Biden vs. Trump: Live Updates of US 2020 Election - The New York Times
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Alicia Parlapiano in Washington
The registrar in Clark County (Las Vegas) said the county would release the next batch of votes around noon ET on Friday. Remaining votes include mail and provisional ballots.
Americans continued to voice frustration over the election process on Thursday, taking to the streets in mostly-peaceful marches in cities across the country.
Glenn Thrush in Washington
Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, said there are about 500,000 ballots yet to be counted and told CNN “we definitely could” know the winner by the end of Thursday.
ATLANTA — A superior court judge dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday filed by the Trump campaign that accused elections officials in Chatham County, Ga., of mishandling absentee ballots.
The lawsuit was the first in what the Georgia Republican Party said Wednesday would be up to a dozen lawsuits targeting counties busy counting more than 60,000 outstanding absentee ballots in the state.
The petition, filed jointly by the state party and the Trump campaign on Wednesday, alleged that at least 53 ballots were potentially mishandled by the Chatham County Board of Elections. Chatham County, in coastal Southeast Georgia, is a Democratic-leaning area that includes the city of Savannah.
A hearing on the petition was held Thursday. In an order, Superior Court Judge James F. Bass, Jr. wrote that “there is no evidence that the ballots referenced in the petition were received after 7 p.m. on Election Day, thereby making those ballots invalid. Additionally, there is no evidence that the Chatham County Board of Elections or the Chatham County Board of Registrars has failed to comply with the law.”
A spokesperson for the state Republican Party could not be reached for comment.
Nov. 5, 2020, 1:36 p.m. ET
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Angelo Austin, right, clashed with Trump supporters in Detroit on Thursday.Credit...Bryan Denton for The New York Times
DETROIT — Tensions ran high outside of the TCF Center in Detroit on Thursday morning as a group of about 40 supporters of President Trump faced off against a Black Lives Matter protester outside the building, where the city’s votes had been tallied.
The protester, Angelo Austin, of Detroit, exchanged heated words with the group. “We’re still fighting to breathe,” he said.
Some Trump supporters responded, “It’s not about race,” a comment at which Mr. Austin, wearing a mask that said “Detroit,” scoffed.
An S.U.V. decked out in Trump flags circled the street outside the TCF Center, while a man called for a “fraud investigation” over a loudspeaker. Mr. Austin, alone, walked into the street and took a knee in front of the truck, raising his fist in the air and stopping the vehicle in its tracks — until police officers asked him to move.
Many Trump backers at the rally on Thursday called the election unfair, noting that as they watched the votes come in from Detroit on Wednesday — reversing an early lead for Mr. Trump — they increasingly thought election fraud had been committed.
“The MAGA army is not going to let our vote, democracy, be stolen,” said Mark Conway, a 61-year-old from Macomb County, outside of Detroit. Mr. Conway said that he would be “out here every day until we feel like every legal vote was counted.”
When he saw that Michigan was called for Mr. Biden on Wednesday, Mr. Conway said he felt sick. “The polls were fake, the news was fake, the votes are fake, and the candidate is fake,” he said.
Nov. 5, 2020, 1:30 p.m. ET
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Supporters of President Donald Trump protested the ongoing ballot counting in Philadelphia, amidst rhetoric from the president questioning the legitimacy of the election.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Even as vote-counting proceeds around the country, President Trump is continuing to attack the legitimacy of the election.
In an all-caps written statement issued Thursday afternoon by his campaign, Mr. Trump made unsupported claims of fraud, saying that “if you count the illegal and late votes, they can steal the election from us!”
The Trump campaign is issuing statements as the president’s own efforts to make such allegations directly have run afoul of fact-checking restrictions implemented by social media platforms.
Three of the president’s tweets Thursday, and one from his son Eric Trump, were hidden by Twitter behind a disclaimer that read, “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
One of the hidden Tweets simply said, “STOP THE FRAUD!”
On Facebook, none of the president’s posts were hidden, but many of them had fact checks appended, including one that said “voter fraud is extremely rare across voting methods.”
