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      in Elections

      US election 2020: Joe Biden holds lead over Donald Trump in tense wait for results – live

      by

      Key events

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      6.38am EST06:38
      US recorded record 102,831 new coronavirus cases yesterday

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      10.21am EST10:21

      Donald Trump is again tweeting in all caps, making false claims about the remaining ballots left to be counted.
      “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump said.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!

      November 5, 2020

      In reality, a number of states, including Pennsylvania, allow ballots to arrive for days after election day as long as the ballots are postmarked by election day.
      It’s also worth noting that it often takes longer for ballots to arrive from service members who are deployed overseas. It’s unclear whether the president thinks those Americans’ ballots should be thrown out.

      10.05am EST10:05

      If both of Georgia’s Senate races advance to runoffs, Democrats could take the Senate majority by winning both races and the White House.
      It would be a heavy lift for Democrats to win both Senate races in the traditionally conservative state, as the extremely close presidential race in Georgia demonstrates, and Republicans are still very likely to maintain control of the Senate.
      But Republicans’ chances of success in Georgia may be tied to whether Donald Trump would still campaign for their candidates if he becomes a lame-duck president, as an Atlantic writer noted.

      Edward-Isaac Dovere
      (@IsaacDovere)
      If Biden wins and control of the Senate comes down to those two Georgia seats, GOP hopes of winning them/the majority will likely hinge on whether a defeated Trump would invest himself into turning out his voters in races where he’s not on the ballot and wins won’t benefit him

      November 5, 2020

      9.56am EST09:56

      Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has released his first ad for the January runoff election in Georgia.
      The ad features Warnock subjecting himself to the potential attacks that might come from his Republican opponent, Senator Kelly Loeffler.
      “Raphael Warnock eats pizza with a fork and knife,” the narrator’s ad says in a menacing voice. “Raphael Warnock once stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.”

      Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      Get ready Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming.But that won’t stop us from fighting for a better future for Georgians and focusing on the issues that matter. pic.twitter.com/VN0YIA02MG

      November 5, 2020

      The ad then pivots to Warnock saying, “Get ready, Georgia. The negative ads against us are coming. Kelly Loeffler doesn’t want to talk about why she’s for getting rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic, so she’s going to try and scare you with lies about me.”
      Warnock and Loeffler advanced to the January runoff after no candidate in the special Senate election managed to attract 50% of the vote.
      The other Senate race in Georgia, between Republican incumbent David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, is likely headed to a runoff as well, as it looks like Perdue’s numbers could slip below 50% with the final batch of Georgia ballots.

      9.42am EST09:42

      There are about 61,000 outstanding votes in Georgia, most of them from Democratic-leaning counties, according to the Washington Post.

      Amy Gardner
      (@AmyEGardner)
      UPDATE: 61k votes are outstanding in Georgia. 17,157 from Chatham; 11,200 from Fulton; 7,338 from Gwinnett; 4,713 from Forsyth; 3,641 from Harris; 1,797 from Laurens; 1,552 from Putnam; 1,202 from Sumter; 700 from Cobb. FEAST

      November 5, 2020

      Donald Trump currently leads by about 18,000 votes in the state, and the mail-in ballots that are being counted have favored Joe Biden. It’s expected to be an extremely close final result.

      9.28am EST09:28

      This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam, and we still don’t have a winner in the US presidential election.
      Donald Trump is reacting to the state of play in his now-standard manner: by demanding election officials stop counting valid ballots.
      “STOP THE COUNT!” the president said in a new tweet.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      STOP THE COUNT!

      November 5, 2020

      Election officials have pledged to count every valid vote cast by election day, and many of them have defended the integrity of the counts in their states.
      It’s also worth noting that, if counting were stopped now, Biden would win the presidency because he is ahead in Nevada, which would get him to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

