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The Associated Press, which the Guardian relies on to project election results due to their generally cautious approach, has responded to Donald Trump’s false claim that he has won the election:
The @AP has not declared a winner in the presidential race, with several states still too early to call.
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 6, 2020
But President Trump is renewing unfounded claims that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election. He did not back up his claim with any evidence.https://t.co/LTUEBPnbNV
When will we know the US election result?
Jon Henley explains:
What usually happens?
US presidential elections are not won by the national popular vote. The winner in each state collects its electoral college votes – and needs a total of 270 to take the White House.
In most elections the result is clear – although not officially confirmed – by the end of the night. Major American media outlets “call” each state for one of the candidates. While not based on the final vote count, that projection is almost invariably accurate.
This means an accurate tally of electoral college votes can be made and a winner declared. In 2016, that happened at 2.30am in Washington when Trump reached the required 270.
Why is that not happening this time?
Mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic, large numbers of voters – about 68% of the total, compared with 34% in 2016 – cast their ballots early, including by post.
Counting postal votes is slower because voter and witness signatures and addresses must be checked, and ballots smoothed out before being fed into counting machines. Some states start that verification process long before election day, meaning the count itself can get under way as soon as polls close. Others, however, do not allow that.
Which states are we talking about?
Five states have yet to be called: Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Alaska. Several news organizations, including the Associated Press and Fox News’ decision desk, have called Arizona for Joe Biden. The Trump campaign is arguing, however, that call was made too early. Its next update is not due until 9pm ET on Thursday.
Alaska will end up in the Republican column with near certainty.
Pennsylvania officials say they expect most votes will be counted by Friday.
The Democratic challenger is narrowly ahead in Nevada, with only Democratic-leaning late postal ballots left to tally. Officials have said no more results will be released in Nevada until midday ET on Thursday.
In North Carolina, while Trump is the clear favourite, the state accepts postal ballots until 12 November – although that is expected to make little difference.
What else is complicating matters?
Roughly half of all states will accept postal votes that arrive after election day as long as they carry a postmark of no later than 3 November, so postal delays may mean some ballots are not processed until days later: Pennsylvania has said results will not be considered complete until the deadline of Friday.
There has also reportedly been an increase in the number of provisional ballots cast by people who asked for a postal vote but then decided to go to the polling station in person instead. These need careful checking to make sure no one has voted twice.
Read more:
Mike Pence, who did not stand by the president at his presser today, has nevertheless endorsed Trump’s lies.
“I Stand With President @realDonaldTrump,” Pence tweeted shortly after the president concluded his remarks. “We must count every LEGAL vote.”
Elections officials are, indeed, endeavoring to count every legal vote, even as the president, vice president and their supporters confuse “legal” and “favorable”.
News networks cut away from Trump presser
TV news networks including ABC, CBS and MSNBC stopped broadcasting the president’s remarks – which amounted to a series of un-democratic lies.
As MSNBC cut away from the White House, after the president falsely declared victory, anchor Brian Williams commented, “Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States.”
WATCH: "OK. Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States, but correcting the president of the United States," Brian Williams says on @MSNBC moments into the president's statement tonight. pic.twitter.com/2AliTQuSsr
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 6, 2020
Updated
Trump is falsely claiming that Republican election count observers are being blocked or denied access in Philadelphia and Detroit. They are not.
Here’s election law expert David Becker:
There are literally dozens of Republican observers in Philly where the absentee ballots are being counted. And it’s being live streamed. Philly election officials are welcoming all qualified observers, as are all PA counties and everywhere in the US.
— David Becker (@beckerdavidj) November 5, 2020
Updated
The president is, as Kellyanne Conway warned us, now airing grievances about the political polling ahead of election day.
The idea that these polls, which found Biden leading in key swing states, were deliberately wrong is baseless.
The president is also, once again, complaining that votes are being counted, falsely referring to legally-cast mail-in ballots as illegitimate. He is lying that “they” are trying to “steal” the election, and claiming that he “won” Michigan and Wisconsin – states he has lost.
Trump begins press conference
He has begun by illegitimately, prematurely declaring a victory – launching into a series of lies about the elections.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said, falsely.
Updated
On Fox News, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway said Donald Trump is expected to talk about the “the state of the race from his perspective”.
Trump is also planning to speak about what he calls “suppression polls” which showed Biden leading in key swing states ahead of election day. Those polls made his supporters feel like his candidacy was a lost cause, the president has argued. The idea is nonsensical – to the extent that polls have any effect on voter behavior, they tend to do the opposite – leaving supporters of the leading candidate feeling complacent, and motivating the supporters of the trailing candidate to show up and vote.
Updated
In Georgia, approximately 36,300 ballots remain outstanding. Fewer than 9,500 votes separate Donald Trump and Joe Biden as the president’s tenuous lead in the state continues to shrink.
Biden remains 6 electoral votes away from the 270 needed to win the election. If Biden overtakes Trump in Georgia, its 16 electoral votes would put him well over that threshold.
More than 150,000 mail-in ballots were not delivered by election day, according to a Washington Post analysis of agency data.
More than 12,000 of the undelivered ballots caught up in US Postal Service facilities are in states that remain too close to call. The Post reports:
Despite assurances from Postal Service leaders that agency officials were conducting daily sweeps for misplaced ballots, the mail service acknowledged in a court filing Thursday that thousands of ballots had not been processed in time, and that more ballots were processed Wednesday than on Election Day.
The number of mailed ballots the Postal Service did not deliver by Election Day is expected to grow as more data is released in the coming days. Some election experts worry such delays could run up against even more generous ballot acceptance windows that some states have granted.
In several swing states, late ballots will still be counted as long as they were postmarked by Election Day and received by Friday, according to state law. They include Nevada, where 4,518 ballots arrived after Election Day, as well as North Carolina (2,958) and Pennsylvania, (3,439). But in other states — such as Arizona, where 864 ballots were delayed, and Georgia, where 853 were delayed — votes that did not reach election officials by Nov. 3 will be disqualified
Because the counts are not done in those states, it is unclear whether undelivered ballots would have made a difference in deciding the presidential election. But the delivery failures highlight the risks in relying on the mail service to deliver ballots close to Election Day.
Read more here.
This will be the president’s first address since his post-election day speech, which was replete with lies and inaccuracies.
As his path to victory in the election narrows, the president has grown increasingly frustrated as he continues to baselessly allege fraud and demand that officials stop counting votes.
Earlier today, Politico reported that the leader who prematurely declared victory has “settled on a plan for him to take full advantage of his existing perch at the White House to look as presidential as possible”. As his campaign mounts legal challenges to sow doubt on the legitimacy of the election system, Trump is expected to resume travel and move forward with base-pleasing executive orders.
Updated
Trump to speak at the White House
Donald Trump is planning to deliver remarks at 6:30 local time. We will be watching, and bringing live updates.
Updated
The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani is reporting from Northampton county, Pennsylvania:
We were hoping for some decisive results from Pennsylvania before dinner. Instead, speaking from the state capital, Harrisburg, Kathy Boockvar, the secretary of state, said: “The counties are continuing to count.”
Nevertheless, here are the key numbers: almost 6.5m ballots have been counted so far. Trump’s lead currently stands at 78,000, down from 618,000 on Wednesday morning.
The vast majority (more than 99%) of in-person votes have been counted, while 326,000 mail-in ballots remain. So far today, Biden has won 78% of mail-in ballots counted.
According to CNN analysis, if this trend continues, Biden would win Pennsylvania by over 40,000 votes - almost exactly the number Trump beat Hillary Clinton by in 2016. It’s worth noting that Biden is doing very well in the suburbs such as Chester and Delaware counties where anti-fracking state representatives were elected in 2018 (and re-elected this year), while formerly Democratic rural heartlands voted overwhelmingly for Trump again.
Biden is confident that he will win Pennsylvania, but the mail-in ballots that arrived after 8pm on 3 November (but before 6 November) have been segregated - these are subject to a lawsuit by Trump’s team, who want them disregarded. In addition, most military and provisional ballots have not yet been counted.
In short, it’s not over till it’s over.
Updated
Today so far
That’s it from me today. My Guardian colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
- The presidential race remains too close to call, as we await calls in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. As of now, Joe Biden remains six electoral votes away from victory, having already secured 264 votes.
- Biden urged calm and projected confidence about the ultimate result in a short statement today. “We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. “I ask everyone to stay calm.”
-
Donald Trump’s leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania continue to shrink. As of now, Trump’s lead in Georgia is below 10,000, as election officials there say the final result will be very close. In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead has narrowed to just 90,000, with hundreds of thousands of votes left to be counted. The remaining ballots in Pennsylvania are expected to be very favorable for Biden.
- The Pennsylvania secretary of state said the counting of ballots would continue “into the evening.” Secretary of state Kathy Boockvar previously said she believed Pennsylvania could be called tonight, but she seemed to back off that prediction in a press conference moments ago.
Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.
Updated
Pennsylvania secretary of state says counting will continue 'into the evening'
Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state, said the counting of the state’s remaining ballots would continue “into the evening.”
Speaking to reporters in Harrisburg, Boockvar expressed pride in how election officials have conducted the count in Pennsylvania.
Boockvar also noted military and overseas ballots will be counted through next Tuesday, and provisional ballots will still need to be processed.
“The closer the race is, the longer it takes,” Boockvar said, noting there are hundreds of thousands of ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania.
Updated
Republican incumbent David Perdue is currently at 49.95% in the Georgia Senate race, which would force a January runoff if the numbers hold.
Perdue needed to capture 50% of the vote to win the race outright, but it is seeming more likely that he will fall below that, forcing a January runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff.
The other Senate race in Georgia is already headed to a January runoff between Republican Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock.
If both races advance to runoffs, Democrats could capture the Senate majority by flipping both seats and winning the White House.
We are waiting for a vote count update from Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump’s lead has decreased to about 90,000 votes.
And over in Georgia, Joe Biden has narrowed the president’s lead down to just 9,525 votes, or 0.2% of the total count.
GA Presidential Election Results
— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) November 5, 2020
Trump (R): 49.48% (2,439,678 votes)
Biden (D): 49.29% (2,430,153 votes)
Jorgensen (L): 1.23% (60,821 votes)
Trump Margin: +9,525 (-3,246)
Estimated: > 99% votes in
More results here: https://t.co/xlHf7GZUxJ
It is possible Biden will pull off a very narrow victory in Georgia, which would make him the first Democrat to win there since 1992.
But depending on how fast Pennsylvania counts its ballots, it could be the tipping-point state for Biden to hit 270 electoral votes.
Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, criticized “2024 GOP hopefuls” for not pledging to fight on Trump’s behalf as Joe Biden nears victory in the presidential race.
“The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing,” the younger Trump said in a tweet.
“They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.”
The total lack of action from virtually all of the “2024 GOP hopefuls” is pretty amazing.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 5, 2020
They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.
Don’t worry @realDonaldTrump will fight & they can watch as usual!
And almost immediately, some of the Republicans who have been named as potential presidential contenders weighed in.
From former UN ambassador Nikki Haley:
We all owe @realDonaldTrump for his leadership of conservative victories for Senate, House, & state legislatures. He and the American people deserve transparency & fairness as the votes are counted. The law must be followed. We have to keep the faith that the truth will prevail.
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 5, 2020
From Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton:
We are not done. EVERY Republican needs to:
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 5, 2020
1-Support Trump's legal fund
2-Support Sen. Loeffler vs. a radical who hates the police. https://t.co/uBtV7WtNZ4
3-Support Sen. Perdue vs. a trust-fund socialist. https://t.co/XLths4OOZn
Our country depends on it. https://t.co/jdnTNJ8GnO
But it’s worth noting that neither of these presidential hopefuls called for stopping the counting of valid ballots, as the president has demanded.
Biden urges calm and projects confidence
Joe Biden issued a very short statement on the current state of play in the presidential race, speaking at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware.
The Democratic nominee noted the country is nearing 240,000 deaths from coronavirus and expressed sympathy for Americans who had lost loved ones to the virus.
Pivoting to the results of the presidential election, Biden once again emphasized election officials must count every valid vote that was cast.
“In America, the vote is sacred,” Biden said. “Each ballot must be counted.”
Biden noted he and his running mate, Kamala Harris, “continue to feel very good” about the ultimate result of the race.
“We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” Biden said.
As Americans remains on edge as they await the declaration of a winner in the presidential race, Biden said, “I ask everyone to stay calm.”
Updated
Joe Biden is expected to deliver a short statement at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, in a few minutes.
The Democratic nominee delivered a statement yesterday, urging patience with the vote count and projecting confidence about the ultimate result.
Donald Trump has not been seen on camera since the early hours of Wednesday morning, when he falsely alleged “fraud” in the presidential election and declared victory without the results to back that up.
Defense secretary prepares letter of resignation – report
Defense secretary Mark Esper has reportedly drafted a letter of resignation and is helping members of Congress draft legislation to remove the names of Confederate generals from military bases.
NBC News reports:
Esper has prepared a letter of resignation, according to three current defense officials.
It’s not uncommon for Cabinet secretaries to prepare undated letters of resignation during a presidential transition, giving the commander in chief the chance to replace them for a second term. The president decides whether to accept the resignation letters, and the process usually occurs after the election results are clear.
But defense officials say Esper prepared his letter because he is one of the Cabinet officials long expected to be pushed out after the election. As his tenure may be coming to an end, Esper is helping members of Congress draft legislation that will strip names of Confederate leaders from military bases in a move that could put him further at odds with President Donald Trump.
The president has repeatedly said he does not support changing the names of military bases, even as Esper and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff have expressed openness to the idea.
Updated
More from the Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong:
Facebook’s hasty action on the Stop the Steal group stands in marked contrast to its handling of other domestic groups that have organized on its platform. The company dragged its heels for months before taking action against the anti-government “boogaloo” movement, which has been linked to multiple murders, and against the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon, which has also been linked to violence and identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
The inconsistency and lack of transparency around Facebook’s approach to content moderation drew quick criticism from experts in the field, and digital rights advocates.
“It really matters that platforms should be clear in advance about their policies and consistent in their application,” Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies online speech regulation, told the Guardian.
“That helps fend off charges that any decisions are politically motivated or biased, and gives us a lever to pull for accountability that isn’t purely about who can get the most public attention or generate public outrage … We do ourselves a disservice when we celebrate platform actions purely because they align with our substantive preferences and don’t insist on processes or justifications that we would want to protect us if it went the other way.”
Evan Green, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, raised concerns about Facebook setting “an extremely dangerous precedent”. “Are people not allowed to form a group on Facebook to discuss if they truly believe their government is engaged in electoral misconduct?” she tweeted. “How does this play out globally?”
Facebook did not immediately respond to further queries from the Guardian, including whether the group would have met the threshold for a takedown under normal circumstances, apart from “this period of heightened tension”.
Updated
The Guardian’s tech reporter Julia Carrie Wong reports:
Facebook removed a viral group claiming that “Democrats are scheming to disenfranchise and nullify Republican votes” after it gained more than 350,000 members in a single day.
The group, “Stop the Steal”, was established by a rightwing not-for-profit group, Women for America First, and run by a team of moderators and administrators that included longtime Tea Party activist Amy Kremer. Members were encouraged to provide their email addresses to a website calling for “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote”, as well as to donate money.
The group exploded in popularity on Wednesday and Thursday, racking up more than 730,000 interactions, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics platform. Many of the most popular posts in the group were calls for prayer for Donald Trump, but the group was also rife with misinformation about the election and processes for counting ballots.
“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”
The group was promoting about a dozen “Stop the Steal” Facebook events in cities around the country; some but not all of those event pages have been taken down.
Sites where ballot counting continues have become targets for a handful of protests as the process drags on – and Trump encourages conspiracy theories about the normal process of counting votes. Trump supporters chanting “stop the count” converged at an election center in Detroit on Wednesday afternoon, while Trump backers in Phoenix, some apparently armed, gathered at a counting site to urge more counting.
Two of the group’s moderators, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, are connected to the “We Build the Wall” campaign, for which former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was indicted for fraud, the Daily Beast reported.
There are 47,277 ballots left to be counted in Georgia, according to secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.
With counting continuing in numerous counties throughout #Georgia, as of 2:40 p.m. today there are approximately 47,277 ballots still outstanding.#SecureTheVote
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) November 5, 2020
As of now, Donald Trump’s lead stands at 12,835 votes, so Joe Biden would have to win about 64% of the remaining ballots to flip the state.
That is still possible because many of the remaining ballots were cast in Democratic-leaning counties, but it will be a very close final result regardless.
Abené Clayton reports from Oakland:
Calls to transform police departments and shift public funds away from law enforcement are coming to pass in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In Los Angeles, voters passed Measure J with 57% of the vote. It requires Los Angeles county to earmark at least 10% of its budget for mental health services and jail diversion programs.
The legislation was introduced after a long summer of protests and loud calls to defund police following the killing of George Floyd. And while the funds the measure will create don’t come directly from the LAPD’s nearly $3bn budget, Eunisses Hernandez, co-chair of Yes on Measure J, told Patch that it’s an important step toward a future where cities “invest in jobs, rather than jails; in people, rather than punishment; and in mental health rather than incarceration”.
At the other end of the state, San Franciscans approved Propositions D and E. Prop D creates a Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board and Prop E gets rid of a mandate that requires the city’s police force to be staffed by at least 1,971 officers.
County supervisor Shamman Walton told the San Francisco Chronicle that he created the measure in response to murky in-custody deaths and an alleged officer-facilitated fight club in the city’s jail.
Updated
The Guardian’s Lois Beckett reports from Michigan:
Facebook has removed an Michigan anti-lockdown Facebook page and group, Stand Up Michigan, after they shared posts urging Trump supporters to come to vote-counting location in Detroit to serve as ballot challengers.
Chris Steffes, 22, said he came to @tcfcenter in Detroit responding to this Facebook post. He said he had questions and he thought ordinary people should be able to verify the results. When I said Fox News had just called the election for Biden, he just said huh. pic.twitter.com/VfpcsO8ctE
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) November 4, 2020
At least one of the posts contained false information suggesting that Joe Biden’s lead over Trump on Wednesday was just 18 votes, rather than more than 30,000.
“We removed the Page and the group sharing the post based on the potential risk for offline harm and will stay in contact with the local authorities who are supporting the situation in Detroit,” a Faceebook spokesperson said.
Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson denounced Wednesday’s small but volatile protests, in which pro-Trump protesters chanted “Stop the count” and “Let us in,” both outside the building where the ballot-counting was taking place and outside the ballot-counting room itself.
“As for the folks who showed up in the late hours outside to cause a lot of distraction and make a lot of noise, if they thought they were going to intimidate or stop anyone from doing their job inside the TCF Center, they don’t know Detroit,” Benson said.
Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat of Virginia, unloaded on some of her colleagues during a caucus call this afternoon, according to multiple reports.
Spanberger leads in her race by just 1 point right now, and she blamed the close result on effective attack ads from her opponent based around some Democrats’ calls to “defund the police”.
“We need to be pretty clear,” Spanberger said. “It was a failure. It was not a success. We lost incredible members of Congress.”
Spanberger on the Dem caucus call: We lost races we shouldn’t have lost.
— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) November 5, 2020
Defund police almost cost me my race bc of an attack ad.
Don’t say socialism ever again.
Need to get back to basics.
(Is yelling.)
Updated
On a call with her caucus members today, House speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed pride in her Democratic colleagues, despite Republicans chipping away at their majority in the chamber.
“Though it was a challenging election, all of our candidates made us proud, but especially those in tough races,” Pelosi said, according to a source on the call.
“We held the House. Joe Biden is on a clear path to be the next president of the United States,” Pelosi said.
But the speaker appeared to acknowledge Democrats underperformed in comparison to expectations that they would build upon their House majority.
“This has been a life or death fight for their very fate of our democracy,” Pelosi said. “We did not win every battle but we did win the war.”
Although some races remain too close to call, Democrats are on track to maintain control of the House, although by a slimmer majority than they held after the 2018 elections.
Updated
Joe Biden is in Wilmington, Delaware, today, as his campaign projects confidence about the direction of the vote count.
According to a pool report, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, received a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic and the state of the US economy today.
A Biden official said, “These are the regular public health and economic briefings the vice-president has received since March.”
The Democratic nominee has not declared victory in the presidential race, but he is clearly looking ahead to his potential presidency, having already launched his transition website.
Updated
We still don’t know the winner of the 2020 presidential election, but talks of the 2024 race have already started.
Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s former acting chief of staff who now serves as the US special envoy for Northern Ireland, said he expects the president to run again in 2024 if he loses to Joe Biden.
“I would absolutely expect the president to stay involved in politics and would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people who are likely to run in 2024,” Mulvaney said during a webinar hosted by an Irish think tank.
The president has also discussed a potential 2024 run with some of his aides, according to CNN.
Trump and aides have had discussions about mounting a comeback run in 2024 should he lose reelection to Biden, an adviser tells me. No word whether he would do it. But the subject has come up, I'm told.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) November 5, 2020
Pennsylvania could be decided tonight, secretary of state says
The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports from Northampton county:
Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania secretary of state, has just told CNN that the winner of the state could be announced tonight.
There are still 550,000 ballots left to be processed, but officials are ahead of schedule and most will be counted by this evening, Boockvar said.
The key is Philadelphia, where there’s about 100,000 outstanding ballots and where Joe Biden is winning a whopping 80% of votes.
This means it may not matter that Allegheny county, home to Pennsylvania’s second-largest city of Pittsburgh, has suspended counting until tomorrow.
Boockvar also said that Donald Trump’s legal appeal to discount mail-in ballots posted by 3 November, but which arrive before the end of Friday 6 November, would not make a significant difference as there’s only a few thousand.
Reminder: as things stand, Trump cannot win without Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college seats. His lead has shrunk from 618,000 on Wednesday morning to 111,000 right now.
Updated
A Michigan judge has dismissed the Trump campaign’s lawsuit demanding “meaningful access” to vote-counting sites.
The decision comes one day after the AP declared Joe Biden to be the winner in Michigan and its 16 electoral votes.
The Biden campaign has dismissed the lawsuits as “meritless” attempts to distract from the Democratic nominee’s victories in key states.
Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign attorney, said of the lawsuits earlier today, “It is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process.”
Updated
Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said he is hopeful “the bulk” of the remaining ballots will be processed by Saturday or Sunday.
Gloria said the county still needs to process 63,262 ballots, which are expected to lean toward Joe Biden.
Asked about the president’s baseless accusations of fraud in Nevada, Gloria said, “We are not aware of any improper ballots that are being processed.”
The AP has not yet declared a winner in Nevada, but Jon Ralston, the widely respected editor of the Nevada Independent, says he does not see a path to victory for Donald Trump in the state.
