President-elect Joe Biden has been confirmed as the winner of Georgia, after the state conducted a hand recount.
Continue reading...US president-elect Joe Biden says Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the ‘most irresponsible presidents in American history’, labelling his challenges to the election results ‘incredibly damaging’. Biden said he was not concerned that Trump’s refusal to concede the election would prevent a transfer of power, but added it ‘sends a horrible message about who we are as a country’.
Continue reading...President Donald Trump's election legal team holds a press conference to spout a number of conspiracy theories and baseless claims of voter fraud that they falsely claim changed the results of the 2020 election. Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers repeatedly accuse the media of disregarding their claims and argue a debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela could have hacked election results through machines used by local authorities
Trump’s personal lawyer was trying to drum up interest in tales of election rigging – but viewers were drawn to the drama on his head
On 7 November, the day the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani addressed the media at a landscaping company between a sex shop and a crematorium on Philadelphia’s industrial fringe.
Continue reading...Rising Biden tally and his popular vote lead overshadowed by Trump escalating his false insistence that he actually won
Joe Biden is approaching a record 80m votes, with ballots still being counted and having already recorded the highest number of votes for a US presidential election winner, as Donald Trump persisted on Thursday in denying the result and trying to overturn it.
Continue reading...The Georgia secretary of state tells the Guardian he’s received death threats for pushing back against the president’s claims
Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.
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The US coronavirus death toll has now surpassed 250,029, representing a higher death toll than any other country in the world.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, x number Americans have now died of coronavirus, more than eight months after the start of the pandemic.
Walmart, McDonald’s and Uber are among the companies that have the most employees on food stamps and Medicaid, according to a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO looked into the matter at the behest of Bernie Sanders. “These giant corporations pay starvation wages – wages so low their workers have to rely on Medicaid and food stamps,” Sanders said, pointing to several fast food and other companies whose workers have to rely on benefits because they do not make enough money to survive.
These giant corporations pay starvation wages—wages so low their workers have to rely on Medicaid and food stamps to survive:
Walmart
McDonald’s
Dollar Tree
Uber
Burger King
FedEx
Wendy's
This is what a rigged economy is about. We need a $15 living wage and Medicare for All. https://t.co/GFzfK9ERae
Donald Trump was condemned by opponents on Wednesday for firing the senior official who disputed his baseless claims of election fraud, as the president pressed on with his increasingly desperate battle to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Related: Biden to consult with frontline workers as US approaches 250,000 coronavirus deaths – live
Continue reading...A barrage of voter fraud conspiracy theories reveal Trump supporters’ fundamental misunderstanding of the system
Late last week, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier declared on social media that he had unearthed definitive proof of widespread voter fraud in Detroit. He pointed to an absentee ballot cast by “118-year-old William Bradley”, a man who had supposedly died in 1984.
“They’re trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since-deleted Facebook post, though the election had already been called for Joe Biden by every major news network days before.
Continue reading...Termination of Christopher Krebs comes amid removals of high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal to the president
Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.
Continue reading...As our maps and charts show, Trump not only lost to Joe Biden – he lost to other Republicans on the ballot
After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, many voters who typically vote Republican turned against him.
For example, in Winnebago county, Wisconsin, about 72% of voters cast their ballot for the Republican House candidate – either Glenn Grothman or Mike Gallagher, depending on where they live. But just 52% cast their vote for Trump.
Continue reading...Live streams of the count aren’t a new phenomenon – but after Trump’s baseless vote fraud claims, some are wondering if this method of transparency is too vulnerable
At a vote-counting center in Montgomery county, Maryland, a man sat in a room with other election workers, wearing a grey hat and dark purple rubber gloves. He unfolded a ballot, looked around and leaned forward to mark it. The man appeared on a Yahoo Finance livestream of the center. The video went viral, one version ending up on YouTube, where the narrator said they found it on 4chan.
“Do you notice that, folks?” said the narrator. “How he looks around to see if anyone is watching him – as if he’s about to commit a crime?”
Continue reading...In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the 'competent, caring government we so badly need'.
He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will 'level set' and show that the presidency will not label journalists 'enemies of the state' or 'routinely lie'
Outgoing president reported to have looked at military options against Tehran and its allies
Iran has warned of a strong response if Donald Trump goes ahead with plans to use the twilight of his presidency to mount a strike on Iran or its allies in the region.
It was reported that Trump last week looked at options for striking Iran’s main nuclear site, but was dissuaded from taking action after his advisers warned it might lead to a larger conflict in the Middle East. The report was sourced to four US officials by the New York Times.
Continue reading...Despite the president’s anti-Muslim policies, the margin between Trump and Biden among Muslim voters was closer than experts predicted
Dr Khalid Khan is an internal medicine physician in Houston, Texas. Even in the face of a pandemic that has cost almost quarter of a million American lives and administration that often seemed to demonize Islam, the doctor and self-proclaimed devout Muslim cast his ballot for Donald Trump.
“When you eat a dish, you might not like every ingredient. But you like the whole dish. We should take the good and leave the bad,” Khan said, comparing the US president to a mediocre meal.
Continue reading...How Republicans applied old school racism to new demographics, and lost
In March 1965, ABC interrupted a showing of its Sunday-night movie – Judgment at Nuremberg, a courtroom drama about Nazi war crimes – to show shocking footage from Selma, Alabama, where mostly Black protesters were being beaten bloody by mounted police with billy clubs as they tried to cross Edmund Pettus bridge into the city, demanding the right to vote.
John Lewis, then just 25 years old, led the way. “I can’t count the number of marches I have participated in in my lifetime, but there was something peculiar about this one,” he wrote in his memoir, Walking With the Wind. “It was more than disciplined. It was somber and subdued, almost like a funeral procession.”
Continue reading...‘The idea the president is still playing golf and not doing anything about it is beyond my comprehension. You’d think he’d at least want to go off on a positive note’, US president-elect, Joe Biden, said after a meeting with CEOs and labor leaders. ‘I find this more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started’, he said. Biden warned that if outgoing president Donald Trump continues blocking a US transition of power as the coronavirus pandemic worsens, 'more people may die'.
Continue reading...Brad Raffensperger says the Republican senator asked if he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in certain counties
Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
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According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, if Donald Trump wants a statewide recount, he will have to pay $7.9m.
The president lost the state by more than 20,000 votes - which means a recount is very unlikely to change the fact that he lost. Even if a recount, miraculously, left Trump ahead in the state, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are not enough to change the election outcome.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post that senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was among several members of his party who pressured him to toss out legally cast ballots so that Trump could win the state.
From the Post:
In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.
The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”
Continue reading...Barack Obama has said that if Donald Trump wants to be remembered as someone who 'put country first' then he must concede the presidency to Joe Biden.
Speaking on CBS, the former US president said Trump's actions are 'one more step in delegitimising democracy generally'.
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