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      Trump attacks and vote by mail: the top voting rights stories of 2020

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      The fight over access to the ballot was one of the most important stories in America in 2020.
      The country faced a pandemic that both offered new barriers to the ballot box and exacerbated existing ones. After election day, America faced an unprecedented effort to undermine faith in the election results as Donald Trump and Republican allies baselessly claimed fraud and brought a flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to get election results overturned.
      Even though those efforts have failed, Republicans have created a dangerous precedent, laying out the playbook for future losing candidates to refuse to accept election results. More immediately, Republicans may use the uncertainty Trump helped create to justify new restrictions on the right to vote.
      Here are a few of the biggest stories around voting rights from 2020:
      Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the election
      As it became clear that a record number of Americans were going to vote by mail, experts warned that election officials would probably need more time to count and verify ballots after the polls closed, making it unlikely that Americans would know the winner of the presidential race on election night. Moreover, because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, they warned that initial election results might show Trump ahead, only to see his advantage slip away as more votes were counted. The uncertainty, they warned, opened a dangerous opportunity for Trump to claim victory before all votes were counted after months of falsely saying vote by mail would lead to fraud.
      On election night, Trump did exactly that, making a late-night appearance at the White House to claim he won the election as votes were still being counted. In the days that followed – as Biden’s lead widened – the president and his legal team escalated claims of wrongdoing, alleging things such as that poll workers weren’t given adequate access to observe ballot counting. They began waging long-shot legal battles in both federal and state court, which rejected them overwhelmingly. Trump tried, and failed, to pressure some state lawmakers to override the popular vote in their state and award him electors anyway.
      By December, Trump and his allies had lost dozens of cases in court across the country, but that didn’t seem to matter to many Republicans. A total of 126 Republicans in the US House, nearly two-thirds of the entire caucus, signed on to an amicus brief supporting a last-minute effort by Texas to block electors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia – all states Biden won. The US supreme court rejected the case, but the fact that so many Republicans were willing to embrace the claims underscored how the party embraced Trump’s baseless claims.
      Switching to vote by mail
      When America began shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear there was going to be a surge in the number of people who cast their ballots through the mail. That presented a huge problem for many states, including key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where vote by mail was not widely used before.
      Loud alarm bells sounded early on. During an April election in Wisconsin, there were reports of voters not receiving their ballots on time while others waited hours in line to vote. In Pennsylvania’s June primary, there were reports of similar delays and election officials struggled to count the influx of ballots. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated states needed about $4bn to adequately conduct elections during the pandemic, but Congress allocated just a fraction of that in the spring, $400m.
      As state election officials scrambled to get new procedures in place, a significant new problem for mail-in voting emerged during the summer. Americans began experiencing severe mail delays, a problem critics attributed to changes implemented by Louis DeJoy, a prominent Republican donor who took over the US Postal Service in June. Many worried that a poorly functioning postal service would disenfranchise many voters, who would not be able to get their ballots and return them in time to have their vote counted. In a remarkable admission, Trump said publicly that he opposed additional funding for the postal service because it would make it harder to vote by mail.
      Facing several lawsuits and congressional inquiries, DeJoy pledged to reverse the changes and ensure timely delivery of ballots. As the election moved into its final months, there was a sprint to get voters to request and return their ballots as early as possible. State elected officials encouraged voters to return their ballots in person, either to an election office or to a ballot drop box. Some states, facing legal pressure, extended the deadline for returning an absentee ballot.
