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The 2020 Election

Started by soleil, Feb 09, 2020, 12:19 AM

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Rad

Republican secretary of state blows off Trump's claims of voter mail fraud

Raw Story
10/17/2020
By Tom Boggioni

Appearing in CNN with host John King the Republican secretary of state for the state of Washington laughed at comments Donald Trump made during his Thursday night town hall where he predicted widespread voter fraud due to mail-in voting, saying she had no worries about it at all.

Speaking with host King, Secretary of State Kim Wyman was pressed to describe any problems she sees coming in November's election.

"Kim Wyman thank you for your time again," King began. "You're the expert since you've been at it for so long in Washington. I was reading the transcript of an interview you did, you can handle this but what strikes you as the vitriol. You're a Republican, but the nation's top Republican is saying fraud, rigged, saying things that are frankly wrong, correct?"

"That's correct. and every time President Trump takes a swing at absentee ballots or vote-by-mail ballots it undermines confidence," she replied. "So officials have more to do to make sure their voters know that their vote is protected, their vote is going to be counted accurately and we're going to count for every vote we receive."

"˜The numbers the president was using with Savannah Guthrie were wrong, but there are cases where people are finding ballots discarded or in wrong locations. are other secretaries of state reaching out to you to how to handle it?" King asked. "Are you concerned so far? Do you think these are routine hiccups?"

"We've been working with secretaries of state and election officials from across the country for the last seven, eight months," she explained. "10 percent rolls population moves every year so we're trying to keep up our voter roles to make sure we have the most accurate address, get the ballot to the voter on the first try and the right ballot to the voter. But people move, and in an apartment or condominium we'll have opportunities for people to receive someone else's ballot that's why we have security measures in place to make sure only the voter it was issued to gets to cast that ballot."

"˜Your state is a high participation state anyway, a civic tradition and all that," King continued. "I look at the primary turnout, number one and now the early questions: you have huge lines in many places with early voting. Based on those and based on your experience, what does it tell you about the interest in this election?"

"It's exactly what we expected," she replied. "We see very high turnout. I'm excited because I think what we're going to see here in Washington is close to 90 percent turnout of our registered voters. As an election official, it makes you excited and we have to work really hard to make sure we get through all the volume."

Watch: https://youtu.be/QoUqBBSsRSk

Rad

Polling expert pinpoints the key indicator that could tell us Trump's fate in the election

on October 17, 2020
By Alex Henderson, AlterNet

With the election less than three weeks away, thousands of Americans have taken advantage of early voting in states ranging from Georgia to Texas to North Carolina. David Wasserman, house editor for the Cook Political Report, discussed this abundance of early voting with NBC News' Andrea Mitchell on Friday - and Wasserman pointed to Sumter County, Florida as a possible way to gauge how the election will ultimately turn out.

"It's true that we're both seeing historic early voting, and it's a drop in the bucket because we're headed for likely 150 million to 160 million votes cast this year - which would be record-shattering," Wasserman told Mitchell.

Sumpter County, Wasserman stressed to Mitchell, is an important place to keep an eye on because it is full of retirees and 65-and-old voters - who could play an important role in determining whether President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden wins Florida's 29 electoral votes.

"It's going to be difficult, this Election Night, to figure out what's going on in a lot of states because a lot of the upper midwestern states are going to need probably days or perhaps even weeks to be able to count all of those mail-in ballots that lean D," Wasserman explained. "But one thing I'll be watching early on Election Night is Florida. And in Florida, counties are permitted to begin counting ballots 22 days before Election Day, and I'll be watching Sumter County - which is where the bulk of The Villages is."

The Villages, Wasserman noted, is "the largest retirement community in Florida."

Wasserman told Mitchell, "The median age there is 68.9 years old, and the Trump campaign has placed so much importance on The Villages that (Vice President Mike) Pence visited last weekend. Trump is holding a rally tonight in Ocala, which is right next door. And Democrats took delight in these images, last weekend, of a flotilla of 500 golf carts with Biden flags that were on their way to drop off mail-in ballots. That's anecdotal, but what we know from the polls is that Biden has really made inroads with white seniors - particularly in the last couple of weeks."

The Cook Political house editor added that Biden is "ahead, on average, among seniors, 53-44%. Compare that to the final polls in 2016, which had Trump up among seniors 49-44 over Clinton. And so, if there is this gray revolt, it should be apparent early on Election Night because, keep in mind: Sumter, in 2016, 84% of the vote there was cast early. And they reported their entire batch of early votes pretty shortly after the polls closed. We could know by 7:15 PM whether Trump has a massive problem with seniors. And if he can't win Florida, then he can't win a second term."

Rad

These 6 key battleground states will decide the 2020 presidential election - and Trump trails Biden in all of them

on October 19, 2020
By Agence France-Presse

The November 3 US presidential election is boiling down to a handful of key states that will decide the race between Democrat Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.

Trump carved a narrow path to victory in 2016 by winning the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona.

This time polls have him behind in all six - albeit by narrow margins in some.

Trump also trails by a slim margin in three other states he won in 2016 - Georgia, Iowa and Ohio, according to an average of state polls by the website RealClearPolitics (RCP).
NEW! Help us launch the Raw Story Podcast. Click to learn more.

Here is a look at some of the key states:

Biden's birth state is the largest at play in the Rust Belt, a north-central region marked by decades of industrial decline.

Trump volunteers are swarming the state, including city suburbs where they are canvassing door-to-door.

On the Democratic side, former president Barack Obama is to make his first appearance on the campaign trail on Wednesday at an event in Philadelphia for his former vice president.

Pennsylvania's big cities will vote heavily for Biden, while its rural west and conservative central regions are committed to Trump. Its suburbs and northeast will be critical.

RCP average: Biden leads by 5.6 percentage points.

Michigan narrowly tipped for Trump in 2016 and is being fiercely contested this year.

Trump has visited the Great Lakes state to argue he is ushering in an American comeback, but voters are concerned about the coronavirus' impact on the economy and the president's response to the pandemic.

Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has clashed repeatedly with the president and her enforced lockdowns have angered conservatives.

Gun-toting protestors staged demonstrations outside the state capitol this summer and members of a right-wing group were arrested recently for plotting to kidnap the governor.

RCP: Biden by 7.2

Democrat Hillary Clinton opted against campaigning in America's dairyland in 2016, and voters punished her for it.

This year Democrats highlighted Wisconsin, locating their national convention there although the gathering moved online over coronavirus concerns.

Trump and Biden have campaigned in the state, while Vice President Mike Pence and Biden running mate Kamala Harris have also visited.

RCP: Biden by 6.3

The largest of the swing states anchors the Sun Belt, the band of states across the US South and Southwest rapidly growing in population, and features agriculture, military industry and large numbers of retirees.

Republicans are mounting a fierce defense here, with Democrats accusing them of suppressing the vote, particularly in communities of color.

The state's huge Latino population will be key, and polls show them aligned with the Democratic ticket less than in 2016.

At the same time, polls show seniors swinging away from Trump because of his handling of the pandemic.

Most experts say Florida is a Trump firewall; if it's breached, Trump likely loses the White House.

RCP: Biden by 1.4

This traditionally conservative state went to Trump by three points four years ago but both parties acknowledge it is now too close to call.

North Carolina's governor is a popular Democrat who has won praise for his balanced response to the pandemic.

Republicans based their national convention here, although it ended up being largely online.

RCP: Biden by 2.7

Arizona has been a Republican stronghold for decades, but its electorate is changing, with a growing Latino community and an influx of more liberal Californians.

Conservative voters appreciate Trump's efforts to restrict immigration and build a wall on the border with Mexico.

But Trump has hurt his prospects by repeatedly denigrating the late senator John McCain, who represented Arizona and still looms large over its politics. McCain's widow, Cindy McCain, has endorsed Biden.

RCP: Biden by 4.0

Trump won easily in Iowa four years ago, beating Clinton by nearly 10 points, but the race appears close this time in the midwestern farming state.

Trump held a campaign rally in Iowa last week, a sign he is playing defense in a state he had been expected to win.

RCP: Biden by 1.2

A Democrat has not won a presidential race in Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992 but it has been trending Democratic in recent years.

Trump held a rally in Georgia on Friday, an indication he may be on shaky ground there.

RCP: Biden by 1.2

Ohio, with 18 electoral college votes, is a major prize.

Trump defeated Clinton in Ohio by 8.1 points but polls show a close race this time in the midwestern industrial state.

Biden has visited and touted his role in helping save the US automobile industry when he was vice president.

RCP: Biden by 0.6

Rad

Federal Appeals Courts Emerge as Crucial for Trump in Voting Cases

NYTimes
10/19/2020

Federal district courts have tended to rule for Democrats in litigation over how to run the election, but appeals courts, well stocked with the president's nominees, are blocking them.

This month, a federal judge struck down a decree from Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas limiting each county in the state to a single drop box to handle the surge in absentee ballots this election season, rejecting Mr. Abbott's argument that the limit was necessary to combat fraud.

Days later, an appellate panel of three judges appointed by President Trump froze the lower court order, keeping Mr. Abbott's new policy in place - meaning Harris County, with more than two million voters, and Wheeler County, with well under 4,000, would both be allowed only one drop box for voters who want to hand-deliver their absentee ballots and avoid reliance on the Postal Service.

The Texas case is one of at least eight major election disputes around the country in which Federal District Court judges sided with civil rights groups and Democrats in voting cases only to be stayed by the federal appeals courts, whose ranks Mr. Trump has done more to populate than any president in more than 40 years.

The rulings highlight how Mr. Trump's drive to fill empty judgeships is yielding benefits to his re-election campaign even before any major dispute about the outcome may make it to the Supreme Court. He made clear the political advantages he derives from his power to appoint judges when he explained last month that he was moving fast to name a successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so the Supreme Court would have a full contingent to handle any election challenges, which he has indicated he might bring in the event of a loss.

In appointing dozens of reliable conservatives to the appellate bench, Mr. Trump has made it more likely that appeals come before judges with legal philosophies sympathetic to Republicans on issues including voting rights. The trend has left Democrats and civil rights lawyers increasingly concerned that they face another major impediment to their efforts to assure that as many people as possible can vote in the middle of a pandemic - and in the face of a campaign by Republicans to limit voting.

"There has been a very significant number of federal voting rights victories across the country and those have in the last week or two - many if not most - been stayed by appellate courts," said Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which has been involved in several voting rights lawsuits this year. "We're seeing the brakes being put on the voting rights expansion at the appellate level in these jurisdictions, in many cases in ways that won't be remediable before the election."

In potentially pivotal states like Wisconsin and Ohio, the outcomes appear to be serving the president's effort to limit voting while in some cases creating widespread confusion about the rules only three weeks before Election Day.

There has been a dizzying amount of election-related litigation this year, with more than 350 cases playing out in state and federal courts. In general, the disputes focus on how far states can go to make it easier to apply for, fill out and send in mail ballots, and how much time election officials can take to count what is certain to be a record number of them. In polls, Democrats have indicated that they are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail this year.

Democrats and civil rights groups have argued that certain provisions regarding ballots that may have made sense before the pandemic are unduly onerous in light of social distancing guidelines and delays throughout the badly overwhelmed Postal Service. Those include requiring excuses and witness signatures for absentee ballots, having strict Election Day deadlines for the official receipt of mail votes and the limited use of drop boxes.

Rad


Rise in use of ballot drop boxes sparks partisan battles

2020/10/19 05:44
Stateline.org

In the presidential election four years ago, there were fewer free-standing ballot drop boxes, and they were uncontroversial. This year, as officials in many states expand use of the boxes amid a pandemic, they have become another flashpoint in the controversy over voting access.

Supporters of the expanded use of drop boxes say they make voting easier for people who are afraid to vote in person and fear their absentee ballots won't be tallied if they send them through the mail. Opponents say they are worried about ballot security, despite little evidence that drop boxes are any less secure than other voting methods. It's led to court cases, political back-and-forth and uncertainty for local election officials and voters.

Because many states lack specific rules about how many drop boxes are allowed per county, disputes over their numbers have sparked lawsuits in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all key states in the presidential election.

In Texas, a federal appeals court last week upheld the Republican governor's order limiting drop boxes to one per county, which Democrats see as voter suppression. California Republicans last week said they will continue to set up unofficial drop boxes for their supporters to use, despite state officials arguing the boxes are illegal.

Controversy over drop boxes stems from unease over the huge ramp-up in absentee voting during the pandemic and the unproven idea - fomented mostly by Republicans and President Donald Trump - that "if you have drop boxes it would be easier to do nefarious things," said Charles Stewart III, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor who has studied election mechanics extensively and found no evidence of drop box misuse.

Democrats have mostly focused on expanding voting access and have called for more drop boxes. Republicans have argued there could be security problems.

"It's gotten caught up in this puzzling politicization of balloting," Stewart said in a phone interview.

Trump tweeted in August that drop boxes are "a voter security disaster," and suggested they were easy to tamper with. However, in another tweet he waded into the California controversy over the unofficial boxes, encouraging his supporters to use them. "You mean only Democrats are allowed to do this? But haven't Dems been doing this for years? See you in court. Fight hard Republicans!"

Nationwide, most drop boxes look like oversized postal boxes or delivery service collection bins. They generally are bolted to the ground and monitored by cameras or located near government buildings where they can be watched. The boxes are emptied by election workers regularly - the frequency depends on how many ballots are pushed into them - but at least daily, and sometimes hourly. Some states require election monitors from both major parties to be present during the transfer of the ballots from the box to the election office.

Stewart rejected the idea that efforts to remove or diminish the number of drop boxes is a naked move to tamp down voting by certain constituencies - Democrats in a state run by Republicans, for example, as in Texas.

"The difference is whether they feel security or access are the biggest problems," he said, and conservatives are more likely to be concerned about security.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been accused of trying to stifle Democratic votes by issuing a directive limiting ballot drop boxes to one per county. That strikes some Democrats as an effort to make voting harder for residents of the state's sprawling metropolises, which tend to vote Democratic. Harris County, home to Houston, has a population of more than 4.7 million people and covers 1,777 square miles.

"I can't think of any other reason to do this other than voter suppression," said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, which filed suit against the state over the directive.

"It's just purely politics," said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University. "Texas has a long historic dedication to active voter suppression. Federal courts have generally forced them off their traditional voter suppression so now they depend on passive voter suppression "¦ voter requirements, lack of drop boxes in an election that is expected to see surge in absentee voting."

But Abbott spokesperson John Wittman, in an emailed statement to Stateline, said that by allowing one drop box per county, the governor "has expanded access to voting" by allowing drop boxes at all. Prior to the governor acting, voters who got absentee ballots could only mail them back or submit them in person on Election Day, under a Texas statute dating from the 1990s.

The drop boxes, Wittman said, expand the time voters can drop off the ballots "to include any time leading up to Election Day. That time period did not exist under current law."

A federal appeals court ruled Oct. 12 that the one drop box per county is legal. Opponents were expected to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a similar case in Ohio, a federal appeals court Oct. 9 refused to allow multiple drop boxes in each county, citing an unwillingness to change the rules amid an election that is already underway. Ohio officials interpreted a 2008 state law regarding absentee voting to mean that a box could be set up near or in the election board's offices to collect ballots.

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter election rules on the eve of an election "¦ Here, the district court went a step further and altered election rules during an election," the court opinion said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, is following current law with the limitation of one box per county, according to a statement emailed to Stateline by his spokesperson Maggie Sheehan.

"This will be the first time in Ohio's history that for a General Election, each county board of elections will have a secure receptacle for the return of absentee ballots," she said. "We believe election reforms should be made at the statehouse, not the courthouse."

She said LaRose would be willing to work with the legislature on new laws but would not elaborate on what LaRose thought those new laws should be.

But in Pennsylvania, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit from the Trump administration seeking to limit the use of drop boxes. U.S. District Court Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who wrote the opinion, was reluctant to second-guess the judgment of the state legislature and election officials and said the administration had not demonstrated widespread fraud would result.

All three of the court cases involved Republicans seeking to limit drop boxes - a limitation Democrats say is meant to tamp down the vote. But in California, Republicans set up unofficial drop boxes of their own outside churches and gun shops and other locations, and collected ballots. Those immediately became a target of California elections officials who ordered them removed Oct. 12. Republicans refused.

"As of right now, we're going to continue our ballot harvesting program," California Republican Party spokesperson Hector Barajas told California media. State officials issued a cease-and-desist order; Republicans expressed a desire to expand the program.

Drop boxes have been a "major part of the landscape" in states (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington) that have entirely vote-by-mail elections, MIT's Stewart said. But it took a while for voters to get comfortable with them, he said, with initial skepticism giving way to confidence over a period of years.

In Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which Stewart called the "big three" of remote-voting states, more than half of mail ballots were returned either to a drop box or to an election office in the 2016 presidential election, according to an MIT study. The study found that 73% of voters hand returned ballots in Colorado, 59% in Oregon and 65% in Washington.

Before 2020, eight states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington - had explicit laws about drop boxes. In practice, however, the boxes are allowed in 40 states, though they were rarely used until this year's explosion of absentee ballots. Just 10 states will not offer drop boxes at all.

