By The Washington Post · Lesley Wroughton, Carol Morello · WORLD, AFRICA Ethiopia’s dispute with the northern Tigray region escalated Thursday with reports of heavy shelling and the army’s deputy chief declaring that the country had entered into “an unexpected war” and was sending more troops to the area.
The intensifying conflict drew an urgent international response, with the United Nations dispatching a special envoy to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and the International Crisis Group warning that the conflict could spread beyond Ethiopia’s borders.
“Our country has entered into an unexpected war. The war will not come to the center. It will end there,” in Tigray, the deputy chief of the Ethiopian National Defense Force, Birhanu Jula, said on state television.
A statement attributed to the regional government on Tigray TV claimed government fighter jets had bombed the outskirts of the region’s capital, Mekele, but those reports could not be confirmed. Communications, including Internet and phone connections, were cut in the region this week.
Ethiopia’s government has not commented on the bombing allegations, and a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed did not respond to a request for comment.
Clashes erupted in Tigray on Wednesday after Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, sent troops into Tigray province and declared a “military confrontation” after the regional government attacked a federal military base. Abiy accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which for decades was the dominant political force in the country’s multiethnic ruling coalition, of attempting to steal artillery and other military equipment during the attack.
A senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment frankly on the volatile conflict, said he had heard “wildly contradictory” reports about events on the ground in Tigray. He said he had heard of military casualties but said that communications network had been cut and that it was difficult to confirm reports.
The official confirmed that international efforts to de-escalate tensions were underway and said that the United States wanted to be “as helpful as possible to promote a peaceful resolution.”
The official pushed back at suggestions that Ethiopia was engaged in a war, saying that “it is not one sovereign state fighting against another sovereign state.”
Debretsion Gebremichael, president of the Tigray region, told reporters that “we are in position to defend ourselves from enemies that waged war on the Tigray region. . . . We are ready to be martyrs.”
Human Rights Watch called on Abiy’s government to immediately restore communications to the region, saying it hampered critical reporting of events affecting people’s health and safety in Tigray.
“It also undermines their rights to question the government’s account of events,” Mausi Segun, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Biden renews call for patience as Trump campaign launches more legal fights over ballots
InternationalNov 06. 2020Former Vice President and presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks Thursday in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman
By The Washington Post · Matt Viser, Toluse Olorunnipa · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, WHITEHOUSE WASHINGTON – Joe Biden insisted Thursday that he was on the verge of winning the presidency, urging calm and patience as the final votes were methodically counted. As he did, President Donald Trump made frantic legal claims and promoted unfounded allegations about voter fraud in a number of states that he was losing or seeing his lead swiftly diminish.
With tension high in states that remained too close to call, weary election officials continued tallying results, at times with police protecting them from protesters as the presidency hung in the balance of final tabulations in a handful of states.
A far right protester is seen at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, Ariz, on Nov. 4, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Caitlin O’Hara
Biden remained in the lead, with 253 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 and a number of pathways toward winning the 270 needed to secure the presidency.The former vice president maintained his leads in Arizona and Nevada, while Trump’s advantages were diminishing in both Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Officials in Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize and a state that would given Biden enoughelectoral college votes to be declared the winner, said they were ahead of schedule and may have enough ballots tallied by Thursday night to declare a winner.
On Thursday afternoon, Trump’s campaign issued a statement from him using exclamation points and all-caps lettering to drive home a baseless charge of election rigging.
“IF YOU COUNT THE LEGAL VOTES, I EASILY WIN THE ELECTION!” Trump said in the statement. “IF YOU COUNT THE ILLEGAL AND LATE VOTES, THEY CAN STEAL THE ELECTION FROM US!”
Minutes later, Biden wrote on Twitter: “Be patient, folks. Votes are being counted, and we feel good about where we are.”
Biden’s campaign has expressed increasing optimism that a victory was imminent, creating a website to promote the work of his transition team. Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., on Thursday held a briefing at a theater in Wilmington, Del., with a team of health and economic advisers to discuss the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
It was a visible sign of what his campaign hoped to project: Biden soberly preparing to transition into the White House. Trump, meanwhile, has not been seen publicly since the early morning hours of Wednesday, when he gathered with supporters at the White House and declared he had won. He spoke Thursday evening.
“Democracy is sometimes messy. Sometimes it requires a little patience, as well,” Biden said Thursday afternoon following his briefing.
“We continue to feel very good about where things stand. And we have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners,” he added. “So I ask everyone to stay calm – all people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed. And we’ll know very soon.”
Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon displayed several slides to reporters earlier in the day, demonstrating how they think Biden will win at least four of the remaining six competitive states. She said their calculations showed Biden’s lead might narrow in Arizona and Nevada, particularly as results from more pro-Trump rural areas are counted, but they remained confident that returns from urban strongholds would help protect their lead.
“We don’t really care which state takes us over the top. We just want to keep going and make sure the counts get done,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We know that it’s going to take a little bit of time and we support that, and we’re just going to stay calm and be patient.”
Biden and other Democrats got a bit of good news Thursday, as Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., fell below the 50% mark in his bid for reelection. If that holds once counting is completed, it would trigger a runoff in January. A second Georgia Senate race is already expected to lead to a runoff.
Democrats lost multiple Senate races on Tuesday, and their chances of drawing a 50-50 split in the Senate would rest on winning both of those races.
The legal wrangling also continued on Thursday, with Trump’s campaign attempting to sow doubt in the election results in a way that could both seek to change the results as well as produce an explanation for a loss.
Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer accused Trump’s campaign of engaging in a series of “meritless” lawsuits meant to misinform the public and disrupt the vote count.
“This is part of a broader misinformation campaign that involves some political theater,” he said, adding that the Trump camp has provided no evidence of wrongdoing.
“All of this is intended to create a large cloud that, it is the hope of the Trump campaign, that nobody can see through,” he added. “But it is not a very thick cloud. It’s not hard to see what they’re doing. We see through it. So will the courts, and so do election officials.”
Offering no specific evidence, several Trump allies have claimed that voter irregularities have impacted the tally in states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada. The campaign has filed lawsuits in several of those states attempting to halt or alter the vote-counting process.
“These magical sacks of ballots that keep popping up in corrupt and crooked localities that are run by partisan Democrats – we’re going to have eyes on them,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters Thursday, making broad accusations with no specific evidence. “And we’re going to make sure they’re not able to pull a fast one on the American people.”
