The NPR Politics Podcast - Yeah, They're Still Counting. No, There's Nothing Suspect About That.

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Election workers are still diligently counting votes. Joe Biden has a narrow edge of counted votes so far in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while Donald Trump is expected to carry North Carolina. Despite conspiracy theories and lawsuits, the process remains legitimate and on track.FOLLOW OUR LIVE BLOGThis episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, voting reporter Miles Parks, and senior political editor Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Okay, I need some hype music right now. Woohoo! Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. It is 5.33 p.m. on Friday, November 6th, the fourth in a long day, the fourth day of a very long election day. Is that right? We said it was going to be election season, right?

As promised. We tried. So, Domenico, it seemed like there was a lot of action and movement this morning. Where are we now? After a slow drip of a day, we have some results in. But Georgia was the big flip. Yesterday into last night, Biden was able to take the lead in Georgia, and it's only expanded. In fact, just in the last 20 minutes or so, Biden has gained almost 3,000 votes in Georgia. He's up to a difference of 4,235. That's really important because this thing is likely headed to a recount,

and it's really tough to overturn a margin of thousands of votes. Most recounts only change votes by a few hundred. So that's a really interesting one. And of course, we're watching Pennsylvania. I mean, the margin is up to 14,500 for Biden. He needs to get to somewhere like 35, 36,000 to beat the automatic recount margin. And that's, I think, why we're not seeing a call made yet from the networks. I am trying to remember the last time a race was called. And I don't know what day it is now, so it may be hard to remember. The last call, our producer tells us, was on Wednesday afternoon for Michigan, where Joe Biden wound up taking the lead there with mail-in ballots.

And now that race is not close. The state that we're watching, though, that's really interesting, that got called Wednesday early morning was Arizona by the Associated Press, which NPR, we should say, relies on the Associated Press's calls. We don't have a decision desk. We don't make calls. The AP is who we rely on. They called Arizona, but the margin has been steadily shrinking there. The other networks have not called that race. Right now it's within 40,000 votes, but a little back of the envelope math that I've done, President Trump's going to need, you know, mid 50%, high 50% of all of the votes that have, that are still coming in there, about 200,000 votes that are still out in order to be able to overtake the lead. Democrats feel like they're going to wind up maybe a smaller margin, but that in the end they will win Arizona.

OK, so we are waiting for networks to make calls. It seems as though everything is moving in one direction in Pennsylvania. And that direction is Biden is just adding to his total as more and more ballots that were cast before the election or on election day are being counted. Miles, how is this counting going? And there are a lot of states where they're still counting, which is why we aren't getting these calls, I guess. Yeah, it's I mean, I would actually say it's going roughly, this is going to be, I would actually say it's going roughly, this is going to be shocking to people, but it's going roughly according to plan.

And, you know, I'm having, going back to what we were just saying with Domenico, I'm having like a little bit of deja vu here from like 10, 10 months ago, I guess. I don't know, I'm not doing the math, but Iowa caucus night, okay, we get for weeks, for weeks, I was sitting there saying, it's going to be a little while they haven't tested this app. We're not sure everyone's just, you know, you know,

be waiting, make sure it's a, you know, pretty complicated process. Everyone should just be patient. Everyone said, Yeah, we'll be patient. And then people are freaking out at 11pm. Same thing happened. I for weeks have been saying, absentee ballots take longer to count some of these states. In Nevada, for instance, we're not even to the deadline where absentee ballots can get to election officials as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. So for weeks, we've been saying, you know, it's going to take a while to count these ballots. And yet here we are. We have people freaking out about it. I will say this is just kind of what election officials have been telling us. The Secretary of State of Pennsylvania, for instance, she said, you know, most almost all of our ballots will be

counted by the end of the day on Friday. That's today. We're almost the end of the day Friday, and they've got like 98, 99 percent of the votes counted. So, you know, it's actually going pretty much what they told us. You know, there's like a thing called a marshmallow test where they put marshmallows in front of little kids. And they're like, if you don't eat the marshmallow, you can have two in 10 minutes. And it's always like, I'm going to eat all the marshmallows. No, like we all just want to eat the marshmallows right now. We want to get on with it.

Yeah, we do. Well, look, this is what happens with close elections. I mean, we've said this before in the podcast. I've joked that this country does elections well, unless they're close. But you know, that I shouldn't say that, because actually, they're doing a pretty good job. It's just not as fast as what Americans would want to see in close elections, particularly mail in votes, and those provisional ballots, or the ballots that wind up going through machines like we're seeing in Allegheny County in Pennsylvania where they maybe got jammed up or weren't accepted, they have to go through all of those by hand. And it takes much longer to count and process that information.

I, for one, would rather they take their time, do it correctly than force anything out. Though in the end, I wonder if we will all be calling this a close election or not. Well, look, it depends on how you slice it, right? I mean, if you look at the popular vote, it's not a close election. You know, Joe Biden is almost at 51% of the electorate, which is amazing, honestly, in a polarized environment to be able to win that margin. And he's beating President Trump now by 4 million popular votes. That's a lot, but I think it explains how we've all sorted ourselves, how Democrats are in cities and on the coasts, and how Republicans are in more rural areas. And in these, you know, electoral swing

states, you know, you don't have the same migration of, you know, kind of, I guess, you know, more liberal elites into those parts of the country. Well, and doesn't it kind of get at the idea that like how effective President Trump has been in the last couple days at driving the narrative around this election that we're all talking about the vote counting process, as opposed to the results at this point? I mean, Tam, can you talk a little bit about, you know, your opposed to the results at this point. I mean, Tam, can you talk a little bit about, you know, your reaction to last night, when the president basically went out and as somebody who covers voting, I did not hear a whole lot of truth come out of the president's mouth last night. I mean, it was kind of like false statement after false statement after false

statement. What was your response? Yeah, I mean, it was a pretty remarkable compilation of things that were not true that the president came out and said about the election process. And part of that seems to be that he is he is employing conspiracy thinking about things that are perfectly normal. He he earlier today tweeted, where are the missing military ballots in Georgia? What happened to them? And the answer is that lots of ballots are sent out. Not all ballots are returned. That's like totally normal. There are so many parts of what has been happening over the last four days that are not a conspiracy. It is not fraud. It is not theft. It is just ballots being counted. Full stop. I mean, to be blunt, what President Trump did was an assault on democracy. I mean, he was undermining the foundational thing that separates the U.S. from corrupt countries.