      When election day arrived, those efforts paid off – there were no reports of widespread disenfranchisement because of the mail. And preliminary data shows Democrats’ focus on voting by mail paid off. Some of the places where voters were the most likely to return their ballots saw some of the biggest swings towards Democrats compared to 2016.
      Drop boxes
      Amid worries about mail service, Republicans in some places began cracking down on ballot drop boxes.
      In Ohio, Frank LaRose, the state’s top election official, refused to allow counties to offer more than one location for voters to return their ballots, even as courts said there was nothing preventing him from doing so.
      The most egregious example may have been in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally said in October that counties could offer just one ballot drop box. The decision meant that Harris county, home to 2.4 million registered voters, could offer just one location for voters to leave their ballots instead of the 12 it had planned. Texas already makes it extremely difficult to vote by mail, and the decision meant that voters in Harris cunty, one of the most diverse in Texas, had to travel long distances if they wanted to return their ballots in person.
      The supreme court’s conservative turn on voting rights
      The unique conditions of the 2020 elections unleashed a flood of litigation aimed at easing rules around mail-in voting. The suits, filed in large part by Democrats and voting rights groups, sought to suspend things like witness requirements for mail in ballots as well as state policies that allowed officials to reject a ballot based on a voter’s signature without first giving the voter a chance to fix the ballot.
      Several of those cases reached the United States supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority kept restrictions in place. In June, for example, the court allowed Texas to keep in place a law that only allowed a certain group of voters to cast their ballot by mail. It also said Alabama could block some counties from offering curbside voting.
      In the week before the election, the supreme court declined to overturn decisions from state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania extending the ballot receipt deadline. But it did overturn a federal court ruling doing the same in Wisconsin. In that case, Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion strongly suggesting that state supreme courts could do little to question state election laws because the constitution gives state legislatures clear authority over elections. The opinion alarmed many observers, who worried it could handcuff state courts from striking down suppressive voting laws in the future.
      In a case not related to the pandemic, the supreme court also left in place a 2019 Florida law requiring people with felony convictions to repay fines and other court costs before they could vote again. Voting rights advocates challenged the measure, saying it effectively amounted to a poll tax and gutted a 2018 constitutional amendment eliminating Florida’s lifetime ban for people with felonies. An estimated 774,000 people in the state are blocked from voting because of the law, according to an estimate by the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped represent some of the plaintiffs in the case.
      The decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, blocked some people from voting, “simply because they are poor”.
      Attacks on the census
      Even before the pandemic, the 2020 census, which aims to count every living person in America, faced enormous challenges. Advocates worried that immigrants, turned off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, would not respond to the decennial survey. They also worried about new technological changes – this was the first census where the government encouraged people to self-respond online.
      An inaccurate census would be catastrophic. The survey is used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets as well as how $1.5tn in federal funds get allocated. Businesses and local governments also rely on the data to make decisions about where to open stores, build schools, roads and implement transportation routes.
      When the pandemic hit, it upended carefully prepared census plans and the bureau had to pause operations. After initially supporting an extension in completing the survey, the Trump administration reversed course, and said it was going to try to complete the census on-schedule, even as the bureau fell behind. That decision was probably linked to a July memo in which the president ordered undocumented immigrants excluded from the data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. Several federal courts have since blocked the order, but the US supreme court reversed those decisions earlier in December without deciding on the merits of the memo, saying the suit was premature.
      Deep concerns remain about the reliability of the data, given the Trump administration’s rush to complete the process. The consequences of the rush are likely to become clearer when the bureau begins to release data in the coming weeks. More

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      'It's put Delaware on the map': Biden’s win drags state from the shadows

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      It is not so much a flyover state as a does-the-train-have-to-stop-here? state. Most travellers between New York and Washington do not disembark at the Joseph R Biden Jr Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps they will now take a second look.The station is where Biden launched his first, ill-fated campaign for US president in June 1987 and where, standing on a deserted platform 33 years later, proud local Democrats cast the votes that clinched his nomination at a virtual convention. Now, with Biden as president-elect, this unglamorous station, city and state are enjoying a rare moment in the sun.“If there’s anything that people know about Wilmington it’s that there’s an Amtrak station,” said Xavier Teixido, a local restaurateur who has served Biden often. “We don’t really have an airport of any note but the Amtrak station is like our airport. Every Acela [train] that comes up and down the east coast stops in Wilmington, Delaware, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s probably Joe and our other senators that commute to work.”Delaware is the second smallest state in the union after Rhode Island. It does not have a professional sports team, signature cuisine or claim to fame except as a corporate tax haven. Wilmington, founded by Swedes in 1638, was long dominated by credit card companies and the chemical giant DuPont. Biden does not have much competition as Delaware’s most famous man.Caesar Rodney, who signed the declaration of independence, is described by the History Channel’s website as “the founding father you’ve probably never heard of”. A slave owner, his statue was removed from Wilmington’s Rodney Square this summer amid the uprising over racial injustice.John Eleuthère du Pont built Delaware’s natural history museum to display his collections of 66,000 birds and 2m seashells. He was also a wrestling enthusiast who shot dead an Olympic champion in 1996 and spent the rest of his life in prison (the story was given a chilly retelling in the film Foxcatcher starring Steve Carell).A recent New York Times article argued that Wilmington, which has a population of just 72,000, has spent centuries in obscurity and long struggled to define its identity, with officials devising earnest slogans such as “A Place to Be Somebody”, then “Wilmington, in the middle of it all” and most recently. “It’s Time”.But with Biden, it can finally call one of its own “Mr President”. His victory speech at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, and his transition events unveiling cabinet picks at the Queen theatre, have drawn thousands of supporters and journalists. Suddenly thrust centre stage, the city and state are emerging – at least momentarily – from the daunting shadow of New York, Washington and neighbouring Philadelphia.Teixido, owner of Harry’s Savoy Grill and Kid Shelleen’s Charcoal House & Saloon, said: “I really do think it’s put Delaware on the map.”Teixido, 67, was born in Paraguay but grew up in Wilmington and after, a few years in Philadelphia and New Orleans, came back for good. “It’s going to be ‘reporting from Wilmington, Delaware’ or ‘Joe Biden did this’ or ‘These people came to Wilmington’,” he predicted. “I’m sure he’s proud of this state and he’s going to show it off the best he can. At a time that things seem so dark and so bleak, it’s nice to have a little light shone on the place that you live and work. Not everyone has that.”The aura of the presidency can lift small-town America out of obscurity. Dwight Eisenhower, from Abilene, Kansas, once remarked: “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.” Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, the small Georgia farm town where he was born, and Bill Clinton, from Hope, Arkansas, accepted the 1992 Democratic nomination by declaring: “I still believe in a place called Hope.”Now it is the turn of Biden’s modest home to get name-checked on the nightly news. Michael Purzycki, the Democratic mayor of Wilmington, said: “Joe’s being elected has created this curiosity about Wilmington that people just never had before. All of a sudden, there’s mystique about Wilmington. Here he is broadcasting from the Queen – where’s the Queen? What’s on Market Street? What are the restaurants down there? What’s special about this place? Where does Joe live? Where did he grow up?”It might be said to be fitting that Donald Trump – whose brash personality is reflected by garish Trump Tower in New York and opulent Mar-a-Lago in Florida – is about to be supplanted by a man who honed his common touch in Delaware, a low-key state whose riches are less instantly obvious. The place is a measure of a man.Purzycki, 75, who shared a dormitory with Biden at the University of Delaware and was a classmate of his sister, added: “Joe can expound on subjects but he’s a modest person, he’s not a person with this massive ego that needs to be stroked all the time and I think if you could take a look at our state, we’re an understated place.“Our train station is small, our convention space is much smaller than you find in the big cities. We have an intimate scale to the city, which I think is a pretty accurate reflection of Joe Biden.”In fact Biden was born in Scranton, a hardscrabble city in neighbouring Pennsylvania, but when he was 10, his father moved the family to Delaware to work as a car salesman. Biden went on to represent the state for 36 years in the US Senate, famously commuting by train, before becoming Barack Obama’s vice-president.The size of the state was ideal for Biden to hone his style of retail politics; it does not take long to find someone whom he has looked in the eye or whose hand he has shaken. Local activist Coby Owens noted that his uncle, Herman Holloway Sr, Delaware’s first Black legislator, was a close acquaintance of the future president.Owens said: “Because we’re a small city, I feel as though we’re connected. We have a very strong sense of self and unity. Everyone knows each other. In some neighbourhoods in the big cities you grew up on your block so you know people on your block. In the city of Wilmington, you know people throughout the city and that’s one of the unique things.”Although Biden’s vice-presidency was something of a dress rehearsal, Owens, 25, has already noticed an increase in TV crews, Secret Service agents and the Biden motorcade, as well as supporters eager to pay homage. “It’s cool to see that we are literally the centre of democracy right now and, each time he rolls out a new cabinet member, having them come to Wilmington and speak here just brings joy to my heart.”For the out-of-towners, what else is there do to? Owens suggests attractions including beaches in Sussex county, picturesque churches and parks and the Christiana shopping mall, which includes a popular Apple store. “But we don’t have an Empire State building, we don’t have a Rockefeller. In Washington you have the monuments; we don’t have that here. So I think it’s less of a draw towards that and more a draw towards the shopping and the vacation areas.”Delaware does boast DuPont family mansions, museums and gardens that are open to visitors. Local tourism officials are also hoping for a post-pandemic boom courtesy of their local hero. Liz Keller, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, which has one of the smallest budgets of any such office in the country, admitted that “we can’t buy the type of media exposure” that comes from Biden’s election.“It 100% has benefited our state tourism industry and we’re definitely looking forward to welcoming people and also sharing with them some of the Biden favourite spots: some of the dining locations that we know the family likes to visit to get a taste of Delaware.”It is surely only a matter of time before a Biden statue is erected, perhaps at the railway station he made famous. But some residents are still rather skeptical about the state’s tourism charms.Cris Barrish, 62, a veteran newspaper journalist now based in PBS affiliate WHYY’s Wilmington office, said: “I’ve travelled to Europe, I’ve been up the east coast a lot, I’ve been north-west, I’ve been to Canada, I’ve been to New England and I can’t imagine wanting to be a tourist and like, ‘Let’s go to Delaware for a trip’ – unless you were going to the beach for a week. l’d put those beach towns up against almost anywhere but the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.” More