The Trump campaign has also increased its attacks on Arnon Mishkin, who runs the decision desk at Fox News. The campaign said in a statement, without citing evidence, that Mishkin “put his finger on the scale for Joe Biden.” Mishkin’s election-night call that Arizona’s electoral votes would go to Joe Biden, which many other news organizations have not yet echoed, angered President Trump and his campaign.
Nov. 5, 2020, 1:25 p.m. ET
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BOSTON — When Representative Chris Pappas, Democrat of New Hampshire, was re-elected to Congress on Tuesday, he managed a feat that no other incumbent in the state’s first congressional district had achieved in more than a decade: holding onto the seat for more than two years at a time.
The voters of the first district, which includes the city of Manchester and much of the eastern portion of the state, are among the most fickle in the country. For five election cycles, the seat ping-ponged back and forth between the same two candidates: Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat, and Frank Guinta, a Republican.
Ms. Shea-Porter beat Mr. Guinta in 2008. He beat her in 2010. She won the seat back in 2012. He prevailed in 2014. She was victorious in 2016.
When Ms. Shea-Porter announced her retirement from Congress, Mr. Pappas, a Democrat, ran successfully to replace her in 2018. And this week, he was re-elected, beating Matt Mowers, the Republican challenger, by a comfortable margin.
No word yet on a rematch.
Michael Gold in New York
Trump’s lead in Georgia shrank to 13,540 votes on Thursday afternoon. The secretary of state said that about 50,000 votes now remain uncounted.
With Biden slowly making gains in three key states, Trump issued a written statement, in all capital letters, making baseless claims that there could be fraud in the late votes.
Credit...The New York Times
Joseph R. Biden Jr. widened his slender lead over President Trump in Nevada on Thursday from about 8,000 votes to about 12,000 votes as more ballots were counted, election officials announced. Mr. Biden now leads Mr. Trump by just under one percentage point.
Nevada has six electoral votes and its entire Election Day vote has been counted; the late mail-in and provisional ballots that remain lean Democratic. About 13 percent of the state’s votes have yet to be tabulated.
A key question is whether Mr. Trump can close Mr. Biden’s current lead of eight percentage points in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and is Nevada’s most populous county. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried that county by 10.7 percentage points.
The Trump campaign has already identified Nevada, which allows any losing candidate to request a recount, as one of the battleground states where it plans to use the courts and procedural maneuvers to stave off defeat in the Electoral College. Less than 24 hours before Election Day, a Nevada judge rejected a lawsuit filed by Republicans who had tried to stop early vote counting in Clark County.
Few political observers expected Nevada to be a key state in the 2020 presidential race.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump there by 2.4 percentage points, or about 27,000 votes. Democrats had pegged that as the tipping point to her nationwide victory — until she lost several traditionally blue states in the Midwest.
Since then, Nevada has turned a deeper shade of blue, with Democrats controlling the governor’s office and legislature, both Senate seats and all but one House seat. It was not widely expected to be a battleground state this year.
But while recent polls consistently showed Mr. Biden ahead of President Trump in Nevada, Democrats worried that the pandemic would make it difficult to create a robust election turnout operation. The state has reported more than 104,000 coronavirus cases.
Nov. 5, 2020, 12:51 p.m. ET
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Vote counting in Atlanta on Thursday.Credit...Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times
ATLANTA — An official with the office of Georgia’s secretary of state said that the more than 60,000 outstanding absentee ballots in the state could be counted by the end of the day Thursday.
“The anticipation is that we will continue to go through the process throughout the day and into the evening if necessary,” said Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s statewide voting system implementation manager, in a news conference at the state capitol Thursday morning. He added: “I am prayerful that we can get to a resolution by the end of the day.”
But Mr. Sterling noted that the state would also have to process an unknown number of outstanding overseas, military and provisional ballots. He said that military ballots from overseas that were postmarked by Tuesday could be accepted up through Friday, and voters have until Friday to settle issues with provisional ballots.
