US election 2020: Biden takes Georgia to solidify victory
US President-elect Joe Biden has won the state of Georgia, the BBC projects, the first Democratic candidate to do so since 1992.
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A manual recount is to be carried out in Georgia because of the narrow margin between the two candidates, but the Biden team said they did not expect it to change the results there.
Mr Trump's team dropped a lawsuit in Arizona on Friday after it became clear his rival's lead was unassailable. watch Come Play Full Movie
The win solidifies Mr Biden's victory, giving him a total of 306 votes in the electoral college - the system the US uses to choose its president.
Georgia and North Carolina are the last states to be decided. Donald Trump is projected to win in North Carolina, giving him 232 electoral votes.
But he still refuses to concede.
President Trump has launched a flurry of legal challenges in key states and levelled unsubstantiated allegations of widespread electoral fraud.
Mr Biden's electoral votes equal the tally Mr Trump, a Republican, achieved in his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. At the time Mr Trump referred to it as "a landslide".
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A manual recount is to be carried out in Georgia because of the narrow margin between the two candidates, but the Biden team said they did not expect it to change the results there.
Mr Trump's team dropped a lawsuit in Arizona on Friday after it became clear his rival's lead was unassailable.
Despite Mr Trump's refusal to accept defeat, pressure is growing on him to acknowledge Mr Biden's victory and help prepare the transition from one administration to another.
In his first official appearance since his defeat in the 3 November election, Mr Trump acknowledged the possibility of a new administration in January, but stopped short of announcing a formal concession.
Speaking at a briefing of the coronavirus task force in the White House Rose Garden, he said: "Ideally, we won't go to a lockdown. This administration will not be going to a lockdown. Whatever happens in the future - who knows which administration will be. I guess time will tell."
Earlier, he took to Twitter, thanking those who supported his unsubstantiated claim that the election was "rigged". He suggested he might join them at a rally planned in Washington on Saturday.
President-elect Joe Biden is projected to win Georgia, and President Trump is projected to win North Carolina in the final calls of the presidential race.
Edison Research projects that Biden will capture Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, flipping a state Republicans have won in presidential elections since 1996. Georgia is now conducting a statewide hand recount of presidential votes, but Biden’s current lead of 14,152 votes in Georgia is expected to withstand any recount changes.
Trump is projected to add N.C.’s 15 electoral votes to his total. Overall, Biden is projected to win 306 electoral votes, Trump is projected to win 232.
Trump will deliver an update on the effort to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine at 4 p.m., his first public remarks in more than a week. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris continued to meet with transition advisers to plan their administration even as Trump challenges the vote count in several states and refuses to concede.
A Michigan judge has rejected a GOP demand to delay certification of the vote count in Detroit. This is the latest in a string of defeats for President Trump and his allies, who have sought to un-do – or at least delay – Biden’s electoral victory with long-shot lawsuits claiming election irregularities.
Here’s what to know:
Election officials in Georgia have begun a recount to manually verify all of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in the presidential race in the state, where Biden narrowly leads.
Trump is mostly ignoring public presidential duties as he focuses on baseless claims that voter fraud cost him reelection.
Far-right protesters who back Trump’s refusal to concede plan to gather Saturday in D.C.; anti-fascist and anti-racist counterdemonstrators are expected as well.
8:15 a.m.
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Federal prosecutors assigned to monitor election malfeasance tell Barr they see no evidence of substantial irregularities
By Matt Zapotosky and Tom Hamburger
Sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys specially assigned to monitor malfeasance in the 2020 election urged Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday to rescind his recent memorandum allowing investigators to publicly pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified, saying they had not seen evidence of any substantial anomalies.
In a letter — an image of which was shown to The Washington Post — the assistant U.S. attorneys told Barr that the release of his Monday memorandum — which changed long-standing Justice Department policy on the steps prosecutors can take before the results of an election are certified — “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.”
The signers wrote that in the places where they served as district election officers, taking in reports of possible election-related crimes, there was no evidence of the kind of fraud that Barr’s memo had highlighted. Barr’s memo authorized prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases,” particularly where the outcome of an election could be affected.
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7:45 a.m.
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Biden socks are in, MAGA gear on clearance: D.C. gift shops usher in new administration
By Abha Bhattarai
There are socks emblazoned with Joe Biden’s face and wine glasses honoring Kamala D. Harris.
Also on sale at White House Gifts in downtown Washington: Biden-Harris candy jars, celebratory hair scrunchies, and plush German shepherds with “First Pet” bandannas honoring Biden’s dogs, Major and Champ. Donald Trump merchandise, meanwhile, has been moved to the back of the store, marked down 75 percent.
Every four to eight years, Washington’s gift shops and souvenir stands undergo an overnight transformation. Barack Obama action figures made way for “Make America Great Again” gear in 2016, and now Biden-Harris face masks and T-shirts are pushing MAGA hats to the clearance racks.
“Whenever you have a change in administration, no matter who it is, there are new customers and all new energy,” said Alesia Jones, vice president of the longtime Washington store. “It’s like you flip a switch and have a completely new store.”
Sales are typically steady regardless of who’s in the White House, but this year is different: Revenue tumbled after the pandemic ground tourism to a halt and now shopkeepers are looking to the inauguration for a needed boost. “The inauguration is like a Super Bowl for us,” Jones said.
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6:59 a.m.
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Trump campaign acknowledges its Arizona lawsuit will not make a difference in presidential race
By Hannah Knowles
On Friday afternoon, election results in Maricopa County, Ariz., were still not quite complete. But a judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump campaign challenging some ballots as moot, as Trump campaign lawyer Kory Langhofer said the odds of it making a difference in even a local race were so small that he did not think it worth reconvening.
The suit had alleged that “up to thousands” of allegedly mishandled ballots in Maricopa County would “prove determinative” in the presidential election. But its claims and goals were steadily watered down this week in court as county officials said that fewer than 200 votes for president were at stake. Biden leads by close to 11,000 votes in Arizona.
The campaign maintained in a Friday filing that two down-ballot races “remain at issue”: a Board of Supervisors seat and a state Senate seat. But attorneys for the Arizona secretary of state, a defendant in the case, said that all claims were almost certainly moot, pending 3 p.m. local time Friday, when Maricopa County expects to finish counting its ballots.
The suit also does not allege the fraud Trump and his allies have warned about throughout the country — a point Langhofer emphasized repeatedly at a hearing Thursday. His arguments cut a sharp contrast with the “Stop the steal” push that has rallied Trump supporters in Arizona.
“We’re not alleging that anyone was stealing the election,” Langhofer told the court Thursday, adding later, “The allegation here is that, in what appears to be a limited number of cases, there were good-faith errors in operating machines that should result in further review of certain ballots.”
The Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleges that poll workers pressed or told voters to press a button on a tabulating machine to cast their ballots even after those tabulators flagged an apparent “overvote,” in which the machine believed a voter marked two candidates in the same race. If the machine reads two votes in the same race, it will not count a vote for any candidate in that contest.
Maricopa County says it has identified about 950 total ballots with overvotes, roughly 190 of them with an overvote for the office of president.
The lawsuit originally sought to halt certification of election results until all affected ballots could be reviewed by hand. But on Thursday, plaintiffs said they wanted a review only if the final vote tallies showed that it could make a difference.
The Trump campaign encountered skepticism and setbacks right off the bat Thursday, when Judge Daniel Kiley refused to admit some of its evidence, saying it was not trustworthy.
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6:42 a.m.
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Trump continues to cast doubt on election outcome in third public appearance since election night
By Derek Hawkins
In his third public appearance since election night, Trump largely limited his remarks to updates on his administration’s efforts to roll out a coronavirus vaccine, while pausing briefly to cast doubt on his projected loss to Biden.
Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Trump said a vaccine could be available to the general public by April. He made virtually no mention of the fact that the country’s daily caseload has skyrocketed in recent weeks, shattering yet another record Friday. He acknowledged infections were high but misleadingly attributed the surge to expanded testing, when hospitalizations and positivity rates make it clear that the virus spread is spiraling out of control.
Trump said a vaccine would help bring the numbers down but in the meantime vowed his administration would not pursue a lockdown, claiming it would hurt economic recovery.
“This administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully, the … whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be,” he said, implying the election results could be reversed. “I guess time will tell. But I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown. There won’t be a necessity.”
Trump ended the news conference without taking questions. His remarks came shortly after the final results of the election were called, with Edison Research projecting Biden winning Georgia and Trump winning North Carolina. Overall, Biden is projected to win 306 electoral votes, while Trump is projected to win 232.
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5:26 a.m.
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Biden officials continue to warn about lack of cooperation during transition
By Matt Viser
Biden transition officials continued to raise concerns that the Trump administration has yet to allow government officials to work with the president-elect’s team, which could hamper the new administration’s ability to learn about coronavirus vaccine plans or global threats to the United States.
While the Biden transition still does not envision a lawsuit anytime soon, they are raising alarms that the president-elect is unable to get national security briefings because the administrator at the General Services Administration has yet to accept the election results.
“We’re not interested in having a food fight with the GSA administrator or anyone, really,” Jen Psaki, a transition adviser, said on a call with reporters. “We just want to get access to intelligence information, to threat assessments, to the ongoing work on covid, so that we can prepare to govern.”
Psaki said that Biden, who is at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., is planning to spend several days off and that no additional personnel announcements are planned.
The transition website will soon launch a feature to allow people to apply for jobs in the Biden administration.
Psaki declined to say which Republicans the incoming president has spoken with, or whether there were any plans for a conversation with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). She also would not say what Biden wanted to see happen with a stimulus package that could be passed in the lame duck congressional session.
She said that Biden and his transition team were tapping into a wide network of contacts as a way to work around the lack of cooperation so far from Trump’s administration.
“President-elect Biden has a wealth of not just experience but contacts, people he’s worked with in that past, people he can engage with and have discussions with in the national security field,” she said. “He’ll certainly be doing that.”
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4:53 a.m.
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Incoming GOP Senate campaign chair says party can compete in blue states in 2022
By David Weigel
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks to reporters on Thursday, while arriving for a Senate Republican policy luncheon at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News)
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks to reporters on Thursday, while arriving for a Senate Republican policy luncheon at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News)
CUMMING, Ga. — Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who was elected this week to lead the Republican Party’s Senate campaign committee, said in an interview that the GOP can expand the map in the 2022 midterm elections. But he didn’t go as far to say who will be president.
“If you look at three seats the Democrats have, they’d won close races,” Scott said, before rallying with GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both of Georgia, who face runoff elections on Jan. 5. “New Hampshire, Nevada and Arizona — you know, [Arizona Sen.-elect Mark] Kelly will be up and running again. And he just had a close race. On top of that, if you look at states like Illinois and Connecticut, they hate government. They’re fed up with government."
Scott also said he’d work to recruit strong candidates in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Republican incumbents are retiring. “I think the Democrat Party has basically become a coastal party, and we’re a national party,” he said.
Kelly defeated Republican Sen. Martha McSally last week; Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) won two of 2016′s closest races. President-elect Joe Biden ran ahead of Hillary Clinton’s numbers in those states this year, carrying all three.
Like most Senate Republicans, Scott declined to say that Democrats had won the presidency, a fact that has implications for the Georgia runoffs and for recruiting and fundraising for the 2022 races.
“I think the presidential election will be decided in the next week,” Scott said. “I think just whichever way the presidential election goes, the Republican controlled-Senate is a big deal.”
Scott, whose 2018 race was decided by a few thousand votes and challenged by the Democrats, said the results of the Biden-Trump race would be definitive after states certified their votes. He rejected an idea proposed by some Republican state legislators in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and reportedly speculated about by Trump: GOP majorities in state capitols approving their own slates of pro-Trump electors, rejecting the result of the certified popular vote.
“I just think the voters decide,” Scott said.
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4:12 a.m.
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Georgia, last state to be called, goes to Biden
By Colby Itkowitz and Scott Clement
Georgia, the last state to be called in the 2020 presidential election, has been won by Biden, giving the president-elect another 16 electoral votes to expand his lead over Trump.
Trump’s apparent early lead in the state on election night eroded as mail-in ballots from more Democratic areas were counted. Georgia, which voted for Trump by five percentage points in 2016, was a major pickup for Democrats, who have hoped to one day flip the state.
Biden visited the state for the first time in the campaign a week before the election, seeing possibility there but never counting on it to deliver him the presidency.
Like other Sun Belt states, Georgia’s population has grown younger and more diverse, cutting into the long-held Republican advantage there. Much credit has gone to Democrat Stacey Abrams, who, after losing a race for governor in 2018, made it her mission to fight voter suppression and register new voters.
Although the race has been called for Biden, the political drama in the state is far from over. The narrow margin of victory triggered a hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots, which began Friday, but Biden’s current lead of 14,152 votes in Georgia is expected to withstand any recount changes.
A 2020 Fairvote study of 31 recounts across various states found on average recounts shifted the vote margin by 430 votes. The largest shift in the percentage-point margin was in Vermont’s 2006 auditor’s race, in which the recount shifted the vote margin 0.107 percentage points, a 239-vote swing. Biden’s current percentage-point advantage is more than twice that level, standing at 0.28 percentage points.
In the meanwhile, Georgia will become the center of the political universe, with both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats up for grabs in dual runoff elections on Jan. 5. The winners of those races will determine the balance of power in the Senate.
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3:33 a.m.
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Arizona GOP lawsuit criticized by office of state’s Republican attorney general
By Hannah Knowles
A new election lawsuit filed Thursday by the Arizona GOP is being criticized by the office of the state’s Republican attorney general as having no legal footing.
The suit takes issue with the hand-count auditing process for ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, but seemed confused about how it worked. The suit said the audit in Maricopa was expected to start “any day now,” when in fact the county had already finished, with reported 100 percent accuracy.
Arizona’s hand-count audits check that machines worked correctly by examining ballots from two polling places or 2 percent of them, whichever is greater. They also look at either 1 percent of all early ballots cast or 5,000 early ballots, whichever is less. The hand counting is done by a bipartisan group appointed by county political parties.
The Arizona GOP wants the court to order Maricopa to sample “precincts,” the word used in state law. But Maricopa uses a “vote center” system, in which voters can choose whatever polling place they find most convenient, rather than their designated precinct. So it sampled vote centers for its audit, as the state’s election manual advises.
In a letter to Republican state legislative leaders, the chief deputy and chief of staff for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) wrote that there is no legal basis to insist on “precinct” auditing. “In those counties that use voting centers, the practical effect of a hand count audit based only on precincts could result in no ballots being counted because no ballots would have been cast using tabulating machines at precincts,” the letter states. “We do not believe the Legislature intended this result.”
Earlier this week in an interview with Fox Business, Brnovich rejected the idea of any scheme to steal the election and said there was no evidence “that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change.”
The Arizona Republican Party did not respond to questions Friday about its lawsuit.
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3:25 a.m.
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Trump adds 15 electoral college votes to his total with projected North Carolina win
By Paulina Firozi and David Weigel
President Trump is projected to win North Carolina, adding 15 electoral college votes to his total, according to Edison Research.
The state was one of the final battlegrounds to report final results, taking a relatively long time to tabulate votes in part because it allowed ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be received through Nov. 12.
North Carolina was a reach state for Democrats. They didn’t need it to win the presidency, but believed there was an opportunity to wrest it away from Trump, who won the state in 2016 by 3.7 points. Barack Obama won the state in 2008, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so in 32 years, but it’s otherwise leaned Republican.
Trump bested Biden in the state by just under 2 points.
2:51 a.m.
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Trump to speak at 4 p.m., his first public remarks since last Thursday
By Colby Itkowitz
President Trump arrives in the White House briefing room Nov. 5. President Trump arrives in the White House briefing room Nov. 5.
President Trump arrives in the White House briefing room Nov. 5. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The White House announced that Trump will deliver remarks at 4 p.m. regarding the development of a coronavirus vaccine, marking only his second time speaking publicly since the Nov. 3 election.
The president, who for four years was heard from almost daily, went dark after a news conference Nov. 5, the Thursday after the election, in which he decried the election results and baselessly claimed that they were corrupted.
Since then, he has been heard from only through tweets and through surrogates arguing that he was the rightful winner of the election.
It is unclear whether the president will take questions from the media after his remarks, as he typically has done after delivering coronavirus updates.
2:45 a.m.
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Michigan judge rejects GOP demand to delay certification of vote count in Detroit
By David Fahrenthold
A Michigan judge on Friday rejected Republicans’ requests to delay the certification of election results in Detroit, saying he saw no convincing evidence of election fraud at a center for counting absentee ballots.
Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenny said that the allegations of misconduct, made by GOP poll watchers and one Detroit election official, were “not credible.” Kenny said that the plaintiffs’ demand for an outside audit of the election in Michigan could delay the process so long that Michigan’s electors might not be selected in time to vote in the electoral college.
To grant the plaintiffs’ request, Kenny said, “would undermine faith in the Electoral System.”
Biden now leads in Michigan by about 148,000 votes.
Kenny’s ruling is the latest in defeats for Trump and his allies, who have sought to undo — or at least delay — President-elect Biden’s electoral victory with long-shot lawsuits claiming election fraud. In Michigan alone, this is the third time that a judge has rejected GOP demands to delay certification of the state’s result — or even to rerun the entire election.
