Tensions and divisions continue to mount in the United States, which still has two self-declared presidents. That’s even though vote counts remain unfinished, in a very tight race and in a uniquely-conducted vote which was preceded by months of controversy.

For the past week there has been enormous grassroots pressure, mainly coming from conservatives, that confidence in the electoral system has been so repeatedly undermined that a rush to judgment is not acceptable to many.

The state of Georgia announced they need to recount every ballot by hand, and lawsuits may force several other states to do the same. Democrats and seemingly all of the mainstream media are demanding President Donald Trump concede, with challenger Joe Biden maintaining a slight lead.

Top Republicans have refused to acknowledge Biden as the president-elect and thrown their support behind Trump to not concede. Many have insisted that Trump is within his rights to look into charges of “irregularities” in last week’s election.

Three of the past six presidential elections are now disputed. Many warn that massive alienation, instability and possibly violence could result if a large minority refuses to accept any final vote results which are not subjected to the check and balance of a judicial review.

Support for judicial review of the electoral process mainly falls along party lines. For decades the US has had endemic low voter turnout, but those who do vote have become extremely polarized, with the disputed election of the year 2000 often cited as a primary reason.

Without a concession, tensions and legal battles are likely to mount for weeks. On December 6 the Electoral College meets – the US does not decide their president by direct vote – and that institution has become increasingly unpopular due the 2016 disputed election.

One week after they went to vote, the US has become even more bitterly divided regarding their executive branch and electoral system.

Source: Presstv

The Trump administration threw the presidential transition into tumult on Monday, Attorney General William Barr authorizing the Justice Department to probe allegations of voter fraud and President Donald Trump firing the Pentagon chief and blocking government officials from cooperating with President-elect Joe Biden’s team.

Despite little evidence of fraud, Barr signed off on investigations into the unsubstantiated claims made repeatedly by Trump. Even as Biden began assembling experts to face the surging pandemic, the federal agency that needs to green light the beginnings of the transition of power held off on taking that step. And the White House moved to crack down on those not deemed sufficiently loyal as Trump continued to refuse to concede the race.

Top Republicans largely refused to put widespread pressure on Trump to accept his election loss. He remained out of sight at the White House, conversations ongoing about how the defeated president would spend the coming days and weeks as he challenged the people’s verdict.

The ouster of Defense Secretary Mark Esper was expected by some aides to be the first of several firings by Trump, now freed from having to face voters again and angry at those in his administration perceived to be insufficiently loyal. Others believed to be vulnerable: FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA head Gina Haspel and infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Out of sight but not unheard, Trump took to Twitter to again dispute the result of the election, making baseless accusations of widespread “unthinkable and illegal” activity in the vote.

Trump is not expected to formally concede but is likely to grudgingly vacate the White House at the end of his term, according to several people around him. He was in discussion with top allies about the possibility of more campaign-style rallies as he tries to keep his supporters fired up despite his defeat. It was possible they would feature his family and top supporters but not the president himself.

The president was given cover to keep fighting by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, seen by many in the GOP as the one who may eventually need to nudge Trump to the exit.

“Our institutions are actually built for this,” McConnell said as he opened the Senate on Monday. “We have the system in place to consider concerns and President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer countered that the Republicans’ refusal to accept the election results was “extremely dangerous, extremely poisonous to our democracy.”

“Joe Biden won the election fair and square,” Schumer said.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said it was time for the transition to proceed unimpeded. “At this stage, I think the transition should be underway, even though it’s not finalized,” he said. “We want to make sure that the interests of national security and smooth transition” are carried out.

A few other GOP senators sent tepid nods toward a transition. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska offered congratulations to Biden, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine noted the Democrat’s “apparent victory.” But many Republican lawmakers were reluctant to speak up about the election, seeing little political incentive to take a firm stance on Trump’s transition from the White House.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have been hesitant to push Trump to concede to Biden, knowing it would anger their base of Trump’s most devoted supporters. Most were also not overtly encouraging the president’s unfounded claims of fraud, while allowing baseless questions about the election process to linger.

