RSN: Bob Bauer and Benjamin L. Ginsberg | Trust Our Electoral System. It's Built to Handle Challenges Like This.
03 November 20
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Bob Bauer and Benjamin L. Ginsberg | Trust Our Electoral System. It's Built to Handle Challenges Like This.
Bob Bauer and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "We are members of different parties, but we share a commitment to the health and integrity of our voting system."
Based on our time leading the Presidential Commission on Election Administration and each of our four decades of work in U.S. elections, we believe our electoral system is strong and will deliver the reliable results required for the peaceful transfer of power that is foundational to our democracy. It is important that the public understand this and that the media strive to depict the election process as working, not as it is portrayed by those seeking to undermine its legitimacy.
Despite all the 2020 rhetoric, this country has a solid system to count votes; to adjudicate allegations of fraud, irregularity or error; to provide avenues for resolving close elections; and to declare winners. When challenging the results, opposing parties are charged with vigorously advocating their positions so that fact-finders can issue determinations that may then be peacefully accepted. No matter how hard the feelings, that is what’s best for the country.
Among the ground-level validators of our elections are poll watchers and observers, whose roles are sometimes not well understood. Official poll watchers are authorized under the laws of each state and actively recruited by both parties. Appointed pursuant to legal processes and requirements, they can assist in spotting and resolving problems on Election Day or during any post-election contests and recounts.
Suspicions are high that the 2020 election will not run smoothly and will be difficult to validate. This is primarily due to President Trump’s characterization of the electoral system as “rigged” and his claim that the historic number of mail-in ballots cast because of the pandemic will result in widespread fraudulent voting.
The president has notably failed to produce any evidence of systemic fraud to support his claims. He has ignored the fact that Republican observers have witnessed voting in every election and have discovered fraud only in rare, isolated incidences. Never have they found anything close to the scale of irregularity that would justify the president’s rhetoric.
Moreover, the president has promoted the suggestion that votes cannot be lawfully counted after midnight on Nov. 3. Some have read an echo of this extraordinary and factually inaccurate claim in Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s dissent in the recently decided voting case from Wisconsin and worry that the Supreme Court could be heading in this direction. We do not read the Kavanaugh concurrence to support the Trump argument. In any event, this argument completely lacks merit. Ballots received by the statutory deadline — whether they are physically cast or postmarked by Election Day, depending on each state’s own laws — will be counted no matter how long it takes to count them. The counting can and always has continued past Election Day.
As a result, the president’s attempt to undermine the election is a self-serving assault on a fundamental American system. It should be condemned across party lines.
We believe any candidate (or his supporters) abusing these norms will be unsuccessful for two reasons: First, Americans have a history of rising to the occasion to stop any threat. Local, county and state election officials can typically count on the support of responsible elected officials, federal and state courts, law enforcement and the national security agencies to uphold the law and norms that ensure voters are heard.
Second, the process to overturn an election would require specific evidence proved on a precinct and county level. Blanket challenges won’t work. Bombastic rhetoric at a rally or a television interview is far from sufficient.
It’s also important to remember that mistakes will occur. Roughly 10,500 separate jurisdictions will process as many as 160 million votes aided by more than 1 million volunteers. That broad participation is a core strength but will also yield inevitable errors.
Mistakes do not equal systemic fraud. Distorting mistakes into something more than they are may serve one candidate’s agenda while damaging the integrity of our system. The media have a responsibility to refrain from inflating human polling place error to imply that the entire system is unreliable.
The need for reliable reporting will never be greater than the coverage of the casting and counting of ballots. It is normal for the tallying of results to extend beyond election night; indeed, it is an indication that states want to get things right. At the same time, the outcome in some states will be available much sooner, so that even with the unprecedented number of absentee ballots this year, there may be more clarity about who won in highly contested “battleground” states than many suppose.
Our basic, bipartisan message is that we can have confidence in a system forged over 230 years of elections. It is not perfect, but we take comfort in the quality and commitment to a free and fair election by local and state election administrators, elected and public officials, and the courts and agencies charged with stopping foreign interference.
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Joe Biden. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/NYT)
Ryan Bort | A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind
Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
Bort writes: "Election Day 2020 is going to be a wild one."
