Elections

When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News Sucks!”
Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the last two days Fox News has become the focus of the Trump campaign’s anger after it made an early call on Tuesday night that the state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
In the process, the channel switched the media’s attention away from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote counting in Pennsylvania.
Such was the level of fury within the Trump campaign at the call that his team reportedly attempted to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, while in Vanity Fair’s reporting it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who was placing the calls, Fox has stuck by its decision – much to the anger of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.

The decision to call the ultra-close Arizona race for Biden – a victory that was later also declared by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian – was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who runs the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, had made clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure in making calls for states.
As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated rightwing hosts who shape the external perception of the channel.
On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not be changing his mind on the basis that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that’s why we’re not pulling back the call”.
Dismissing claims from Trump’s team that they could still edge ahead in the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin pushed back and said the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings”.
“We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.

Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency he has been an obsessive watcher of the channel, often providing commentary on his Twitter feed about its audience ratings when he objects to its coverage and phoning in to dispute specific issues.
On the day of the election he complained on air about the channel’s coverage not being sufficiently supportive: “Somebody said what’s the difference between this and four years ago, and I say Fox … In the old days you wouldn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on every time he opens his mouth. You had Democrats on more than you had Republicans. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling people.”
One of the bigger questions in US rightwing media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with longstanding speculation that he could be tempted to start his own media outlet in a bid to communicate directly with his supporters. More

On Wednesday the country woke up to the fact that a sizable portion of Latinos liked President Trump enough to help him clinch a victory in Florida. And a CNN exit poll suggested that Mr. Trump picked up more Latino voters in several other key battleground states compared to his numbers in 2016.Many people were surprised, but they shouldn’t be. In 1984, 37 percent of Latinos voted for Ronald Reagan; 40 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004. It would be easy to dismiss these voters as self hating, or racists. But that’s a simplistic way of viewing this wildly diverse and complex demographic.The reason the “Latino vote” befuddles is because it doesn’t exist, nor do “Latino issues.” If we want to understand how Latinos vote, we should start by retiring the word “Latino” entirely — and maybe “Hispanic,” too, a term first used by the United States government in the 1970 census that is based solely on the language native to the European settlers who conquered the Americas. These labels have served only to reduce us to a two-dimensional caricature: poor brown immigrants who always vote Democrat.Latinos, like all Americans, are motivated by the issues that affect them directly. Those can vary depending on factors like our religion, where we grew up, whether we are first generation or our ancestors lived in North America long before the United States existed. Many Democrats act as if Latinos care only about immigration policy. In fact, a recent survey by UnidosUS, an advocacy group, and Latino Decisions, a polling and research firm, found that Latinos are more concerned about jobs and the economy.Journalists and pundits who have spent some time in Latin America or interviewed a few Spanish speakers (and now fancy themselves experts) have suggested that machismo, and a desire to be closer to whiteness, is what drove these voters to support the man who promised to build a wall to keep caravans of Spanish-speaking brown people out. That may be true, but it’s far from the whole story.I’m a Cuban-American from Miami, and I’m not surprised that around 52 percent of Cuban-Americans in Florida voted for Mr. Trump. No one who was paying attention could be. In the weeks leading up to the election, Cubans