The campaign touted a legal ruling in Pennsylvania that allowed Republican operatives to get a closer look at the ballot-counting process. A judge in Georgia dismissed a separate lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign on Thursday. The lawsuit alleged voter fraud in a few dozen ballots but lacked evidence.
For his part, Trump remained behind closed doors for a second straight day, tweeting his displeasure from the White House.
“STOP THE FRAUD,” he tweeted Thursday afternoon, providing no specifics in a comment deemed by Twitter as misleading. Hours earlier he tweeted “STOP THE COUNT.”
Trump and his allies took issue with the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day, claiming that the standard process of tallying those votes was a sign of voter fraud.
“ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump wrote on Twitter, another tweet that the social media platform hid after determining it was false or misleading.
In reality, election officials commonly take days, if not longer, to count ballots cast by mail. This year those mail-in ballots had to be counted after Election Day in part because Republican state lawmakers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania blocked election officials from getting a head start on processing and sorting ballots before then. In states that allowed early processing, such as Republican-led Ohio, mail-in votes were tallied on Election Day.
The Trump campaign on Thursday did secure a ruling in Pennsylvania that allowed them access to watch votes be counted in the state, as long as the observers are six feet away and wear masks in accordance with health guidelines during the pandemic.
Several of their other lawsuits were quickly shot down by judges.
A judge in Chatham County, Ga., denied a Trump campaign suit alleging that ballots had been improperly counted because ballots that arrived after the 7 p.m. deadline may have been mixed in with eligible ballots. The judge determined that the poll watcher cited by the Trump campaign could not provide evidence for the claim.
A judge in Michigan, which was called for Biden on Wednesday, told lawyers for the Trump campaign that she would deny the campaign’s request for an emergency halt in the counting of votes in the state.
Trump campaign advisers held a news conference in Nevada in which they made unsubstantiated claims that dead people and nonresidents had been voting in large numbers. Shortly after the event, Biden’s narrow lead in Nevada widened.
By early Thursday evening, after a new batch of votes was tabulated, Biden had a lead of more than 11,000. There were still tens of thousands more votes left to be counted, including about 63,000 mail ballots and 60,000 provisional ballots in Clark County, the state’s largest county and a Democratic stronghold.
The numbers could grow further, since election officials in Nevada must count any mail ballot that was postmarked by Election Day and arrives by Nov. 10.
“Our goal here in Clark County is not to count fast. We want to make sure that we’re being accurate,” said Joe Gloria, the county’s registrar of voters, warning final counts might not be done until this weekend. “Obviously, we are going to be very important to the entire country and that is our number one goal.”
If the remaining states remain extremely tight, calling the race could be further complicated because tens of thousands of ballots were caught in U.S. Postal Service processing facilities until the day after Election Day, according to new data filed in federal court.
In Pennsylvania, 6,877 ballots were processed on Nov. 4. That number was 5,915 in North Carolina, 9,037 in Nevada and 1,706 in Georgia. Those votes – which could count in some states but not others depending on local ballot deadlines – could loom large in tightening races.
The Postal Service processed close to 150,000 ballots nationwide on Wednesday, with a 94.5-percent on-time rate, an improvement over recent days, but still below the 97 percent that postal and voting experts expect of the agency.
But in the nine postal districts spanning five swing states yet to be decided – Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia – the ballot on-time rate was 84.6 percent. That means roughly 15 out of every 100 ballots in processing plants were not sorted – or delivered – on time.
In filing the data, Justice Department lawyers representing the Postal Service in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cautioned that the figures were not reliable. The data does not include “first mile” and “last mile” handling steps, which could add time to delivery, and only accounts for items the agency was able to successfully identify as ballots.
The Postal Service also encouraged post offices to cull local ballots by hand and deliver them directly to vote counters, bypassing the regional facilities that account for processing scores, though the agency cannot say how widely that practice was being employed.
Police officers accused of killing George Floyd to be tried together, in Minneapolis
InternationalNov 06. 2020Flameless candles are illuminated after being placed at the memorial for George Floyd outside Cup Foods to celebrate what would have been Floyd’s 47th birthday on Oct. 14 in Minneapolis. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Joshua Lott.
By The Washington Post · Holly Bailey · NATIONAL, COURTSLAW, RACE MINNEAPOLIS – The former police officers charged with killing George Floyd will be tried together next March in a downtown Minneapolis courthouse, though the judge overseeing the criminal case said he would reconsider a change of venue motion if security or other issues arise.
In a series of rulings filed Wednesday but made public Thursday, Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill denied defense motions for separate trials in which the former officers’ attorneys claimed their clients will be presenting “antagonistic defenses” that could jeopardize their right to a fair trial. Such defenses could include individual officers arguing that they are not responsible for Floyd’s death but alleging that other officers should take responsibility for the slaying.
Cahill denied those motions, arguing in a 51-page ruling that evidence against the former Minneapolis officers – Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao – “will substantially overlap” and that separate trials would be complex and place an “undue burden” on state prosecutors and the court system.
Citing security threats, the judge also ruled that jurors in the case will be publicly anonymous – their names, addresses and other identifying information known only to the court and involved attorneys until after the trial. He also ruled that jurors will be partially sequestered; they will be allowed to sleep in their own homes, but the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office will transport them to the courthouse from a remote meeting point each day to maintain their privacy.
Cahill also decided that there can be audio and video coverage of the trial – against prosecutors’ wishes – because of the anticipated need to maintain social distancing during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.
In a separate ruling, the judge also declined to move the trial out of Hennepin County, rejecting defense concerns about the ability to seat an impartial jury given the intense media coverage of the case and the possibility of protests that could threaten the safety of participants, including jurors. Cahill wrote that a “fair and safe trial” can be held in Minneapolis and pointed out that “no corner of the state of Minnesota has been shielded from pretrial publicity regarding the death of George Floyd.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose office is overseeing the prosecution, said he was “satisfied” by the court’s decisions and believes the case should go forward as planned.
“The murder of George Floyd occurred in Minneapolis, and it is right that the defendants should be tried in Minneapolis,” Ellison said. “It is also true that they acted in concert with each other and the evidence against them is similar, so it is right to try them in one trial.”
Floyd died May 25 while handcuffed and restrained facedown on a South Minneapolis street as police investigated a 911 call about a counterfeit $20 bill that had been passed at Cup Foods, a local convenience store. During a struggle with police, Floyd was placed on the ground, where Chauvin pressed his knee into the man’s neck for approximately nine minutes as Floyd repeatedly complained of struggling to breathe. Floyd ultimately lost consciousness and lost a pulse while subdued.
