The NBC News Vote Watch team compiled some bullets on the successes surrounding the 2020 election. Here are some of them: 

• Voter participation is at a record high, with more than 142 million votes counted as of Thursday morning. NBC News estimates this will climb to more than 160 million, a record for a presidential election.
• More than 100 million ballots were cast during the early voting period, made possible by secretaries of state who ensured their citizens were able to vote safely during a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 230,000 Americans.
• Despite fears, the Department of Homeland Security was able to say on Election Day that "there doesn’t appear to be any violence anywhere." While we are monitoring isolated protests across the country, there is currently no widespread unrest. 
• Voters respected one another, and there were very few credible reports of voter intimidation at the polls. Poll workers, including the thousands of young people trained to fill the shortage left by older workers sitting this one out due to Covid-19 concerns, have been called the "unsung heroes" of this process.
• The polls closed on Election Day without any evidence of cyber manipulation by foreign governments or criminals. DHS credited the work of federal, state and local election officials who focused on protecting our elections over the past four years, part of a nationwide effort.
• Social media wasn’t the problem many feared it would be. Despite all the worry about widespread hoaxes and false information, this was not the horror scenario some expected.
• So far, ballot counting continues with no reports of significant fraud or systemic issues. On Election Day, machinery issues were limited and addressed. 
• Despite multiple controversies, the Postal Service was able to get ballots where they needed to be and is currently not searching for any lost ballots.

Here are recount laws in key states as the presidential race comes down to the wire.

The two plaintiffs behind the Republican-backed lawsuit claiming improprieties in the handling of mail ballots in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, are now seeking to withdraw their claim.

In what is clearly a tactical retreat, GOP congressional candidate Kathy Barnette says because there’s another case in state court that raises similar claims, she wants to let go of this one in federal court. The judge will undoubtedly grant the motion.

It appeared during a hearing on the motion that she was likely to lose. She may simply be trying to avoid a loss. In any event, this case has now collapsed. 

The claim was that the county was improperly screening mail ballots before Election Day and giving voters a chance to fix any errors that would render their ballots invalid.

The Kentucky hamlet of Rabbit Hash has a new mayor — Wilbur, a 6-month-old French bulldog.

"Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, has never had an actual person or human as a mayor," Amy Noland, Wilbur's human, told NBC News.

Noland said the tradition emerged in the late 1990s.

Read more here.

About 35,000 mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, which covers the Pittsburgh area, still need to be counted, and officials say they won’t be able to start doing so until Friday. 

A federal court ordered that the bulk of those ballots — 29,000 — couldn’t be handled or processed until 5 p.m. ET Friday, County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said at a brief press conference Thursday. Those were replacement ballots sent to voters after a printing company that contracted with the county sent incorrect ballots to voters in October. Because voters were also sent the correct ballots, officials need to verify that the voters didn’t try to cast both. 

At 9 a.m. ET Friday, the election return board will be sworn in, which can’t happen until three days after Election Day across the state, and will begin going through the remaining uncounted mail-in ballots. That includes about 6,800 ballots that have other issues, such as those that were damaged in the mail or during opening or that did not have the required secrecy envelopes.

Another batch that will be looked at Friday is provisional ballots, which could amount to between 10,000 and 15,000 in number, Fitzgerald said.

Around 1:30 p.m. ET Thursday, Fulton County Elections Director Rick Barron said that officials there have finished processing absentee ballots.

As many as 7,000 vote tallies will be published later Thursday.

Fulton, where Atlanta is located, is the most populous county in Georgia. Biden currently leads there with 72.6 percent, though Trump is ahead in the state overall.

A state court judge has denied a request from the Trump campaign which asked Michigan to stop counting absentee votes until an election inspector from each party was present at each county canvassing board and until surveillance video was available of each ballot box. 

She said the Trump campaign failed to offer solid evidence that any laws were being violated.

A state court judge in Georgia has dismissed a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Trump campaign and the Georgia Republican Party, which claimed that late-arriving mail ballots were being mixed in with ballots that arrived on time.  The lawsuit included a claim from an observer who thought he saw evidence of such mixing. 

The judge said Thursday there was no evidence that the ballots seen by the observer were actually received after the cutoff for mail ballots.

“There is no evidence that the Chatham County Board of Elections or the Chatham County Board of Registrars has failed to comply with the law,” the judge said.

If Joe Biden comes back in Pennsylvania, he will have the suburbs of Philadelphia to thank for a shift in his direction.

In Chester County, which runs south toward Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, home, and west of Philadelphia toward Lancaster, Biden's share of the vote is 5.6 percentage points higher than Hillary Clinton's at 57.5 percent.

Already, with 95 percent reporting, he has about 36,000 more votes out of Chester than Clinton did. Trump's share of the vote is down a little bit, about 1.5 percentage points.

The lack of third-party candidates this cycle may account for the differences in Biden’s increased share and Trump's fall: In 2016, the major parties received about 94.5 percent of the vote in Chester. This time, they are at 98.5 percent combined.

Likewise, in neighboring Montgomery County, which runs west-northwest of the city, Biden’s share of the vote is 4.1 percentage points higher than Clinton’s at 62.5 percent, while Trump’s is down six-tenths of a percentage point from 2016. Biden’s raw vote total is 57,000 votes higher than Clinton’s.