      8.58am EST08:58

      Look, you know and I know that as soon as enough races have been called that Biden has 270 Electoral College votes, it is still not going to be the end of this.
      Wisconsin, provided Trump is within 1% of Biden, will get recounted for sure. And there are the legal challenges. Reuters have just put together this handy outline of a few of the key ones:
      Michigan ballot-counting fightTrump’s campaign said on Wednesday it had filed a lawsuit in Michigan to stop state officials from counting ballots. The campaign said the case in the Michigan Court of Claims seeks to halt counting until it has an election inspector at each absentee-voter counting board. The campaign also wanted to review ballots that were opened and counted before an inspector from its campaign was present.
      Pennsylvania court battlesRepublican officials on Tuesday sued election officials in Montgomery County, which borders Philadelphia, accusing them of illegally counting mail-in ballots early and giving voters who submitted defective ballots a chance to re-vote. At a hearing on Wednesday, US District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of their allegations and how the integrity of the election might be affected.
      In a separate lawsuit, the Trump campaign asked a judge to halt ballot counting in Pennsylvania, claiming that Republicans had been unlawfully denied access to observe the process.
      Meanwhile, Republicans in Pennsylvania have asked the US Supreme Court to review a decision from the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrived through until Friday 6 November. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign filed a motion to intervene in the case.
      Supreme court justices said last week there was not enough time to decide the merits of the case before Election Day but indicated they might revisit it afterwards. As a result, Pennsylvania election officials said they will segregate properly postmarked ballots that arrived after Election Day, which opens the possibility the court could subsequently strike them out.
      US Postal Service litigationA judge on Wednesday said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must answer questions about why the USPS failed to complete a court-ordered sweep for undelivered ballots in about a dozen states before a Tuesday afternoon deadline. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan is overseeing a lawsuit by Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates who have been demanding the postal service deliver mail-in ballots in time to be counted in the election.
      Georgia ballot fightThe Trump campaign on Wednesday evening filed a lawsuit in state court in Chatham County, Georgia. Unlike the Pennsylvania and Michigan actions, that lawsuit is not asking a judge to halt ballot counting. Instead, the campaign said it received information that late-arriving ballots were improperly mingled with valid ballots, and asked a judge to enter an order making sure late-arriving ballots were separated so they would not be counted.
      After the announcement just now that there will be a press conference in Nevada this morning featuring the Republican chair of the state and attorneys, presumably we’ll be able to add Nevada to that list soon.

      8.47am EST08:47

      This could be intriguing. 8:30am PST is 4:30pm this afternoon if, like me, you are in London.

      Andrew Feinberg
      (@AndrewFeinberg)
      INBOX: @TeamTrump will make a “major announcement” in Las Vegas this morning, headlined by 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot participant ⁦@mschlapp⁩, ex-Acting DNI Ric Grenell, Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, and ex-NV AG Adam Laxalt. pic.twitter.com/OCGjmnOKRz

      November 5, 2020

      Nevada still has around 25% of its votes to count, which is approaching 400,000. Joe Biden has a narrow lead of about 7,500 at the moment. Under state law, ballots can still be accepted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day up until 10 November.
      Trump narrowly lost Nevada in 2016 as the state has trended toward the Democrats in the past decade. The last Republican to win the state was George W. Bush in 2004.
      The tweet mentions Matt Schlapp as a Brooks Brothers Riot participant. For those of us without total recall of US elections from twenty years ago, my colleague Adam Gabbatt reminded us what the Brooks Brothers Riot was recently:

      In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped.
      The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. The counting of disputed ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision.

      Updated
      at 9.23am EST

      8.39am EST08:39

      A very simple message coming out from the Biden campaign this morning: Count every vote.

      Joe Biden
      (@JoeBiden)
      Every vote must be counted. pic.twitter.com/kWLGRfeePK

      November 5, 2020

      8.29am EST08:29

      These two charts sum up exactly why in one state Trump supporters were protesting to keep the count going, and in another state the Trump campaign has been taking legal action to try and shut the counting down.

      Sophy Ridge
      (@SophyRidgeSky)
      Here’s the changing situation in Arizona & Pennsylvania – things are narrowing in opposite directions. It could really go to the wire pic.twitter.com/OdWpR2OvvR

      November 5, 2020

      Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Wolf, by the way, was quite clear yesterday on the state’s determination to count every vote, saying:

      Pennsylvania is going to count every vote and make sure that everyone has their voice heard. Pennsylvania is going to fight every single attempt to disenfranchise voters and continue to administer a free and fair election.

      8.07am EST08:07

      I suspect it is the experience of watching Donald Trump grind out the last few Electoral College votes to win in 2016 that is making some people still lack confidence that Biden will actually win.
      However, as well as Jennifer Rubin being convinced, Giovanni Russonello writes this for the New York Times politics newsletter this morning. Note, that unlike Fox News and the Associated Press (and us), NYT have not yet put Arizona into Biden’s column. But he writes:

      Joe Biden has now won 253 electoral votes and has multiple routes to the White House, with five swing states still undecided and uncounted votes in several likely to favor him. While Trump has not indicated that he has any plans to concede, and his campaign insists he could still prevail, at this point a path to victory would most likely run through the courts. It’s a hard road ahead for him.

