Joe Biden beats Donald Trump to win US election 2020 – as it happened

We’re moving to a new blog now – follow all the latest on Joe Biden’s win and the US election here:

Kamala Harris shared a video of her phone call with Joe Biden shortly after they were declared the winners of the US presidential election.

“We did it,” Harris says in the video. “We did it, Joe. You’re going to be the next president of the United States.”

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:

The city erupted shortly after the presidential race was called for Joe Biden here Saturday morning.

People driving down Broad Street, a main avenue that runs through the heart of the city, were honking, cheering, and applauding loudly.

One worker cleaning the streets said it felt like the Eagles, Philadelphia’s football team, won the Super Bowl.

Now I’m at the Pennsylvania convention center, which is where votes are being counted and has become the epicenter of protests and celebrations in recent days. There were loud cheers of “lock him up” and “Black Lives Matter”.

Donna Widmann, a teacher here who helped get her students and their families registered, said she’s hasn’t been able to stop crying.

“So much emotion has happened in the past four years, man, and it just feels really good,” Widmann said. “I can’t stop crying.”

Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, celebrated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ victory.

“The voters have spoken, and they have chosen @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris to be our next president and vice president,” Clinton said in a tweet.

“It’s a history-making ticket, a repudiation of Trump, and a new page for America. Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. Onward, together.”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both updated their Twitter bios to reflect their victory in the US presidential election.

Residents of Washington, DC, which leans heavily Democratic, took to the streets to celebrate after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election.

Foreign leaders have already started offering their congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris after they were declared the winners of the presidential election.

From the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau:

The country’s new vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, sent a tweet celebrating her and Joe Biden’s win as a victory for the conscience of the nation.

“This election is about so much more than @JoeBiden or me,” Harris said. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.”

Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, denying Donald Trump a second term after a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic, economic turmoil and social unrest.

Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes on Saturday morning, after days of counting votes and record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.

The American people have replaced a real estate developer and reality TV star who had no political experience with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in public life and twice ran unsuccessfully for president.

With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century, a fearful and anxious nation elected a candidate who promised to govern not as a Democrat but as an “American president” and vowed to be a unifying force after four years of upheaval.

The result also marked the historic rise of Kamala Harris, who will be the first woman and the first woman of color to serve as vice-president in American history.

The homepage of the conservative-leaning website Drudge Report, which has moved away from Donald Trump in recent months, currently has a picture of the president with a caption taken from The Apprentice: “You’re fired.”

With Joe Biden’s victory, Kamala Harris will be the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American to become vice president.

Harris is the fourth woman to be on a major party’s presidential ticket -- after Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, Sarah Palin in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Harris is the first woman to be on a successful ticket. She will be sworn in as vice president in January.

The networks have also declared Joe Biden to be the winner of the US presidential election.

The call came after a new batch of ballots came in from Pennsylvania, pushing Biden’s lead in the state over 30,000 votes.

Some outlets, including CNN, have not yet called Arizona, so they currently show Biden’s electoral college vote count as 273.

But with or without Arizona, Biden has surpassed the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Joe Biden’s lead in Arizona has narrowed, after the latest update from Maricopa county, the most populous county in the state.

As of now, Biden’s lead in the battleground state stands at 20,573 votes, or 0.6% of the total vote, which is down from 29,861 votes earlier today.

As a reminder, the AP has already declared Biden to be the winner of Arizona, and the Guardian follows the AP’s calls.

However, a number of other outlets have not yet called the state, and election analyst Nate Cohn said the latest batch of ballots would likely prevent a call for now.

Some of us might have thought Donald Trump meant to say that his campaign was holding a press conference at the Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia.

But the Four Seasons would like to make very clear that that is not the case.

“To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia,” the hotel said in a tweet. “It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping— no relation with the hotel.”

Meanwhile, the actual site of the Philadelphia press conference appears to be next to an adult bookstore.

It’s unclear why the Trump campaign is holding a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia today, as the president announced this morning.

A Washington Post reporter could not reach anyone at the company for comment, but she did note that the Internet has started doing what it does best: trolling through online reviews.

Donald Trump’s team has alleged fraud in various battleground states, without producing any evidence to back up those claims.

Election officials have consistently defended the integrity of their vote counts, and one official seems to be a bit fed up with the baseless accusations.

Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said in a tweet, “My office has been putting out information for months about how election processes work in the state & all we do to ensure security & fairness. If you haven’t been paying attention, that’s on you, but don’t show up when you don’t like the result & scream fraud w/no evidence.”

Hobbs’ comments come as some of the president’s allies have flocked to vote-counting sites in Arizona to protest the vote count. Some of the protesters have been seen carrying firearms.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam, and I’m working on this beautiful Saturday here because we somehow still don’t have an official winner in the US presidential election.

I am as flummoxed as anyone.

But Joe Biden holds leads in Nevada and Pennsylvania, so additional updates from those states today could help him reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Stay tuned.

Twitter has again masked some of Donald Trump’s recent tweets as being misleading.

Calvin Woodward has undertaken the task of factchecking president Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the election over the last few days. It’s nearly a long read. Here are some of the bullet points.

• TRUMP: “We’re hearing stories that are horror stories ... We think there is going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence and so much proof.”
  Trump produced no evidence.
• TRUMP: “In Pennsylvania, partisan Democrats have allowed ballots in the state to be received three days after the election and we think much more than that.”
  It was the state supreme court.
• TRUMP: “Our campaign has been denied access to observe any counting in Detroit.”
  That’s false.
• TRUMP: “The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats.”
  The elections is overseen by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.
• TRUMP: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.”
  This is baseless.
• TRUMP: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”
  Not true.

There’s plenty more where that all came from: AP Fact check – Trump’s errant assault on election integrity

And that is it from me today, thanks for sticking with us – Joan E Greve will be here shortly to bring you the rest of the day. I’ll see you all here tomorrow …

It might seem like the election is going on forever, but there is a deadline.

In fact, there are a few.

8 December is the deadline for states to resolve any disputes over the selection of their electors of the electoral college.

Then on 14 December the electors meet in their respective state capitals to formally vote for the president and vice-president.

The Senate counts those votes on 6 January, and then the inauguration takes place on 20 January.

If you missed it yesterday, here’s an interesting look from Jeffrey Crouch at the Hill on the curious question of whether Donald Trump is able to pre-emptively pardon himself before he left office. Crouch looks at it like this:

Article II of the Constitution contains broad, virtually unlimited clemency language that allows the president to forgive any federal crime. However, the Constitution is silent on the self-pardon question, and there is no example of an American president ever following through on a self-pardon attempt. The case for a self-pardon being constitutionally allowed rests heavily on the principle that the Constitution does not forbid the practice, therefore it should be permissible.

Crouch cautions that this may have consequences though:

A Supreme Court case suggests that such a move is akin to admitting guilt. In other words, a self-pardon would ultimately be self-defeating because it would supply the impetus needed by Congress to deploy the ultimate constitutional remedy for abuses of power: impeachment.

He sets up another possibility though – using the 25th amendment

Trump would temporarily step down from the presidency at some point before the official end of his term, leaving Pence to take over as acting chief executive. Acting President Pence would pardon Trump, who could then become president again or resign from office.

Read more here: The Hill – Like it or not, a Trump self-pardon may be coming soon

Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, speaking for a lot of us here, I think.

If you’ve been enjoying Georgia taking days to count an election, then I have good news. They’ll be doing it again in January, because there are going to be two pivotal Senate run-off races, which could still flip the Senate away from the Republicans. In fairness that count should go a bit faster.

Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff will face off in a 5 January runoff for Perdue’s seat. Libertarian candidate Shane Hazel was able to get enough votes so that neither Perdue nor Ossoff was able to clear the 50% threshold needed for an outright win.

It became clear earlier this week that Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler are headed for a runoff on the same day for Georgia’s other Senate seat.

Nationally, Democrats and Republicans can each already count on 48 seats in the Senate. Republicans lead uncalled races in Alaska and North Carolina, so the ultimate balance is likely to come down to what happens in the Georgia runoffs.

If Democrats win the Georgia seats, it would leave the Senate split 50-50, with the vice-president serving as a tie-breaker.

If Joe Biden is in the White House, that would mean a vice-president Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote in the Senate. If Donald Trump wins a second term, then it would be Mike Pence, the current vice-president.

Democrats had hoped to wrench control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, and raised millions of dollars to fight the GOP candidates in states such as Maine, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina. But larger-than-expected Republican turnout prevented a “blue wave.”

There’s more here: Georgia becomes center of battle for Senate as races head to runoff elections

President Donald Trump appears to be on the move and about to go … somewhere?

Linda Feldmann, who is on press pool duty today has this update:

Pool has been Covid-tested and is now waiting in motorcade on WH south driveway, destination unannounced. The weather is spectacular – 57 degrees, will hit 70s by early afternoon, not a cloud in the sky.

The US confirmed 126,480 new coronavirus cases on Friday, a record number for a third day in a row. At the White House, chief of staff Mark Meadows was reported to have tested positive for Covid-19.

On Saturday morning, Johns Hopkins University in Maryland put the total US coronavirus caseload at 9,731,198, with 235,925 deaths.

States recording record daily highs on Friday included Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Utah.

News of Meadows’ test came days after he appeared with Donald Trump at a White House event at which numerous people did not wear masks. The president himself was previously treated for Covid-19, spending three days in hospital, after attending a White House event at which Covid mitigation measures were not enforced.

Members of Trump’s family, senior aides and leading Republicans have all contracted the virus after attending events in Washington and on the campaign trail. On Friday, Bloomberg News said numerous Trump campaign aides had also tested positive.

On Friday, across the US, states posted record numbers.

In Illinois, faced with 20,000 new cases in two days, JB Pritzker, the governor, said a stay-at-home order was possible if the spread was not slowed – just before his office announced that he was self-isolating after being exposed to the virus for a third time.

Read more of Martin Pengelly’s report here: US confirms over 126,000 Covid cases on Friday, third daily record in a row

You may recall that in 2016 there was a strand of opinion that voting for for Green party nominee Jill Stein in crucial states had effectively handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.

Green party supporters were hounded over the fact that in Michigan, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by about 10,000 votes while Stein got in the 50,000s. And in Wisconsin, Trump’s margin over Clinton was in the order of 22,000, while Stein garnered 31,000 odd votes.

There’s a chance that the reverse has happened this year, report Newsweek, highlighting that the Libertarian party presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, may have scuppered Trump’s chances. Meghan Roos writes:

As election officials continued counting ballots cast during the 2020 presidential election, some Republican strategists are questioning whether votes for third-party candidates could have closed the gap between President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in key battleground states.

“Libertarian voters could have swung the electoral college by at least 22 votes by supporting Trump in battleground states Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada,” political strategist Ryan Cassin told Fox News. “By throwing away their votes, they’ve likely become spoilers for the Trump reelection effort.”

Votes cast for Jorgensen in Georgia and Pennsylvania also exceeded the margins between Biden and Trump on Friday night, and her vote tally in Arizona was also within striking distance.

Read more here: Newsweek – Libertarian party could play a big role in Trump’s impending defeat, but party chair says they’re not to blame

There’s little doubt now that Joe Biden will win the popular vote, and ultimately should win enough votes in the Electoral College to propel him into the White House in January. It’s just taking a while to get there.

Keven Freking at the Associated Press is one of those who is taking the slowness of the US count as being ‘mostly a good thing’. He writes that while it is fueling a lot of criticism, it is a reflection of two laudable things: greater voter enthusiasm, and the steps that states took to protect their residents from Covid.

On turnout, he says:

Even though the count is not yet complete, President Donald Trump has easily surpassed the number of votes he got four years ago. Joe Biden has gained some 73.9 million votes, versus the 65.9 that Hillary Clinton got. All in all, some 15 million more voters participated in this year’s presidential election than in 2016.

On the way pandemic preparation has affected that turn-out, he notes:

Minnesota, North Carolina and Nevada extended the deadlines for when ballots could be received. Nebraska and Iowa joined the ranks of states that send an absentee ballot application to every registered voter. New Jersey and California mailed ballots to every registered voter, whether they requested it or not. Millions of voters took states up on the offer and chose to vote by mail rather than in person on election day.

And then there’s this common refrain. The slowness of the count in some states is not through incompetence on the part of the people running the election, or counting the ballots, but because of deliberate decisions made in advance of the election.

In Florida, clerks can start counting ballots 22 days before an election. In North Carolina, beginning five weeks before the election, county boards insert approved ballots into a voting machine, allowing for a prompt tabulation on Election Day.

But other states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all with Republican-led legislatures and all of them swing states, were made to wait so there would be no counting of mail-in ballots prior to Election Day. Michigan did eventually allow election officials to process some ballots one day earlier, but the counting of the ballot still had to wait until 3 November

A little more on Trump’s Twitter tirade here from the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, that not only is the president wrong, but he’s also misunderstood the numbers. The Post reported on Thursday that Pennsylvania’s count does not yet include any ballots that arrived after election day.

“To the extent this is Trump’s fixation, he’s wasting his time.” Blake observed on Twitter.

A reminder that Joe Biden has a slim lead in Georgia, which is heading for a recount. However his lead of 7,248 is probably too big for Republicans to hope to overturn with that process.

SoS in that tweet is Georgia’s secretary of state – Republican Brad Raffensperger.

The state of Nevada has probably caused more people to post GIFs of sloths to social media in the last week than anything else in history. Here’s an update on the count there, which is worth 6 electoral college votes, from NBC’s Jo Ling Kent. She told the network:

There are 124,000 votes left to count statewide. Here in Clark County, the majority of the count is right here, it’s 54,000 ballots that are left. The registrar tells me that he hopes to finish that count by Sunday. Then after that, they’re going to do 60,000 provisional ballot counting, and that’s going to include same day registration. As for the speed of the count, I know a lot of people have been criticising Nevada. I’ve been pressing the registrar here in Clark County about that and he said there’s no way to speed this process up. They have to be able to use their machines to scan, and then also they have the element of human review. They say they’re going to release two more tranches of votes today.

She suggested a final official result might not be signed off until 16 November, although that wouldn’t prevent the state being called for Biden or Trump before then if they have amassed a lead that can’t be surpassed.

Joe Biden currently leads by 22,657 votes.

The president of the United States has just now again baselessly asserted on Twitter that “Tens of thousands of votes were illegally received after 8 P.M. on Tuesday, Election Day, totally and easily changing the results in Pennsylvania and certain other razor thin states.”

It is boring writing it, you may be bored reading it, but I cannot stress enough that this is simply not true.

Mail-in and absentee votes that arrive after the end of polling on election day have been valid, legal and counted in various states for decades.

They include ballots arriving from military posted overseas. That is an entirely normal part of the American democratic process.

In fact, to be clear, all of these states, some of which are Republican, allow mail-in ballots which are postmarked on 3 November or before to arrive after 8pm on election day and be counted. These are their deadlines.

• Texas (4 November)
• Virginia (Noon on 6 November)
• Kansas (6 November)
• Kentucky (6 November)
• Massachusetts (6 November)
• Pennsylvania (6 November - subject to legal challenge)
• Iowa (9 November)
• North Dakota (9 November)
• West Virginia (9 November)
• Minnesota (10 November - subject to legal challenge)
• Mississippi (10 November)
• Nevada (10 November)
• New Jersey (10 November)
• New York (10 November)
• North Carolina (12 November)
• Alaska (by 13 November)
• District of Columbia (13 November)
• Maryland (13 November)
• Ohio (13 November, result not announced til 28 November)
• Illinois (17 November)
• Utah (17 November)
• California (20 November)
• Washington (23 November)

David Daley, the author of Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, writes for us today about the democratic deficit that seems inherent in the US election system:

The good news is that Donald Trump appears to be on the cusp of being voted out of the White House. The bad news is that Trump was not a unique, aberrant threat to American democracy; it was already broken so deeply and in so many ways that no single election can possibly repair the damage.

Even with a Biden administration, the worsening structural inequities embedded in the nation for centuries – and cynically exploited by Republicans to govern with narrow minority support – will still be with us. They are embodied in institutions such as the electoral college, which elected Trump in 2016 despite his losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.

In fact, including Biden, the Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. But in part because of the electoral college’s rural bias (a vote cast for president in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much as a vote cast in California), and in part because the college heightens the importance of a handful of largely white, midwestern battleground states, Republicans have won the White House with fewer votes twice since 2000.

Representational fairness is even more dire in the US Senate, which gives disproportionate power to older, whiter, more rural and more conservative interests. Right now, states representing just 17% of the nation’s population could elect a majority of senators. By 2040, the 15 most populous states will be home to 67% of Americans yet represented by just 30% of the Senate. Add up the actual votes received in the winning election of every sitting US senator, and Republicans haven’t won a senate majority since the mid-1990s. Yet they’ve controlled the Senate for 10 of the last 20 years, and used that advantage to shape the ideological balance on the federal courts.

