Eliana Willis

Given Donald Trump’s lifelong predilection for tying up opponents in the courts, and his long-stated threat to do the same with an election result that threatened to go against him, his call to have the 2020 election settled in the supreme court is not a surprise.
So can he do it?
Trump may, with this in mind, have filled the supreme court with conservative appointees, but things aren’t so straightforward. The supreme court is the final court of appeal in the US and has discretion over which cases it should hear, largely relating to challenges to cases heard in lower courts on points of federal law and the constitution.
So a lot of action will happen initially at state-level courts – the election has prompted a spate of new cases in the hotly contested battleground state of Pennsylvania, including two due to be heard later on Wednesday.
What has made the current election landscape more of a minefield is the fact the coronavirus pandemic has led states to look for ways to make voting safer, including expanding absentee ballots, which has opened states up to challenges in the courts over issues such as proposed extensions to the period in which late mail-in votes are counted.
It is important to remember that election challenges in state courts are nothing new, sometimes without merit, and often have little impact in the end. However, one important exception to that was the 2000 election where a series of legal challenges over faulty voting procedures in Florida handed the election to George W Bush.
What’s the thrust of Trump’s tactic?
With more than 40 pre-election cases by Republicans, Trump’s strategy is to argue that any measure to make voting easier and safer in the midst of a pandemic is unconstitutional and open to fraud, a framing aimed at the supreme court.
A second argument that has been deployed several times is that many of the measures to ensure voting is easy have been made by state officials – like governors – rather than state legislatures, opening a path, say conservatives, for a constitutional challenge.

How could this work?
The most common scenario is for lawyers to challenge the way an election was conducted locally and seek to have votes discarded. In the key state of Pennsylvania, conservative groups have already ramped up cases to ensure late mail-in ballots are not counted, with two cases due to be heard on Wednesday.
However, Pennsylvania requires an unusually high burden of proof for challenging elections, including written affidavits detailing wrongdoing.
Pennsylvania is already on the supreme court’s radar in this respect. Republicans in the state have already appealed against a Pennsylvania supreme court decision ordering state election officials to accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after the election, relying on an interpretation of the state’s own constitution.
The US supreme court deferred hearing this case before the election but in a case that it did rule on, the court sided with a Republican challenge saying the state could not count late mail in ballots in Wisconsin. The supreme court chief justice John Roberts made clear, however, that “different bodies of law and different precedents” meant the court did not consider the situation in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as the same.
Isn’t that good news for Democrats?
It’s difficult to know. The Wisconsin decision was delivered before Trump’s third pick for the supreme court, Amy Coney Barrett, formally joined the bench last week, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority.
Trump’s hope, as he has made very clear, is that this would help in the event he challenged the election result, but it is also unclear how Barrett would respond given Trump’s comments. And she could recuse herself from hearing any election-related cases because of a perceived conflict.
Where else could we see challenges?
Michigan, if it is close, is an outlier in that it has no formally laid-out system for a challenge, although any recount is automatically triggered by a margin of less than 2,000 votes.
North Carolina, for instance, also has a challenge to a late voting extension before the courts. It all becomes something of moot point should Biden secure enough of a lead in the electoral college.
What’s the worst-case scenario?
The closer the outcome in the electoral college, the more messy things become, with the memory of Florida in 2000 looming above everything. The closest of results led to 35 messy days of legal challenges and laborious hand recounts, which gave the election to George W Bush after the state was originally called by news organisations for the Democratic challenger Al Gore.
Bush took 271 of the 538 electoral votes, winning Florida by fewer than 600 votes, after a recount was halted by the supreme court, making Bush the first Republican president since 1888 to win despite losing the popular vote. More

Mark Kelly, the Democrat and former astronaut, focused on bipartisanship in a speech shortly before he was declared the winner of the Senate race in Arizona. ‘I’m confident that when all the votes are counted, we’re going to be successful in this mission,’ Kelly told supporters. ‘The work starts now.’
The retired US navy captain, who ran his campaign by playing up his outsider status in politics, said: ‘Our state doesn’t need a Democrat senator or a Republican senator. We need an Arizona senator. There is nothing we can’t achieve if we work together’
Results come in after polls close – as it happened More