Adding to the sense of uncertainty, the General Services Administration held off on formally beginning the transition, preventing Biden’s teams from gaining access to federal agencies. An agency spokesperson said late Monday that an “ascertainment” on the winner of the election had not yet been made. Citing what the agency did during the extended 2000 electoral recount, it signaled that it may not do so until Trump concedes or the Electoral College meets next month.

Across government, there were signs of a slowdown.

In weekly Monday morning all-hands phone calls for Midwest-based employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, mid-level administrators responded to questions about the transition by telling staffers they had no information yet, said Nicole Cantello, an agency employee and president of the Chicago local of a union representing EPA workers.

Up to Friday, at least, EPA employees told agency retirees that the agency’s political appointees were refusing to discuss any transition, saying they were sure Trump would be reelected.

A senior administration official said presidential personnel director John McEntee, the president’s former personal aide, has sent word to departments that they should terminate any political appointees seeking new work for now. Another official said the warning was not seen as likely to result in any firings but rather meant to reinforce to staff that they should not act counter to Trump while he refuses to concede. Those officials and others who were not authorized to discuss internal policies or describe private discussions requested anonymity.

At the U.S. Agency for International Development, which already underwent an abrupt post-election change in leadership, staffers were instructed not to begin acting on transition planning until the GSA approved it, according to officials familiar with the matter.

But some elements of the federal government already were mobilizing to prepare for Biden to assume power. The U.S. Secret Service and Federal Aviation Administration extended a flight restriction over Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home through Inauguration Day. Biden’s security detail has been bolstered with agents from the Presidential Protective Division.

And despite Trump’s public stance, there was a growing realization in his inner circle that the election result would be impossible to overturn.

Legal challenges already have been dismissed in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin. And Trump’s legal challenge was dealt another blow Monday when campaign adviser David Bossie, tasked with leading the effort, tested positive for the coronavirus.

Bossie had been at the indoor White House election night party now being perceived as a possible superspreader event after other attendees — including chief of staff Mark Meadows, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and other aides — contracted the virus.

Some senior officials have tried to make the case that Trump should turn his efforts to cementing his legacy, but they are wary of being labeled disloyal for even thinking it.

At the White House, attendance among aides had dropped off since election night — partly because of the result and partly because a number are in quarantine after contracting or being exposed to people who came down with COVID-19. And Vice President Mike Pence was slated to depart Tuesday for a vacation in Florida.

In the closing days of the election, Trump repeatedly described campaigning as “my job,” and it steadily crowded out his official duties.

Trump’s public schedule hasn’t included an intelligence briefing since Oct. 1. The White House hasn’t provided a “readout” of any call between the president and a foreign leader in weeks. He hasn’t met with members of the White House coronavirus task force in months. He also offered no public comment on Tropical Storm Eta lashing the Florida Keys.

The drawn-out resolution to the election has only added to the culture of suspicion that has permeated the hollowed-out West Wing.

Aides said there were two camps at the White House: those who have already accepted the outcome and those who are still working through it and pushing Trump to keep fighting. Staffers don’t know in which camp their officemates reside and those who are looking ahead to new work are fearful of being branded as disloyal.

The Trump campaign has claimed there has been a widespread, multi-state conspiracy by Democrats to skew the vote tally in Biden’s favor, without hard evidence to back it up. There would need to be proof of illegally cast votes or improperly counted ballots on a massive, organized scale in order to throw out enough ballots to overcome Biden’s sizable lead across multiple states. And that just hasn’t emerged. In fact, election officials from both political parties have publicly stated the election went well.

But in every election, there are problems: voting machines break, long lines force some people away, ballots are miscast and lost. And 2020 has been no exception.

Source: AP

US President Donald Trump called in his lawyers to shore up his dimming re-election prospects, but legal experts said the flurry of lawsuits had little chance of changing the outcome but might cast doubt on the process.

As Trump’s paths to victory narrowed, his campaign on Thursday was ramping up legal challenges and said it was planning to file its latest case in Nevada.

