The 2020 general election has arrived

One of the big surprises of the 2020 election was how even though most Latino voters across the US voted for Joe Biden, in some counties of competitive states like Florida and Texas, a higher-than-expected percentage of Latinos supported Donald Trump. One factor that many believe played a role: online misinformation about the Democratic candidate.

It’s still too early to know exactly why these voters favored Trump, a candidate who made demonizing Latino immigrants a cornerstone of his campaign and administration. For one, Latinos in the US are a diverse group of almost 60 million people who represent more than 15 origin countries and encompass a range of generational, socioeconomic, and religious identities. And we’re still waiting for more complete demographic data on voter turnout.

The 2020 US election was the most secure in American history, according to US elections officials.

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result,” the coordinating bodies on election infrastructure and security said in a joint statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

President-elect Joe Biden has named the members of his agency review team, the people on his transition team who are supposed to go into federal agencies to help prepare the incoming administration to take over, seamlessly, on Inauguration Day.

There’s just one problem: The Trump administration hasn’t allowed that process to start.

It appears President-elect Joe Biden will win at least as many electoral votes as Donald Trump did in 2016 — a result Trump advisers touted as a landslide at the time. But even with that outcome no longer in doubt, the Trump campaign is making a last-ditch effort to keep the president in power by attempting to delegitimize the whole election.

Their strategy is to make allegations first and hopefully find evidence for them later. This state of affairs was thrown into stark relief late Friday morning during a Fox News interview with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. During it, Fox News hosts appeared to be out of patience with her evidence-free insinuations that the election was somehow stolen from Trump.

Update: Vox’s partners at Decision Desk have called the presidential race for former Vice President Joe Biden, but Georgia is still too close to call.

The results of the presidential race in Georgia are extremely close — with more returns still coming in on Friday.

Joe Biden has won Pennsylvania — and enough other states to win the presidency.

Vox’s election partner Decision Desk called the state, and the race, for Biden on Friday, and Saturday, decision desks at outlets including CNN, NBC, and the Associated Press followed. The state was once the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s hopes for a second term, but as more votes are counted, Biden slowly but surely gained an edge.

Joe Biden is the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election — but it all has come down to thousands of votes in a handful of states. If you’re a voter in one of them, you might be eager to know whether your ballot will be counted in the total. And some Senate and House races are still in play.

Right now, most of what’s still left to be counted are mailed or absentee ballots. Pennsylvania still has to count hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes because the state could not begin processing mail ballots until Election Day. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina are still tabulating ballots in close races.

Most people who lose their jobs get to do so privately. But there are a few exceptions. Contestants on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice got fired on national TV. And so did President Donald Trump, who was able to ride a lifelong preoccupation with image and branding to the White House, but not to a second term.

If a celebrity is “a person who is known for his well-knownness,” then Donald Trump was the equivalent for wealth. He was not the richest person in the world, or even the country; he came in at 339th on Forbes’s most recent US wealth rankings. His businesses are not the most famous or most successful; unlike Jeff Bezos, he does not run the most popular store in the world, and even in the hotels business, the Trump Organization was a much smaller presence than Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt.

Joe Biden has won the presidency.

A clear picture of the results of the 2020 election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden came into view on Friday, days after Election Day. Vox’s partner Decision Desk called the election Friday morning. And on Saturday, CNN, NBC, the Associated Press, and Fox News all called the election for Biden.

Joe Biden supports an increase to the national minimum wage; Donald Trump does not. Biden’s is a widely popular position, but one that he and many other Democrats often fail to highlight. During the final presidential debate, “wages” was the most-searched term on Google, as viewers seemed surprised to see that the issue was really even in play.

In the 2020 election, Florida voted 60-40 in favor of Amendment 2, a ballot measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 by September 30, 2026, even as it also voted to keep President Donald Trump in office. Beyond signaling that people just aren’t ideologically consistent, there is another — and perhaps more important — read into Florida’s results: Increasing wages is an attractive proposition to a lot of people, and it’s a position Democrats should embrace and highlight more.