Few saw this knife-edge US election result coming. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. Overall, the 2020 election bears a striking resemblance to the one that took so many by surprise four years ago. The belief that 2020 would be decisively different from 2016 turns out to have been based on a very human but ultimately very foolish triumph of hope over experience. In politics, we have been reminded, hope is not power.
Four years ago, as now, the opinion polls pointed pretty consistently in one direction. Then, as now, the results did not reflect their confidence. That’s certainly the fault, in part, of the polls and their methodology. But the polls never want to get the result wrong. They have a vested interest – as do the media that commission them – in getting it right. The problem that the pollsters can’t lick is that they can’t reach everyone they need to.
That is what happened in 2016. Now it has happened again in 2020. This suggests that the Democrats were fighting the wrong campaign. Joe Biden and his voters campaigned as if the Covid-19 pandemic was the main issue. But the white working-class voters in the rust belt and upper-midwest states who delivered victory to Trump in 2016 have not changed. They elected Trump for all the very serious reasons that quickly became a consensus explanation: they felt ignored, their jobs and communities had gone, they thought others – including foreigners – were getting too good a deal, and they wanted someone to speak for them. And the Democrats seemed to have stopped doing that.
None of that has changed in 2020, or not as much of it as lots of the Democrats – and, yes, the media too – persuaded ourselves. Those visceral complaints about being left behind, left out, ignored and unfairly dismissed were still there, still deep and still defining. Trump spoke to those complaints in ways that Biden did not, although he was better at it in some ways than Hillary Clinton. Trump’s much-stronger-than-predicted showing in those states this time tells us that the determinative experience in this election was not Covid or the death of George Floyd. It was the economy and, behind that, the enduring trauma of the 2008 financial crash and its inequalities.
That’s not to say Covid was irrelevant. Trump’s reckless negligence in the face of the pandemic clearly helped Biden to do well, not least among voters who were going to vote for him anyway. But Trump turned Covid to advantage too. His brush with the virus in October fired him up for a strong performance in the final weeks of the campaign. In public health terms it was outrageously reckless and irresponsible. But politically it was outrageously brilliant, a performance that brought a kind of hope to millions that they can get back to life as normal and can defeat the virus. In retrospect, much of the media failed to see this, perhaps because we didn’t want to believe it.
It’s not to say that Floyd’s death was irrelevant either. If Biden makes it over the line, African American votes will have been crucial. But white Americans, who still make up the majority of the electorate, have again rallied in spectacular numbers behind Trump. Hispanic voters have been split, in spite of – or perhaps because of – Trump’s anti-immigrant hostility. This election has not overcome the historic race divide that makes America different in so many ways from Europe. It has deepened and preserved it.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the election, there is one thing it emphatically was not. It was not the watershed moment that most of the rest of the world, and half of America, craved. It was not the cathartic rejection of Trump that seemed tantalisingly possible in the summer. Instead it was another squeaker. It is already another toxic seedbed of future challenges, disputes, investigations, conspiracy claims and lies. It is also – and there’s a pattern in modern American elections here – the third time in 20 years in which the electoral college may end up handing the White House to the candidate who lost the popular vote.
I thought Biden fought a skilful campaign in many ways: relying on his experience and decency, playing the long game, keeping the focus on Trump, trying to build a majority coalition and keep it together. But it hasn’t delivered a decisive victory. The senate seems likely to remain in Republican control. There has been no big boost for the Democrats in the house or at state level. All the old criticisms about Biden’s age and his big-tent politics will now resurge. The socialist wing of the Democratic party will believe that a more radical candidate would have done better. They will be wrong, but that argument is set to smoulder for years to come and to shape the 2024 election, for which manoeuvring will now begin.
The reality of the election is that the United States has shown itself to be, yet again, a 50-50 nation. Half of Americans backed Trump. The other half didn’t. In this respect, American electoral politics bears some comparison with other countries, not least Britain. The choice for both countries is whether to deepen that divide or to try to heal it. The choice is between a government that acts as if the other half does not exist, or a government that recognises that the other half exists too. Here again, hope points in one direction but experience points in the other.
The meaning of that grim conclusion should not be fudged. The result of the November 2020 election is that America has not purged itself of what it did in 2016. It has not turned its back on Trump’s climate change denialism, not rejected Trump’s racism, not spurned his isolationism, not punished him for rushing to pack the supreme court, not held him to account for his corruption and behaviour. The plain truth is this. Americans did a very bad thing indeed in 2016 and, whatever happens when the dust finally settles, Americans have pretty much done it again in 2020.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More

Donald Trump’s false claim to have already won the US presidential election while millions of votes remain to be counted has focused the spotlight once more on one of the big uncertainties of the 2020 race: when will we know the 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. Others, however, do not allow that.
Which states are we talking about?
The states that could decide this year’s race. Trump’s victories in Florida, Ohio and Texas have kept alive his hopes of re-election, but a key state, Arizona, has been called for Biden. If the Democratic challenger wins Michigan and Wisconsin, he could afford to lose Georgia and Pennsylvania and still win the election by two electoral college votes.
Millions of postal votes still remain to be counted in these undecided states, and Democratic voters are known to have been more likely to vote by post than Republican ones.
In Georgia, where rules allowed absentee ballots to be pre-processed, several big counties reported long delays and sent counters home late on Tuesday evening rather than finish counting overnight.
Neither Wisconsin, where Biden is seen as having a narrow lead, or Pennsylvania, where Trump is ahead for now, allow postal votes to be prepared for counting before election day.
In Wisconsin, a call could be coming soon. In Pennsylvania – where the count started at 7am on election day – officials have said the process could take up to two days.
In Michigan, processing was allowed to begin 24 hours before election day in cities, but officials have said that was not soon enough to expect an early result either.
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 breached 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.
Recounts have to be a strong possibility in one or more of the key swing states, and Trump said in his first post-election address late on Tuesday that he would be going to the supreme court in an attempt to stop ballot counting. While it is far from clear how feasible such a move would be, anything like it could delay a final vote for weeks. More

