Election 2020 presidential results

By Meg Wagner, Melissa Mahtani, Melissa Macaya, Jessica Estepa, Veronica Rocha and Fernando Alfonso III, CNN

Updated 7:32 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020
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5:03 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

Our live coverage has moved

Our live coverage has moved. Go here for the latest results and news from the election.

4:34 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

It's just after 4:30 a.m. ET: This is where the race to 270 stands.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads the race for the White House with 253 electoral votes. President Trump has 213 electoral votes.

It's still too close to call in six states: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Based on CNN's latest projections, this is where the race to 270 currently stands:

CNN projects Biden will win at least three of Maine's four electoral votes, plus Wisconsin, Michigan, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington state, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Delaware, Washington, DC, Maryland, Massachusetts and one of Nebraska's five electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine award two electoral votes to their statewide winners and divide their other electoral votes by congressional districts.

CNN projects Trump will win Montana, Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Ohio, Mississippi, Wyoming, Missouri, Kansas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee and four of Nebraska's five electoral votes.

Reminder: Each candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win the presidency.

4:20 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

About 10,000 absentee ballots left to count in Georgia's Fulton County

From CNN's Nick Valencia

Democratic and Republican representatives review absentee ballots at the Fulton County Election preparation Center in Atlanta, on November 4.
Democratic and Republican representatives review absentee ballots at the Fulton County Election preparation Center in Atlanta, on November 4. John Bazemore/AP

Georgia’s largest county has about 10,000 absentee ballots left to count, Fulton County elections director Richard Barron told CNN early Thursday morning.  

The county has decided to continue counting through the night and has been tabulating votes at a rate of about 3,000 per hour. 

Fulton County is home to Atlanta and Democratic stronghold.

The county has tabulated all in-person votes and is now counting only absentee votes. The only remaining votes would be provisional and overseas military ballots. 

 

3:27 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

Republicans remain hopeful about winning key states

From CNN's Ryan Nobles

While there is no question Republicans are gearing up and prepared to engage in a series of legal challenges, their true hope is tied to the vote totals in the key states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. 

Republicans both inside and outside the campaign understand that is where their most realistic path to victory lies and the lawsuits and recount requests serve as more of a Hail Mary to an election that may already be too far gone.  

Still, the GOP remains bullish on their chances of winning the actual vote count. They started sounding the alarm bells on Arizona being a Trump state early on after networks began declaring the race for Biden and continue to warn reporters that the trend lines are in Trump’s favor. If Arizona flips, they believe the race is within the President’s grasp.

Many Republicans hope they will be able to make the case the President won the election from a position of having an electoral college lead, as opposed to hoping to flip results through court challenges. 

One Republican operative expressed frustration over the characters the campaign was rolling out to present their legal arguments, suggesting it wasn’t doing the President any favors.  

“I can’t understand how Rudy keeps popping up,” the operative said referring to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

5:06 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

Biden's lead narrows in Arizona

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks one day after Americans voted in the presidential election, in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 04.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks one day after Americans voted in the presidential election, in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 04. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The race for the White House is still too close to call as contests tighten in the battleground states of Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, has just released the second of two sets of new votes promised Wednesday night – shrinking Joe Biden's lead in the county by just over 10,000 votes. 

Updated vote totals released by Maricopa County after 2:30 a.m. Thursday show Biden with 912,585 votes and Trump with 838,071.

Previously, Maricopa was reporting 887,457 votes for Biden and 802,160 for Trump. 

Biden currently has 1,469,341 votes statewide, and Trump has 1,400,951. (Follow the race in Arizona here.)

The release came as Maricopa County officials were forced to close the Phoenix election office building to the public due to growing pro-Trump protests outside.

2:32 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

It's 2:30 a.m. ET: This is where the race to 270 stands.

Getty Images
Getty Images

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads the race for the presidency with 253 electoral votes. President Trump has 213 electoral votes.

It's still too close to call in six states: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Based on CNN's latest projections, this is where the race to 270 currently stands.

Reminder: Each candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win the presidency.

2:56 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

The Trump campaign filed a series of lawsuits in key battleground states. Here's what we know.

From CNN's Katelyn Polantz

President Trump's team launched a series of lawsuits in key battleground states that seemed less about sound legal reasoning and more about slowing Joe Biden from marching over the electoral vote threshold. 

At times, the lawsuits have contested ballots in the double digits — hundreds if not thousands of votes away of potentially swing any state's result.

