes have been cast for Donald Trump. The final count is expected to be 306 electoral votes for Biden and 232 votes for Trump.

The Michigan state capitol, where electors will cast their votes for Joe Biden, is also closed to the public today due to threats of violence. State legislators have been instructed to work remotely.

The Detroit News reports:

Citing ‘safety and security concerns,’ the Michigan House and Senate will close their offices in downtown Lansing on Monday as presidential electors meet in the state Capitol.

On Sunday night, House and Senate officials sent notifications about the closures to members and staff. ...
Some are expecting protesters in support of Republican President Donald Trump to gather outside the building, which will be closed to the public.

The electors are scheduled to cast Michigan’s 16 electoral votes for the president-elect in about two hours.

A Michigan state lawmaker was stripped of his committee assignments after raising the possibility of violence during today’s electoral vote count.

Hours before Michigan’s electors were scheduled to meet and cast their ballots for Joe Biden, Republican state representative Gary Eisen said in a radio interview that there was a “Hail Mary” effort underway to disrupt the process.

When asked if he could guarantee there would be no violence in Lansing today, Eisen replied, “No.”

As the interview attracted national attention, the Republican speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives announced that Eisen had been stripped of his committee assignments in response to his comments.

“We as elected officials must be clear that violence has no place in our democratic process,” speaker Lee Chatfield said in a statement. “We must be held to a higher standard. Because of that, Rep. Eisen has been removed from his committee assignments for the rest of the term.”

Earlier this month, a Democratic state representative in Michigan was also stripped of her committee assignments over comments she made about Donald Trump’s supporters in a Facebook video.

Michigan’s electors are scheduled to meet at 2 pm ET to award the state’s 16 electoral votes to Biden.

De Blasio says New Yorkers should prepare for possibility of 'full shutdown'

Bill de Blasio said New Yorkers should prepare for the possibility of a “full shutdown,” warning that December and January will be particularly difficult months in the city’s fight against coronavirus.

The New York mayor said he agreed with the assessment of governor Andrew Cuomo, who told the New York Times over the weekend, “If you extrapolate out at this rate of growth [of infections], you could be looking at the shutdown of New York City within a month.”

De Blasio told reporters at a press conference this morning, “We all have it within our power to fight back this virus and overcome it in the weeks ahead, but they’re going to be tough weeks.”

The mayor added, “We need to recognize that [a full shutdown] may be coming, and we’ve got to get ready for that now because we cannot let this virus keep growing, especially at a moment where we are finally getting the vaccine and can turn the corner.”

Frontline healthcare workers received New York’s first doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine earlier today, and the treatment is expected to become more widely available in the coming months.

De Blasio’s comments come three days after Cuomo announced that New York would halt indoor dining as part of the state’s strategy to limit the spread of the virus.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who will serve as Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, was asked when the president-elect might receive the coronavirus vaccine.

The infectious disease expert told MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson that the matter was “under discussion right now.”

“I am certain he will get vaccinated,” Fauci said. “It’s a question of when he’s going to do that.”

Like Fauci, Biden has pledged to receive the vaccine publicly in order to boost Americans’ confidence in the treatment.

Fauci hails 'historic' day as frontline workers start receiving vaccine

Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, hailed today as “historic” after frontline health care workers started receiving the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

Fauci, who has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, told MSNBC that the distribution of the vaccine proved that “science well done” can help get the country out of an emergency.

Asked by anchor Hallie Jackson when the vaccine would be widely available to the American public, Fauci said that depended on “the efficiency of the rollout” but predicted it would happen in late April or early May.

But Fauci emphasized that Americans would still be taking certain health precautions, such as wearing masks, for months after the vaccine became widely available to limit the risk of additional coronavirus outbreaks.

Fauci also reiterated his pledge to take the vaccine on camera, and he predicted he would be able to get vaccinated in the next couple of weeks.

Updated

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports on the supreme court turning away a significant voting rights case:

The US supreme court said Monday it would not consider an appeal seeking to reinstate a Kansas law that required people to provide documents proving their citizenship when they registered to vote.

The law, which has been blocked since 2016, was one of the most severe voting restrictions in the country. Between 2013 and 2016, when the law was in effect, it blocked around 35,000 people from registering to vote, nearly 14% of all new registrants, according to an estimate by the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law.

The law was the signature achievement of Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, who used baseless claims about voter fraud to raise his national profile. Kobach, who helped write the law, said it was necessary to deter non-citizen voting in Kansas.

But during a federal trial in 2018, Kobach could provide little proof that non-citizen voting was a significant problem. State data showed that just 129 non-citizens had attempted to register in the state since 1999.

The loss was particularly stinging for Kobach, who personally argued the case in court. The loss was seen as a clear refutation of the idea that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the US.

