Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

One story I’m keeping tabs on today is that of lawsuits being filed over voting procedures in key states. To be clear, it is extremely normal for there to be litigation on Election Day. So I’m watching for anything that could be especially significant — both in terms of the outcome and previewing what we could see in the courts after today.

A lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania by Republicans falls into the latter category. The lawsuit alleges that Montgomery County has been reaching out to voters who submitted their ballots by mail and giving them the opportunity to fix mistakes they made on the ballots. That’s not what all counties are doing, so the Republicans are claiming that this procedure is a violation of the equal protection clause. And they’re asking both for the county to stop contacting voters to fix their ballots and for the ballots that were already fixed to be thrown out.

Legal scholars like election law expert Rick Hasen seem skeptical of these claims. But as he notes, this lawsuit could also be a harbinger of Republicans’ strategy if the margin is close in a state like Pennsylvania, since at that point the fight could shift to a focus on which individual ballots should be counted.

Although Trump is doing slightly better among Black voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, Biden will likely still win Black voters overall by a huge margin. The Black vote isn’t a monolith, though. According to our analysis of likely voters, Black voters 45 and older are much more supportive of Biden than Black voters under 45 are. Our analysis found voters under 45 are still overwhelmingly supporting Biden, but the age gap among Black Democrats is noteworthy.

Why does Biden do slightly worse (and Trump slightly better) among younger Black voters? According to the African American Research Collaborative poll, Black voters under 30 are less likely to think about their vote as support for the “Black community,” which could signal that they express lower levels of linked fate than their elders. Linked fate is the idea that Black Americans vote as a unified bloc in part because their history of being discriminated against in America has made them view their fate in a collective way. In the absence of strong feelings of linked fate, younger Black voters might feel less affinity for the Democratic Party. That same poll also found that Black voters under 30 were less likely than their elders to agree that the Democratic Party is welcoming to Black Americans, or to trust congressional Democrats to “do what is best” for Black people.

Happy Election Day! This afternoon I’ve been tracking reports of technical glitches with voting equipment, and while there have been a handful, that’s to be expected.

A few technical difficulties happen every election. (I wrote a whole story about it!) As Lawrence Norden, director of the election reform program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me: “No election is perfect. There are always going to be some technical problems.” And no, it’s not evidence of a hack or some kind of meddling. It’s just the reality when we have 10,000 different jurisdictions, all using different technology on the same day, and some voters using new equipment for the very first time.

There have been timely, effective fixes in each of the cases I’ve found so far. In Franklin County, Ohio, election officials weren’t able to sync electronic poll books with an online database, so they switched to paper poll books to check in voters. A similar fix was made in Spalding County, Georgia after their voting machines went down — voters were able to cast ballots on paper until the machines were back up and running.

And these few examples are the outliers. The vast majority of polling places today have had no problems. Instead, there have been lots of reports of no lines and smooth sailing: