US Early Voting Rises As Trump and Biden Make Late Push

DETROIT: A record 90 million Americans have voted at the beginning of the US presidential election, data showed on Saturday (October 31), as President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden campaigned across the country to try to influence the few remaining undecided voters.

The high number of early voters, about 65 percent of the total turnout in 2016, reflects intense interest in the race, with three campaign days remaining.

Concerns about exposure to the coronavirus at busy Election Day polling places on Tuesday have also increased the number of people voting by mail or at the first polling places in person.

READ: In Split Screen Town Halls, Trump and Biden Fight Over COVID-19 Response

Opinion polls show that Trump is behind former Vice President Biden nationally, but with closer competition in the most competitive states that will decide the election. Voters say the coronavirus is their main concern.

Trump has repeatedly asserted without evidence that vote-by-mail ballots are susceptible to fraud, and more recently has argued that only results available on election night should count. In a series of legal motions, his campaign has sought to restrict absentee voting.

“I don’t care how hard Donald Trump tries. There is nothing, let me say it again, there is nothing I can do to stop the people of this nation from voting in overwhelming numbers and getting this democracy back,” Biden said at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where former President Barack Obama joined for their first 2020 campaign event together.

Trump held four rallies on Saturday in the battlefield state of Pennsylvania, where campaigns seek to win over undecided voters in areas such as suburban Philadelphia and the western “Rust Belt” of the state.

“If we win Pennsylvania, it’s over,” Trump said at a large rally in Reading before moving on to another large rally in Butler.

Officials in several states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, say it could take several days to count all mail-in ballots, possibly leading to days of uncertainty if the outcome depends on those states.

Commentary: If Trump wins again, the true values ​​of the Republican Party will be abandoned

A federal judge in Texas scheduled an emergency hearing for Monday on whether Houston officials illegally allowed direct voting and should cast more than 100,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Harris County.

In Iowa, a new poll released Saturday shows that Trump has assumed leadership there just days before the election. A Des Moines Register / Mediacom Iowa poll shows Trump now outperforming Biden by seven percentage points, from 48 to 41 percent. The results, based on a poll of 814 Iowa voters, suggest that Biden has lost support among independent voters in the Midwest state.

In a small in-person rally in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Trump mocked his opponent for his criticism of the administration’s record in fighting COVID-19, which has killed more people in the United States than in any other country.

“I saw Joe Biden speak yesterday. All he talks about is COVID, COVID. He has nothing more to say. COVID, COVID,” Trump told the crowd, some of whom were not wearing masks.

He said the United States was “just weeks away” from the mass distribution of a safe COVID-19 vaccine, which is pushing hospitals to full capacity and killing up to 1,000 people in the United States every day. Trump did not provide details to back up his comments about an imminent vaccine.

WORKS AND FRACKING

In his closing arguments, Biden accused Trump of being a bully, criticized his lack of a strategy to control the pandemic, which has killed nearly 229,000 Americans; his efforts to repeal the Obamacare healthcare law; and his disdain for the science on climate change.

It has offered its own made-in-America economic platform, in contrast to Trump’s “America First” approach, saying it will make the rich pay their fair share and ensure that the profits are distributed more equitably.

In an effort to highlight what he says is Biden’s plan to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract fossil fuels, Trump signed an executive order Saturday asking the US Department of Energy to commission a study on the potential harm caused by the ban. or restrict the practice.

The order also reinforces an earlier law, which directs federal agencies to produce reports on decisions that are detrimental to the fracking industry. Fracking for natural gas is a major source of employment in western Pennsylvania. Biden denies intending to ban fracking if the White House wins.

Comment: Trump will be beaten by Biden by millions of votes, but plans to win anyway

Stanford University economists on Saturday released an estimate that Trump’s June-September rallies led to more than 30,000 additional COVID-19 infections and possibly as many as 700 deaths. The study was based on a statistical model and not on actual investigations of coronavirus cases. The article, which did not cite disease experts among its authors, has not been peer reviewed.

Public health officials have repeatedly warned that events from Trump’s campaign could accelerate the spread of the virus, particularly those taking place in places where infection rates were already increasing. The actual impact of these manifestations on infection rates has been difficult to determine due to the lack of robust contact tracing in many US states.

Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, described the report as “suggestive.”

“I would just say that it is suggestive but difficult to completely isolate the specific impact of an event without robust contact tracing data from the cases,” Adalja said.

Biden’s campaign, which has drastically limited crowd sizes at events or restricted fans to their cars, quickly took advantage of Stanford’s findings.

“Trump doesn’t even care about the lives of his staunchest supporters,” Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

At a Biden rally in Detroit on Saturday, social distancing was broken when supporters crowded onto the stage to hear Obama speak.