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      Joe Biden confirmed as Georgia winner after recount

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      President-elect Joe Biden has been confirmed as the winner of Georgia, after the state conducted a hand recount.
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      The first Democrat to take the state since Bill Clinton in 1996, Biden wins its 16 electoral college votes as part of a victory by 306-232.
      The Associated Press called the race on Thursday evening following the recount, which election officials said reaffirmed Biden’s victory more than two weeks after election day.
      The recount resulted in officials in four counties discovering a total of about 5,800 votes. Trump has inched about 1,400 votes closer to Biden as a result, but remains the loser. The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that the discount was due to human error, and there was no evidence of rigging or widespread fraud.
      “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” he added. “This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
      “The recount process simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Georgia voters selected Joe Biden to be their next president,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg, the Biden campaign spokeswoman, in an email to the Associated Press.
      “We are grateful to the election officials, volunteers and workers for working overtime and under unprecedented circumstances to complete this recount, as the utmost form of public service.”

      Donald Trump has refused to concede the race, contesting and questioning results in states including Georgia and pursuing recounts or delays in certification while making wild and unfounded accusations of electoral fraud.
      The president continued to do so on Thursday, with specific reference to Georgia, before the result was confirmed.
      But the hand recount of about 5m votes was not held in response to any suspected problems with results in Georgia or any official recount request.
      It stemmed instead from an audit required by a new state law. Selecting the race to be audited, the Georgia secretary of state, a Republican, said the presidential race made the most sense because of its significance and the tight margin separating the candidates. That, he said, made a full hand recount necessary.
      Gabriel Sterling, the official who oversaw implementation of the new Georgia voting system, said before the recount result was announced that previously uncounted ballots in four counties would reduce Biden’s margin of victory from around 14,000 to about 12,800.
      The state has until Friday to certify results certified and submitted by the counties. Once the state does so, the losing campaign will have two business days to request a recount if the margin remains within 0.5%.
      That recount would be done using scanners and would be paid for by the counties, Sterling said.
      The news came as Biden approached a record 80m votes with ballots still being counted in California and New York. Voter turnout in the 2020 election was the highest in more than a century, according to data from the Associated Press and the US Elections Project.

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      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Trump one of the 'most irresponsible presidents' in US history, Biden says – video

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      US president-elect Joe Biden says Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the ‘most irresponsible presidents in American history’, labelling his challenges to the election results ‘incredibly damaging’. Biden said he was not concerned that Trump’s refusal to concede the election would prevent a transfer of power, but added it ‘sends a horrible message about who we are as a country’.
      Biden condemns Trump as one of the ‘most irresponsible presidents in American history’ More

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      No time to dye: Rudy Giuliani channels My Cousin Vinny amid hair malfunction

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      On 7 November, the day the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani addressed the media at a landscaping company between a sex shop and a crematorium on Philadelphia’s industrial fringe.
      For two weeks, as the Trump campaign continued to claim without evidence that the election had been stolen, America wondered if Giuliani could possibly ever top that.
      On Thursday, he gave it a damned good try.
      A day after his claims of massive voter fraud fell flat in a Pennsylvania court room, Giuliani staged another press conference, this time in slightly more salubrious surrounds, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But it did not go well.
      First, while claiming Republican poll observers had been kept too far away from ballot counters in Philadelphia, a key Trump claim in a vital state which like others fell to Biden, Giuliani attempted to recite a scene from My Cousin Vinny, an Oscar-winning comedy from 1992.
      “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn,” he said.
      Giuliani, who also comes from Brooklyn, tried to sum up a key plot point from Jonathan Lynn’s film, in which Joe Pesci’s personal injury lawyer, hitherto out of his depth in a murder trial, manages to discredit a key witness by proving her vision to be impaired.
      “And when the nice lady said she saw …” Giuliani said, switching into a very rough approximation of Pesci’s Brooklyn accent. “And then he says to her, ‘How many fingers do I … How many fingers do I got up? And she says three. Oh, she was too far away to see it was only two.
      “These people [the poll observers] were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing,” he added, apparently drawing a line between the movie scene and claims about the problems faced by poll observers in Philadelphia.
      So far, so predictably surreal. But things got stickier. More

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      Biden nears record 80m votes as Trump persists in trying to overturn result

