US election 2020: Biden holds lead over Trump in tense wait for results – live updates
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. 8:30 PST is 4:30 this afternoon if, like me, you are in London.
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. A recount of 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.
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A very simple message coming out from the Biden campaign this morning: Count every vote.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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