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      in US Politics

      Facts won't fix this: experts on how to fight America's disinformation crisis

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      At the beginning of 2021, millions of Americans appear to disagree about one of the most basic facts of their democracy: that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.The consequences of Donald Trump’s repeated, baseless claims of voter fraud will come in several waves, researchers who study disinformation say, even if Trump ultimately hands over power and leaves the White House. And there is no quick or easy way to fix this crisis, they warn. Because when it comes to dealing with disinformation, simply repeating the facts doesn’t do much to change anyone’s mind.In the short term, Trump’s false claims about election fraud have weakened Biden’s ability to address the coronavirus pandemic. “If only 20% of the population is like, ‘You’re not my president, I’m going to double down on my mask resistance,’ or ‘I’m going to continue to have parties over the holidays,’ that means we are going to be even less likely to bring this thing under control,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University.Over the longer term, the president’s falsehoods may also undermine Biden’s overall governing capability, just as the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, another false claim spread by Trump, helped fuel political resistance to Barack Obama’s presidency. And the damage to Americans’ basic trust in their democracy may have effects far beyond electoral politics.“What does it look like if we don’t have a shared sense of reality?” said Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats disinformation. “We’ve seen more conspiracy theories moving mainstream. There’s an increasing number of people who do not believe in the critical infrastructure of a society. Where does that end?”How we got hereAmerica’s current disinformation crisis is the culmination of more than two decades of pollution of the country’s information ecosystem, Wardle said. The spread of disinformation on social media is one part of that story, but so is the rise of alternative rightwing media outlets, the lack of investment in public media, the demise of local news outlets, and the replacement of shuttered local newspapers with hyper-partisan online outlets.This “serious fragmentation” of the American media ecosystem presents a stark contrast with, say, the UK, where during some weeks of the pandemic, 94% of the UK adult population, including 86% of younger people, tuned into the BBC, a taxpayer-funded broadcaster, according to official statistics.And the left and right in the US don’t merely have different sets of media outlets for their different audiences: they have also developed distinct models of information-sharing, Wardle said. Mainstream media outlets still follow a traditional top-down broadcast model: an authoritative source produces the news and sends it out to consumers. The rightwing media ecosystem, which developed through talk radio, on the other hand, operates as a network of media personalities interacting with each other, “a community telling stories to their own community”, Wardle said.Trump has built on that, embracing what Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies disinformation, on Twitter called a model of “participatory disinformation”.“Trump didn’t just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of voter fraud, he inspired them to create them … and then echoed those false claims back at them,” she wrote.Participatory disinformation might actually be “stickier” and more effective than “top-down propaganda”, Starbird argued, in part because of the “positive reinforcement” of Trump supporters seeing their “‘discoveries’ repeated by their media & political celebrities”.When their platforms turned out to be ideal environments for making and monetizing participatory disinformation, social media companies were slow to curb its spread.Companies like Twitter and Facebook did not begin putting warning labels on Trump’s false voting fraud claims until very close to the election. Even then, only a handful of his tweets were flagged, Wardle noted, while Trump sent dozens of other tweets pushing the same story and media outlets continued to report on his statements, creating a powerful national narrative about fraud despite the attempts at factchecking.The social media platforms’ decision to finally flag some of Trump’s disinformation right before a consequential election also may have had its own damaging political consequences. “They spent so much time refusing to moderate content that what they’re doing now feels like the worst kind of censorship,” Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said. “If they had been doing that for years, it wouldn’t be so shocking.”A new approach?The rapid spread of Trump’s election lies should be a “wake-up call” for the “well-intentioned people” who think that disinformation can be cured by providing “more quality information”, such as encouraging people to eat “more spinach instead of chocolate”, Wardle, who has conducted training sessions for journalists on how to understand and deal with disinformation, said.“We have an emotional relationship to information. It is not rational,” Wardle said. But people who work in the “quality information space”, Wardle’s term for journalists, scientists, researchers and factcheckers, still often act as if information-processing were fundamentally rational, rather than deeply tied to feelings and the way a person expresses their identity.It’s crucial to understand that the way people process information is through entire narratives, not individual facts, Wardle said. Trying to combat disinformation through factchecking or debunking individual false claims just turns into an endless, fruitless game of “whack-a-mole”.Take the New York Times’ banner headline a week after the election: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud”. The story cited election officials from both political parties in dozens of states.But that reporting, though valuable, wasn’t likely to change many minds, Phillips, the communications professor, said.“There is an enormous percentage of the population who sees the word ‘election official’ and actually, in their brains, decodes that as liberal, anti-Trump,” she said. “If you’re disinclined to trust institutions, who cares what election officials are saying, because they’re corrupt, they’re in bed with Biden and the fake news media.“The impulse to throw facts at these problems is really strong, and it’s understandable,” she said “But simply saying what the facts are is not going to convince minds that aren’t already open.”Conspiracy theorists, in particular, tend not to be very open to falsification of their claims, added Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who studies social media and politics. “Almost any new piece of evidence or fact can be converted to the conspiracy theory perspective.”Research has also shown that disinformation and conspiracy theories are often deeply intertwined with racial prejudice and hatred, he added. Some of this year’s most dangerous disinformation, about the seriousness of coronavirus pandemic, which disproportionately killed black Americans, and about Trump supposedly winning the election, based on the argument that votes in majority-black cities were fraudulent and should not be counted, were clearly influenced by white Americans’ racial views, he noted.It’s no accident, Freelon said, that some of the same people suggesting Covid is a myth are also arguing that black votes are illegitimate.‘A lot of the country’s been taken’While it is possible to engage with people who believe deeply in false narratives, and sometimes change their minds, that work is most successful on an individual basis, with people who know each other well, experts said.It’s helpful to understand someone’s fundamental framework for viewing the world, including whom they view as the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, in order to understand what kind of additional information might sway them, Phillips said.“The other thing that makes people move on this – it’s corny – is love,” Freelon added. “People who love you, your family, people who are willing to engage.”But disinformation is also sustained by personal relationships.“Nearly all conspiracy theories are supported by social connections and ties. It’s not just one person subscribing to this in isolation, but a network of people who support each other in their beliefs,” Freelon said. “Leaving the group means at a minimum betraying those friends and cutting those social ties.”There are other emotional barriers to people changing their minds.“Nobody anywhere likes to feel like they’ve been duped,” said Shafiqah Hudson, an author and researcher who has studied online disinformation campaigns. “We will fight tooth and nail as humans to avoid feeling foolish. That’s why you see people double down. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve been taken, but a lot of the country’s really been taken.”While personal relationships can help to combat disinformation, many Americans have simply given up trying to fight relatives’ false beliefs.During the holidays in the US, “people are muting their uncles [on social media] or refusing to talk to their mom,” Wardle said.“I am worried,” she said. “If you have two different senses of reality, with two different sets of actors who don’t trust the other side, who are not open to listening to the other side, that’s not how democracy functions.” More

