Eliana Willis

Republican senator Lindsey Graham has defended the Trump campaign’s baseless claim of irregularities during the election, saying the president’s team deserves the opportunity to make the case. “Democracy depends upon fair elections. President Trump’s team is going to have a chance to make a case regarding voting irregularities,” he said. “I’m going to stand with President Trump.” Graham’s comments come as presidential candidate Joe Biden took a lead over Trump in battleground Pennsylvania and Georgia, as ballots continue to be counted
Trump campaign vows to keep fighting: ‘This election is not over’
US election live updates: Biden edges toward victory with leads over Trump in Nevada and Pennsylvania More

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Donald Trump repeated his unfounded claims of election fraud on Friday, as it seemed increasingly likely he would refuse to accept the results and concede defeat to Joe Biden.
“This is about the integrity of our entire election process,” the president insisted in a statement issued early on Friday afternoon, adding: “I will never give up fighting.”
Earlier, as the Democratic challenger moved into the lead in Georgia and Pennsylvania – two states Trump must win to have any chance of retaining the presidency – the Trump campaign insisted in a statement talk of a Biden victory was a “false projection” and hinted at further legal challenges to come.
In return, Biden’s spokesman, Andrew Bates, said: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge a probable Biden victory seems likely to set the scene for an ugly legal battle waged across several states. Given the incumbent is yet to provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud, it seems like this will be a futile fight. But the campaign insisted it would be waged in any case.
“This election is not over,” said the Trump campaign general counsel, Matt Morgan. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
Morgan said the campaign was confident it would find “improperly harvested” ballots in Georgia, and claimed there had been “many irregularities in Pennsylvania”. In Nevada, according to Morgan, individuals cast mail-in ballots incorrectly.
“Biden is relying on these states for his phoney claim on the White House,” he said, “but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected.”
The Trump campaign had not provided any evidence for these claims.
Over the past six months Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, when asked, and has claimed he will only lose if the election is rigged.
Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chief of staffs and the country’s top military officer, has said the armed forces would not get involved in the transfer of power.
Biden, however, back in June said the military would remove Trump if it came to that. He told the Daily Show: “I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
Recount
In Georgia on Friday morning, as Biden squeezed into a narrow lead, the state secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said there would be a recount. He also promised transparency. It seemed likely both Georgia Senate races, key to control of the upper chamber, would be decided in January runoffs.
Biden’s most significant lead was in Pennsylvania, where thousands of votes remained to be counted. The majority of those votes were from counties that lean heavily Democratic, the process taking longer than usual due to more votes having been cast by mail.
Trump quoted a talking head on Fox Business when he tweeted that “Philadelpiha [sic] has got a rotten history on election integrity”. But the Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey was among Republicans edging away from what appeared to be the death throes of the Trump presidency.
Toomey told NBC that though he thought “the president still has a very narrow path by which he can win”, he also thought there was “absolutely not” any “evidence [of] significant large-scale fraud or malfeasance anywhere in Pennsylvania”.

Other senior party figures sprang to the president’s defence. Several GOP politicians who might fancy themselves as contenders for the presidency in 2024 did so on Thursday night, after the president’s sons goaded the party on Twitter.
Among senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – a former friend and ally of John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, once seen as a relative moderate but who swore fealty to Trump long ago – all raged against the tide of Biden votes, echoing the president’s baseless claims of fraud.
Of the counting in Pennsylvania, which is being watched by official Republican observers, Cruz echoed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud when he told Fox News: “I am more than a little frustrated that every time they close the doors and shut out the lights, they always find more Democratic votes.”
The three only intervened, however, after receiving a public shaming from Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr.
“The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr – seen by many as a possible 2024 contender himself. More

