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Americans are preparing for an election day unlike any other in American history, overshadowed by threats of manipulation and violence, fueling fears that democracy itself is at stake when the polls close Tuesday night. .
It marks the end of a campaign that has been unprecedented in many ways. More than 94 million Americans had already cast their votes on Monday, a record for early voting, amid a pandemic. It was equivalent to 70% of the 2016 turnout even before election day dawned.
It is also the first election in which the incumbent president has said that he would attempt to stop the counting of votes if advance statements on election night show that he is ahead and has openly encouraged acts of intimidation by his supporters.
On Monday, a tall “unscalable” fence, last seen during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, was being erected around the White House. In anticipation of the riots, businesses in Washington and major city centers across the country boarded up their windows. The DC business district advised residents to “take precautions, like securing outdoor furniture and projectile signage.”
A poll by USA Today and the University of Suffolk found that three out of four voters were concerned about possible violence, with only a quarter of the electorate “very confident” that there would be a peaceful transfer of power if the Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, he won the election.
Delivering his closing message on the last day of the campaign, Biden repeated his campaign message that the election was a “battle for the soul of the nation.”
“The character of America is literally on the ballot,” he said at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio. “It is time to recover our democracy.”
In his final campaign stops, Trump has tried to portray his opponent’s future response to the coronavirus pandemic as a dystopian lockdown that would stifle economic and social life.
“The Biden plan will turn America into a prison state that locks you in, while letting the rioters on the far left roam free to loot and burn,” he told a rally in Iowa.
The air of apprehension has been deepened by Trump’s repeated threats that he would seek to portray all uncounted votes on election night as illegitimate. He said “let’s go in with our lawyers” as soon as the vote closes.
Vote counting continues routinely for days and sometimes weeks after an election in the United States, but news outlets often announce the result based on projections of undercount. This is less likely to be possible this time due to the large number of early voting and by mail.
Multiple legal challenges are also normal, but there are fears that this year Republicans will also seek to physically shut down the vote count by intimidating election officials, as they did in Florida in 2000, the last time an election was held. It wasn’t decided until weeks after the vote.
Trump backed his supporters’ mob tactics over the weekend by praising the actions of loyalists in Texas who boxed in a Biden campaign bus on the road with their own flag-adorned cars, forcing the bus to suddenly slow down and cause a collision between a Trump. Supporter’s car and a Biden officer’s vehicle. Two Biden rallies were canceled in the threatening atmosphere.
The FBI said it was investigating the incident, but Trump hailed the Texas loyalist group as “patriots” and tweeted Monday that they “did nothing wrong,” and advised the FBI to scrutinize left-wing groups instead.
Their endorsement was echoed at a rally in Florida early Monday by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who told the crowd: “We love what they did.” The higher echelons of the party have remained unconditionally loyal to the president, despite occasional expressions of displeasure at having violated a series of democratic norms. One of the unknowns in the coming days is how many party leaders will break with Trump if he tries to stop the vote counting.
The Texas highway confrontation was one of a series of incidents across the country where Trump fans exercised their muscles by causing disruptions to the roads. They blocked a New Jersey highway and a New York bridge, and there were also reports of Trump supporters driving to Biden’s rallies with the aim of forcing their opponents to separate and return home.
The election came amid a record spike in cases, particularly in the battlefield states. Over the past week, 36% of the tests in Iowa have been positive. the corresponding figure in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin it was 14%.
The campaign ended with Biden holding a solid and reasonably consistent lead across the country, but with narrower margins in key states on the battlefield. According to polling aggregator fivethirtyeight.com, Biden’s margin in Florida is two percentage points and with his lead in Pennsylvania widely viewed as a must-win for the challenger, it was just under five points.
Trump has used his latest campaign rallies to voice a series of grievances about poll numbers, the press and social media. He complained that the trending topics on Twitter were “boring,” focusing on him rather than the “scandals” and “affairs” of his opponents, and expressed frustration that his efforts to turn the business activities of Biden’s son Hunter, on a major campaign issue, had been unsuccessful.
“You can’t have a scandal if no one writes about it,” Trump said.
Twitter issued a statement on Monday saying that it would label as disinformation any statement about the election result “before it is called with authority.”
“Tweets intended to incite interference with the electoral process or with the implementation of electoral results, such as through violent actions, will be subject to deletion,” the statement said.
The power of disinformation was on display over the weekend with the mass circulation of a doctored video that falsely made it appear that Biden thought he was in Minnesota when he addressed a rally in Florida, echoing a theme from the campaign of Trump that the age of the Democrat affected his mind. faculties. Twitter removed the video on Sunday night, but by then it had already been viewed more than a million times.
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