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      in US Politics

      'Sore loser': Walmart apologizes after tweet mocks Senator Hawley

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      Walmart on Wednesday apologized to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator who said he would not vote to certify electoral college results, after a post on its Twitter account called him a “#soreloser”.“The tweet published earlier was mistakenly posted by a member of our social media team. We deleted the post and have no intention of commenting on the subject of certifying the electoral college,” the retail giant said in a tweet. “We apologize to Senator Hawley for this error and any confusion about our position.”The social media controversy started unfolding before noon, about one hour after Hawley tweeted his position on the usually ceremonious count. “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf,” Hawley said.“Go ahead. Get your 2 hour debate. #soreloser” said a reply posted to Walmart’s Twitter account.Hawley replied “Thanks ⁦@Walmart⁩ for your insulting condescension. Now that you’ve insulted 75 million Americans, will you at least apologize for using slave labor?” In another tweet, the Missouri legislator said: “Or maybe you’d like to apologize for the pathetic wages you pay your workers as you drive mom and pop stores out of business.”Congress will meet on 6 January to count electoral college votes, which is the last step in affirming president-elect Joe Biden’s win. Hawley’s move won’t thwart Biden’s victory, but it could delay the count by spurring separate House and Senate votes. The move would force other Republicans to openly cast a vote that puts President Trump’s false voter fraud allegations against millions of voters’ enfranchisement. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden and Harris to campaign in Georgia as Trump calls on its governor to quit