The former officers have offered various defenses. Through their attorneys, Kueng and Lane, who were rookies who had been on the job full time for less than a week, have sought to shift blame to Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minnepolis Police Department who was the senior officer at the scene. Chauvin has blamed Kueng and Lane, suggesting they were in control of the scene and did not do enough to de-escalate the situation with Floyd. Thao, who was handling crowd control, has said his job was to be a “human traffic cone” and that he was not paying close attention to the scene behind him as he kept onlookers at bay.
Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide movement for social and racial justice, with protests emerging in cities from coast to coast along with a renewed and widespread push for police reform. Some of the protests have pitted social justice activists against those backing law enforcement officers.
Chauvin is facing second-degree unintentional murder and manslaughter charges; Kueng, Lane and Thao are charged with aiding and abetting.
During a pretrial hearing in September, defense attorneys for all four former officers pressed the judge for separate trials, arguing that their defenses, including who was in charge of the scene, would be “antagonistic” and risk their clients’ rights to a fair trial.
“I am not just dealing with prosecutors,” Robert Paule, an attorney for Thao, told the judge. “I am dealing with three other attorneys who are defending their clients.”
But in his ruling, Cahill rejected that argument, saying the former officers had only hinted that they will be pursing antagonistic defenses but have not informed the court formally that that’s what they intend to do. The judge said that under Minnesota law, he could not “assume defenses will be antagonistic unless and until antagonistic defenses have actually been asserted.”
Cahill said the officers have signaled that they will pursue similar defenses. He pointed to recent filings by Chauvin, Lane and Thao in which their attorneys said they would seek to defend their conduct as authorized use of force permitted under state law. The officers also have indicated they will argue Floyd’s death was caused by not their behavior but preexisting health conditions and drug use.
An attorney for Kueng, one of the rookies, told the judge in September his client’s defense would put him at odds with Chauvin’s because he planned to include evidence of the training his client had received from Chauvin, who had been his field training officer. But the judge noted that Kueng had not yet filed a formal notice of his planned defense.
Cahill also rejected claims from the defense that a joint trial would result in “classic finger-pointing” between the former officers. He noted that prosecutors, in their charges, are not seeking to prove that any of the defendants “restrained Floyd with the intent to kill him” but are instead seeking to prove Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death and that the other three officers knew Chauvin was committing a crime.
All the officers, Cahill wrote, “thus have an interest in mounting common defenses, rather than adversarial defenses seeking to blame each other.”
Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide movement for social and racial justice, with protests emerging in cities from coast to coast, along with a renewed and widespread push for police overhauling. Some of the protests have pitted social justice activists against those backing law enforcement officers.
Chauvin faces second-degree unintentional murder and manslaughter charges; Kueng, Lane and Thao are charged with aiding and abetting.
As Election Day drags into Election Week, the waiting is the hardest part
InternationalNov 06. 2020Biden supporters on Election Night, waiting in their car outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman
By The Washington Post · Marc Fisher · NATIONAL The rhetoric, on the streets and in the White House, has gone triple exclamation point, with shouts about stolen elections and all manner of imagined shenanigans. Tense gatherings of partisans outside – and even inside – vote-counting centers threaten to get physical. And in millions of homes across the country, a gnawing impatience is eating away at what’s left of American nerves.
Wait, says Joe Biden’s camp – just count the votes. Wait, say President Donald Trump’s allies – let the courts decide. Wait, say elections officials: We’re working as fast as we can.
But many Americans have had it with waiting. Waiting for the all-clear to go back to work and school. Waiting for the vaccine. Waiting for a decision on the country’s future. The message from people across the political and cultural divide is united, for once: It’s too much.
Now, as Election Day – one of the country’s grandest instant gratification traditions – stretches into a third day and a fourth day and who knows how many more, many people just want it to stop.
The impatience is contributing to some curious scenes. On Wednesday, Trump supporters in Michigan, where Biden was leading, chanted, “Stop the count!” while Trump supporters in Arizona, where the president was trailing, chanted “Count the votes!” On Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, a man watching anti-Trump marchers as they shouted, “Count every vote,” reared back and delivered his own retort: “They’re counting, you idiots!”
“This is kind of like an acid flashback,” said Jean Elliott Smith, who should know: Twenty years ago, in South Florida, she spent day after day recounting ballots in the 2000 version of this week’s nail-biter election extension. In an elections office in West Palm Beach back then, Smith, a Democrat, sat alongside Republican observers and county employees, lifting up individual ballots to figure out whether each voter intended to choose George W. Bush or Al Gore as president.
“It was such a distressing time,” recalled Smith, now retired in New Hampshire. “There was intimidation, suppression, bullying and a challenge over nothing. It was like a rehearsal for right now.”
The waiting is worse than the wanting, some voters say. And Americans in particular are an impatient bunch, according to psychologists who study patience and self-control.
“Americans have a hard time waiting,” said Dominik Guess, a psychology professor at the University of North Florida. “Immediate gratification is an important part of our culture. Children are taught to expect things right away. And it’s especially hard to wait when something is highly important and we’ve invested our values in it.”
Guess has studied differences in patience across cultures and has found that people in highly individualistic societies like the United States have more trouble waiting than people who grew up in collectivist cultures that put more emphasis on teaching children to wait for rewards.
Anxiety over the wait has brought hardcore partisans on both sides into the streets. In Durham, N.C., on Wednesday, about a thousand anti-Trump demonstrators accompanied by a drum corps marched to the local elections board to demand that every vote be counted.
“My people know patience,” said Rabbi Salem Pearce, executive director of Carolina Jews for Justice. “We wandered in the desert for 40 years. We can wait a few days for election results.”
But many people say they are losing sleep, unable to work, or falling into stress-eating to get through to a final result.
“We have lost some of our capacity to wait,” said Sarah Schnitker, a psychologist at Baylor University who studies patience. “A lot of waiting is about expectations and, with new technologies, our expectations have definitely changed about how much uncertainty we should have to tolerate.”
That website is supposed to load instantly. That answer should be in the first page of search results. And that election is supposed to end on Election Day.
The pandemic has left patience in even shorter supply, Schnitker said. “This whole year, our expectations have been violated. About how science works and how quickly we should be able to solve the virus. And now the election on top of that.”
Impatience, Schnitker said, can arise from interpersonal stressors, such as an annoying person at work; from life hardships, such as chronic illness or racism; or from daily hassles, such as being stuck in traffic or waiting in a queue.
The delayed election result “is a mixture of all three categories,” she said. “It’s quite interpersonal – a lot of us have people in our lives who we argue over politics with. Political decisions are life and death to us – very basic life hardships. And this also feels like a daily hassle, waiting for the next update every hour.”
The trick to getting more comfortable with the wait is to figure out what you’re feeling, think about how other people see the same situation, and understand why you care so much about this, Schnitker said.
“Don’t just sit there and stew,” she said. “Imagine the situation in a new way. Americans can call upon our care for our country and think about how to help it live up to our ideals. And do something that puts you in a flow state – absorbing work, a hobby, meditation, a challenging video game. Watching TV does not get you there.”
Even in an impatient culture, some people are better at waiting than others – and those who are confident that their guy is going to prevail are having a somewhat easier time of it this week. Those who have been through this before say the final result can be worth the wait.
As much as Smith shudders to recall that fall of 2000, Brad Card, who was on the other side of the Florida recount, said the seemingly never-ending Bush-Gore faceoff “made me proud to be an American.”
“We have a peaceful process where you can challenge votes, and you let the process work and then you have a winner,” he said. “We’re an incredibly resilient country, and I was amazed how quickly we were able to move on from that bitter and divisive process.”
Card, now a Washington lobbyist but then a Republican observer of vote recounts in Jacksonville and West Palm Beach, said he doesn’t mind waiting as long as it takes to get every vote counted this time. But he has enough PTSD from 2000 to argue that there should be some limits.
“I don’t think we should subject the country to prolonged litigation just to muck up the system,” Card said. “When the decision is final, the loser should accept it and respect it. I don’t know if President Trump would do that – I hope so – but Al Gore really set the tone, walking away and helping America heal after being as close as you can be to the presidency.”
Biden’s lead in the last remaining battlegrounds could be large enough to avert the painstaking examination of individual ballots that dominated TV screens that November.
As the 2000 wait stretched into its fourth week, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote that it was “so horrible, so dreadful, so terrible, and yet you can’t look away. It’s the Florida Chain Saw Election.” A month into the count, a CNN poll found that 62% of Americans agreed that the whole mess had “gone on too long.”
Richard Cheney, who was waiting to become either vice president or nothing, told reporters in the midst of the wait that all he did was “sit around and watch television all day.” And then he had a heart attack, his fourth, a mild one.
“Sometimes, there’s just too damn much news,” Cheney said.
The country was different in those days. Gore and Bush were able to seclude themselves at home, refraining from public comment for days on end.
Similarly, in 1960, when the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon also turned out to be a nail-biter, Nixon decided on the morning after Election Day to quit his Los Angeles campaign headquarters and fly to Key Biscayne, Fla., leaving his allies in Washington to spend their days hollering on his behalf about election fraud while Nixon took long walks on the beach.
Biden has gone on TV twice to express his confidence that he will prevail, and Trump has kept up a rapid-fire assault of tweets alleging fraud without evidence. In a blast email seeking donations to his legal campaign to stop vote counts in several states, Trump, who has described himself as an impatient man, said: “The Democrats are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. They will try to drag this Election out for as long as possible.”
The candidates and their staffs at least have jobs to do while they wait. For many voters stuck at home during the pandemic, the wait feels like a wrong turn into purgatory.
“Is this what it’s like to watch/care about sports?” tweeted novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner. “If so, why would you ever do it on purpose?”
Military ballots could take on outsize role in key states
InternationalNov 06. 2020Dan Beeton, center, brings up the rear as scores of marchers took to the streets on Nov. 4, 2020, in Pittsburgh, Penn. Several progressive and union groups met near the Pittsburgh City-County Building and marched and chanted for several blocks with vote counting fairness being one of the major causes for the march. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
By The Washington Post · Missy Ryan, Alex Horton · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, WHITEHOUSE
WASHINGTON – Votes cast by military personnel could assume greater importance as the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden narrowed to a handful of battleground states that accept service members’ ballots after Election Day.
Authorities in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Alaska on Thursday continued to count ballots and wait for others yet to arrive, including those cast by uniformed troops and their families stationed away from their homes.
“We anticipate military ballots could play a decisive role in this election given that these ballots are some of the latest to arrive and be counted,” said Jack Noland, a researcher at the nonpartisan group Count Every Hero, an initiative of anti-corruption advocacy group RepresentUs.
Scrutiny of ballots that were not counted or received until after Election Day has intensified as Trump’s campaign mounted legal challenges in at least three states and the president tried to stoke doubt about the validity of continuing vote tallies.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. In another tweet that was flagged by Twitter as potentially misleading, he also said: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”
While Trump also has made unsubstantiated allegations in recent days of fraud and raised questions about a “mail-in ballot dump,” his campaign has said there “are and should be exceptions” for troops stationed overseas.
U.S. troops have been voting by mail since the War of 1812 and, in larger numbers, the Civil War. In 2016, troops and their families sent more than 630,000 ballots. About 20,000 of those were rejected, mostly because they arrived too late. This year, military authorities urged troops to vote early because of postal delays related to the coronavirus pandemic.
How military mail-in ballots are treated varies by state. According to research compiled by Count Every Hero, 28 states and the District of Columbia allow military ballots to be counted after Election Day. Among the states that are still counting, military ballots can be received up to 15 days after that date. Some states allow troops to vote by email or fax.
In Arizona, state rules require that military ballots must be received by Election Day. Georgia, meanwhile, permits the processing of military ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 6. In Nevada, they must be postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 10.
Pennsylvania requires them to be signed by Nov. 2 and received by Nov. 10. North Carolina requires them to be sent by 12:01 a.m. on Election Day and received by Nov 12. Finally, Alaska allows military ballots that are postmarked by Election Day. For those coming from within the United States, the deadline is Nov. 13; for those coming from overseas that are received by Nov 18.
In a call Thursday organized by Count Every Hero, retired Gen. George Casey, who served as Army chief of staff during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, asked state officials to include assurances when they certify state votes that all service member ballots have been counted. “We ask so much of them, they deserve to know that their voices are heard,” he said.
It was unclear Thursday how many more military ballots could arrive in battleground states, or how they could be affected by legal challenges.
Some critical states have seen larger numbers of military absentee voters this year compared with the number in 2016. In North Carolina, 14,550 service members requested absentee ballots, with 9,750 returned as of Wednesday, said Caroline Myrick, a data analyst with the state board of elections. The number of ballot requests was thousands more than for the last presidential election, she said.
Some of the 4,200 remaining will be tabulated as they come in, but Myrick said the number doesn’t account for service members who requested mail-in ballots but later decided to vote in person on Election Day.
