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Biden, Warner wins show Democrats still dominate Virginia

InternationalNov 05. 2020

Biden

Biden 

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.”

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Tight American election transfixes world, fuels fears over U.S. democracy

InternationalNov 05. 2020

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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Trump campaign mounts legal barrage in 3 states as narrow margins raise stakes for battles over which ballots will count

InternationalNov 05. 2020Philadelphia city workers process mail-in ballots in a secure room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bonnie Jo Mount 

By The Washington Post · Elise Viebeck, Robert Barnes, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Jon Swaine ·NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW 
WASHINGTON – Razor-thin vote margins in a half-dozen presidential battleground states are raising the stakes for legal fights over which ballots will count, a strategy that President Donald Trump’s campaign vowed Wednesday to aggressively pursue.

Trump’s reelection campaign said Wednesday it would launch a legal blitz to try to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania and Michigan and would seek a recount in Wisconsin, threatening to draw out the final results of the razor-thin White House contest.

The campaign’s aggressive legal posture while the presidential race remains unresolved underscored how the close margins in key states have raised the stakes for litigation over which ballots will count. It comes after Trump, who repeatedly has made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the election, vowed to get the courts to determine the outcome of the race.

Democrats said they were unfazed by what they said was legal posturing by the president’s campaign, noting that former Vice President Joe Biden had narrow lead in all three states. They said they were well prepared to fend off any legal actions.

“We’re winning the election, we’ve won the election, and we’re going to defend that election,” Bob Bauer, a top attorney for the Biden campaign, said Wednesday morning in a call with reporters. “So we don’t have to do anything but protect the rights of voters and to stand up for the democratic process.”

In rapid-fire announcements throughout the day, Trump campaign officials said they planned to file suits to halt vote-counting until more access is granted for Republican observers in Michigan and Pennsylvania; seek to initiate a recount in Wisconsin; and intervene in litigation pending before the Supreme Court over Pennsylvania’s extended deadline for mail ballots.

The campaign also said it would challenge guidance related to voter identification rules for some voters in Pennsylvania, one of a half dozen legal efforts announced by Republicans in the state.

“With these key actions, President Trump is telling all Americans he will do whatever it takes to ensure the integrity of this election for the good of the nation,” deputy campaign manager Justin Clark said in a statement.

Trump said early Wednesday that he wants the Supreme Court to determine which votes should count, falsely claiming victory while millions of votes remained outstanding.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” the president said at the White House. “We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Legal experts noted that Trump cannot simply seek the Supreme Court’s intervention in the election and stop the counting of ballots.

There is no routine review of election results at the Supreme Court, and the court’s most consequential election case – Bush v. Gore, which effectively determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential race – did not arrive there for about a month.

The court’s power is constrained, and justices can entertain only specific constitutional questions that have risen from lower courts. A direct appeal from the president to intervene in an election does not count under these rules.

“You can’t bring a case directly to the Supreme Court in an election dispute … And there’s no legal cause of action that says, ‘Stop the count and declare me the winner,’ ” said Joshua Douglas, law professor at the University of Kentucky’s Rosenberg College of Law.

Bauer said that if Trump at some point sought to go before the court to try to stop the counting of ballots that were lawfully cast, “he will be in for one of the most embarrassing defeats the president ever suffered before the highest court of the land.”

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, D, called the effort to stop ballot counting in the state an attempt “to subvert the democratic process.”

“Pennsylvania will fight every attempt to undermine the election,” he said. “We will count every vote.”

In Wisconsin, Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe rejected the idea that there have been irregularities in the state’s count, telling reporters that the election “proceeded in a very normal fashion.”

Her comments to reporters came after Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement that the campaign would request an immediate recount of the vote in Wisconsin, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

Wolfe said that the counting for the 2020 election had gone exceptionally smoothly and to suggest otherwise was an “insult” to election workers who had prepared carefully for the day.

She noted that the counting process was open to the public from start to finish. Some localities even live-streamed images of their absentee ballot counting. “There are no dark corners or locked doors in elections,” she said. “Anyone was free to watch.”

In Michigan, which Edison Research projected Biden would win, Democrats said that the lawsuit the Trump campaign filed seeking to halt vote-counting was preposterous – calling it a stunt designed to promote a false White House narrative of fraud in the counting of mail ballots.

“My understanding is counting of ballots across the state is nearly complete,” said Christopher Trebilcock, an election law specialist representing Democratics in the state. “The case is moot. If they want to challenge the results of the election after all legal votes are cast, Michigan law has a process for that after the canvass is complete.”

Whether any case ends up before the Supreme Court remains to be seen. The most obvious path for a review by the high court would be specific challenge to ballots in a closely divided state that could tip the results of the election.