      He does point out though that capturing the presidency won’t take away all the question marks about the Democratic performance at this election.

      If Democrats end up declaring a victory over all, it will be a beleaguered one. Not only did Trump outperform their expectations in the battlegrounds, but Democratic candidates for both the House and the Senate also lost races — some in states that split their tickets and favored Biden for president — that the party had been fairly confident about. More

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      in US Politics

      Fight to Vote: what election experts warned about versus what really happened

      by

      [embedded content]
      Good morning Fight to Vote readers,
      By now many of you have already stared endlessly at election maps like me, hitting refresh every few minutes to find out if Nevada counted more ballots, or if the gap in Pennsylvania is narrowing more, as you also glance at your TV screen. But if you’ve opened this newsletter, I’m going to assume that you’re hungry for more answers.
      Today I’m thinking a lot about the warnings we’ve gotten for the past few months, and what has played out in reality so far. Were we right to wave red flags about the democratic process and voter suppression? Was 2020 really that bad if a record number of Americans turned out to vote?
      Here are some of the scenarios election experts warned about, and what has actually happened:
      Scenario 1: there wouldn’t be a clear winner on election night
      True to form, there was no victor on Tuesday night, or on Thursday morning, with millions of ballots still left to count in key states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada and Georgia
      Scenario 2: Trump would declare himself a winner before the votes were all counted
      The president indeed attempted to claim victory both on Twitter and in a speech early Wednesday morning, while simultaneously calling any votes counted after election day corrupted. Twitter flagged his tweet immediately, labeling it misleading, and Wednesday and Thursday showed a much different scenario on the electoral map.
      Scenario 3: election offices would be understaffed, underfunded and incapable of carrying out their jobs
      With record turnout and mail-in ballots, election officials were under immense pressure after the polls closed on Tuesday evening. But despite only receiving a fraction of the necessary funding from Congress, there have not been reports of significant lapses or problems in their counts.
      Scenario 4: lawsuits would abound over every vote
      Partisan lawsuits were going strong until election day, with Republicans attempting to discount ballots in Texas drive-thru drop-offs, and local electors in Pennsylvania claiming certain counties were giving their voters an unfair chance to correct ballots. This has only continued: the Trump campaign sued in Michigan and Georgia, setting the stage to contest election results. The lawsuits are demanding, among other things, that campaign observers have better access to locations where ballot are being counted and raised questions over mail-in ballots. On Wednesday, Trump also said he would contest election results in the supreme court.
      It is normal for there to be legal battles after a US election, but this year’s challenges seem to be on track to be lengthier and uglier than most.
      Scenario 5: thousands, maybe millions of people would be disenfranchised by last-minute restrictions, deadlines or ballot rejections
      On Wednesday morning, a new flood of United States Postal Service data had experts concerned that thousands of ballots could have been delayed and left uncounted in states with strict counting deadlines. In states like North Carolina and Georgia, thousands of mail-in ballots had been rejected for voter errors. In Texas, some students reported having their voter registration bungled last minute and casting provisional ballots instead. We won’t know the scale of how Republican voting restrictions and procedural problems impacted voters, but there are likely a significant number of votes threatened.
      Scenario 6: there would be mass chaos on the street and at polling stations on election day or in the days after
      Election day went relatively smoothly, and voter intimidation issues, though apparent, were not widespread. As we await results, demonstrations have cropped up across the US from both camps. About 150 Trump supporters – some of them armed and with gas masks – showed up at an election center in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday to protest the fact that some media organizations (including the Guardian) have called the state for Biden before all the votes are counted. Similar clusters have cropped up in cities like Detroit, Michigan, where the president has lost.
      Meanwhile, anti-Trump protesters are also marching across the country, including in Minneapolis, where this summer’s George Floyd uprising started. Many are demanding that Trump accept election results, since the president has launched several legal challenges to recount or stop counting votes.
      We’ll continue to report on the key takeaways from the election, and the impact it has had on voting access in the days to come.
      Beyond the presidential
      While most people had their eyes on the White House seat, there were several significant smaller races that will impact the US electoral map for the next 10 years, as David Daley wrote in the Guardian yesterday.
      Here in the US, the maps that determine state and legislative and congressional maps are first apportioned according to a census count that happens every decade, and then finalized according to state rules. Some states appoint independent commissions for the job, but most allow state legislators to draw district lines. This can enable gerrymandering, which allows Republicans to manipulate maps for massive partisan gain in 2010. Through gerrymandering, politicians can dilute communities’ political power by splitting them up, or carving up districts to isolate the voters they want.
      What happened this year?
      Though Democrats poured millions into down-ballot races, Republicans ultimately pulled through in the key states of Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Kansas. This gives them a huge advantage when it comes to redrawing new state legislative and congressional maps next year.
      And there’s real-world impact at stake: these wins could propel conservative legislation on voting rights, healthcare, reproductive rights, education funding and much more.
      What now?
      If you’re still looking for ways to get involved, there are still trainings happening for people who want to help voters “cure” or fix ballots that were rejected for technical errors, like missing signatures. States have different deadlines by which voters can cure their ballots.
      Otherwise, can remain patient, and rested while the results are confirmed. May I recommend the Atlantic’s election anxiety playlist? More

