Election 2020 updates: Biden warns of 'dark winter,' pushes masks in pandemic plan
The president-elect emphasized how he would handle the pandemic response.
Joe Biden is set to become the 46th president of the United States, capping a tumultuous and tension-filled campaign during a historic pandemic against President Donald Trump. ABC News characterized Joe Biden as the apparent winner of his home state of Pennsylvania, putting him over the 270 vote threshold needed to capture the presidency.
The hard-fought battle against the president was set against the backdrop of racial unrest and the coronavirus pandemic and bitter divisions among the electorate.
Trump had falsely declared on election night, when he held a lead in several key states, that he won the contest and alleged without evidence, after the count started to swing the other way, that the election was being stolen from him and that fraud had been committed.
Painting the election as a "battle for the soul of the nation," Biden won on a message of unity over division, compassion over anger, and reality over what he called Trump's "wishful thinking" as the coronavirus pandemic cast a heavy shadow over the campaign.
The 2020 election has shattered voting records with votes totaling 147 million and counting, surpassing the 138 million who voted in 2016.
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Technical issue delays absentee ballot counting in 2nd largest county in Ga.
Gwinnett County is experiencing a technical issue that is delaying the counting of absentee ballots, county communications director Joe Sorenson told ABC News.
The county had processed the over 118,000 absentee ballots it received that were ready to be pushed through the system to be counted Tuesday night, but "when the time came to push them, the software system (held) a little more than half of the ballots for adjudication," Sorenson said.
Adjudication means the ballots need to be reviewed by a human being and reentered.
According to Gowri Ramachandran, an election security expert at the Brennan Center, ballots are loaded into voting machines in large batches. When the machines determine that one ballot in the batch requires additional human review, it may flag the entire batch of ballots as requiring additional review. Poll workers would then need to go through the batch to determine which ballots needed to be reviewed to determine voter intent. There were 3,200 batches of mail-in ballots that received the error.
The county told ABC News it does not know how many ballots have been affected.
Sorenson said the county is determined to count these ballots overnight.
"We're gonna stay as long as it takes, up to a certain point," Sorenson said.
He said no determination has yet to be made about when to stop trying.
Gwinnett, the second most populated county in the state, is a key former Republican stronghold in the Atlanta suburbs that has been trending Democratic. In 2016, it went for Hillary Clinton by 5.8 points, but it was the first time it voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when Georgia native Jimmy Carter won every one of the state's 159 counties. In 2018, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams won the county again -- and by a bigger margin taking Gwinnett by 14.4 points.
-ABC News' John Santucci
Trump projected to win Florida
Trump will win Florida’s 29 electoral votes, ABC News projects, boosting his Electoral College standing to 165 votes, while Biden’s remains at 205.
Florida was considered a must-win state for Trump to keep a viable pathway to reelection.
Latest timeline on results from Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania state officials had projected wrapping up the count by Friday before the election, but are now not providing an exact timeline.
Philadelphia will continue counting absentee ballots, with the next updates coming overnight and again at 9 a.m.; Allegheny will continue counting around the clock, while at least seven counties have yet to even begin opening and counting mail-in ballots.
-ABC News’ John Santucci, Adam Kelsey, Benjamin Siegel and Alex Hosenball
Biden to deliver remarks at 12:30 a.m.
The Biden campaign has announced that the former vice president will deliver remarks in Wilmington, Delaware, at 12:30 a.m.
With 74% of the nationwide vote in, Biden is projected to have 205 electoral votes to Trump's 136 -- but votes are still coming in all-important battleground states which will ultimately determine the election.