How Indigenous voters swung the 2020 election

Source: High Country News

Precinct-level data shows that outside of heavily blue metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson, which also have high numbers of Indigenous voters, much of the rural blue islands that have voted for Biden and Mark Kelly, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, are on tribal lands. On some Tohono O’odham Nation precincts, Biden and Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris won 98% of the vote. As reported Thursday by the Navajo Times, the three counties that overlap with the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation gave Biden 73,954 votes, and just 2,010 for Trump, a rate of 97% for Biden as opposed to 51% statewide.
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On the Tohono O’odham Nation, which spans Pima, Maricopa and Pinal counties, most precincts were above 90% for Biden, according to a statewide map pulled together by ABC15 Arizona. Throughout the Trump administration, O’odham citizens and the tribal government have been vocal in their opposition to the border wall, which Trump has forced through without tribal consultation, even as it severs the landscape and destroys ancestral O’odham sites. Those high numbers were repeated throughout precincts covering the lands of the Hualapai, Havasupai, White Mountain Apache, Gila River, San Carlos Apache, Pascua Yaqui, Cocopah and Colorado River tribes, generally within the range of 70-90% for Biden.
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In Montana, though the state went for Trump overall, counties overlapping with the reservations of the Blackfeet Nation, Fort Belknap Tribes, the Crow Tribe and Northern Cheyenne Tribe went blue. The divides were often stark; Glacier County, encompassed by the Blackfeet Nation, went for Biden by 64%, the highest in the entire state, while the neighboring county voted for Trump by 75%. The Native vote in Montana has made the difference before, when Indigenous voters helped Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat who has advocated for Indian Country in legislation regarding water settlements, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and tribal recognition, get elected the last three terms in often-close races.
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Wisconsin, a closely watched swing state, went narrowly for Biden by fewer than 21,000 votes as of Friday morning. There, the Indigenous population is 90,189 people as of 2018. Wisconsin counties overlapping the lands of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the Menominee Tribe and the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans show that voters there helped tip the count to a Democratic majority. Menominee County, which overlaps the Menominee Tribe’s reservation, voted for Biden 82%, compared to the state as a whole at 49.4%.




Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-how-indigenous-voters-swung-the-2020-election

Hit The Road, Jack

Pennsylvania Court Orders Segregation of Provisional Ballots

Source: Bloomberg

A Pennsylvania Court ordered county boards of election in the state to put aside provisional ballots cast on Election Day for voters whose absentee or mail-in ballots were received on time.

A judge of Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court said Friday the ballots should be separated to determine the validity of the provisional ballots and whether they can be counted.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought a group of Pennsylvania Republicans that have been challenging what they believe defective ballots. They have also accused officials in Montgomery County, in the Democratic-leaning Philadelphia suburbs, of helping voters “cure” ballots that should considered invalid.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-06/pennsylvania-court-orders-segregation-of-provisional-ballots?srnd=markets-vp

Nevada election results: State pauses vote counting until Thursday

All mail ballots and provisional ballots still left to count

Nevada has temporarily suspended vote counting in the 2020 election, and will not resume until Thursday morning at 9am PT, which is 5pm in the UK.

The state still has all mail ballots received from Election Day onwards to count, as well as provisional ballots.

Around 70 per cent of the votes have been counted in Nevada so far with Joe Biden leading Donald Trump 49.2 per cent to 48.6 per cent, according to data from the Associated Press.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/nevada-election-results-stop-vote-counting-b1589366.html

Key States Could Be Headed Toward Recounts. Here Are the Rules.

This is just like watching a Seattle Seahawks game.

Paging Russell Wilson.

Almost 100,300,000 early votes cast.

AP Explains: The election result may be delayed. That's OK.

Source: Associated Press

AP Explains: The election result may be delayed. That's OK.

Source: Associated Press

We may not know who won the presidential election on Tuesday night. And if so, it does not necessarily mean anything is broken, fraudulent, corrupted or wrong.
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BUT DON’T NEWS ORGANIZATIONS CALL A WINNER BEFORE ALL THE VOTE IS COUNTED?

Yes, there’s never been a presidential race in history in which all votes are counted on election night. It’s just not physically possible to instantly count that many ballots — possibly as many as 150 million on the night of Nov. 3.

Media organizations, including The Associated Press, declare winners in thousands of races on election night based on the results that are in, voter surveys and other political data.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-elections-presidential-elections-d9208787554db4c4575579f6b75a7cde

Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters?

There is no “both sides do it” when it comes to intentionally keeping Americans away from the polls.
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But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/opinion/us-voting-rights-republicans.html