Away from the presidential and congressional races, at least 124 statutory and constitutional questions were put to voters in 32 US states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).The pandemic dampened grassroots enthusiasm for circulating petitions to get measures on the ballot, as citizen-led initiatives this year dropped to 38, from 60 in 2018 and 72 in 2016, the NCSL said. But the 2020 crop of ballot measures still covered a wide array of issues, from election laws to abortion rights to worker rights and taxes. Here are some of key results:MarijuanaVoters in New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana approved measures to legalise marijuana for recreational use, and South Dakota and Mississippi approved the drug’s use for medical purposes. Since 1996, 33 other states and the District of Columbia have allowed medical marijuana, 11 had previously approved its recreational use and 16, including some medical marijuana states, have decriminalised simple possession, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.Psilocybin (magic mushrooms)Psilocybin, a hallucinogen also known in its raw form as magic mushrooms, was approved by Oregon voters for therapeutic use for adults. Backers of the Psilocybin Services Act cited research showing benefits of the drug as a treatment for anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions. The approved measure sets a two-year schedule to review the matter and create a regulatory structure for its sale.In a related measure, Washington DC voters approved Initiative 81, which directs police to rank “entheogenic plants and fungi,” including psilocybin and mescaline, among its lowest enforcement priorities.Minimum wageVoters in Florida approved a measure to amend the state constitution to gradually increase its $8.56 per hour minimum wage to $15 by 30 September 2026.California gig workersCalifornia voters approved a measure that would exempt ride-share and delivery drivers from a state law that makes them employees, not contractors. The measure, Proposition 22, is the first gig-economy question to go before statewide voters in a campaign. Backers including Uber and Lyft spent more than $190m on their campaign, making it the costliest ballot measure ever, according to the NCSL.AbortionColorado voters rejected a measure to ban abortions, except those needed to save the life of the mother, after 22 weeks of pregnancy. In Louisiana, voters approved an amendment that makes clear that the state constitution does not protect abortion rights or funding for abortions. The amendment clears the way for the state to outlaw abortion if the US supreme court overturns the landmark Roe v Wade decision that protects abortion rights under the US constitution.ElectionsRanked-choice voting, which lets voters select state and federal candidates in order of preference, was rejected by Massachusetts voters. Only Maine lets its voters use the method statewide. A citizen-initiated measure on the issue was also on the ballot in Alaska, but results there were incomplete. California approved a measure to restore the right to vote to parolees convicted of felonies.TaxesIn California, a proposal to roll back a portion of the state’s landmark Proposition 13 law limiting property taxes was too close to call on Wednesday. The measure, Proposition 15 on the state’s 2020 ballot, would leave in place protections for residential properties but raise taxes on commercial properties worth more than $3m. More

Barring a twist inconceivable even by the standards of 2020, we will soon know the result of the US presidential election – and it will almost certainly be a cause for rejoicing. Donald Trump, the man who has haunted the world’s dreams and sparked a thousand nightmares, has all but lost. On 20 January 2021, he will probably leave the White House – or be removed if necessary. The Trump presidency, a shameful chapter in the history of the republic, will soon be over.
True, it is taking longer than we might have liked. There was to be no swift moment of euphoria and elation, an unambiguous landslide announced on election night with a drumroll and fireworks display. Instead, thanks to a pandemic that meant two in three Democrats voted by slower-to-count mail-in ballots, it’s set to be a win in increments, a verdict delivered in slow motion. Nor was there the hoped-for “blue wave” that might have carried the Democrats to a majority in the US Senate (though there is, just, a way that could yet happen). As a result, it will be hard for Joe Biden to do what so urgently needs to be done, whether that’s tackling the climate crisis, racial injustice, economic inequality, America’s parlous infrastructure or its dysfunctional and vulnerable electoral machinery. And it is glumly true that even if Trump is banished from the Oval Office, Trumpism will live on in the United States.
And yet none of that should obscure the main event that has taken place this week. It’s a form of progressive masochism to search for the defeat contained in a victory. Because a victory is what this will be.
Recall the shock and disgust that millions – perhaps billions – have felt these past four years, as Trump sank to ever lower depths. When he was ripping children from their parents and keeping them in cages; when he was blithely exchanging “love letters” with the murderous thug that rules the slave state of North Korea; when he was coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, or else lose the funds it needed to defend itself against Vladimir Putin, the high crime for which he was impeached; when he was denying the reality of the coronavirus, insisting it would just melt away, thereby leaving more than 235,000 Americans to their fate and their deaths – when he was doing all that, what did his opponents long for? The wish, sometimes uttered to the heavens, was not complicated: they wanted Trump’s defeat and ejection from power. Few attached the rider that it would only count if the Democrats could also pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina.
Nor does it seem as though any defeat for Trump will be tentative or partial, even if the delayed result might make it feel that way. Joe Biden crushed him in this contest. He beat him in the popular vote by a huge margin, four million at last count, with that figure only growing as the final result is tallied. Yes, in a high-turnout election, Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 – but Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in history, more even than the once-in-a-generation phenomenon that was Barack Obama.
What’s more, Biden looks to have done something extremely difficult and vanishingly rare, taking on and defeating a first-term president. That would ensure that Donald Trump becomes only the third elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to try and fail to win re-election. Trump would take his place alongside Jimmy Carter and George Bush the elder in the small club of rejected, one-term presidents. As it happens, both those men were gracious in defeat and admirable in retirement, but Trump won’t see them that way. He’ll regard them as stone-cold losers. And he’s about to be one of them, his place taken by a decent, empathic man with the first ever female vice-president at his side.
It’s worth bearing all that in mind when you hear the predictable complaints that Biden was too “centrist”, or that Bernie Sanders would have done better. It could be argued that Biden outperformed the rest of his party, pulling ahead even as Democrats lost seats in the House and failed to make great gains in the Senate. Note that Trump’s prime attack line – that “far left” Democrats were itching to impose “socialism” on America – cut through in this campaign, clearly alarming Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida, for example. But it was a hard label to stick on a lifelong pragmatist like Joe Biden: most Americans just didn’t buy it.
What it adds up to is not perhaps the across-the-board repudiation of Trump and the congressional Republicans who enabled him these past four years. But it does count as an emphatic rejection of what Trump did as a first-term president – and, if it holds, the prevention of all the horror he would have unleashed if he had won a second.
It means that a majority of Americans have said no to the constant stream of insults, abuse and lies – more than 22,000 since Trump took office, according to the Washington Post. They have said no to a man who was a misinformation super-spreader, who called journalists “enemies of the people” and denounced inconvenient truths as “fake news”. They have said no to a man who suggested people should guard against Covid by injecting themselves with disinfectant; who dismissed science in favour of Fox News; who dismissed the word of his own intelligence agencies, preferring conspiracy theories picked up on Twitter.
They have said no to a president who saw white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville in 2017, and declared that they included some “very fine people”. They have said no to a man who referred to one black congresswoman as “low IQ” and suggested four others, all US citizens, should “go back home”. They have said no to the man who refused to disavow the far-right groups who worship him, telling those racist extremists instead to “stand back and stand by”. They have said no to the man who trashed America’s allies, who withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and who grovelled to every strongman and dictator on the planet.
The next few weeks will be perilous. Trump will not concede; he will continue to deny the legitimacy of this result. His performance on Thursday night was perhaps his lowest and darkest yet, groundlessly telling Americans they could have no faith in their most solemn democratic rite: the election of a president. As he leaves, he will scorch the earth and poison the soil.
But all of that is to remind us why it was so essential, for America and the world, that he be defeated. And why, even though it may have arrived slowly and without the fanfare so many of us wanted, this will be a moment to savour. A dark force is being expelled from the most powerful office in the world – and at long last, we can glimpse the light.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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In his Wednesday evening address, an increasingly desperate Donald Trump continued his assault on the democratic process by lying about widespread voter fraud.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he told the nation.
But it’s now clear that some in his party aren’t buying it. Almost immediately, current and former GOP elected officials blasted the president for sowing discord and lying about the ballot counting process.
The Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger tweeted that the president’s lying “is getting insane” and pleaded with his party to “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation”.
Meanwhile, the Texas congressman Will Hurd tweeted: “Every American should have his or her vote counted.”
“A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon,” he wrote.
A clear division line is emerging in the GOP – while sycophants like the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, have continued to parrot the president’s false claims, many are breaking with Trump.
That includes the revered GOP strategist Karl Rove, who on Wednesday morning said the mass fraud that Trump is alleging “isn’t going to happen” in America.
“Some hanky-panky always goes on, and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs,” Rove said. “But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn’t going to happen. Let’s repeat that: that isn’t going to happen.”
While Republican rebukes of the president are refreshing for many Democrats, it only comes as Trump’s re-election campaign appears doomed. Biden took the lead in Georgia hours after the Wednesday address, and the Democratic challenger is on pace to flip Pennsylvania.
As the president concluded his speech, former representative Carlos Curbelo called for “Republicans to stand up for our democracy at this hour”.