Biden is up by 11.4K right now in NV.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2020
Dems are going to win these mail ballots coming in from Election Day and yesterday -- 63K. And they should win them decisively. That leaves 60K provisionals, which have been evenly split.
I see no path left for Trump here.
Georgia’s secretary of state said there are about 50,000 ballots left to be counted in the state, where Donald Trump remains narrowly ahead.
With counting continuing in numerous counties throughout #Georgia, as of 12:45 p.m. today there are approximately 50,401 ballots still outstanding#SecureTheVote
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) November 5, 2020
As of now, Trump leads Joe Biden by 13,540 votes in Georgia, so the Democratic nominee needs to win about 63% of the remaining vote to capture the state.
That is possible because most of the remaining votes are coming from Democratic-leaning counties. Stay tuned.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
Protesters continued to face off throughout the morning outside the Pennsylvania convention center, where Philadelphia election officials continued to count mail-in ballots.
A small pro-Trump group stood on the sidewalk across the street from a second group of protesters that demanded every vote be counted. The protests came as Donald Trump’s lead over Joe Biden continued to shrink in Pennsylvania and Biden continued to overwhelmingly win the ballots being counted in Philadelphia.
One of the people who attended the protests was Elio Forcina, who came to Philadelphia from New York City, who said he was concerned there were illegal votes being mailed in. There’s no evidence that’s true and voter fraud is extremely rare.
“There’s no way of actually counting whether or not the mail-in votes are correct,” he said. “Unless they have a way to actually vet those votes are accurate, I don’t believe the board of elections is equipped to do that.”
Philadelphia election officials have procedures in place, like signature comparison, to make sure votes are valid. Philadelphia voters can also track their ballots.
Elio Fortina came to Philly from NEw York City to join the pro-Trump rally outside of the convention center. He says he doesn’t think election officials are equipped to handle the count (officials have been regularly counting since Tuesday with no major problems) pic.twitter.com/TSGXZMjWuq
— Sam Levine (@srl) November 5, 2020
FreedomWorks, the group funded by wealthy conservative donors that helped launch the Tea Party, helped organize the protest in Philadelphia, as well as others around the country, my colleague Lois Beckett noted.
“We’re here today to help provide a platform for our activists to make it known that we’re watching what’s going on after this election,” said Sarah Anderson, FreedomWorks’ director of Policy, who was at the protest. “I don’t think it’s an effort to get legal ballots rejected. It’s an effort to get legal ballots counted.”
Asked what kind of illegal ballots she was concerned about Anderson claimed there were ballots discovered after election day “that weren’t there on election day.” There’s no evidence that’s true.
Updated
Donald Trump seems to be trying to get around Twitter’s misinformation rules by sharing short statements in all caps through his campaign.
The campaign just released one such statement from the president, pushing baseless claims of fraud in the presidential election.
Many of Trump’s tweets since election day have been labeled as misinformation by Twitter, as the president has falsely claimed victory in states that remain too close to call.
We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020
The Guardian’s Daniel Strauss reports:
Earlier on Thursday, the Trump campaign hailed a court ruling allowing Republican poll watchers’ to observe vote counting within six feet. The Trump campaign has been filing similar lawsuits in multiple states that are still counting votes.
“We believe from our data that the majority of the outstanding ballots left are for the vice-president,” Biden campaign manager Jenn O’Malley Dillon said during a press call.
“And at the end of the day -- and let us hope that it’s at the end of today -- but at the end of the day, we will win by a sizable number of votes in Pennsylvania.”
In Georgia though, O’Malley Dillon sounded more cautious. She said “this race is a true tossup” while adding that Trump “is leading by about 18,000 votes but there are a significant number of outstanding ballots” still.
Even if Trump wins Georgia though, Biden has multiple paths toward the 270 electoral votes he needs to win.
On the Trump campaign’s lawsuits, Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign attorney, said that the lawsuits the Trump campaign is filing don’t have to have merit.
“It is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process,” Bauer said.
Ballots continue to be counted as protesters take to the streets – in pictures
Updated
Biden campaign expresses confidence of victory
The Guardian’s Daniel Strauss reports:
Joe Biden’s campaign manager brushed off “meritless” legal attempts by Donald Trump’s reelection campaign to create uncertainty around the voting process as a handful of states count outstanding votes.
“Joe Biden now has won more votes than any presidential candidate in history, and we’re still counting. Over 140 million votes have been counted so far with more than 72 million of those votes going to vice-president Biden,” Biden campaign manager Jenn O’Malley Dillon said Thursday during a press conference.
“Voters have turned out in record numbers for the vice-president,” Dillon added. “Because he sees the same data we do and knows he’s losing, Donald Trump continues to push a flailing strategy designed to prevent people’s votes from being counted.”
Echoing past comments from the campaign, Dillon said, “Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.”
O’Malley Dillon said the campaign expected most of the counting to be done by the end of the day and that the Biden campaign was optimistic about his slim lead in Nevada. Similarly, O’Malley Dillon said that the campaign is ultimately optimistic about Pennsylvania, where Trump currently has a lead of about 115,000 votes.
Updated
The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports from Northampton county:
Allegheny county, home to Pennsylvania’s second biggest city of Pittsburgh, has paused all counting until tomorrow morning due to a legal challenge over 29,000 ballots.
Another 6000 ballots, which are too creased for the scanner, will need to be counted manually and for some reason those won’t be done until tomorrow either.
Instead, staff will work on “administrative issues” and resume counting at 9am Friday. In total, around 35k ballots are still to be counted in Allegheny county, which means it’s looking unlikely that we’ll get a result from Pennsylvania today.
Donald Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania currently stands at 115,000, down from 600,000 yesterday morning. In Philadelphia, where Joe Biden has a 80% lead, a whopping 17% of votes are still to be counted.
To win Pennsylvania, Biden must win 61-63% of the remaining uncounted votes, while Trump needs to win about 37 to 39%.
In short, Biden will be much happier right now.
Updated
We are also getting some more numbers from Nevada’s rural counties, and Joe Biden’s lead has shrunk slightly to about 11,500 votes.
Lyon, too, not moving dial much.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2020
Shows you disproportionate impact of Clark.
Lyon and Elko are two of larger rural counties.
Biden by 11.5K
But the disproportionate impact of Clark county, where Las Vegas is located, is very good news for Biden, given his advantage with mail-in ballots there.
Biden's lead slightly grows in Nevada
Joe Biden’s lead in Nevada has slightly grown after a new batch of votes came in from Clark county, where Las Vegas is located.
With the latest batch of ballots, Biden’s lead has increased to roughly 12,000 votes, or about 1% of the total count.
NEWS: First batch of new votes from NV, from Clark, shows Biden lead up to 12K.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2020
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s lead in Georgia and Pennsylvania continues to shrink as the states count their final votes.
Depending on how quickly these states count their remaining ballots, the presidential race could be called today.
The Trump campaign held a press conference in Nevada, pushing baseless accusations of fraud in the state, where Joe Biden has a narrow lead.
When an MSNBC reporter pressed campaign adviser Ric Grennell on the accusations, he walked away from him.
BREAKING: @jacobsoboroff demands evidence from Ric Grenell, Trump adviser and former acting director of national intelligence, to back up his assertions about votes in Nevada. pic.twitter.com/glaBjSHJk8
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 5, 2020
Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, would not even respond when another reporter asked for his name.
“You’re here to take in information,” Grenell responded.
Updated
A Georgia judge has dismissed the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over absentee ballots in the state.
The president’s reelection campaign tried to argue election officials were attempting to count invalid ballots in Georgia.
When pressed for evidence of that claim, the Trump campaign could not produce any.
