A woman paints a message reading ‘Our Voices Count’ on blue cloth during a protest organized by Dallas Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression outside Dallas City Hall.
Photograph: Tom Fox/AP More
While the race for the White House is sorted out across tight midwestern battlegrounds, Republicans can already claim an important victory further down the ballot. The GOP held state House and Senate chambers across Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, and many other key states. This ensures a dramatic edge when it comes to redrawing new state legislative and congressional maps next year, following the completion of the census count.
This year, Democrats had hoped to avenge the GOP’s 2010 Redmap strategy, which drove Republicans that year to control swing-state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida, and majorities they have not relinquished since. That also allowed Republicans to draw, on their own, nearly five times as many congressional districts nationwide as Democrats.
Tuesday’s election offered both parties the last chance to gain influence over maps that will define the state of play for the next decade. States have different rules on this: almost three-quarters of all states, however, give their legislatures the prominent role. That heightens the stakes of state legislative races in years ending in zero. On Tuesday, in the two states with the most at stake – Texas and North Carolina – Democrats fell far short, despite millions of dollars invested by the national party and outside organizations.
In Texas, Democrats needed to gain nine seats in the state House to affect redistricting. They may not net any. Republicans picked up several open seats, and GOP incumbents held on in almost all the battleground districts enveloping the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. In House district 134, which includes part of Houston, Democrat Ann Johnson ousted GOP incumbent Sarah Davis. But otherwise, the party ran far behind expectations.
The consequences could linger until 2031, if not longer. Texas Republicans may look to redraw state maps next year based on the “citizen voting-age population” or CVAP, and depart from the longtime standard of counting the total population. A 2015 study by Thomas Hofeller, the late GOP redistricting maestro, found that such a switch “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and create a relative population decline in Democratic strongholds in south Texas and in otherwise fast-growing parts of Dallas and Houston.
In North Carolina, meanwhile, even a new, fairer state legislative map – albeit one that still slightly favored Republicans – couldn’t help Democrats break the GOP’s 10-year hold on both the House and Senate. Democrats netted one Senate seat – they needed five – and lost ground in the state House. Republicans will not only have a free hand to draw maps next year, but they also appear to have gained seats on the state supreme court – which will adjudicate any dispute over these maps – and cut the Democratic majority there to 4-3. (Democrats did make gains on both the Ohio and Michigan state supreme courts, both of which could be asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of maps later this decade.)
As a result, Republicans will have a free hand in drawing new districts across both states, providing the GOP with a renewed decade-long edge and also paving the way for conservative legislation on voting rights, health care, reproductive rights, education funding and much more. Any new voting restrictions, meanwhile, could assist Republicans in maintaining electoral college dominance in these states, as well.
Democrats in Kansas had hoped to simply break GOP supermajorities and sustain a Democratic governor’s veto power over a GOP gerrymander that could devour the state’s one blue congressional seat. But they appear to have been unable to muster either a one-seat gain in the House or the three seats necessary in the Senate.
Wisconsin Democrats, however, did successfully preserve the veto of Democratic governor Tony Evers, ensuring that the party will have some say over maps that have provided Republicans with decade-long majorities even when Democratic candidates won hundreds of thousands more statewide votes. Wisconsin was one of the most gerrymandered states in the country after the Republican takeover in 2010.
Democrats flipped the Oregon secretary of state’s office as well, which plays a determinative role in redistricting should Republicans deny Democrats a quorum to pass a map. The party also denied Republicans in Nebraska’s ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral chamber a supermajority that would allow them to gerrymander the second congressional district in Omaha, which carries an electoral college vote.
There was mixed news for gerrymandering reformers in two states where fair maps were on the ballot statewide. In Virginia, voters overwhelmingly approved a redistricting commission that will consist equally of lawmakers and citizens to draw lines next year. But in Missouri, by a narrow margin of 51% to 49%, voters repealed a 2018 initiative that would have placed maps under the control of a neutral state demographer. That will leave Republicans in full control of the process.
After 2010, Pennsylvania has elected a Democratic governor, and Michigan has adopted an independent commission, suggesting less partisan maps next year. But by holding Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, Republicans appear likely to draw at least four times as many congressional seats by themselves.
That advantage, in turn, will endure long after whoever won Tuesday’s presidential election has left the scene. More
Joe Biden has claimed he is on course to win the US presidential election and issued a plea for national unity, even as Donald Trump threatens to fight the outcome in court.
The former vice-president flipped the crucial battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday, giving him 264 electoral college votes to Trump’s 214. The target is 270 to secure the White House.
“After a long night of counting, it’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes need to win the presidency,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won but I am here to report that, when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”
Biden praised a historic turnout of about 150 million and noted that he was set to win Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, similar to the president’s margin in 2016, and leading in Michigan by more than 35,000 votes and growing – substantially more than Trump managed four years ago. Both states have been called for Biden.
As Trump seeks to fire up his supporters for a bitter legal struggle, Biden called for people on both sides “to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation”.
With his running mate, Kamala Harris, standing nearby, Biden struck the tone of a president-elect: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as I will for those who did vote for me. Now, every vote must be counted. No one’s going to take our democracy away from us. Not now. Not ever.”
It was a clear rebuke to Trump’s attempt to sow doubt with claims of fraud and threats to dispute the election all the way to the supreme court, ushering in a potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
Late on Wednesday there were signs of desperation as Trump felt his presidency slipping away. He tweeted a thread stating that he was establishing a “claim” on Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which remain too close to call.
“We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead,” he wrote. More
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
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
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
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
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
