Friday, November 20, 2020
Biden wins Georgia recount as Trump setbacks mount
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55006188
On Thursday, Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, said the hand audit of ballots had not altered Mr Biden's victory in the state.
"Georgia's historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state's new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results," Mr Raffensberger said in a statement.
Trump told ally he's trying to get back at Democrats for questioning legitimacy of his own election
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/19/politics/trump-democrats-election/index.html
President Donald Trump told an ally that he knows he lost, but that he is delaying the transition process and is aggressively trying to sow doubt about the election results in order to get back at Democrats for questioning the legitimacy of his own election in 2016, especially with the Russia investigation, a source familiar with the President's thinking told CNN on Thursday.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Mitt Romney says consequences of lame duck period are 'potentially more severe' than delayed transition
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/19/politics/mitt-romney-lame-duck-transition-consequences/index.html
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is warning that the consequences of actions taken by President Donald Trump during the lame duck period of his term are "potentially more severe" than those caused by the delayed presidential transition.
Georgia to release recount results; Biden, Harris to speak with governors
Election officials in Georgia say they are on track to finish their weeklong hand recount of the presidential race, with results released by noon Thursday.
Georgia audit on track to finish Wednesday and affirm Biden win, official says
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/17/politics/georgia-recount/index.html
Georgia is on a "good schedule right now" to finish an audit of the presidential election by Wednesday and thus certify its results by Friday, a top state voting official says, and the vast majority of counties are reporting results that are "spot dead on" to the initial tallies or finding only minor discrepancies.
Trump continues to claim he won the election. He did not.
https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/election-2020-misinformation/index.html
President Donald Trump's campaign and Fox News host Tucker Carlson alleged last week that a vote cast by a Georgia woman named Deborah Jean Christiansen was fraudulent.
The allegation was false -- like two other voter fraud claims the Trump campaign and Carlson leveled against legal Georgia voters last week.
The campaign and Carlson said this vote was a fraud because Deborah Jean Christiansen died last year. In fact, the vote was legally cast by a living woman who also happens to be named Deborah Jean Christiansen, born in the same year and month but on a different day.
Christiansen answered the door when CNN showed up on Tuesday evening.
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
'Confusion and chaos': Republicans denounce Trump's latest purge
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/18/republicans-denounce-trump-krebs-cybersecurity-437716
President Donald Trump on Tuesday
evening fired Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, after he spent days actively debunking
the president’s baseless voter fraud claims. And in a rare turn in the
Trump era, Senate Republicans across the spectrum — from Trump allies to
critics of the president — criticized the decision.
Ethics experts and Trump critics call for Senate investigation into Graham's probe into presidential election
Three top ethics experts and prominent critics of President Donald Trump on Wednesday formally requested the Senate Ethics Committee investigate whether Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina violated the chamber's rules in his probe over how mail-in voting was conducted in the 2020 presidential election.
Graham has not looked into states that Trump won. Asked why not, Graham said Wednesday "because they're not in question. I mean, we're looking at states where there's a contest. I'm not looking at states that he lost. I'm looking at states where there's a challenge."
The end of the Trump White House is *exactly* as bad as we thought it would be
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/18/politics/donald-trump-chris-krebs-fired/index.html
The end of Donald Trump's time in the White House was always going to be ugly. Just how ugly is now coming into clearer focus.
New Pfizer Results: Coronavirus Vaccine Is Safe and 95% Effective
The drug maker Pfizer said on Wednesday that its coronavirus vaccine was 95 percent effective and had no serious side effects — the first set of complete results from a late-stage vaccine trial as Covid-19 cases skyrocket around the globe.
The data showed that the vaccine prevented mild and severe forms of Covid-19, the company said. And it was 94 percent effective in older adults, who are more vulnerable to developing severe Covid-19 and who do not respond strongly to some types of vaccines.
Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with its partner BioNTech, said the companies planned to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization “within days,” raising hopes that a working vaccine could soon become a reality.
If the F.D.A. authorizes the two-dose vaccine, Pfizer has said that it could have up to 50 million doses available by the end of the year, and up to 1.3 billion by the end of next year.
However, only about half of its supply
will go to the United States this year, or enough for about 12.5 million
people — a sliver of the American population of 330 million. Americans
will receive the vaccine for free, under a $1.95 billion deal the
federal government reached with Pfizer for 100 million doses.
Georgia election audit finds 3,039 more uncounted ballots in 2 counties
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/georgia-election-audit-uncounted-ballots-two-counties
Unless additional uncounted ballots are found during the audit, it does not appear that the audit will result in a change in the state's election result as President-elect Joe Biden had been leading by approximately 14,000 votes. Sterling said the updated count in Fayette County trimmed the lead to just under 13,000.
If the audit were to
end up with Trump winning the state, he would still only have 248
electoral votes, with Biden remaining at 290.
Trump lashes out in new bid to tarnish an election he lost
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/18/politics/donald-trump-transition/index.html
Trump wrote that he terminated Chris Krebs, a senior Department of Homeland Security official, for contradicting his own baseless allegations of irregularities. The President, his campaign and political allies have made multiple efforts, which started well before the election, to falsely argue that he was cheated out of a second term. His effort appears motivated by a desire to explain away his clear defeat by the former vice president but is also part of a pattern of behavior designed to discredit Biden's presidency and to enshrine national divides that he consciously widened as a tool of power.
In other apparent attempts to cast doubt on the integrity of the election -- unprecedented in modern history -- Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham was embroiled in a controversy after calling election officials in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia -- three key states won by Biden -- to question them on procedures for mail-in ballots, which generally favored Biden. And two Republicans broke with tradition in Michigan, another state where the Democratic nominee triumphed, in temporarily blocking the certification of the election in Wayne County, where Biden beat the President. Michigan's Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, later told CNN's Chris Cuomo that the officials relented and agreed to certify the vote.
The latest maneuvers by Trump and his allies came as more of the President's long-shot legal challenges and threadbare cases alleging election fraud were exposed in the courts.