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Trump: I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait long after the election (Getty)
US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden exchanged harsh criticism Monday, urging voters to vote in hotly contested states in the last round of the contest.
In the final days of the campaign, Americans set an early voting record with nearly 96 million votes cast. This record number constitutes 70 percent of all eligible participants in the 2016 election and nearly 40 percent of all Americans eligible to vote.
And in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the first of five caucuses in four states, Trump has rejected poll results showing he is losing the race and has cited frightening warnings if Biden takes office.
“Voting for Biden means giving control of the government (to the supporters of) globalization, the communists, the wealthy liberal socialists and the hypocrites, who want to silence you, censor you, cancel you and punish you,” Trump said.
Trump has rejected polls showing he is losing the race and given frightening warnings if Biden takes office.
In Cleveland, Ohio, Biden returned to the main issues that fueled his campaign, vowing to heal the nation’s wounds and attacking Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden said: “Tomorrow we have the opportunity to write the end of a presidency that has divided this nation,” and described Trump as “weak” and “a stigma.”
Trump, 74, wants to avoid becoming the first president to lose re-election since Republican George HW Bush in 1992.
And even though national polls broadly show Biden’s progress, the race in the swing states is largely closed, allowing Trump to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Trump will also travel to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, all of which he won by a slim margin in 2016, but opinion polls show that may not be the case this year. Biden (77) will spend the rest of his day in Pennsylvania after giving a speech in Ohio.
Americans have already cast nearly 60 million votes by mail. Counting these votes can take days or weeks in some states, which means the winner may not be announced in the hours after the vote ends on Tuesday night.
Intimidating voters is illegal
Eight state prosecutors, representing Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, warned Monday that they would not tolerate voter intimidation.
“Voter intimidation is illegal in every state, whether it occurs in person or from inside a vehicle,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement. “Those who witness any disruptive behavior should report it to the police immediately.”
Trump will conclude his campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place where his 2016 presidential campaign concluded. Biden will gather union members and African Americans in the Pittsburgh area before singer Lady Gaga joins him for an evening parade in Pittsburgh.
Former President Barack Obama, who served as his Deputy Biden for eight years, will hold a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday, before wrapping up his campaign at night with a rally in Miami.
Eight attorneys are warning they will not tolerate voter intimidation, referring to Trump’s warning statements about Biden’s election.
Biden focused on the states Trump won in 2016 and criticized the president’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, which had dominated the final stages of the election race. Biden accuses Trump of failing to fight the pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and cost millions of their jobs. Polls show Americans have more confidence in Biden than in Trump to fight the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, said the first doses of an effective coronavirus vaccine will likely be available to some high-risk Americans in late December or early January.
Trump again questions the integrity of the elections
Trump again questioned the integrity of the election, saying that the vote count that would continue after Election Day would be a “horrific” and indicated that his lawyers could intervene. “I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait so long after the election,” Trump told reporters. In some states, including Pennsylvania, the mail count doesn’t start until Election Day, slowing down the process.
And in Cleveland, Biden told voters that Trump couldn’t stop them from exercising their rights. “Presidents do not decide who will vote … voters decide who will be the president,” he added.
Trump has repeatedly said, without evidence, that voting by mail is vulnerable to fraud, although election experts say this is rare in an American election. Voting by mail has been a feature of American elections for a long time, and one in four cast their vote this way in 2016.
Democrats have promoted voting by mail as a sure way for people to vote during the coronavirus pandemic, while Trump and Republicans rely on massive personal turnout on Election Day.
A federal judge in Texas will decide Monday whether Houston officials should disqualify the roughly 127,000 votes already cast while voters were in their cars in the Democratic-leaning region.
(Reuters)
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