The Supreme Court’s work typically comes after a ruling in a case by a local judge that has gone through the appellate process. In Bush v. Gore, the court was reviewing decisions of the Florida Supreme Court, for instance, and issued its opinion Dec. 12, with the deadline for naming members of the electoral college looming.

Extended deadlines for returning mail ballots in many states were already hotly contested in courts before Election Day. But some key cases were not heard by the Supreme Court, which could agree to accept appeals of those suits – now with a new conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, on the bench.

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court allowed mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to count if they arrive by the end of the day on Nov. 6, delivering a win for voting rights advocates and Democrats who argued voters deserved more time because of the pandemic and delays in the mail.

Republicans twice sought help from the U.S. Supreme Court and were rebuffed, but Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch suggested they are open to revisiting the case after the election.

“There is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution,” Alito wrote.

“The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election,” Alito added.

The three justices said the commonwealth should segregate those ballots that are delivered after Election Day in case of further legal action, and state officials agreed.

The Trump campaign on Wednesday afternoon filed a brief seeking to intervene in that case.

A Democratic lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Biden team’s legal strategy in Pennsylvania said the campaign believes the best thing it can do is stay out of the way of election officials as they work through the count.

The Biden team believes it has a strong argument under a legal principle known as the reliance interest, which protects voters relying on instructions they received on how to vote legally, the lawyer said.

“The Supreme Court really cares about the reliance interest,” the lawyer said. “You could see them saying, ‘Yes, we believe that the state courts overstepped their bounds here, but we are not going to throw out ballots that voters believed at the time were lawfully cast.’ “

Whether the Supreme Court plays a role in post-election legal fights could depend on how close the results are.

Douglas said that the question of who has authority to extend a state’s mail ballot deadline is “certainly a live legal issue” but that he does not expect the issue to rise to the Supreme Court during the 2020 presidential election unless the vote margins are extremely narrow.

Even then, four justices would have to agree to take a case that risks further politicizing the court. Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch might agree, Douglas said, but it’s unclear whether Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. or Justice Brett Kavanaugh would want to – “and we have no idea about Barrett.”

“I don’t think resolving Trump v. Biden is something the justices want to do,” he said. “I think certainly Chief Justice Roberts is very concerned about the institutional legitimacy of the court. I don’t think it’s the sort of things he wants the court to resolve.”

Aziz Huq, a constitution law professor at the University of Chicago, said he thinks that it is “unlikely that there will be a dispute about ballot-counting that will reach the Supreme Court.”

He pointed out that if Wisconsin turns out to be a tipping point state, Republicans have already brought litigation about the ballot deadline in that state to the Supreme Court and won.

Meanwhile, Republicans filed a slew of new suits after polls opened Tuesday.

In Pennsylvania, a GOP congressional candidate filed a federal lawsuit against authorities in Montgomery County seeking to toss out mail ballots with errors that were fixed by voters before Election Day. A second Republican lawsuit in state court claimed that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, D, broke the law by advising county officials Monday to help voters resolve errors discovered on their ballots.

The Democratic National Committee has intervened in both cases, arguing the Republican candidate lacked standing to bring her lawsuit and did not demonstrate “future irreparable harm,” and that Democratic candidates could be harmed by the statewide case.

In another lawsuit filed Tuesday, the Trump campaign accused Bucks County election officials of inappropriately disclosing the identities of voters with defective ballots to party observers seeking to help them correct the errors. A judge rejected the petition; the campaign did not respond to a question about whether it plans to appeal.

In yet another case, the Trump campaign appealed against a court’s rejection of its request to be able to observe ballot counting in Philadelphia more closely.

A presiding Election Day judge ruled on Tuesday that Trump’s observers were given enough access and that county officials were not required to allow them to “observe the writing on the outside of the ballots.”

The Trump campaign filed a notice on Wednesday that it would challenge the decision in Commonwealth Court. It did not immediately set out its arguments.

Nevada, where Biden clung to a tiny margin Wednesday morning, has already seen a slew of last-minute GOP suits challenging the counting process.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday night unanimously rejected a request from the Nevada Republican Party and the Trump campaign to halt the counting of some mail ballots in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold where votes for Biden would be key to his potential victory.

As a result, Clark County will be able to continue counting most mail ballots under its current protocol. County officials must count any mail ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive by Nov. 10, and they must complete their canvass by Nov. 16.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Biden held a narrow lead of fewer than 8,000 votes in Nevada, but there many mail and provisional ballots left to count, including mail ballots received up to a week after Election Day.