“The election is not over just on the absentee ballots,” he said.
As of noon, according to state figures, President Trump led his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, by just 14,250 votes in Georgia.
Mr. Sterling said that a recount was possible. It would be triggered if the margin in a race was within a half of a percentage point and one of the contestants asked for the recount to take place.
Nov. 5, 2020, 12:50 p.m. ET
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Jon Ossoff spoke to the news media outside Fulton County’s Metropolitan Library voting precinct in Atlanta on Tuesday.Credit...Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock
Democrats’ sputtering hopes of reclaiming the Senate are on the edge of getting a boost, as David Perdue, the Republican incumbent in Georgia, could be forced into a runoff with his Democratic challenger if his vote share falls any lower as the state’s final ballots are counted.
As of Thursday morning, with an estimated 95 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Perdue had just under 50 percent of the vote against Jon Ossoff, who had 47.7 percent. Under Georgia law, if Mr. Perdue falls below 50 percent, he will face Mr. Ossoff in a one-on-one election in January.
There will already be one runoff Senate election in Georgia: Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, will face the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat.
If Democrats were able to win both seats, and if Joseph R. Biden, Jr. wins the presidency, they would have the 50 senators needed — with a Democratic vice president primed to cast tie-breaking votes — to usher through judicial and cabinet appointments, and to enact a Democratic agenda. If Republicans maintain control of the Senate, they could exert their power to block the priorities of a Biden administration.
The Ossoff campaign said on Thursday that they thought the race was on track to require a runoff.
“The votes are still being counted, but we are confident that Jon Ossoff’s historic performance in Georgia has forced Senator David Perdue to continue defending his indefensible record of unemployment, disease, and corruption,” Mr. Ossoff’s campaign manager, Ellen Foster, said in a statement.
But Mr. Purdue’s campaign also continued to project confidence on Thursday. Ben Fry, the campaign manager, released a statement saying, “If overtime is required when all of the votes have been counted, we’re ready, and we will win.” He added, “There’s only one candidate in this race who has ever lost a runoff, and it isn’t David Perdue.”
If President Trump prevails in the election, the Democrats face a more difficult path to a potential Senate majority. They would need to win both Georgia seats and the North Carolina seat held by Senator Thom Tillis, who is nearly two percentage points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, with 94 percent of the votes tallied. The extra seat would be required because the vice president casts the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Mr. Tillis has already declared victory in his race.
Though Democrats flipped Republican-held seats in Colorado and Arizona, they lost one in Alabama and failed to capture seats in several other states in which they invested enormous sums of money.
But a second Georgia runoff could extend their hopes through January, and it would focus the nation’s attention squarely on the Peach State. Georgia election officials are expected to release additional vote totals on Thursday.
Reid Epstein in Madison, Wis.
David Perdue has fallen under the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff in Georgia’s Senate race. He’s at 49.9997 percent — 141 votes short of winning outright with more votes still to be counted from Democratic areas.
Nov. 5, 2020, 12:36 p.m. ET
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A “Count Every Vote” rally in Boston on Wednesday. Credit...Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BOSTON — There is generally little suspense in Massachusetts when it comes to a presidential election, and there wasn’t on election night. The state is reliably Democratic, and the only question is how big the party’s victory will be.
Just don’t tell that to the good folks of Sutton and Webster, Mass., where Tuesday’s vote was considerably more dramatic than the statewide total would have you believe.
In each of those two small communities in Worcester County, about an hour west of Boston, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat President Trump by just a single vote.
In Sutton, the tally was 3,042 to 3,041 for Mr. Biden. In Webster, 4,003 to 4,002.
The region, once dominated by Democrats, has become a Republican enclave in recent years. In some neighboring small communities, Mr. Trump prevailed over Mr. Biden.
Statewide, however, Mr. Biden had nothing to sweat over. He defeated Mr. Trump with 66 percent of the vote.