The vote counts in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia continued to trend in Joe Biden’s direction Thursday morning, though not yet by enough for any of the three states to be called.

As of 2:15 pm Eastern, five key states still remain uncalled by Vox’s partner Decision Desk: Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina. (Alaska also hasn’t been called but that is just due to a slow count, it is very likely to go to Trump.)

Nevada is still too close to call, but the bulk of the ballots left to be counted come from the state’s Democratic stronghold of Clark County.

The presidential race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is tight in this southwestern state. Democrats expected to win Nevada, and Biden is leading Trump there — by just 0.64 percent — according to the latest numbers from Decision Desk as of 10 am ET Thursday. That number is unchanged from Wednesday afternoon. The votes are being counted in Nevada, but the totals have yet to be announced.

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have begun to file their promised lawsuits challenging the vote-counting process — but many of them make no sense.

For example, here are the facts alleged by the Trump campaign in In re Enforcement of Election Laws, a suit filed in Chatham County, Georgia, in an apparent effort to disrupt vote counting in that county:

President Donald Trump began his Thursday by demanding that states stop tallying votes.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted at 9:12 am ET, after spending much of Wednesday posting a flood of misinformation on Twitter meant to make it seem as though Democrats are stealing the 2020 election from him.

As millions of Americans cast their votes on Election Day, there are scattered reports across the country that voting machines aren’t working, causing delays and long lines at some polling sites. While this isn’t desirable, it’s also perfectly normal. Don’t panic just yet.

During an election cycle awash with accusations of election interference from both sides, not to mention the threat of cyberattacks from foreign governments, it’s understandable that people would assume the worst when anything goes wrong. But those assumptions are likely misplaced. Every election, voting machines break or have technical issues for perfectly innocent reasons, and 2020 has, so far, been no different.

Just hours after the polls opened, misleading claims about voting in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the presidential election, were running rampant on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The flurry of social media posts focused on alleged examples of voter suppression and polling location malfeasance, such as broken voting machines and ballots being discarded.

Conservatives — including the official Philadelphia Republican Party, Trump campaign operative Mike Roman, and right-wing media personalities — spread some of these posts on Twitter and Facebook, framing them as indicative of a widespread plot to harm Trump’s campaign. Some of the accusations have been disputed by election officials but continue to proliferate on social media. Local officials such as the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office called one of Roman’s tweets about Democratic Party signs outside a polling station “deliberately deceptive,” and Twitter has put a warning label on at least one of Roman’s recent posts.

For third-party candidates running in this year’s presidential election, 2020 is decidedly nothing like 2016. Rather, it’s more like 2004, or 2012.

Technically, there are 11 people running for president this year, four of whom could, by appearing on enough state ballots, hypothetically receive the 270 votes required to win the Electoral College and thus the White House: Republican incumbent Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Libertarian Party nominee Jo Jorgensen, and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins.

Election officials in several states, including the critically important battleground state of Michigan, are reporting robocalls full of misinformation about how to vote — and they’re warning voters to ignore them.

Experts are always on edge about last-minute hijinks that seek to discourage certain people from voting. But those concerns are even greater this Election Day. That’s both because the rules about how to vote during a pandemic are indeed complicated and because misinformation has been running more and more rampant on online platforms.

When Donald Trump descended a golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York in 2015 and declared that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” he not only announced he was running for president — he set the tone for a campaign where immigration took center stage.

Four years later, Trump has fundamentally reshaped the immigration system in ways that would be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. In a second term, he could embrace further restrictionist policies.

The latest election polling results for Michigan have good news for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden — they show a substantial lead over President Donald Trump.

A poll from Research Co. taken from October 31 to November 1, and released on Monday found Biden leading in the state with 53 percent support compared to Trump’s 45 percent — an 8 percentage point advantage heading into the election.