In Pennsylvania around 4 p.m. Thursday, more than 340,000 mail ballots remained to be counted. The state did not provide an immediate breakdown surrounding military votes that have been received or information about those that might be still in the mail.
Officials in Georgia said on Thursday afternoon that 47,000 votes remain to be counted in that state, but that did not appear to include those that might be yet to arrive by Friday’s deadline for military ballots. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, an official in pivotal Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, said Thursday that all absentee-by-mail votes had been counted, leaving only provisional ballots and an “undetermined” number of military ballots.
The military does not conduct electoral polling, and it is unknown how active-duty troops will vote this year. Traditionally, military personnel have tended to skew Republican politically.
Veterans for Trump, an online coalition, has seized on the president’s allegations of impropriety and asked members to mobilize to observe ballot counting. The group did not return a request for comment, but a recorded phone message said volunteers were needed “to ensure election integrity” in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and other states with close vote margins.
The Biden campaign did not return requests for comment.
By The Washington Post · Gillian Brockell · NATIONAL, POLITICS, HISTORY George Gallup had something to prove: Straw polls were useless.
The typical method for a straw poll in the 1930s went like this: A newspaper or magazine printed a sample ballot in its pages, and readers would fill it out and send it in. Based on all of the responses, the newspaper would make a prediction.
Gallup, who had pursued a PhD in psychology and worked in ad research, thought straw polls were nonsense. Really, you were just surveying the type of people who read the newspaper, cut something out and mailed it. Not exactly representative of the electorate.
Rather than measure the opinion of a large number of the same type of person, Gallup developed a system of “quota sampling” – surveying a small cross-section of Americans who mirror the demographics of the entire population – to get a supposedly more accurate measure. In the United States, he calculated that could be done with 3,000 people from different regions and of different ages, races, educational backgrounds, etc.
That’s how Gallup ushered in the modern era of polling – a method that failed to predict Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and got the strength of the president’s support against Democratic challenger Joe Biden wrong again this week.
While the nation waits for an outcome in the agonizingly close 2020 election, it’s worth examining how we came to rely on polls.
As historian Jill Lepore explained in the New Yorker in 2015, the word “poll” used to mean “head,” as in, the thing being counted when voting “involved assembling (all in favor of Smith stand here, all in favor of Jones over there).” The term “straw poll” evolved from an old expression about throwing hay into the air to see which way the wind was blowing, according to William Safire.
In the mid-1930s, Gallup got an important ally to help prove his theory. In her memoir “Personal History,” Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham wrote about her father, then-publisher Eugene Meyer, taking interest in his new polling method. At the time, Gallup’s “polls weren’t taken very seriously,” she wrote, but “ever the logical thinker, and having always put a premium on the importance of research, my father signed the first contract with Gallup and ran his polls on the front page.”
By the 1936 election between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Republican challenger, Kansas governor Alf Landon, the best-known straw poll was conducted by the magazine Literary Digest. Its method wasn’t exactly scientific. The digest would randomly select millions of addresses in the phone book and car registration data, and then send postcards to those addresses asking for whom the recipient planned to vote.
Gallup spotted a big problem with this method: by only polling people with cars and phones, they had no input from the poor, who couldn’t afford either. And poorer voters largely broke for Roosevelt.
Using his quota sampling system and in-person interviews, he predicted that Roosevelt would win reelection. Not only that, he predicted what the Literary Digest would predict – a win for Landon with 56% of the vote – and explained why the magazine would be wrong.
Roosevelt was reelected, and Gallup prevailed; though, in a bit of foreshadowing, he was way off on the margin of victory.
Literary Digest was also wrong about its prediction of 370 electoral votes for Landon. He got eight. The magazine went out of business soon afterward.
Twelve years later, Gallup was the head of a polling empire with offices in 11 countries. His political polls were carried in more than 100 newspapers, and he had spawned competitors, primarily pollsters Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley.
In May of 1948, the pollster was treated to a gushing profile in Time Magazine, which described him as a “big, friendly teddybear of a man” who “loves children and animals” and whose “fondest dream is that Congress will someday abolish the Electoral College.”
In the last poll published before the election, Gallup had Dewey beating Truman by five percentage points. So sure was he of Dewey’s victory, the firm had stopped polling two weeks before the election and simply ignored the 14% of voters who said they were undecided.
What happened, of course, is best encapsulated by the famous photo of Harry S. Truman, grinning broadly, and holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune erroneously headlined “Dewey Defeats Truman.” In fact, Truman beat Dewey by 4½ percentage points.
Katharine Graham, by then a controlling owner of The Post with her husband Phil Graham, described in her memoir how they handled the embarrassment of having predicted Truman’s loss: “When it became clear that Truman had indeed fooled the pundits and pulled off a political miracle, Phil . . . sent off a telegram to the president, which he printed on Page 1 of the morning-after paper:
“You are hereby invited to attend a ‘crow banquet’ to which this newspaper proposes to invite newspaper editorial writes, political reporters and editors, including our own along with pollsters . . . The main course will consist of breast of tough old crow en glace (You will eat turkey.) Dress for guest of honor, white tie; for others – sack cloth.”
Truman responded magnanimously: “I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow . . . We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”
By The Washington Post · Gregory S. Schneider, Laura Vozzella · NATIONAL, POLITICS RICHMOND, Va. – The apparently comfortable margins of victory for both former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, in Virginia on Tuesday extended an 11-year record of dominance for Democrats in statewide races and cemented the commonwealth’s status as reliably blue.
But at the local and regional level, a different dynamic holds – as evidenced by Republican strength in three close congressional contests driven by rural and military voters energized by support for President Donald Trump.
The results suggest how much the state mirrors the nation as a whole, becoming more polarized and less attuned to the old “Virginia way” of consensus politics, said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
“This was an intensified partisan vote,” Rozell said.
The outcome had appeared very different for a time Tuesday night, as initial returns from in-person voting showed Virginia turning bright red, sending a thrill through Republicans and briefly putting the state in the national spotlight. But that turned out to be a byproduct of this year’s wave of early voting – the number of absentee ballots, many of which weren’t counted until late in the evening, was much higher than in-person Election Day votes, which were tallied when polls closed at 7 p.m.
Once those absentee totals came in – in most cases, overnight – Virginia tilted back into the blue in statewide races. Biden wound up with a nine-point edge over Trump on Wednesday, though late-arriving mail-in ballots will not be fully counted until after the last ones are received by Friday at noon.
