Americans are bracing for an election day unlike any in US history, shadowed by threats of manipulation and violence, stoking fears that democracy itself is at stake when the polls close on 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 ballots by Monday, a record for early voting, in the midst of 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 he would try to stop the vote count if early returns on election night show him to be ahead and has openly encouraged acts of intimidation by his supporters.
On Monday, a high “non-scalable” fence, last seen during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, was being erected around the White House. In anticipation of unrest, businesses in Washington and major city centres across the country boarded up their windows. The DC business district advised residents to “take precautions such as securing outdoor furniture and signage that can be used as a projectile”.
A poll by USA Today and Suffolk University found that three out of four voters were worried about possible violence, with only a quarter of the electorate “very confident” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if the Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, 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 drive-in rally in Cleveland, