Miles Parks

For years leading up to the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump was clear: If he lost, it would be because of voter fraud.

Ahead of California's recall election Tuesday, for which ballots were mailed to all 22 million registered voters in the state, he made a similar baseless declaration.

Voting officials nationwide are still grappling with a new reality after the 2020 election that includes death threats, conspiracy theories and legal penalties for making what were once regarded as minor mistakes, but on Wednesday, a bipartisan group of attorneys announced an organization aimed at helping them fight back.

The Election Official Legal Defense Network is the first organization of its kind aimed at providing pro-bono legal help and advice for election officials who up until a year ago did not really need it.

As Democrats maneuver to pass voting rights legislation through Congress, some high-profile members of the party have expressed an openness to one GOP-backed policy they have long opposed: voter ID requirements.

It's been more than nine months since Election Day 2020, but as the nation's top election officials met in Iowa over the weekend, it was clear the shadow of that race will stretch far into the future of American democracy.

In 2021, Ben Shapiro rules Facebook.

The conservative podcast host and author's personal Facebook page has more followers than The Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the world's biggest social networking site.

An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.

To Matt Masterson, the review of 2020 ballots from Maricopa County, Ariz., that's underway is "performance art" or "a clown show," and definitely "a waste of taxpayer money."

But it's not an audit.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' biggest fear as a parent isn't gun violence, or drunk driving, or anything related to the pandemic.

It's social media.

And specifically, the new sense of "brokenness" she hears about in children in her district, and nationwide. Teen depression and suicide rates have been rising for over a decade, and she sees social apps as a major reason.

CNN. ABC News. The New York Times. Fox News.

Those are the publishers of four of the five most popular Facebook posts of articles about the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine this week. They're ranked 2 to 5 in total interactions, according to data from the tracking tool CrowdTangle.

The No. 1 posting, however, isn't from a news organization. Or a government official. Or a public health expert.

Big Tech taking questions from Congress is becoming a quarterly event.

The latest edition came Thursday, when Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and Google's Sundar Pichai appeared virtually before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The hearing was centered around misinformation. It was the first time the executives took questions from lawmakers since the riot at the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump supporters on Jan. 6 and since the widespread rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine began.

The odds of dying after getting a COVID-19 vaccine are virtually nonexistent.

According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning.

But you might not know that from looking at your social media feed.

Darren Linvill thought he was prepared for 2020 and the firehose of false information that would come flooding down on the United States during an election year in which the country was bitterly divided.

Linvill is a researcher at Clemson University in South Carolina and he tracks disinformation networks associated with Russia.

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."