New Mexico has become the first state in history to elect all women of colour to the US House of Representatives.

The group of three includes Representative Deb Haaland, a Democrat who in 2018 became one of the first Native American women elected to Congress. She thanked those who elected her in a tweet:

Republican Yvette Herrell, who is also Native American (of the Cherokee nation), and Democrat Teresa Leger Fernandez, who is Hispanic, were the other two women voted in.

At least 10 people who worked at a polling station on a university campus in Southampton in Long Island, New York, have been infected with coronavirus, local reports say.

It happened at an early voting site and forced dozens to self-isolate.

Those infected people include six poll workers who were helping out at Stony Brook University’s campus.

On Wednesday, 18 states reported record numbers of patients who have been hospitalised with Covid-19, CBS says.

As our chart below shows, the number of daily cases registered in the country went above 100,000 cases for the first time on Wednesday.

Two young US voters have spoken to the BBC's Annita McVeigh about their first experience at the ballot box in the 2020 election.

Ashtyn Vickers voted for Joe Biden and Jesse Fischer opted for Donald Trump. Watch below.

Image source, EPA

As we mentioned in an earlier post, the possible threat of violence in the US, in the wake of the undecided election, continues to be a theme of media coverage in several countries.

In some cases this ongoing narrative is aimed at undermining the US.

Iran’s state radio said protesters "are armed to the teeth and are not afraid of police", while TV stations in Russia showed footage of protesters clashing with police.

While there have been protests over the vote and some reports of clashes and arrests, the demonstrations have been mostly small and peaceful.

It’s also important to remember that delays with the result were anticipated this year because of the increase in postal voting caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

In states where counting is still under way, officials say the process is going according to plan.

“We knew the process would take some time but the process is working,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford told the BBC on Wednesday.

Image source, EPA

There are now just a handful of states up for grabs to determine the final outcome of the election.

Biden currently has 243 electoral college votes, and Trump 214. They need 270 to win the White House.

The key remaining states are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

There are various possible paths to victory.

To reach 270, Trump could lose Wisconsin (10), but he must win Georgia (16 votes), North Carolina (15), Pennsylvania (20), and either Arizona (11) or Nevada (6) to prevail.

Biden could win without Pennsylvania (where a projected result is not expected any time soon), but he would need to win Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

Note that some news outlets have projected a Biden win in Wisconsin and Arizona, but the BBC - via our monitoring partners - has deemed them too early to call.

With Wisconsin, BIden would need just Arizona and Nevada.

Counting is continuing, with officials expected to provide updates later in the day.

• In Georgia, officials said they would keep counting all night until all the ballots are tallied. Trump's lead there is slowly dwindling, down to 24,000 votes, the New York Times reports
• In Nevada, the race is on a knife edge, and Biden leads by fewer than 8,000 votes. Officials said the next results would be posted on Thursday at 17:00 GMT (09:00 local time)
• In Pennsylvania, Trump's significant lead has narrowed. With 90% of ballots counted at 05:45 GMT (23:30 Wednesday local time), Trump was ahead by 164,414 votes
• In Arizona, Biden was leading by about 80,000 votes, with further results expected on Thursday, external
• In North Carolina, where most of the votes have been counted but some remaining to be tallied, Trump clung to a narrow lead with some 77,000 votes
• Our partners, Reuters, have still not projected Wisconsin, where Joe Biden's lead is said to be of more than 20,000 votes. But other news outlets are reporting that Biden has won the state

Read more here: When might we get a winner?

And this is what happened when we put Republican and Democrat voters in the same group chat on WhatsApp.

Initially, they all agreed that this election campaign had been "the race that never ends".

But then the results started to come in, and tensions flared.

Read more here.

BBC Radio 5 Live

BBC Radio 5 Live has been hearing a heated exchange between a Republican and a Democrat.

Paula, who voted for Joe Biden, said she was “struggling” with the state of things in America.

“We have a current president who stepped up last night and said that he has won states where the votes haven’t been counted yet,” she said.

“This is such a terrifying thing as anybody who knows history knows how dictators take over.”

Donald Trump supporter Eric responded: “You can’t believe that many people voted for Donald Trump. I can’t believe that many people are voting for Joe Biden who is honestly beholden to a lot of far-left revolutionaries and very liberal activists.

“They hate this country, they want to rewrite the history books.”

Listen to BBC Radio 5 Live on BBC Sounds.

Image source, Reuters

The latest voting data from Arizona has shown Democrat Joe Biden’s lead there narrowing.

Maricopa County - the state’s most populous county - released the results from 140,000 more ballots on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

The updated vote totals show Biden leading Donald Trump in Maricopa County by 74,514 votes, almost 11,000 fewer than the previous update.

State-wide, Biden currently has a lead of about 68,000.

In the two new batches of results released by Maricopa County, Trump's share of the vote was about 57%.

But how significant is this to the wider state picture?

In order to win, Trump would have to receive the same proportion of votes that remain to be counted in other parts of Arizona, including in areas that tend to vote for the Democratic party, the New York Times reports.