Axel Hufford, a Stanford law student who authored a white paper on drop box use in the 2020 elections for healthyelections.org, a joint project between Stanford and MIT, said the use of drop boxes is expected to be the highest in history this year and said claims of voter fraud surrounding the receptacles do not appear to be based in historical experience.

"I don't see why drop boxes should be any more controversial than vote-by-mail generally," he said in a phone interview. "A lot of voters want a safe, secure and viable way to vote without interacting with other voters."

But there is angst among voters using some boxes for the first time.

Renee Connell, a 51-year-old substitute school librarian from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, dropped her absentee ballot into a box at an auxiliary election office in a partially occupied strip mall just down the street from a county building.

"There was a fold-out table, with a metal box, about the size of a cereal box, which kind of threw me," she said in a phone interview. "Because it was so little, I couldn't get it (the ballot) all the way in."

Spotsylvania County's director of elections, Kellie Acors, said in a phone interview that the small boxes are under video surveillance and emptied by officials twice a day. The ballots are "put into another secure container so we can scan them and put them in (the system)." She said voters also can hand deliver ballots on Election Day.

Connell said she was anxious about leaving her ballot in the small box, so much so that she used the tracking number on her ballot to check the Virginia Department of Elections website to make sure it had gotten there. "I checked and indeed, our ballots have been received," she said in a follow-up text. "Phew!"

---

©2020 Stateline.org


Rad


US supreme court denies Republican bid to limit Pennsylvania mail-in-voting

The US's highest court is allowing Pennsylvania to count ballots received up to three days after the presidential election

Sam Levine in New York
Tue 20 Oct 2020 02.12 BST
Guardian

The supreme court is allowing Pennsylvania to count ballots received up to three days after the election, in a consequential ruling that will likely mean thousands more votes are counted in one of the most critical swing states in the election.

The court on Monday rejected a Republican plea to pause a September ruling from Pennsylvania's state supreme court that allowed ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and received up to three days later.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's three liberal justices in the ruling, producing a 4-4 deadlock. The even split means that the state supreme court's ruling stands.

The ruling is a win for Democrats, who sought the extension in state court, and a loss for Republicans, who had asked the US supreme court to intervene. Nearly 900,000 voters in Pennsylvania have already returned their ballots, according to state data collected by Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida.

The justices made the ruling after an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans and, as is customary in similar cases, offered no explanation for their decision. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all said they would have granted the Republican request.

Pennsylvania typically requires mail-in ballots to arrive by election night in order to count. But last month, the Pennsylvania supreme court, citing potential postal service delays amid the Covid-19 pandemic, extended the deadline by three days, saying ballots should count as long as they are postmarked by election day. The court also required election officials to count ballots with no postmark or an illegible one.

In a typical election, only around 1% of mail-in ballots are rejected, but that number is expected to rise this year as more people vote by mail for the first time. One of the top reasons mail-in ballots get rejected is because they arrive after election day. The decisions from the Pennsylvania supreme court and US supreme court offer important insurance against that kind of disenfranchisement.

The ruling is a break from a string of rulings this year in which the US supreme court has upheld a swath of voting restrictions across the country, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. But the Pennsylvania case had an important distinction; while all the voting cases that have reached the supreme court this year have been from federal courts, the Pennsylvania case came from a state court.

Rad


Los Angeles ballots damaged after suspected arson attack on official drop box

Blaze Sunday night appeared to be intentional though the cause and extent of destruction are under inquiry

Sam Levin in Los Angeles
Guardain
20 Oct 2020 23.22 BST

A fire inside an official election drop box in Los Angeles county has damaged voters' ballots and is under investigation for arson, officials said.

The blaze Sunday night in the city of Baldwin Park appeared to be intentional, according to authorities, though the cause and the extent of the destruction were still under investigation. The fire required firefighters to spray water into the box to extinguish the flames, likely causing significant damage. Video from the scene showed dozens of wet and burnt ballots.

"The arson of an official ballot drop box "¦ has all the signs of an attempt to disenfranchise voters and call into question the security of our elections," Hilda L Solis, LA county supervisor, said in a statement, adding that the county has asked the state attorney general and FBI to investigate.

The LA county registrar's office, which oversees the elections in the state's largest county, has not responded to questions about how many ballots were affected, but said officials had last collected ballots from the site at 10am on Saturday. The fire was reported around 8pm on Sunday, and the damaged drop box location has since remained closed.

A fire department spokeswoman said three arson investigators were dispatched to the scene, and that the fire department spent nearly two hours on site responding to the blaze.

George Silva, a local resident who saw the fire on Sunday night while on a bike ride, told the Guardian firefighters initially struggled to put out the blaze.

"I saw a lot of smoke coming out of the ballot box," said Silva, 33, who lives nearby in Baldwin Park, a majority Latino city in south LA county. "Clearly somebody lit something and threw it in there. There's no way this was an accident. It's completely outrageous."

Silva filmed nearby as firefighters ultimately used a saw to cut the metal box. "We're going to save as many ballots as we can," one of the responders said on his footage, which showed firefighters pulling out piles of soaked and damaged ballot envelopes.

"I felt a sense of broken-heartedness and disappointment," said Silva, who runs a local air conditioning business. "I can't believe somebody would do this." He hasn't voted yet and said he now planned to cast his ballot in person when early voting begins later this month. "I'm waiting until I know my vote will be safe and secure."

The incident comes one week after California's Republican party sparked confusion by placing their own unauthorized ballot boxes in several counties, prompting state election officials to send a cease-and-desist order demanding their removal. The state warned that the GOP boxes could mislead voters and violate the law.

Monday was the deadline for residents to register to vote in California before the 3 November election. There has already been record turnout, with more than 1m ballots cast in the state. There are hundreds of drop boxes in operation across LA county, and voters can also cast ballots at voting centers starting on Saturday, or they can vote by mail. Voters can also track their ballots online.

The registrar's office said it was reviewing material collected from the damaged box "to determine the appropriate notifications to voters whose ballots may have been impacted".