On Wednesday, the campaign sued in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia and asked to join a pending case at the US Supreme Court.

Experts said the litigation serves to drag out the vote count and postpone major media from declaring Biden the victor, which would have dire political implications for Trump.

“The current legal maneuvering is mainly a way for the Trump campaign to try to extend the ball game in the long-shot hope that some serious anomaly will emerge,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “As of now, we haven’t seen any indication of systematic irregularities in the vote count.”

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a statement Wednesday the lawsuits were aimed at ensuring legal votes were counted.

“The lawsuits are meritless,” said Bob Bauer, who is part of Biden’s legal team. “They’re intended to give the Trump campaign the opportunity to argue the vote count should stop. It is not going to stop.”

Ultimately, for the lawsuits to have an impact, the race would have to hang on the outcome of one or two states separated by a few thousand votes, according to experts.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump asked courts to temporarily halt the vote counts because the campaign’s observers were allegedly denied access to the counting process.

The Michigan case was dismissed on Thursday but a Pennsylvania court ordered that Trump campaign observers be granted better access to counting process in Philadelphia.

At the Supreme Court, the campaign is seeking to invalidate mail-in votes in Pennsylvania that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive by the end of Friday.

In Georgia, the Trump campaign asked a judge to require Chatham County to separate late-arriving ballots to ensure they were not counted, but the case was dismissed on Thursday.

“There is no consistent strategy there,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She said the campaign was “throwing theories at a wall to see if anything sticks for long enough to muck up the waters.”

Edward Foley, who specializes in election law at the Moritz College of Law, said the cases might have merit but only affected a small number of ballots and procedural issues.

“But merit in that sense is very different from having the kind of consequence that Bush v. Gore did in 2000,” said Foley.

In that case, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling by Florida’s top court that had ordered a manual recount and prompted Democrat Al Gore to concede the election to Republican George W. Bush.

The 2000 election improbably close, with a margin of 537 votes in Florida deciding the outcome.

The campaign is still challenging late arriving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which according to media reports numbered in the hundreds so far, likely too few to have a meaningful impact.

In addition, it appears increasingly likely Biden can win the race even if he loses the state.

Danielle Lang, who advocates for voting rights at Campaign Legal Center, said Trump has a long history of attempting to whip up mistrust in our electoral system.

“Allegations of ‘irregularities’ — backed up by lawsuits, even frivolous ones — could potentially serve that narrative,” she said.

Experts said the lawsuits and claims of fraud might be aimed at softening the sting of being bounced from office by calling the process into question.

“The litigation looks more like an effort to allow Trump to continue rhetorically attempting to delegitimize an electoral loss,” said Joshua Geltzer, a professor at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy & Protection.

(Source: Reuters)

Democratic US presidential candidate Joe Biden is nearing 270 electoral votes after key victories in Michigan and Wisconsin, while President Donald Trump demanded a recount and threatened legal action.

Victories in those Midwestern states gave Biden a critical boost in the race to obtain the magic number of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Trump had won both Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016. With the count still underway, he has falsely declared victory, accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election and vowed to fight the states in court.

“It’s clear that we’re winning enough states to reach (the) 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” Biden said in his home state of Delaware.

“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report that when the count is finished we believe we will be the winners.”

There are five states still left uncalled, including Pennsylvania, and key small state of Nevada – meaning both Trump and Biden still have a path to victory.

Biden has so far secured 264 electoral votes while Trump stands at 214.

If Biden were to win in Nevada, which has 6 electoral votes, he would in theory have the necessary 270.

Other closely contested states including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina were still counting votes, leaving the national election outcome uncertain.

Trump’s campaign launched lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop vote counting and demanded a recount in Wisconsin.

Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim of voting fraud and did not explain how he would fight the results at the Supreme Court. US election experts say fraud is very rare.

Source: Presstv

Tension spiralled in the still undecided US election Wednesday after President Donald Trump made unprecedented claims of fraud and demanded a recount in Wisconsin, where Democrat Joe Biden notched up another win to inch closer to overall victory.