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      Joe Biden is approaching a record 80m votes, with ballots still being counted and having already recorded the highest number of votes for a US presidential election winner, as Donald Trump persisted on Thursday in denying the result and trying to overturn it.
      In a gigantic turnout of the US electorate, Trump has now got a record number of votes for a losing candidate.
      With more than 155m votes counted and California and New York – Democratic bastions – still counting, turnout stood on Thursday at 65% of all eligible voters, the highest since 1908, according to data from the Associated Press and the US Elections Project.
      The rising Biden tally and his popular vote lead – nearly 6 million votes – has been overshadowed by Trump escalating his false insistence that he actually won the 3 November election and his campaign and supporters now intensifying efforts to stop or delay results being certified by state officials.
      “It’s just a lot of noise going on, because Donald Trump is a bull who carries his own china shop with him,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “Once the noise recedes, it’s going to be clear that Biden won a very convincing victory.”
      Indeed, some experts are saying that the way the lame duck president is digging in on his false claims of victory and an election stolen from him by widespread fraud, as all the while his legal challenges fall one by one is actually serving to entrench his failure.
      “Each [legal] loss further cements Biden’s win,” said election law expert Richard Hasen, Axios reported on Thursday.
      But Trump’s last ditch could also be dangerous.
      “History shows that any leader who constructs a major myth, that is later shown to be false, will eventually fall,” Harvard science historian and Merchants of Doubt author Naomi Oreskes further told Axios.
      She added: “The risk is that he takes his country down with him.”
      Trump has made up to 30 legal challenges so far and by Thursday morning, more than two weeks after the polls closed for in-person voting and the bulk of mail-in ballots were received, 19 of those lawsuits had been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, NBC reported.
      He is fighting the result in various ways in Pennsylvania, which tipped the election to Biden when it was declared for the Democrat on 7 November and he passed the crucial 270-electoral college vote mark, also in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.
      Biden currently has an electoral college lead of 290-232. But that does not include electors from Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points as officials conduct a hand tally which concluded on Wednesday night with every expectation that Biden would be confirmed the winner on Thursday.
      The Associated Press, the news agency whose projections of winners in each state are followed by the Guardian, had not called the race in Georgia on Thursday morning, even though CNN has already called it for Biden.
      If Biden’s lead holds he will win the electoral college that determines the victor for the White House with 306 votes to 232 for Trump – the identical margin Trump won in 2016 over Hillary Clinton, which he then described as a “landslide”.
      On Thursday, Trump mounted an all-out assault on the election result in Michigan, reportedly planning to fly state lawmakers to meet with him in Washington and phoning county officials in an apparent attempt to derail the certification of Biden’s 150,000-vote victory in the state.
      Some analysts believe the noise and confusion being generated by Trump is an end in itself, and sowing chaos is the goal rather than a real attempt to overturn an election Trump – and increasingly those around him – must know he has lost.
      “This is all about maintaining his ego and visibility,” said Judd Gregg, the former Republican governor and US senator from New Hampshire.
      He added: “He’s raising a lot of money and he intends to use it.”
      The scenario of confusion and doubt is exactly what Trump spent much of 2020 laying the groundwork for, particularly with his unfounded claims that mail-in ballots would be subject to systemic fraud. That wasn’t true before 2020 or in this election.
      “His response should surprise no one. He foreshadowed it well before the election and it continues his pattern of declaring victory, regardless of the actual facts,” said Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota. More

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      Trump's election legal challenges: where do things stand?