The BBC still considers the race in Arizona too early to call. Even though, some outlets, via the Associated Press news agency, have already projected a win for the Democrats.

As we reported earlier, a crowd of some 200 Republican supporters descended on the Maricopa County Recorder's Office as staff were counting ballots overnight.

The protesters were responding to baseless claims on social media that votes likely to be for Donald Trump would not be counted.

BBC Monitoring
The world through its media

The possible threat of violence in America, in the wake of the undecided election, continues to be a theme of media coverage in several countries. In some cases this ongoing narrative is aimed at undermining the US.

Iran's state radio has reported on clashes in Los Angeles, Seattle and Minneapolis, and asserts that protesters "are armed to the teeth and are not afraid of police".

"Violence, guns. These are often fixtures of elections in underdeveloped or developing countries," says a commentary in China's Global Times newspaper. "What is happening during the US election is something that we could have never imaged in this 'Beacon of Freedom'."

In Russia, TV stations are also showing footage of protests and protesters' clashes with police in New York and other cities.

Many commentators there note the outcome is likely to further divide the country. The heavyweight daily Kommersant describes the election as "the wildest in the country's history, external" and adds "the only guaranteed outcome... is a civil divide".

There is also dismay over how possible violence and other events may further undermine the country's democratic values and practices.

"The shame of America, external" a headline in Kenya's Standard newspaper calls it, against a black background and image of US forces carrying guns in a street.

Turkish media outlets have highlighted the “chaos” amid the ongoing vote-counting.

"The American president makes unfounded claims of fraud , externaland hastily claims the election victory," notes one commentary in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The USA has "fallen into its biggest institutional and political crisis, external since Richard Nixon’s resignation", says another in Spain's El Mundo.

A cartoon in South Africa’s news site, the Daily Maverick, depicts Donald Trump holding a knife to the neck of the statue of liberty with the threat: “I win or the dame gets it”, external.

There is also acknowledgement that Trump's challenger Joe Biden is leading the polls, albeit slimly, and a consideration of what this means.

In Afghanistan the Rah-e Madaneyat newspaper asks: "Is Trump's victory the victory of the Taliban? Is Biden's victory the continuation of a republic in Afghanistan?"

A commentary on the pro-Iran Al-Mayadeen TV website said Gulf states were holding their breath as they waited to see if “the honeymoon with Trump, external” would continue.

Frank Luntz, a Republican pundit and pollster, has explained why some polls got projections wrong in the US presidential election.

Speaking to BBC Newsnight, he said 19% of Trump supporters "were dishonest with their friends and family", compared to "9% of Biden supporters who acted in the same way".

National polls are usually a good guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, but they're not necessarily a good way to predict the result of the election.

All polls should be read with some scepticism.

Image source, EPA

The result in Nevada is still on a knife-edge as vote counting there continues.

As we have mentioned, the Trump campaign has filed legal action in several states, alleging irregularities.

But Nevada’s Attorney General Aaron Ford says the state is not concerned about any cases that might come its way, telling CNN its voting system is “pretty impenetrable when it comes to a legal challenge against us”.

Speaking to the BBC on Wednesday, Ford said all the evidence showed that the state had conducted a “free, safe and secure election”.

“We knew the process would take some time but the process is working,” the Democrat said.

“It’s taking time because we have safeguards in place to prevent fraud, such as signature verification, unique barcodes and other tools," he continued.

He also explained how vote counting works when it comes to postal ballots.

“These ballots are mailed back to the local county registrars and they go through a signature verification process and they go through a tallying process that are observed by a bipartisan group of individuals called poll observers.”

“At every level and every step here, there are verification processes at play that can protect the integrity of our elections.”

On the eve of election day, a Nevada judge rejected a Republican lawsuit that sought to halt early vote counting in the Las Vegas area, over procedures for poll observation and mail-in ballot processing.

Officials say the next results in Nevada will be posted on Thursday at 17:00 GMT (09:00 local time).

As we reported earlier, a crowd of some 200 Republican supporters descended on the Maricopa County Recorder's Office as staff continued counting ballots overnight in the state of Arizona.

The protesters were responding to claims on social media that votes likely to be for Donald Trump would not be counted.

There is no evidence for this. Officials have reiterated that they are following procedures and counting all votes.

Officials had to call the sheriff's department, but counters did not stop their work.

Image source, EPA

An international observer mission says the US elections were “tarnished by legal uncertainty and unprecedented attempts to undermine public trust”.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the vote itself was “competitive and well managed” despite the challenges presented by Covid-19.

But, it said, “at the same time, the campaign was characterised by deeply entrenched political polarisation that often obscured the broader policy debate and included baseless allegations of systematic fraud”.

In a statement on its preliminary findings,, external the OSCE mission said “baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions”.

Before Tuesday's vote, there were hundreds of lawsuits regarding postal and early voting. They centred on a range of issues such as the deadline for posting and receiving ballots and the witness signatures required.

Republican-run states said restrictions were necessary to clamp down on voter fraud, while Democrats said these were attempts to keep people from exercising their civic rights.

In his speech on election night, Donald Trump called the vote "a fraud on the American public".