Read more here: David Daley – Getting rid of Trump won’t be enough to fix America’s broken democracy

Kyle Cheney has a (slight) update on Politico about foreign interference in mail-in ballots during the election – and it’s a continued “nothing to see here” from the US intel community, despite Trump campaign claims.

Donald Trump’s all-caps warning in June – that foreign countries would surely print “millions of mail-in ballots” to upend the US election – appears to have amounted to nothing.

Trump made the claim all summer and fall, but he hasn’t raised the matter in recent days, even as he fights for his political life. And intelligence officials, who for months described no evidence that such a plot was afoot, reaffirmed Friday that their earlier judgment stands.

“Our assessments have not changed,” said Dean Boyd, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“We have nothing new to add to our previous statements,” FBI spokesperson Carol Cratty said.

Trump has bristled publicly at intelligence leaders, including FBI director Christopher Wray, for emphasizing the extreme unlikelihood that coordinated voter fraud would play a role in the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, Trump has made sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of fraud as he tries to keep his presidential bid alive.

Read it here: Politico – Intel agencies still see no evidence of foreign attack on mail ballots

I mentioned earlier that Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, looks to have become the first world leader to congratulate on Joe Biden on a victory that remains unconfirmed. A former prime minister, in the shape of Denmark’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had some advice for Biden’s opponent overnight. I’m sure it will go down well in the White House.

Richard Luscombe reports for us today on the early signs of what happens next in the Republican party on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to be a one-term president.

For four years he commanded their unflinching loyalty. They protected him from impeachment, tacitly approved as children at the border were prised from their parents and placed in cages, and looked the other way as peacefully protesting Americans were gassed for a photo opportunity.

Now, in the death throes of Donald Trump’s presidency, Republicans who once stood shoulder to shoulder with the man who reshaped their political party to his will are scrambling to distance themselves from his unfounded claims that the election is being stolen from him.

“Outrageous, uncalled for and a terrible mistake,” the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, said of Trump’s erratic pursuit of his false allegations; “very disturbing,” according to the Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey; and “reckless” in the words of the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

This breaking of ranks by growing numbers of senators, congressmen, governors and other elected officials – coming only after Trump’s cause appeared lost – heralds a looming battle for the future direction of the Republican party with its figurehead gone from the stage.

Those now openly critical after years of silence must weigh up the consequences of speaking out while there remain loyalists inside the party determined to carry the banner of Trumpism into the 2024 election and beyond. That faction includes Republican senators such as Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump ally who has urged the president to “fight on, exhaust all options” in his futile effort to prove widespread election fraud.

“Trumpism will remain because he is such a wildly popular figure among their base. But, you know, it’s always been pragmatic for many Republicans,” said Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the bestseller How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

“There’s some portion of the Republican party supporting him mainly because he’s Trump, and he’s owning the libs and saying racist things. And then another group is supporting him because he’s pushing through the hardest-right policies.”

Read more of Richard Luscombe’s report here: After Trump – first shots fired in battle for Republican party’s future

We should not lose focus on the fact that the election is taking place against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic in the US.

According to Johns Hopkins University figures, yesterday the US recorded another new daily record for coronavirus cases – 126,480. There were 1,146 deaths.

The US has had four straight days of more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths this week. The last time there was such a streak was in August.

The New York Times reports that at least 17 states reported single-day records for new cases on Friday. And four states reported record deaths: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Utah. In 27 states, there have been more cases announced in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch since the pandemic began.

Jaline Gerardin, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago told the Washington Post: “It is community spread everywhere.”

The main problem, she said, was allowing the virus to simmer at fairly high levels throughout the summer, particularly among young people who congregated in bars and restaurants against expert advice.

“I think it ended up busting out of their own age group,” she said. “It spread out from there, and what we’re seeing now is it’s in every age group ... It’s just everywhere.”

Astead W Herndon and Annie Karni have written the New York Times’s On Politics newsletter today, and this bit caught my eye:

There was one subset of the political world that felt vindicated by the nail-biter presidential race: Democrats who worked for Hillary Clinton. The closeness of the Biden-Trump race suggests that the 2016 election outcome may have been less about Clinton’s political weaknesses than it was about Trump’s political strengths.

In some of the states that Biden managed to flip, like Wisconsin, his victory was by a slim margin of about 20,000 votes. Four years ago, Clinton lost the state by about 22,000. A potential victory with more than 300 electoral votes would look like a blowout for Biden, but it would also mask the fact that in some of the most critical states, the race was still only won by a hair.

Here’s another question that is being asked a lot. Why are the media reporting different US election results?

We’ve got 264-214 up the top of the blog, but you may be seeing 253-214 on the New York Times, CNN, BBC and elsewhere. The answer is basically: Arizona.

The president is elected by winning at least 270 electoral college votes, not the outcome of the popular vote. Because there is no centralised federal election system, it has become tradition in the US that “decision desks” at media organisations make a call that states have been won by one candidate or the other when enough votes have been counted. States that are too close to call remain in the balance until a network “calls” them.

The Guardian uses the data collected and analysed by the Associated Press (AP) news agency as the source for when we will call election results.

There are a number of other highly reputable election decision desks in US media, including NBC, Fox News and others. They may call races earlier or later than AP. US networks obviously use the decisions from their own desks – other channels may chose to follow one, or wait for two desks to call a state before they count it.

This year, Arizona has brought this into sharp relief. Our current total of 264 electoral votes for Joe Biden includes the fact that AP has called Arizona for the Democratic nominee. So has Fox News – attracting the ire of the Trump campaign. Not all decision desks have yet, leaving Biden without its 11 electoral votes and on 253 on some websites and news networks.

By the way, the prospect of recounts might be worrying you that they could drastically alter the result. The answer is probably not. Stef W Kight had this analysis at Axios yesterday:

The Trump campaign says it will seek recounts in several key states, but that’s highly unlikely to change the outcome. Statewide recounts have historically only changed electoral margins by an average 430 votes, according to the nonpartisan election reform group FairVote. Joe Biden’s lead in several states is thin, but it’s not that thin.

There have only been 31 recounts in the past 20 years, the research found. That was out of more than 5,700 statewide general elections. Three of those recounts overturned results, but they only shifted the final margin by 239-440 votes.

Here are the criteria for recounts in each state according to Axios:

• The Pennsylvania race is currently within the 0.5% margin that would trigger an automatic recount.
• The Trump campaign has said it will ask for a recount in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the president is down by tens of thousands of votes.
• The only way to get a recount in Arizona is if the margin is within 0.1%.
• Georgia has already said it will recount.

Read the full analysis here: Axios – Trump’s odds of winning through a recount are nearly impossible

If you are one of those people who subscribe to the theory that Murdoch newspapers always want to be seen to be backing the winning side, then here’s today’s New York Post.

It is not perhaps a road to Damascus-style conversion, but let’s bear in mind that back in September they were running with front pages like this, with the strapline “Another day of hidin’, help us find Biden”.

I’m sure a lot of people are coming to this live blog just wanting to know when we’ll get a final result, and what is holding it all up. Here’s what the Associated Press (AP) said yesterday about the reasons remaining for not “calling” the final few swing states for one candidate or another.

They all essentially boil down to “there’s still enough uncounted votes to swing it either way, and there will likely have to be a recount in any case”.

GEORGIA: Outstanding ballots left to be counted and a razor-thin margin. The AP does not declare a winner of an election that will be – or is likely to become – subject to a mandatory recount

In instances where a recount isn’t required by law but a candidate requests one, AP will not call a race if the margin between the top two candidates is 0.5 percentage points or less.

NEVADA: A tight vote margin and large number of ballots that have yet to be counted made the Nevada race too early to call.

Clark County officials said Thursday that they would be releasing the results of 51,000 ballots on Friday. But they later clarified that they had overestimated the size of the batch and released results from about 30,000 ballots instead.

Separately, state officials said on Thursday that there were about 190,000 votes left to count statewide, a total that included mail ballots and provisional ballots from voters who registered or updated their registration at the polls. But it was unclear if that figure took into account the overestimated number of ballots by Clark County election officials. In a tight race, that could delay the AP declaring a winner.

NORTH CAROLINA: Race too early to call. Ballots left to count. Trump holds nearly a 77,000-vote lead, but there were up to 116,000 mail ballots left to count on Friday, as well as about 41,000 provisional ballots statewide. As long as ballots are postmarked by 3 November, state election officials have until 12 November to count them. And when it comes to mail ballots, Biden was outperforming Trump. That means the ballots yet to be counted could give Biden a lead.

PENNSYLVANIA: A close margin and a large number of outstanding votes are making the Pennsylvania contest too early to call. Biden held a lead over Trump of 0.29% on Friday. State law dictates that a recount must be held if the margin between the two candidates is less than 0.5%. Additionally, there are potentially tens of thousands of provisional ballots that remain to be tabulated, though an exact number remained unclear. Those ballots will be counted after officials verify their eligibility to be included.

The president’s children continue, without any evidence of widespread voter fraud, to suggest that there is widespread voter fraud.

If you’ve been watching the US election unfold for days now – especially if you don’t live there – you may have thought on more than one occasion: “But why do they even have the electoral college?”

The answer, as is often the case with the US constitution, is because of trying to strike a workable compromise between the northern states and the slave-holding southern states in the early days of the US.

If you want to read up on it, there’s a great essay from last year here by assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, Wilfred Codrington III called “The Electoral College’s racist origins”. He writes:

The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned.

The ‘three-fifths compromise’ mentioned there was the 1787 decision that enslaved people would equal ‘three-fifths’ of a person for the purposes of counting the population of states and thus determining their level of representation in Congress.

As we wait some 200+ years later for count numbers to slowly update, I recommend it as a fascinating read in the meanwhile: The Atlantic – The Electoral College’s racist origins

Some analysis from S&P Global has landed, which clearly indicates that the two campaigns had differing priorities for their ad spend.

The Biden campaign outspent Trump on traditional broadcast TV ads by $249.9m to $174.6m.

But the Republicans put more money behind digital. In that market, Trump spent $201.46m. Biden spent $166.12m.

And where did the most money go? Well, as you’d expect, the states pivotal to the outcome. S&P Global found that:

• Phoenix, Arizona was the top market.
• Three of the top five markets were in Florida.
• Four of the top 15 markets were in Pennsylvania
• Michigan and Wisconsin each had two of the top 15 markets.

“Tomorrow is the beginning of a new day,” Joe Biden said in his final campaign rally in Pittsburgh on the eve of the US election. “There’s one more day to show who we are as a country: looking out for each other, the thousand acts of kindness, the decency that people used to show one another – and still do.”

Three days later, Donald Trump appeared in the press briefing room of the White House and let the world know what he thinks of kindness and decency. With votes still being counted, he laid out a paranoid fantasy of a vast leftwing conspiracy stealing the election from him, one fraudulent ballot at a time.

For the media networks who cut away from Trump’s speech after just a few minutes, it was all too easy to dismiss his lie-infested rant as the death rattle of a man whose political lifeblood was being drained from him in real time.

Except for three inconvenient truths: Trump will continue to be head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth until at least 20 January; 70 million Americans voted for him, of whom a portion is likely to be susceptible to his falsehoods; some 17m guns have been bought so far this year – the largest number in US history.

Nor did this outpouring of baseless histrionics end with the president. The rightwing talkshow host Mark Levin called on Republican state lawmakers to bypass the vote entirely and declare Trump the winner no matter what the final count.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House now facing charges for running a fraudulent scheme to build the Mexican border wall, told Fox News: “Donald Trump won an overwhelming victory on Tuesday night.”

A few hours later Facebook permanently suspended one of Bannon’s accounts after he suggested senior members of the Trump administration should be beheaded. Facebook also banned a group, “Stop the Steal”, that popped up on its platform attracting within the first 24 hours some 350,000 members, a number of whom made “worrying calls for violence”.

Joe Biden, assuming he is declared the next occupant of the Oval Office, is going to have to climb a steep and stony path before he can drag America back to anything resembling decency.

Read more of Ed Pilkington’s report here: Joe Biden poised to inherit Disunited States of America

A couple of news websites like Vox and Business Insider have already called the whole election for Joe Biden – and it seems like some young Trump supporters on TikTok have already accepted that result.

Kelsey Vlamis reports for Business Insider on a trend that has swept the social media site since Friday – young Trump supporters posting clips of themselves folding up their Trump 2020 flags and congratulating Biden.

The trend started Friday. The first video was posted by a user with an audio clip of the song “Latch” by Disclosure. He folds up his Trump 2020 flag and has text over the video that says, “Good luck, Biden.”

“I wish nothing but good health and love for him,” it reads. “Trump, I’ll miss you, sir. Stay united, America.”

Hundreds of similar videos have since been created with the same audio clip, many showing young supporters of the president taking down flags or removing Trump hats.

Read more here: Business Insider – Young Trump supporters on TikTok are posting videos of them folding up their Trump 2020 flags and congratulating Biden

Sean Sullivan for the Washington Post has a good look here at why the Democrats are having some mixed feelings about Tuesday’s vote:

Democrats charged into the election as a unified party, setting aside deeply felt divisions to maximize Joe Biden’s chances of defeating President Trump.

But as Biden closes in on the presidency, old fissures have resurfaced and new ones are erupting, driven by unexpected losses among Democrats running for the House and Senate and areas where Trump was surprisingly strong. That’s creating an anxiety and strain unusual for a party that stands on the cusp of accomplishing its biggest goal.

Moderates blame liberals for promoting socialism and proposals to “defund the police”. Liberals are warning Biden not to cozy up to Senate Republicans, who might retain their majority. Latino leaders are raising alarms about Biden’s poor performance in some of their communities.

While Democrats were upbeat about Biden’s lead in the presidential race, they were also engaging in soul-searching. Because both Biden and the GOP can claim successes, the outcome defies simple theories about the electorate and potentially leaves Biden without full control of Congress or a unified direction for his party.

Read more here: Washington Post – Democrats, nearing a moment of triumph, still feel anxious and divided

Slovenia’s rightwing prime minister, Janez Janša, went out on a limb earlier in the week by seemingly being the first foreign leader to congratulate Donald Trump on his “victory”.

It looks like Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has decided to make his mark in the opposite direction – he seems to be the first leader to congratulate Joe Biden.

Other politicians have sent Biden their best wishes already. Vox report that congratulations came from “several European politicians and officials desperate to work with him on climate change”.

Messages came in from two members of the European parliament from Germany’s Green party. “Congrats Mr. President,” tweeted Rasmus Andersen while Jutta Paulus referred to Biden as “Mr. President-elect” and referenced the state of Pennsylvania, which Biden had just won, clinching the race.

Belgium’s recently appointed climate minister, Zakia Khattabi, also celebrated Biden’s win, though without directly naming him, tweeting: “Welcome back #America! See you at the next #Cop,” referring to the next UN Climate Change Conference to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021.

A reminder, not that you probably need it, but nobody has yet won the 2020 US election, and we don’t know for sure who will be the next president of the United States.

We might not have a final result yet, but we can already see areas where candidates did better, or worse, than expected. Alexandra Villarreal has this for us, on how Biden failed with Latino voters along the Texas border.

While Democrats aggressively pushed to turn Texas blue this election cycle, they were banking on help from people like Barbara Ocañas, a highly educated, 37-year-old Latina voter from the Rio Grande valley.

But, after Donald Trump faced backlash for using the word “coyote” to describe human smugglers, Ocañas was turned off by liberals focused more on semantics than the actual realities of the migrant crisis affecting her home. As the daughter of a Mexican émigré, she believes that undocumented immigrants are “just people, like you and me”.

However, when it comes to earning US citizenship, “there is a right way and a wrong way to do it”, she said.

She also fears what Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s administration could mean for people she knows who rely on jobs in refineries or hauling crude oil. So, faced with a ballot and a choice, Ocañas decided she preferred four more years with Donald Trump in the White House.

“Not all of us take it to heart when we’re called rapists and bad hombres,” she said. “We have tough skin.”

Read more of Alexandra Villarreal’s report here: Why Democrats lost Latino voters along Texas border: ‘They relied on loyalty’

If you missed it, here’s how Joe Biden addressed the nation. He said “we’re going to win this race” as crucial states trend in his favour.

Biden, who stands on the cusp of victory, said late on Friday he was on track to claim 300 electoral votes. The former vice-president has already urged unity during the count after Donald Trump continued to sow doubt about the election process without presenting any evidence. “We may be opponents, but we’re not enemies,” Biden said. “We’re Americans.”

It’s 4am on the US east coast, and here’s a run-down on those current Biden leads – they are all narrow, but he doesn’t need to win all of them to get to the magic figure of 270.

Here the Guardian’s Luke Harding narrates how a turbulent election night gave way to a desperate position for Trump – and a seemingly futile strategy to stay in power:

Trump reportedly spent the next few hours ringing Republican governors. At 2.30am he gave a presidential briefing. It was everything his adversaries had feared: an angry and unfounded riff in which he accused the Democrats of fraud. Trump claimed – wrongly – that he had won the election. He suggested the supreme court would intervene. “This is an embarrassment to our country,” he said, to cheers from his family and friends.

The grim scenario, which Trump had been carefully preparing for months, was now being played out on the nation’s TV screens. The president’s argument – that mailed-in votes for Biden amounted to cheating – was untrue. But like previous presidential lies, it was to have ugly real-world consequences. A dark myth was taking shape: that the Democrats had stabbed Trump in the back.

Meanwhile, Biden expressed optimism and urged voters to be patient. Later on Wednesday, results looked increasingly good for him. Trump’s 2016 path to the White House went through Michigan, a traditionally Democratic northern state, and Wisconsin. Now both had swung back and were called for Biden. In a speech that afternoon, he said: “When the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

Slowly but surely, the race was going the wrong way for Trump. The president’s aggressive fightback took a familiar shape: a wave of lawsuits. In Wisconsin the Trump campaign demanded a recount, in Michigan a stop to counting, in Pennsylvania a challenge to the legality of extending ballot deadlines. And so on. The apparent goal: to prevent Trump from sliding, as each ballot was counted, to ignominious defeat.

“I have never been more grateful for President Trump’s incompetence,” writes the conservative columnist Max Boot in the Washington Post. “He can’t even organize a coup d’état properly.”

From the piece:

Many of us have spent the past few years decrying the tendency of Trump supporters to live in a world of alternative facts. But ultimately reality bites. The fact that Trump and his cultists cannot point to a single actual case of fraud — much less enough fraud to overturn an election that he is on track to lose by a significant margin — makes it impossible for them to effectively challenge the results. Their theory — that Democrats perpetrated a massive fraud in the presidential race but neglected to fix the results of House or Senate races — is laughably absurd.

Read further here.

Without the electoral college, of course, Biden would long ago have left Trump in the dust, and we would not all be staring at county clerk web sites and cable TV tallies.

Illustrating Trump’s inconsistent nature by digging through his endless Twitter stream might be too easy, but still.

“Suspended animation” – that’s the new phrase the Associated Press has selected to describe the state of the US presidential race.

Here’s the top of their latest news take (which is walled off from the AP elections decision desk):

Four days after the election, the US presidential race hovered in suspended animation Saturday as the long, exacting work of counting votes brought Democrat Joe Biden ever closer to a victory over President Donald Trump.

The verdict delay can be attributed to high turnout, a massive number of mail-in ballots and slim margins between the two candidates. But Biden held leads in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia, putting him in an ever-stronger position to capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed to take the White House.

There was intense focus on Pennsylvania, where Biden led Trump by more than 27,000 votes, and Nevada, where the Democrat led by about 22,000. The prolonged wait added to the anxiety of a nation facing historic challenges, including the surging pandemic and deep political polarization.

Read more here.

New results out of Georgia and – they just basically say the same thing, Biden has a small but significant lead. The state is in any case heading for a recount (in the future! The results referenced below are still part of the first count). But in the interest of total information awareness, and in case you are keeping a separate tally at home:

It has been a few hours since we’ve had any new results in the states still counting the US presidential vote.

It’s about 3am in Pennsylvania and coming up on midnight in Nevada.

That does not mean the decision desk gears are not grinding offstage. The Associated Press and others still might decide at any moment that they have quote-unquote seen enough.

But on the other hand if you are weighing sleep, or a break for coffee, or a morning jog, depending on your time zone – you might be safe to do that without fear of missing The Big Moment. Might.

A texting company run by one of President Donald Trump’s top campaign officials sent out thousands of targeted, anonymous text messages urging supporters to rally where votes were being counted in Philadelphia on Thursday, falsely claiming Democrats were trying to steal the presidential election, the Associated Press reports:

The messages directed Trump fans to converge at a downtown intersection where hundreds of protesters from the opposing candidates’ camps faced off Thursday afternoon. Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground state where former Vice President Joe Biden’s jumped ahead Friday and in a televised address later predicted a victory that would give him the presidency.

“This kind of message is playing with fire, and we are very lucky that it does not seem to have driven more conflict,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s online watchdog Citizen Lab. Scott-Railton helped track down the source.

The texts were sent using phone numbers leased to the text-messaging platform Opn Sesame, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition they not be further identified. The company’s CEO is Gary Coby, the Trump campaign’s digital director. It provides text-messaging services to GOP clients including the Republican National Committee.

“ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!” the text said, directing recipients to “show your support” on a street corner near the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes were being counted and tensions were running high.

Read the full piece here.

Is it possible that national politics – as distinct from policy – could begin to demand a smaller share of the national attention?

For the dead-enders, there are still those two runoff senate elections in Georgia to grapple over, and after (if and when) Biden is installed in the White House, depending on what happens in those runoffs he could then face a protracted struggle with Mitch McConnell and the conservative courts.

The presidential race has not yet been called. It’s not over. But we are well into a blending period between not-over and over. It seems. Like.

Multiple Rupert Murdoch-owned conservative media outlets have shifted their messaging to warn readers and viewers that Donald Trump just might have lost the presidential election.

The messaging appears to be closely coordinated right down to an appeal to Trump about preserving his legacy by showing grace in defeat. It’s being carried on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

If and when the writing is on the wall for Trump, the Murdoch media-sphere is likely where he’ll encounter the truth. Unless Don Jr tells him?

Fox News host Laura Ingraham, an intimate of the president ever since she spoke at the 2016 Republican national convention, made an astounding statement that seemed directed at Trump himself, advising him to accept defeat “if and when that does happen” with “grace and composure” and appealing to his sense of his own legacy.

Ingraham said in part:

If and when it’s time to accept an unfavorable outcome in this election, and we hope it never comes, but if and when that does happen, president Trump needs to do it with the same grace and composure he demonstrated at that town hall with Savannah Guthrie. So many people remarked about his tone and presence. Exactly what he needs.

Now losing, especially when you believe the process wasn’t fair, it’s a gut punch. And I’m not conceding anything tonight by the way. But losing, if that’s what happens – it’s awful. But president Trump’s legacy will only become more significant if he focuses on moving the country forward.

The Wall Street Journal has published an opinion piece with almost the exact same message. It is titled “The Presidential Endgame” and subtitled “Trump has the right to fight in court, but he needs evidence to prove voter fraud.”

“Mr Trump’s legacy will be diminished greatly if his final act is a bitter refusal to accept a legitimate defeat,” the piece warns.

Here’s the top:

Perhaps it was inevitable that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign would end as his Presidency began: with the President claiming victory and his frenzied antagonists denouncing him as a would-be fascist. The reality is that the U.S. can and probably will have a normal election outcome regardless of the shouting between now and then.

Mr Biden is leading in enough states to win the presidency, and if those votes survive recounts and legal challenges, he will be the next president.

Top editors at the New York Post – which before the election was the launch vehicle for wild and desperate attacks on Joe Biden’s son Hunter – have “told some staff members this week to be tougher in their coverage” of Trump, the New York Times reported, citing two anonymous employees of the paper. From the piece:

On Thursday, in a sudden about-face, Rupert Murdoch’s scrappy tabloid published two articles with a wildly different tone. One accused the president of making an “unfounded claim that political foes were trying to steal the election.” The headline on the other described Donald Trump Jr. as the “panic-stricken” author of a “clueless tweet.”

News coverage at Fox News has similarly shown little patience with the lies about voter fraud Trump is advancing in hopes of reversing the election.

Asked about the Trump campaign’s assertion that Republican observers had not been allowed to observe vote-counting, the Fox correspondent states flatly, “That’s not true. It’s not true. It’s just not true”:

We’re haven’t seen any big vote tally updates coming in over the past couple of hours.

Philadelphia isn’t expected to release any data tonight, and vote counters in Pittsburgh have wrapped up for the night as well. We’re unlikely to see a winner projected in Pennsylvania until those population centers process ballots.

More results from Nevada are expected tomorrow morning PT.

As elections workers continue tabulating ballots, many have put themselves at risk of contracting Covid-19, as CNN’s Brianna Keilar pointed out.

Officials have taken precautions, including requiring face masks and mandating social distancing at election centers. But there’s an inherent risk to spending hours indoors with other people, and election workers have accepted that risk as they speedily count Americans’ votes.

Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs is reporting that Covid-19 has spread among White House to Meadows and at least four others :

Here’s a video from election day, which shows Donald Trump and Mark Meadows at a campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Neither was wearing a mask to protect themselves and others from contracting Covid-19.

In the leadup to election day, Trump complained that the media was focused too much on the coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than a quarter-million Americans.

He has consistently insisted that the US is “rounding the turn” and overcoming the pandemic, even as tallies of cases and deaths mounted. Even after he and at least two dozen others in his circle tested positive for Covid-19, Trump has refused to encourage his supporters to wear face masks.