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      As Donald Trump continues to push falsehoods about the election, his legal team has failed to gain traction in court, present pertinent facts or evidence of widespread fraud. Experts widely agree the evidence doesn’t exist, and election officials have declared the election, won by Joe Biden, the most secure in American history.Experts say Trump has almost no chance of reversing the result. But his repeated claims that the race was rigged are undermining public confidence in the system, the Associated Press reported, while instilling in his supporters the notion of an illegitimate Biden presidency.The Republicans have made up to 30 legal challenges so far and by Thursday, more than two weeks after the polls closed for in-person voting and the bulk of mail-in ballots were received, 19 of those lawsuits had been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn, NBC reported.Here is a summary of where Republican election challenges stand in six states:ArizonaThe case The Arizona Republican party is trying to block the certification of the election results in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, until the court rules on the party’s lawsuit asking for a new hand count of a sampling of ballots. An audit already completed by the county found no discrepancies, officials said.What happened The judge has not issued a decision. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday.In a separate case, Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee had sought to delay the certification of election results in Maricopa County. A judge dismissed the case on 13 November.GeorgiaThe case A high-profile conservative attorney, L Lin Wood Jr, has sued in an attempt to block the certification of election results in Georgia. Wood alleges Georgia illegally changed the process for handling absentee ballots, involving standards for judging signatures on absentee ballot envelopes. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state has called Wood’s case a “silly, baseless claim”.What happened A judge has scheduled a hearing for Thursday to consider a request for a temporary restraining order to halt certification.MichiganThe case Trump’s campaign is trying to block the certification of election results in the state, alleging that election officials “allowed fraud and incompetence to corrupt the conduct of the 2020 general election”.Another lawsuit filed this week on behalf of two Republican poll challengers asks a court to halt the certification of election results until an independent audit is completed to “ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election”.What happened There have been no decisions in either case. Judges have already swatted down several other Republican efforts to block certification in the Detroit area. The Trump campaign on Thursday withdrew their federal lawsuit challenging the Detroit-area results.NevadaThe case Trump’s campaign is asking a judge to nullify Nevada’s election results or set them aside and declare him the winner, arguing that illegal or improper votes were cast and the use of optical scanning to process signatures on mail-in ballots violated state law. The Trump lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, rehashes arguments that judges in Nevada and elsewhere have already rejected.In a separate court filing this week, a voting watchdog group led by a conservative former state lawmaker wants a judge to block statewide certification of the election.What happened There have been no rulings in either case.PennsylvaniaThe case A Trump campaign case aims to stop the state from certifying the election, alleging Philadelphia and six counties wrongly allowed voters to correct problems with mail-in ballots that were otherwise going to be disqualified for a technicality, like lacking a secrecy envelope or a signature. The total number of affected ballots was not expected to come anywhere close to Biden’s margin of more than 80,000 votes.What happened Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, jumped into a case this week after others withdrew, and the former New York City mayor argued in court on Tuesday for the first time since the 1990s. Giuliani made wild allegations of a nationwide conspiracy by Democrats to steal the election. No ruling yet.WisconsinThe case Trump’s campaign on Wednesday filed for a recount in the counties that cover Milwaukee and Madison, both Democratic strongholds. It alleged that absentee ballots were illegally altered or issued and that officials violated state law.What happened Biden leads Trump by 20,000 votes statewide. The recount requested by Trump will begin Friday and has to be complete by 1 December. Officials say there is no evidence to back up the claims. More

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      Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan

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      Donald Trump has mounted an all-out assault on the election result in Michigan, reportedly planning to fly state lawmakers to meet with him in Washington and phoning county officials in an apparent attempt to derail the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 150,000-vote victory in the state.
      On Tuesday night, Trump placed phone calls to two Republican members of a county-level vote certification board the night before the pair tried to reverse their previous endorsement of a large chunk of the vote in Michigan.
      The news emerged as Republican lawmakers in Michigan prepared to fly to Washington on Friday to meet with Trump at his request, the Washington Post first reported.
      While no explanation for the meeting has been given, Trump has been pressuring Republican state lawmakers to try to hijack the electoral college by advancing slates of electors that could compete with those selected by the states’ voters.
      There was no indication that Trump’s strategy, which in addition to the consent of legislatures would require a string of highly unlikely court victories and ultimately participation by Democrats in Congress to succeed, had any remote chance of overturning the election.
      But Trump’s full-court press in Michigan has raised concerns about the integrity of the state’s election result, which has an election certification deadline of Tuesday 23 November.
      As members of the Wayne county board of canvassers, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer played a crucial role this week in transforming Michigan’s popular vote into all-important electoral college votes for Biden. Michigan has 16 electoral votes.
      But at a meeting on Tuesday night, Hartmann and Palmer at first refused to certify the vote in Wayne county, which hosts the city of Detroit and where more than 80% of the vote is African American, citing minor irregularities. Biden won the county by more than 330,000 votes – his largest margin of any county in Michigan.
      After three hours of discussion among community members attending the meeting virtually, some of whom accused Hartmann and Palmer of carrying out a brazen, racist assault on the right to vote, the pair certified the Wayne county vote. In the past the process has been treated as routine.
      Trump spoke with Palmer on the phone later that night, she told the Detroit Free Press. “He was checking to make sure I was safe,” she said. Palmer said that she and her family had “received multiple threats”.
      The next day both Hartmann and Palmer filed affidavits in court seeking to reverse their certification of the Wayne county result, claiming that they had been promised internally that the vote would be audited, only to discover it would not be.
      The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did Hartmann or Palmer. Trump inaccurately tweeted on Tuesday night that the board had declined to certify the Wayne county vote, indicating that he was following the process closely.
      The Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said through a spokesperson on Thursday that the certification was final. “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” she said. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the board of state canvassers to meet and certify.”
      The vice-chairman of the Wayne county board of canvassers, Democrat Jonathan Kinloch, denied the substance of the affidavits, telling the Washington Post that the Republican pair understood the process and knew what they were certifying.
      Ever since Trump’s election loss two weeks ago, the Trump campaign has been filing lawsuits and applying pressure on Republican officials in multiple states in an effort to overturn the election result or, barring that, to spread the false belief that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Polling indicates that they are succeeding in the latter objective with a majority of Republicans.
      Trump campaign tampering had not caused a serious hitch in the process of vote certification, however, until Tuesday night.
      Biden needs electoral votes to make his win over Trump official, although he defeated Trump in a sufficient number of states that he still would win in the electoral college even if the Trump campaign managed to steal the election in multiple big states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Separately in Michigan on Thursday, the Trump campaign withdrew an election-related lawsuit in federal court, making the false assertion in court documents that the Wayne county vote had not been certified. The Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was leading that case.
      The Trump campaign’s legal strategy came under question in a separate case in Pennsylvania, where on Wednesday the campaign proposed that the campaign itself should conduct a review of mail-in ballots and let the court know what it found. As of this writing the court had not taken up the offer from the campaign, which has failed to advance any of its dozens of lawsuits since election night. More