In an interview Tuesday, Gov. Steve Sisolak, D, said that the legal tactics were an effort by Republicans to undercut the Democratic advantage.

“They’re knocking on courthouse doors, and we’re knocking on Nevada doors,” Sisolak said. “I have confidence that the court system is going to see these for what they are.”

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Analysis: Here’s where the election stands and what’s next

InternationalNov 05. 2020Mail ballots are scanned in a secure room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bonnie Jo Mount 

By The Washington Post · David Weigel · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

The morning after the 2020 election, there are millions of votes left to count, as expected. More than 2 million of them, as of Wednesday morning, are coming from the pivotal states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – as expected. The president used his election night megaphone to declare victory, urge a halt to the vote count and encourage lawsuits to challenge ballots expected to break against him. That was expected, too.

But anyone who tells you they expected the race to end this way, from congressional candidates to party strategists to newsletter editors, is not telling you the truth. There are Republicans across the country who woke up Tuesday girding for defeat and woke up Wednesday getting ready for their Capitol Hill orientations; there are Democrats who assumed that Joe Biden could never run behind Hillary Clinton’s numbers with working-class White voters and are confounded by the places where he did.

The Trump and Biden campaigns spent the morning laying out their paths to victory, with Democrats emphasizing the gains they expected to make in the mail ballots that were counted last in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Republicans suggesting two things: that Democrats’ estimate of the mail ballots was off and that they’d win enough of the outstanding vote in Nevada and Arizona to take those states back out of Joe Biden’s column.

Republicans working down-ballot races had more to celebrate: They clearly broke through in some places that had remained Democratic as recently as 2018, holding on to the Senate, reducing Democrats’ numbers in the House and denying Democrats majorities in state legislatures that looked to be trending that way a week ago.

“The president ran a heck of a race,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “Everyone said he had no shot, [but he] turned it into a cliffhanger against everybody’s expectations. I think it helped us in our Senate races.”

Here are the immediate questions.

– – –

Who’ll win the presidential election? 

That depends on outstanding ballots in the states that have yet to be called, which fit into two categories. In Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, ballots that did not arrive by Election Day will not be counted. In North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there’s a grace period: Ballots that were postmarked by Nov. 3 can be counted if they show up by Nov. 12 and Nov. 6, respectively.

The president, and many pro-Trump voices in conservative media, are attempting to spread confusion, portraying any ballots counted now as mysteriously pro-Biden. “They are finding Biden votes all over the place,” Trump tweeted Wednesday afternoon. But as we knew going into today, there’s a reason that so many absentee ballots, cast days before the election was over, were not counted quickly: Republican legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania, in particular, rejected Democrats’ proposal to allow ballots to be processed before Nov. 3. States that did so, such as Ohio, rocketed through their first vote count; states that did not are working through them now.

The Trump and Biden campaigns are describing paths to victory, in different terms. On Wednesday morning, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would win after every “legal” ballot got counted; Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon noted that “if Donald Trump got his wish, and we stopped counting ballots right now, Vice President Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States.”

– – –

How is that possible? 

Because the unfinished count Wednesday afternoon had the president trailing in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. The Trump campaign’s hope last week was for the president to be clearly ahead on the first counts, which did not include most mail ballots. That did not happen, denying the president the situation that boosted George W. Bush in the contested 2000 election: an early, erroneous call by networks that left many voters thinking he’d won the election and Democrats were trying to “steal” it.

That’s hard to do in this context. When Republican activists showed up to a Detroit ballot count Wednesday, shortly after the Trump campaign announced that it would sue to stop the count until its observers could watch it, Biden held a lead in the Michigan count about 40 times bigger than the one Bush held at the start of the Florida recount.

– – –

What happens next? 

Lots of counting, and lots of lawsuits. The unrest that leaders worried about in big cities did not pan out; a violent clash in the District of Columbia and some flag-burning in Portland, Ore., was about as bad as it got. But as ballots are tallied in the closest states, watch for dueling rallies outside the counting centers, as we saw after Florida’s close 2018 election and, more famously and dramatically, after the 2000 election.

The state to watch: Pennsylvania, where the gap between absentee ballots and in-person Election Day votes has been as massive as expected. And that is what Democrats feared. Republicans had focused on Philadelphia, where they have long baselessly accused Democrats of holding back votes until they know what they need to win the state, in their pre-election poll-watching; the Trump campaign shared videos that it claimed to show a voter putting mail ballots in a drop box, and a poll watcher being denied entry to a voting site he was later allowed into.