While there was no official winner more than 12 hours after the last polls closed on Tuesday, the fate of the most divisive contest in decades was coming down to just a handful of states where the Republican incumbent and his challenger fought over razor-thin margins.

In the latest blow to Trump, Biden, 77, was declared the winner of Wisconsin, with an unsurmountable lead of 20,000 after 98 percent of ballots had been counted.

This mirrored Biden’s slow but steady march across the remaining toss-up states in the vast country, where counting was complicated by the Covid-19 pandemic and record numbers of early and mailed-in votes.

Biden led in Michigan by nearly 45,000 votes with 94 percent counted and has already been declared winner of another tight race in Arizona. Results were still being tabulated in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — all of them close contests.

The apparent shift in fortunes toward the Democrat prompted Trump, 74, to launch a tirade claiming mass fraud that he claimed on Twitter had made his victories “magically disappear.”

Trump’s campaign announced a lawsuit to try and suspend the vote count in Michigan, where it said its team was denied proper access to observe vote counting.

The campaign said it was also suing to halt the counting of votes in Pennsylvania — after the president called overnight for Supreme Court intervention to exclude the processing of mail-in ballots after the close of polls.

And it demanded a recount in Wisconsin, citing “irregularities.”

– Biden’s confidence –

The Biden camp expressed confidence, with campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon calling victory by the former vice president a “foregone conclusion.”

Biden himself was expected shortly to make a statement on the knife-edge race.

But Trump has made clear he will not accept defeat before he has exhausted every possible challenge.

During the night after polls closed Tuesday, he went on live television from the White House to claim “we did win this election” and to allege there had been “fraud on the American public.”

He later repeated his vague accusations of vote rigging on Twitter, despite a lack of any substantiated reports of meaningful irregularities during voting or counting.

“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled,” Trump tweeted. “Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted.”

– ‘We have to be patient’ –

The tightest and messiest count could potentially unfold in Pennsylvania — the biggest prize still outstanding.

Here, Trump had a roughly 500,000 vote lead with an estimated 78 percent of the vote counted but votes were awaited from heavily Democratic parts of the state, promising to level things up.

“We have to be patient,” Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf said. “We may not know the results today.

“There are millions of mail-in ballots,” he said. “They’re going to be counted accurately and they will be counted fully.”

The Democratic governor shrugged off criticism from the White House over the slow vote count and said “our democracy is being tested in this election.”

“Pennsylvania will have a fair election,” he said. “And that election will be free of outside influences.”

The tight White House race and recriminations evoked memories of the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

That race, which hinged on a handful of votes in Florida, eventually ended up in the Supreme Court, which halted a recount while Bush was ahead.

The US Elections Project estimated total turnout at a record 160 million voters including more than 101.1 million early voters, 65.2 million of whom voted by mail.

Source: AFP

Joe Biden leads US President Donald Trump in electoral votes yet both still have a chance to reach the magic number of 270 – and with it the keys to the White House. Several states are still to play for, with votes still being counted.

Seven states still undecided: Biden leads in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, Trump in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

The election is likely to hinge on postal votes, which are still being counted.

Trump has predicted a “big win”, claiming – without evidence – that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election.

Biden has called for patience, saying he is “on track” to win the White House race.

America set for its highest voter turnout in over a century, with more than 100 million votes cast before Election Day.

US President Donald Trump leads Democratic rival Joe Biden in the vital battleground of Florida and other US swing states, but Biden has pinned his hopes on Arizona and a trio of Rust Belt states that could take days to count their votes.

Trump is projected to win the key battleground state of Florida after significantly outperforming pollsters’ predictions

Biden leads in Arizona and is locked in a close race in other key states

The election is likely to hinge on results in Pennsylvania and other “Rust Belt” states, where vote counting is expected to stretch for hours or days

Trump has predicted a “big win”, claiming – without evidence – that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election

Biden has called for patience, saying he is “on track” to win the White House race

America looked set for its highest voter turnout in over a century, with more than 100 million votes cast before Election Day

Reported By France 24