“Tens of thousands of Kansas voters were illegally denied the most fundamental right in our democracy because of this law. The Supreme Court’s decision not to review the case will finally close this chapter on Kris Kobach’s sorry legacy of voter suppression,” Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU , said in a Monday statement.

Vermont’s electors have already cast their votes for president, giving Joe Biden his first three electoral votes today.

Vermont will send its certification of the vote to Congress, where electoral votes will be formally counted on January 6.

Electors meet in four states to cast votes for president

It is 10 am ET, which means that electors in four states -- Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Vermont -- are now gathering to cast their votes for president.

Of those four states, Joe Biden won New Hampshire and Vermont, while Donald Trump carried Indiana and Tennessee.

Electors will be meeting in states across the country today to formally cast their ballots, bringing Biden one step closer to his January 20 inauguration.

The final meeting of electors will start at 7 pm ET, when Hawaii’s electors gather to cast their votes for Biden.

First doses of coronavirus vaccine in US distributed to frontline workers

Critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay in New York became one of the first Americans to receive the coronavirus vaccine this morning.

Lindsay received the vaccine live on camera, as governor Andrew Cuomo virtually joined the event via video conference.

Lindsay did not appear to flinch as she received the vaccine, and she told Cuomo that the experience was no different than receiving any other vaccine.

“I would like to thank all the frontline workers, all my colleagues who have been doing a yeoman’s job despite this pandemic all over the world,” Lindsay said.

“I feel hopeful today, relieved. ... I hope this marks the beginning of the end of a very painful time in our history. I want to instill public confidence that the vaccine is safe. We’re in a pandemic, so we all need to do our parts.”

The Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for emergency use on Friday, and hundreds of thousands of doses of the vaccine were shipped from the company’s Michigan plant last night.

Frontline workers like Lindsay will be among the first to receive the vaccine, and it will be made available to a wider array of Americans in the coming months.

Updated

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

The members of the electoral college will gather in states across the country today to officially cast their ballots in the presidential election.

Although the results of the November 3 election guides electors’ votes, the electoral college has the constitutional duty to select the president and the vice-president.

Electors will gather to cast their votes for president and record the results and will then sign six copies of a certification of the vote to make their ballots official. (At least one state, Nevada, is carrying out this process virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic.)

The process will bring Joe Biden one step closer to his January 2o inauguration. However, given that Donald Trump continues to push his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, it seems unlikely the president will ever formally concede in the race.

But Biden does not need Trump’s concession to take office next month. The blog will have more about the electoral college vote coming up, so stay tuned.

It’s not going to be a quiet electoral college day, is it?

And it will be Joan E Greve taking you through it, as I am handing over from London to Washington now. Have a great day, stay safe and take care…

Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is attempting to make play today that last time around in 2016, the boot was on the other foot, and it was some on the Democratic side of the aisle who were suggesting that “faithless electors” should opt not to put Donald Trump into the White House.

As is being pointed out to him, the circumstances were somewhat different. The Democrats did not officially legally dispute the election result, and indeed nominee Hilary Clinton conceded on the night. She had, however, won the popular vote.

How long does the electoral college meeting take place, and when will we know (again) that Joe Biden is the winner of the election? Those are good questions. The answer is, it is going to take all day.

The “meeting” is distributed across each state, with each set of electors meeting in their state capitol. Well, mostly – Nevada is holding the event in a virtual format. The first ones will be at 10am ET on the east coast. The last one scheduled is in Hawaii, which will be at 2pm local, or 7pm ET. Joe Biden will address the nation about an hour after that.

In a rather grand old fashion, the electors have to produce six certificates of their votes. Only one goes to the Senate to be counted on 6 January. Other copies get sent to the local secretary of state, a presiding judge, and the national archives.

Oscar Quine has this for Newsweek this morning, suggesting that Donald Trump’s sudden decision not to get senior White House officials vaccinated against Covid raises national security questions about the continuity of federal government.

Since Trump returned to work in the Oval Office after he was hospitalized with the coronavirus in October, a number of staffers have fallen ill as the West Wing became a Covid-19 hotspot.

Last week, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani became the latest high-profile figure close to the president to announce they had caught the virus.

John Ullyot, National Security Council spokesman, said in a Sunday evening statement that top officials would be among the first to be inoculated against Covid.

In doing so, he cited the 2016 National Continuity Policy, a directive that “calls for providing executive branch leadership personnel with the appropriate resources to perform their prescribed continuity roles and responsibilities.”

“Senior officials across all three branches of government will receive vaccinations pursuant to continuity of government protocols established in executive policy,” Ullyot said

That was before the president appeared to personally countermand him on Twitter.

Read more here: Newsweek – Donald Trump’s delay to White House vaccine raises national security questions

“It feels like the cavalry is arriving,” Robert C. Garrett, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, said as New Jersey’s largest health network awaited delivery of the first authorized Pfizer/BioNTech shots.

Laureen Neergaard reports for Associated Press that for health care workers who, along with nursing home residents, will be first in line for vaccination, hope is tempered by grief and the sheer exhaustion of months spent battling a coronavirus that still is surging in the US and around the world.

“This is mile 24 of a marathon. People are fatigued. But we also recognize that this end is in sight,” said Dr. Chris Dale of Swedish Health Services in Seattle.

Packed in dry ice to stay at ultra-frozen temperatures, the first of nearly 3 million doses being shipped in staggered batches this week made their way by truck and by plane around the country Sunday from Pfizer’s Kalamazoo, Michigan, factory. Once they arrive at distribution centers, each state directs where the doses go next.

Pharmacists Richard Emery, left, and Karen Nolan, wheel a box containing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as it arrives at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.
Pharmacists Richard Emery, left, and Karen Nolan, wheel a box containing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as it arrives at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. Photograph: David Goldman/AP

Some hospitals across the country spent the weekend tracking their packages, refreshing FedEx and UPS websites for clues.

More of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will arrive each week. And later this week, the FDA will decide whether to green light a second Covid-19 vaccine, made by Moderna.

Now the hurdle is to rapidly get vaccine into the arms of millions, not just doctors and nurses but other at-risk health workers such as janitors and food handlers and then deliver a second dose three weeks later.

“We’re also in the middle of a surge, and it’s the holidays, and our health care workers have been working at an extraordinary pace,” said Sue Mashni, chief pharmacy officer at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. Plus, the shots can cause temporary fever, fatigue and aches as they rev up people’s immune systems, forcing hospitals to stagger employee vaccinations.

A wary public will be watching closely to see whether health workers embrace vaccination. Just half of Americans say they want to get vaccinated, while about a quarter don’t and the rest are unsure, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Health Research.

“Please people, when you look back in a year and you say to yourself, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ I hope you’ll be able to say, ‘Yes, because I looked at the evidence,”’ Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “People are dying right now. How could you possibly say, ‘Let’s wait and see.”’

Gabrielle Canon in San Francisco has been reporting for us on the economic impact that Covid is having in California.

Laurie Thomas had high hopes that her restaurant, Terzo, would be able to stay open this holiday season. Her team had been serving its upscale Mediterranean fare from the restaurant’s San Francisco sidewalk after adjusting to outside-only dining requirements.

But as California saw a dramatic surge in Covid cases in recent weeks, Governor Gavin Newsom issued stricter shutdown orders that again restricted businesses and put an end to outdoor dining.

Now, thousands of newly constructed outside dining parklets across the state – some which cost tens of thousands of dollars to build – sit empty. Restaurateurs like Thomas are bracing for difficult weeks ahead. Many of them say they won’t survive on takeout and deliveries alone, making another surge in statewide unemployment all but certain.

“It is tragic,” said Thomas, who also heads the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, adding that she expected hundreds more restaurants in San Francisco would shut down in the coming weeks, leaving thousands without jobs. Data from San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce shows up to 85% of bars and restaurants in formerly bustling parts of the city have already closed.

California’s new stay-at-home order is a desperate attempt to contain the fast-spreading virus as hospitals in the state near capacity. The virus has already infected close to 1.5 million Californians and killed more than 20,500, and officials and epidemiologists say Covid has become so prevalent that activities that were relatively safe before now constitute more risk. But for many businesses already reeling from the state’s first lockdown in March, the new restrictions will have an exacting economic toll. That impact is bound to exacerbate an already towering wealth gap between the state’s rich and poor.

Read more of Gabrielle Canon’s report here: ‘People are desperate’: California shutdown pushes businesses to breaking point

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has just added a tweet congratulating Sudan’s prime minister Abdalla Hamdok and the Sudanese people to his earlier statement about the country being removed from the official US list of state sponsors of terrorism.

By the way, aside from the electoral college meeting, here’s what we know is in the diary for later today:

Outgoing president Donald Trump will lunch with vice president Mike Pence at 12.30pm, and then will sign an executive order on increasing economic and geographic mobility at 2.30pm.

After lunch, Mike Pence will lead a governors’ video teleconference on Covid-19 response and recovery in the White House situation room at 4pm.

Also on the coronavirus front, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, takes part in a ‘Year-End Reflections’ virtual discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank at 1pm.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont hold a virtual press event at 9am on the need for a bipartisan Congressional Covid-19 relief package

As previously mentioned in the blog, president-elect Joe Biden gives speech about electoral college vote certification and the state of democracy in Wilmington, Delaware, at 8pm. Earlier, Delaware’s three electors meet in the state capital of Dover to cast their votes for him at 11.30am.

While we will doubtless hear dissenting Republican voices as the electoral college meets today, the Biden campaign team have been expressing confidence that the president-elect will be able to move forward and lead the country from January. Jennifer Epstein notes for Bloomberg that at the weekend his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who will join the Biden White House as deputy chief of staff, told reporters:

Joe Biden won decisively and has a clear mandate to lead this country. If you look across any metric that we could put together, and in the context of history, it is hard to see anything but a historic victory for the president-elect.