Here’s Meadows on election night:

Gabrielle Canon reports:

Marches continued in New York City for the 4th night, in support of vote counters and the expected end to Trump’s presidency. Hundreds are still gathering in the streets tonight, and even after clashes with police and documented abuses committed by officers through the week, people are dancing, celebrating, and calling for all the votes to be counted.

Here are some scenes from NYC:

A campaign aide has also tested positive, Bloomberg reports. CNN and NBC have also confirmed Meadows has contracted Covid-19.

The White House did not immediately respond to a query from the Guardian.

As CNN’s Kaitlan Collins noted, Meadows was at a White House election night party. In the lead-up to the election, Donald Trump held multiple rallies a day, attended by hundreds of supporters, most of whom were not wearing masks to slow the spread of disease.

The United States broke its record for the highest number of new Covid-19 infections in a single day, with more than 121,000 new cases recorded Friday.

Daniel Strauss reports from Wilmington, Delaware:

Former vice-president Joe Biden didn’t declare victory during a speech on Friday night, but he did say he has the upper hand as the remaining votes are counted. “We’re on track to over 300 electoral college votes,” Biden said. “And look at the national numbers. We’re on track with a clear majority behind us.”

“Our vote total is still growing. We’re beating Donald Trump by over 4 million votes,” he added.

“While we’re waiting for the final results I want people to know we’re not waiting to get the work done,” Biden said, adding that on Thursday, he and his running mate California senator Kamala Harris met with experts on the economy and the coronavirus.

Biden’s comments come as votes are counted in a handful of remaining states. Neither he nor Donald Trump have reached the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race, but over the past few days Biden has retained a lead in both votes in those states and the electoral count.

“We may be opponents, but we’re not enemies,” Biden said. “We’re Americans.”

Echoing the message of calm and unity that he has been repeating in days since the election, Biden also emphasized the he plans to make the coronavirus crisis a top priority if he takes office.

The Democratic candidate’s transition team is already at work to tackle the pandemic and other issues, he said. “We can’t save any of the lives that have been lost but we can save a lot of lives in the months ahead,” he said.

“One of the things I’m especially proud of is how well we’ve done across America,” Biden continued, citing his lead in red states Arizona and Georgia.

He urged patience.

“I know watching these vote tallies can be very slow,” he said. “It can be numbing” to watch. But those numbers represent voters, he said, and their voice should be heard.

In Detroit, anti-racist protesters were worried that pro-Trump demonstrators would return to the city on Friday after dark for another protest, after an estimated 200 people, some armed, rallied for Trump outside of Detroit’s vote counting location this morning.

Instead, nothing happened, except for some shouting between the protesters and some women wearing Trump hats who had come to Detroit to support the president. The women complained to reporters about how they had been treated after the protesters screamed insults at them and told them to go home, but would not say where they had come from, or give their names.

Another Trump supporter spat at the Detroit protesters before driving away from a downtown hotel.

With no rightwing demonstration in sight, the local activists left, too.

The Proud Boys, a violent far-right street fighting group, and pro-Trump provocateurs have advertised a “Stop the Steal” protest at Michigan’s Capitol at noon on Saturday.

Biden supporters have gathered outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, where the Democratic candidate will speak soon.

A few Trump supporters are also there.

A few Trump supporters are also there, in protest.

Many are growing impatient awaiting a presidential election result, including, it seems, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer.

Here’s more on why it’s taking so long:

An update: we are expecting remarks from Joe Biden in Delaware at 10:30pm east coast time. We’ll bring you live coverage.

Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said Trump and his campaign’s attempts halt the vote count with litigation will amount to nothing.

“They either lose, or the suit is dismissed,” he told MSNBC. “There has been a lot of noise, but there has been literally zero impact on the counting of ballots.”

He also noted that his children have been asking him – as many people in the US and around the world have been wondering – when we’ll have a result. “My kids keep asking me, when is this going to be over,” he said. “It’s going to take as long as it takes to make sure every legal vote is counted.”

It is still unclear what we can expect from Joe Biden tonight. Reporters were directed to the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware – which had been staged for a speech from the Democratic candidate.

Chris Coons, a Democratic senator of Delaware, joined reporters in Wilmington. “Bob Casey [a Democratic senator of Pennsylvania] just texted me,” he said, according to the pool report. “I don’t think we’re going to get a call out of Pennsylvania until tomorrow.”

“I have not spoken directly to the vice-president,” he told reporters, according to Nikki Schwab of the Daily Mail. “I think the folks around him are staying calm and being appropriate respecting voters and respecting the process.”

Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, continues to grow.

He’s now up by 21,705 votes - leaving the candidates one-third of a point apart.

Here’s the scene in Philadelphia, captured by Amber Jamieson of Buzzfeed:

A state of emergency has been declared in Miami-Dade county, as Tropical Depression Eta heads toward Florida.

“I will be meeting with my senior staff and emergency managers this evening to ensure that all necessary emergency operations are underway,” Mayor Carlos Giménez said in a statement released Friday night. “For now, I urge residents to stay informed as to the storm’s track and potential impact. We are looking at experiencing heavy rainfall through Monday and possible tropical storm force winds beginning Sunday.”

The storm, which is expected to strengthen as it approaches Florida, has already devastated Central America, leaving landslides and flooding in its wake. More than 100 fatalities have already been reported and thousands remain under evacuation across the region.

In Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold where Joe Biden has maintained a shrinking lead as officials tabulate votes, Cindy McCain says she’s confident that Biden will ultimately win.

McCain, the widow of the late Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, endorsed Biden and helped him campaign in her home state. She is one of several high-profile Republicans who have backed Biden over Trump.

Arizona has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election but one since 1952. We’re waiting for more results from the presidential race there tonight.

Read more about why Arizona is so competitive this year:

We’ve been anticipating an address from Joe Biden tonight, but it remains unclear when that will be.

Bloomberg News’ Jennifer Epstein reports that Biden is planning to speak even if the election results do not become clear tonight:

Gabrielle Canon in San Francisco reports:

While the nation anxiously awaits confirmation of who will be the next president, moves are being made inside the White House that could inhibit a smooth transition to Joe Biden, who is close to clinching a win.

Bonnie Glick, the deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development was ousted from her position on Friday, after being asked to resign in a letter signed by the director of the White House presidential personnel office, John McEntee.

USAid has been on the frontlines in the battle against Covid-19, playing a critical role in the global response to the pandemic.

“Should there be a transition, she will be missed and it will be a loss for USAid,” a senior figure told CNN, adding that “people in the community have the highest respect for her” and that she “brought real thought leadership to the agency”.

Some are now expressing concerns that the president could begin purging officials he believes to have not been loyal to him, before the end of his term, should he lose the election as currently expected. Trump also demoted Neil Chatterjee, who heads the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this week.

Glick, a well-liked Republican appointee who was confirmed in her role by the Senate in the beginning of 2019, is believed to have been fired to open her position to John Barsa, whose role as acting administrator for the agency expired today. Barsa was never confirmed, and regulations allow only 210 days for “acting” positions, but with Glick’s departure, he will continue heading the agency from the deputy position.

Barsa isn’t as popular internally and has come under criticism for appointing inflammatory and inexperienced officials in the agency, for political and ideological reasons.

Sam Levine reports:

A federal judge dismissed another lawsuit from Republicans alleging vote irregularities, this time in Nevada.

Nevada Republicans had sought to block the use of a signature verification machine and wanted more observation access to ballot counting in Clark county, home of Nevada.

The loss is the latest in a string of suits experts consider to be long shots.

Sam Levine, the Guardian’s voting rights reporter:

Samuel Alito’s order requiring all counties in Pennsylvania to segregate ballots that arrived after 8pm on election day is the first time the supreme court has weighed in on a matter affecting the presidential race since Tuesday.

But Alito’s order is not that significant because it tells Pennsylvania officials to do what the state had already asked local officials to do.

After Pennsylvania Republicans asked the supreme court to halt the counting of mail-in ballots received post-election day, justice Samuel Alito has directed elections officials follow procedure and segregate and tally late-arriving ballots separately.

The Pennsylvania secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, has already directed officials to segregate the late-arriving ballots, and told CNN she didn’t think those ballots would affect the outcome of the elections “unless it’s super close”.

Republicans are ultimately seeking to have ballots that were postmarked by election day but arrived late thrown out. The Pennsylvania supreme court had ordered that the normal deadline to return ballots – 8pm election day – could be extended to today at 5pm local time.

As more and more votes in Pennsylvania are tabulated, Joe Biden’s lead in the state has been growing – so it’s unclear that Republican litigation will have any impact.