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia to campaign for next week’s high-stakes Senate runoff elections, it was announced on Wednesday, as Donald Trump called on the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to resign.
      For weeks, Trump has been attacking Kemp for his refusal to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election, a state he won in 2016 and narrowly lost to Biden in 2020, and on Wednesday went as far as to call on his fellow Republican to resign.
      “@BrianKempGA should resign from office,” Trump wrote in a tweet that encouraged supporters to watch a broadcast of a hearing on purported election irregularities. “He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG! Also won the other Swing States.”
      Kemp, long considered a staunch ally of the president, has refused to embrace Trump’s meritless accusations that the state’s vote count was tainted. Earlier this month, Kemp recertified Georgia’s 16 electoral votes for Biden after multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s victory in the state.
      Despite dozens of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, they produced no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia or any other state. Yet Trump’s insistence that the presidential vote was fraudulent has rattled some Republicans in the state who fear his unfounded claims may depress turnout among his supporters ahead of runoff elections, scheduled for 5 January.
      The runoffs will determine which party controls the Senate.
      “I love the Great State of Georgia, but the people who run it, from the Governor, @BrianKempGA, to the Secretary of State, are a complete disaster and don’t have a clue, or worse,” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets on Tuesday night. “Nobody can be this stupid. Just allow us to find the crime, and turn the state Republican….”
      He also made reference to a conspiracy theory that claims the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has a brother named Ron who works for a Chinese tech firm, which purportedly explains his refusal to accept Trump’s unfounded claims about voter fraud in the state. The man is not related to Raffensperger.
      Trump will hold a rally with Georgia’s Republican senators in Dalton on Monday, setting up a split screen with Biden, who will campaign for the Democratic challengers, the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, in Atlanta on the same day. On Sunday, Harris will appear with the Democrats in Savannah, while Vice-President Mike Pence has made frequent visits to the state on behalf of the Republican candidates. More

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      in Elections

      Biden says Trump aides are obstructing his transition team – video

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      President-elect Joe Biden accused the outgoing Trump administration of failing to provide sufficient information to his transition team. ‘Right now, we just aren’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas,’ said US president-elect Joe Biden. ‘It’s nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility.’ Biden also said that the Trump administration had caused serious damage to many government agencies. ‘Many of them have been hollowed out in personnel, capacity and in morale,’ he said. ‘In the policy processes that have atrophied or have been sidelined. In the despair of our alliances and the disrepair of those alliances.’
      America’s democracy is in crisis – how can Joe Biden fix voting rights? More

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      Donald Trump signs Covid-19 relief and spending bill

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      Donald Trump has abruptly signed a $900 billion Covid-19 relief and spending bill, ending days of drama over his refusal to accept the bipartisan deal that will deliver long-sought cash to businesses and individuals and avert a federal government shutdown.Without the legislation, the government would have shut down on Tuesday and millions of Americans would have lost eviction protections and unemployment benefits. His delay in signing the bill has already allowed crucial unemployment aid programs to lapse.Trump blindsided members of both parties and upended months of negotiations when he demanded last week that the package – already passed by the House and Senate by large margins and believed to have Trump’s support – be revised to include larger relief checks and scaled-back spending.But on Sunday night, while vacationing in Florida, Trump released a statement saying he had signed the bill, and it was his “responsibility to protect the people of our country from the economic devastation and hardship” caused by the coronavirus.Signing the bill into law prevents another crisis of Trump’s own creation and ends a standoff with his own party during the final days of his administration. It was unclear what, if anything, Trump accomplished with his delay, beyond angering all sides and empowering Democrats to continue their push for higher relief checks, which his own party opposes.Trump had received the bill last Thursday and his decision to delay signing it allowed unemployment benefits for millions of Americans to expire. The lapsed benefits will not restart until the first week of January.In the statement, Trump said he would still send a “redlined” version of the bill to Congress highlighting changes he wanted to the legislation. There is no indication Congress plans to act on these changes, in part because Trump’s presidency ends in a few weeks.Trump ended the statement by saying “much more money is coming,” although he provided nothing to back this promise.Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell welcomed Trump’s signing of the bill. “I am glad the American people will receive this much-needed assistance as our nation continues battling this pandemic,” the Kentucky Republican said.Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was a “downpayment on what is needed” adding: “Now, the president must immediately call on congressional Republicans to end their obstruction and to join him and Democrats in support of our stand-alone legislation to increase direct payment checks to $2,000.”Democratic lawmakers, who have a majority in the House of Representatives and have long wanted $2,000 relief checks, hope to use a rare point of agreement with Trump to advance the proposal – or at least put Republicans on record against it – in a vote on Monday afternoon.It was not immediately clear why Trump changed his mind as his resistance to the massive legislative package promised a chaotic final stretch of his presidency.White House officials have been tight-lipped about Trump’s thinking but a source familiar with the situation cited by Reuters said that some advisers had urged him to relent because they did not see the point of refusing.Republican officials were relieved that Trump had backed away from his veiled veto threat, saying it should help Republican Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the Senate.Republican representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said too much was at stake for Trump to “play this old switcheroo game”.“I don’t get the point,” he said. “I don’t understand what’s being done, why, unless it’s just to create chaos and show power and be upset because you lost the election.”Washington had been reeling since Trump turned on the deal, without warning, after it had won sweeping approval in both houses of Congress and after the White House had assured Republican leaders that Trump would support it.The bill laid unsigned on his desk since Christmas Day as the president, who was mostly silent through weeks of intense negotiations, spent the weekend at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.Instead, he assailed the bill’s plan to provide $600 Covid-19 relief checks to most Americans – insisting it should be $2,000 – and took issue with spending included in an attached $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal government operating through September.And already, his opposition has had consequences, as two federal programs providing unemployment aid expired on Saturday.Lauren Bauer of the Brookings Institution had calculated that at least 11 million people would lose aid immediately as a result of Trump’s failure to sign the legislation; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.How and when people are affected by the lapse depends on the state they live in, the program they are relying on and when they applied for benefits.In some states, people on regular unemployment insurance will continue to receive payments under a program that extends benefits when the jobless rate surpassed a certain threshold, said Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank.About 9.5 million people, however, had been relying on the pandemic unemployment assistance program that expired altogether Saturday. That program made unemployment insurance available to freelancers, gig workers and others normally not eligible. After receiving their last checks, those recipients will not be able to file for more aid, Stettner said.Joe Biden, who won November’s presidential election and who will be sworn in as Trump’s successor on 20 January, accused him of an “abdication of responsibility” in a statement on Saturday.The relief bill wrangles come as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen in the US, with medical experts joining Biden in predicting that the darkest days lay ahead.“We very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year, surge,” Dr Anthony Fauci, the US head of infectious diseases, told CNN on Sunday. More

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      Why congressman James Clyburn was the most important politician of 2020

