US elections 2020

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

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

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

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

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      Biden advances in key states as Trump seeks to challenge results in court

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      Joe Biden took significant strides towards winning the presidency on Wednesday but the Trump campaign vowed to reverse them at the vote count and in the courts, ushering in a potentially prolonged and messy endgame to the election.
      Biden was called the winner in the critical battleground of Wisconsin, and was ahead in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, while Trump held leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
      If the current standings are sustained, it would take Biden over the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to clinch victory, even without the deadlocked state of Pennsylvania, where a million ballots were yet to be counted by Wednesday afternoon.
      Unleashing a long-planned legal campaign, the Trump campaign demanded a recount in Wisconsin and called for the count in Michigan to be halted, on the grounds that its representatives did not have “meaningful access”.
      Starting with a television statement after 2am, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the routine counting of ballots after election day was somehow fraudulent. In practice Trump campaign officials were on Wednesday supporting continued vote counts where the president was behind and vigorously opposing them where he was ahead.
      On Wednesday afternoon, Trump staged a rally of his supporters outside a convention centre in Philadelphia where votes were being counted, echoing Republican tactics to stop the recount in Florida 2000, which helped win the election for George W Bush.
      The 2000 election was finally decided by the US supreme court, and on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign also asked the supreme court to rule on its objections to an extended vote count in Pennsylvania.
      The Biden camp has assembled its own legal teams at the chief electoral flashpoints, and launched a “fight fund” to finance the effort.
      Meanwhile the US Postal Service was criticised by a judge for failing to carry out a sweep of its sorting offices for postal votes that had not yet been delivered to polling stations, amid claims that thousands of ballots were stranded at sorting offices.
      As the legal manoeuvring gathered momentum, it was clear the fate of the US presidency was likely to be determined by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, and possibly the decision of an array of judges.
      It was also evident the nation had not delivered the decisive “blue sweep” repudiation of Trumpism Democrats had hoped for, nor did it look likely the election would give them control of the Senate.
      Even before the counting was finished, Biden had won more votes than any president in history – over 70 million – edging out Barack Obama’s 2008 record and about 2.5 million ahead of Trump, once again highlighting the disparity between the popular vote and the arithmetic of the US electoral college system.
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      The pollsters were wrong – again. Here's what we know so far | Mona Chalabi

