Election category, Page 111
Trump, GOP drop Nevada court appeal of ballot count case
LAS VEGAS — A state court legal fight to stop the counting of mail ballots in the Las Vegas area has ended after the Nevada Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by the Donald Trump campaign and the state Republican party, at their request. The dismissal leaves two active legal cases...
With GOP win in Alaska, control of Senate pushes to January
WASHINGTON — Control of the Senate won’t be decided until the new year after Republicans won a seat in Alaska on Wednesday. Neither party can lock the majority until January runoffs in Georgia. Incumbent Alaska GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan defeated Al Gross, an independent running as a Democrat. With Democratic...
Georgia audit to trigger hand recount of presidential voteVideo
ATLANTA — Georgia’s secretary of state on Wednesday announced an audit of presidential election results that he said would be done with a full hand tally of ballots because the margin is so tight. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference that his office wants the process...
Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick offers $1M reward as Trump makes unfounded claims
AUSTIN, Texas — Republican Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick on Tuesday offered up to $1 million in defense of President Donald Trump’s unsupported claims of irregularities in the U.S. presidential election, saying he would pay out rewards for information that leads to voter fraud arrests and convictions. The money put...
Dems clinch House control, but majority likely to shrink
WASHINGTON — Democrats clinched two more years of controlling the House but with a potentially razor-thin majority, a bittersweet finale to last week’s elections that has left them divided and with scant margin for error for advancing their agenda. The party on Tuesday nailed down at least 218 seats, according...
States cite smooth election, despite Trump’s baseless claims
ATLANTA — The 2020 election unfolded smoothly across the country and without any widespread irregularities, according to state officials and election experts, a stark contrast to the baseless claims of fraud being leveled by President Donald Trump following his defeat. Election experts said the large increase in advance voting —...
Oakmont Councilwoman Carrie DelRosso claims victory in race to unseat Frank Dermody
Oakmont Councilwoman Carrie Lewis DelRosso claimed victory Tuesday night in her race to unseat state House Minority Leader Frank Dermody. DelRosso, a Republican, had collected 51.5% of the votes counted compared with Dermody’s 48.5%, a margin of 923 votes, according to unofficial results from the Pennsylvania Department of State. “I’m...
Republican Stacy Garrity claims victory in state treasurer’s raceVideo
HARRISBURG — Republican Stacy Garrity, a retired U.S. Army Reserves colonel who is vice president of a tungsten smelting plant, claimed victory Tuesday in the Pennsylvania state treasurer’s race. Her Democratic opponent, incumbent Treasurer Joe Torsella, conceded Tuesday in a phone call to Garrity and posted a video message on...
Westmoreland County ballot challenges to be heard Friday
Westmoreland commissioners will serve as the county’s elections board Friday to begin adjudication of challenges to mail-in and provisional ballots cast during the Nov. 3 election. Commissioners spent Monday and Tuesday reviewing 816 mail-in ballots that arrived at the courthouse between 8 p.m. on Election Day and 5 p.m. Nov....
Allegheny County to count 2,349 undated ballots
The Allegheny County Board of Elections on Tuesday voted to count 2,349 ballots that appear to be eligible in every way save for the voter failing to put a date on the outer envelope. The ballots, which have not been opened, all arrived on or before Election Day, as they...
State lawmakers call for creation of a panel to investigate, audit election
Citing a deluge of calls to their offices and legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign, state lawmakers in the Republican-controlled House called for an audit of the election Tuesday as well as an investigation, complete with subpoena power. The move, seeking to empanel a commission controlled by lawmakers, came...
Cal Cunningham concedes to U.S. Sen. Tillis in North Carolina
RALEIGH — Democrat Cal Cunningham conceded to incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina on Tuesday, saying “the voters have spoken” and it was clear Tillis had won. With Cunningham’s concession, all eyes turned to Georgia, where two U.S. Senate runoff races in January are likely to determine...
GOP backs Trump as he fights election results, transition
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration threw the presidential transition into tumult, with President Donald Trump blocking government officials from cooperating with President-elect Joe Biden’s team and Attorney General William Barr authorizing the Justice Department to probe unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud. Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, rallied...
Lawsuits’ threat looms as Pennsylvania vote count grinds on
HARRISBURG — President Donald Trump’s campaign launched a lawsuit to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, suing Monday as counties continued to sort through provisional ballots and late-arriving mail-in ballots nearly a week after the election. The Associated Press on Saturday called the presidential contest for former...
After Biden win, McConnell says Trump OK to fight election
WASHINGTON — Despite President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says President Donald Trump is “100% within his rights” to question election results and consider legal options. The Republican leader said Monday the process will play out and “reach its conclusion.” Trump has declined to concede the presidential...
Westmoreland debates how to count mail-in ballots that arrived minutes late on Election Day
Westmoreland County election officials said Monday that 375 mail-in ballots delivered to the courthouse nine minutes late on Election Day will not initially be added to the vote totals. County commissioners, acting as the elections board, approved the start of the process to review and count all 816 ballots that...
Referendum on Trump shatters turnout records
With votes still being counted, turnout in the 2020 presidential election has hit a 50-year high, exceeding the record set by the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama — an extraordinary engagement in what amounted to a referendum on President Donald Trump’s leadership. As of Sunday, the tallied votes accounted...
Allegheny County resumes processing remaining election ballots
More than two dozen observers from both major parties – including two representatives from Congress — are watching as Allegheny County elections officials continue to process several categories of ballots that remain to be counted. Bins of ballots that still need to be resolved are being reviewed by the Elections...
Trump, who never admits defeat, mulls how to keep up fight
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump never admits defeat. But he faces a stark choice now that Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House: Concede graciously for the sake of the nation or don’t — and get evicted anyway. After nearly four tortured days of counting yielded a victory for...
Red wave threatening 3 Western Pennsylvania state lawmakers
Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Pennsylvania may be overshadowing a red wave in Southwestern Pennsylvania threatening to wash away three Democrats with more than 60 years’ combined experience in the General Assembly. Preliminary returns showed the last resident Democrat in the Westmoreland County legislative caucus, state Rep. Joe Petrarca, a...
Election 2020: Presidential vote count and Pennsylvania races in charts
Here is a roundup of charts and graphics that illustrate the presidential race, as well as races in Pennsylvania. Here is the breakdown of the U.S. Electoral map. PA vote countInfogram Presidential votes in Western PAInfogram U.S. Rep Conor Lamb won reelection in Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District in a tight...
Message of Election 2020: Trump lost, but Trumpism did not
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lost. But Trumpism did not. It won in the parts of the country and with the voters whom Trump catered to over four years, constantly jabbing the hard edges of almost every contentious cultural issue into Red America, on the bet that fear and anger...
What’s next? Saturday’s election verdict isn’t last step
WASHINGTON — Saturday’s election verdict isn’t the last step in selecting an American president. Under a system that’s been tweaked over two centuries, there is still a weekslong timeline during which the 538-member Electoral College picks the president. A look at the key steps: — When American citizens vote for...
Love it or hate it, here’s how the Electoral College came to be
CHICAGO — As they do every four years, pundits and newscasters again are explaining why we choose a president in the peculiar way we do. By now, our customary amnesia has set in. Millions of Americans voted for president on Nov. 3, but it is the 538 electors in the...
5 states OK measures eradicating racist language, symbols
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama voters reversed themselves from a few years ago and removed racist vestiges of segregation from the state constitution that courts long ago ruled unconstitutional. Rhode Island did a similar a U-turn to eradicate the word “plantations” from the state’s official name. In a year when discussions...