Free and fair elections are the basis of the American democracy. So, you know, for him to go out and do that, that, you know, makes it very difficult when you have these close elections, when people are trying to count the vote, who've been working long hours to be able to get through and make sure that people in the country have confidence in the accuracy of the result. All right, well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more about the legal challenges being mounted by the president. Support for this podcast and the following message come from SimpliSafe Home Security. Every 26 seconds in the U.S., there's a break-in.

But with SimpliSafe Home Security, you can protect your home around the clock. SimpliSafe has everything you need to protect your home if there's an emergency. You can set it up yourself in under an hour. Head to simplisafe.com slash NPR politics and get a free HD camera with the purchase of a security system. The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule. Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast. And we're back. And Miles, the concrete part of the president's strategy from here appears to be

mounting legal challenges. Now, some of them have already been batted down by judges in various states. Where does this all stand? Yeah, I mean, at this point, you could say most of them have been batted down by judges. And the lawsuits have mostly focused on this general narrative that we were kind of getting at a second ago about President Trump is trying to build this idea that there is cheating going on in our elections, which there's just, you know, there's been so much research done on this and there just has never been any evidence in the past. And then this year, we just have not seen the evidence come forward from the Trump campaign.

They've asserted this in Michigan and Pennsylvania and basically said, you know, they want more transparency in the vote counting process. And until they get that, the vote counting should be stopped. And judges have just not had it at this point. What the law experts I've talked to say is that the Trump campaign is actually not filing these lawsuits in an effort to get the things they say they're asking for, but more at trying to just build this narrative around the election and around what President Trump's rhetoric is. It's not actually about trying to affect the votes. Well, and if the president does go to court, and it's his right to do so, I mean, if there are places and pieces of evidence that they have, they should present

them in court. And if they do so, and votes get changed because of it, that's fine. But if the election doesn't change, then, you know, for the sake of the country, a president is supposed to accept that. Yes, I mean, I think that where they have settled at this point, and I think that this is nuanced, and maybe I'm reading too much into it. But the line, the official line, not what the president is saying, because that is often not the official line, but the official line is tweeted by very on message Ivanka Trump and stated by Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman and many other people is, let's just investigate. Let's count

all the legally cast ballots. There's no problem in looking into it, asking to be able to look into it. It doesn't seem at this point like they're saying this is going to ultimately change the outcome in any way. Right. Maybe they're not saying that. But last night, President Trump got up there, you know, got in front of reporters and on live television said, you know, we think that we have the I can't remember how we put it, but we have tremendous evidence that this will end up in front of the Supreme Court, that the election somehow is so fraudulent that it would end up being litigated and the result would end up being decided by the court. The president's saying that,

but no legal experts I've talked to think that's even a remote possibility at this point. And actually, Miles, there's a mechanism for this. Like, I think that there was an issue raised in Michigan about some ballots being misfiled or some votes being misfiled in the computer system. And there's a mechanism. It's called the canvas. You know, the vote isn't final until they double check it. Yeah, it gets I mean, what we're talking about when we talk about states getting called, these are media organizations who are using the the unofficial data to basically say, we think we are we are almost 100 percent positive that this is the way the election will turn out in these states. And these are the results that will come from that.

But in reality, election officials are going to be working for the next few weeks, actually finalizing all of these vote tallies, making sure there weren't all these like little administrative errors. And those results, the ones that have been double checked, triple checked, quadruple checked in a lot of cases are the ones that will actually decide, you know, who goes to Congress and who's the president. Okay. I have one last question for you guys. I don't think you're going to know the answer, but can we go to sleep tonight? Don't ask who's going to win. No, no, no, no. Can we go to sleep tonight? I think you should go to sleep tonight. Sleep, exercise, and diet are all the most important things for a healthy lifestyle.

Everybody should hydrate. I want to tell you a secret. Regardless of what happens, when you go to sleep and you wake up, the same result will have happened. Whether you stay up and watch it on Twitter on your phone at 2 a.m. or whether you see it at 10 in the morning, I personally saw that Wisconsin was called when I woke up. I know it's a crazy concept, but I got like four hours of sleep and then woke up and found out about Wisconsin

and it was still true. And, you know, my life is not worse for it. Hey, listen, I'm one to talk. I was up till 1 a.m. last night thinking we were gonna get some big shift and, you know, it didn't happen. I woke up this morning and there was this shift and I have to tell you, I felt some FOMO.

The larger point here is we just have no idea when this is going to end, right? It will end. They will count. There are certification deadlines in each state and they have to have those counts done by then. Some of those places it's within a week. Some places it's the end of this month. We could be, you know, close to Thanksgiving time vacations before we know, for example, a place like Pennsylvania. Right. But eventually we will know and it will be before a new president is supposed to be sworn in or feeds as soon as news comes, though someone may have to call and wake us up. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. And a special thanks to our funder, The Little Market, for helping to support this podcast.