US Elections 2020

The United States has reported over 184,000 new Covid-19 cases on Friday. Amid surging case numbers, Donald Trump promised imminent distribution of a vaccine - except to New York, which he threatened to leave out for political reasons - while the president-elect Joe Biden pleaded with Americans to follow basic mitigation measures.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg defended this decision to not ban Donald Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of former FBI director Christopher Wray and pandemic expert Anthony Fauci in a video broadcast. In a conversation with employees Zuckerberg stated that Bannon was "close" to "crossing that line" but did not break enough rules to justify banning him, so his account will remain available.

China has finally congratulated Joe Biden on his projected win in the US presidential election, indicating China have accepted the result and expect Joe Biden to be inaugurated as president in January despite legal challenges from the Trump campaign.

"We respect the choice of the American people. We extend congratulations to Mr Biden and Ms Harris," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday.

President-elect Joe Biden has named Ron Klain, a veteran Democratic operative, a lawyer and a decades-long confidant, as his White House chief of staff. Klain has served as a top aide to Biden since the 1980s, was a senior White House aide to Barack Obama and also VP Al Gore's chief of staff.

President-elect Joe Biden projected confidence about a transition effort that he said is "well underway" even as outgoing President Trump and his administration refuse to concede and decline to give access to Biden's team.

Biden called Trump's refusal to concede the election that he lost "an embarrassment" that "will not help the President's legacy." The Trump administration's refusal to initiate the transition process "does not change the dynamic at all in what we're able to do," Biden said.

Georgia's Secretary Brad Raffensperger has announced that all votes within the state will be hand recounted.

While Joe Biden currently sits approximately 14,000 votes ahead of Donald Trump, Secretary Raffensperger said "It's an audit, recanvass and recount all in one. It'll be a process that gets it all." He went on to say that he 'understood the national significance of this', and "We're doing this because it's really what makes the most sense... We have to run a statewide audit."

At the time of writing, currently projected President-elect Biden leads the popular votes by over 5 million. (JB: 77,320,00 / DT: 72,220,000)

Following the clearance for federal prosecutors to investigate "specific allegations" of voter fraud by Attorney General William P. Barr, the official overseeing investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, steps down. According to an internal email that the New York Times has obtained, Pilger "would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions".

Donations made to President Donald Trump's "official election defense fund" would also be used to pay off the campaign's debt, according to the fine print on the donation pages.

Trump's website links to a donation paged for an "Official Election Defense Fund," and asks supporters to donate. According to the fine print lower on the page, 60% of the donation would go towards "the retirement of general election debt".

Following Trump's defeat, Jair Bolsonaro broke his silence to announce that he might not run for re-election because "there is an advance from the left" in South America.

“See how the world is. In South America, there are several countries again painted in red. Many times, the President has no way to change, as I would like to happen, the destiny of Brazil. Some people want the destination to be another, and they may be right," Bolsonaro said on Facebook.

As Donald Trump played golf on Saturday morning, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was surprised on camera during a press conference by the announcement of Joe Biden's win in the presidential election.

Earlier confusion regarding the location of the press conference had led the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia to tweet that it was not being held at their premises, but at an unrelated outdoor area, described by the Deutsche Welle news agency as "a parking lot between a crematorium and an adult book store."

Democrat Joe Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election, according to projections by CNN, Fox News, Associated Press. The former Vice President has been elected the 46th president of the United States, as vote tallies in several swing states were slowed by an unprecedented surge in mail-in ballots.

The race was called for Biden on Saturday when predictions that Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes put him over the 270-vote threshold needed to win the Electoral College, pending the outcome of any legal challenges.

Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota and Montana all passed legislation Tuesday permitting the possession of marijuana by adults, which means 15 states have legalized recreational weed or voted to legalize it.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there would be a recount in the state in the presidential election race, based on the current narrow margin and the small number of votes left to be counted. Under state law, candidates in Georgia can request a statewide recount once the election is certified if the margin is within half a percentage point.

"The focus for our office and the county elections officials, for now, remains on making sure that every legal vote is counted and recorded accurately," Raffensperger said. "We are literally looking at a margin of less than, you know, a large high school," he added.

Multiple broadcast news networks such as ABC and NBC have cut away from the United States President Donald Trump as he made remarks regarding the presidential elections on Thursday evening. With the vote count still underway when Trump faced the cameras, he made multiple unsubstantiated claims regarding voter fraud. The networks then made the decision to cut away from the screening.

Donald Trump Junior claims in a tweet without providing any arguments or evidence that the predidential elections had been fraudulent and has called for his father president Donald Trump "to go to total war".

Twitter has flagged the tweet as disputed information that "might be misleading about an election or other civic process".

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is speaking from the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware where he also accepted the Democratic nomination in August. According to new reports, Biden has won Michigan.

"More Americans voted this election than ever before in American history. Over 150 million people cast their votes. I think that is just extraordinary. And if we had any doubts, we shouldn't have any longer about a government of, by and for the people. It is very much alive, very much alive in America," so Biden. "Now after a long night of counting, it's clear that we are winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. I'm not here to declare that we have won, but I am here to report when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners."

The Trump campaign has stated that it has filed a lawsuit in Michigan, demanding the state "to halt counting until meaningful access has been granted", stating that it "has not been provided with meaningful access to numerous counting locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan law."

Republican David Andahl, who died from Covid-19 in October, has won a seat ion the North Dakota House of Representatives. Andahl, who was 55 when he died, couldn't be removed from the ballot for Tuesday's election.

Kanye West, a candidate for the presidency of the United States in the current elections, admitted defeat through social networks, last night. However, he has already launched a campaign for the election in 2024

Sarah McBride (Delaware), national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, becomes the first openly transgender state senator in US history.

"We did it. We won the general election. Thank you, thank you, thank you," McBride tweeted. "I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them, too."