Otherwise, most absentee totals from around the state have been reported. A block of absentee votes from Spotsylvania County had kept uncertainty hovering over the 7th Congressional District race between incumbent Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, and Republican challenger Nick Freitas – but those results came in Wednesday afternoon, and Spanberger declared victory hours later.
Also in that race, questions arose in Henrico County about what appeared to be thousands of absentee votes that were missing from reported results.
Officials said they expected to resolve those issues over the next few days.
The outcome is not in doubt for either Biden or Warner, who led by more than 11 percentage points over Republican challenger Daniel Gade.
Assuming the margin holds, Biden’s result improves on the five-point edge Hillary Clinton notched over Trump in 2016. Turnout was heavy – Trump picked up about 130,000 more votes in Virginia this year than in 2016, while Biden won about 311,000 more votes than Clinton received.
For Republicans, “that’s a bad night. There’s no other way to spin it,” said Tucker Martin, who was communications chief under former governor Robert McDonnell, the last Republican to win statewide in Virginia.
“The first thing Virginia Republicans need to do right now is go sit down with Governor Larry Hogan and Governor Charlie Baker,” said Martin, referring to the Republican leaders of deep-blue Maryland and Massachusetts. “Ask them what they did and take copious notes.”
The problem, though, is that among GOP activists – the people who pick the party’s nominees – Trump is as popular as ever.
“Trumpism was not soundly defeated in this election,” said longtime Richmond political analyst Bob Holsworth. “When you take a look at the Republican candidates who are winning in Virginia, they’re basically winning on conservative, populist messages and in some instances stressing the kind of social conservatism that is wildly unpopular in the more suburbanized, affluent areas of Virginia.”
That divide was further emphasized Tuesday night when six rural counties around the state voted in favor of preserving their local Confederate monuments – at a time when cities such as Richmond and Norfolk have taken theirs down amid calls for racial justice during protests over the summer.
An energized GOP base powered Bob Good to victory against Democrat Cameron Webb in the 5th Congressional District race in central Virginia. Good, a former Liberty University official who promoted himself as a “biblical conservative,” had knocked off incumbent Rep. Denver Riggleman in a Republican primary after the freshman congressman officiated at a same-sex marriage between two campaign aides.
Webb, a physician who is Black, seemed well-positioned to ride Biden’s coattails to an upset win over Good but lost by more than five points in preliminary results.
Similarly, GOP enthusiasm made for close contests for incumbent Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democrat, in the 2nd District in the Hampton Roads area and for Spanberger.
Unofficial results showed Luria defeated Republican Scott Taylor, who had held the seat in 2018 when Luria won the first time. “It’s my honor to continue to serve you,” Luria said Wednesday in a brief Facebook Live appearance, where she noted that Trump had just signed her eighth bill – related to Chesapeake Bay cleanup funding – into law.
“The Republicans did better than many expected in the three competitive congressional races because they had a great turnout of their core voters in the rural areas of the state,” George Mason University’s Rozell said. He added that the showing undercuts the idea that Democrats own the state.
“Republicans are in the game again. I have no doubt about that. People have prematurely declared that the state is now and forever blue. I just don’t buy it,” he said.
That was certainly the perspective of Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson on Wednesday, who said in a statement that “we made Virginia a battleground once again. . . . We have laid the groundwork for decades of future success here in Virginia. The fight is far from over.”
But Holsworth said that while Trumpian conservatism has energized the party’s base in some areas, it won’t play well across a state where power is gravitating toward racially diverse suburbs.
And there might be another factor making life difficult for Republicans seeking statewide office: the bipartisan redistricting commission approved by voters in Tuesday’s election. That body will redraw political boundaries next year under the findings of this year’s census, and it could shake up the status quo.
Washington-area districts will have to shrink in size because of population growth, Farnsworth said, and blue suburbs will wind up attached to some of the districts that are now mostly rural and conservative. “That could really scramble these districts,” Farnsworth said, diluting the power of underpopulated rural areas.
“How do you find some way to combine the populism animating the base with the practical message that people in the suburbs want to hear?” Holsworth said. “While Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp in Washington, what he’s effectively done is drain Northern Virginia of Republicans.”
By The Washington Post · Eva Dou, Robyn Dixon, Michael Birnbaum, Rick Noack, Siobhán O’Grady · WORLD, POLITICS People around the world were transfixed by America’s cliffhanger vote count Wednesday, with the presidential election still too close to call. President Donald Trump’s premature victory claim and false allegations of voter fraud were met with expressions of shock and fear over the state of U.S. democracy, along with disparagement on the part of U.S. adversaries.
Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, the rivals wrangling for leadership of the world’s largest economy and its most powerful military, have presented contrasting visions for U.S. foreign policy. Trump has charted a more unilateral approach that has eschewed alliances and international agreements, while Biden has promised a return to America’s more traditional role.
Which vision would win remained uncertain as viewers across the globe watched returns trickle in.
The close nature of the race may portend a world order in which Trumpism remains a major factor, some analysts said Wednesday. “The Americans did not, as many had hoped, forcefully reject Trumpism – even if Biden wins in the end,” Clemens Wergin, the chief foreign correspondent for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, wrote in an op-ed.
In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declined to comment on the election, beyond noting that the Mexican economy had not been affected by the uncertainty. But analysts were stunned by Trump’s strong showing. Alejandro Hope, a respected Mexican security analyst and columnist for the daily El Universal, said that whether Trump wins, the electoral results indicate that his ideology will remain a force in U.S. politics.
European media outlets led their websites with headlines suggesting that U.S. democracy is on the brink of collapse. The New Zealand Herald offered live coverages under the headline: “The Divided States of America.”
“America looks into the abyss with close scrutiny and Trump’s threat to go to the Supreme Court,” read a headline in Spain’s El País newspaper. An editorial in France’s Le Monde newspaper compared Trump’s comments on the election to those “common in authoritarian regimes.”
Shortly after the president wrongly declared himself the winner and demanded that the count end with millions of votes still to be tabulated, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer warned of the potential for a dire outcome.
“This is a situation that can lead to a constitutional crisis in the U.S.,” she said on the German television channel ZDF. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that while voter turnout has been “historically high” – polarization has been, too.
The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord took effect Wednesday. Biden has said he would seek to rejoin it. “Whoever is elected has an immense responsibility to help tackle our planet’s greatest challenge,” British Prime Minister Theresa May wrote.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Britain has full confidence in the U.S. system of checks and balances. “We need to be patient and wait and see who wins the US election,” he tweeted. “Important the process is given sufficient time to reach a conclusion.”
Colleagues to the north did not share that confidence. Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, said that the hours and days ahead would be crucial “for the integrity of US democracy.”
