2020 US election results

4 min readNov 6, 2020

Leads in individual states may change from one party to another as all the votes are counted. Select a state for detailed results, and select the Senate, House or Governor tabs to view those races.

For more detailed state results click on the States A-Z links at the bottom of this page. Results source: NEP/Edison via Reuters.

States are placed by Edison Research/Reuters in one of the five categories below, based on how they were expected to vote before election night.

The ‘Tossup’ states are those which Donald Trump and Joe Biden both have a chance of winning, while ‘Lean’ shows where it is more likely that one particular candidate will win. The ‘Solid’ states are where it is much more likely that one party’s candidate will win.

A good sign a candidate is doing well is if they win states that are not expected to go their way. The proportion of votes counted is represented in the column labelled % EXP, which shows how many of the total expected votes have been counted so far.

This table shows an estimate for the amount of votes remaining to be counted in each state where the winner is not yet known, and the number of votes separating the current leading candidate from the second-placed party (the margin). Taken together the two things suggest how much scope there is for the positions to change in the final count.

“The group was organised around the delegitimisation of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.

She said the move was in line with the “exceptional measures” Facebook was taking during “this period of heightened tension”.

The “Stop the Steal” group had prepared for Facebook to take action, directing new members to an email sign-up page “in the event that social media censors this group”.

Another group using the same name, but with different administrators, told its members that no threats would be allowed and that they should take precautions like using images with words rather than text. This group, which had more than 2,000 members, also said it would shift to become private in a few days.

Public Facebook groups can be seen, searched and joined by anyone on Facebook, while only members can see posts in private groups.

Facebook has billed groups as community forums for shared interests but watchdog organisations and social media researchers have argued that they can be hotbeds for hyper-partisan misinformation.

“Facebook has been enabling and amplifying the infrastructure that’s now being used to attack our democratic process,” Arisha Hatch, executive director of the racial justice group Color Of Change, told Reuters News Agency.

The winner of the election is determined through a system called the electoral college. Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, is given a number of electoral college votes, adding up to a total of 538 votes. More populous states get more electoral college votes than smaller ones.

A candidate needs to win 270 electoral college votes (50% plus one) to win the election.

In every state except two — Maine and Nebraska — the candidate that gets the most votes wins all of the state’s electoral college votes.

Due to these rules, a candidate can win the election without getting the most votes at the national level. This happened at the last election, in which Donald Trump won a majority of electoral college votes although more people voted for Hillary Clinton across the US.

How are the results reported?
The election results on this page are reported by the Associated Press (AP). AP “call” the winner in a state when they determine that the trailing candidate has no path to victory. This can happen before 100% of votes in a state have been counted.

Estimates for the total vote in each state are also provided by AP. The numbers update throughout election night, as more data on voter turnout becomes available.

Facebook, which normally recommends groups to users that they may want to join based on their activity on the site, last week suspended these recommendations for political groups and new groups around the election.

The now-removed “Stop the Steal” group was run by the Trump action group Women for America First. The non-profit organised protests against COVID-19 restrictions and supported Trump during his impeachment hearing.

On Twitter, one of the Facebook group’s administrators, Amy Kremer, said: “The left is trying to steal an election and Social media is complicit,” she said. “This is outrageous!”

Unfounded claims
Unfounded and debunked claims about the integrity of the US election have been spread on social media by Trump and high-profile Republican accounts and the hashtag #StopTheSteal has gained momentum.

In what’s come to be known as #Sharpiegate, social media posts suggest that election officials in Maricopa County provided voters with Sharpie pens, which interfered with ballots being recorded, specifically those for Trump.

Arizona election officials say that voting with a Sharpie would have no impact on the votes being recorded by tabulation machines, and if there was an issue, there is a process that would prevent the ballots from being cancelled out.

2020 US election results

Written by nexx