US Election Live: 2020 voter turnout is the highest in over a century

President Donald Trump won't be on the ballot in January when Georgia voters settle two Senate runoffs that will determine control of the U.S. Senate. But both Republicans and Democrats are hoping voters forget that.

Even before Barr issued a memo that authorized federal prosecutors across the country to investigate "substantial allegations" of voting irregularities if they exist, the Justice Department had already begun looking into two specific allegations.

Lawyers from Trump's campaign sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr alleging they had uncovered what they described as "criminal voter fraud" in Nevada and saying they had identified 3,062 people who "improperly" cast mail ballots in Clark County, a Democrat-heavy area that includes Las Vegas and about 75% of the state's population.

But has it finished, have the elections already finished?

- Jair Bolsonaro on US election

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of Trump and one of the few prominent world leaders still not to have congratulated Joe Biden on his election win.

I believe Joe Biden was elected for the sole purpose of healing and uniting, bringing our country together. These are the things that he's good at.

- Michael Karloutsos, President-elect's close family friend

The 2020 election saw the highest turnout in any election since 1900 — in part because of expanded access to mail ballots. Current projections suggest about two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots, which would beat every election since 1900, when more than 7 in 10 eligible American voters cast ballots, according to numbers from the United States Election Project.

Biden’s popular vote margin currently stands at more than 5 million, according to Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman’s great popular vote tracker.

As in 2016, we are arguing two different points. One is how many votes truly decided the presidential race, while the other is the size of mandate for the victor.

Tensions inside the Democratic party are boiling over and spilling out into public view.

Biden wants Anthony Fauci to play a key role in his administration's response to the pandemic. But for now, the president-elect is staying away from Fauci, wary of violating official protocols by talking to him before Trump concedes.

While we were worrying about an election crisis, we may be unprepared for the crisis of governance that Joe Biden will face after he is inaugurated as president on Jan. 20. Biden may have to reassemble a broken government before he can begin to use it for good.

We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely. While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.

- Zuckerberg defends not suspending ex-Trump aide Bannon from Facebook

A dream for some, nightmare for others - Can Trump still win? Nope. Biden’s winning margins in the key battleground states he has captured — 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 54,000 votes in Pennsylvania and 148,000 votes in Michigan — are well above the thresholds of votes that have been changed in previous recounts.

Twitter labeled nearly 300,000 tweets under its Civic Integrity Policy for content that was disputed and potentially misleading in the US election period from October 27 till November 11. These represent 0.2 per cent of all US election-related Tweets sent during this time period.

For the first time in decades, Arizona has voted for a Democrat for president. Bill Clinton won the state in 1996, and he had been the only Democrat to do so since Truman.

Eco Alert: The U.S. is starting the 2021 budget year the way the old year ended, with soaring deficits. The Treasury Department reported that the federal government ran up a record October deficit of $284.1 billion, nearly double the red ink of a year ago.

The most powerful Republicans are still standing firmly behind President Trump and his unsupported claims of voter fraud. But new cracks are emerging as a handful of GOP officials say President-elect Joe Biden should receive intelligence briefings.

President-elect Joe Biden, a lifelong Roman Catholic, has spoken by phone to Pope Francis. Biden thanked Francis for “extending blessings and congratulations and noted his appreciation," the presidential transition team said.

The Nov. 3 election was the most secure in American history, a coalition of federal and state officials have said. The statement from cybersecurity experts is the most direct repudiation to date of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud.

After Kamala Harris, another Tamil Nadu village celebrates, this time for US epidemiologist Celine Gounder. Gounder's father Raj Natarajan Gounder was a native of the village near Perumapalayam near Modakurichi in this western district in Tamil Nadu and had migrated to the US in the 1960s.

I'm honored by the president-elect's confidence and will give my all to lead a talented and diverse team in a Biden-Harris White House.

- Ronald Klain, Biden's White House Chief of Staff

How does Biden plan to tackle the pandemic? The president-elect has said he would use his executive power to create a Rooseveltian Pandemic Testing Board to compel companies to produce more tests, lab materials and PPE.

Meanwhile, the States continued to notch up grim Covid records, with a worsening outbreak in the northeast of the country adding pressure on top of an already reeling Midwest. Reported new infections of 142,279 were at an all-time daily high for a second day in a row and above 100,000 for an eighth consecutive day.

Will Biden make Air Force One blue again? The aircraft's sky blue and white paint is so iconic that its trademark colouring gave away a surprise by the president and first lady to Iraq in 2018.

In the House, Democrats are still in court fighting to obtain Trump's financial records and testimony from his first White House counsel Don McGahn, a key figure in the obstruction to justice case.

Trump will become a private citizen in January. But Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are poised to carry on the investigations and legal battles that define his presidency.

We are not going to stop. Because this is fundamental to democracy that the law enforcement community acts on evidence and not bias.

- Lindsey Graham, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman

Is Trump's planning a coup-- or is it merely a political show? In this golden age of conspiracy theories, few can agree. Ostensibly, Trump is exercising his right to complain that the count showing Democrat Joe Biden with a solid if close win was wrong. "Rigged Election!" he tweeted in his latest broadside Thursday. But the president is not making much sense.

Here's how President- elect Biden plans to tackle climate change, starting Day 1 in office

The mass exodus at federal agencies began during Trump's first year in office, after his relentless attacks dragged down morale and quickened the decades-long trends of decline in some agencies. Roughly 24,000 more government employees left in the first nine months of his term, than at the start of Obama's.

This week, Trump fired his Defence secretary and top officials overseeing policy and intelligence at the Pentagon. More than two dozen political appointees have left the Department of Health since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump's 4-year war with the so-called "deep state" will leave President-elect Joe Biden a hollowed out and weakened federal workforce. Biden will now have to first rebuild the force if he wants a shot at executing his sweeping policy agenda.

Everyone is talking about Kamala Harris making US history as the first woman veep, but did you know, Jill Biden will also be making her mark in history - as the first First Lady with a day job. She is an English teacher.

The audit results come as Arizona currently has a thin margin between President-elect Joe Biden and Trump. Biden is ahead by 11,390 votes, or about 0.34 percentage points, and more than 3.3 million ballots were cast statewide.

There were no irregularities found in Maricopa County, which is the most populous county in the battleground state and includes Phoenix, the reports show. Officials in Pima County, home to Tucson, audited a random sample of 4,239 votes in the presidential race and only found a two-vote discrepancy.

More than half of all counties in Arizona have conducted post-election audits and found either no discrepancies or microscopic issues that don't affect the outcome of the race, according to reports filed with the Arizona secretary of state's office.

Biden is getting a head start on his presidency, reaching out to world leaders and setting the stage for when he takes the office on January 20. The latest is South Korea's President, Moon Jae-in, whom he has committed to meeting as soon as possible.

US President-elect Biden’s team has tapped a mix of progressives and centrist policy experts, including former derivatives market regulator Gary Gensler, to lead a transition plan for financial industry oversight.

Presidential race: Key tallies, undetermined states