Penny Wong, a leading opposition lawmaker in Australia, urged that democracy be allowed to take its course and for all votes to be counted. “It’s in Australia’s interest that America remains a credible, stable democracy,” she tweeted. Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former conservative prime minister, urged: “Count every vote.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered a staid comment Wednesday, telling reporters in Ottawa that his government was “carefully” following the “electoral process” underway in the United States. A Globe and Mail columnist weighed in, writing that “it’s hard to imagine many other advanced countries electing or coming within a hair of electing a president like Donald Trump.”
In Turkey, for which the stakes are especially high due to Trump’s nearly unflinching support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government over the past few years, commentators awaited a clear outcome with keen interest. Under a Biden presidency, U.S. relations with Turkey could grow more “contentious,” wrote Sedat Ergin, a columnist for the Hurriyet newspaper.
Nitzan Horowitz, a member of the Israeli parliament and head of the liberal Meretz party, decried Trump’s claim of victory and threat to have the courts stop the count. Writing on Facebook, Horowitz likened the tactics to those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close Trump ally. “It’s hard not to see the similarities between Trump and Netanyahu – the complete disregard for the rules of the game of democracy, the legal threat that hangs over them in case they lose, and the willingness to do anything, truly anything to win,” he wrote.
Trump does have his supporters among world leaders, especially other right-wing populists, including the leaders of Slovenia and Hungary, who have expressed hopes for his reelection. “It’s pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears,” tweeted Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.
But a top official in Hungary, another Trump-friendly European nation, voiced skepticism. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff on Wednesday said he is “pessimistic” about Trump’s reelection chances, Politico Europe reported. Orban had been one of the few world leaders to endorse Trump publicly.
Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro reiterated his support for Trump – but held back from weighing in on the outcome of the race, Reuters reported.
The protracted battle over results, along with some of Trump’s statements, seem to have damaged the image of U.S. democracy in the eyes of many commentators and invited comparisons with disputed contests in developing nations.
In India, the world’s largest democracy, in which hundreds of millions of votes were tallied within hours during last year’s national elections, the slow counting drew some amused responses. “Looks like America needs to learn the art of counting from India,” quipped a leading anchor. One journalist hailed India’s election commission, an autonomous body tasked with conducting elections, and called the U.S. elections “shambolic.”
Hours after Trump prematurely declared victory Wednesday morning, the U.S. Embassy in the Ivory Coast, which is also grappling with a contested election, posted a tweet urging leaders in the West African country to “show commitment to the democratic process.”
“Trump is all about intimidation and tweets,” said Sylvain N’Guessan, a political analyst in the country’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said the election proved that American democracy was not a standard to be followed, adding, “Nobody here would approve of such an approach.”
Ming Jinwei, deputy foreign editor of China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, described the United States as a country “without hope.”
One senior European security official said he feared that Russia and China would “misuse” the time before the inauguration if there is turbulence in Washington. “Everybody worries,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security concerns.
In Hong Kong, however, many pro-democracy activists who see the U.S. president as a key figure in their fight against Beijing are firmly behind another term for Trump. A group of Trump supporters in Hong Kong filmed a YouTube video in support of his campaign, saying Trump was the only one who could fight the Chinese Communist Party. A local YouTuber, who goes by the name Stormtrooper, told his 15,000 viewers that Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., would be more inclined to help the Chinese government than Trump would.
More than almost any other country, Iran can expect to see a divergence in U.S. foreign policy based on the election result. Under Trump, the United States pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal, which Biden has said he hopes to restore, and imposed crippling sanctions on the country.
“What a spectacle!” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top leader, wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office. His rival says Trump intends to rig the election! This is how #USElections & US democracy are.”
D.C. streets tense but calm Wednesday as ballots are counted
InternationalNov 05. 2020As the sun rises in the nation’s capital on the day after Election Day, a thin group of mostly media stand by or do stand-up news feeds from Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House on Nov. 4. With tensions flaring across the country leading up to Election Day, officials, experts and activists have been gearing up for an array of possibilities about what they might face, including potential voter intimidation, clashes around the polls or spiraling unrest. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jahi Chikwendiu.
By The Washington Post · Marissa J. Lang, Michael E. Ruane · NATIONAL, POLITICS
WASHINGTON — Holding signs that declared “the people have spoken” and “we are the majority,” weary protesters returned to the streets of Washington on Wednesday as the nation waited to learn the results of the presidential election.
Amid crisp, sunny weather and an eerie-feeling calm across the city, marchers set off from Union Station just before noon to decry those that organizers said were a threat to the nation’s democracy.
The crowd was small and fatigued after a late night of protests in the District that kept many demonstrators out into the early hours of the morning.
Marchers were urged to sing and chant as they walked, carrying flags, homemade signs and a papier-mâché rendering of a billionaire holding a check made out to Fox News.
“We are here to fight what we know is an attack on democracy,” said organizer Aura Angélica with the youth-led Sunrise Movement, an activist group focused on climate change and social justice.
The march made its first stop outside the D.C. headquarters of Fox News, where protesters chanted, “Trump lies, democracy dies!”
The midday demonstration, organized by the Shutdown DC coalition, brought together activists from more than 10 groups with different missions.
But Ashley Dorelus, a Black filmmaker from New York, balked at the makeup of the crowd, which had few Black protesters.
She said she was frustrated that at a march about democracy, no mention of race was made – even as Trump’s calls to halt vote counts would disproportionately affect the votes of Black Americans.
“This feels performative to me,” she said. “They’re not here for Black people, for democracy.”
Outside the Republican National Committee, protesters faced a line of police and began to chant, “Count every vote! Every vote counts!”
Demonstrators said the GOP has been complicit with the president’s campaign of misinformation – about the ongoing pandemic and about the validity of the presidential election.
“They profit from his exploitation of the American people,” Frank Santos Fritz, an organizer with D.C.’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, told the group. “Trump has never won the popular vote. We remember that. And now he’s trying to rig the electoral [college].”
Organizers told the crowd the election would not be decided “for weeks, maybe months,” and that activists must remain vigilant to “protect our democracy.”
As they chanted at the building, several demonstrators shook maracas and drummed the tops of overturned buckets.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, compared the Republican effort to cast doubt on the election results in several contested states to efforts to overthrow authoritarian leaders in other countries.
“Hypocrites,” the crowd chanted.
“The cheating has already happened,” Benjamin said. “The cheating happened with gerrymandering. The cheating happened with the long lines to vote.”