Nick Corasaniti in Philadelphia
Ballot counting in Philadelphia was briefly halted after state Democrats appealed a ruling that allowed observers to watch the process. The state Supreme Court has not accepted or rejected the appeal. Counting resumed.
Nov. 5, 2020, 12:32 p.m. ET
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PhiladelphiaBy Chuck Bonfig Via Twitter and Nick Corasaniti
PhiladelphiaVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
PhiladelphiaBy The Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — As election officials work through a backlog of thousands of absentee ballots, protesters squared off outside of the convention center here.
Trump supporters led by Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, and Corey Lewandowski, a political adviser, held up a printed out court order that permitted Trump campaign poll watchers to get closer to observe the ballot counting. The order was appealed by state Democrats.
Bondi’s brief remarks were drowned out by protesters across the street blasting “Party” by Beyoncé, dancing to the music and waving signs declaring “Count every vote.”
Nov. 5, 2020, 12:20 p.m. ET
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Election precinct suitcases containing ballots, election materials and keys to voting machines were held under guard by the police at the Allegheny County elections warehouse on Wednesday in Pittsburgh.Credit...Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
PITTSBURGH — As America continues to watch vote counting in Pennsylvania, a key battleground with 20 electoral votes, the results of more than 35,000 mail-in ballots in Allegheny County, Pa., will not be reported on Thursday, according to a news release from the county.
Elections staff in the county, which includes Pittsburgh, will spend the day doing “administrative work,” the release said. The county’s Election Return Board, which canvasses or checks votes before they are reported, does not plan to reconvene until Friday, and no canvassing is taking place on Thursday.
The race in Pennsylvania remains close, and the gap between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. has narrowed over the past two days as more votes have been counted. Mr. Trump currently leads by more than 100,000 votes.
In Philadelphia, where Mr. Biden was expected to gain ground, vote counting was briefly halted after a court ruling about the ballot observation process. It resumed after a brief delay.
The 35,413 unreported votes in Allegheny County represent 11 percent of the total number of mail-in or absentee ballots that were received by officials as of Tuesday at 8 p.m.
According to the release, the bulk of the remaining ballots come from votes by some of the 29,000 voters who were incorrectly sent ballots intended for a different voter last month, because of an error by the company contracted to send the ballots.
These voters were reissued a new ballot, indicated by a special mark, and their ballots have to be checked to make sure no one returned two ballots.
Other uncounted mail ballots include approximately 2,250 that cannot be fed into scanners because of marks or stains and will be “duplicated” so they can be scanned. There are also some 4,350 ballots that are missing the date or include an illegible voter’s name on their outer envelope.
Michael Gold in New York
Joe Biden’s lead in Nevada widened to about 12,000 votes after newly tabulated votes were reported in Clark County (which includes Las Vegas). More updates are expected today.
Steven Kelsey, the pastor of Spirit Filled New Life Church Ministries in Louisville, Ky., repeatedly told his congregation on Wednesday night: “I’m trying to help somebody.” Verse by verse, he analyzed parables of Jesus, gleaning lessons that seemed fine-tuned for the turmoil of Wednesday night in America.
Rodnesha Vaughn, a stay-at-home mother who attended the Bible study on Wednesday night, said she was leaning on her faith this week as the outcome of the presidential election remains unclear. Ms. Vaughn voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and blamed his opponent, President Trump, for stoking racism and hatred.
Kentucky has experienced a record number of new coronavirus cases, and the pandemic has contributed to a staggering rate of violence that has predominantly impacted Louisville’s Black neighborhoods. This year has been the worst for homicides in Louisville in the past decade, according to a report last week from the Louisville Metro Police Department.
Ms. Vaughn said she was hopeful for a Biden victory, but that she was holding her breath that the former vice president would follow through on promises to give Black people and children equal opportunities to succeed.
“Some people think the Black Lives Matter movement is just for police brutality, and it’s not,” said Lakesha Randolph, 24, a nursing assistant who attended the Bible study. “It’s poverty, it’s showing how the system was meant to fail Black people.”