Epstein reminds readers that Biden’s win came amid record turnout, with more than 158 million votes cast. He drew over 7 million more votes than Trump, giving him a 4.5 percentage point victory, the largest margin for a challenger over an incumbent president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 win over Herbert Hoover. She quotes campaign chief strategist Mike Donilon:

Donilon pointed to a post-election poll from Gallup that put Biden’s approval rating at 55%, even as many Republican lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, haven’t publicly acknowledged the Democrat as president-elect.

“There’s a very strong story that is running through this country, which is the country wants to come together. And the president-elect is determined to lead the country to do that,” said Donilon, who’ll be a senior White House adviser.

He predicted that some congressional Republicans will choose to cooperate: “It’s going to be in the interest of the country, it’s going to be in their own self-interest, to get on board and not to get in the way.”

“I know there’s 74 million folks who voted for Trump -- and there are 81 million who voted for Biden,” Donilon said with a slight laugh.

Read more here: Bloomberg – Biden has ‘clear mandate,’ aides say as electoral college votes

Susan Del Percio, Republican strategist and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, gives her take for NBC News this morning on what Texas Republicans really want from their attempts to subvert the 2020 US election result.

Power — trying desperately to attain it or to hold on to it — often motivates morally and politically bizarre behavior. So does the fear of potentially going to jail. It seems even partisan PR stunts are bigger in the Lone Star State.

Last month, reports indicated that the FBI is investigating allegations that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton broke the law by using his office to serve the interests of a political donor. This would be a federal crime — a crime that President Donald Trump could pre-emptively pardon Paxton for, even though the attorney general hasn’t officially been charged with anything.

Against the backdrop of these problems, Paxton filed a lawsuit last week asking the supreme court to overturn the election results in the four key battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Republican state Rep. Kyle Biedermann announced that he will introduce legislation to allow Texas to secede from the nation. His reason? “The federal government is out of control and does not represent the values of Texans.”

There is no chance that Texas will secede from the United States. Just as with Paxton’s supreme court ploy, the law is not on Texas’ side. Secession is simply not legal, and Biedermann should know that.

But also like Paxton, Biedermann’s real goal may be more personal. Perhaps he is looking to raise his profile with a new speaker of the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives. By introducing legislation with such fanfare, he further shores up his conservative credentials.

Read more here: NBC News – Trump-loving Texas Republicans one up one another with election and secession insanity

Sudan officially removed from US list of state sponsors of terrorism

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has said that Washington has now officially removed Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, adding that the move represented a fundamental change for the two countries’ bilateral ties towards greater cooperation.

“This achievement was made possible by the efforts of Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government,” Pompeo said in a statement.

The full statement reads:

Today, Sudan’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism is officially rescinded. This represents a fundamental change in our bilateral relationship toward greater collaboration and support for Sudan’s historic democratic transition. This achievement was made possible by the efforts of Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government to chart a bold new course away from the legacy of the Bashir regime and, in particular, to meet the statutory and policy criteria for rescission.

We commend the calls of the Sudanese people for freedom, peace, and justice, and we congratulate the members of the civilian-led transitional government for their courage in advancing the aspirations of the citizens they serve.

The number of new cases of coronavirus recorded in the US dipped slightly to 190,920 on Sunday, after a record-breaking five consecutive days above 200,000. There’s another change of circumstance as well – for the first time in the US a vaccine is on its way. Susannah Cullinane writes for CNN:

Eleven months after the earliest recorded case of coronavirus in the United States, medical workers are preparing to give the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, with deliveries set to arrive at administration sites from around 8am ET.

“We expect 145 sites across all the states to receive vaccine on Monday, another 425 sites on Tuesday, and the final 66 sites on Wednesday, which will complete the initial delivery of the Pfizer orders for vaccine,” Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, said Saturday.

It’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines, but the CDC has recommended that frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get the vaccine first. Officials warn it could take months before the vaccine becomes available to many Americans as the virus continues to surge, breaking grim state and national records.

A slightly falling caseload isn’t the only number that the authorities have to keep an eye on. According to the Covid Tracking Project, US hospitalizations have remained above 100,000 for 12 consecutive days, breaking records for eight days in a row.

Michigan to hold electoral college vote behind closed doors due to ‘credible threats of violence’

Michigan looks set to hold its electoral college vote in the state capitol behind closed doors, citing “credible threats of violence”. Teo Armus reports for the Washington Post:

Gideon D’Assandro, a spokesperson for Republican state House Speaker Lee Chatfield, confirmed on Sunday to the Washington Post that Michigan House and Senate leadership consulted with the state police regarding the threats. The state Capitol, where the vote is set to take place, was already set to be closed to the public Monday.