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      Even if Biden wins, the world will pay the price for the Democrats' failures | Owen Jones

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      How could the electoral circumstances for the US Democrats have been more favourable? A quarter of a million Americans have died in a pandemic bungled by the incumbent president, and at least 6 million have consequently been driven into poverty. The coronavirus crisis is the devastating climax of a presidency defined by hundreds of scandals, many of which alone, in normal circumstances, could have destroyed the political career of whoever occupied the White House.Despite having the active support of almost the entire US press, Joe Biden’s victory looks to be far narrower than predicted. During the Democratic primaries, Biden’s cheerleaders argued that his socialist challenger Bernie Sanders would repel Florida’s voters, and yet Donald Trump has triumphed in the sunshine state. They argued that his “unelectable” rival would risk the Senate and down-ballot races, yet the Republicans may retain control of the Senate, and Democrats are haemorrhaging seats in the House of Representatives.Without coronavirus, Trump would have undoubtedly secured another term and potentially dismantled an already flawed US democracy for a generation or more. This should have been a landslide, and now the world will pay the cost for the self-inflicted wounds of the Democratic establishment. Trump may be defeated; Trumpism lives on.While attention should now focus on resisting attempts by Trump and his allies to steal the election, the Democratic establishment must also understand why this entirely avoidable farce came to pass. As their phones lit up four years ago with notifications that he had become the 45th president of the American republic, Trump was, to self-styled Democratic “moderates”, a sudden hurricane that materialised under clear blue skies: an aberration; a glitch; a perverse accident to be undone so normality and civility could be restored.Many Democrats comforted themselves with the notion they had nothing to answer for: they had simply been cheated, Russia was to blame, and Hillary Clinton – whose hubristic campaign had initially wanted Trump as its preferred Republican nominee – had been tragically wronged. Rather than offering an inspiring alternative, Biden would bask in the reflected glory of Barack Obama, present himself as the “grownup” in the room, and focus on flipping erstwhile Trump voters on the grounds of competence alone. Striking, then, that not only did Trump win more votes than 2016, but 93% of Republicans opted for him this time around, up three points from that fateful election.Ample criticisms can be made of Biden’s candidacy, which limited its political horizons in deference to the Democrats’ corporate client base, when even Fox News exit polls showed that most Americans favoured a government-run healthcare plan. Democrats have taken Latino and black Americans for granted, an oversight that Trump ably exploited, winning (albeit from low numbers) increased support among both groups. But the roots of this failure go back decades. The Democratic establishment has long refused to embrace even the basic tenets of social democracy – not least taxing the better-off to fund programmes such as a comprehensive welfare state and universal healthcare.The political consequences of this failure have been devastating. In the 1960s, the Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson launched a series of “great society” programmes to tackle poverty. Yet while the tax burden of the average American family nearly doubled between the mid-1950s and 1980, taxes on corporate America have been successively slashed. Here was a resentment to be tapped into: that hard-working Americans, rather than the boss class, were subsidising those demonised as the “undeserving” poor.This fury became racialised as the struggle of black Americans – which was met with harsh white backlash – forced the federal government to introduce basic civil rights. When Ronald Reagan furiously denounced “welfare queens”, many blue-collar workers heard a dog whistle targeting often single black mothers, who their hard-earned tax dollars were supposedly subsidising. When Bill Clinton’s administration backed trade agreements that devastated industrial jobs in the rust belt, here was another grievance waiting to be mined. And it was, by the most unlikely figurehead, the former host of the Apprentice. Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together.In the aftermath of the financial crash, Obama’s presidential campaign appeared to offer a break with the failures of successive Republican and Democratic administrations. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the 2008 crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined. While the slice of national income belonging to middle Americans fell from 62% to 43% between 1970 and 2018, the number of billionaires has surged: from 66 in 1990 with a combined wealth of $240bn, to 614 today, with a total fortune of nearly $3tn. America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation – racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined.The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. The party lost against Trump in 2016, and has at best scraped a stillborn administration this time around. We will all pick up the tab for this failure. Although Biden committed to signing the world’s biggest polluter back up to the Paris climate accords, a failure to win the Senate will block a Green New Deal that is desperately needed to tackle the existential threat of the climate emergency. The world cannot afford another four years of inaction. With Biden’s likely presidency held hostage by a potentially hostile Senate and supreme court, the Republicans will be able to further gerrymander an already fatally compromised democratic system and, come mid-terms, tap into people’s disillusionment with an inevitably do-nothing government.That does not mean there is no hope. The so-called Squad of progressive Congressional Democrats – whose most famous member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – has doubled in number, including the election of former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and the first queer black Congressman, Mondaire Jones, in New York. The old Democratic establishment has failed to inflict the final reckoning on Trumpism that is deserved. It falls to this new generation of progressive leaders – predominantly working-class people of colour – to finish the job, not just for the United States, but for all of us.Join Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Labour MP Dawn Butler and academic Maya Goodfellow as they discuss the hostile environment and attitudes towards immigration in Britain. Tuesday 24 November, 7pm GMT Book tickets here More