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      On any given day, my role is to write. On this particular day, I am supposed to write about what 240 million people decided – whether they stood in line or stuck down an envelope and which box they checked on a piece of paper.But at this particular moment, I have nothing to write. I am watching people talk loudly on a television screen and reading people type in ALL CAPS on Twitter and I am thinking about the importance of not writing.Journalists, supposedly chastened by a 2016 Trump win that they did not see coming, were going to be very cautious this time around. No more flailing New York Times needle. No more decimal places on FiveThirtyEight’s homepage – instead, a cartoon fox in glasses explaining to you what voters might do. And yet countless articles were still written over the past few months predicting that a Biden win was more likely than a Trump win, and so a lot of people are shouting online and offline because they have been caught by surprise. Because yet again, somehow, they trusted the polls.Maybe we will still see a President Biden. I understand you are here looking for factual certainties instead of “maybes” and I can’t give you those right now at a presidential level. Here is what I can say:1. The polls were probably inaccurate. Again.When I say “polls” here, I’m not talking about the actual process of voting in an election, I am referring to very expensive surveys that ask about a thousand US adults who they will vote for (although it’s confusing that these both have the same name).Overall, most polls gave Biden a lead nationally. A significant lead of 5 to 10 percentage points appeared as soon as the surveys started and persisted right up until election day. Pollsters claimed that they had learned the lessons from their 2016 mistakes. In fact, Biden was so far out in front, according to the pollsters’ questionnaires with strangers, that even if they were as wrong in 2020 as they were four years ago, Biden would still probably win comfortably.It’s possible, however, that they were actually more wrong this time around – either because they found it even harder to track down and speak to 1,000 adults who accurately represented 240 million voters, or because Trump voters were even more reluctant this time to tell a stranger their preferred candidate. Or both.As of around 11.30am EST on Wednesday, it looks like if Biden does win, it will not be by a large margin. Unfortunately, it is going to take a very long time to count all of the votes. Four key battleground states – Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia – still have tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted. Election workers might need days, not hours, to get to a final tally.2. The electoral college is still broken.In US presidential elections, there are two kinds of “wins”: by popular vote and by the electoral college. Only the latter means you become president. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2000 and 2016, Democratic candidates who won the popular vote still did not go to the White House. It is quite possible that Biden will win the popular vote and lose the electoral college.Currently, it looks like Biden will win the popular vote, and he still has some hope of winning the electoral college, too. Most of the votes left to be counted are absentee or mail-in ballots. We know that those ballots are more likely to be Democrat than Republican. Early voting has long skewed Democrat, but this time there is also a pandemic that is more likely to make Democrats choose to vote by mail over voting in person, compared to Republicans. (Republicans are more likely to have consumed media that has downplayed or flat-out denied Covid-19.)Take Pennsylvania, for instance, where, at time of writing, 84% of votes have been counted and Biden is losing by more than 300,000 ballots. There are almost 1.1m ballots left to count and Biden is winning three mail-in ballots for every one that goes to Trump. A little simple arithmetic (winning approximately 75% of 1.1 million votes = 825,000) indicates that Biden might comfortably win, once the votes are fully counted.3. Some women voted for Biden. Some women did not.Initially, this article was supposed to analyze the demographics of support for each candidate so let me try to at least throw my editor a bone.As much as I am thoroughly skeptical of polling, exit polls are slightly more accurate – they interview far more people (this Edison survey spoke to 14,318 adults, whereas most polls speak to around 1,000) and they speak to people who have already voted rather than asking people days, sometimes weeks, ahead of time who they maybe plan to maybe vote for.The exit polls suggest that whereas men were pretty evenly split (49% Biden, 48% Trump), women as a group tended to favor Biden (57% Biden, 42% Trump). But, in case you haven’t noticed, women are a pretty big old group. Demographics cannot be divided into neat slices of the pie – Americans can be rich and Black and male and living in a suburb and college-educated and each of those factors can influence someone’s vote differently.Despite the fact that Trump described Mexican immigrants as “bad hombres” and “rapists” during his 2016 campaign, Hispanic voters in Florida still showed up for Trump because many Cubans appreciated his anti-communist stance. So I’m not placing much faith in these numbers either. People do not vote in tidy groups.So I do not have much to write. Except to resurface the article I wrote on 9 November 2016, and make the same plea: avoid predicting the behavior of 240 million people, avoid reading those predictions, avoid complacency.Journalists will continue to create charts predicting future presidents as long as readers continue to demand them. I do not know how many times polls have to be wrong or how wrong they have to be for us to finally walk away from the dangerous seduction of predicting political outcomes. Seeing graphics that tell us the future is hypnotic, but it is very important to be awake. Especially now. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump calls foul play as Biden takes Wisconsin: Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      As we wait for the final few votes from battleground states, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith run through the latest results from the 2020 US presidential election

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      The blue wave never made it to shore, but the pathway for a Joe Biden win looks slightly clearer than that for Donald Trump. So what do we know and what should we preparing for over the next few days? Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in US Politics

      Paths to US election victory: what Trump and Biden need to win

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      Paths to victory remain in the US presidential race for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but Biden has more ways to win and appears to be running stronger state to state, based on the places – cities, mainly – where large absentee votes have yet to be counted.
      Biden leads the electoral tally 248-214 after he was declared the winner in Wisconsin on Wednesday and Trump gained one vote in Maine. Adding Alaska for Trump – which had not been called but where the result is not in doubt – gives the president 217.

      From there, five states remained to be called as Wednesday evening approached in the US: Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Trump’s paths
      The simplest way for Trump to find the 53 electoral votes he needs would be to win Pennsylvania and at least three other states. If he does not win Pennsylvania, Trump must make a clean sweep of all four remaining states to get to 270.
      But a huge Democratic vote share remained to be tallied in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, meaning Trump could have difficulty hanging on to a narrow lead gained elsewhere in the state. In Michigan, Trump appeared to be in even deeper trouble, because the outstanding vote was expected to be heavily Democratic.
      Trump’s path (Wisconsin update)
      Biden’s paths
      Biden had many paths to find his remaining 22 electoral votes. His most likely path lay through the Great Lakes states, where Pennsylvania and Michigan combined would net 36 votes.
      Without Pennsylvania, Biden could win by winning Michigan and Nevada, where he held a clear but narrow lead. A Biden victory in either of the two reddest states in the mix – Georgia or North Carolina – would almost certainly foretell wins elsewhere and a Biden victory.
      Biden’s path (Wisconsin update) More