Everything you need to know about how mail-in ballots could affect election night, when to expect a winner to be announced, and why everyone should hope it doesn’t come down to Pennsylvania
There are two big reasons for this. The first is that Covid-19 has led an unprecedented number of Americans to use mail-in ballots, and different states have different procedures for counting them. This usually doesn’t matter, but since there are going to be so many mail-in ballots this year, it could cause some wonky fluctuations regarding which candidate appears to be leading in which states and when. It’s going to be tricky to navigate, and it’s likely to lead to a more protracted vote-counting process than we’ve seen in elections past.
The second reason is that President Trump is actively trying to steal a second term in office. Trailing in the polls, his campaign seems to have reasoned that his best chance to stay in power is to declare victory if he’s ahead on Tuesday night, arguing that ballots not counted by the end of Election Day are not valid, and then sue states who try to tabulate legally cast ballots after November 3rd. It’s an absurdly blatant effort to subvert democracy, but this is the state of things.
Absent a Biden landslide smothering Trump’s chances to claim he won before all the ballots are counted, Tuesday night is likely to be full of uncertainty, which leaves the results vulnerable to disinformation from Trump and others. To get a better sense of what to expect, we spoke to Charlotte Swasey, vice president of data and polling at Data For Progress, and the coordinator of the Election Night Integrity Project, a joint venture between DFP and VoteAmerica aimed at providing “responsible reporting and visualization during the 2020 general election.”
Here are a few key points to keep in mind:
We’re probably not going to know who won on election night
States counting ballots after Election Day is nothing new. It happens every cycle. But there’s usually enough information available on election night to determine who won. This isn’t likely to be the case this year, as states are contending with an influx of mail-in ballots, and are expected to exercise more caution than usual in processing results. So are the networks that will be reporting those results. “I think at this point the news outlets and the AP are sufficiently nervous about preemptive calls, and I don’t think we’re going to get it until the next day no matter what,” Swasey says.
Based on when states have indicated they’re going to release their results, Swasey estimates that we could have a call sometime late Wednesday morning or early Wednesday afternoon. “I think by noon on Wednesday we’ll have Florida, and we’ll probably have a decent amount from Georgia,” she says. “I don’t think Pennsylvania is going to be done. But I think we’ll also get Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Arizona — at least enough so that a call can be made either way.”
If Pennsylvania is the tipping point, however, we might not know who won until later this week, or *gulp* beyond.
Beware of early results from states that already began counting mail-in ballots
Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Ohio are all expected to report their mail-in ballot results before their in-person Election Day ballot results. Because mail-in voters are more likely to favor Biden, the initial results from some of these key swing states could favor him, before swinging in Trump’s direction as they begin to report in-person results.
“The biggest thing to keep in your brain is how slow it’s going to be until we actually know anything,” Swasey says. “The first hour after polls close is this weird void where we have no more information. The states that have been pre-processing early votes are going to give us data maybe by like 8 p.m., but it still won’t be complete enough to say literally anything about the national state of the race. Anything you’re seeing on election night is conjecture, projection, and forecast — and even if it’s done really well, no one has complete information yet.”
…and of early results from states that aren’t permitted to count mail-in ballots until Election Day
This is where things get hairy. Crucial states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are not permitted to begin counting absentee ballots until Election Day. Why? Because Republican legislatures refused to amend election rules to account for the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots that resulted from the pandemic. What this means is that all three states are expected to swing in Trump’s favor on election night, and even into Wednesday, while millions of absentee ballots likely to favor Biden are still outstanding.
Virginia is also expected to report in-person voting results first, which could give an early bump to Trump.
For more details on what to expect from which states when, The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight have compiled helpful state-by-state guides.
Trump will likely try to declare himself the winner anyway. Do not listen to him
Axios reported on Sunday that Trump is planning to declare himself the winner if it looks like he’s “ahead” on election night. This isn’t surprising. The president for months has been laying the groundwork to claim absentee ballots counted after Election Day are illegitimate. Both he and his campaign know this is the best chance he has to win. From The New York Times, on Saturday:
“Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio, and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden of a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after.”
Yes, Trump’s “best hope” is to undermine the validity of mail-in ballots counted after Election Day, in order to drum up doubt so he can potentially get the Supreme Court he packed with conservatives to hand him the election. Trump and his campaign haven’t been shy about this in the days leading up to the election. On Sunday, campaign spokesperson Jason Miller explicitly equated tabulating legally cast ballots with “stealing” the election.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong, logically or legally, with counting ballots beyond Election Day. Most states are not required to certify election results until late November or early December. Anyone who has a modicum of respect for the democratic process — we’re looking at you, Republican lawmakers — should be stressing publicly that a winner should not be declared until all of the votes are counted.
Pennsylvania is going to be a mess
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are the key states that are not permitted to count absentee ballots until Election Day, and where Trump is likely to cry fraud and attempt to contest the validity of ballots counted later this week. Wisconsin seems to have its business in order. Officials have indicated the state will have its count more or less wrapped up by early Wednesday morning. The same can’t be said for Michigan, where the count is expected to take a few days after Election Day. Pennsylvania is in even worse shape. Some of the state’s counties won’t be able to start processing absentee ballots until after Election Day, and in the best-case scenario the majority of ballots won’t be counted until Friday.
Pennsylvania could also be in for a monumental swing between election night and when the count is finished:
“Pennsylvania is kind of a nightmare state,” Swasey says. “I’m expecting that it’s going to be at least somewhat Trump-leaning the day of and that there’s going to be a really active dispute over counting the mail-in ballots and early votes at all.”
Trump has already said that he plans to “go in” to the state with lawyers after Election Day in order to prevent absentee votes from being counted. “I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait for a long period of time after the election,” the president said. It goes without saying that in no way is waiting a few more days for election results “unfair,” certainly not compared to how unfair it would be to the residents who cast their ballots legally only to have their voices go unheard.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, took issue with the president’s comments, writing on Sunday that the state would “be happy to defeat you in court one more time.”
In September, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that the state should accept absentee ballots up to three days after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, citing the pandemic and delays in the mail service. Pennsylvania Republicans were none too pleased, and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state Supreme Court could not override laws put in place by the state legislature. Absent Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in October the Supreme Court upheld the state Supreme Court’s ruling by a vote of 4-4. And last week, the Supreme Court shut down a plea by Republicans to reconsider, but left open the possibility that the case could be revisited after Election Day.
Democrats fear a Supreme Court that now includes Coney Barrett could overrule the state Supreme Court’s decision and invalidate legally cast absentee ballots. The potential justification, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh teased as part of a recent decision to restrict absentee votes in Wisconsin, doesn’t amount to much more than it would be nicer if everything could be wrapped up earlier. “States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,” he wrote. Never mind democracy.
Though Pennsylvania is one of the most significant swing states and could determine the election, as far as tracking results on Election Day, Swasey recommends focusing your attention elsewhere. “What I’m looking at is other states on either side of it that could serve as indicators as to how the night is going and take some of that focus off of disputing Pennsylvania,” she says. “I would feel a lot better watching states like Iowa, Texas, Florida, and Georgia for indicators of a strong Biden night, rather than trying to tease anything from Pennsylvania, where we’re just not going to be able to tell what is a real lead.”
Remember that America is a democracy. Every vote deserves to be counted, no matter what Trump and Republicans say
The crux of Trump’s closing argument — that votes not counted by Election Day are invalid — is fundamentally anti-American and has absolutely no basis in law, reality, or any of the other tenets of democracy that Trump has routinely ignored over the course of his four years in office. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, no evidence the election is rigged by Democrats, and no evidence that mail-in ballots are illegitimate. Nor is there any law stating that a winner must be declared on Election Day. Trump is trying to undermine faith in democracy and con his way into a second term. As his advisers told the Times on Saturday, his “best hope” is to sow confusion in order to make it easier for him to steal the election. Don’t be confused.
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: KTLA)
Voters in Battleground States Are Getting Robocalls Discouraging Them From Going to the Polls
Albert Samaha, BuzzFeed
Samaha writes: "As Americans across the country make their way to the polls on Election Day, residents in Michigan, North Carolina, Nebraska, and Kansas have reported receiving robocalls discouraging them from casting their ballot."
Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen stated in a tweet that residents were getting “anonymous phone calls to voters telling voters to ‘stay home and stay safe.’” The Kansas Secretary of State's office also warned that there have been "robocalls telling voters to stay home."
BuzzFeed News has journalists around the US bringing you trustworthy stories on the 2020 Elections. To help keep this news free, become a member.
Hashim Warren, a registered Democrat in Guilford County, North Carolina, who already voted earlier this week, told BuzzFeed News he received a similar anonymous message today telling him to "stay home and stay safe" shortly before 10 a.m.
“It was sort of creepy,” he told BuzzFeed News. “It definitely hit on the anxieties my family has had about the election.”
Residents of Flint, Michigan, have also gotten robocalls this morning falsely informing them that “due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow,” state Attorney General Dana Nessel stated in a tweet.
People in parts of Michigan that tend to vote Democrat have for weeks received robocalls dissuading them from casting their votes. On Monday, Nessel warned residents of Dearborn about text messages “being sent to trick you into thinking there are ballot sensor issues.” Last month, two right-wing activists were charged with violating election laws for orchestrating a scheme that targeted around 85,000 registered voters, including in Detroit, and falsely claimed that mailing in their ballots would increase the chances of police arresting them for outstanding warrants or debt collectors tracking them down for unpaid bills.
While votes submitted before Election Day already amount to around 70% of the turnout in 2016, millions of Americans are expected to make their way to polling places today, as the country awaits the results of a contentious election.
In some states, local officials have faced technical problems.
In Spalding County, Georgia, local officials switched from voting machines to paper ballots due to what they called a “computer glitch” that shut down the system, WSBTV reported.
Franklin County, Ohio, switched to a manual check-in process after poll workers were “not able to upload all early in-person voting data into their electronic check-in system,” the state’s board of elections stated in a series of tweet. “It will not impact the security or accuracy of today’s vote. It's important to note that this does NOT impact voting machines in any way, and only modifies how voters are checked in.”
Voting machines were also temporarily down in Upshur County, Texas, before getting fixed before the morning was over, KYTX reported.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Republicans Don't Want the "Wrong Kind of People" to Vote
Josh Mound, Jacobin
Mound writes: "Republicans and the broader conservative movement have been trashing democracy and pushing voter suppression for decades - because they know that their oligarchic project is unpopular and they can't win fair and square."
n November 22, 2000, a phalanx of chino-clad Republican
operatives descended on Florida’s Miami-Dade County polling headquarters, where local officials were scrambling to complete a manual recount of ballots cast in the presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Swarming the lobby of the government high rise, the GOP protesters chanted and banged on the glass wall as local officials inside attempted to review ballots. Faced with an increasingly dangerous situation, the county canvassing board abandoned its recount, which had seemed poised to deliver a substantial number of votes for Gore.
The members of what was subsequently dubbed the “Brooks Brothers riot” provided the extralegal support for the challenge being waged in the courts for Bush by the likes of Ted Cruz, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Brought to the cusp of victory by the wrongful disenfranchisement of black Floridians, the Bush campaign’s coordinated attacks against the recount in the courts and in the streets cemented Bush’s dubious victory.
The lesson Republicans drew from 2000 was that suppression works. “It worked then, and they are thinking it might work well again,” Brad Blakeman, the Bush campaign operative who took credit for the “Brooks Brothers riot” explained to the Miami Herald in 2018.
It’s a lesson that Donald Trump and the GOP have put into full effect this year. Already aided by the anti-democratic structures of the Senate and the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans have waged a concerted effort in states across the country to suppress the vote by closing polling places, limiting drop boxes, stunting the postal service, throwing out ballots for dubious reasons, and disenfranchising ex-felons, among other tactics.
If all else fails, President Trump has made clear that he expects Republican judges to “get rid of the ballots” that would result in his defeat. At a rally last weekend in Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump goosed up his supporters for a “win on Tuesday or — thank you very much, Supreme Court — shortly thereafter.” His Federalist Society–trained allies in the courts have made clear they’re all too ready to help. In a concurring opinion to a 5-3 decision barring the counting of late-arriving ballots in Wisconsin, Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaled that the Court’s conservative majority may be willing to stop counting votes and declare Trump the winner if a deluge of (disproportionately Democratic) mail-in ballots take too long to count after Election Day. Trump’s game plan is to falsely declare victory on election night, then wait for his allies in the judiciary to subvert the voters’ will.
While it’s become commonplace since 2016 to cast Trump and his disregard for democracy as “unprecedented,” the conviction that the “wrong” people should not be allowed to vote — and, crucially, that Republicans cannot win if they do — has been central to the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement for decades.
As Bill Kristol, one of the many conservatives to attempt a late-in-life “never Trump” reinvention, admitted recently, “We [Republicans] lost faith in democracy. We lost faith that we could compete for votes and win elections. Therefore, you’ve got to start restricting the electorate, and that’s very bad for democratic principles and very bad for a political party.”
But, despite Kristol’s insistence otherwise, this “loss of faith” was no recent occurrence.
From civil rights opponents in the 1950s to the participants in the Miami-Dade protest to Trump Republicans sitting on the Supreme Court today, the GOP has been represented for decades by a parade of well-dressed, superficially respectable conservatives dismissing voter disenfranchisement with the absurd refrain of “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”
When President Trump’s son-in-law-cum-adviser, Jared Kushner, waved away Trump’s struggles to win black voters by complaining that “[Trump] can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful,” he was reciting then-presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” comments almost verbatim. The GOP didn’t appeal to the poorest half of the population, Romney told a gathering of rich donors in 2012, because they were “dependent upon government.” “[M]y job is not to worry about those people,” Romney concluded. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
When Trump told Fox & Friends earlier this year that Democrats’ attempts to make voting by mail easier during COVID-19 were “crazy” because they’d create “levels of voting that, if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he was channeling Paul Weyrich, the cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, who quipped in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote . . . Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
When Republicans level baseless accusations of voter fraud, they’re standing on the shoulders of conservative icons like Ronald Reagan and John McCain. In 1977, Reagan insisted that Jimmy Carter’s modest voting reform proposals “invite[d] wholesale election fraud” by making it easier for “those who get a whole lot more from the federal government — in various kinds of welfare — than they contribute to it.” In 2008, McCain fed a right-wing conspiracy theory by claiming that ACORN was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
When Utah senator Mike Lee recently tweeted, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are . . . Rank democracy can thwart that,” he was echoing William F. Buckley’s insistence in 1957 that “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”
And when the Trump campaign mobilizes its “army” of supporters to patrol the polls and intimidate suspected Democratic voters on Election Day, it is drawing on the example of the “Brooks Brothers riot” and the Reagan-era “National Ballot Security Task Force.”
Republicans know it’s unlikely that they could prevail today in a free and fair election. In the longer term, they find themselves besieged by the growing share of socialism-curious young people and left-leaning Latinos and Asian Americans. While it’s always possible for Democrats to squander their demographic advantages, the GOP seems ready to refine and escalate its decades-long campaign of voter suppression and anti-majoritarian machinations in order to maintain its grip on power.
Should the Democrats manage to take control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate, their top priority should be preventing future GOP subterfuge by enacting a modern Voting Rights Act, adding states to the union, empowering labor, and using taxation to kneecap the GOP’s plutocratic funders, among other measures. Anything less, and we may enter an era of anti-democratic Republicanism that makes the “Brooks Brothers riot” look quaint.
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'That's not how it works and it's not up to him,' CNN's Tapper said in a tweet. (photo: Josh Haner/NYT)
'It's Not Up to Him': How Media Outlets Plan to Sidestep Any Trump 'Victory' News
Ed Pilkington and Alex Hern, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Newsrooms across the United States are bracing for a potentially volatile election night, after reports suggested that Donald Trump is planning to declare 'victory' on Tuesday even before results from critical battleground states have been determined."
With reports that the president intends to make a premature speech, newsrooms across the US are bracing for misinformation
The president’s reported intention to make a premature – and potentially false – victory speech by the end of Tuesday night, with large numbers of mail-in ballots yet to be counted, has provoked intense journalistic debate. TV channels would be under pressure to air such an event on grounds that it is “news”, while aware that it amounted to dangerous misinformation that could stir violence across the nation and undermine the democratic process.
Such a clash of responsibilities would amount to a heady climax in the American media’s extremely vexed relationship with Trump over the past four years.
Were Trump to try to stage such a “victory” stunt it would chime with the relentless doubt that he has sown for months around the election, with repeated false claims that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. His comments suggest that his aim is to create the illusion that the election is being stolen from him in states such as Pennsylvania where early results from in-person voting might favor Trump in a so-called “red mirage”, only for the balance to swing to Biden as absentee ballots are counted beyond election day.
As Jake Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN, pointed out, any premature claim of victory would be electorally meaningless, the equivalent of a football coach bragging about having won at half-time. “That’s not how it works and it’s not up to him,” Tapper said in a tweet.
But it would still present media outlets with a classic Trump conundrum. How do you cover a presidential “victory” speech that is founded upon hot air yet has the potential to cause serious public discord?
Vivian Schiller, a former president and CEO of National Public Radio who was also NBC News’s chief digital officer, said that news organizations have no excuse for being unprepared for such an eventuality. Headlines such as “Trump declares victory”, especially on social media, could “shape public opinion and become a weapon against truth and trust in the democratic process,” she told the Guardian.
Schiller, who in her current role as executive director of Aspen Digital has co-written a 10-point plan for news rooms on how to cover a historically toxic election, proposed that TV channels should actively counter any Trump gambit. One technique would be to display a fixed on-screen banner reminding viewers that the votes are still being counted with no winner yet declared.
“If Trump goes on for more than a minute or two with falsehoods, cut away from the live feed and have your reporters explain that elections are not ‘called’ by their contestants,” she said. “Explain why such a premature declaration of victory is both wrong and dangerous.”
Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, responded to the Axios story by calling on newsrooms to step up and meet the challenge. A premature Trump “victory” declaration would be the most important test yet of what he called the “fading maxim” that whatever the US president says is news.
That maxim, Rosen said on Twitter, was “corroded beyond repair by its abuser”.
Election night is also likely to present the social media giants with challenges, after they struggled to counter misinformation throughout the presidential election cycle.
Late on Monday, Twitter and Facebook announced that they would flag posts from candidates who claim to have won the election before the votes have been counted.
In Twitter’s case, a warning label on the tweet will say “Official sources called this election differently”, or that “Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted”. Users would still be able to quote tweet the post, but not to like or retweet it.
The company says it will consider a result official after it has been declared by a state election official, or confirmed by two or more of a list of news outlets including Fox, CNN and the Associated Press.
Facebook’s warning labels, applied on both Facebook and Instagram, will state that “votes are being counted. The winner of the 2020 US presidential election has not been projected.” The company has also updated its “voting information centre”, which was that “Some election results may not be available for days or weeks. This means things are happening as expected.”
“Election officials will get the vote count right, and slower results reporting does not mean wrong or fraudulent results,” Facebook advises its users. “All Americans need to give election officials the time to do their jobs right.”
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Iván and his mother, Hilda Ramirez, have taken refuge in a suburban church in Austin, Texas, for more than four and a half years. (photo: John Burnett/NPR)
Sanctuary Immigrants Take Refuge in Texas Church, Watch Election Closely
John Burnett, NPR
Burnett writes: "Among those anxiously watching the U.S. presidential election is a Guatemalan mother and her teenaged son who have taken refuge in a church in Austin, Texas, for the entirety of Donald Trump's presidency."
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A hydro fracking tower used for gas drilling in Pennsylvania. (photo: Alamy)
Five Things to Know About Fracking in Pennsylvania. Are Voters Listening?
Nicholas Kusnetz, InsideClimate News
Kusnetz writes: "Pennsylvania has drawn a flurry of attention from both presidential candidates during the final days before the election, and Donald Trump and his campaign have focused on the state's natural gas industry as critical to his chances there."
The president’s false claim that Joe Biden would ban the drilling practice is just one of the misbeliefs about its role in the state’s economy and politics.Trump spent the weekend hammering his claim—refuted by his opponent—that Joe Biden would ban hydraulic fracturing, the technology that has unleashed vast quantities of oil and gas from deposits across the country, including in Pennsylvania.
But many of Trump's claims about fracking are either false or exaggerated. And it remains unclear whether the issue will help decide who wins Pennsylvania, or is even a top concern for voters in the state. Here are five things to know about the debate over fracking in this critical battleground state:
Biden Does Not Support a Ban on Fracking
Trump's entire attack stems from three words that Biden uttered at a March debate with Bernie Sanders, when the former vice president said "no new fracking." He was responding to a charge from Sanders that he supported fracking, but his campaign quickly clarified that the comment applied to federal lands only—Biden's climate platform includes a plan to end new oil and gas development on such lands. Biden has since said repeatedly he would not ban fracking on private or state lands in Pennsylvania, Texas and other states, where the vast majority of the nation's oil and gas is produced.
Trump Is Trying to Make a Big Deal of it Anyway
Biden's denials haven't stopped Trump and his campaign from accusing him of planning to end the process altogether. Trump spent the weekend traveling across Pennsylvania, where he pushed the claim that Biden would ban fracking "and eradicate your great economy." On his way to one rally, Trump signed a memorandum that would purportedly protect jobs "by ensuring appropriate support of hydraulic fracturing and other innovative technologies." But in reality the directive only calls on the Energy Department to issue a report within 70 days that assesses "the economic impacts of prohibiting, or sharply restricting, the use of hydraulic fracturing and other technologies," along with a similar report on the impacts to national security.