The president’s campaign is trying to launch legal challenges in multiple battleground states, but they do not seem to have much merit at this point.
Election officials in multiple states have emphasized they will count every valid ballot before finalizing their results.
Trump's lead in Georgia continues to shrink
Donald Trump’s lead in Georgia continues to shrink, as the final batches of votes are posted by state election officials.
After an update from the Democratic-leaning Fulton county, Trump’s lead over Joe Biden now stands at 14,857, or 0.3% of the total vote.
Senator David Perdue is also now in runoff territory, with his vote number slipping below the 50% needed to win outright.
After the latest batch of ballots, Perdue stands at 49.997% of the vote in the Senate race.
If his number stays below 50%, Perdue will face off with Democrat Jon Ossoff in a January runoff that could determine control of the US Senate.
Updated
Here is Donald Trump again, alleging widespread fraud in the presidential election with no evidence.
“All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud. Plenty of proof - just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!” the president said in a new tweet.
Again, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. It’s also worth noting that presidential nominees do not “claim” states, as Trump tried to do yesterday. Nominees win states through securing a majority of the legally cast votes there.
Biden was declared the winner of states like Wisconsin and Michigan after it became clear he had won more votes than Trump. It’s as simple as that.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:
Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski, two top Trump campaign surrogates, appeared outside the Pennsylvania convention center in a chaotic scene Wednesday to announce they were going inside to observe the counting of absentee ballots.
Pam Bondi is holding up a court order - can’t hear a word of what she’s saying pic.twitter.com/dCUxS6TbIZ
— Sam Levine (@srl) November 5, 2020
I couldn’t hear what either of them said because they were drowned out by a large group.
They stood in front of a small group of protesters loudly chanting to “count every vote.” Bondi and Lewandowski both held up a printed copy of a court order that appeared to secure their access to observe the polls.
The two Trump surrogates stood in front of a small group of Trump supporters that could be heard singing “America the Beautiful” at one point.
Senator David Perdue, a Republican of Georgia, released a statement as it becomes more likely his reelection race will advance to a January runoff.
“If overtime is required when all of the votes have been counted, we’re ready, and we will win,” Perdue’s campaign manager said.
Republican Sen. David Perdue campaign manager says in a statement that "if overtime is required when all of the votes have been counted, we're ready, and we will win." pic.twitter.com/NCYFFEnJkZ
— Ali Zaslav (@alizaslav) November 5, 2020
Perdue is currently at 50% in Georgia, with about 60,000 votes from mostly Democratic-leaning counties left to be counted.
If Perdue falls below 50%, which seems likely at this point, Perdue will face Democrat Jon Ossoff in a January runoff.
A spokesperson for Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger expressed hope that the state would know the winner of its electoral votes by the end of the day.
“I am prayerful that we could get to a resolution by the end of the day today,” the spokesperson said.
There are about 60,000 votes left to be counted, according to the secretary of state, and Donald Trump leads by about 18,000 votes, or 0.4% of the total count.
A Georgia election official confirmed there are about 60,000 votes left to count in the state, which remains too close to call.
A spokesperson for Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said officials are prioritizing accuracy over speed.
But the spokesperson also acknowledged some county officials had forgotten to click the “upload” button to post their vote counts, so the state has sent out a reminder for that.
As a reminder, Donald Trump’s lead in Georgia has narrowed to about 18,000 votes.
Updated
Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro criticized Donald Trump’s reelection campaign for suing to halt vote-counting in the pivotal swing state.
“I’m not going to let anyone stop that process of counting,” Shapiro told MSNBC. “These are legal votes. They will be counted.”
Shapiro accused the president of trying to draw election officials into a political battle, when the focus should be on counting the remaining ballots.
“The rhetoric needs to go away,” Shapiro said. “The campaign is over.”
Donald Trump is again tweeting in all caps, making false claims about the remaining ballots left to be counted.
“ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump said.
ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2020
In reality, a number of states, including Pennsylvania, allow ballots to arrive for days after election day as long as the ballots are postmarked by election day.
It’s also worth noting that it often takes longer for ballots to arrive from service members who are deployed overseas. It’s unclear whether the president thinks those Americans’ ballots should be thrown out.
If both of Georgia’s Senate races advance to runoffs, Democrats could take the Senate majority by winning both races and the White House.
It would be a heavy lift for Democrats to win both Senate races in the traditionally conservative state, as the extremely close presidential race in Georgia demonstrates, and Republicans are still very likely to maintain control of the Senate.
But Republicans’ chances of success in Georgia may be tied to whether Donald Trump would still campaign for their candidates if he becomes a lame-duck president, as an Atlantic writer noted.
If Biden wins and control of the Senate comes down to those two Georgia seats, GOP hopes of winning them/the majority will likely hinge on whether a defeated Trump would invest himself into turning out his voters in races where he’s not on the ballot and wins won’t benefit him
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) November 5, 2020
Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has released his first ad for the January runoff election in Georgia.
The ad features Warnock subjecting himself to the potential attacks that might come from his Republican opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler.
“Raphael Warnock eats pizza with a fork and knife,” the narrator’s ad says in a menacing voice. “Raphael Warnock once stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.”
Get ready Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming.
— Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) November 5, 2020
But that won’t stop us from fighting for a better future for Georgians and focusing on the issues that matter. pic.twitter.com/VN0YIA02MG
The ad then pivots to Warnock saying, “Get ready, Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming. Kelly Loeffler doesn’t want to talk about why she’s for getting rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic, so she’s going to try and scare you with lies about me.”
Warnock and Loeffler advanced to the January runoff after no candidate in the special Senate election managed to attract 50% of the vote.
The other Senate race in Georgia, between Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, is likely headed to a runoff as well, as it looks like Perdue’s numbers could slip below 50% with the final batch of Georgia ballots.
There are about 61,000 outstanding votes in Georgia, most of them from Democratic-leaning counties, according to the Washington Post.
UPDATE: 61k votes are outstanding in Georgia. 17,157 from Chatham; 11,200 from Fulton; 7,338 from Gwinnett; 4,713 from Forsyth; 3,641 from Harris; 1,797 from Laurens; 1,552 from Putnam; 1,202 from Sumter; 700 from Cobb. FEAST
— Amy Gardner (@AmyEGardner) November 5, 2020
Donald Trump currently leads by about 18,000 votes in the state, and the mail-in ballots that are being counted have favored Joe Biden. It’s expected to be an extremely close final result.
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam, and we still don’t have a winner in the US presidential election.
Donald Trump is reacting to the state of play in his now-standard manner: by demanding election officials stop counting valid ballots.
“STOP THE COUNT!” the president said in a new tweet.
STOP THE COUNT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2020
Election officials have pledged to count every valid vote cast by election day, and many of them have defended the integrity of the counts in their states.
It’s also worth noting that, if counting were stopped now, Biden would win the presidency because he is ahead in Nevada, which would get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
Look, you know and I know that as soon as enough races have been called that Biden has 270 Electoral College votes, it is still not going to be the end of this.
Wisconsin, provided Trump is within 1% of Biden, will get recounted for sure. And there are the legal challenges. Reuters have just put together this handy outline of a few of the key ones:
Michigan ballot-counting fight
Trump’s campaign said on Wednesday it had filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop state officials from counting ballots. The campaign said the case in the Michigan Court of Claims seeks to halt counting until it has an election inspector at each absentee-voter counting board. The campaign also wanted to review ballots that were opened and counted before an inspector from its campaign was present.
Pennsylvania court battles
Republican officials on Tuesday sued election officials in Montgomery County, which borders Philadelphia, accusing them of illegally counting mail-in ballots early and giving voters who submitted defective ballots a chance to re-vote. At a hearing on Wednesday, US District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of their allegations and how the integrity of the election might be affected.