in Miami composed a salsa song in support of Mr. Trump and organized Trump caravans hundreds of cars long.It may sound ridiculous, but some of those voters are genuinely afraid of socialism, and he leaned into that. “We will never have a socialist country,” he promised. He understood that for Cubans and Venezuelans, the word is a reminder of the dysfunctional governments they left behind.It didn’t matter as much to them that the punitive sanctions Mr. Trump imposed on Venezuela did nothing to dislodge an oppressive dictator, or that rolling back parts of President Barack Obama’s thaw on Cuba has only made things harder for families like mine back on the island. They cared that Mr. Trump delivered on his promises.He kept his promise on the courts, too. The three conservative judges he nominated most likely mattered to evangelical Latinos in Central Florida who care deeply about issues like abortion. In return, many of these voters, like others, could overlook his questionable morals or autocratic tendencies.Though many Cuban-Americans benefit from the Affordable Care Act, many also own or work in small businesses. They cheered the removal under Mr. Trump of the Obamacare requirement that most Americans have health insurance or pay a fine. Michael Binder, a University of North Florida pollster, noted that business owners liked Trump’s message that the coronanvirus pandemic was “rounding the turn.”Protecting your interests is classic American individualism.Finally, maybe part of the appeal of a leader like Mr. Trump is that he feels familiar. I was parsing the results with Ariana Diaz, a Venezuelan friend living in the United States, the day after the election. “We come from a place where there hasn’t been a working democracy in at least 20 years,” she said. She wondered if perhaps that’s why Venezuelan voters were more susceptible to his message. They’re not the only ones. Many people who lived through the socialism brutally foisted upon Central America in the 1980s vote Republican, and consider Reagan a hero.Mexican-American voters in Zapata County in Texas also helped Mr. Trump hold onto the state. But of course plenty of so-called Latinos did vote for Mr. Biden. In Wisconsin and New Mexico, they helped him win. While the votes are still being tallied, Latino activists and grass roots political organizations may also help him win Nevada and Arizona.But Mr. Biden spent little time and resources on outreach to Latino voters. This is also not new. Most campaigns court our vote only every two or four years. They assume we all speak Spanish, look the same and vote the same. Only one Senate candidate, Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat who won his bid for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico, had a Latino campaign manager or senior consultants on staff, according to the political consultant Chuck Rocha.This isn’t just about how politicians woo some voters while taking others for granted; it’s also about how the news media sees and reports on these groups. At a social event a few years back, a fellow journalist introduced me to a friend as someone who rose from being a custodian to a self-taught journalist and master’s degree candidate. But I’d never been a custodian. It was as if she was shocked that someone like me could do something other than clean.The language society uses doesn’t just shape the national narrative, it ascribes an identity independent of who we are. “Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Nathalie Nieves, the president of the New York chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists told me. “One of those tools includes language and the way the media continues to refer to us as Latino or Hispanic.”If I’m totally honest, I only learned I was a Latina in the last few years. I still don’t know what that means. Growing up, I thought of myself as Cuban, or maybe Caribbean. Eventually, I became a citizen and thus a Cuban-American. These days I think of myself as an American.I will not fit neatly into the “Latina” box others want to put me into. While my culture may be a prism through which I view the world, it doesn’t guarantee that I will identify with or vote like other Cuban-Americans, let alone other Latinos. Mr. Trump understood that. Hopefully Democrats do now, too.Isvett Verde (@isvettverde) is a staff editor in the Times Opinion section.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside the Maricopa County Elections Department, chanting ‘count the votes’ after Joe Biden was named victor in the state by a number of news organisations. Media, including Fox News and the Associated Press, called the state in Biden’s favour, but Trump has been narrowing the gap. Maricopa county, Arizona’s most populous and a conservative stronghold, has been the focus of attention as the overall election results remains in the balance
Trump supporters protest at Arizona vote counting centre
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

Incluso antes del día de las elecciones, Donald Trump alentó las dudas sobre los votos por correspondencia de Pensilvania. En un tuit, escribió que la decisión de la Corte Suprema de permitir que el estado aceptara votos en ausencia hasta varios días después de la elección era “MUY peligrosa. Dejará que haya estafas descaradas y descontroladas”. El domingo, les dijo a reporteros que, apenas termine la elección “vamos a intervenir con nuestros abogados”. Los republicanos ya están en el tribunal, reclamando el recuento de algunas boletas de votación por correo en Pensilvania.Pero no hay ningún fraude descontrolado en Pensilvania, y cualquier juez con integridad y honestidad intelectual debería reconocer este reclamo como lo que es: engañoso. Un fraude de la escala suficiente para afectar una elección presidencial, o siquiera lograr una remontada en un estado, requeriría planeación, coordinación, buena suerte y una alta tolerancia al riesgo. Las probabilidades de lograrlo con éxito son sumamente escasas.Un complot tan perverso requeriría de previsión —con muchas semanas o incluso meses de anticipación— para saber que el esfuerzo debe enfocarse en Pensilvania. Los conspiradores podrían ir a la segura al cubrir varios estados, pero eso solo aumentaría el costo, el riesgo y la dificultad de la labor.Una conspiración para amañar la elección de 2020 en Pensilvania también tendría que reunir decenas de miles de votos. En 2016, casi 6,2 millones de pensilvanos emitieron su voto para elegir al presidente. Donald Trump ganó por 44.292 votos, un 0,7 por ciento del total.Supongamos que los confabuladores de alguna manera sabían que este año habría un empate en Pensilvania si no se movilizaban. A modo de hipótesis, digamos que decidieron juntar 62.000 votos fraudulentos, aproximadamente el uno por ciento del total de 2016 y el doble del margen del 0,5 por ciento que da pie a un recuento automático (incluso ese parece ser un margen demasiado estrecho).¿Qué tan difícil sería ordenar 62.000 papeletas ilegales?Las probabilidades de que 62.000 partidarios de Biden en Pensilvania votaran de improviso con una segunda boleta ilegal, ya sea en persona o por correo, en la práctica, son de cero. Es difícil creer que cualquier votante se expondría a ser arrestado por cometer un delito grave, así como recibir multas y una sentencia de prisión, sin saber si alguien más también lo estaba haciendo con tal de otorgarles un voto más a los demócratas para que ganaran en Pensilvania. Un fraude de la magnitud necesaria tendría que estar organizado.¿Y qué requeriría ese proceso?Tal vez una mente maestra del fraude reclutaría a mil cómplices que generarían 62 boletas ilegales por cabeza. Esos mil participantes tendrían que arriesgar su reputación, sus recursos y su libertad para vencer a Donald Trump en Pensilvania. Tendrían que ser capaces de mantener en secreto su labor en ese momento y para siempre, y confiar en que el resto de sus colaboradores haría lo mismo.El trabajo de los mil implicados en el fraude exigiría mucha habilidad y un montón de suerte. Cada uno podría intentar convencer a 62 personas de que voten una segunda vez, pero sería una tarea difícil.No les convendría a los reclutas votar en persona y por correo, dada la facilidad con la que las autoridades electorales detectan esto. Además, a menos que diera la casualidad de que están registrados en dos jurisdicciones, no pueden votar en más de una y, si lo hacen, se arriesgan a ser enjuiciados. Los confabuladores también tendrían que jugársela con la esperanza de que ninguna de las 62 (o más) personas a las que contactaran fuera partidaria de Trump en secreto o un simpatizante de Biden con conciencia intachable.Como alternativa, los conspiradores podrían hacerse pasar por 62 electores legales para solicitar y devolver papeletas de voto postal. Este tampoco es un proceso fácil.Como protección contra el fraude, Pensilvania exige que la mayoría de las personas que solicitan boletas de voto por correo proporcionen una identificación, ya sea una licencia de conducir o el número de un documento de identidad, o al menos los últimos cuatro dígitos de un número de Seguro Social. Así que, de alguna forma, los encargados del fraude tendrían que averiguar los números correctos de identificación de los 62 votantes.Si uno de los electores reales acudiera a votar o solicitara una boleta por correo, su teatro se vendría abajo y quedarían expuestos a una situación legal riesgosa. Ahora multiplica todas estas dificultades por mil, ya que los mil cómplices enfrentarían los mismos problemas.Por último, ¿qué tal si la mente maestra detrás del fraude es un funcionario electoral del condado y solo suma 62.000 votos para Biden al recuento (u omite 62.000 votos para Trump)? Por supuesto que los funcionarios electorales son partidistas aunque supervisan el conteo de los votos.Sin embargo, la mayoría de los estados permiten que observadores partidistas vigilen el recuento de votos. Además, tal vez se vería un poco sospechoso que el conteo normal de votos en un condado de pronto tuviera 62.000 votos de más o de menos. Darle la vuelta a una elección presidencial en la etapa del recuento también requeriría que muchas personas trabajaran en sintonía, organizadas con mucha anticipación.Los desafíos de un fraude electoral de la escala suficiente para cambiar el resultado de una elección presidencial son abrumadores, cuando menos. Robarse una elección presidencial en Estados Unidos requeriría, como mínimo, decenas de miles de votos (o incluso millones, si alguien de verdad cree que el presidente perdió el voto popular en 2016 debido a una estafa).Los costos de cometer un fraude electoral incrementan con el número de votos, al igual que las probabilidades de ser atrapado, detenido y sentenciado.Este año, según parece, muchos pensilvanos votaron por primera vez en su vida o por primera vez en mucho tiempo y algunos quizá se sintieron motivados a hacerlo por una animadversión hacia el presidente Trump.Pero eso no es fraude, eso es democracia.John Mark Hansen, profesor de Ciencias Políticas en la Universidad de Chicago, fue coordinador de investigación en 2001 en la Comisión Nacional para la Reforma Federal. More