Carlos Curbelo
(@carloslcurbelo)
By “illegal votes” it seems @potus is referring to votes cast by mail which disproportionately benefitted his opponent this election. Those votes are not in any way illegal. Important for all public leaders, especially Republicans, to stand up for our democracy at this hour.

November 5, 2020

Still, in Michigan, Trump supporters alleging fraud on Thursday marched outside Detroit’s TCF Center where ballots were counted the day before. Meanwhile, the Trump acolyte and Senate candidate John James is refusing to concede in his apparent loss to Senator Gary Peters, and is demanding an investigation.
But as Republicans baselessly claim fraud publicly, at least one GOP official involved in the ballot counting process has said behind closed doors that voter fraud isn’t an issue. Stuart Foster, a top state Republican official who trained ballot challengers in Michigan, told trainees just days ahead of the election that he was “confident with our election system”.
Foster can be heard making the comments in a recording of the training session leaked to the Guardian.
“I’ll get myself into trouble here. I basically made the comment like, so if fraud was so prevalent, then did the Democrats forget to do it in 2016? They just forgot to do it?” he said. “I mean, Trump … barely won. And it’s not because he didn’t win. [Democrats] just didn’t show up. Did they just forget? Fraud was so prevalent, but they just forgot to do it?”
Other Republicans in the state are now publicly breaking with the administration. Congressman Paul Mitchell insisted that every vote should be counted.
“Anything less harms the integrity of our elections and is dangerous for our democracy,” he said. More

Donald Trump’s repeated claims to have won the US presidential election while votes remain to be counted have focused the spotlight once more on one of the big uncertainties of the 2020 race: when will we know the final result?
It could take days, weeks or even months, depending on what happens.

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.
There was no early processing in multiple key battleground states this year, however, because Republican-led state legislatures refused urgent requests from local elections officials to pass new laws to allow extra time for ballot processing. Such a refusal in Pennsylvania produced enormous backlogs in cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, which has gone from counting about 6,000 mail-in ballots in 2016 to more than 350,000 this year.
Which states are we talking about?
Five states have yet to be called: Alaska, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. 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.
Alaska will end up in the Republican column with near certainty.
The race is extremely tight in Georgia. Biden pulled ahead of Trump by 1,097 votes on Friday morning, with 99% of votes reported, according to Edison.
The Democratic challenger is ahead in Nevada, with only Democratic-leaning late postal ballots left to tally. But by state law, ballots postmarked on election day can be counted as long as they are received by 5pm on 10 November, which means counting in the state could continue through the weekend.
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. State officials have said a full result would not be known until next week.
Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning. He’s been winning the mail-in ballot counts by huge margins, and could very well take the state. Pennsylvania officials say they expect most votes will be counted by later on Friday.
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.