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      Fight to Vote: A revolt against Trump's election denialism

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      Good morning Fight to Vote readers,
      As the Covid-19 pandemic rages across the country, so too are officials and citizens sick of Donald Trump and his Republican allies undermining the election.
      In three key states that flipped for Democrats, the fight over election results has continued amid lawsuits and disinformation. As Republicans attempt to finagle any last votes – despite the fact that they lost overwhelmingly – it’s clear that some have lost patience.
      ‘The Trump stain’
      In Wayne county, Michigan, local Republican officials initially refused to confirm the election results in Detroit, a majority-Black city that largely favored Joe Biden. The backlash directed at those officials was fierce.
      “The Trump stain, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have covered yourself in, is going to follow you throughout history,” said Ned Staebler, a business owner in the county.
      In Georgia, where the state performed a manual recount because of the close race, the normally staid secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, said other Republicans such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and the Georgia Senate candidate Doug Collins were pressuring him to throw out legal ballots.
      “I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”
      Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is pouring $3m into a partial recount of the votes in two Wisconsin counties. The president claims his observers were not stationed close enough to the ballot count to spot mistakes. Local officials disagreed.
      “No, no, that’s not why they were chosen,” the Milwaukee mayor, Tom Barrett, said of the counties chosen for recounts. “They were chosen because they are the two counties that have a very high percentage of Democratic voters. That’s 100% why they were chosen.”
      Meanwhile, Trump has continued firing anybody who stands up to him.
      Say goodbye to Chris Krebs
      On Tuesday night, the president fired Chris Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity chief in charge of securing the election. On Monday, Krebs had said that the election was not compromised by voter fraud, as Trump has charged.

      Chris Krebs #Protect2020
      (@CISAKrebs)
      ICYMI: On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, “in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” #Protect2020 https://t.co/Oj6NciYruD

      November 17, 2020

      Another DHS cybersecurity official, Bryan Ware, is also resigning from the department.
      But there is reason to give thanks
      With Thanksgiving around the corner, it’s crucial to think about the power of Native voters – one of the last groups in the US to gain the right to vote. This year, they played a key role in Biden’s win in states such as Arizona and Wisconsin. For example, the margin in Arizona between Biden and Trump was 10,377 as of Monday. There were 67,000 eligible voters on the Navajo Nation, which heavily supported Biden.
      Turnout was also high despite the extensive hurdles many Native Americans face when it comes to casting a ballot on rural reservation land.
      I’ll leave you with this gem: the whole video of Ned Staebler’s comment to Wayne county officials.

      Rex Chapman🏇🏼
      (@RexChapman)
      Hey guys, Please Watch @NedStaebler — a Wayne County Board Member of Canvassers stuff in a locker @HartmannDude and @monicaspalmer — the two members that refused to certify the ballots for the county…pic.twitter.com/iGl3LSf3Sw

      November 18, 2020 More

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      in US Politics

      'Integrity still matters': the unlikely Republican standing up to Trump's voter fraud lies

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      Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.
      It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.
      But after Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by around 13,000 votes, Raffensperger has emerged as one of the few Republican officials across the US who has aggressively disputed Trump’s baseless claims that fraud tainted the election result in the state. Trump, who endorsed Raffensperger in 2018, is now directing his ire at the secretary of state, and Georgia’s two Republican senators, both locked in separate runoff contests against Democrats, have called on Raffensperger to resign.
      Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.
      “I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”
      He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.
      “Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”
      “Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”
      Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.
      “We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.
      He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls. More