"Tampering with vote by mail drop boxes and ballots is serious criminal offense and we will vigorously seek the prosecution of individuals who engage in such behavior," said Dean C Logan, the LA county clerk, in a statement.

Rad


USA TODAY shatters four decades of tradition as it endorses Joe Biden for president

on October 20, 2020
Raw Stroy
By Matthew Chapman

On Tuesday, the USA TODAY editorial board published an endorsement of Joe Biden for president - the first time they have ever affirmatively endorsed a presidential candidate in the 38-year history of the paper.

"Recent polls show that more than 90% of voters have decided between Biden and Trump, and nothing at this point will change their minds," wrote the board. "This editorial is for those of you who are still uncertain about which candidate to vote for, or whether to vote at all. It's also for those who settled on Trump but might be having last-minute doubts. Maybe you backed Trump the last time around because you hoped he'd shake things up in Washington or bring back blue-collar jobs. Maybe you liked his populist, anti-elitist message. Maybe you couldn't stomach the idea of supporting a Democrat as polarizing as Clinton. Maybe you cast a ballot for a minor party candidate, or just stayed home."

These voters, wrote USA TODAY's board, must ask themselves the Ronald Reagan question: "Is America better off now than it was four years ago? Beset by disease, economic suffering, a racial reckoning and natural disasters fueled by a changing climate, the nation is dangerously off course." The board provided several video interviews of voters in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of whom answered emphatically no, their lives are worse off under Trump.

"When Trump was elected as the nation's first president without previous experience in government or the military, we hoped that he would become, as he promised during the 2016 campaign, "˜more disciplined' and "˜so presidential that you people will be so bored.' After all, when you are a passenger on an airplane, you root for the pilot, even one who has never been in a cockpit before," wrote the board. "But when confronted with an emergency - COVID-19, the biggest public health threat in more than a century - Trump didn't land the plane safely on the Hudson River. His shambolic response to the coronavirus pandemic has inflated a national death toll that is equivalent to the crashes of more than 1,000 Boeing-737 jetliners."

Trump, continued the board, is not trustworthy as a leader, having made over 20,000 false statements over the course of his term. By contrast, Biden "is an experienced hand with working-class roots who understands the American dream. He knows the levers of power and how to wield them. He has a history of working across the aisle on such issues as health care, racial justice and the environment. He has the knowledge and the personality to begin repairing America's tattered reputation around the world."

"This extraordinary moment in the history of our nation requires an extraordinary response," concluded the board. "With his plans, his personnel picks, his experience and his humanity, Joe Biden can help lead the United States out of this morass and into the future. Your vote can help make that happen."

Rad

Trump can "˜rage from the balcony' but he "˜will not succeed': Dem super lawyer promises to protect the vote

Raw Story
10/21/2020

President Donald Trump has a lot of options available to him when it comes to his attempt to steal the election. That doesn't mean they'll work, however.

In an interview with Democratic "super-lawyer" Bob Bauer, "The Circus's" John Heilemann listed a few scenarios for Trump trying to steal the election.

"We already have an electoral infrastructure - a voting system - that is not always adequately resourced or supported," Bauer explained. "You take that system, you layer on top of it a pandemic, you lay on top of that destructive behavior by one of the major political parties who espouses this kind of nonsense, and you add on top of that the internet-distributed misinformation plays, and that just means that the task that you have to address these contingencies is much larger than it's been as a structural matter any time in the past."

Bauer leads a crew of 600 lawyers on the team and over 10,000 volunteer lawyers prepared to fight back against any illegal attempt to undermine the election or stop vote counting.

"This is significantly greater in scale than anything I've ever done before," said Bauer.

He went on to say that Trump talks an "aggressive game" when it comes to his attempts to do whatever it takes to win an election. Bauer said that when you separate fantasy from reality, however, "he's not going to be sending troops to polling places. That's not going to happen."

The agencies under Trump's command know and understand that there are legal liabilities for them if they follow an illegal order from Trump. As a result, Bauer doesn't think they'll do it.

Heilemann asked about the militia members like those who attempted to kidnap and assassinate the Michigan governor. There is a fear by many that they'll come to the polls and try and intimidate people away from voting. Bauer noted that the men, in that case, are in jail and anyone else who attempts to try and create a terrorist plot to save Trump's presidency will also land in jail.

If Trump were to try and send federal marshals to the polls to impound ballots, Bauer said it won't work either.

"He may issue an order. He may rage from the balcony of the White House about his political misfortunes and look for a magic answer and he will not succeed in issuing an effective order to have federal marshals go to polling places and have them impound ballots, " said Bauer. "It won't happen."

Contrary to Trump's belief that he has all the power in the world to do whatever he wants, he does not.

"We are still a country with constitutional and legal limits," said Bauer. There are "a whole host of constraints."

"We will not appeal to him to mind his manners, we will block him," he explained.

See the full video: https://twitter.com/jheil/status/1318586655985598471

Rad

Expert who saw trouble for Clinton in 2016 has bad news for Trump in 2020

on October 21, 2020
By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet

Dave Wasserman, a polling expert with the Cook Political Report, closely watches polling at the district level in the United States. And in 2016, he saw signs in the data that Donald Trump was performing better than many expected in areas like New York's 22nd District - where Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were tied in 2012. Those warnings turned out to be prescient when Trump eked out a narrow win in three key swing states while losing in the popular vote.

Now, though, Wasserman has said he sees little sign of hope for Trump's re-election, even as Democrats continue to fear that former Vice President Joe Biden's polling lead will evaporate in the coming days:

An important point about his claims is that Wasserman, a nonpartisan analyst, is privy to a lot of information that isn't publicly available. While there's a lot of public national and state-level polling, district-level polls are harder to come by. Many pollsters keep this info private, though they will share it with people like Wasserman. This data can give a closer glimpse into trends and demographic changes in the electorate that other polls may be missing.

