phone): hi, sonia. - i'll give a heads up, at knights of columbus, the ds200 was acting up. i told them if it doesn't get resolved in an hour, i want a new one. ♪ ♪ lima: steady here, that's good. woman: yeah, very good, no complaints. the checkers are working great with us. - oh, that's good. that's good. man: hey, i need help over here. man: what happened? woman: all right, call 911? lima: yep, call 911. (sirens wailing) grace: your machine isn't working? what do you mean, your machine isn't working? so we can unplug it, right? yeah, i'll be there in a minute. lima: yeah, put, um, like, two or three booths along this wall. we got an outlet right here. again, they had the space, they should've set 'em all up. i don't know why they didn't. ♪ ♪ man (on speakerphone): until we get this resolved, they're gonna have to open the emergency slot. they're gonna have to be scanned when we can get the machine up and running. ♪ ♪

woman: thank you. - not a problem. - sorry for the... - thank you. de burgo: let me call steve and see if he can get us a ds200. grace: just, we want a new one. - i don't know if he can do it, though. - what? - they might not have enough, that's the problem. ♪ ♪ grace: oh, my friend! she hasn't voted in years, she just sent me a picture with her sticker. people are really touching me today. did you see that old lady that was over there? 81 years old, first time voting. come on now, guys. ♪ ♪ omisore: not even an email, whoo! oh, my gosh, i feel wonderful. not even an email. that hasn't happened in weeks. woman: would you like a sticker? man: oh, yeah, of course.

- thank you for coming. woman: no red on these stickers-- we need red, white, and blue. lima: next time-- it was a high school kid that designed 'em, so... - we need some red! - (chuckles): yeah. rock: she's talking about the sticker contest? woman: yeah, people are pissed off because the sticker doesn't have red in it. - doesn't have what? - red in it-- red in it. the sticker doesn't have red in it. (chuckles) (phone ringing) de burgo: hey, matt. matthew jerzyk (on phone): hey, did you see my text about knights of columbus? - no, i did not. - so, the machine's been broken for the last two hours, according to the clerk there. - yeah, they, they were supposed to send us a new machine, but then the secretary, i mean, sorry, board of elections stated that they weren't sending another machine. so, what they're doing is just sticking it in, they're sliding it into the emergency pocket in front of the machine. at the end of the night, they're going to have to manually count every ballot. - i'm just confused-- why are the people of central falls not being allowed to cast their ballots? - they are being allowed to cast their ballot.

they're not being told they... - they don't have the comfort of putting them in the machines. - they are putting them in the machines. - i've never known a machine to be broken for this long in my 20 years of doing this work, so... this, you need to do better. - will do. - all right, man. - bye. oh, this election is killing me. (sighs) reporter: emily, we learned from the secretary of state's office that rhode island has now matched its 2016 voter turnout, and that was about an hour ago. so, it is likely we will set a new record for voter turnout by the end of the night. with so many ways that you can vote this year, the board is projecting that more than 70% of registered voters in rhode island will vote. miguel nunez (on phone): our technician went to check that machine and it seemed to be working. it's a small print quality issue. so, here's how we're gonna solve the problem. - hold on, can i put you on speakerphone so my moderating clerk can hear? - yeah. woman: that'd be great.

grace: okay. this is miguel from the board of elections. nunez (on speakerphone): anything that's in that emergency compartment you need to put in that manual count bag and seal it and sign it. those are gonna come back to us... grace: is this something we should drop off to you tonight? - manual counts typically come back with the returns, which would be on friday. - we'd prefer for them to go and be out of here tonight. we would rather not hold onto them. so, if there's a way that we could drop it off, i'd appreciate it, and i'm ready to go, and i even have police escort to go with me. - all right, sounds good. i'll get back to you. - okay, thank you. - all right, bye. - bye. it's a plan, right? - so, when do we know who's president? (woman chuckles) - i don't want to know. one stressful situation at a time. lima: this is my 30th location of the day. woman: oh, do you have to visit every single one? - i don't have to, but i wouldn't be a very good elections director if i didn't. how's everybody doing tonight?

i'm nick from the board of canvassers. it's a long day amongst different circumstances than we're used to, and no matter what, we're part of history tonight, because we may very well see an all-time record-high turnout. (phone rings) grace: hey, miguel, hold on. nunez (on speakerphone): so, what we want you to do is bring the ballots here tonight. - okay. - we're gonna have another ds200 set up here and we are gonna finish loading in those 60 or so from the emergency compartment, and then we're going to, right then and there, produce the totals. - oh, i appreciate it, i really, really do. ♪ ♪ man: the polls are closed. woman: the polls are closed. hurray! congrat, everyone! (applauding) ♪ ♪ (phone ringing) smith-regan: has it got the little circle going?

i call it the circle of death. keep in mind the ds200's a digital scanner, honey. it took a picture of all the ballots. so, now it's tabulating them all. man: ...trump, 235. democrat joseph biden, 115. man: okay, trump, 252 votes. biden, 833. allen waters, 150. taylor: the mifi has nothing to do with the ds200s. nope, not at all. man: jacob, 25 in warwick, the screen is frozen. - so, that adds up to 722. so on my end, you're... (phone rings) you're balancing out here. ♪ ♪

