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

How The Election Ended In 2016

The 2016 election came down to fairly narrow margins in a few states, as seems likely the case in 2020. That made me think about how the previous presidential campaign ended up winding down. Here’s how the Associated Press wrote about it the day after Election Day:

“The Associated Press declared that Trump had won the presidency at 2:30 a.m. EST. Within 10 minutes, CNN reported that Clinton had called Trump to concede. Except for the AP, the politicians beat media organizations: CNN called the race for Trump as the Republican took the stage at his Manhattan headquarters, and CBS, ABC and NBC did the same as he spoke.”

As Clinton later described in her book “What Happened,” she was nudged to concede by a powerful figure in her own party (and the nation): Barack Obama. After a call with the then-president, Clinton called Trump to congratulate him on his surprising victory.

This year, if Biden is declared the winner, it will be interesting to see whether any GOP officials urge Trump to concede (or whether they have already). The question is whether Trump will, in fact, do so.

Among other places (Clark County, Nevada, and Maricopa County, Arizona), we’ll be getting more results tonight from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania — home of Pittsburgh. Allegheny has about 35,000 absentee ballots left to sift through (plus an unknown number of provisional ballots). Election workers today remedied 3,000 of those ballots that were damaged, and they are currently processing 3,873 overseas ballots. They hope to report these two batches by 6:30 p.m. After that, they will turn to the remaining 29,000 ballots, which a court ordered set aside until today because they were cast by people who were initially mailed the incorrect ballot, then mailed a replacement. Poll workers must go through each of these ballots to ensure that each voter only casts one ballot. Allegheny County officials say it will probably take a few days to get through this batch, so Pennsylvania counting isn’t ending tonight.

When is a lawsuit just a very expensive press release? Republicans have spent the past few days questioning the legality of the presidential election — even though, as I’ve mentioned several times on this live blog, the Trump campaign hasn’t yet produced actual evidence of wrongdoing, or proof that “illegal” ballots are being included in the count.

The latest notable legal maneuver came this afternoon, when Pennsylvania Republicans asked the Supreme Court to order Pennsylvania counties to segregate ballots that arrive after Election Day and refrain from counting them until the legal questions surrounding the deadline have been resolved.

Upon reading that, those of you who have followed the election litigation closely might have a bit of déjà vu. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state has already directed county election officials to set aside the late-arriving ballots (which are still valid under a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling) to be counted later. (This batch of ballots does not appear to be very large.) In their emergency application to the Supreme Court, Pennsylvania Republicans expressed concern that some counties might not be following the secretary of state’s orders because they hadn’t confirmed that they were adhering to the procedure, but didn’t offer any evidence that the guidance was actually being flouted.

This is just the latest in a stream of legal actions from the Trump campaign and Republicans that allege election misconduct without providing concrete proof that something illegal has happened. In a statement earlier today, Trump declared that “illegal ballots should not be counted.” But there’s no evidence that’s actually happening. The legal arguments that have been made in that direction either haven’t been convincing to judges, or — like this one — seem highly unlikely to affect the election in ways that could change the outcome. And so far, the litigation hasn’t stopped or even meaningfully slowed the vote count in key states — much less called the totals into question.