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      The Guardian view on the US elections: a nation dangerously divided | Editorial

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      Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
      Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
      It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since he took office. Mr Trump received so many more votes than he did in 2016 that his tally is only surpassed by Mr Biden this year, and Barack Obama in 2008.
      Should he depart, and there are few signs he will do so without a fight, Mr Trump’s legacy will be the politics of anger and hate. It is a tragedy for America that a poisonous division is becoming the norm rather than the exception. The concern in the US is that cultural divisions have gone past the point of no return. The priority for Americans must be to work out a way to stop the political rift from yawning so wide that the two hostile, sometimes armed, camps are incapable of talking to each other.
      The national conversation will not be easy to start, especially given the venomous way in which President Trump conducts politics. If there was any idea that the country could pick up after the election where it left off in 2016, it vanished the moment Mr Trump declared a victory he obviously had not yet won. His claim that his legal team would attempt to block states from counting all the votes that have already been cast, ballots which are widely viewed as certain to skew Democratic, was as outrageous as it was expected.
      Republicans have embraced their inner Trump, which is why democracy itself was on the ballot in 2020. Under Republican control, the US Congress, for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, did not check Mr Trump’s assault on the norms of democratic governance as much as enable it. The Grand Old Party has increasingly turned to policies designed to constrain the majority electorate. Faced with unfavourable demographic change, Republicans have cemented minority rule across American political institutions. The question that Mr Trump now poses is whether Republicans would go as far in their pursuit of power to undo a presidential election.
      The president may be counting on Republicans to subvert longstanding election norms or hope that the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices, will make the final call. If permitted, the ensuing constitutional crisis would dwarf Trumpism’s outrages. It would also play out against a background of heightened political mobilisation, which would bring with it the threat of civic strife.
      There is a real worry that the two main US parties appear locked in a dangerous and ferocious power struggle for control of the government. Mr Trump’s divisive politics have seen elections become a source of volatility in the world’s leading democracy. The margin of control of the Senate is so narrow that it would be foolish to predict who may end up in charge. Democrats retain their hold on the House of Representatives, but with a looser grip than before. This is a zero-sum game, where one party’s loss is another’s gain. Government in America, and its people, will be the losers. More

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      Regardless of the US presidential election outcome, Trumpism lives on

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      When all the votes are counted, the presidential election may deliver defeat for Donald Trump. But it did not deliver defeat for Trumpism.Democrats had hoped that four years of turmoil, attacks on norms and institutions and mendacity – plus a pandemic that cost 230,000 lives – would result in a quick, clean and overwhelming repudiation of the 45th president.That would have been clarifying about the direction of the country, a warning to the Republican party that it must take its 2013 “autopsy” report off the shelf and reinvent itself.But on another miserable night for pollsters, it did not turn out that way. Trump proved resilient and increased his vote in Florida, Texas and other states. He found even more white working-class voters than last time and chipped away at Democratic support among Latinos. His cult-of-personality campaign rallies were as enthusiastic and rambunctious as ever.His victory in 2016, it turns out, was no fluke attributable to Vladimir Putin or James Comey. In 2020 his sexism, racism and lie-telling have been legitimised and emboldened.When some Americans protested “This is not who we are”, Trump voters replied: “This is exactly who we are – and we’re not going anywhere.”“The so-called moral outrage around Trump’s presidency did not produce any substantive shift in his Republican support,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black. “In fact, he expanded his base among white voters. Trump continues to flourish in the intersection of greed, selfishness and racism.”Now, if Trump wins the election, Trumpism wins. But if Trump loses the election, Trumpism wins too.A sense of grievance over a narrow defeat, fuelled by the president’s bogus claims of fraud and amplified by conservative media, will thrive again a Democratic president. The “Make America Great Again” movement – with its nostalgia for a country that never was – was built for opposition rather than incumbency. More