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      Juan Williams, an author and analyst, calls James Clyburn the politician of the year. Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, says he was the most important person of 2020. “Without Jim Clyburn endorsing Joe Biden, Donald Trump would be president for real – not just in his own mind,” Meacham told Real Time with Bill Maher on the HBO channel.The Black congressman’s vote of confidence for Biden during the Democratic primary set the stage for a comeback worthy of Lazarus. It was a transformative moment in a transformative year in which the flame of American democracy looked as fragile as a candle at the altar of St John Baptist Church in Hopkins, South Carolina, which is where the story begins.It was around 11.30am on 21 February and Clyburn, a political giant in the Palmetto state, had arrived early at a funeral service for his longtime accountant, James White. “I went down the aisle of the church to pay my respects and, when I turned to walk away from the coffin, my eyes met the eyes of this lady sitting on the front row at the church and she beckoned me over to her,” the 80-year-old recalls by phone in an interview with the Guardian.“I went over and she said, ‘I need to ask you a question and, if you don’t want anybody to hear the answer, lean down and whisper it in my ear.’ Then she asked me, ‘Who are you going to vote for in this primary?’ I leaned down and told her I was going to vote for Joe Biden. She snapped her head back and looked at me and said, ‘I needed to hear that. And this community needs to hear from you.’”Biden’s going to have his detractors but I think he can do what the country needs doneThe woman concerned was Jannie Jones, a 76-year-old church usher who, like Clyburn, is African American. Her question made him realise that he could not stay silent. He says: “I continued my trip down to Charleston and I could not get her out of my head and what she was saying to me.”Another woman’s words were also whispering to him. Clyburn’s wife of 58 years, Emily, had died just five months earlier. “My wife had said to me before she passed away that she thought our best bet to defeat Donald Trump was Joe Biden.”Two days later, Clyburn met Biden and told him he intended to make a public endorsement that would “create a surge”. He did so a few days later and followed up with video ads, robocalls and messaging on Black radio stations. It worked. Written off by pundits after defeats in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Biden won South Carolina with 48.6% of the vote, well ahead of Bernie Sanders on 19.8%.It was the first state where African American voters had a significant voice and they spoke clearly. Three days later Biden went on to win 10 out of 14 states on Super Tuesday, becoming an unlikely “comeback kid” and effectively clinching the nomination.When the histories of 2020 are written, they may judge that he was the safe, wise, albeit unspectacular choice. Biden met the moment as a general election candidate, not only as a steady hand and empathetic figure during the coronavirus pandemic, but as a moderate immune to the kind of sexist and racist attacks and socialist scaremongering that his Democratic rivals would have suffered.The former vice-president proved his doubters wrong and beat Trump by more than 7m votes, a margin of almost 4.5% – bigger than all but one presidential election in the past 20 years. But none of this had seemed obvious back in February. “I felt vindicated after so many people on social media gave me such a hard time for having endorsed him,” Clyburn says.“There were people who thought I’d committed heresy or something and so, when he won, I felt good about the victory but when I started seeing all the pundits saying, looking back, Joe Biden was the only Democrat who could have defeated Donald Trump, that made me feel doubly good. Twenty-twenty hindsight.”After four tantalising days of vote tallying, Biden was declared the winner and, along with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, delivered a victory speech in his home city of Wilmington, Delaware. He said: “Especially in those moments when this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African American community stood up again for me. They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”Clyburn, the number three Democrat in the House of Representatives, takes him at his word. “I think he will. I’m certainly going to work hard to make sure that he remembers that he said it.”The election result was also hailed as a near death experience for democracy, with many commentators suggesting that America’s institutions could not have survived a second term of Trump. Clyburn did more than most to sound the alarm.“He’s an autocrat. I’ve said before that I do not think he’s planning to give up the office. Two years ago I compared him to Mussolini and caught hell for it. However, when he came out of that hospital [following treatment for coronavirus] and walked up on the Truman balcony at the White House and stood, pulled off his mask and looked out, the next morning I saw people on television referring to that as a ‘Mussolini stance’.”Democracy prevailed, Clyburn believes, but Trump has done “tremendous damage” to America’s standing around the world. Can Biden repair it? “I think he can and I think he will.”But the election was bittersweet for Democrats. The party suffered disappointing losses in the House, prompting bitter recriminations between moderates and progressives, and now holds only a slender majority. Clyburn, the majority whip, suggests the setback had more to do with campaign strategy than ideology.“I think we did not invest enough again in what I call door to door canvassing. The Republicans had a very good ground operation. We did not have the ground operation that we should have had. We turn folks out now – Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes four years ago but this time Biden won it by 150,000 votes – but there are areas where we would have done better in down ballot races if we had invested in those communities with canvassing.”Democrats suffered defeats in New York state, Clyburn argues, because the state was so safe for Biden in the presidential contest that too little investment was made for down ballot candidates. A similar problem may have occurred in California, a Biden stronghold where Republicans picked up seats. Conversely, investments in Georgia helped Democrats flip a district.Clyburn also believes that the phrase “defund the police”, popularised during this summer’s uprising against racial injustice, hurt candidates such as Jaime Harrison, who lost his bid to unseat Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham in a Senate election in Clyburn’s home state.The congressman, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, shares Barack Obama’s view that, though it does not mean abolishing police departments, the phrase risks scaring away voters that the party needs. “People have weaponised ‘defund the police’ against us,” he says.Does he believe the momentum of the protests can be sustained? “Yes, I think it can be and I think it will be. There is a tremendous amount of support all across the board for Black Lives Matter and it’s kind of interesting when I see articles written that tell me that all of the agenda of Black Lives Matter is being supported broadly, and then see in the next breath a case can’t be made for the dangers of a phrase like ‘Defund the police’.”Biden’s halo as the savior of democracy is likely to vanish within a few minutes of his inauguration as he faces multiple crises and becomes a target for both Republicans and the progressive left. “It won’t take long,” Clyburn admits, before adding some historical perspective that includes his late colleague John Lewis, whom he first met 60 years ago.“We’re lionising John Lewis today but he was not appreciated by everybody before. We have a whole holiday for Martin Luther King Jr but he was assassinated because everybody didn’t lionise him before. Joe Biden’s going to have his detractors but I think he can do what the country needs done.” More