In a separate lawsuit, the Trump campaign asked a judge to halt ballot counting in Pennsylvania, claiming that Republicans had been unlawfully denied access to observe the process.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Pennsylvania have asked the US Supreme Court to review a decision from the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived through until Friday 6 November. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign filed a motion to intervene in the case.
Supreme court justices said last week there was not enough time to decide the merits of the case before Election Day but indicated they might revisit it afterwards. As a result, Pennsylvania election officials said they will segregate properly postmarked ballots that arrived after Election Day, which opens the possibility the court could subsequently strike them out.
US Postal Service litigation
A judge on Wednesday said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must answer questions about why the USPS failed to complete a court-ordered sweep for undelivered ballots in about a dozen states before a Tuesday afternoon deadline. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan is overseeing a lawsuit by Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates who have been demanding the postal service deliver mail-in ballots in time to be counted in the election.
Georgia ballot fight
The Trump campaign on Wednesday evening filed a lawsuit in state court in Chatham County, Georgia. Unlike the Pennsylvania and Michigan actions, that lawsuit is not asking a judge to halt ballot counting. Instead, the campaign said it received information that late-arriving ballots were improperly mingled with valid ballots, and asked a judge to enter an order making sure late-arriving ballots were separated so they would not be counted.
After the announcement just now that there will be a press conference in Nevada this morning featuring the Republican chair of the state and attorneys, presumably we’ll be able to add Nevada to that list soon.
This could be intriguing. 8:30am PST is 4:30pm this afternoon if, like me, you are in London.
INBOX: @TeamTrump will make a “major announcement” in Las Vegas this morning, headlined by 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot participant @mschlapp, ex-Acting DNI Ric Grenell, Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, and ex-NV AG Adam Laxalt. pic.twitter.com/OCGjmnOKRz
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) November 5, 2020
Nevada still has around 25% of its votes to count, which is approaching 400,000. Joe Biden has a narrow lead of about 7,500 at the moment. Under state law, ballots can still be accepted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day up until 10 November.
Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
The tweet mentions Matt Schlapp as a Brooks Brothers Riot participant. For those of us without total recall of US elections from twenty years ago, my colleague Adam Gabbatt reminded us what the Brooks Brothers Riot was recently:
In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped.
The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. The counting of disputed ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision.
Updated
A very simple message coming out from the Biden campaign this morning: Count every vote.
Every vote must be counted. pic.twitter.com/kWLGRfeePK
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 5, 2020
These two charts sum up exactly why in one state Trump supporters were protesting to keep the count going, and in another state the Trump campaign has been taking legal action to try and shut the counting down.
Here’s the changing situation in Arizona & Pennsylvania - things are narrowing in opposite directions. It could really go to the wire pic.twitter.com/OdWpR2OvvR
— Sophy Ridge (@SophyRidgeSky) November 5, 2020
Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Wolf, by the way, was quite clear yesterday on the state’s determination to count every vote, saying:
Pennsylvania is going to count every vote and make sure that everyone has their voice heard. Pennsylvania is going to fight every single attempt to disenfranchise voters and continue to administer a free and fair election.
I suspect it is the experience of watching Donald Trump grind out the last few Electoral College votes to win in 2016 that is making some people still lack confidence that Biden will actually win.
However, as well as Jennifer Rubin being convinced, Giovanni Russonello writes this for the New York Times politics newsletter this morning. Note, that unlike Fox News and the Associated Press (and us), NYT have not yet put Arizona into Biden’s column. But he writes:
Joe Biden has now won 253 electoral votes and has multiple routes to the White House, with five swing states still undecided and uncounted votes in several likely to favor him. While Trump has not indicated that he has any plans to concede, and his campaign insists he could still prevail, at this point a path to victory would most likely run through the courts. It’s a hard road ahead for him.
He does point out though that capturing the presidency won’t take away all the question marks about the Democratic performance at this election.
If Democrats end up declaring a victory over all, it will be a beleaguered one. Not only did Trump outperform their expectations in the battlegrounds, but Democratic candidates for both the House and the Senate also lost races — some in states that split their tickets and favored Biden for president — that the party had been fairly confident about.
Jennifer Rubin, columnist at the Washington Post, has put up a typically blistering piece today. She seems extremely confident we are heading to a Biden presidency, and writes:
Biden and Harris appear to have won despite a right-wing media universe willing to distort, deny and lie about verifiable facts and despite a mainstream media that was far too restrained in calling a lie a lie and in preventing President Trump from using their platforms to spread abject falsehoods.
Biden will also be the seventh Democrat in the past eight elections to have won the popular vote, once more illustrating the degree to which our system has departed from the basic concept of majority rule.
Had Republican lawmakers allowed Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to begin tabulating votes a week or so ago, we likely would have known all this late Tuesday night or early Wednesday. Trump’s predictable claims that he was cheated had one salutary effect: He finally provoked some Republican lawmakers and Fox News commentators to recover some sense of responsibility and acquaint themselves with reality by debunking the notion that voting should stop.
There are deep problems in America that stem from one party’s refusal to operate in the factual world in favor of a world that allows ignorance and resentment to shape political views. I will have much to say in the coming days about what we do about that. But if the country wanted someone who would beat Trump and heal the country, it picked the right guy.
Read it here: Washington Post – Jennifer Rubin – Joe Biden ran a historic race
Pennsylvania is the biggest remaining uncalled prize on offer. The 20 electoral votes there would almost certainly seal the deal for Joe Biden, regardless of how Arizona turns out in the end.
Here’s how the Philadelphia Inquirer was reporting the count in their part of the state last night – which will be very welcome news to the Biden camp.
Joe Biden’s lead in the Philadelphia suburbs is growing by the minute as elections officials continue to count scores of mail ballots, and his strong performance there may well help lift him to Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes.
Biden is on track to beat President Donald Trump in Philadelphia’s four collar counties by a bigger margin than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
In Montgomery County, Biden leads Trump with more than 60% of the vote — and county officials said they still have to count 50,000 mail ballots, which thus far have skewed heavily toward the former vice president.
Pennsylvania’s election results continue to fluctuate as votes are counted. The first results released after polls closed Tuesday began with Joe Biden above Donald Trump because they came mostly from mail ballots counted during the day.
Trump’s numbers climbed steadily throughout the night as in-person results were tallied, and a slow move toward Biden — what’s known as a “blue shift” — is expected as mail ballots are counted in the days ahead.
Read it here: Philadelphia Inquirer – The ‘blue shift’ is already moving vote margins in the Philly suburbs from Trump to Biden
Just back to the coronavirus crisis for a moment, Reuters have this in their round-up today, that hospitalizations have topped 50,000 for the first time in three months.
They report that North Dakota reported only six free intensive care unit beds in the entire state on Wednesday, when it was one of 14 states that reported record levels of hospitalized Covid patients.
Hospitalization are a key metric because they are not impacted by the amount of testing done.
President Trump has repeatedly downplayed the number of cases in the US, falsley claiming that if they didn’t test so much, they wouldn’t have so many cases. Testing makes no difference to the number of people infected – it just allows you an idea of how many are.
The proportion of tests coming back positive is greater than 50% in South Dakota and over 40% in Iowa and Wyoming. The World Health Organization says rates of more than 5% are concerning because they indicate undetected community transmission.
Trump has been keen to portray the country as ‘turning the corner’, but the numbers are against him.
The top 5 Covid-19 case days so far:
— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) November 5, 2020
November 4: 102,831
October 30: 99,321
November 3: 91,530
October 31: 89,126
October 29: 88,521
Whether Democrats retain any hope of flipping the Senate comes down to what now happens in the Senate elections in Georgia. There were two Senate seats up for grabs.