The really big unknown: a disputed result
In the 2000 race, the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, famously lost Florida by just more than 500 votes out of a total of nearly 6m, costing him the election. After a disputed recount and a supreme court ruling, George W Bush was declared the winner.
More than 300 lawsuits have already been filed over alleged breaches of electoral law in the 2020 election, according to reports, and more can be expected over accusations of postal voting irregularities and changes to voting rules due to the pandemic.
Trump and his campaign have this week already sued to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania and Georgia (which have not yet been called by Associated Press) and Michigan, which the AP called for Biden. Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed the campaign’s lawsuits on Thursday.
Trump’s campaign has also requested a recount in Wisconsin, which AP called for Biden.
There is no evidence the campaign’s legal challenges will have a bearing on the election result under the law. More

Speeches from candidates conceding defeat in past US elections have been resurfacing after Donald Trump’s latest address as the 2020 result looms. Speaking from the White House on Thursday, Trump falsely referred to legally cast mail-in ballots as illegitimate, and made unsubstantiated claims that pollsters got results ‘knowingly wrong’ and that the election was being stolen
Trump doubles down on false election result claims as Biden calls for calm
US election live coverage More

Wall Street is supposed to hate uncertainty but as the fight over the presidential contest continues, investors couldn’t be happier.
If, as appears likely, Joe Biden wins, he will become the first president since George HW Bush to enter office without control of both the House and Senate – an outcome that indicates at least two years of legislative gridlock.
It’s a scenario Wall Street appears to love. One that may give Republicans in the Senate little incentive to enact a new, larger coronavirus stimulus package that Democrats have hoped for and the power to block tax increases, big spending programs and tougher regulations.
Stocks jumped again on Thursday, the first time since 1982 that the Dow and S&P 500 rose at least 1% on four straight sessions, giving the stock indices their biggest weekly gains since April, with the Dow up 7.1% week, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq up 7.4% and 9% in the week to date.
Oliver Jones, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told the Guardian: “There’s definitely some relief that things like tougher tax policy, tougher corporate reforms look to be off the table without Democrats having more control over Congress.
“Essentially, it’s going to look more like a continuation of the status quo, which is the outcome favoured by most firms,” Jones added.
Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network, attributed some of the gains to the election’s smooth running and, notwithstanding legal challenges, the likelihood of an imminent outcome.
Looking forward, McMillan told the Guardian, markets were encouraged by prospects that a Biden administration’s more progressive, high spending proposals are less likely to get through a politically split legislature.
“Biden’s economic plan included substantial new corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, all of which would have been very disruptive to the market,” McMillan said. “The risks from a blue wave and a Green New Deal are now off the table.”
Wharton professor of finance Jeremy Siegel also welcomed the result, even as the final outcome of the presidential election remained unresolved. “Truthfully that combination is excellent for the economy and it’s excellent for the markets,” Siegel told CNBC on Wednesday
Market enthusiasm for a split government has historical roots going back decades. In 2018, after voters handed control of the lower chamber to Democrats in the midterm elections, markets soared.
“The better-performing periods are periods where the houses were split in terms of leadership,” financial adviser Mellody Hobson noted at the time.
Since Tuesday, markets have also been buoyed by the prospect of government infrastructure spending that could also pump billions of taxpayer dollars into an overhaul of the nation’s energy and transportation systems.
For big tech, which is facing antitrust investigations under the Trump administration, the political scenario could also be rosy. Ahead of the election, FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) stocks, in particular, showed jitters after months of impressive pandemic gains.
“The Street appears to have gotten the ‘Goldilocks election outcome’ for tech stocks with no ‘blue wave’ expected (Senate staying red) and a likely Biden White House now on the horizon,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities in an investors note on Thursday.
“With the Republicans likely to control the Senate, the chances of major legislative changes to antitrust law now is off the table in the eyes of investors which posed the biggest risks to tech stalwarts with a ripple impact across the sector,” Ives added.
Ives said the likely election outcome was a “green light to buy tech stocks” and predicted that big tech stocks could rally another 10% to 15% into year-end. “We continue to be bullish on owning the secular growth stories for 2021,” he wrote. More