Read more:

In Phoenix, Arizona, pro-Trump protestors have reconvened outside the Maricopa county tabulations and elections center, where officials are still counting ballots.

Caitlin O’Hara, who worked with the Guardian on our series on Maricopa county’s changing political landscape, is reporting the scene.

Signs posted near a fence designed to keep demonstrators from getting too close direct people to watch a live feed of the vote count, she reports. Counter protestors are also on scene, with people on both sides carrying arms. The scene is calm, local reporters say.

Joe Biden has maintained a narrowing lead in Maricopa, with more vote counts expected from the county at 6pm local time tonight.

Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson issued a statement addressing “false claims from Ronna McDaniel”, the Republican National Committee chair, saying that they “have no merit”.

In a bullet-pointed list, Benson disputed unsubstantiated claims from McDaniel alleging inaccuracies in the vote count. McDaniel, when pressed today by Fox News anchors for evidence of “irregularities” in the vote count, couldn’t come up with any. She responded, “We’re working on that. And that’s why I’m saying, give us time.”

“Michigan’s elections were conducted fairly, effectively and transparently and are an accurate reflection of the will of Michigan voters,” Benson said. She also noted – as reporters have also pointed out – that one instance of “erroneous reporting of unofficial results” was due to a software error and did not affect vote totals.

Read her statement here.

As more votes are counted, Donald Trump’s hopes for a victory appear to be dimming – a reality he seems to be processing in his most recent tweets.

“I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by,” he wrote, quite accurately describing what happened when more ballots were tabulated.

“Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!” he added. However, his baseless and ineffectual legal challenges are, perhaps, unlikely to have that effect.

Earlier, CNN reported that Trump has not prepared a concession speech, according to those familiar with the matter. The president’s path to winning the election is narrowing. In Pennsylvania, a latest update found Biden up by more than 16,000 votes.

The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani is reporting from Easton, the county seat of Northampton county in eastern Pennsylvania, which Biden has won by 0.5 percentage points:

Northampton county is one of three counties in Pennsylvania that flipped over to Trump after voting twice for Obama. It’s a leafy university city where half the people (that’s not a statistically reliable estimate) seem to be from New Jersey or Brooklyn, in a county that has voted for the presidential winner almost every election since 1920, apart from three times.

Biden currently leads Trump by just over 14,500 votes and it looks almost certain that he will take Pennsylvania’s 20 college electoral votes and therefore the White House.

Nancy Amacker, 52, an activity coordinator at an elementary school, is hopeful but not taking a Biden victory for granted. “Four years ago I went to bed thinking Hillary had won. This time I’m waiting until it’s final.”

Amacker said the community has become far more divided over the past four years, with people growing less respectful and tolerant of opposing political views. “We’re definitely more polarized than before, and it’s not just about candidates, it’s about demonizing anyone who doesn’t agree with you.”

Amacker’s husband voted Republican, which she said has been “really hard”.

It’s not just American voters who are anxious about the results, according to Sidharth Vijay, 21, originally from Kerala, India, who is studying chemical engineering and math-econ at Lafayette College. “I can’t vote but this is a high stake election for the world because America dictates global policy. Four years ago I can understand that some people gave Trump the benefit of the doubt, but this time, we know that another Trump victory will lead to more polarization and misinformation, not consolidation. He’s shown his true colors in the pandemic, so that more people have voted for him this time … that’s really troubling.”

We’re expecting a batch of results from Philadelphia and Allegheny county within the hour, inshallah it will then be over.

International election observers from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Panama said they found the presidential campaign was “competitive and quite aggressive, with one campaign, in particular, launching repeated attacks on its major rival as well as the integrity of the country’s electoral system” in a damning new report.

“These attacks served to further divide an already highly polarized electorate and electoral process,” said the report from the Organization of American States, a Washington-based group that has also provided analysis of often chaotic Latin American elections.

The report also noted that Trump-allied “stop the count” demonstrators “were clear examples of intimidation of electoral officials”.

Read the report here.

Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman of Virginia, has said the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement “must be condemned by all political figures”. Riggleman, who lost a Republican primary this year, will be leaving office.

His primary opponent Bob Good, who identifies as a “biblical conservative” and closely aligns with Donald Trump, has won the election to take Riggleman’s seat in congress. One of Good’s new colleagues will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The White House has called a “lid” - meaning that we’re not expecting Donald Trump to deliver remarks tonight ... unless he changes his mind.

We are expecting to hear from Joe Biden tonight, at 8pm ET, according to Axios. The Democratic candidate is poised at the brink of victory. Multiple news organizations have projected him the winner, though the Associated Press, which the Guardian relies on to declare election results, has yet to do so.

Biden is expected to speak from Wilmington, Delaware, and Kamala Harris will introduce him, Axios reports.

Ja’Ron Smith, a top administration aide and the highest-ranking Black official at the White House, has left his post.

This was a “planned departure from the White House”, he said in a statement. But his move comes amid reports that several top aides are considering an exit as Donald Trump’s chances of winning re-election dim.

Smith served as deputy assistant to Trump and worked closely with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, including on a recent executive order aimed at reforming policing. Smith spoke at the Republican national convention earlier this year, saying he had seen Trump’s “true conscience”.

“I can tell you – he really cares,” Smith said at the time. “But, more importantly, he takes action.”

Smith said his decision comes as he’s expecting twins and was made with the blessing of White House colleagues “long before the election”.

First up, an update on Lindsey Graham – the Republican South Carolina senator who has become one of Donald Trump’s most loyal allies.

During a Zoom call with reporters, Graham said if Biden wins the presidency, he “deserves” a cabinet. “I’ll give him my input about who I could vote for as secretary of state, attorney general,” Graham said. “There may be some people that I just can’t vote for because I think they’re unqualified or too extreme.”

The senator, who won an expensive re-election race in South Carolina, is already positioning himself as a thorn in the Democrats’ side. He told reporters he’d oppose the Green New Deal – an ambitious climate action plan touted by progressive Democrats – and other progressive policies.

Graham, who has worked with and known Biden for many years, said their personal relationship was “good”. But he has remained committed to Trump.

“I’m going to stand with president Trump,” he said. Echoing the president’s baseless claims of “election irregularities”, Graham said Trump and his campaign should be allowed to “make their case”.

So far, Trump and his lawyers have failed to substantiate allegations of irregularities in a series of legal actions seeking to halt vote counts.

Hi there, it’s Maanvi Singh – blogging from the west coast.

I’ll be bringing you elections updates, including the latest electoral math, throughout the evening. You can also find me on Twitter @maanvissingh.

We’re watching the vote count in Georgia closely. The latest batch of processed ballots in Gwinnett county has boosted Joe Biden up by 4,200 votes statewide. More ballots – including those from the military – are yet to be processed. And the Democratic candidate’s lead is still close enough to trigger a recount. Stay tuned for more results.

As Donald Trump’s reelection campaign tries to raise money for their lawsuits in battleground states, their persuasion tactics have turned from pleading to bullying, as this fundraising email demonstrates.

It’s also worth noting it appears that half of the money raised for the lawsuits will actually go toward paying down the Trump campaign’s debt:

Let’s check in with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former adviser who is now facing fraud charges over allegations he misused money that was meant to help build a wall along the US-Mexican border.

Bannon has now lost his lawyer in the fraud case after suggesting Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.

The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports:

Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.

‘Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,’ Bannon said.

‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.’

Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.

The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.

Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:

The corner of 12th and Arch Street has become the epicenter of the political universe over the last few days as demonstrators have gathered to face off. The larger group has urged officials to “count every vote,” while a smaller pro-Trump group has cheered to “stop the steam.”

At times, it’s felt a little tense as protesters have confronted one another and the anti-Trump crowd has drowned out pro-Trump surrogates like Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski.

But on Friday the intersection had a notably different tone - the “count every vote” group essentially transformed into a large dance party. The celebration came as Joe Biden took a lead in the count for ballots in this key swing state.

“It feels great to finally celebrate something,” said Ann Dixon, who said she hasn’t been following the incremental changes in vote totals because she wants “every vote to be counted and it’s not over til its over.” She said she was concerned, however, that Trump would try and drag out the vote count, which would divide the country more and more.

Protesters young and old danced to a mix of music, which included Beyoncé, the Backstreet Boys, and Shakira.

“I sort of debated whether or not I should come out and then I decided I should. It’s important to sort of celebrate despite having a bunch of work to still do moving forward,” said Rachel MacDonald. “I’m not really motivated by anger in the same way and so I decided I should come out and dance with everybody as well and not just yell,”

She was there with her friend Hannah Chervitz, who was attending her first protest.