States will not officially certify results for weeks, and the Trump campaign has announced that it will request a recount in Wisconsin, which processed ballots quickly and found Biden leading by a bit more than Trump’s 2016 margin there. A recount that year, requested by Green Party nominee Jill Stein, found a net 131-vote gain for Trump; several Trump allies in Wisconsin, such as former governor Scott Walker, have already said Biden’s 20,000-odd vote margin is larger than any recount, historically, has overturned. (Biden’s margin is bigger than the 0.25 percentage points that trigger a state-funded recount; a campaign can request a recount if the margin is below 1% and it’s willing to pay for it.)

By seeking a recount at all, the Trump campaign is working the refs a bit, urging media outlets to avoid another call like the one, by The Associated Press and Fox News, that put Arizona on Biden’s map. So long as the election is close, rumors ranging from Sharpies canceling Republican ballots in Arizona (they are not) to a mysterious six-figure addition of Biden votes in Michigan (it was a technical error undone later Wednesday morning) to unspecified allegations in Philadelphia will persist.

“We’re winning the election, we’ve won the election, and we’re going to defend that election,” Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer said Wednesday.

– – –

What else is up in the air? 

Dozens of House races, Senate races in Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, and two more Senate races that could go to runoffs in Georgia. And it’s too early to assess how votes and demographics shifted until more votes are counted. 

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Americans try to act and feel normal on day of uncertainty, inner turmoil

InternationalNov 05. 2020Election officials from the Allegheny County Elections Division look for a particular bin of ballots on Nov. 4, 2020, at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, Penn. The bin was thought to have been left at a polling place but the search revealed it was indeed in this warehouse. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson 

By The Washington Post · Maura Judkis, Ellen McCarthy, Ashley Fetters · NATIONAL, FEATURES, POLITICS
Vanessa Council needed something to take her mind off the unbearable wait for election results, and she decided it would be the chickens that live inside her phone. The morning of the election, the 28-year-old graphic designer from Northampton County, N.C., downloaded a game called Egg, Inc., which allows users to immerse themselves in the life of a chicken farmer. 

“The more chickens you have, the more eggs you have, and the more eggs you have, the more trucks you need to ship the eggs,” says Council. 

By noon Wednesday, as incoming ballot tranches scrambled maps and minds, Council reached a level of the game called “Quantum egg.”

What does that mean? Doesn’t matter. Any math beats electoral math.

America went to bed on Tuesday night without knowing who the president would be, and woke up not knowing when they would find out the answer. And so people held their breath and tried to do normal things to get through a very abnormal day. 

Susie Shaffer, 69, of Silver Spring, Md., scrubbed her freezer. 

“Cleaning out a closet or scrubbing a floor, you know, the gratification is immediate, which is I think is what I need right now,” says Shaffer. The longer the count takes, the cleaner her house will get. With some results not expected until Thursday or beyond, she paced herself. “I’ve told my sons they can’t rake the leaves,” she says, “because I need to save that for later, if necessary.”

Shelley Laabs Weber, 41, of San Antonio, wrangled her kids into virtual school, while furtively checking her phone every few minutes. All day long, she had a song called “The Next Right Thing” stuck in her head. It’s from the movie “Frozen 2,” one of her kids’ favorites, but the lyrics are pretty grim.

Hello, darkness, I’m ready to succumb . . .

But first, the day. “Today, the next right step was feeding my children tacos and sending them to school like everything is normal and like the adults aren’t all freaking out,” she says. 

Wednesday was Lexi Goldwyn’s 24th birthday, not that anyone in the District of Columbia noticed. Her mom called her early in the morning to talk about the election. 

“And then she hung up, and then she called me right back and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t even wish you happy birthday,’ ” she says. 

Yes, we were warned. Experts talked for days about how, due to the large number of mailed-in ballots and states’ varying timelines for counting them, a long wait was probable.

Still, it was hard to prepare for the feeling of uncertainty. 

Jessica MacNair, 39, a therapist in Falls Church, Va., planned weeks ago to take Wednesday off, and advised several therapists in her practice to do the same as they attended to their own angst. 

“It’s not always best practice to work with people who are mirroring your issues,” MacNair said.

And yet her phone kept buzzing. Not with news alerts, but texts from clients asking if she had openings for that day, or anytime soon. 

“People just aren’t coping very well,” MacNair says. 

Others in politics weren’t faring much better. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, spent election night at the White House, and characterized the time since then as “not relaxing.” 

“I’ve spent the last 16 hours making calls to our top donors, to our endorsed candidates, congratulating some very hard fought victories,” Dannenfelser said via email. But the uneasy wait would go down smoother with some fizzy, alcoholic refreshment. “Plan to have a White Claw soon,” she added.

Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, meanwhile, was feeling slightly more optimistic Wednesday than he was Tuesday night about a Biden victory. The former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency was among the prominent Republicans who had endorsed Biden.