(phone calling out) boy (on phone): hi, mom. grace: well, i still have a lot of work to do, so i probably won't see you tonight. - oh, whack! you gotta do something, like, less stressful. - (laughs): no, i like my job. i have so many stories to tell you. - all right, bye, mom! - goodbye, love you all. it's these and these, this is what i was told to bring. - okay, you wanna come with me? - yes, sir. - okay, cool. so, we're ready to go. i'm gonna start feeding these in. and we'll see how we do. man: there you go.

grace: i like it when it works. (laughs) placencia: so, what are the percentages off top, then? yeah, it's 89, 60... 54. okay. man: and, like, look at rhode island broken down. barrington, 83% in with trump ahead by 100 votes. johnston and little compton actually is not in, but it's, this is the effect of early voting. it just has not all totaled up. there's just way too many factors playing into it. - yeah. - on top of the fact that there are mail-in ballots, early voting, and in-person voting all to come in-- i don't know. that's gonna have to go into morning. newscaster: if you managed to sleep last night, things changed. you may have gone to bed thinking this election was headed one way and then you woke up

and you saw things were different and maybe trending, trending increasingly in another direction. - the vote count has favored joe biden after election night itself. the record numbers of early votes weren't even gonna begin to get counted until yesterday, until election day itself. and it was the case this year the democrats made a concerted effort. they tried to get their voters to vote early, and president trump was actually discouraging his people to do that. donald trump: this is a fraud on the american public. we were getting ready to win this election. frankly, we did win this election. reporter: and the president also threatened legal action, even though there's nothing to challenge yet because ballots are still being counted by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands. newscaster: thousands of emergency and mail ballots are still being counted today at the board of election. this is delaying the results of several local races here, especially in cranston, where there was a glitch in a usb drive. lima: hey, have you heard what happened with our ds200?

yeah, once it hit 14,000 and something ballots, that usb was just out of memory. so, we can't report our early voting results. so, there's gonna be a meeting at 10:00 with the state board of elections, and that they intend to rerun all the emergency ballots, and our office could be present for the recount, or not recount, or the ballot tabulation this morning, which is gonna be tough for us, because we're doing our provisional ballots, the write-ins. so, we got a lot going on today. i don't know about the other towns. when bob talked to me this morning, he said, you know, that ours is the only one they were unable to get on because of that memory drive-- usb stick. oh, i know that-- no, trust me. (with mouth full): this is one thing i know... i'm eating a doughnut right now, sorry. i just realized, i hadn't eaten since monday. (laughs) man: i understand the course of action in terms of... lima: it is a software glitch. man: who is scanning these ballots? is it us or is it the board of elections? lima: the board of elections.

but they're gonna have representatives... yeah, they want representatives from our office to witness it. - (sighs) nobody should be declaring victory in the city till this is done. man: yeah, that's a lot of votes. - yeah. - all right. lima: okay. - joseph casalino. - c-a-s-a-l-i-n-o, yeah. - logan napolitano. - yeah. - (clears throat): kanye west. - morning, mr. speaker, it's nick lima... - one for jesus christ, original spelling. (man chuckles) (people talking in background) man: all right, everyone, we're gonna get started over here. man: everyone on this side, please. we'll get some chairs over here for you. get you a six-piece bar.

(talking and laughing softly) (machine whirring) (people talking in background) (machine whirring) lima: yeah, we're here at the board of elections. they just started running the ballots through the machines and this is all off of that flash drive i told you about the other day. yeah, a few of the candidates have representation. there are some close general assembly races. there are a couple of council races that depend on, you know, this vote. so, they're all vote-watching like a hawk. depending on how the vote swings with this early voting, that could be, you know, decisive in a lot of races. yeah. man: ward six, reilly 3,090.

bucci, 2,851. non-partisan school committee citywide, traficante, 30,446. (man continues reading results) man: i won! man: question 4, approve: 23,800, reject: 12,755. question 5... reporter: with mail-in ballot counting still underway in several states, protests have erupted across the country. - (chanting): we want trump! reporter: the president insists there's something wrong, tweeting, "they are finding biden votes all over the place" with "surprise ballot dumps" leading to his support "magically disappearing." - (shouting and clamoring) - how can 120,000 ballots show up after the election date? and they're all for biden? protesters: ♪ from the mountains ♪ ♪ to the prairies ♪ ♪ to the oceans ♪

♪ white with foam ♪ ♪ god bless america ♪ ♪ my home sweet home ♪ (blowing fanfare) man: you're an embarrassment to every italian in rhode island! woman: we want fair! protesters: fair! - honest! - honest! - elections! - elections! - and we want to ask nellie, how were all those mail-in ballots certified when they came in? they weren't! (people yelling) this election is a fraud. woman: there was a illegal ballot dump in the state of rhode island! we're not stupid! and we know what happened! - we want a recount! - we the people! - we want to know how many military ballots came in. gansert: it's public record, so... - we want to view the mail-in ballots today! - we're working on that. - where are the mail-in ballots?

are they destroyed? woman: show us the proof! (shofar blowing) if you didn't cheat, show us the proof you didn't! ♪ ♪ man: all right, we're gonna get started here. we're gonna start with our first box. woman: guys, we are doing, as you know, the risk limiting audit. so, once you get your batch, you're gonna look, and you're only doing the presidential race. so, let's say you take the first one out and it's for president trump. you're gonna look and say, "president trump," pass the ballot to your partner, they will verify. if you both agree, it's gonna go into the pile by the sign that says "trump." - okay.

biden. woman: biden. - biden. - biden. - biden. - trump. - trump. woman: for biden. man: biden. - trump. - trump. ♪ ♪ - we're gonna go ahead and do the data entry,

and nine for trump, 16 for biden. - for biden. woman: returning audit team one. pile 29. taylor: pile 29. we've got 99 confirmed returned votes in that envelope, we have 19 votes for trump, 80 votes for biden. we have a total ballot tally down here of 3,772 ballots that were tallied by hand, manually by human beings here at the board of elections, and it matches our batch size of 3,772. so, we are golden as far as that is concerned. man: ladies and gentlemen, the risk limiting audit has concluded. (all cheering and applauding) thank you on behalf of voters throughout the country

for all your work all year long. i think a lot of people's eyes were opened about just how hard real people work to make elections happen. ♪ ♪ woman: stop the steal! rock: this looks like three people. one holding a trump flag, one holding an american flag, and one holding a sign. i love passion, i love that people express their feelings, but it's a double-edged sword, because some people are so excited and so passionate that you're seeing hate mail.

you're seeing election officials across the country who are being threatened, and it's heartbreaking. this is the envelope that the voted ballots are gonna go in. oh... i mean, i'm an elections administrator. our job was to conduct an election so that people could vote easily and securely and safely. we did that. i'm not even talking about who won-- honest to god. i didn't vote for the guy that won, i didn't vote for the guy that lost. and that's why i can honestly tell you, i am so confident that this election was run well and that these documents are gonna get to washington so that the votes are counted in congress on, i think it's january 5 or 6. it's not often you get to send something to the vice president of the united states. it's pretty cool-- it's a formality. but, i mean, really, what's cool about it is that these pieces of paper are gonna be counted

before a joint session of congress led by the vice president of the united states, which is pretty cool. and it's interesting, 'cause the vice president is gonna be counting the votes that's gonna kick him out of office, which is interesting, i guess, too. woman: ♪ oh, say, does that ♪ ♪ star-spangled banner yet wave ♪ ♪ o'er the land of the free ♪ ♪ and the home of ♪ ♪ the brave? ♪ man: the chair recognizes the honorable nellie gorbea, secretary of state. - good afternoon, rhode island. it's my honor to welcome you to the 2020 electoral college.

today, rhode island's presidential electors are going to be casting their ballots for president and vice president as required by federal law in a tradition that goes back more than 200 years. i have sorted and counted the ballots and announce that there are four votes for joseph r. biden of delaware for president of the united states. ♪ ♪ (radio playing in background) lima: it's had its stresses, but i do love the job. because we're doing good. we as a society have to say, "this is our process.

this is how we elect our government." we need to have good, trustworthy, fair elections to do that-- and we do. you know, with the election this year in rhode island, we had, on november 3, the in-person results released first and then the mail ballot results released later, then provisionals and other types of votes, manual count, get added in after that-- that's normal. that happens every single election process. yet, only this year, people say, "oh, why is this? this is all wrong!" it was like that in 2018, 2016, 2014, 1992. like, doesn't matter. that's how we've always done it. this is the way it's always been. this is normal. they read it as abnormal because it doesn't match their expectations in their head of what they've pieced together it should look like. and it's very easy for someone with malintent to manipulate that fact-- which is a fact, that people don't fully understand the process-- to their own advantage, and that's, you know,

that's what's happened, that's what's happening, and hopefully it happens less, you know, the further we go into 2021 and the further we go into the future of the country, because it can't happen more. we're at a tipping point where it's dangerous if it happens more. it's already dangerous now. chris paplauskas: i call for the appointment of the registrar. any council member like to make a motion? council member donegan? - president paplauskas, i'd like to nominate nicholas lima. paplauskas: nicholas lima has been nominated for registrar. mr. lima, congratulations, raise your right hand. you do solemnly swear that you will be true and faithful unto both the constitution of the united states... lima: elections are about trust, and i'm worried right now that there are some people out there who are trying to say, "well,

elections officials can't be trusted." once you go down that road, i don't know how you ever get that trust back. you know, that can spread like a virus, and to undo that damage, it's gonna take a monumental effort from a lot of people from all walks of life. - ...and that you will well and truly execute the office in which you have been appointed, so help you god. - i do. - congratulations. ♪ ♪ now nominations are in order for the office of council vice president. ♪ ♪

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