As the US election slowly draws to its conclusion, one of the areas of confusion is that different media outlets are showing different results for the electoral votes.
The president is elected by winning at least 270 electoral college votes, not the outcome of the popular vote. Because there is no centralised federal election system, it has become tradition in the US that “decision desks” at media organisations make a call that states have been won by one candidate or the other when enough votes have been counted. States that are too close to call – such as Nevada and Georgia at the moment – remain in the balance until a network “calls” them.
The Guardian uses the data collected and analysed by the Associated Press (AP) news agency as the source for when we will call election results. There are a number of other highly reputable election decision desks in US media, including NBC, Fox News and others. They may call races earlier or later than AP. US networks obviously use the decisions from their own desks – other channels may chose to follow one, or wait for two desks to call a state before they count it.
This year, Arizona has brought this into sharp relief. Our current total of 264 electoral votes for Joe Biden includes the fact that AP has called Arizona for the Democratic nominee. Not all decision desks have yet.
AP has issued this guide to all of the states it has called. This is what it says about Arizona:

The AP called the race at 2.50am EST Wednesday, after an analysis of ballots cast statewide concluded there were not enough outstanding to allow Trump to catch up. With 80% of the expected vote counted, Biden was ahead by 5 percentage points, with a roughly 130,000-vote lead over Trump, with about 2.6m ballots counted. The remaining ballots left to be counted, including mail-in votes in Maricopa county, where Biden performed strongly, were not enough for Trump to catch up to the former vice-president.

The Trump campaign disagrees. Biden’s lead is currently down to about 68,000 votes in the state – or less than three percentage points – with 88% of the votes counted. More

In the morning hours of Oct. 30, as most of the country slept, President Trump was binge tweeting again.At 2:32 a.m., he told his 87.3 million Twitter followers: “Way ahead in Texas! Watch the Great Red Wave!”Minutes later, he tweeted the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamiily, with a typo in the word “family.” That was it. No context, no link.#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages. Without the hashtag, the slogan has had more than a million public interactions this month on Facebook.On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.It’s effective because it’s simple. The hashtag took a complicated issue with legitimate questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and China — and reduced it to a slogan that could also be used to spread falsehoods about Joe Biden. (An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by Mr. Biden.)Constant repetition makes the charge sound true, and blunts accusations of unethical behavior against Mr. Trump’s own children. With the hashtag, Mr. Trump found a way to tell supporters: Here is all you need to know about the Democratic nominee.And Mr. Trump’s typo? It was surely not accidental. That extra “i” circumvented Twitter’s efforts to hide the hashtag in search results. Called #typosquatting, this tactic is often used by trolls and media manipulators to get around the rules of social media platforms.To understand the power of this disinformation campaign, let’s study its life cycle.Stage 1: OriginsFor more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling. More

Biden has the clearest path to victory
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has won 264 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to declare victory, strengthening his lead with wins in Michigan and Wisconsin on Wednesday. Donald Trump has 214 electoral college votes after gaining one vote in Maine.
As of 2 am ET on Thursday, Biden holds a lead in Nevada, which has six electoral college votes – just enough to get him over the line.
Trump’s lead in Georgia began to narrow late on Wednesday, and as more postal votes are counted Biden could flip the state and win its 16 electoral college votes. More Georgians voted by mail than voted in total in 2016 and these mail-in ballots could skew blue. As of 2 am ET on Thursday, Trump led by 22,000 votes in the state, with an estimated 100,000 votes left to be counted.
Biden could also net Pennsylvania, which would gain him 20 votes, although counting in the state is expected to continue for quite a while.
Addressing supporters at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said it was “clear” he would hit the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. “I’m not here to declare that we won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we will be the winner,” Biden said. More

