Georgia vote recount - Why polls missed again - Hong Kong legislators resign

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rejected the suggestion the hand recount was coming because of the demand from the Trump campaign, telling reporters "it's really what makes the most sense with the national significance of this race and the closeness of this race." In its letter to the secretary of state, the Republicans allege voting discrepancies and statewide errors, though they did not cite specific evidence of such irregularities.
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[Raffensperger] said the presidential contest will undergo a risk-limiting audit, which requires a full by-hand recount in each of Georgia's 159 counties. Ninety-seven counties in the state have sent in final numbers to the state, Raffensperger said, and the current margin of votes between President-elect Biden and President Trump is 14,111.
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On Monday, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, whose respective races are each heading to a runoff, called on Raffensperger to resign because of "mismanagement and lack of transparency," though they did not cite examples of the alleged mismanagement. Raffensperger, however, rejected their calls to step down, saying in a statement "the voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me."

According to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the polling error in 2020 will likely be somewhere between 3 and 4 percent when all votes are accounted for. For an industry that spent years reassuring Americans that they had corrected the errors of 2016, an even larger margin of error in 2020 signals further issues for the polling industry. How did the polls once again misjudge Americans’ voting preferences by such a large margin?

This week, The Factual used 17 highly credible articles from 15 outlets across the political spectrum to look at polling errors in the 2020 election to see where the polls went wrong and what this means for the future of the industry.

The legislation would work to prevent “violent and disorderly assemblies” and expand “forcible felonies” under Florida’s self-defense law by allowing the use of force on those whose violence leads to the “interruption or impairment” of a business and looting, according to the Miami Herald. The law would reportedly also give immunity to drivers who unintentionally hurt or kill protesters blocking traffic, and it would make protests that disrupt the community by blocking traffic a third-degree felony.
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The move comes after DeSantis, a Republican, pledged in September to crack down on those spreading violence during protests. “Recently, in our country, we have seen attacks on law enforcement. We’ve seen disorder and tumult in many cities,” DeSantis said at the time.
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“It allows for vigilantes to justify their actions,” said Denise Georges, a former Miami-Dade County prosecutor who handled Stand Your Ground cases. “It also allows for death to be the punishment for a property crime — and that is cruel and unusual punishment. We cannot live in a lawless society where taking a life is done so casually and recklessly.”

Four pro-democracy figures were forced out of the legislature, prompting another 15 to vow to resign in solidarity. The departures will reshape the city’s political landscape, which has been upended since China imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong this summer that gave the authorities broad powers to crack down on resistance.
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Many of the seats [in the Hong Kong Legislative Council] are elected directly by the public, helping to give the pro-democracy camp a sizable minority and a forum to express its views to the establishment. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, dismissed suggestions that the absence of the opposition lawmakers would tarnish the legislature if it pushed through policies favored by Beijing’s supporters.
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U.S. officials condemned the disqualification of the lawmakers, with the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien. He added that the “one country, two systems” framework “is now merely a fig leaf covering for the C.C.P.’s expanding one party dictatorship in Hong Kong,” referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The U.S. is now reporting an average of more than 120,000 new Covid-19 cases a day — a staggering number that sets a deadly tone heading into the holiday season, medical experts say. ICU beds in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are full, North Dakota’s hospitals don’t have enough doctors and nurses, and hospital administrators in Iowa are warning that they are approaching their limits.
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More lives will be lost in December than the U.S. saw in March and April, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The country was reporting around 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and more than 2,000 deaths a day this spring.
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Pfizer and BioNTech released early data from their late-stage vaccine trial on Monday that indicated it was more than 90% effective. If authorized, the vaccine could be available to a limited number of people as early as December, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.