But according to Wasserman, this data should give Trump no solace. It's consistent with Biden's estimated 10-point lead in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average. He explained his findings in an interview with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post.

"In 2016, district-level polling in late October showed flashing red warning signs for Clinton in districts dominated by White non-college voters," he said. "It wasn't being detected so much in state-level polling, because the state polling chronically under-sampled those voters."

But in 2020, Wasserman is seeing a consistent pattern, and it's not good for Trump.

"Trump is underperforming his 2016 margins by eight to 10 points in most competitive districts. If Trump won a district by three last time, he's probably losing it by six this time. It's a pretty consistent pattern," he explained.

There are some exceptions and variations, but overall, it's a brutal picture for the president. He won by the skin of his teeth in 2016 - and he is dramatically underperforming that race.

Trump is doing worst in "upscale suburbs," Wasserman explained, while he has improved somewhat in his support in some Latino communities. Biden is doing better than Clinton did in districts that are predominately populated by "blue-collar Whites," though not as well as the Obama-Biden ticket did in 2012.

But Biden is improving most in areas dominated by college-educated white people, and that demographic may well be decisive on Nov. 3. It also means Trump has a difficult path forward to claw back from the hole he's in.

"Trump needs to boost turnout of non-college Whites by five points nationally, just to offset their declining share of the population since 2016. But he also needs to increase the share of those voters he's winning," said Wasserman. "Trump's gains among non-Whites can only get him so far, because there's really not much of a Hispanic vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. So he's got to solve this riddle with both persuasion and turnout. He needs to persuade more White voters - both college and non-college - to stick with him. And he really needs to boost non-college White turnout."

It's not impossible that Trump could pull it off, but it's hard to see it happening.

Rad


University of Florida students get threatening emails warning them to vote for Trump - or else

on October 21, 2020
By Matthew Chapman
Raw Story

On Tuesday, the Miami Herald reported that University of Florida students are receiving threatening emails with the subject line "Vote for Trump or else!"

"Alachua County officials were made aware of the emails on Tuesday morning. In one of the emails, the sender told a voter to "˜vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,' according to a copy obtained by the Miami Herald," reported Ana Ceballos and Carli Teproff. ""˜Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply,' the email said. "˜We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take it seriously if I were you.'"

County officials and the FBI are reportedly investigating the emails.

The messages came from an address called "email protected," a seeming reference to the pro-Trump group the Proud Boys. However, Vice's Tess Owen spotted a number of red flags suggesting that the messages did not really come from the Proud Boys, and may have been originated somewhere in Eastern Europe. Proud Boys Chairman Henry "Enrique" Tarrio Jr. claims the group was a victim of spoofing and said, "To whoever did this, I condemn these people."

"The first thing I did was panicked for a brief moment," said a UF journalism major who received the email and requested anonymity from the Herald. However, she said she is not deterred by the voter intimidation tactic, adding, "I am still going to vote."

Rad

Armed guards at Florida polling site say they were sent by the Trump campaign

Raw Story
10/22/2020

Two armed men set up a tent outside of an early voting location in St. Petersberg, Florida, saying that they were the Trump campaign.

"The Sheriff [Bob Gualtieri] told me the persons that were dressed in these security uniforms had indicated to sheriff's deputies that they belonged to a licensed security company and they indicated, and this has not been confirmed yet, that they were hired by the Trump campaign," said Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus.

"The sheriff and I take this very seriously," Marcus said. "Voter intimidation, deterring voters from voting, impeding a voter's ability to cast a ballot in this election is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in any way shape, or form. So we anticipated many things going into this election. Not only cybersecurity, but physical security, and we had a plan in place and executed that plan."

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said that he would do whatever it takes to protect the authenticity of the election.

"I just don't want to get too deep into the specifics because we're trying to balance it," Gualtieri said. "But I'll say it's a combination of uniformed personnel who will be in the area, and also we're gonna use some undercover personnel just to monitor the situation."

The guards said they were hired by Trump and would be out at the polling place again tomorrow. It's illegal to bring a gun to a polling place in Florida.

See the full report: https://www.wfla.com/news/pinellas-county/armed-guards-at-st-pete-early-voting-site-told-deputies-they-were-hired-by-trump-campaign-election-officials-say/

Rad


AP Road Trip: In Mississippi, Black voters face many hurdles

AP
10/22/2020

Meridian, Miss. (AP) - The old civil rights worker was sure the struggle would be over by now. He'd fought so hard back in the '60s. He'd seen the wreckage of burned churches, and the injuries of people who had been beaten. He'd seen men in white hoods. At its worst, he'd mourned three young men who were fighting for Black Mississippians to gain the right to vote, and who were kidnapped and executed on a country road just north of here.

But Charles Johnson, sitting inside the neat brick church in Meridian where he's been pastor for over 60 years, worries that Mississippi is drifting into its past. "I would never have thought we'd be where we're at now, with Blacks still fighting for the vote," said Johnson, 83, who was close to two of the murdered men, especially the New Yorker everyone called Mickey. "I would have never believed it."

The opposition to Black voters in Mississippi has changed since the 1960s, but it hasn't ended. There are no poll taxes anymore, no tests on the state constitution. But on the eve of the most divisive presidential election in decades, voters face obstacles such as state-mandated ID laws that mostly affect poor and minority communities and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of former prisoners.

By at least one measure, it's harder to vote in Mississippi than any other state. And despite Mississippi having the largest percentage of Black people of any state in the nation, a Jim Crow-era election law has ensured a Black person hasn't been elected to statewide office in 130 years. After years of being shut out of state races, Democrats hope mobilizing Black voters and recruiting Black candidates can eventually give them a path back to relevance in one of the reddest of red states.

But sometimes, it can seem that voting rights in Mississippi are like its small towns and dirt roads, which can appear frozen in the past.

