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US election results 2020: Donald Trump vows court challenge; Biden gains ground in key states
Joe Biden is making headway in key battleground states, but Donald Trump has doubled down on his legal threats and demanded a recount in the crucial state of Wisconsin.
Welcome to day two of our rolling coverage of one of America’s most historic elections to find its 46th President.
Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden have been declared the winner, but the Trump campaign has called for a recount of votes in Wisconsin as presidential nominee Joe Biden has won the crucial “Rust Belt” state, according to CNN.
Responding to Mr Biden’s clear lead in the state, earlier today on Twitter, Wednesday local time, the Trump campaign account tweeted that there has been “reports of irregularities” in the votes and it would be requesting a recount to dispute Mr Biden’s knife-edge lead.
Mr Biden has a slim lead over Mr Trump in Wisconsin.
The state has not been called yet as a Biden win.
The key battleground states that are yet to be called are Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania
Democrats and Republicans were gearing up Wednesday for a possible legal showdown to decide the winner of the tight presidential race between Mr Trump and Mr Biden.
Trump declared overnight he was ready to go to the US Supreme Court to dispute the counting of votes, as the results remained unclear in several key states.
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Updates
Closing off as the count continues
Biden’s lead tightens in Arizona county
The biggest county in Arizona has revealed two sets of new votes that show Joe Biden’s lead is not just more than 10,000 votes.
Maricopa County vote totals have shown he has 912,585 votes and Trump has 838,071.
Four states that will decide the election
This is why Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania are all going to decide who becomes the next President of the US.
Georgia vote count to continue into the night
Officials in Georgia are vowing to count every single last vote until a result can be announced in the coming hours.
The state is now a key battleground for Trump and Biden.
Trump is still ahead with 98 per cent of the count complete – but mail-in ballots are still being counted.
Can courts decide the election?
In 2000 the White House contest between Republican George Bush and Democrat Al Gore rested on one state: Florida.
With Bush ahead by just 537 votes, and with problems with the state’s punch-card ballots, the Gore campaign sought a statewide recount.
The Bush campaign appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled to effectively block the full recount, handing Florida — and the election — to Bush.
Experts say such lawsuits are only practical if focused on a real problem and the vote gap is narrow.
If the margin separating candidates in that state is two or three percentage points — say, a 100,000 vote difference in Pennsylvania — “that’s pretty difficult to be litigating at the end of the day,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Iowa.
However, said Muller, “if it comes down to one state, then I would expect really serious litigation.”
If a campaign or candidate sues over state regulations, it has to first exhaust its options in the state justice system before heading to federal court and the US Supreme Court.
By piggybacking on the existing ballot extension case, the Trump campaign has raised its chances of reaching the high court.
But the Supreme Court has been cautious over involvement in voting matters that are decided by states, and is aware that it risked its standing as an independent body by effectively handing the 2000 election to Bush.
A case would put the political leanings of the court’s six conservative and three liberal justices in the spotlight — especially on Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court only last month.
Trump said he rushed her appointment in part so she could be in place to hear any election cases.
– AFP
What impact did COVID-19 have on the election?
Research from Yale University using geo tracking data from 15 million smartphones found that people in counties which voted for Donald Trump in 2016 did not socially distance as much as people in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.
The researchers found people in Trump-voting counties showed a 24 per cent drop in regular activity during the Covid-19 outbreak, but people in Clinton-voting counties reduced their movements by 38 per cent.
The researchers also found that political support was more associated with physical distancing than other factors such as race, age, wealth, and a county's median income, or its total Covid-19 caseload.
"The partisan gap strengthened over time, even when stay-at-home orders were in place," the researchers said.
The significant difference in social distancing behaviour has since led on to marked differences in Covid-19 transmission – to the extent that the Washington Post deemed the current outbreak to be "largely a red-state phenomenon".
"At this point, 7 in 10 new cases and nearly three-quarters of new deaths are occurring in states that supported Trump," the Post reported in October.
An exit poll conducted by Edison Research showed that four out of 10 voters said they thought the effort to contain the virus was going "very badly" while in the battleground states of Florida and North Carolina, five out of 10 voters said the national response was going "somewhat" or "very badly".
Half the voters said it was more important to contain the coronavirus even if it hurt the economy.
– David Mills
The biggest political event of the year has captivated Sky News broadcast audiences, with yesterday's coverage delivering top ratings on Foxtel.
Sky News recorded its highest rating day of the year with 5.6 per cent audience share. It was the number-one channel on subscription television reaching more than 800,000 unique viewers.
The news channel has delivered a share of 3.1 per cent across the past 40 weeks, ranking as the number-one channel on Foxtel.
On Sky News on WIN, Sky News coverage reached almost half a million unique regional free-to-air viewers.
– Holly Byrnes, national TV editor
Election a ratings bonanza for Sky
The biggest political event of the year has captivated Sky News broadcast audiences, with yesterday's coverage delivering top ratings on Foxtel.
Sky News recorded its highest rating day of the year with 5.6 per cent audience share. It was the number-one channel on subscription television reaching more than 800,000 unique viewers.
The news channel has delivered a share of 3.1 per cent across the past 40 weeks, ranking as the number-one channel on Foxtel.
On Sky News on WIN, Sky News coverage reached almost half a million unique regional free-to-air viewers.
– Holly Byrnes, national TV editor
Polls 'still get it right more often than wrong'
Australian pollsters have defended their record as their American counterparts cop a pasting for getting their predictions wrong yet again.
Most US pollsters were projecting a clear Biden win, and while that might still happen, his early sluggish performance in counting prompted many commentators to assert that the pollsters had got it wrong, as they did in 2016.
Well-known electoral analyst Nate Silver(pictured), who had given Biden an 89 per cent chance of winning, copped some heat on social media.
“Win or lose we fire Nate Silver out of a cannon into the sun at dawn,” one wag posted on Twitter.
The Chair of the Australian Polling Council, Campbell White, stressed that not all votes in the US election have yet been counted, and when finished, “the likely outcome is a Biden presidency, in line with the polls”.
“Polling is subject to the rules of probability and they are not a crystal ball. If a poll picks the wrong winner but is within its margin of error, it’s just not correct to describe it as wrong,” he said.
Polls still get it right a lot more often than they get it wrong, he said.
“For instance, the polling for last Saturday’s Queensland election picked the right result, identified correctly there was a swing to Labor, and every party’s vote was within the margin of error for a poll,” Dr White said.
“The 2019 UK election was also as expected by the polls. Out of all the many elections federal and state in Australia across the past 20 years there have been only two where the results were not in line with the polls (including last year’s federal election, which Scott Morrison unexpectedly won). From time to time there will be cases where polls aren’t correct but statistically that is to be expected.”
Roy Morgan CEO Michelle Levine said one common error in polling was an in-built bias towards the party or leader that everyone thinks will win.
“This is especially the case in telephone, robo-polling and online polls,” she said.
“In the US this phenomenon was demonstrated to the extreme – as it did in the previous election.
“The best way to measure voting intention accurately is with face-to-face interviews conducted with a representative sample of people using a ‘secret ballot’,” Ms Levine said.
– David Mills
Protests as Nevada goes down to wire
Trump supporters clash with “Count the Vote” protestors outside the Clark County Election headquarters in Las Vegas as workers continue to process mail-in ballots in the key battleground of Nevada. Pictures: AFP