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Donald Trump has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents by making a false declaration of victory in the US presidential election and threatening to plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis.
Results so far show his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, with an edge in the race to 270 electoral college votes after flipping the state of Arizona, but it could be days before the outcome is known.
“The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented and incorrect,” said the Biden campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, in a statement.
That Trump had been widely predicted to make a baseless assertion of triumph and resort to the courts to stop votes being counted did not make his 2.21am speech at the White House any less shocking. Some likened the move, unprecedented in American history, to a presidential coup.
“Once again, the president is lying to the American people and acting like a would-be despot,” tweeted Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee. “We will count every vote. And ignore the noise.”
Trump spoke in the east room with numerous US flags behind him and flanked by two TV screens, which had been showing Fox News. Around 150 guests were standing with few face masks and little physical distancing. Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and other family members sat in the front row.
“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight, and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it,” Trump said to whoops and cheers. “We will not stand for it.”
There is no evidence for Trump’s allegation of disenfranchisement. More

Joe Biden expressed confidence and optimism in an address to supporters on election night, as millions of votes continued to be counted and results tightened in his race for the White House against Donald Trump.
Democratic hopes of an early landslide over Trump were dashed as the president won Florida, one of the biggest prizes of the night, raising the spectre of a drawn-out contest, legal challenges and potentially civil unrest.
“I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election,” Biden said early on Wednesday morning, appearing relaxed in front of a packed parking lot of supporters in Wilmington, Delaware.
“We feel good about where we are, we really do,” Biden told a cheering crowd, honking from their cars as they observed social distancing measures amid the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election.
“We knew because of the unprecedented early vote, the mail-in vote, that it’s going to take a while, we’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of counting votes is finished. And it ain’t over till every vote is counted, every ballot is counted.” More

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All four members of the progressive “squad” of Democratic congresswomen have handily won re-election.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan will return to their seats in the US Congress. The four women of color, who championed ambitious climate action, healthcare for all Americans and other progressive causes while enduring frequent racism and derision from Donald Trump, will no longer be newcomers to Capitol Hill.
“Our sisterhood is resilient,” Omar tweeted.

Ilhan Omar
(@IlhanMN)
Our sisterhood is resilient. pic.twitter.com/IfLtsvLEdx

November 4, 2020

“Serving New York-14 and fighting for working-class families in Congress has been the greatest honor, privilege and responsibility of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Thank you to the Bronx and Queens for re-electing me to the House despite the millions spent against us, and trusting me to represent you once more.”
Ocasio-Cortez had been expected to easily win re-election, but like other congressional Democrats was watching hopes that the party would expand their majority wane. After Republicans flipped two House seats in Miami-Dade county – where a majority of the voters are Latino – she lamented that Democrats and Joe Biden had not done more to galvanize Latino voters.
“Tonight’s results … are evolving and ongoing,” the New Yorker wrote, “but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Democratic vulnerabilities with Latinos for a long, long time. There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.
“We have work to do.”
In a message to supporters, Pressley said: “Together, we have fought for our shared humanity. We have organized. We have mobilized. We have legislated our values. I am so proud to be your congresswoman and your partner in the work. I believe in the power of us. And we’re just getting started.”
Tlaib, who with Omar was one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress two years ago, tweeted congratulations to Pressley.
“The Squad is big,” she said.
Trump has frequently vilified all four congresswomen, and in the lead up to election day lobbed frequent xenophobic attacks at Omar – accusing her at a recent rally of telling “us” – his overwhelmingly white audience – “how to run our country”. Omar came to the US at the age of 12, after fleeing civil war in Somalia. When she was first elected in 2018, she became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress.
The president has also often singled out Ocasio-Cortez as a radical, socialist voice in the Democratic party. Although her seat in New York’s Bronx and Queens was never competitive, she raised more than $17m for her re-election campaign. Her challenger, Republican John Cummings, raised about $9.5m – and a group called the “Stop AOC Pac” spent more than half a million dollars on ads opposing the congresswoman.
Other progressive representatives who have won re-election include Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. And the progressives Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri are headed to Congress for the first time, after winning their respective elections. More

Washington, DCPeople watch a phone screen as President Donald Trump speaks about early results in front of the White House
Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters More