US President Donald Trump has accused Democrats of voting “shenanigans” as the result from Tuesday’s White House election hangs in the balance.

His Democratic challenger Joe Biden earlier appealed for calm as the nail-biting count drags on in five states.

While clinging to wafer-thin leads in Nevada and Arizona, Mr Biden has been chewing into the Republican president’s edge in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The cliff-hanger follows one of the bitterest campaigns in living memory.

The election is projected to have generated the highest turnout since 1900. Mr Biden has so far pulled in well over 73 million votes, the most ever for a US presidential candidate. Mr Trump has drawn almost 70 million, the second-highest tally in history.

What did Trump say?

In his first public remarks since appearing at the White House in the early hours of Wednesday, the president said: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.

“If you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us.”

Beyond allegations of irregularities, the Trump campaign has not presented any evidence of election fraud.

Speaking from the White House on Thursday, the president added: “We were winning in all the key locations, by a lot actually, and then our numbers started getting miraculously whittled away in secret and they wouldn’t allow legally permissible observers.”

Mr Trump’s critics have pointed out his lead is evaporating because he actively discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, while Mr Biden urged his voters to do so, and it is these postal ballots that are now being tallied in the key states.

The president added: “There’s been a lot of shenanigans and we can’t stand for that in our country.”

Election analysts have argued that the president’s claims of Democratic electoral corruption are undermined by the better-than-expected performance of his fellow Republicans in congressional races across the map.

What’s the reaction?

Some Republicans who have in the past raised rare dissent against the president implicitly criticised his latest remarks.

Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who lost as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, said: “The votes will be counted. If there are irregularities alleged, they will be investigated and ultimately resolved in the courts.

“Have faith in our democracy, in our Constitution, and in the American people.”

Also without naming the president, Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger said: “If you have legit concerns about fraud present evidence and take it to court. Stop spreading debunked misinformation… This is getting insane.”

But Texas congressman Will Hurd, a Republican who did not seek re-election, was more forthright, calling Mr Trump’s comments “dangerous” and “wrong”.

And Maryland Governor Larry Hogan tweeted: “There is no defence for the President’s comments tonight undermining our Democratic process.”

However, Georgia Senator David Perdue tweeted that “every lawful vote cast should be counted, once”, and then the president would win.

What did Biden say?

Earlier on Thursday, speaking from his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, Mr Biden appealed for calm across the country.

In a brief televised address, the Democratic challenger again expressed confidence he would be declared the winner.

“Democracy is sometimes messy,” he said. “It sometimes requires a little patience as well.

“But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years, the system of governance that has been the envy of the world.”

He added: “I asked everyone to stay calm. All people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed. And we’ll know very soon.”

As results gradually trickle in, protests involving both sides have been held in major cities over the vote counting.
(Culled from BBC News)

Most of the Trump clan tend to stick to the family line (except Tiffany).

So it’s no surprise that when their dad is engaged in spreading misinformation and out-and-out lies about voter fraud, that his offspring are too.

Eric Trump has become the latest member of the dynasty to share false information on social media.

While his social feeds are full of clips he alleges show completely unproven voter fraud, one video, in particular, has been singled out for being egregiously fake.

Trump shared a now-deleted clip of a person claiming to be burning 80 Trump ballots in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Wednesday.

But as CNN Business reports, the video has been debunked completely by officials.

The clip shows an anonymous person dousing the ballots – which he claims are “all for President Trump” – in a flammable liquid and setting fire to them.

As if the fact the person prefixed Trump with the honorific of ‘president’ first wasn’t enough of a giveaway, Virginia Beach officials say that the ballots were fake too.

In a statement, Virginia Beach said that the ballots were clearly “sample ballots” and that they “lack the bar code markings that are on all official ballots”.

Officials also provided news outlets with side-by-side comparison of a real ballot and screenshots from the fake video.

It hasn’t stopped the clip spreading though; by the time Eric Trump posted it, the video had racked up around 1.2m views.

People aren’t exactly happy at him boosting inaccurate claims.

The Trump family were called “absurd”.

People essentially said, “like father, like son”.

indy100 reported that the election still too close to call, it seems the fact-checkers will be having to work around the clock while the Trump misinformation campaign is still in operation.

An unenviable job.

Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is knocking on the door of the White House, sitting just shy of the 270 electoral votes needed to win — but what happens if President Trump loses and refuses to concede?

When Inauguration Day rolls around on Jan. 20, if Trump has exhausted his legal challenges and physically refuses to leave the White House premises, Biden said in June that he was “absolutely convinced” the military would remove Trump “with great dispatch.”

But Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told NPR last month that he intends to keep the military out of any election disputes.

“This isn’t the first time that someone has suggested that there might be a contested election,” he told the outlet. “And if there is, it’ll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the US Congress. There’s no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election. Zero. There is no role there.”

Given America’s history of peaceful transitions of power, such an event would steer the country into uncharted waters.
It also assumes that the electoral votes will be untangled.

With the final vote in dispute, states with Democratic governors but Republican legislatures — including the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, the latter two of which have already been called for Biden — could conceivably end up dispatching two distinct groups of Electoral College voters, reported Marie Claire, citing a study by election scholar Edward B. Foley.

In that scenario, those states would have two competing sets of electoral votes, and, as president of the Senate, Republican Vice President Mike Pence would be tasked with unraveling the situation.

He could opt to throw out both sets of votes from those states, meaning neither candidate could reach the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
In that event, the members of Congress would vote for president and vice president.

The House of Representatives would vote for president, with each state’s delegation getting one shared vote, and a simple majority of 26 votes needed to elect.

In the Senate, each senator gets one vote, with a simple majority of 51 votes needed to elect.

Should either of those bodies fail to reach a majority, the plot thickens further.

If the Senate elects a vice president but the House of Representatives fails to elect a president, the vice president-elect serves as president until the impasse is resolved.

If neither body can reach a conclusion by Inauguration Day, then the presidential line of succession kicks in, and the speaker of the House of Representatives — currently Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — would serve as president until the knot is untied.

As President Trump’s reelection prospects continued to dim on Wednesday, his campaign launched an aggressive yet questionable strategy to keep Joe Biden from winning the state of Pennsylvania.

Trump’s campaign announced on Wednesday afternoon that it was suing to prevent the state from proceeding with tallying ballots there “to stop Democratic election officials from hiding the ballot counting and processing from our Republican poll observers,” the Associated Press reported.

The Trump campaign is also backing a Republican lawsuit filed with the U.S. Supreme Court that seeks to prevent legally cast mail-in ballots postmarked by a Nov. 3 deadline but that arrived after Election Day from being counted. So far, the Supreme Court has allowed Pennsylvania officials to continue counting those ballots.

With an estimated 83 percent of the ballots counted in Pennsylvania, Trump held a 352,000-vote lead over Biden, but that margin had fallen throughout the day as more votes were tallied. Democrats believe they have enough uncounted ballots to push Biden over the top in the state, snuffing out all hopes Trump might still have for winning reelection.

Knowing that their chances of victory are diminishing, Team Trump sought to stop the clock on Wednesday with a public relations offensive that was immediately flagged on Twitter as being potentially misleading.

While the Trump campaign also announced on Wednesday that it would seek a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden has been declared the winner, it simultaneously moved to halt the counting of votes in Michigan, where, with more than 98 percent of the vote counted, Biden leads Trump by a little more than 61,000 votes.

As for the legal maneuvers in Pennsylvania, officials in the state pledged to continue counting ballots.

“No one is going to rush anything. No one is going to be able to question the underlying validity of the results when they are finalized in Pennsylvania,” Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said in a Wednesday interview with MSNBC.

It remains to be seen whether the courts will come to Trump’s rescue in Pennsylvania, but legal experts remain skeptical that a strategy of pushing for the recounting of every vote cast in one state will square with attempting to halt the counting of legally cast ballots in others.

Culled from Yahoo news

Democrat Joe Biden’s chances of defeating President Trump improved in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but vote-counting continued in several key states that would decide the presidency.

Biden’s prospects looked strong in Michigan and Wisconsin, with him in the lead. The Associated Press has called Arizona for Biden. If he wins those three and holds Nevada — where the margin is very close — he will have 270 Electoral College votes and be the next president.

If Trump wins Nevada, Biden would need to win either Pennsylvania or Georgia in its place to reach 270. Trump would have to win both Pennsylvania and Georgia in addition to Nevada to get above 270.

A Biden win would most likely come sooner than a Trump win, since Trump’s chances would hinge on Pennsylvania and Biden can win the presidency without it at this point.

The political world was focused on these states on Wednesday, studying the remaining votes left to come in. There had been concern among Democrats after Trump won Ohio by nearly the same margin as four years ago, but the Rust Belt trio of states that decided the last election were incredibly close last time, and Biden is outperforming Hillary Clinton’s numbers in all three states.

Democrats felt good about Biden’s ability to hold his lead in Michigan and Wisconsin — since outstanding votes were expected to go heavily Democrat — and Nevada results also looked likely to keep that state in Biden’s column. But Nevada’s results might not be finalized until Thursday morning, according to veteran state reporter Jon Ralston, editor of the Nevada Independent.

Meanwhile, Trump’s baseless claims of victory early Wednesday morning were largely ignored after being met with criticism and reproach from even some of his Republican allies.

“He has undercut his own credibility,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who advised Trump during the campaign. “So I think it’s a bad strategic decision, it’s a bad political decision and it’s not the kind of decision you would expect someone to make tonight who holds the position he holds.”

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a Republican, said he was “very distressed” by Trump’s unsupported claims of fraud.

And conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who has a significant audience on the right, tweeted that “Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.”

But Trump also repeated his threat to try to stop ballots from being counted through litigation. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said at the White House. “We want all voting to stop.”

The problem with Trump’s statement is that there are only a small number of mail ballots that have a chance of being legitimately challenged in court. There were 3 million mail ballots requested in Pennsylvania, and 2.5 million of them arrived before Election Day, meaning they will be counted no matter what the court says.

As of now, ballots postmarked by Election Day in Pennsylvania — or with no postmark at all — that arrive after Election Day can be counted until the end of the day Friday. That is the issue Republicans want to challenge, but it’s not clear this represents more than 100,000 or so mail ballots.

The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on this issue of late-arriving ballots, in a 4-4 split, before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was on the court. If she casts a tiebreaking vote on that issue, it could reverse the Pennsylvania policy.

In light of that, Pennsylvania election clerks are separating out mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, in case they are invalidated. These ballots would affect the presidency only if the election came down to this state and the margins were razor-thin. That is a possibility.

But the prospects for throwing out millions of clearly legitimate ballots has very little chance of success in the courts.

“These are all legally cast votes, and the process of trying to toss them out for some reason would just, I think, be viewed by any court, including the Supreme Court, as just a massive disenfranchisement that would be frowned upon,” Ben Ginsberg, the GOP’s top election lawyer for the last 20 years, said early Wednesday morning on CNN.

The only reason America is waiting for mail ballots to be counted for days after the election in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is that the legislatures in those states did nothing to avoid this scenario, despite a chorus of warnings from Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan voting experts.

Almost every state in the country allowed election clerks to open mail ballots at least a week or two before Election Day so they could check them for things like signatures, recognizing that there would be unprecedented numbers of mail ballots due to concerns over COVID-19. But these three states ignored pleas to make this simple change.

The delay is not the fault of election officials, who are counting the ballots around the clock.

Overall, the election was a shock in some ways but played out as expected in others. Trump’s gains among minority voters had been foreshadowed in polling, but his numbers among Cuban Americans in Florida’s Miami-Dade County were much higher than expected.

The polling in key swing states was way off, and Republican operative Ralph Reed’s words to Yahoo News two weeks ago rang prescient: “I think polling is at this point, it’s a discredited science. I think it’s a modern version of phrenology. I don’t think it works,” Reed said. “They’re all blindfolded and swinging at a piñata.”

There was also a fairly widespread sense of distrust in the polling among most political observers, based on Trump’s outperforming polling surveys four years ago. And that skepticism turned out to be well founded.

On the other hand, polling of states like Georgia turned out to be correct. It was projected to be very close, and whoever wins that state, it will be a photo finish.

One dynamic that has played out exactly as predicted is the “red mirage” and “blue shift” scenario in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Because of the intransigence on the part of the legislatures in each state, resisting common sense pleas to get mail ballots counted quickly, Trump jumped out to a large lead in those states on election night. But as mail ballots have been counted, Biden made up ground and took the lead in Wisconsin and Michigan and was on track to do so in Pennsylvania.

And as predicted, the president made an unsupported claim of victory before all the votes in those states could be counted, knowing that Democratic voters cast mail ballots at a much higher rate than Republicans.

Culled from Yahoo news