At MacPherson Square, a quiet crowd gathered Wednesday afternoon to demand a full vote count in the race for the presidency. Toddlers hoisted hand-made signs above their heads, a group of veterans stood in silent protest and community activists delivered speeches from a stage.
Every so often, musicians performed beneath a Jumbotron that read “COUNT THE VOTES,” transforming the 100-person demonstration into a sort of democratic park concert.
“It’s not enough to invite people to democracy … to kick them out of it,” Tyson Hobson-Powell, founder and director of policy at Concerned Citizens DC, told the crowd. He later urged the group to continue mobilizing for justice after President Donald Trump leaves office, echoing the cautious optimism of many of the event’s left-leaning speakers. “Racism did not stop with Donald Trump and it will not end with his departure,” he said. Steven Kiernan, a 33-year-old Marine veteran, traveled from Eugene, Oregon, to make sure every vote is counted in this year’s presidential election, which he called the most important election of his lifetime.”We all served to protect the Constitution and rights of all Americans,” he said, surrounds by other members of progressive veterans group Common Defense.
For Jaya Blaser, the gathering at McPherson Square was an outing. The 7-year-old from Arlington stayed up past her bed time on Election Day, filling in a color-coded map as the election results came in.
“Donald Trump is not a good president and is saying that he won’t count every vote,” she said, snacking on a clementine and crackers. “That’s not good.”
As the afternoon stretched into evening, the rally turned into a watch party with CNN blasting on the screen.
Many nearby buildings remained boarded-up in anticipation of unrest that failed to materialize. Hundreds gathered late Tuesday and early Wednesday for a carnival-like watch party and protest that were at times tense but mostly peaceful.
By morning, international news outlets were setting up for live shots at nearby Black Lives Matter Plaza. The protesters were gone, and sidewalks were littered with abandoned helmets and crates of spray paint near a black fence covered with protest signs.
The cordoned-off White House was barely visible, a fact that frustrated passersby who bent and craned to take photos of the mansion over the signs that bore messages such as “loser” and “end fascism.”
Just before 9 a.m., a man on a bicycle slowed as he passed the fence encircling the White House. He took in the scene, read the messages and observed the assembled reporters.
Before kicking off again, he chuckled, then bellowed:
“Good morning, Donald!”
Mela, 19, and Amara, 21, who declined to give their last names, came to the plaza to “see the aftermath” of a night of protest and nail-biting anxiety.
They had been at the watch party at McPherson Square, bundled against the cold, nervously watching the results roll in until about 3 a.m.
Mela, who voted this year in her first election in Virginia, said she has been “especially engaged in politics. Way more than I ever have been before.”
She posed for a photo in front of the wall of protest art as Amara framed her with the Washington Monument in the distance.
She had helped to reassemble the display after conservative activists tore down signs that had been up since the summer. She said she wanted to memorialize the moment, and the protests, “just in case they’re not here for much longer.”
European election observers decry Trump’s ‘baseless allegations’ of voter fraud
InternationalNov 05. 2020Voters line up early in Cranberry, Pa., at the Cranberry Highlands Golf Course on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson
By The Washington Post · Carol Morello · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS, EUROPE WASHINGTON – International election observers on Wednesday praised the U.S. vote as orderly but condemned President Donald Trump’s “baseless allegations” of fraudulent ballot counts and suggestion that the tally be stopped midstream; they said he had undermined public confidence in democratic institutions.
“Nobody – no politician, no elected official, nobody – should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the lawmakers sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to observe a U.S. election for the ninth time.
“Coming after such a highly dynamic campaign, making sure that every vote is counted is a fundamental obligation of all branches of government,” he said. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent President, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”
At the invitation of the State Department, the OSCE sent over 100 observers to more than 30 states to watch the vote. The preliminary findings they released Wednesday will be followed by a more comprehensive report early next year by the election monitoring branch of the OSCE.
The observers expressed a measure of admiration for the administration of the election, and a heavy dose of criticism. They portrayed Election Day and the early voting in preceding weeks as “competitive and well-managed” amid the coronavirus pandemic, despite the more than 400 lawsuits already filed in 44 states.
But the preliminary report spread its criticism broadly. It expressed concern about the “acrimonious campaign rhetoric,” especially by Trump, who the observers said had often blurred the lines between campaigning and governing.
The team said the media had provided accurate information. But it accused cable networks of infusing their reporting with opinion and bias and newspapers of showing political leanings. It said online websites “regularly presented exaggerated or ungrounded messages” that were amplified by social media.
Urszula Gacek, a former Polish diplomat who led the observers from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said a team that visited post offices to watch the handling of mail-in ballots found “nothing untoward.”
“We feel that allegations of systemic wrongdoing in these elections have no solid ground,” she said. “The system has held up well.”
The observers’ biggest criticism was for Trump’s remarks and his conduct. In releasing the report, Gacek said she was impressed by the high voter turnout “despite deliberate attempts by the incumbent president to weaken confidence in the election process.”
The report lambasted Trump’s “discriminatory and pejorative” statements against women and others, and charged he had misused his position.
“The distinction between state and party activities was not always respected, as the incumbent president repeatedly used his official capacity for political advantage,” it said.
The report said “most candidates” had misrepresented facts, “especially from the incumbent president, thereby detracting from the ability of voters to accurately appraise the candidate’s views and qualifications.” And it criticized Trump for refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses and his repeated claims that the election was rigged.
“Such statements by an incumbent president weaken public confidence in state institutions and were perceived by many as increasing the potential for politically motivated violence after the elections,” the report said.
Former Vice President and presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks Thursday in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 
Flameless candles are illuminated after being placed at the memorial for George Floyd outside Cup Foods to celebrate what would have been Floyd’s 47th birthday on Oct. 14 in Minneapolis. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Joshua Lott. 
Biden supporters on Election Night, waiting in their car outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 
Dan Beeton, center, brings up the rear as scores of marchers took to the streets on Nov. 4, 2020, in Pittsburgh, Penn. Several progressive and union groups met near the Pittsburgh City-County Building and marched and chanted for several blocks with vote counting fairness being one of the major causes for the march. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson 
Biden 
As the sun rises in the nation’s capital on the day after Election Day, a thin group of mostly media stand by or do stand-up news feeds from Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House on Nov. 4. With tensions flaring across the country leading up to Election Day, officials, experts and activists have been gearing up for an array of possibilities about what they might face, including potential voter intimidation, clashes around the polls or spiraling unrest. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jahi Chikwendiu. 
Voters line up early in Cranberry, Pa., at the Cranberry Highlands Golf Course on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson 
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