Dr. Kelsey moved to a parable in which the disciples are in a boat during a storm; they see Jesus walking across the water toward them. Peter, the only disciple to recognize Jesus, gets out of their boat into the turbulent sea. He, too, starts walking across the water. Halfway to Jesus, though, Peter gets scared. He begins to sink.
“We’re all in the same boat,” Dr. Kelsey said, his voice oscillating from a roar to a whisper. “We’re all scared.”
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said on Thursday that she was confident that Mr. Biden would win the election and urged voters to remain patient.CreditCredit...Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign manager on Thursday urged patience as ballot counting is completed, acknowledging that margins in Nevada and Arizona could tighten later in the day but stressing her belief that Mr. Biden would ultimately win the election.
“The story of today is going to be a very positive story for the vice president but also one where folks are going to need to stay patient and stay calm,” the campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said during a press briefing. “The counting is happening. It’s going to take time.”
Ms. O’Malley Dillon said Mr. Biden would win both Nevada and Arizona, though she cautioned that the margin in Nevada was likely to fluctuate as more results are reported later Thursday, and that Mr. Biden’s lead in Arizona would likely tighten.
She predicted that Mr. Biden would win Pennsylvania by a “sizable number of votes,” and she described Georgia as a “true tossup,” but said it leaned toward Mr. Biden.
“We’re very confident, whatever happens with the counting and the timing, we will come out ahead,” she added. “We are absolutely confident that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. And we are equally confident that we’re going to be able to watch the counting throughout the day and into tomorrow to finalize these last states that are going to put us over the top to 270.”
During the briefing, Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign adviser and former White House counsel, described election-related lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign as without merit and said they were intended to “create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process.”
“This strategy of disrupting the vote count, as you can tell by the efforts of election officials to continue to count, is doomed to fail,” he said.
Philadelphia election officials have not provided an update on when they’ll finish counting ballots, but next-door Bucks and Montgomery counties are nearing a full count.
Pennsylvania election officials plan to hold a news conference this afternoon. Democrats here are increasingly confident that Biden will have a big lead when all votes are counted.
In Derry, N.H., a bit of hand sanitizer briefly gummed up a ballot reader on Election Day. In Atlanta, the culprit was a leaky pipe, flooding a room full of absentee ballots. In Hidalgo County in South Texas, new laptops didn’t immediately function, causing voting delays.
Government officials have spent the past four years bracing for grave disruptions to the election, including by foreign meddlers intent on sowing chaos. But voting in America is largely run at the local level, overseen by thousands of municipal officials and volunteers, and it is mundane infrastructure glitches that can sometimes cause the biggest headaches.
That was perhaps especially true this year, when voters participated in record numbers, casting ballots early and by mail as well as in person on Election Day. The flood of participation, combined with coronavirus precautions, complicated the process.
Until this year, for instance, “hand sanitizer was never a thing at a polling place,” said Tina Guilford, an election official in Derry, where just over 18,000 people voted. The ballot that jammed the machine was ultimately hand counted, she noted, and the ballot reader was taken out of service.
Nov. 5, 2020, 11:20 a.m. ET
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Bill Stepien, center, listening to President Trump speak at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., on Tuesday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
President Trump’s campaign team, facing a narrowing path to victory, on Thursday held firm to its predictions that the race will be called for the incumbent as soon as Friday, and said it will likely be filing additional legal actions.
Mr. Trump’s aides said that the campaign was creating a website for people to track what’s taking place in terms of the various counts in different states and a hotline to report allegations of fraud.
The campaign officials said they feel good about their prospects in Georgia, where the race has tightened. Bill Stepien, the campaign manager, professed optimism, saying that people had prematurely counted Mr. Trump out at various junctures since the 2016 presidential primaries.
“Donald Trump is alive and well,” he said.
Not surprisingly, the campaign of Joseph R. Biden Jr. sees the electoral landscape differently. “Our data shows that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,” Biden’s campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said at a press briefing.
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