The Pennsylvania native kept a hopeful eye on election results in his home state, but he did not plan to turn any TV news coverage back on until later Wednesday evening. His wife, he says, wants to start Season 2 of “Schitt’s Creek.”

The outcome may come later, but nobody knows for sure when the uncertainty will be resolved. So Lisa Honan, 39, a project officer with the Environmental Protection Agency who lives in King of Prussia, Pa., spent much of Wednesday putting up Christmas decorations and trying not to think about the careers of her and her husband, who works for the National Park Service. 

“It’s a good thing I’m medicated for my anxiety normally,” Honan sighs. “That helps.”

Over in Queens in New York City, performance artist Christen Clifford, 49, had planned a whole list of activities to get through the wait: a walk in Forest Park, talks with friends, a yoga session, some plants to repot, donations to make to a local food pantry. 

A long, long list of stuff to keep her mind and body occupied. How was that working out for her? 

“Well,” she reported, approaching midday. “I’m still in bed.”

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USPS data shows thousands of mailed ballots missed Election Day deadlines

InternationalNov 05. 2020Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post 

By  The Washington Post · Jacob Bogage, Christopher Ingraham · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW 
WASHINGTON – Nearly 7% of ballots in U.S. Postal Service sorting facilities on Tuesday were not processed on time for submission to election officials, according to data the agency filed Wednesday in federal court, potentially leaving tens of thousands of ballots caught in the mail system during an especially tight presidential race.

The Postal Service reported the timely processing – which includes most mail-handling steps outside of pickup and delivery – of 93.3% of ballots on Election Day, its best processing score in several days, but still well below the 97% target that postal and voting experts say the agency should hit.

The Postal Service processed 115,630 ballots on Tuesday, a volume much lower than in recent days after weeks of warnings about chronic mail delays. Of that number, close to 8,000 ballots were not processed on time, a small proportion but one that could factor heavily in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which do not accept ballots after Election Day and could be decided by a few thousand votes.

Earlier Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia ordered the Postal Service to sweep 12 postal processing facilities that cover 15 states for ballots. The agency rebuffed that order and said it would stick to its own inspection schedule, which voting rights advocates worried was too late in the day for found ballots to make it to vote counters.

The directive came after the Postal Service disclosed that more than 300,000 ballots nationwide could not be traced. Those ballots received entry bar code scans at processing facilities, but not exit scans. The agency said the likelihood of that many ballots being misplaced was very low; mail clerks had been ordered to sort ballots by hand in many locations and items that were pulled out for expedited delivery were not given an exit scan.

“We know yesterday that if the sweeps were doing their job, mail that was identified as ballots and were in the system should have been pulled out and delivered, and it may be that affects what we see as the scores,” said Allison Zieve, an attorney representing the NAACP, which brought the lawsuit against the Postal Service with other civil and voting rights groups. “The problem is, in part because of the timing and in part because they haven’t given us all the information we asked for, it’s hard to know whether the numbers we saw today – the low scores for example in Atlanta and Central Pennsylvania – it’s hard to assess how big a problem that is.” 

About 101 million Americans cast their ballots before Election Day, according to an early vote tally maintained by Michael McDonald at the University of Florida, with roughly 60 million others voting in-person on Election Day. Given the widely publicized issues with mail delivery, experts last week began advising absentee voters to drop off their ballots in person rather than send them by mail. The high rates of early voting led to generally uncrowded conditions at polling places nationwide on Election Day, although long lines were reported in some areas.

Sullivan had given the mail agency until 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to conduct the “all clear” checks to ensure that any found ballots could be delivered before polls closed. But in a filing sent to the court just before 5 p.m., Justice Department attorneys representing the Postal Service said the agency would not abide by the order, to better accommodate inspectors’ schedules.

Attorney John Robinson, writing for the Justice Department, noted that the daily review was already scheduled to occur from 4 to 8 p.m. on election night. “Given the time constraints set by this Court’s order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30 pm to 3:00 pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the Election, something which Defendants did not understand the Court to invite or require.”

“This is super frustrating,” Zieve said Tuesday. “If they get all the sweeps done today in time, it doesn’t matter if they flouted the judge’s order. They say here they will get the sweeps done between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., but 8 p.m. is too late, and in some states 5 p.m. is too late.”

Sullivan was incensed during Wednesday’s hearing over the sweeps, accusing the Postal Service of attempting to run the clock out on his order to avoid conducting the sweeps.

“It just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth for the clock to run out – game’s over – and then to find out there was no compliance with a very important court order,” he said.

He said that at some point, he would order Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to appear before the court or sit through a sworn deposition, and intimated that he’d consider contempt charges against postal leadership, saying “someone might have to pay a price,” for defying his order.

It was DeJoy’s aggressive cost-cutting regimen, according to postal experts, that created sustained slowdowns in the mail service that over one five-week span delayed more than 7% of the nation’s first-class mail.

The Postal Service began election mail “all clear” sweeps in January, agency spokesman David Partenheimer wrote in an emailed statement, to search for misplaced political mail (such as campaign ads) and election mail (ballots, ballot applications and voter registration information).

Since Thursday, he said, agents from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the agency’s law enforcement arm, conducted daily reviews at 220 ballot processing facilities. Inspectors walk the facility and observe mail conditions and check daily political- and election-mail logs.

In the past 14 months, Partenheimer said, the Postal Service has processed more than 4.5 billion pieces of political and election mail, up 114% from the 2016 general-election cycle.

“Ballots will continue to be accepted and processed as they are presented to us and we will deliver them to their intended destination,” Partenheimer said.

Timely ballot processing scores, which indicate the proportion of ballots sorted, postmarked and transported within the agency’s one-to-three-day service window, worsened in the run-up to Election Day, according to data the agency submitted to the court. In 28 states, election officials must receive ballots by the end of Election Day to be counted.

Voting and postal experts say the mail agency should be able to process 97% of incoming ballots – or completed ballots sent to election officials. But data shows the Postal Service missed that mark seven out of eight days. And in the five days ending Monday, processing scores dropped, from 97.1% to 89.6% on Monday. (The Postal Service did not report Sunday data.)

In 17 postal districts that cover 151 electoral votes, Monday’s on-time processing rate was even lower: 81.1%.

Sullivan on Tuesday ordered officials from the Postal Inspection Service, the agency’s law enforcement arm, or the Postal Service Office of Inspector General, its independent watchdog, to inspect all processing facilities in the districts of Central Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Metro, Detroit, Colorado/Wyoming, Atlanta, Houston, Alabama, Northern New England (Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine), Greater South Carolina, South Florida, Lakeland (Wisconsin) and Arizona (which includes New Mexico) by 3 p.m.

The Postal Service continued Tuesday to try to track down the more than 300,000 ballots it said had entered processing plants but could not be traced. In 17 postal districts in swing states that account for 151 electoral votes, more than 81,000 ballots were untraceable. In Los Angeles, 48,120 ballots were missing, the most of any district. San Diego was next, with 42,543 unaccounted.

“At this point,” said Zieve, “we don’t have any way of knowing if those ballots are of concern or if they aren’t.”

Sullivan has been more aggressive than judges in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington state to grant increased oversight of the mail system. He has ordered the Postal Service to report daily data on ballot performance scores and to provide written explanations each day for underperforming districts.

He has scheduled daily hearings – some of which have included sworn testimony from postal executives – on the agency’s struggles. On Monday, he lamented the nation’s crazy-quilt of mail-in-voting rules, saying the system should be overhauled.

“When I read about the astronaut voting seamlessly from outer space, there must be a better way for Congress to address all these issues,” he said.

Sullivan contrasted the chaotic mishmash of Election Day rules with the relative simplicity of the federal income-tax deadline: “Think about it. Every year everyone knows to file taxes by April 15th. It’s seamless. If you don’t file, there’s penalties. But everyone knows – that’s a given.”

By contrast, state vote-by-mail deadlines present a spaghetti-like tangle for the Postal Service and voters to navigate.

“Postmarks matter, postmarks don’t matter. … Delivery matters, delivery after a date doesn’t matter. Why can’t there be one set of rules?” Sullivan said, concluding, “Someone needs to be tinkering with the system to make sure it works seamlessly and better for the American voters.”

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U.S. picks Taiwan for first armed drones sale under eased rules

InternationalNov 05. 2020A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle drone stands on display during the Singapore Airshow at the Changi Exhibition Centre in Singapore on Feb. 11, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by SeongJoon Cho. /Photo by: SeongJoon Cho — Bloomberg Location: Singapore, Singapore 

By Syndication The Washington Post,  Bloomberg · Iain Marlow, Samson Ellis

The U.S. will sell Taiwan armed Reaper drones in a $600 million deal that will likely further anger China and help lock in a shift in American military support for Taipei during the next presidential administration.

The State Department on Tuesday approved the proposed sale of the four weapons-ready MQ-9B drones from General Atomics — capable of carrying laser and GPS-guided munitions — along with radar, sensors and ground control stations for flying the aircraft. It was the first time the U.S. has approved the sale of armed drones since the Trump administration eased export restrictions in July.