Details about the threats remain unspecified and unconfirmed. D’Assandro declined further comment about the closures, while spokespersons for Whitmer, Michigan State Police and Democratic leaders in the state legislature did not immediately respond to requests for comment late on Sunday.

Amber McCann, a spokesperson for Republican Michigan Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, said in an email to the Post that the decision to close legislative offices “was not made because of anticipated protests, but was made based on credible threats of violence.”

Michigan was one of the states targeted by the Texas attorney general in his attempt to get the supreme court to overthrow the election result.

Read more here: Washington Post – Michigan closes legislative buildings due to ‘credible threats of violence’ ahead of electoral college vote

Now, that’s how the electoral college works. Which begs the question, how did the US arrive at an arrangement like this? I’ve always found this essay by Wilfred Codrington III useful on this point:

The Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the electoral college. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances.

The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system.

The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned.

The three-fifths compromise was that, for the purposes of calculating the population of a state, enslaved people would be counted as precisely three-fifths of a person. Codrington concludes:

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

Read more here: The Atlantic – The electoral college’s racist origins

Since it only happens once every four years, you may need a refresher on what actually happens on the day that the electoral college meets to vote for the US president. Fortunately for both you and me, Jan Wolfe at Reuters has put this handy reminder together.

The winner of the presidential election is determined not by the popular vote – in which Joe Biden leads by over 7 million – but through the system of the electoral college, which is part of the US Constitution. It allots the so-called “electoral votes” to the states and the District of Columbia based on their congressional representation.

Before the election, state-level leaders of the two major parties selected people to serve as “electors”. Technically, during the election, Americans are casting their votes for those slates of electors, not the candidates themselves. Those individuals are typically party loyalists who have pledged to support the candidate who got the most votes in their state.

Much of the legal activity disputing the election results was based around the Trump team trying to get states to appoint Republican electors who would support him, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote.

There are 538 electoral votes, meaning 270 are needed to win the election. Joe Biden is slated to receive 306.

Most electors are not household names, but this year do include some notable faces, including Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, and Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former candidate for governor in that state who has been widely credited with playing an integral role in flipping it blue.

Electors meet at a time and place selected by their state’s legislature. Nevada is meeting virtually this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Most states will be livestreaming the ceremonies.

Electors will sign certificates showing their votes, which are sent to government officials including vice [resident Mike Pence. Those certificates are paired with ones signed by governors showing the popular vote tallies, which have already been certified by all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Electoral votes will be officially tallied by a newly seated Congress on 6 January, in a special joint session that Pence will preside over. At that point, the election is officially decided. Biden will be sworn in as president during an inauguration ceremony at noon on 20 January, a time which is set by the constitution.

Occasionally electors can go rogue, and become “faithless electors”, who don’t vote for who they are supposed to. In 2016, seven of the 538 electors cast ballots for someone other than their state*s popular vote winner, which was an unusually high number.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws intended to control this. Some provide a financial penalty for a rogue vote, while others call for the vote to be canceled and the elector replaced. It would be nearly impossible for faithless electors to hand a last-minute victory to Trump – he would need 38 electors to defect.

There’s also a theoretical – albeit unlikely – possibility that Congress could refuse to accept the result. A law called the Electoral Count Act allows individual members of the House and Senate to challenge the results during the 6 January special session, though it is a rarely used procedure.

Any objection to a state’s results must be backed by at least one House member and one senator. The two chambers would then separate to debate the objections before voting on whether to reject the state’s results.

An objection, though, must pass in both chambers by a simple majority. Democrats control the House, meaning a last ditch attempt to thwart Biden’s victory would not pass. Nevertheless Republicans are yet to rule it out. 126 Republicans in the House – almost two-thirds of the party’s conference – backed the Texas attempt to overthrow the election in the supreme court, so it is possible we will see yet another attempt by Republicans to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.

Kremlin dismisses allegation that Russia involved in cybersecurity hack on US federal agencies

One of the big stories breaking this morning is the news that the US has detected a cyber espionage operation that has compromised federal agencies, including the Treasury and the Commerce department. Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg report for the Washington Post:

Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments, along with other US government agencies, as part of a global espionage campaign that stretches back months, according to people familiar with the matter.

Officials were scrambling over the weekend to assess the nature and extent of the intrusions and implement effective countermeasures, but initial signs suggested the breach was long-running and significant, the people familiar with the matter said.

The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The same Russian group hacked the State Department and the White House email servers during the Obama administration.

The FBI is investigating the campaign, which may have begun as early as spring, and had no comment Sunday. The victims have included government, consulting, technology, telecom, and oil and gas companies in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, according to FireEye, a cyber firm that itself was breached.