This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Decades after the murders, the narrow county road where they happened still turns pitch black after dark. Pine forests press in from both sides. The only light comes from a couple distant houses and the ocean of stars overhead.

One night in early October we stopped the car along the road and I stepped out. The songs of crickets filled the air. In the distance, I could hear the occasional truck driving past on Highway 19.

The killers who traveled that road in 1964 were local men - Ku Klux Klan members, a deputy sheriff, a few others. The victims were three young civil rights workers - the oldest just 24 - who had joined a mass campaign that over the coming years helped bring voting rights to Black Mississippi. The men, one Black and two white, were shot at close range. Their bodies were found in an earthen dam 44 days later.

Today, with the presidential election weeks away, three of us on a reporting trip across America wanted to see what things were like in a state where the simple act of voting was impossible for nearly every Black person well into the 1960s. In a year when America has been marked by so many convulsions - a pandemic, an economic crisis, countless protests for racial justice, a virulent political divide - the road trip has been a way to look more deeply at a country struggling to define itself.

We came to Mississippi because what happened here in 1964 was also about elections, and because of the three men murdered on that little road outside the little town of Philadelphia.

The case grabbed attention all the way to the White House. Along with such seminal events as the 1963 murder in Mississippi of Black civil rights activist Medgar Evers, it helped lead to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Eventually, so much changed for Black voters in Mississippi.

And yet so much didn't.

Today, voters in Mississippi face a series of government-created barriers that make it, according to a study in the Election Law Journal in 2018, far and away the most difficult state in which to vote.

Mississippi has broad restrictions on absentee voting, no early voting or online registration, absentee ballots that must be witnessed by notaries and voter ID laws that overwhelmingly affect the poor and minorities, since they are less likely to have state-approved identification. The restrictions have grown even tighter since a 2013 Supreme Court decision blocked many voting rights protections.

"Anything that increases the "˜costs' of voting - the time it takes, the effort it takes - that tends to decrease voter turnout," said Conor Dowling, a professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. "And there is evidence that some of these burdens are disproportionately felt by minority voters."

Mississippi also has widespread poverty. Nearly one-third of Black people here live below the poverty line, more than double the rate for white people, which means taking a day off work to vote can be too expensive.

Then there are the felony voting restrictions, which in Mississippi have disenfranchised almost 16% of the Black population, researchers say - compared to just 5% in nearby Missouri, another deeply Republican state. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Mississippi's restrictions a holdover from an old state constitution designed specifically to disenfranchise Black voters.

Demarkio Pritchett, who said he was convicted as a teenager of drug possession "and some other stuff," understands that.

A lanky 29-year-old Black man now out of prison, he lives with his grandmother in Jackson, the state capital, in a poor neighborhood of battered houses with peeling paint, small well-kept homes and empty lots overgrown with trees and kudzu. His grandmother's house, which manages to be both neat and battered, has an election sign out front for Mike Espy, a Black Democrat running for the U.S. Senate.

Democrats here see hope in candidates like Espy, a former congressman and the first Black Agriculture Secretary, who is focused on registering Black voters. Their long-term strategy hinges on mobilizing Black voters and recruiting Black candidates.

Pritchett's grandmother is zealous about voting. But her grandson can't vote in Mississippi for the rest of his life. Anyone convicted here of one of 22 crimes, from murder to felony shoplifting, has their voting rights permanently revoked. Pritchett's only chance: getting a pardon from the governor, or convincing two-thirds of the state's lawmakers to pass a bill written just for him.

"I want to vote, but they make it so I can't," he said, sitting on the front porch with a friend on a recent afternoon. "We just can't beat the government. We just can't."

Distrust of the government runs deep in the Black community in Mississippi, where harsh voter suppression tactics - voting fees, tests on the state constitution, even guessing the number of beans in a jar - kept all but about 6% of Black residents from voting into the 1960s. A Black person who even tried to register to vote could find themselves fired from their job and evicted from their home.

As a result, Black politicians have long been fighting an apathy born of generations of frustration.

Anthony Boggan sometimes votes, but is sitting it out this year, disgusted at the choices.

"They're all going to tell you the same thing," he said. "Anything to get elected."

A 49-year-old Black Jackson resident with a small moving company, Boggan likes how the economy boomed during the Trump years, but can't bring himself to vote for a man known for his insults and name-calling.

"He's a butthole," Boggan said, as a group of Black friends, including one who planned to vote for Trump, laughed and nodded in agreement. "Everybody knows he's a butthole."

As for Biden: He and Trump both "got dementia," Boggan said, and he hates how the former vice president tries to curry favor in the Black community.

"Why does everything he says got to be about the Black? "˜I did more of this for the Black. I'm going to do all of this for the Black,'" he said, angrily mimicking Biden. "Just have them do all this for the American people!"

One man in the group, which was doing construction on a friend's house on a recent morning, simply refuses to vote.

"Most of the presidents that got in there, they lied all the way," said Clyde Lewis, a 59-year-old mechanic. "They hurt us more than they help us."

That kind of talk is painful for Kim Houston.

"Sometimes I think we beat ourselves," said Houston, the president of the Meridian City Council, the frustration clear in her voice. "There's this mindset that (voting) doesn't matter, that nothing is going to change, that the election system is rigged."

It adds up to a state where plenty of Black people have reached office - by some estimates it has the highest number of Black officials in the country - but many of them are local: mayors, city council members, city officials.

With those officials came significant infrastructure improvements, such as roads paved in Black neighborhoods and sewage systems installed that allowed Black homeowners to finally abandon their outhouses. But in Mississippi, a Black politician can rise only so high, they say, and are kept from those statewide offices.

"When it comes to the positions that really matter, we're not sitting at that table," said Houston, a Black woman who also runs an insurance company.

This is why people like Houston, Johnson and countless pastors and activists push so hard to get more Black people to the polls.

Black registration and turnout rates are actually reasonably high in Mississippi. In 2016, for example, 81% of Black Mississippians were registered and 69% turned out to vote.

Roshunda Osby is one of those voters. A 37-year-old certified nursing assistant, she goes to the polls in every election, she said, including local ones.

"If you don't get out and vote you shouldn't even have an opinion about what's going on," said Osby, who detests Trump for his racism.

"I don't know much about Joe Biden, but we only have two options, and he's going to be the better candidate than Trump," she said, sighing.

Black women are, in many ways, the electoral bedrock of the Democratic Party, a fiercely partisan community known for turning out in force.

But Black women are not enough in a state where politics and race are so tightly interwoven. Mississippi, which is 38% Black, has very few Black Republican voters and relatively few white Democratic voters.

"It almost doesn't matter if (Black voter turnout rates) are comparable to other states," said Dowling, the political science professor. "It's not enough for them to win elections unless it gets better."

Johnson, the civil rights worker, remembers well how things used to be in Mississippi.

Mississippi could seem like a different country in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. It was far poorer than most of America, it barely bothered to fund some Black schools, it openly treated Black people as third-class citizens.

And Mississippi fought bitterly to deny the vote to Black residents, fearing their numbers would give them political power.

The racism was not subtle.

"I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the (Black people) away from the polls," Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo told a group of supporters during his 1946 election campaign, using a virulently racist term. "If you don't understand what that means you are just plain dumb."

Johnson was repeatedly refused the right to register to vote. But his anger pushed him to try again and again.

"It made me feel like whatever they try, I was going to knock it down," he said.

As the civil rights movement took hold, Johnson focused on organizing boycotts of businesses that wouldn't hire Black people. In 1964, he joined with activist groups who were busing in hundreds of out-of-state volunteers to help organize Black voter registration drives and set up "Freedom Schools" for Black children.

That was when he met Michael Schwerner, a charismatic white 24-year-old who ran a small community center in Meridian with his wife. Schwerner often worked with James Chaney, a quiet 21-year-old Black plasterer and rights activist who sometimes attended Johnson's church. Chaney and Schwerner traveled to meeting after meeting in this part of Mississippi, encouraging and cajoling people to try to register.

Sometimes, the two would sleep in a car in front of Johnson's church, fearing it would be targeted in the wave of Black church burnings that swept Mississippi that year.

Then, on June 21, Schwerner, Chaney and a newly arrived volunteer - 20-year-old white New Yorker Andrew Goodman - drove to a little Black church on the outer edges of the town of Philadelphia to meet with witnesses to a KKK attack. The Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, where Schwerner and Chaney had spoken a couple months earlier, had been burned down and its parishioners beaten by a group of Klansmen.

Over the coming hours, the men would be briefly jailed in Philadelphia on trumped-up charges, released and then forced to stop on the highway as they tried to drive home to Meridian. The kidnappers, led by a deputy sheriff and local Klansmen, drove Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman to that narrow country road and shot them at close range.

Johnson was heading to a church meeting in Portland, Oregon on the day of the killing. He stepped off a train to see newspaper front pages declaring the three were missing.

"I knew they were dead," he said. "If they went that far to take two white boys and a Black boy, I knew somebody was going to die."

"It looked like there was no good that existed."

He's driven down the road a couple times since then, and it reminds him of the continued difficulties that Black people face in Mississippi when it comes to voting.

"I'm afraid the road is just as crooked now as it was then," he said.

Rad


Trump, Biden attorneys flock to Florida to protect votes

Agence France-Presse
10/22/2012

Miami (AFP) - Hundreds of attorneys and volunteers from the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have deployed to Florida polling stations to make sure votes for their candidates are respected, as record numbers of people cast ballots early.

Tensions are especially high as fear about the coronavirus and violence at polling stations is compounded by Florida's history of contested elections that have ended in recounts or even court battles.

Florida, where Republican Trump and Democrat Biden are practically tied, accounts for 29 crucial electoral votes, with 270 needed to win the US presidency on November 3.

"We cannot trust those Democrats," said Cristiano Piquet, 43, a Republican and Brazilian-American who was casting his early vote at a Miami polling station while carrying a US flag.

"They're pure evil and they are capable of anything. So I want to make sure that my vote counts," he told AFP, explaining why he voted early instead of by mail.

This is the type of fear that attorney Juan Carlos Planas - one of the 1,421 registered observers in south Florida's densely populated Miami-Dade County - wants to allay.

"There's never been a credible case of election fraud in the general election," Planas told AFP.

He is a former Republican state representative who has observed elections previously - and this year is observing for the Democrats.

"Here there really isn't any sort of fraud or let alone massive fraud, it just doesn't happen," he said.

Florida's 14 million registered voters can vote by mail, a method widely used since 2002 and preferred by Democrats in part to keep people away from crowds and safe from the virus.

Trump, however, has made his distrust of the mail-in system clear -- even though he has voted by mail in the past in Florida, where he has his residence, and has said that Florida's mail-in system is trustworthy.

Floridians can also cast ballots in-person at an early voting station, like Piquet did, or on November 3, when Republicans are expected to vote in large numbers.

Tense environment

Florida's most memorable contested election occurred in 2000, when a mere 537 votes gave the state - and the presidency - to Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

In 2018 a recount was needed to confirm that the current governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, won.

Meanwhile in 2016, Russian intelligence hacked into the electoral system of at least one Florida county, according to the FBI.

Adding to the uncertainty are cases of voter intimidation.

The photo of a police officer in full uniform with a facemask emblazoned with "Trump 2020" at a polling station generated heated controversy on social media.

"We are aware of the photograph," the Miami Police Department tweeted. "This behavior is unacceptable, a violation of departmental policy, and is being addressed immediately."

As of Wednesday more than 2.95 million Floridians had voted by mail, state election officials said, surpassing the 2.73 million mail-in ballots in the 2016 presidential election with two weeks still to go.