The Trump campaign now wants to stop the count in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan, claiming - without evidence - that there is voter fraud.

You can read more about the legal challenges here.

Steve Rosenberg
BBC Moscow Correspondent

The Russian media - and Russian politicians - are following events in America closely.

“The spectacle of a sinking superpower is bewitching!”

That was the reaction of one Russian MP to the US election.

There are some people in power in Russia who think that Moscow stands to benefit from confusion, court cases and general post-election mess in the United States. They view geopolitics as a zero-sum game, believing that if your opponent is weak, you’re strong. They calculate that a "disunited" United States of America is less likely to busy itself with imposing more sanctions on Russia.

Not everyone here shares that view. There are people in Russia’s political and diplomatic circles who are convinced their country gains more, politically and economically, from a stable America, and that only a strong US president would be in a position to repair relations with Russia.

Vote counting is still under way in a handful of key battleground states that will decide who wins the White House.

So far, Biden has 243 electoral college votes and Trump has 214. To win the presidency, 270 are needed.

But while we do not yet know the winner, we do know other things about this year’s vote.

Preliminary figures show the highest turnout since 1900, with 66.9% of eligible voters casting their ballot compared with 60.1% in 2016.

Exit poll data from across the US has also given a glimpse into voters' priorities and an indication of how different demographic groups have cast their ballots.

You can see more on that here, as well as our election map tracking all the latest results.

Officials in the battleground state of Arizona have rebutted claims that ballot papers marked with sharpies [permanent markers] have been disqualified.

In a post on Twitter the state's top election official, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said using a sharpie would not invalidate ballots.

Some posts on social media contained claims that Republican voters in Arizona were given sharpies in a bid to make their ballots unreadable.

"The poll workers were taking the pens from voters and making them use Sharpies. Sharpies bleed through. All of the votes marked with Sharpies couldn't be read," one Facebook post read.

Democrats said the claims - dubbed "sharpiegate" - were part of a misinformation campaign to undermine Joe Biden's lead. With 85% of the vote counted in Arizona, Biden was ahead by more than 79,000 votes. Republicans have won every presidential race there since 1952, except for one Democratic interlude in 1996.

The president of the United States doesn't win by getting the most votes nationwide in America. Instead, the candidates are trying to win the majority of what's called the electoral college votes.

These are essentially points assigned to each state, roughly based on their population. Some have more electoral college votes (California has 55) and some have fewer (Alaska has three).

In most states, the candidate who wins the popular vote is awarded all of that state's electoral college votes. As there are 538 in total, a count of 270 wins the presidency.

So it is possible to lose the overall popular vote, and still be elected president by carrying key states - even by a slim margin. That was the case in 2016, when Trump won the election even though his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, got nearly three million more individual votes. Here’s how the system works in more detail.

If you are seeing different tallies at the top of the live coverage from various news sites, you might well be confused.

This is because some news sites have projected wins in Arizona (meaning an extra 11 electoral college votes) and Wisconsin (10 electoral college votes) for Biden.

The BBC still considers these too early to project.

This year, the BBC gets its data via Reuters, from polling firm Edison Research, who do the field work for the exit polls and work with US networks in the National Election Pool.

In Wisconsin, 99% of the votes have been counted, with the candidates neck and neck.

In Arizona, 85% of votes have been counted, and Biden is leading with 51% of the votes, with Trump on 48%.

The watch word this year is "patience". Stay tuned and we will bring you updates as soon as we have them.

Image source, Reuters

One of the biggest differences between a Trump presidency and a Biden one would be green energy, former Federal Reserve Governor Randall Kroszner told the BBC’s Today programme.

“President Biden would very much do investments in that realm, President Trump would certainly not,” he said.

Here’s a quick look at some of the key pledges the Democrat has made on this:

• Biden wants the US energy sector to go carbon-free by 2035
• His campaign says he will phase out taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuel companies
• Earlier in the campaign cycle, Biden suggested to voters that he favoured ending fracking, which allows drilling firms to access difficult-to-reach oil and gas reserves. But since becoming the White House nominee, he has said his policy is more limited - to end fracking leases on federal land
• He says he would seek to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which aims to tackle global warming. Under Trump, the US has become the first nation in the world to formally withdraw from the deal
• He has ambitious ideas to revolutionise transport in the US using electric vehicles and trains
• He has also pledged to build 1.5 million sustainable homes and housing units

You can read about Biden and Trump’s differing approaches to energy and climate change here.

A vote counting centre in Maricopa county, Arizona, found itself grappling with the dilemma of whether to pause work and close after a crowd of Republican supporters gathered outside - responding to claims on social media that votes likely to be for Trump would not be counted. Some protesters even made their way into the centre and were escorted out. Officials had to call the sheriff's department, but counters did not stop their work.

It is too early to project the result in Arizona. As of 23:00 local time on Wednesday (06:00 GMT on Thurday), 82% of the vote in Maricopa county had been counted, with Joe Biden leading - officials say they have more than 400,000 ballots still to tally.

The county, which includes the city of Phoenix, is considered a battleground in a traditionally Republican state.