“This proposed sale will improve the recipient’s capability to meet current and future threats by providing timely Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, target acquisition, and counter-land, counter-sea, and anti-submarine strike capabilities for its security and defense,” the State Department said in a statement. “The capability is a deterrent to regional threats and will strengthen the recipient’s self-defense,” it said.

The move comes shortly after similar approval in recent weeks for two arms sales worth a total of $4.2 billion for the democratically controlled island, which Beijing considers part of its territory. The deals leading up to Tuesday’s election in the U.S. continue a notable shift away from the sale of more traditional, expensive weapons platforms — such as warplanes and tanks — toward a so-called “hedgehog” defensive strategy designed to make the costs of a Chinese invasion too high by deploying nimble weapons such as mobile missile systems, mines and drones.

China’s military has continued to pile pressure on Taiwan, with People’s Liberation Army aircraft breaching the island’s air defense identification zone on a near-daily basis. Tensions are also high between the world’s two biggest economies, with China featuring prominently in election rhetoric between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called the latest arms sale a “severe violation” of the one-China principle and urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel its arms sale plans to avoid further damaging China-U.S. relations.”

“It grossly interferes in China’s domestic affairs and gravely undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests,” Wang told a daily briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. He vowed China would “take legitimate and necessary responses in light of the changing developments,” without elaborating.

While the U.S. recently sold Taipei F-16 warplanes and Abrams tanks, military analysts have argued that these expensive acquisitions are particularly vulnerable should China launch a barrage of missiles to knock out the island’s defenses — including parked jets and vehicles, runways and military facilities — ahead of an invasion.

“The trend for U.S. security assistance to Taiwan is to shift away from large platforms and systems like the F-16V fighters and M1A2 Abrams tanks sold to Taiwan in 2019,” said Shirley Kan, an independent specialist in Asian security affairs and a member of the research organization Global Taiwan Institute’s advisory board.

Taiwan has also scrambled around 3,000 jets this year as Chinese military aircraft fly close to the island, and a crash of an aging F-5 fighter has fueled concerns about the age of its fleet.

“The main benefit of these drones will be to improve our surveillance and detection capabilities in the Taiwan Strait,” Shu Hsiao-huang, assistant research fellow at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said, citing their ability to stay in the air for long periods. “This will help us maintain stronger surveillance on the areas around Taiwan.”

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Anxious electorate lifts turnout in key states

InternationalNov 04. 2020Voters wait outside West Allis City Hall near Milwaukee, Wis., on Nov. 3, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sara Stathas 

By The Washington Post · Jenna Johnson, Jose A. Del Real · NATIONAL, POLITICS

A record number of Americans are expected to have voted in this year’s presidential election, making their voices heard at a time when the country is tensely polarized and battling a deadly pandemic.

First-time voter Quanique Beasley, 33, is excited about voting for the first time on Nov. 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken

Even before Election Day, more than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots, nearly three-quarters of the total number in 2016. With the stakes high for supporters of both candidates, voters shattered records in several key states.

In six states, voters cast more ballots during early voting than they did during the entire election in 2016, and then grew those numbers on Election Day. Nine additional states came close to doing the same.

It was still unclear late Tuesday which candidate would benefit most from these increases in a race that was neck and neck.

President Donald Trump took Florida, a perennial battleground, where more than 11 million voted – an increase of nearly 1.6 million compared with 2016. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, a Democratic stronghold that has a high concentration of Latino voters, Joe Biden led Trump by about 83,000 votes – a far smaller lead than the 290,000-vote margin Clinton had in 2016.

Democratic strategists in Florida had long worried that the national party was not investing enough resources between presidential election cycles to build sustained support among Latino voters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign heavily focused on the state’s Latinos, particularly Cuban Americans, for years.

A different story played out in Arizona, a new battleground state, where Biden was leading with more than 76% of votes counted. Democrats hoped this would be a culmination of a decade of grass-roots political organizing among Latinos. Political activists have insisted that Arizona could have flipped in 2016 if national Democrats had invested more money earlier.

In both of these states, Latinos will probably play a deciding role. Early exit polls suggest that while Biden won the Latino vote 2 to 1 nationally, Trump improved his standing among Latino voters in at least two swing states since 2016: Florida and Georgia.

Some of the largest spikes in voter participation appeared in states that Trump easily won in 2016 but have since become battlegrounds because of rapid changes in their populations: Texas, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. All of these states have seen an influx of new arrivals, often Democrats relocating from places such as California, New York and Illinois, and large numbers of young people of color turning 18 each year. There has also been a number of Republicans and right-leaning independents repelled by Trump who were willing to vote for Democrats.