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      in Elections

      Fox draws Trump campaign's ire after calling Arizona for Biden

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      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

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      Protesters gather outside election centre in Phoenix as Biden's Arizona 'win' challenged – video

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      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

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      in Elections

      Why are the media reporting different US election results?

      by

      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

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      in US Politics

      'Count every vote': protesters take to streets across US as ballots tallied

      by

      Protestors marched and rallied across the US on Wednesday as the presidential election remained too close to call. Most demonstrations were large, peaceful events organized by progressive groups calling on officials to “count every vote”. But in some cities, including Phoenix and Detroit, Trump supporters converged on vote-counting centers.
      In New York City, thousands marched past boarded-up luxury stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, as ballots were still being tallied in key battleground states.
      Similar protests took place in at least a half-dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and San Diego. Demonstrators gathered outside Dallas City Hall in Texas, and in Chicago, protesters demanding a complete count marched through downtown and along a street across the river from Trump Tower.
      Many of these events were organized by local groups affiliated with Protect the Results, a coalition of grassroots organizations and labor unions.
      In Phoenix a group of pro-Trump protesters, some of them armed, gathered outside the Maricopa county election center, where sheriff’s deputies were guarding both the outside of the building and the counting inside.
      Many wore “Make America great again” hats and some carried signs baselessly alleging fraud. The Associated Press and other news organizations, including the conservative network Fox News, declared Biden the victor in Arizona yesterday, but Trump has been inching closer to a tie. Demonstrators chanted: “Shame on Fox.”

      Despite reports that counting would be halted as a result of the demonstration, county officials confirmed that ballots would continue to be tallied into the night. Reporters, however, were asked to leave as the pro-Trump protesters crowded outside.

      Maricopa County Elections Department
      (@MaricopaVote)
      Staff at the @maricopacounty Elections Department will continue our job, which is to administer elections in the second largest voting jurisdiction in the county. We will release results again tonight as planned. We thank the @mcsoaz for doing their job, so we can do ours.

      November 5, 2020

      The incident echoed an earlier event in Michigan, when a rightwing, anti-lockdown group crowded outside a ballot-counting site in Detroit. The small cluster of Trump supporters descended on the center amid chants of “Stop the count!”. (In Phoenix, where Biden’s lead was shrinking, Trump supporters shouted the opposite.) More

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      in Elections

      What we know so far about the 2020 US election

      by

      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