One was a special election, which, as CNN reports, featured a divisive, intra-party matchup pitching Democratic party nominee Rev. Raphael Warnock up against TWO Republican opponents, Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins. No, I’ve no idea why either.
Loeffler and Collins had tried to outdo each other in touting their ties to President Donald Trump, and they have bashed each other as insufficiently conservative. But, on Tuesday evening, that intra-party feud came to an end when Collins conceded, tweeting that he had called Loeffler to congratulate her on making it to the runoff. “She has my support and endorsement,” he said.
So now Rev. Warnock will face a run-off with Sen. Loeffler in January. Warnock got 32.7% of the vote. The combined Loeffler/Collins share was 46.2%.
The other race is a slightly more straight forward affair, involving Republican incumbent David Perdue and the Democratic party’s Jon Ossoff. It is tight. Very tight.
Senate control may hinge on whether Perdue can stay just above this line and avoid a runoff. If he doesn’t, two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5 will determine which party runs the Senate.
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) November 5, 2020
If Perdue fails to get 50% of the vote, they too will run-off in January. While the Republicans will be favorites in both races, you can imagine that a lot of campaign money will be thrown at trying to turn the seats blue,
Democrats had hoped that four years of turmoil, attacks on norms and institutions and mendacity – plus a pandemic that cost 230,000 lives – would result in a quick, clean and overwhelming repudiation of the 45th president.
That would have been clarifying about the direction of the country, a warning to the Republican party that it must take its 2013 “autopsy” report off the shelf and reinvent itself.
But on another miserable night for pollsters, it did not turn out that way. Trump proved resilient and increased his vote in Florida, Texas and other states. He found even more white working-class voters than last time and chipped away at Democratic support among Latinos. His cult-of-personality campaign rallies were as enthusiastic and rambunctious as ever.
His victory in 2016, it turns out, was no fluke attributable to Vladimir Putin or James Comey. In 2020 his sexism, racism and lie-telling have been legitimised and emboldened.
When some Americans protested “This is not who we are”, Trump voters replied: “This is exactly who we are – and we’re not going anywhere.”
“The so-called moral outrage around Trump’s presidency did not produce any substantive shift in his Republican support,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black. “In fact, he expanded his base among white voters. Trump continues to flourish in the intersection of greed, selfishness and racism.”
Read more of David Smith’s analysis here: Regardless of the US presidential election outcome, Trumpism lives on
We don’t have the result yet, though obviously people are already casting their eyes forward to a potential Biden transition period. But, with the Democrats seemingly having failed to flip the Senate, getting stuff done in cahoots with Mitch McConnell’s Republican leadership is going to be tough. Axios this morning have this:
Republicans’ likely hold on the Senate is forcing Joe Biden’s transition team to consider limiting its prospective Cabinet nominees to those who Mitch McConnell can live with, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new Senate political math could essentially dash the ambitions of some Democrats, including those who have clashed with Republicans.
The process is in its early stages as Biden officials await final numbers on the size of the majority, and any potential signals from McConnell about whether he’ll fight every nominee or focus on one or two examples.
This political reality could result in Biden having a more centrist cabinet.
Barack Obama’s final years as president saw him struggle to get things done because of constant Republican blocks at the Senate level, the most obvious example being McConnell’s simple refusal to countenance moving forward with Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland for the US supreme court.
Read more here: Axios – Republican Senate wins wreak havoc on Biden transition plans
You probably have your own views on whether the Kanye West run for president was a publicity stunt, a genuine attempt at siphoning off Democratic votes, or something else entirely. We now know that West garnered around 60,000 votes in total across the 12 states where he appeared on the ballot.
He himself voted in Wyoming, where he had to write his name in, as he had been unable to got on the ballot there. The star has already tweeted a Kanye 2024 message, so this may not be the last we see of him in the political arena.
KANYE 2024 pic.twitter.com/Zm2pKcn12t
— ye (@kanyewest) November 4, 2020
There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution or any federal law that mandates a winner of the election be declared on Election Day. In fact, for much of the 19th century, it took days – if not weeks – for the winner to be declared.
That’s Chris Cilizza for CNN reminded us that while it may be inconvenient for the 24 hour news cycle, that’s just the facts. His analysis is that the delay shows ‘the system is working’. He writes:
When you double the number of early votes and keep the same rules in place about when and how they will be counted (and the same or fewer number of election officials to count them), the situation we are seeing play out is to be expected. Every vote needs to be counted – even if that tabulation process is slower than we would like.
If you are wondering why counting is slow in some states – aside from sheer numbers and geography – this may help. NBC News’ Gadi Schwartz has been in one of the counting centers in Arizona and in the video linked below he explains the three tiers poll workers go through to make sure a signature on a dropped off or mailed-in ballot is authentic. It’s a good watch.
See it here: NBC News – How Arizona poll workers verify signature on ballots
US recorded record 102,831 new coronavirus cases yesterday
It shouldn’t be forgotten that the election was taking place in the midst of a pandemic, and yesterday the US set a new record for the highest number of new daily cases recorded anywhere in the world.
According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, yesterday the US recorded 102,831 new cases of coronavirus, and saw 1,097 new Covid deaths.
The New York Times reports that 23 states have recorded more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch. And five states — Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota and Nebraska — all set new single-day case records yesterday.
Deaths related to the coronavirus, say the NYT, have increased 21 percent across the country in the last two weeks.
The Associated Press report that the surge was most pronounced in the Midwest and Southwest.
Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and New Mexico all reported record high hospitalizations this week. Nebraska’s largest hospitals started limiting elective surgeries and looked to bring in nurses from other states to cope with the surge. Hospital officials in Iowa and Missouri warned bed capacity could soon be overwhelmed.
Claims like this, by the way, are palpably untrue.
I haven’t heard the mainstream media mention COVID-19 for 36 hours.
— Dr. David Samadi, MD (@drdavidsamadi) November 5, 2020
That’s been a nice change.
The American Academy of Pediatrics also announced earlier this week that the number of US children contracting COVID-19 has soared to unprecedented levels. There were nearly 200,000 new cases during October.
If the current rate continues, by the middle of next week the US will have recorded over 10 million cases.
Here’s a clip of Donald Trump supporters chanting “Count the vote!” outside a Phoenix, Arizona counting centre. The Trump campaign firmly believe they can erode Joe Biden’s current lead in the state and retain it, and 11 crucial electoral college votes with it.
They might, however, be more inclined to want to chant “Stop the count!” in Georgia, where the reverse is happening, and Biden is cutting into the president’s narrow lead there.
Georgia has narrowed yet further. Now just 18,540 with more Atlanta votes to come.
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) November 5, 2020
Trump carried the state by 200,000 in 2016.#Election2020 pic.twitter.com/XEGYXLoIsO
Here’s a quick explanation of why you may be seeing different electoral college counts across different media channels and websites. The short answer, by the way, is essentially varying levels of confidence over the potential result in Arizona.
The president is elected by winning at least 270 electoral college votes, not the outcome of the popular vote. Because there is no centralised federal election system, it has become tradition in the US that “decision desks” at media organisations make a call that states have been won by one candidate or the other when enough votes have been counted. States that are too close to call – such as Nevada and Georgia at the moment – remain in the balance until a network “calls” them.
There are a number of highly reputable election decision desks in US media, including Associated Press, NBC, Fox News and others. They may call races earlier or later, or not at all.
This year, Arizona has thrown this into sharp relief. Our current total of 264 electoral votes for Joe Biden includes the fact that Associated Press, as well as Fox News, have called Arizona for the Democratic nominee. Not all decision desks have yet.
Read more here: Why are the media reporting different US election results?
There’s been a lot of conspiracies and disinformation flying around about the election and vote counting. This appears to be from the “Well, this is awkward” files…
A conservative “news” site reports catching a man wheeling in “suspicious” equipment to the Detroit convention center, implying it was used to steal ballots.
— Ross Jones (@rossjonesWXYZ) November 5, 2020
The “ballot thief” was my photographer. He was bringing down equipment for our 12-hour shift. https://t.co/4UsRdOncZ3
Whichever way you look at it, it has been quite a phenomenal vote in America this week. Record turnout, the two candidates with the highest voting tallies in history, and possibly the biggest margin of victory since Ronald Reagan swept Jimmy Carter out of the White House in 1980.
if this estimate proves correct, Joe Biden will have received a higher percentage of the popular vote than Ronald Reagan received in his landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980 https://t.co/3qLW4WKhv1
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) November 5, 2020
All of which only highlights how strange it must feel to be 3.4 million votes ahead of your opposite number, and still be in a position to lose the election.
It isn’t of course, just the president that was on the ballot yesterday. As well as Senate and House races, lots of states were also asking residents to vote on other legislative issues. One of those was abortion, and it’s worth picking up this from Kate Smith from CBS News, looking at the very different outcomes in Colorado and Louisiana. She writes:
In Colorado, voters protected access to abortion later in pregnancy, striking down a ballot measure that would have banned nearly all abortion procedures after 22 weeks of pregnancy. But in Louisiana, anti-abortion rights groups saw a major victory: 62% of voters approved a constitutional amendment that clarifies the state’s Declaration of Rights does not protect the right to an abortion, an addition that would make it nearly impossible to keep abortion legal in the state if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Those starkly different positions — in one state maintaining expanded access to abortion and another moving towards a complete ban — highlight what Elizabeth Nash, interim associate director for state policy at the Guttmacher Institute, called a “divided country.” They also offer a preview of how states may react if the Supreme Court decides to reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court giving conservatives a 6-3 majority, Colorado and Lousiana show how very divided state reaction will be to any supreme court moves on the issue.
Read it here: CBS News – Abortion ballot measure results show starkly divided opinion on reproductive issues
Election Day was Tuesday. It’s Thursday and we still don’t know who the next president of the United States is going to be. Here’s how the key states are looking now…
Arizona: 11 electoral votes
Called for Biden by AP and Fox News, but seems still in play.
Biden leads 50.5-48.1, with 86% counted.
Trump needs to win nearly two-thirds of the remaining votes.
Next update: Expected Thursday night local time (that’s late in the UK).
Georgia: 16 electoral votes
Toss-up
Trump leads 49.6–49.1, with 95% counted
Biden needs to win 60% of remaining votes, many coming from Democrat areas.
Next update: Secretary of state says they hope to have results today
Nevada: 6 electoral votes
Toss-up but leans Biden
Biden leads 49.3-48.7, with 86% counted
The lead is fewer than 8,000 but remaining mail-in expected to skew Democrat.
Result expected noon ET/5pm UK
North Carolina: 15 electoral votes
Toss-up but leans Trump
Trump leads 50.1-48.7, with 95% counted
Biden needs two-thirds of mail-in ballots to go his way
Mail ballots still accepted if they arrive by 12 November, so could be a long wait for certainty.
Pennsylvania: 20 electoral votes
Toss-up
Trump leads 50.7-48.1. 89% of vote in
Most votes yet to be counted are in strong Democratic urban areas
Result expected Friday, but already subject to Trump legal challenges over mail-in ballots being counted which are postmarked on election day or before, but arrive after 3 November. Trump wants them tossed out.
Michigan: 16 electoral votes
Called for Biden. The Trump campaign is suing to halt counting of mail-in ballots
Wisconsin: 10 electoral votes
Called for Biden
Biden’s lead is 49.4-48.8.
If the winning margin is less than 1%, then Trump is entitled to a recount, which the campaign say they will demand.
Here are some of the most striking images from overnight of exhausted election workers, protesters on the street, and police in riot gear across the US.
Updated
Donald Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was getting an uncharacteristically tough time on Fox News last night as she tried to outline the legal action the Trump campaign is taking in Pennsylvania.
She was repeatedly pressed on whether the plan was to throw out ballots that had been cast in good faith on election. She was asked “Even if they voted on 3 November [by mail], in Pennsylvania, because they were told that was ok to do, you’re going to toss their ballot out?”
McEnany replied no, but then said: “We believe every vote on election day should be counted, but it’s those that arrive after the election day that we are fighting.”
So…yes?
Kayleigh McEnany says if Trump loses PA they will go to the supreme court to get ballots mailed before or on election day thrown out pic.twitter.com/rNWA959Nwr
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) November 5, 2020
Worth noting too that McEnany ended the segment by predicting: “I think that it’ll be a mere hypothetical, what we’re talking about now, because we will prevail by 40,000 votes in the state of Pennsylvania.”
Pennsylvania has 20 electoral college votes. Trump’s lead is currently 164,418, but there are more than 780,000 votes still to be counted.
Updated
What’s going on with Arizona? Good question. Well, yesterday Associated Press and Fox News both called the race for Biden. But they may have been premature. Other outlets were more cautious. Biden did have a significant lead, but it is down to 68,000, and the Trump campaign still insist they will win it. That could throw the election right back up in the air.
At the moment, if Biden wins Arizona, he just needs to win one more state. If Trump takes Arizona, the math starts to look more complicated, although it still slightly favors the Democrat nominee if he can take Nevada, where he leads, and Georgia, where he is closing on a narrow Trump lead. Nevada will report its results today, around about 5pm UK time, or noon in New York.
Jennifer Medina at the New York Times has this though – suggesting that Trump still faces an uphill battle to clinch the state:
Trump would have to receive at least 57 percent of votes that remain to be counted in other parts of the state as well, including counties that tend to vote Democratic.
Biden’s narrow edge underscored a profound political shift in Arizona, a longtime Republican bastion that has lurched left in recent years, fueled by rapidly evolving demographics and a growing contingent of young Latino voters who favor liberal policies.
Welcome to our continued live coverage of the US election. Here’s where we are up to…
- Joe Biden has won more votes than any US presidential candidate in history – but the race for the White House remains too close to call.
- Based on the states that Associated Press (AP) has called, Biden needs just one more state to get over the 270 threshold in the electoral college to be declared the winner.
- Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Alaska remain to be called. Biden has a narrow lead in Nevada, and Democrats believe he will overhaul Trump’s lead in at least one of Georgia or Pennsylvania as the last remaining votes are counted.
- The Nevada result should come through today. It is expected at lunchtime in the US, around 5pm in the UK
- There’s a slight question mark over the status of Arizona. AP and Fox News have called it for Biden, other news organisations aren’t so confident of the result, and the Trump campaign are still predicting they will ultimately win there. Biden’s lead is down to 68,000 with more mail-in ballots to count.
- Trump supporters protested at a Detroit vote-counting site, and outside a Phoenix election center. The crowd called upon Michigan election officials to “stop the vote”. In Phoenix, Trump supporters demanded the opposite, telling officials to keep counting as Biden’s lead narrowed.
- Twitter flagged more of Trump’s tweets for pushing misinformation about the election results. The president shared a tweet thread this evening trying to “claim” multiple battleground states that he has not won. Obviously, those “claims” have no legal standing in a US election.
- You can find our full live results service here.
- We also have the full results for Congress, where the Democrats’ attempt to flip the Senate appears to have faltered.
- The election isn’t the only story in town. Yesterday the US set a new world record for daily coronavirus cases, with 102,831 recorded. There were 1,097 deaths.
I’m Martin Belam, and I will be with you for the next few hours – you can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com. And while we are settling in to our new home, you might want to have a scroll back through what has been happening overnight.
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