Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 46m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred sixty-sixth day and the seventh day.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing for a sign ordinance amendment review at 9 AM.
On this day in 1962, NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.
Recommended for reading in full —
Lois Beckett and Julia Carrie Wong report The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump’s election lies (‘Rightwing news outlets have taken up the president’s message on social media, stirring supporters into a frenzy’):
But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claimscasting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
“I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool.
David E. Sanger, Matt Stevens, and Nicole Perlroth report Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud:
Hours after President Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday declaring flatly that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised.
The rebuke, in a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr. Trump by name. But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr. Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed.
The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process. Coming directly from one of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet agencies, it further isolated the president in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election.
Lockdown is named Collins Dictionary’s 2020 word of the year: