This is an Epoch Times News Brief presidential election update. From the News Brief desk, I’m Bill Thomas and here’s what’s happening right now.
Polling locations have closed in a number of states, officials are now tabulating the ballots, and Americans nationwide are waiting anxiously to hear the first results.
The Associated Press says that former President Donald Trump is projected to win Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
Meanwhile, Maryland, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were called for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Earlier, the Associated Press projected that Trump will win both Indiana and Kentucky, which are worth a combined total of 19 electoral votes.
Trump has now won each of these states for the last three presidential elections, and no Democratic candidate for the nation’s highest office has carried Kentucky since Bill Clinton back in 1996.
The AP also says that Trump is in line to win the state of West Virginia and its 4 electoral votes.
The AP also projects that Harris will win the state of Vermont, along with its 3 electoral votes.
Moving along, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has just been reelected to a fourth term in the Senate after he defeated the Republican candidate Gerald Malloy.
The Associated Press called the race for Sanders shortly after the polls closed in Vermont at 7 p.m. Eastern.
The 83-year-old senator recently told a local TV station that he ran for reelection because he did not want to “walk away” from the state “at this difficult moment in American history.”
The AP is also projecting that Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) will win the governorship of Indiana.
With just under 20 percent of Indiana’s precincts reporting, Braun had received nearly 60 percent of the vote, leading the Democratic candidate, Jennifer McCormick, by a wide margin.
If he secures the win, the 70-year-old Braun will succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who was prevented by term limits from seeking reelection.
We’ll move along now to Wisconsin, and officials in the city of Milwaukee say that they’ll have to re-tabulate around 31,000 absentee ballots after they found out that their tabulation machines were not closed properly.
A spokesperson for the city said that officials do not believe that the voting equipment was “tampered with in any way,” but that they will err on the side of caution anyway and start the entire ballot-counting process all over again.
He said that election officials will reset the voting equipment to zero and rerun the ballots through the machines. So you know, the process could delay the city’s election results by several hours.
More election news to share with you now, and earlier this afternoon, Harris visited a Democratic National Committee phone bank in Washington and here’s what happened.
Harris made the stop to thank the volunteers for their efforts in encouraging voter turnout for her campaign.
The Harris campaign says that throughout the day, the vice president participated in interviews with several radio stations in key battleground states, and tonight, Harris will host an election night event at Howard University, her alma mater.
Meanwhile, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, says he cast his ballot in Texas earlier today, and that he’ll be joining Trump tonight to watch the election results at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
This has been an Epoch Times News Brief presidential election update. I’m Bill Thomas and please stay with us for the remainder of the evening for continuous election coverage.