“It’s nice to come out and channel all of this energy into something positive,” Chervitz said.

MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why his network, like the AP, has not yet called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.

Kornacki explained that there are about 200,000 ballots left to be counted in the state. About half of them are mail-in ballots, and half of them are provisional ballots.

Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been very favorable for Biden, as it appears most of Donald Trump’s supporters chose to vote in person. But some of those ballots may still be challenged.

Historically, provisional ballots are also very favorable for Democrats, but so far, they have been a bit better for Trump. One explanation for this is that some of the president’s supporters received mail-in ballots but then chose to vote in person instead, so they received provisional ballots to allow election officials to confirm the vote was valid.

But election analyst Nate Silver said he was skeptical of that analysis:

A Republican congressman is engaging in a Twitter battle with one of his new colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.

It all started when congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican of Texas, sent a tweet this afternoon, saying, “If Trump loses, he loses. It was never an impossible outcome and we must accept the final results when it is over.

“But the unfortunate reality is that there is very little trust in the process, where irregularities have been flagrant and transparency lacking.”

That second sentence looks past the fact that Donald Trump has worked diligently to sow distrust in the election results, and the president’s advisers have been allowed to view the vote count in multiple battleground states.

But we’ll set that aside for a second. After Crenshaw sent that tweet, Greene, who is now a congresswoman-elect after winning her congressional race on Tuesday, replied, “The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans can’t back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win.”

Crenshaw responded by chastising Greene and urging her to live up to the office she has been elected to. “I literally said investigate every irregularity and use the courts,” Crenshaw said. “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.”

That dust-up could preview some of the contentious conversations to come in the House Republican caucus once Greene is seated in January.

The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:

It is a US-born slur that was inspired by Honduras and has haunted Latin America for decades – a deprecatory way to describe politically volatile and economically puny backwaters ruled by erratic and venal autocrats.

But on Friday, after Donald Trump’s alarming press conference at the White House yesterday, voices across the region, from Mexico to Uruguay, delighted in lobbing the insult back at their neighbours to the north.

“Who’s the banana republic now?” wondered the frontpage headline of Colombia’s Publimetro, one of many Latin American newspapers whose editors thought the term perfectly captured the electoral turmoil playing out in the US.

Over the border in Venezuela, a columnist from the El Nacional agreed calling Trump’s behaviour “intemperate and foolish” and telling readers the US election seemed to be taking place “in a country at war, or a república bananera”.

Merval Pereira, one of Brazil’s most prominent political commentators, called his daily column “Bananas americanas” and wrote: “This is a singular event in US democratic history which puts the country in the list of banana republics, an expression created by the Americans themselves.”

The Latin American Twittersphere went bananas too, with the Uruguayan human rights defender Javier Palummo asking followers: “How do you say banana republic in American English?”

The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro:

One of Donald Trump’s most devoted international disciples, the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now seems to be decoupling from his political idol.

Bolsonaro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders and revels in being portrayed as South America’s “tropical Trump”. Last year Brazil’s far-right leader was reported to have told his fellow populist: “I love you”.

But on Friday morning, with a Trump defeat looking increasingly likely, Bolsonaro appeared to jump ship. “I’m not the most important person in Brazil just as Trump isn’t the most important person in the world, as he’s said himself,” he told an event in southern Brazil. “The most important person is God.”

To hammer his point home Bolsonaro later posted a video of those comments to his Twitter feed, where he has 6.6 million followers. Despite Bolsonaro’s admiration for Trump, the US president is reportedly not one of them.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, held another press conference as the margin in the race for his state’s 16 electoral votes remains razor-thin.

“We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections,” Raffensperger said, promising an “open and transparent” vote-counting process.

Raffensperger once again acknowledged that, with a margin this small, a recount was all but certain in the state.

The Republican official defended the integrity of the vote-count, saying he was committed to ensuring trust in the process.

As of now, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 1,603 votes in Georgia, out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the state.

The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports from Los Angeles:

Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger, in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.

George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested Lacey’s policies for years.

An emotional Lacey conceded the race Friday, thanking her family and her supporters.

Lacey was the first woman and first African American to serve as the Los Angeles DA. In her second term, Lacey faced intensifying scrutiny over her refusal to prosecute police officers who kill, her close ties with law enforcement unions and her continued use of the death penalty.

Gascón, who was endorsed by political heavyweights such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, is part of a wave of liberal, reform-minded DA candidates across the US who have pledged to undo some of the harms and racial inequities of policing and prisons.

BLM and other activist groups have increasingly put pressure on elected district attorneys, who are some of the most influential and least accountable players in the US criminal justice system.

Joe Gloria, the Clark county registrar of voters, has said the Nevada county will post the results of another batch of ballots in about four hours.

Joe Biden currently leads in Nevada by 20,137 votes, but the AP has not yet called the race because of the outstanding mail-in and provisional ballots.

Gloria previously said there are about 63,000 mail-in ballots and 60,000 provisional ballots left to be processed.

Given Biden’s advantage in Clark county, the additional updates will likely help him build upon his lead in Nevada.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:

A day after Donald Trump leveled baseless claims about the election from a White House lectern, it was clear that his supporters standing outside the Pennsylvania convention center, where workers are counting ballots, heard him clearly.

Chanting “let us see the vote,” many in the group repeatedly said that Republicans were not being allowed inside the convention center, an untrue claim Trump made Thursday.

“We’re here for the millions of Americans who stood in line for hours to cast non absent votes for the president and who are being disenfranchised right now behind me by people who will not let us legally watch, who are keeping the poll watchers and the candidates 20 feet away. You cannot see anything,” said Joanne Young, a protester.

Observers from both parties have been allowed in. The Trump campaign secured a court order on Thursday requiring local election officials to allow observers to get up to six feet closer to observe the process. A Trump campaign attorney conceded in federal court that the party had observers inside the hall.

A woman who would only give her first name, Kathy, said that it was obvious Democrats were cheating because vote totals were consistently being added to Joe Biden’s vote totals. The reason that’s happening is because Democrats overwhelmingly voted by mail-in ballot, which take longer to count, while Trump supporters voted in person.

Kathy also said that Trump had watermarked all of the ballots and all the fake ones would come out this week. Such a watermark would be impossible - elections in the United States are run by the states at the local level. The president has no access to ballots or role in administering elections.

Valerie Fiorinno said she had observed the mail-in process and believed there were many ways to cheat. Election officials and voters closely track and verify ballots.

“I will never see him as legitimately elected,” she said of Joe Biden.

House Democrats have picked up their first major win of this election cycle, a rather remarkable statement given Democrats expected to build upon their majority in the chamber by at least a dozen seats or so.

The AP has just declared Democratic candidate Carolyn Bourdeaux to be the winner in Georgia’s 7th congressional district, which is currently represented by retiring Republican Rob Woodall.

Bourdeaux’s win represents the third seat Democrats have flipped, but the two others were largely thanks to redistricting in North Carolina.

Meanwhile, Republicans have defeated several freshman House Democrats in vulnerable districts and are looking at a net gain of about five seats in the chamber.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports from Philadelphia:

The area outside the Pennsylvania convention center has essentially become a massive dance party, with protesters holding “count every vote” signs and getting down to blasting tracks Beyoncé and others.

There’s a moderately sized pro-Trump crowd across the street, waving Trump 2020 flags and cheering “show us the vote.”

The Trump campaign has said they’re not being allowed meaningful access to vote-counting inside, even though the campaign does have observers in the hall where votes are being counted and there is a 24 hour live stream.

It’s the second day crowds have gathered here as workers continue to count ballots inside. But the mood is noticeably different - it’s much more jubilant today than it was on Wednesday or Thursday when protesters were more confrontational. Joe Biden overtook Trump’s lead in this key swing state earlier today.

The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports from Pennsylvania:

Joe Biden currently has a 19-point lead in Allegheny county, the state’s second-most populous county that’s home to Pittsburgh.

Donald Trump has so far picked up about 10,000 more votes than in 2016, whereas Biden has more than 34,000 more than Hillary Clinton managed four years ago.

Much to everyone’s frustration, especially mine, the county suspended counting yesterday due to a pending lawsuit. They hope to get through their outstanding 37,000 ballots by the end of today, inshallah.

On CNN, county executive Rich Fitzgerald has just reminded us that the only reason we are still waiting for Pennsylvania to finish counting is because the Republican-controlled legislature refused to allow mail-in ballots to be opened until 7am on election day.

Biden currently leads by 13,220 votes in Pennsylvania, and that lead is expected to grow as more ballots are processed.