Misinformation loves a vacuum, and the uncertainty around the outcome of the US presidential race has created a mighty one. As election officials work to count ballots, Donald Trump and his allies have launched a campaign to cast doubt on the electoral process. False declarations of victory and false allegations of fraud are being pumped into the information void, where their salacious narratives compete with the more prosaic reality that counting takes time.
We spoke with experts on disinformation about why people believe the false narratives Trump is pushing, what those people might do in response, and why Trump’s latest conspiracy theory might not catch on the way he hopes.
The big lie
For months, Trump has seeded doubt about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, laying the groundwork for the vague conspiracy theories about fraudulent ballots that he tweeted wildly about throughout the day Wednesday.
Trump’s claims are perfectly suited to people who share what Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University, calls “deep memetic frames” or “deeply, viscerally held stories about the world that shape what you think to be true and what you think should be done in response”. One such frame is characterized by deep distrust of institutions and “a general sense that there are people who are out to get people who look like us” – such as the so-called “Deep State”.
This mindset has been prevalent in recent months amid the rise of QAnon and Covid-skeptic communities, Phillips said. “In some ways, the sensationalist child-eating, blood-drinking QAnon stuff distracts from the really corrosive part of the narrative, which is the idea that liberals, scientists and Jews are all coming to get you, so you better go get your guns.”
Phillips views Trump’s failure to debunk or denounce conspiracy theories as preparations for selling this latest conspiracy theory. “In the past few months, Trump started using the deep state by name; he started specifically engaging with and embracing QAnon,” she said. “That underlying frame – ‘don’t trust “them”’ – was the groundwork for his efforts to contest the election.”
Notably, this disinformation effort remains a top-down approach. “We’re not talking about misinformation from the grassroots or foreign actors, said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, at a Wednesday morning election debrief. “It’s known influencers.”
Online to offline
Among people who believe Trump’s false claims about election theft, there is likely to be a strong impetus to take action. “Anytime people feel that their rights are being taken from them, especially by the government, we do see widespread social unrest,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Already, protesters have targeted the TFC Center in Detroit, demanding access to the office where ballots are being counted. And worryingly, the American right does not have the same tradition of street protest that the political left does.
“If you don’t have a robust repertoire of tactics as you’re heading into a street protest, then it becomes very appealing to use violence as the messenger,” Donovan said. “It does tend to enliven the spirit of paramilitary organizations and people who are supporters of the second amendment, who believe that a Democratic president would be coming for their guns. We’re going to see a lot of those issues coalesce in the next few days.”
The role of the platforms
Under intense pressure from the traditional news media, researchers and civil society, the social media platforms that long allowed Trump tremendous leeway to break their polices have taken a more aggressive stance toward his false claims about the election. In the run-up to the election, Twitter and Facebook began applying misinformation labels to some of Trump’s false statements, and Facebook even expanded its policy on premature declaration of victory on Wednesday – an uncommonly quick response from a company that tends to dig in its heels when facing criticism from the press.
The labels are by no means a panacea. “For people behind a certain frame, a label on a tweet is just more evidence that there’s censorship,” said Phillips. Stamos also noted that the lack of lasting punishments (like suspensions or bans) for repeat offenders has created a reverse incentive for certain influencers. “They seem to enjoy being punished,” he said. “It’s part of their brand now.”
Losing the megaphone
While Trump is certainly pushing the false idea of a stolen election, and while some of his supporters are deeply susceptible to believing that narrative, it’s still unclear if the narrative will take hold more broadly.
“In order to do disinformation well, you have to have a few key elements,” said Donovan. “One is an online cavalry ready to troll. The second is either key figures or key evidence that allow you to make your claim. The third thing is the claim has to be very straightforward and people have to have something to circulate.”
While various videos and photos have emerged as supposed “proof” of fraud, they have all been debunked by fact-checkers and none appear ready for prime time – the fourth element of a successful disinformation campaign. “To really break out, you need the megaphone of conservative media,” Donovan said.
On election night, Fox News declined to validate Trump’s conspiracy theory and instead hewed generally to evidence-based projections. “The Maga coalition that brought Trump’s presidency into being has been fractured,” Donovan added. “The tale of the tape is going to be if Fox News calls it for Biden ahead of other outlets or in line with other major news outlets. If they are not on board with Trump’s challenges ideologically and in terms of evidence, then Trump is going to have a really big uphill battle in terms of controlling the narrative of who won.” More