In a move very much from the “well they would say that, wouldn’t they?” files, Russia has vehemently denied the claims this morning. Reuters report Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissing the allegations, saying:

Once again, I can reject these accusations and once again I want to remind you that it was president Putin who proposed that the American side agree and conclude agreements with Russia on cyber security. As for the rest, if there have been attacks for many months, and the Americans could not do anything about it, it is probably not worth immediately groundlessly blaming the Russians. We didn’t have anything to do with it.

Peskov said that Washington had not responded to the previous Russian offer of setting up a cyber security treaty.

Joe Biden has already made it clear that he has little interest in starting his administration with a detailed examination of whether outgoing president Donald Trump may have broken the law while in office, but that hasn’t stopped Paul Blumenthal this morning calling for the Biden administration to expose what evidence there may be:

If president-elect Joe Biden was inclined to prosecute Trump, his only dilemma would be where to start. Trump’s own Department of Justice refused to indict him for alleged crimes uncovered related to hush-money payments to his extra-marital lovers, and for obstruction of justice alleged in the Russia investigation. He faces multiple state-level criminal inquiries stemming from his personal business practices, civil suits related to his alleged sexual assaults and his 2017 inauguration.

While Biden admirably does not intend on echoing Trump’s undemocratic “lock them all up” chants, his administration can simply allow independent prosecutors to make their own decisions by opening the books on the Trump administration to expose wrongdoing, self-dealing and unlawful activity.

This will require the adoption of an affirmative policy to release and disclose information both in response to requests from Congress, oversight entities, journalists and the public — something the Trump administration did not do almost as a matter of policy. But in other respects it will involve the proactive implementation of policies through executive order or agency directive that would allow for the release of documents suppressed by the Trump administration. Much of the evidence of the Trump administration’s malfeasance is not yet in the public sphere, and by simply disclosing it Biden could begin the process of holding the soon-to-be ex-president accountable for his misdeeds.

“There is a ton of information about the Trump administration that can come out pretty easily with the Biden administration just restoring normal practices,” said Jordan Libowitz, spokesman for the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Read more here: Huffington Post – Donald Trump has hidden evidence of his crimes for years. Joe Biden can expose it

Incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler had an uncomfortable campaigning weekend for the Georgia runoff, as Sarah Polus reports for The Hill:

Loeffler’s campaign on Sunday condemned the white supremacist with whom she took a photo and said the senator didn’t know who he was at the time.

Stephen Lawson, Loeffler’s campaign spokesman, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “Kelly had no idea who that was” and that “if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for.”

The photo in question, which was taken at a campaign event Friday, depicts the senator smiling next to Chester Doles, a reported former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who was sentenced to prison for the 1993 beating of a black man. The AJC reported that Doles also has ties to the Hammerskins, also known as Hammerskin Nation, defined as the “best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Progressive Jewish advocacy group Behind the Arc, which works to rise up in “solidarity with everyone threatened by the Trump agenda,” shared the image to Twitter and condemned Loeffler.

Read more here: The Hill – Loeffler’s campaign condemns white supremacist who appeared in photo

Oliver Laughland in Warner Robins, Georgia and Sam Levine in New York have this report for us this morning on the Georgia Senate runoffs

As James Brown’s funk classic Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud pulsed through the mobile sound system, Cliff Albright marched up a steep roadway, bellowing into a microphone trying to get people out of their doors.

“Let’s go y’all,” he said. “Black voters matter every day, everywhere.”

Albright and other members of the organization he co-founded, Black Voters Matter, walk with pride in these central Georgia neighborhoods. And for good reason.

Turnout here in Houston county soared in the 2020 election. And although the county, staunchly Republican for decades, stayed red – Joe Biden narrowed the margin by over 6%. It’s in no small part due to the months of organizing here to mobilize the county’s Black voters, who make up around a third of the population.

It was also the later vote tallies, from mail-in voting here in Houston county, that helped propel Biden past Trump to flip the state of Georgia. A fact that many people in these communities celebrate with a deep source of pride.

“We put a lot of work in here,” Albright said, as he handed out literature, face masks and an invitation to a drive-in watch party of the evening’s US senate debate. “It’s been all year round, because we say Black votes matter 365. We do work not just around elections, but on the issues.”

As early voting starts on Monday in the crucial Georgia Senate runoff elections, organizers like Albright, critical players in the efforts to flip the state from Republican to Democrat for the first time since 1992, are once again gearing up for another election.

Black and minority organizers, who have for years been pushing to turn this state’s rapidly diversifying demographics into a more progressive politics, are being called on again to secure two Senate seats that would effectively hand Democrats control of the US legislature.

Albright is optimistic that the communities he has worked to mobilize will turnout again and predicts, in fact, a rise in turnout.

“You’ve got people now who have seen Georgia flip, when previously believed their vote might not matter. And what they’ve seen is that, you know what, if we come out in record numbers we can actually change the state. So some folks who may not have done it in November, who now want to be a part of it,” he said.