The Michigan lawsuit at issue Friday was brought by two Republican poll watchers. It echoed the allegations made in other Michigan lawsuits: that workers counting absentee ballots in Detroit had broken rules to help Biden.
The plaintiffs submitted affidavits from witnesses — and one election worker — alleging that late-arriving ballots had been backdated to appear valid, and that some voters had a birth date in 1900.
Lawyers for the defense said these witnesses, armed with little knowledge of the vote-counting process, had been alarmed by normal procedures they did not understand. In his ruling, Kenny agreed, saying he’d been convinced by defense witnesses who were experts in administering elections.
2:29 a.m.
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Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene complains about having to wear a mask in Congress
By Colby Itkowitz
Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), right, on Friday during an orientation for newly elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill.Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), right, on Friday during an orientation for newly elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), right, on Friday during an orientation for newly elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter during her freshman orientation to Congress to lament Capitol Hill’s policy that everyone wear a mask.
“Our first session of New Member Orientation covered COVID in Congress. Masks, masks, masks.... I proudly told my freshman class that masks are oppressive,” the representative-elect tweeted. “In GA, we work out, shop, go to restaurants, go to work, and school without masks. My body, my choice. #FreeYourFace.”
Greene, a far-right, Trump allegiant who has espoused baseless QAnon theories and promoted bigoted rhetoric, won her seat to Congress after beating the establishment GOP candidate in the primary. In her deep-red district, it was all but assured she would then win the general election.
Greene’s comments come as coronavirus cases are spiking in the United States. Many Trump campaign aides and Secret Service agents have been infected, as has the longest-serving House member, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), age 87.
Several Democrats pounced on Greene’s tweet as an example of the extremist beliefs within the Republican Party.
“The top House Republican said yesterday House Republicans would welcome their new QAnon Caucus into the fold, and sure enough, crazy attacks on science followed,” tweeted Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) “Masks save lives. They protect the people around us. Refusing to wear masks is selfish and endangers others.”
Greene was seen around the Capitol wearing an American-flag mask but was also photographed without it.
The message came hours after US election officials said the vote was the "most secure in American history", the most direct rebuttal from federal and state officials of the president's claims.
The statement from the Election Infrastructure Government Co-ordinating Council was released after Mr Trump tweeted that voting software used in 28 states had deleted millions of votes for him, but presented no evidence.
The claim appeared to originate from the obscure TV network One America News (OANN) and was flagged by Twitter as disputed.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News: "President Trump believes he will be President Trump, have a second term".
Shifting electoral map
Joe Biden did not have to win Georgia or Arizona to secure the White House. His recapturing of the "blue wall" northern industrial states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by themselves assured his victory.
The former vice-president's success in these Sun Belt states - the first time a Democrat has won either in decades - suggests, however, that Democrats may be clearing a new path to presidential success in future elections.
If so, it would make Democrats less dependent on the kind of non-college-educated white voters in those northern battlegrounds that, given Donald Trump's appeal, may be trending toward the Republicans. It was educated suburban voters, as well as traditionally Democratic ethnic minorities, that delivered Georgia and Arizona to Mr Biden.
It is not all good news for the Democrats, however. Donald Trump did win North Carolina - another southern swing state - even though it was carried by Barack Obama in 2008.
The electoral map is shifting, and the parties will have to adjust their strategies accordingly. In the meantime, Georgia - which has two January run-off elections that will decide control of the US Senate - will take centre stage in the months ahead. Joe Biden's narrow victory there all but assures it will be a hotly contested battle.
What are others saying?
A group of more than 150 former national security officials warned that delaying the transition posed "a serious risk to national security".
In a letter, they urged the General Services Administration - the government agency tasked with beginning the transition process - to officially recognise Mr Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris so that they could access "pressing national security issues".
Also, a small but growing number of Republicans are backing calls for President-elect Biden to be given daily intelligence briefings.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a key Trump ally, was among those saying Mr Biden should start receiving the secret presidential memo, as is usual with incoming presidents.
Between 10 and 20 Republicans in Congress have now either congratulated Mr Biden or accepted there must be moves towards a transition. But most have yet to acknowledge the president-elect's win.
Correspondents say Republican lawmakers are anxious not to alienate the Trump base, given that the president just won more votes than any incumbent ever, even though he is projected to lose.
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