Swing states that have long been key to both campaigns saw different levels of early voting. Pennsylvania, which was decided by just over one percentage point in 2016, had about 2.5 million votes cast early, which was roughly 40% of the total number in 2016. Wisconsin was at about 65% of its 2016 number, and Michigan was at nearly 60%.

Over the past several months, both presidential campaigns targeted voters who didn’t participate in 2016 to try to persuade them to vote this year.

For Trump and Republicans, that meant finding those who liked the president but don’t usually vote, especially men. For Biden and Democrats, that meant connecting with voters who haven’t bothered to vote in many years and people newly eligible, including those who turned 18 since the last presidential election, naturalized citizens, and felons who regained their voting rights.

“Really why I decided to vote this time around was just how divisive the last four years have felt, and a lot of what’s gone on politically feels like tearing people apart and polarizing,” Jana Hainey, 32, an email marketing specialist from Kansas City, Mo., who cast her first-ever ballot this election and voted for Biden. “I kind of really wanted to make sure after the last four years to make sure my voice mattered.”

While much attention has been given to the bursts of new Democratic voters, especially in urban and suburban areas, Trump also inspired a number of first-time voters to get involved.

Brian Dalley, 60, who lives in Cascade, Mich., always thought the country ran just fine without his input. But following heart surgery in April, he more closely followed the news and was alarmed by protests that had turned violent in some cities and the widespread disrespect of the president.

“You’re supposed to get behind your president,” said Dalley, a plumber who was first in line at the polling place near his home Tuesday morning and voted for the first time by filling out a ballot for Trump.

In the final days of the 2020 election, the Biden campaign said it thought its voters would reflect the strength of the “Obama coalition” 12 years ago, which included historic numbers of young people and voters of color.

It was a bullish claim given that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 was due, in part, to her difficulty motivating precisely those voters in certain key states. That and a surge of support for third-party candidates delivered, on the margins, an electoral college victory to Trump.

“To me, 2016 was not a story of what Trump did, it was a story of what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats failed to do. They failed to hold on tightly to that Obama coalition,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “But it’s too simple to say it was a turnout issue. There is a reason people don’t turn out.”

After the 2016 election, Trump’s strength among White voters without college degrees became a topic of intense focus. But Clinton’s relative strength with White college graduates was also a factor.

“These white college graduates, they were more evenly divided before, and for a while they were Republican. But over time they have moved into the Democratic coalition in a powerful way, led by college-educated white women,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, who said anti-Trump sentiment has accelerated the trend.

Belcher said he thinks White college graduates have become likelier to vote for Democrats in part because they have been disturbed by racial conflict during the Trump administration.

Since the 2016 election, the share of voters without college degrees has fallen by nearly 5% nationally, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

And some of the most dramatic demographic changes have transpired in battleground states. In Arizona, for example, the share of White voters without college degrees fell by more than five percentage points since the last election, while the share of Hispanic voters increased by more than 6%.

White men without college degrees fell as a percentage of eligible voters by about 3% in Georgia, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and, to a slightly smaller degree, in Florida, according to that data. White women without college degrees fell as a proportion of the electorate by about 3% in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas.

Meanwhile, the share of Hispanic residents who are eligible to vote grew by 4% in Colorado, 3% in Florida and 3% in Texas – all states that saw a huge increase in voter participation this year.

The burst of first-time voters could be seen in the line that formed at a polling location at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday.

Renna Rebischke-Smith, 18, cast a provisional ballot for Biden because “there are a lot of issues on the table that affect me.” Fiontay Williams, 31, a health-care worker voted for Biden because of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. And Savannah New, 20, voted for Trump because of his support for gun rights.

Across the country, first-time voters for Trump also included Jairo Acedo, a 26-year-old truck driver in Phoenix who worried that a Biden presidency would negatively affect his life, and Ouedia “Exie” Nowling, a 67-year-old living in Pensacola, Fla., who wasn’t interested in politics until Trump was elected.

First-time presidential voters who picked Biden included Leila Ahmed, an 18-year-old college student in Idaho who came to the United States from Kenya in 2005 and who is alarmed by the racism she has seen in the country, and Dejah Wright, a 28-year-old in Atlanta who was not a fan of the former vice president but didn’t want Trump reelected.

In Chicago on Tuesday, there was a block party atmosphere at the United Center, the home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks that was transformed into a polling location. In line was Christian Torres, 19, who was voting for the first time – making him the first in his family to vote in a U.S. election.

His parents and older siblings are from Guadalajara, Mexico, and are undocumented. His younger siblings have yet to turn 18. He voted for Biden, who he hopes will reform the country’s immigration system.

“They don’t have a voice like I do,” he said of his family. “So I want to be their voice.”