As Trump continues to undermine the result in Georgia, and the election at-large, Albright believes the president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud, significantly directed at many communities of color around the country, will serve as extra motivation.

“The fact that he [Trump] is out here trying to target us, to take our votes away, I think that’s going to stir up even more excitement,” he said. “If Trump keeps acting a fool, it’s going to backfire.”

Read more of Oliver Laughland and Sam Levine’s report here: Democrats again look to Black voters to win Georgia runoffs and take the Senate

Early in-person voting begins in Georgia today for the state’s crucial Senate runoff races

Early in-person voting begins in Georgia today for the state’s Senate runoff races that pit incumbent Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler against Democratic nominees Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.

If the Democrats can win, it would tie the Senate up at 50-50 for the start of the Joe Biden administration, with vice president-elect Kamala Harris holding the casting vote.

The Associated Press report that more than half of the record 5 million votes in the state in the 3 November general election were cast during the two-week early voting period. Early in-person voting could be even more important for the runoffs because of the short time frame for voters to request and send back ballots by mail.

Overnight the president of the United States was making clear just how he felt about the way that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ran the November vote.

On Friday Warnock emphasised how important a factor it could be, saying after a speech to labor union canvassers. “It’s how we won in the general and it’s how we’re going to win in the runoff.”

No one expects turnout to be as high in the runoff as the general election. But Bernard Fraga, an Emory University professor who studies voting, said overall turnout could rise as high as 4 million.

More than 125,000 people cast ballots in October on the first day of early in-person voting before the general election. Gabriel Sterling, election system implementation manager for the Georgia Secretary of State, said he expects a surge of people on Monday. Some Atlanta-area early voting sites in October and November saw people frequently lined up for hours.

“As always, on the first day of early voting, it’s kind of like when the iPhone comes out,” Sterling said last week. “People want to go get the new iPhone at the Apple store. They’re going to stand in line for a while.”

One question is how many mail-in ballots will be cast in the election. By Friday, 1.2 million mail-in ballots had been requested and 200,000 returned. In the general election, Biden won 65% of the 1.3 million absentee ballots that were returned, a record fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 86,000 voters who did not vote in November had requested ballots as of Friday, according to statistics from Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who tracks voting.

Fraga said it’s possible that mail-in ballots, if anything, will be even more favorable for Democrats in the runoff because of attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting by President Donald Trump and many Georgia Republicans.

US under Biden to hold world climate summit early next year and seek to rejoin Paris accord

The US will hold a climate summit of the world’s major economies early next year, within 100 days of Joe Biden taking office, and seek to rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency, in a boost to international climate action.

Leaders from 75 countries met without the US in a virtual Climate Ambition Summit co-hosted by the UN, the UK and France at the weekend, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord. The absence of the US underlined the need for more countries, including other major economies such as Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, to make fresh commitments on tackling the climate crisis.

Biden said in a statement: “I’ll immediately start working with my counterparts around the world to do all that we possibly can, including by convening the leaders of major economies for a climate summit within my first 100 days in office … We’ll elevate the incredible work cities, states and businesses have been doing to help reduce emissions and build a cleaner future. We’ll listen to and engage closely with the activists, including young people, who have continued to sound the alarm and demand change from those in power.”

He reiterated his pledge to put the US on a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and said the move would be good for the US economy and workers. “We’ll do all of this knowing that we have before us an enormous economic opportunity to create jobs and prosperity at home and export clean American-made products around the world.”

Read more of our environment correspondent Fiona Harvey’s report here: US to hold world climate summit early next year and seek to rejoin Paris accord

Trump administration to roll out 'Building vaccine confidence' advertising campaign this week

Donald Trump’s decision not to immediately make a statement by taking the Covid vaccine certainly muddies the message from his administration, which is due to roll out a massive pro-vaccine advertising campaign imminently to attempt to counter public mistrust. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael D. Shear report for the New York Times that:

The Building Vaccine Confidence campaign, overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, will unfold in an atmosphere of hope as vaccinations begin. The celebrity component — which was to include the actor Dennis Quaid and the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus — was scrapped after an inquiry by House Democrats prompted Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary, to order an internal review of the plan.

The new initiative will take a “science-based approach,” said Mark Weber, the federal health official who is running it, and will begin this week with a first wave of advertisements in print, social media and radio, with television advertising added when the vaccine becomes more broadly available.

The effort — developed by Fors Marsh Group, a market research group, under contract with the government — is focused on what officials are calling the movable middle: people who are hesitant to take the vaccine, but who can be persuaded to do so. But that will not be an easy task.

“I have advised my team that we recognize our operating environment is complicated, we have a public health mission, and we need to stay focused on that,” said Weber, a 30-year career government official who has a master’s degree in marketing. He acknowledged that the campaign was battling “a credibility factor right now,” with a high level of distrust in government and fears about the safety of a vaccine that was produced in record time.

On Friday, while declining to talk specifically about president Trump, Dr Anthony Fauci said “When you have an anti-science element together with a divisiveness in the country, it will be challenging.”

Read more here: New York Times – Trump administration plans a rushed effort to encourage Americans to be vaccinated

Trump reverses plan to give White House officials Covid vaccine

Donald Trump has said he is reversing an administration directive to vaccinate top government officials against Covid-19.

Trump made the announcement hours after his administration confirmed that senior US officials, including some White House aides who work in close proximity to Trump and the vice-president, Mike Pence, would be offered coronavirus vaccines as soon as this week under federal continuity of government plans.

“People working in the White House should receive the vaccine somewhat later in the programme, unless specifically necessary,” Trump said in a tweet. “I have asked that this adjustment be made. I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time.”

It is unclear at this juncture whether Trump is attempting to send the message that frontline healthcare workers and seniors should be a priority over DC staffers and the administration leadership, or whether it is a signal that Trump has personally cooled on the idea of a vaccine that he was exerting political pressure on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve. On Friday he had ordered them, via Twitter, to “Get the dam vaccines out NOW”.

Several senior figures at the White House, including Trump himself, have been diagnosed with the coronavirus in recent months.

Electoral college set to vote Joe Biden as president today

Donald Trump on Monday could suffer a withering blow to his increasingly hopeless effort to overturn the results of the US presidential election when 538 members of the electoral college will cast their ballots and formally send Joe Biden to the White House.

Under the arcane formula which America has followed since the first election in 1789, Monday’s electoral college vote will mark the official moment when Biden becomes the 46th president-in-waiting. Electors, including political celebrities such as both Bill and Hillary Clinton, will gather in state capitols across the country to cement the outcome of this momentous race.

Normally, the process is figurative and barely noted. This year, given Trump’s volatile display of tilting at windmills in an attempt to negate the will of the American people, it will carry real political significance.

Trump continued those quixotic efforts over the weekend, sparking political unrest in several cities including the nation’s capital. On Sunday morning he tweeted in all caps that this was the “most corrupt election in US history!”.

In an interview with Fox & Friends that aired on Sunday, he insisted that his anti-democratic mission was not over. “We keep going and we’re going to continue to go forward,” he said, before repeating a slew of lies about the election having been rigged.

Trump’s barefaced untruths about having won key states including Pennsylvania and Georgia went entirely unchallenged by the Fox News interviewer, Brian Kilmeade.

Any faltering hopes Trump might still harbor of hanging on to power were shattered on Friday when the US supreme court bluntly dismissed a lawsuit led by Texas to block Biden’s victory in four other states. In a different case, a Wisconsin supreme court judge decried Trump’s lawsuit aiming to nullify the votes of 200,000 Americans, saying it “smacked of racism”.

Despite the categoric rebuff that Trump has suffered in dozens of cases, including before the nation’s highest court, his unprecedented ploy to tear up democratic norms continues to inflict untold damage on the country with potential long-term consequences. The Texas-led push to overturn the election result was backed by 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – almost two-thirds of the party’s conference – as well as Republican state attorneys general from 18 states.

Read more of Ed Pilkington’s report here: Electoral college vote may be knockout blow to Trump’s ploy to subvert election

Good morning, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of US politics, on a milestone occasion as the electoral college formally casts the nation’s votes for president.

  • The electoral college will meet in state capitols across the US today to case the votes to confirm that Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden will be heading to the White House as president and first lady in January.
  • Normally a barely noticed ceremonial event, this year it has added significance as outgoing one-term president Donald Trump continues to dispute the result, spreading baseless conspiracies of widespread voter fraud across multiple states that nearly 50 court cases have failed to demonstrate any evidence for.
  • Violence broke out in the streets of Washington DC after far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters in the aftermath of a march by conservatives denying Biden’s victory.
  • On Sunday the US recorded 190,920 new coronavirus cases, and 1,389 further deaths, according to figures from the Johns Hopkins University. Figures are often slightly lower at the weekend due to different reporting practices on a Sunday.
  • The US is on track to exceed 300,000 total deaths from Covid today.
  • There is some light at the end of the tunnel – trucks hauling trailers loaded with suitcase–sized containers of Covid-19 vaccine rolled out of Pfizer’s manufacturing facility in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Sunday – launching the largest and most complex vaccine distribution project in the US.
  • They aren’t, apparently, heading to the White House though. Officials had originally said senior members of the Trump administration would be among the first people to be given the jab, but Donald Trump said he had asked for an “adjustment” to be made.
  • Reports suggest that hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the US treasury and commerce departments. It led to a national security council meeting at the White House on Saturday.
  • President-elect Joe Biden is expected to address the nation tonight at 8pm ET to speak on “the electoral college vote certification and the strength and resilience of our democracy”.
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