Miles Parks

The elections company Dominion Voting Systems, which has been at the center of many of President Trump's conspiracy narratives about the 2020 election, filed suit Friday against one of the loudest amplifiers of those false stories.

The company sued Sidney Powell, a lawyer who previously worked for the Trump campaign and who has spent much of the past two months claiming Dominion rigged the election and was somehow tied to the Venezuelan regime of the late Hugo Chavez.

Updated at 61:28 a.m. ET Thursday

Heading into Wednesday's Electoral College counting process, 14 Republican senators had said they planned to object to at least one state's results.

But that number dwindled after a mob overtook the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday afternoon, stoked by President Trump and his continued falsehoods about the election's legitimacy.

Over the four years of Donald Trump's presidency, people in charge of elections in both major parties have warned that his continued peddling of falsehoods about elections could one day lead to violence.

Now, as a mob took over the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, those predictions have come true.

"Every elected leader who helped spread lies about American elections paved the way to today," said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold.

On Wednesday afternoon, Congress will meet to count the Electoral College votes that have come in from across the United States.

But what is normally a simple bureaucratic step on the road to inaugurating a new president may drag on for many hours this year and feature more drama than usual, as many Republicans have signaled a willingness to go along with President Trump's false claims about election fraud.

A top election official with the Georgia secretary of state's office went line by line Monday refuting allegations made by President Trump about the state's voting system.

The strong pushback by state officials comes a day after a phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was made public, in which Trump urged the secretary to "find" enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.

More than a month ago, Eric Coomer went into hiding.

The voting conspiracy theories that have led millions of Republicans to feel as though the election was stolen from them, which are still spreading, have also led to calls for Coomer's head.

Updated at 8 p.m. ET

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the needed majority of votes in the Electoral College on Monday in another step putting them closer toward taking the White House in January.

Updated at 1:45 p.m. ET

It may come and go without much fanfare, but on Tuesday, the U.S. will pass a key deadline cementing President-elect Joe Biden's victory as the 46th president.

The day, Dec. 8, is known as the "safe harbor" deadline for states to certify their results, compelling Congress to accept those results.

Most Americans see Election Day as the end of the long political season aimed at choosing new federal leadership, but it's really only the beginning.

Republicans at the national level have mostly stayed quiet during President Trump's monthlong baseless crusade against November's election results. But at the state and county level, it has been a different story.

Local election administrators, most of whom are elected along partisan lines, are in charge of the nuts and bolts of voting in America's decentralized elections system.

Christopher Krebs, who led the federal government's efforts to secure the 2020 election, was fired by President Trump last month for saying the election went smoothly and with no signs of cheating or interference.

Efforts to protect U.S. elections from disinformation are proceeding amid reports that the head of the agency in the Department of Homeland Security that oversees election security expects to be fired soon by the White House.

Christopher Krebs, director of DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, spearheaded an agency campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud and election irregularities.

Updated at 12:24 p.m. ET

Despite calls from many for a concession this weekend, President Trump and his campaign say they are pushing on to fight the election results tooth-and-nail.

Practically speaking, that means lawsuits.

"Our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated," Trump said in a statement Saturday. "The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots."

Even though all the major news networks, including Fox News, called the race for former Vice President Joe Biden, Saturday was the only the beginning of a long road to convincing a sizable portion of the American public who won the presidency.

President Trump has spent much of his four years in power amplifying false claims about election fraud, which has eaten into the confidence many Republicans have in the voting process.

Updated at 6 p.m. ET

With former Vice President Joe Biden inching closer to the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win, President Trump and his campaign have ramped up their efforts to delegitimize the vote-counting process.

Those efforts have come both in public comments, with Trump airing unfounded conspiracies and incorrect information about voting in recent days, and in lawsuits that have thus far had almost no success.

Election Day itself went off far more smoothly than many election officials would have predicted seven months ago, as the pandemic took hold in the middle of primary season.

But for months, those officials warned that the expected influx of mail-in votes this year could mean a longer wait before the winner of the presidency was known.

As Nov. 3 turned into Nov. 4, it became clear that's exactly what was happening.

Government officials have spent the year touting Tuesday's election as potentially the "most secure" in the nation's history.

Fewer voters are set to use the riskiest machines — electronic systems that leave no paper record — as compared to four years ago, and there is a whole-of-government approach to election security that never existed before.

Throughout his eight-year career as the Washington Wizards' starting shooting guard, Bradley Beal has scored more than 11,000 points. He's made two All Star teams and he's hit over a thousand three-pointers.

One thing he hasn't done in all that time: Vote.

"I can selfishly say I was that person four years ago, and eight years ago," Beal said, as his home court, Capital One Arena, was being announced as a voting center this fall. "I was someone who didn't take registration seriously, and I was someone who thought my vote didn't count."

The pandemic has changed a lot about how we vote this year, including when we may find out who won.

It's possible — because some rules have changed, and some haven't — that Nov. 3 could come and go without a clear answer as to who the next president will be.

Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.

"Despite some of those concerns, things are going at this point reasonably well," said former Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman, speaking specifically about the expansion of voting by mail.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Tina Barton knew counting mail ballots would become a problem.

COVID-19 is still spreading across the United States, but you would barely know it by how people are planning to vote this year.

As the pandemic took hold in the spring, voting experts predicted a national shift toward mail or absentee voting. Some experts predicted as many as 70% of all votes cast could be by mail, as was the case in Wisconsin's April primary.