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Most Americans have chosen Democrat Joe Biden as the next president of the United States. Still, the incumbent Donald Trump is trying to do everything he can to overturn Biden’s victory on the legal path. All news and updates at a glance:
Trump pays partial recount in Wisconsin
Wednesday, November 18, 8:00 pm: US President Donald Trump now wants to recount some of the votes in the state of Wisconsin as well. The president’s election campaign team transferred $ 3 million for a partial recount, the state election commission said.
Trump’s side said it was about two districts. They were selected because most of the irregularities existed, he said. Biden is far superior in both districts. In Dane County he is ahead of Trump with more than 260 185 to 78,800 votes, in Milwaukee County with 317 270 to 134 357 votes.
In Wisconsin, Democrat Biden prevailed over Republican Trump by 20,470 votes, or 0.62 percentage points. The cost of a recount would only be borne by the state if the advantage had been less than 0.25 percent. This is why the Trump side had to transfer the money. A recount of all the votes in the state would have cost Trump’s campaign team, according to authorities, $ 7.9 million.
Before concluding, there is a manual review of the votes in Georgia. There Biden led with around 14,000 votes before the count began. During the inspection, it was found that about 5,600 counted votes were not included in the results, reducing Biden’s lead by 1,300 votes, Fox News television reported.
Trump’s allies are now suing in Nevada too
Wednesday, November 18, 3:23 am: After unsuccessful trials in Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states, Republican allies of incumbent US President Donald Trump are now also demanding the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in Nevada. Republicans are demanding that a court order “declare Trump the winner of the Nevada election” or, alternatively, that the election results be overturned and no winner confirmed. That stems from the complaint filed by a group of Republican election observers on Tuesday.
It states that “fraud and abuse would make such Nevada election results illegal.” The election was rigged by a faulty machine to verify voters’ signatures. Official election observers are also said to have been denied access to the polls.
The lawsuit appears to be based on “parroting false accusations without first-hand knowledge of the facts,” said Dan Kulin, spokesman for the Clark County Elections Department in Nevada. Trump supporters would repeat allegations that the courts have already dismissed. According to official figures, Biden was ahead of Trump in Nevada with 33,596 votes.
There was also an uproar in the state of Michigan, more precisely in Wayne County: there, Republican representatives had initially blocked the certification of votes in the corresponding electoral body on Monday night. After a protest on social networks, the Republicans lifted the blockade and certified the result of the elections.
Trump fires chief of authority after fraud denial
Wednesday, November 18, 1:40 am: US President-elect Donald Trump fired a key head of the Department of Homeland Security for publicly rejecting allegations of alleged voter fraud. The head of the cybersecurity and infrastructure agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, was removed from office “with immediate effect,” Trump wrote on Twitter. His statement that the presidential election had not been rigged was “very inaccurate,” Trump said.
There were “massive irregularities,” Trump claimed. Among other things, the deceased had cast votes and voting machines had thrown Trump’s votes to Democrat Joe Biden, the Republican continued. Twitter warned Trump’s fraud allegations that the statements were “controversial.”
In a first reaction, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, criticized Trump’s actions. Cancer ensured election security and worked against dangerous misinformation, according to a statement from Pelosis. “But instead of rewarding this patriotic service, the president fired Krebs because … he rejected Trump’s ongoing electoral fraud campaign.”
Krebs and other top US officials rejected Trump’s ongoing accusations in a joint statement last Thursday, without naming the president. “The November 3 elections were the safest in the history of the United States,” the statement said. They pointed out that the vote had not been manipulated through the use of computer programs. “There is no evidence that a voting system has removed or changed votes, or was compromised in any way.”
Krebs, who previously worked for Microsoft, had held high-level positions in the Department of Homeland Security since 2017. Trump appointed him head of the cybersecurity agency in February 2018.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey testify before the Senate
Tuesday, November 17, 4 pm: Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the heads of Facebook and Twitter, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The focus is on the practice of social media to deliver content with increasingly frequent warnings that it could contain misleading or false statements.
The two company bosses had been summoned to the Senate three weeks ago. They were accused of secretly campaigning on behalf of Trump’s competitor, Joe Biden.
Dorsey said in a written statement that his short message service Twitter had warned about 300,000 tweets of false or misleading information in the days surrounding the US election. That’s 0.2 percent of all short messages sent between October 27 and November 11 in connection with the elections. Of these, 456 tweets were not immediately readable by users.
Before the elections, Dorsey and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had vowed to aggressively protect their platforms against manipulation by foreign governments and against attempts to incite violence due to the election results. After the election, Facebook removed a group called Stop the Steal, which supporters of President Donald Trump used to organize protests against the counting of more ballots. Twitter’s warning notices weren’t limited to the president’s tweets.
Republicans and Democrats watch the big Internet platforms very closely. Trump and Republicans accuse them of being prejudiced against conservative views. Democrats criticize the fact that companies did not act sufficiently against disinformation and hate speech. Therefore, both parties could come together to deprive Internet platforms of legal protection from being responsible for content distributed on their websites. This would require changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law dates from 1996 and was intended, among other things, to protect young Internet companies from legal trouble. President-elect Joe Biden has also spoken out in favor of reform.