Fracking Doesn't Support All That Many Jobs
Trump's claims of the economic benefits are greatly exaggerated. There's no doubt drilling and fracking wells has sent an influx of money into the state's economy, as gas production has soared over the past decade. But the industry doesn't actually employ very many people. In fact, fewer than 33,000 people were employed in the oil and gas sector in Pennsylvania last year, while an additional 7,000 were employed in the pipeline sector, according to data collected by BW Research Partnership. Trump claimed at a rally on Saturday in Bucks County outside Philadelphia that the energy sector was responsible for "probably a million" jobs in Pennsylvania. Thousands of jobs related to fracking were lost earlier this year as the coronavirus pandemic cratered the economy and energy use. By comparison, more than 71,000 people were employed in the energy efficiency sector. The largest number of jobs is in education and health services, which employs more than 1.2 million people across the state, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Biden's Climate Plan May Not Have a Big Impact on Pennsylvania's Gas Boom
Biden's plan to halt fossil fuel development on federal lands would have very little impact in Pennsylvania, because the vast majority of the state's fracking occurs on private and state lands. Even if a Biden administration tried to ban fracking on private land (and, again, he has said he would not), a nationwide fracking ban would likely require Congressional action, and even then could be vulnerable to legal challenges from drilling companies or landowners.
Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, said that an end to fracking on federal lands, which are concentrated in the West, could actually benefit drillers in Pennsylvania by cutting off a portion of new supplies from elsewhere in the country that would compete with them.
That said, Biden has announced a range of other policies that could affect drilling in Pennsylvania. Biden's platform includes a requirement that federal permitting decisions account for effects on the climate, reinstates limits on methane pollution from oil and gas development and, more broadly, states that "polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting."
The methane regulations could impose new costs on drillers and frackers, while the permitting decisions might apply to interstate pipeline projects that carry the state's gas to power plants and cities across the region, as well as potential export facilities that would send the gas overseas.
Per Magnus Nysveen, head of analysis at Rystad Energy, a research and consulting firm, said more stringent regulation under a Biden administration could slow the construction of some of this infrastructure. But he added that years of intensive development has led to a surplus in pipeline and processing capacity, so the impact of any slow-down in building more would be limited, particularly with the pandemic continuing to drag on economic growth.
Book added that the biggest impact could come from Biden's promise to raise the corporate income tax rate and end subsidies and tax incentives for the industry, which would drive up costs for producers across the country.
Bottom line, Biden's policies wouldn't end drilling in Pennsylvania, and it is difficult to say how they would affect the state's natural gas development, or whether they'd have much impact at all.
Fracking May Not Be Decisive in Who Wins Pennsylvania
We won't know for sure until after Tuesday, of course, but there are a number of reasons to think that fracking might not be as big an election issue as Trump is trying to make it seem. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that likely voters are split equally between the candidates when it comes to who they trust more to handle fracking in the state. And in general, the poll found 51 percent of likely voters in Pennsylvania favor Biden, compared to 44 percent for Trump.
Another poll, by The New York Times and Siena College, found that 52 percent of respondents supported fracking, while 27 percent opposed it. But Biden is leading in that poll, too, carrying 49 percent of respondents, compared to 43 percent for Trump.
"I think fracking matters as an issue to the people who are directly affected by it, but then after that I don't think it's a really big issue," said Larry Ceisler, who runs a public affairs company that he said has worked for gas companies and environmental groups. "For every person who's bothered by Biden's comments about fracking, I think there are a lot of people that welcomed them."
While fracking has brought economic benefits, it has also brought pollution that has harmed people in some of the communities that are home to drilling. In June, a two-year investigation by Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, found that the state had failed to protect its residents from the health and environmental impacts of the drilling.
Ceisler, a Democrat who grew up in western Pennsylvania, which is home to much of the drilling, said he thinks Trump's image of the region is disconnected from reality, pointing out that many more people are employed by universities, hospitals and the technology industry than in drilling.
"That's where the jobs are there," he said. "I think the Trump administration wants to build this image that western Pennsylvania is just a lot of people working on natural gas pads."
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