"Admitting defeat is not a plausible reaction so soon after the election, so they throw a lot of Hail Mary lawsuits at the wall and hope something sticks," said longtime Republican elections lawyer and CNN contributor Ben Ginsberg. He said these types of suits aren't indicative of a campaign that's feeling optimistic — and instead, is scrambling.

"I think much of the litigation is a longshot and unlikely to succeed," said Franita Tolson, a law professor at USC Gould School of Law and CNN contributor. 

She pointed to a lawsuit in Georgia the Trump campaign announced Wednesday night over a poll worker mixing unprocessed and processed absentee ballots. That might have the potential to affect few votes, she said. 

"I suspect that a big goal of this litigation is, in the short term, to change the narrative" from a potential Biden win to a conversation about election mismanagement or even fraud, Tolson said.

Another law professor and CNN contributor, Rick Hasen, said the lawsuits appeared to be more public relations than serious litigation. "These lawsuits so far are not tackling any major problem that would seem to call overall vote totals into questions," he said.

Justin Levitt, another elections expert and law professor, called some of the suits, like in Michigan, "laughable." 

"One says you didn't put people by absentee dropboxes, so stop the count. Huh?!"

Even a Republican-appointed federal judge in Pennsylvania cast doubt on the validity of a suit from Republicans on Wednesday, when they challenged fewer than 100 ballots that absentee voters corrected in a county outside Philadelphia. At a hearing Wednesday morning, the judge, Timothy Savage, did not rule, yet he suggested the lawyer for Republican canvass observers was seeking to disenfranchise votes. He noted the lawsuit appeared to have other problems in its arguments. 

Some legal challenges in Pennsylvania from the Trump campaign were quickly dismissed on Election Day, with Trump touting his appeals of those losses apparently as new cases Wednesday. For instance, a Philadelphia election day judge had shot down a Trump campaign case over ballot processing access, writing that "observers are directed only to observe and not to audit ballots" and deciding that the city's board of elections complied with the law. Another Election Day challenge from the Trump campaign to the ballot observation process in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, also near Philly, was dismissed by a judge, though Trump is now appealing, according to Pennsylvania court records.

Lawyers for the Trump campaign sued in Nevada on Tuesday, too, claiming that their observers were not given enough access to all aspects of the ballot counting process — from opening the ballots, to machine and manual signature checking and duplicating spoiled ballots. A Nevada judge denied the GOP challenge to the early voting process in the heavily Democratic county.

“If this last-minute suit were successful, it would require a major change in how [Nevada] processed absentee [ballots] to determine if the signature on the ballot matched the voter’s prior signature on file,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University and CNN election law analyst. “Courts are typically unwilling to let plaintiffs come in the door so late in the day and ask for major changes to a process that’s already well underway.”

However, one suit, the petition before the US Supreme Court on Pennsylvania's ballot deadline, may be a more serious litigation challenge. It challenges the validity of potentially several thousand votes cast in good faith by voters, but received by officials after the election through the mail. 

For this case to make a difference, Pennsylvania would need to be the deciding state for the election, and the margin of difference between Trump and Biden would need to be a few tens of thousands of votes.

CNN's Maeve Reston and Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.

2:31 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

Nevada attorney general: We feel "impenetrable" to any potential Trump legal challenge 

From CNN's Josiah Ryan

Nevada is ready to rebuff any legal challenges the Trump campaign brings against the state's election results, the state's Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford said late this evening.

"We feel quite invulnerable, if you take a look at the track record we've already established against Mr. Trump," said Ford when asked by CNN's Chris Cuomo how invulnerable to legal attack he felt.

"[Trump] sued us twice, maybe three times, already," he said. "Each time my office has been able to work with our local district attorney ... and defeat those lawsuits."

Late last month, for example, the Trump campaign along with Nevada Republicans sued in state court to halt the count of some mail-in ballots over stringency of signature-matching computer software and how closely observers can watch votes being counted. A Nevada judge rejected that lawsuit on Monday, with less than 24 hours before Election Day.

"We actually have safeguards to prevent fraud, such as signature verification and unique barcodes, that are also part and parcel of the process here," Ford told Cuomo. "We think it's pretty impenetrable when it comes to legal challenge against us."

Watch the interview:

2:05 a.m. ET, November 5, 2020

Update on Philadelphia mail-in ballots expected overnight

From CNN's Kristen Holmes

New numbers on Philadelphia mail-in ballots are expected overnight, according to a state official.

Philadelphia County still has 120,000 mail-in ballots to count, according to the state’s website.