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    Trump threatens to sue his way to victory amid millions of uncounted votes

    With millions of votes waiting to be counted in the US presidential election, Donald Trump has effectively threatened to sue his way to re-election.
    As of Wednesday evening, the president and his campaign had promised to bring the election to the supreme court, sued to halt vote-counting in three battleground states and requested a recount in another.
    But at this moment, there is no evidence the campaign’s legal challenges will have a bearing on the election result under the law. Instead, the concern is how litigation plays in the court of public opinion, where the suggestion of fraud in one battleground state could cast doubt on the whole election.
    Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Americans should be confident their votes will be counted, but warned of Trump’s history of voting disinformation.
    “The more desperate he may become, the more baseless allegations there are about the ways in which states count ballots, about our democratic process and his own authority over this process,” Gupta said.
    Post-election litigation is normal. Lawsuits are always filed on election day and the days after in response to issues such as equipment malfunctions, printing errors and polls not opening on time.
    Usually, they receive little attention. This year, they are under more intense scrutiny because the president has spent the year making frequent, baseless claims about election fraud.
    For one of these routine cases to affect the outcome of the election, the ballots being contested would need to be both (a) big enough in number to determine the state’s result (for example, a suit which concerns 50,000 votes in a state a candidate won by 30,000 votes) and (b) in a state decisive for the election result.
    As of Wednesday evening, election law experts said none of the lawsuits filed appeared to meet both these qualifications. “These case don’t seem to be very strong, they also don’t seem to be significant as a matter of votes,” said Paul Smith, vice-president for litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center.
    That could change as counting continues.
    For now, the more significant cause for alarm is the Trump campaign’s actions on Wednesday as election results turned in Biden’s favor. Instead of waiting for a media outlet to call Pennsylvania, as is traditional, the campaign said Trump had won it despite the fact that 1 million votes were still waiting to be counted.
    The campaign also announced it was suing to halt vote-counting in Michigan – which the Associated Press called for Biden, Pennsylvania and Georgia and that it would request a recount in Wisconsin, which the AP also called for Biden.
    The first three challenges are unrealistic – most states count ballots until the results are certified two to three weeks after election day and ending the process is not something the court would consider seriously.
    Hours before the Trump campaign filed the lawsuits against Michigan and Pennsylvania, the newly re-elected Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said as much.
    “Claiming you win the election is different from finishing the counting, and what we’re going to see in the next few days, both in the Senate races and the presidential race, is each state will ultimately get to a final outcome and you should not be shocked that both sides are going to have lawyers there,” McConnell said.
    Late on Wednesday, the Trump campaign has filed the lawsuit seeking to pause vote the count in Georgia, where Biden was trailing Trump by one point. The Fulton County Elections Director said that they would finish counting votes on Wednesday, “Whatever it takes.”
    The Wisconsin recount is also unlikely to fall in the Trump campaign’s favor. Biden was more than 20,000 votes ahead of Trump and statewide recounts in elections from 2000 to 2015 resulted in an average margin swing of 282 votes, according to FairVote.
    In response to the legal actions, Biden said: “Now every vote must be counted. No one is going to take our democracy away from us, not now, not ever. America has come too far.”
    One reason an election-upsetting lawsuit has not emerged is because before the election, hundreds of lawsuits were filed to work out the inevitable kinks that would follow the dramatic increase in mail in voting. This left fewer opportunities to challenge the process, because most issues had been tested in court.
    One exception to this is in Pennsylvania, where there were more open questions about how mail in votes would be processed. It is also one of the three states which wasn’t able to start processing absentee ballots until election day and it has an unresolved legal fight about whether mail-in ballots that arrive after election day should be counted. The Trump campaign also filed several lawsuits there on election day.
    If the election comes down to Pennsylvania, this is a recipe for chaos. As of Wednesday night, Biden could win the electoral college without Pennsylvania.
    This all followed Trump’s baffling early morning proclamation that he would go to the supreme court to stop voting – which had already stopped. If one assumes he meant he would go to the nation’s highest court to stop ballot counting, that too is unlikely to work out.
    Guy-Uriel Charles, a Duke Law School professor, said in a press call: “He certainly can’t just run to the US supreme court and file a suit there. That’s just not how our legal system operates.”
    It is possible, but unlikely, one of the new legal challenges his campaign filed could end up in the supreme court. But that case would have to have a legal basis, be tried in a lower court, then appealed to the nation’s highest court, which would have to accept it. And for it to matter in the presidential race, it would have to meet the qualifications of affecting a large enough number of ballots in a decisive state.
    Charles said: “But again, you can’t just walk into federal court and say, ‘I lost.’ You have to have a legal basis for saying a law has been violated.”
    In reviewing the day in legal challenges, the election law expert Rick Hasen wrote that the Trump campaign’s moves could be done to slow the vote or be a last-minute attempt to capture one of the battleground states.
    Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, professor, also echoed other legal experts’ concerns that the moves could simply be a disturbing effort to undermine Biden’s presidency, should he win.
    “We always knew Trump would claim without evidence that fraud cost him the election,” Hasen wrote. “These suits let him pile up what might appear to some supporters as evidence but are actually unsupported assertions of illegality.” More

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    'Simply wrong': Pennsylvania governor reacts to Trump campaign court bid to stop count – video

    Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf has condemned a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s campaign to stop the counting of ballots in the crucial state. Democrat governor Wolf had previously tweeted that more than 1 million ballots were still to be counted. ‘This afternoon, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit to stop the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania,’ he said. ‘That is simply wrong. It goes against the most basic principles of our democracy’
    US election 2020 live: Biden wins Michigan in vital step towards presidency as Trump tries to challenge results
    US election 2020 live results: Donald Trump takes on Joe Biden in tight presidential race More

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    International observers say US elections 'tarnished' by Trump and uncertainty

    An international observer mission has reported that the US elections have been “tarnished” by legal uncertainty and Donald Trump’s “unprecedented attempts to undermine public trust”.A preliminary report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) pointed to systemic weaknesses in US elections, as well as the stress imposed by the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s calls for an end to vote counting in certain states based on false claims of fraud.“Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions,” the report, by the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the organisation’s parliamentary assembly, said.“With Covid and so many things changing at the last minute practically for the voter and for the election administration, there was this feeling of unease or confusion,” the head of the ODIHR mission,the Polish diplomat Urszula Gacek, told the Guardian. “And then on top of that, you have an incumbent who is doing something we’ve never seen before, casting doubt on the actual process, and making the way you cast your ballot also a political statement.”The OSCE report pointed to efforts at the state level to adjust voting procedures in light of the pandemic, and then the raft of legal challenges to those adjustments (overwhelmingly from Republicans), as being a source of considerable confusion when it came time to vote.“There was an unprecedented volume of litigation over voting processes in the months before the elections, with over 400 lawsuits filed in 44 states, some still before the courts a few days before elections,” the report said. “The legal uncertainty caused by this ongoing litigation placed an undue burden on some voters wishing to cast their ballots and on election administration officials.”The issues caused by the pandemic and an erratic president compounded long term systemic problems, the OSCE found, many of which disadvantage the poor and ethnic minorities, such as the varying requirements for proof of identity at polling stations, which the report found to be “unduly restrictive” for some voters.“If the only thing you could possibly use would be a college student card and you’re not a student, or a driving license and you don’t drive, or a passport and you never travel anywhere, you can imagine that certain economically disadvantaged groups will be disproportionately affected, and certain ethnic minorities could be excluded,” Gacek said.The report also referred to the disenfranchisement of felons and former felons. It said: “An estimated 5.2 million citizens are disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction, although about half of them have already served their sentences.”“These voting restrictions contravene the principle of universal suffrage,” the report concluded.Gacek said that $400m federal emergency funding for states’ election administrations had not been sufficient and the shortfall had come from private sources. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, contributed $400m.“But when you look at the $14bn which has been spent on the campaign, and you juxtapose that against an administration which has been having to rely on philanthropists to help them actually run the election, I think it’s interesting,” Gacek said. More

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    Joe Biden: 'When the count is finished, we believe we will be the winner' – video

    Joe Biden expressed confidence in his victory in the presidential election, he stressed he was not ‘declaring’ victory but said it was ‘clear’ he would hit the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
    On the election results, Biden emphasised all votes should be counted and he characterised his potential win as non-partisan, calling once again for unity in the US
    Biden wins key state of Wisconsin as Trump sues to stop count elsewhere – US election live More

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    Joe Biden bullish but down-ballot races deliver disappointment for Democrats

    Joe Biden remained confident on Wednesday that his campaign was on track to win the White House, while Democrats and voters who had been hoping for a blue wave were left sobered and disheartened by election night results.In a televised address from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden told reporters that he would not yet declare victory, but he believed he would hit the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.“My fellow Americans, yesterday once again proved democracy is the heartbeat of this nation,” Biden said. “I’m not here to declare that we won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe will be the winner,” Biden said.“Senator [Kamala] Harris and I are on track to win more votes that any other ticket in history,” Biden said, referring to his running mate, who stood next to him at the podium wearing a face mask. He said only three presidential campaigns had won against an incumbent in US history.“When it’s finished, God willing, we’ll be the fourth,” he said. “This is a major achievement.”The race for the presidency remained too close to call on Wednesday afternoon – a far cry from the landslide that some pollsters predicted. Democrats down the ballot had not pulled off the upset in the Senate they were aiming for, and had not made the gains in the House that had seemed on the cards.The Biden campaign insisted the veteran Democrat appeared on track to oust Trump, as hundreds of thousands of outstanding mail-in votes continued to be counted in key battleground states. In the face of Trump’s false claims of victory and efforts to launch legal battles to the curtail the vote counting, its messaging became defiant. More

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    Democrats fail to persuade swaths of rural America's heartlands

    America’s rural heartland stuck firmly with Donald Trump on Tuesday, dashing Joe Biden’s hope of a decisive victory that would have allowed him to claim he had reunited the country, as well as undercutting Democratic expectations of winning the US Senate.
    Results across the midwest showed the US still firmly divided as Trump again won a solid victory in Iowa, a state that twice voted for Barack Obama, and the Republicans held on to crucial Senate seats targeted by the Democrats.
    Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, a close Trump ally, proclaimed that the Democrats were now history in her state as the president’s base turned out in force.
    “We have proven without a doubt that Iowa is a red state,” she told a rowdy victory rally in Des Moines where few Republicans wore masks.
    Trump was ahead in Iowa by more than seven points with over 90% of the vote counted, a victory just two points short of his 2016 win.
    In Iowa and Missouri, Trump’s support in rural counties generally held up or strengthened. In some states that delivered him victory. In others, such as Wisconsin, Biden triumphed after a surge of urban votes.
    But the president’s solid performance in rural America could cost the Democrats control of the Senate after what the party regarded as its best shot at two midwestern seats in Iowa and Kansas flopped.
    Iowa’s Republican senator, Joni Ernst, beat her Democratic rival, Theresa Greenfield, by more than six points in a race that opinion polls for many months said would be closer. Ernst won the seat from a Democrat in 2014.
    Results showed that the president dominated in rural counties that he took from the Democrats four years ago. Opinion polls said that in recent weeks voters’ primary concern shifted from coronavirus to the economy which helped swing independent voters the president’s way to supplement his core support.
    “The economy was doing well before coronavirus. That was a big thing for me, said Elysha Graves as she clutched her toddler after voting for Trump in Urbandale, Iowa.
    “They tried to blame him for the pandemic. I don’t know how anybody else would have handled it. It’s a hard situation. He just seems real. He’s not a politician. He’s more relatable. I trust him more than I trust Biden.”
    Left: Elysha Graves and her son Parker Peters of Urbandale Iowa pose for a photo after Graves cast her vote on election day in Urbandale, Iowa. Right: A sign informs residents of a voting location on election day in Urbandale, Iowa on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Photographs by KC McGinnis/The Guardian
    Democrats disappointed
    Iowa is not a crucial state for Biden but his failure to significantly reduce the size of Trump’s 2016 victory there is evidence that the Democrats failed to persuade swaths of rural America that the party had much to offer them or was even paying attention to their communities and concerns.
    Biden was counting on the president defeating himself with his style of governing and handling of coronavirus as the economy collapsed. But large numbers of midwestern voters were prepared to forgive Trump his hostile tweeting and other sins because, in a widely heard refrain, “he is not a regular politician”, a quality they regard as central to their support of him.
    They also did not blame Trump for the economic downturn, saying it would have happened no matter who was in the White House. While the president’s handling of coronavirus was widely scorned in other places, there is a popular view in the rural midwest that Trump got it right when he opposed lockdowns as too economically damaging. More

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    'Truly remarkable': Arizona activists celebrate as conservative stalwart shifts blue

    Ten years ago in Arizona, a night like 3 November 2020 would have seemed impossible.
    Back then, the conservative stalwart of the south-west was not just a state with strong Republican leadership on almost every level – it was a state whose staunch anti-immigration stance would go on to shape policy in the party for years to come, and would gain a reputation as the birthplace of Trumpism.
    A Republican super-majority state legislature had passed SB1070, a law requiring local law enforcement to ask for proof of legal immigration status from anyone deemed suspicious. Hardline anti-immigration sheriff Joe Arpaio – the Donald Trump of Maricopa county before Donald Trump became the Donald Trump he is today – was not just in power, he seemed near untouchable.
    “We would host know-your-rights sessions, with backyards full of over a hundred people because there was so much fear,” said Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of advocacy group Living United for Change in Arizona (Lucha). “There were literally checkpoints that we would have to go monitor that Sheriff Arpaio put in common intersections. There were phone trees that the community had to give each other heads up of when Arpaio and his posse were going to be there.”
    Gomez smiled. “We don’t have that any more. And that’s because of the resistance of Arizona and the strategic calculations that this community has made.”
    On Tuesday, Arizona began to shift blue. While a number of ballots remained to be counted, the Associated Press called the race for Joe Biden, who was leading by 5 percentage points, saying that the remaining ballots would not be enough for Trump to close the gap to victory in Arizona. With 99% of precincts reporting, Democratic candidate Mark Kelly leads Republican Martha McSally with 52.63% of the vote in the race for John McCain’s former senate seat. Alongside Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who won her US Senate seat in 2018, this marks the first time Arizona would have two sitting Democrats in the US chamber in a lifetime. The state legislature is also expected to flip to a Democratic majority in both chambers for the first time since 1966, though with narrower margins in some races than previously hoped.

    “In 10 years, we went from a super-majority Republican state, and now, in 2020, we’re going to flip the legislature to a majority blue, our electoral votes will be a deciding factor in electing Joe Biden, and we are going to have not one, but two United State senate seats going out to Washington DC to represent our voices,” said Democratic state representative Athena Salman, who won her re-election bid Tuesday.
    “It is truly remarkable and so exciting to be living in this state right now.”
    But Tuesday was no fluke. It was the culmination of more than 10 years of tireless boots-on-the-ground organizing, campaigning, marching, protesting and door-knocking.
    It was never about politics for these organizers and activists. It was never about Republican or Democrat, red state or blue state, conservative or liberal.
    “This was not a state where you got involved in politics because you wanted to do work in politics,” said Tomas Robles, co-executive director of Lucha. “For us, it wasn’t about attaching ourselves to a political party. In 2010, both political parties deserted us. There were Democrats who did not vote against SB1070, folks who did not even bother showing up.”
    For them, it was a fight for their lives. It was a fight to keep families together, to prevent the deportation of loved ones, the criminalization of an entire race.
    “The 10 years of this, it’s a sign that Arizona is moving in the direction that we envisioned since 2010,” Robles said. “You have eight-year-olds who experienced the heartbreak of watching their families stand there in fear because of SB1070. They’re now 18-year-old voters. You have a ton of people that have grown up experiencing what it is to organize and what it is to build collective political power in a state that used to have none of it.”
    In the pandemic, 90% of the members of Unite Here Local 11, a union representing predominantly Latinx and immigrant hospitality workers in southern California and Arizona, lost their jobs. So instead, they took to the streets, knocking on doors to campaign for Biden and Kelly, sometimes in the sweltering 120-degree Fahrenheit Arizona heat.
    In July, union organizers met with epidemiologists specifically to find ways for their members and volunteers to safely continue knocking on doors. Since then, they estimated that they’ve knocked on 800,000 doors and had at least 250,000 conversations.
    “People know,” said Unite Here Local 11 co-president Susan Minato. “They’re not stupid. They know there are a lot of negative things going on and our country is way worse than it was before Trump started. That’s why people are here. There are children today, 550 of them, who are in cages. No one even knows who they are, who their parents are. They were taken from their parents arms. If we live in a country where that can happen, then anything can happen.
    “If people know that in their gut, then they’re here in the heat, they’re here, separated from their own children and loved ones temporarily, they’re here knocking on the doors of strangers in a pandemic, and they’re loving it because they know this is how we save our country.”
    Local organizers and activists have much to celebrate after Tuesday. Beyond the wins, beyond turning Arizona blue, the state saw historic youth and Latinx voter turnout, they said.

    Vivian Ho
    (@VivianHo)
    “Tonight, we claim victory. We claim victory because we were told that Latinos don’t show up. And we showed up.” @LUCHA_AZ pic.twitter.com/VMpnhw5vym

    November 4, 2020

    But they’re also already looking ahead. Minato noted that they have just two years to go before the governor’s race. And Robles pointed out that winning the election is just half the battle.
    “This is a marker in a very long marathon,” Robles said. “We’re going to have to prepare our members and prepare our leaders and also prepare our elected officials that our voters put in those seats. Election Day is just when you get the job. The job has only just begun. We’re ready and prepared to deal with whoever is in charge with crafting policy that will affect our families.” More

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    Record number of Native American women elected to Congress

    The 117th Congress will have a record number of Native American women after voters elected three to the House of Representatives.Democrats Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member representing New Mexico, and Sharice Davids, a Ho-Chunk Nation member representing Kansas, both retained their seats after becoming the first Native American women elected to Congress, in 2018.They are joined by Yvette Herrell, who is Cherokee. Herrell, a Republican, beat the Democratic incumbent Xochitl Torres Small for her New Mexico congressional seat.The wins for Herrell and Haaland mean that New Mexico will be the first state to have two indigenous women as congressional delegates. The state also became the first to elect women of color as all three of its delegates in the US House of Representatives.According to a Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) report, 18 indigenous women were running for congressional seats this year – a record in a single year. Native American women made up 2.6% of all women running for Congress this year, the highest percentage since CAWP started collecting data in 2004.There have been four Native Americans in the US Senate and a handful of indigenous US representatives. All were men until Haaland and Davids were elected in 2018.In Kansas, Stephanie Byers, who is Chickasaw and a retired teacher, became the state’s first transgender lawmaker when she won her race for a seat in its house of representatives.“We’ve made history here,” Byers said on Tuesday. “We’ve done something in Kansas most people thought would never happen, and we did it with really no pushback, by just focusing on the issues.”Also in Kansas, Christina Haswood, a Navajo Nation member, became the youngest person in the state legislature at 26. A third member of the Kansas house , Ponka-We Victors, a Tohono O’odham and Ponca member, won her re-election campaign.The US House of Representatives will have its highest number of indigenous representatives after Tuesday’s election, according to the independent Native American newspaper Indian Country Today.Six candidates, including Haaland, Davids and Herrell, won their elections. Two Oklahoma representatives, Tom Cole, who is Chickasaw, and Markwayne Mullin, who is Cherokee, won their re-elections, and Kaiali’i “Kai” Kahele, who is Native Hawaiian, won an open seat for Hawaii. There were previously four indigenous members of Congress, all in the House of Representatives. More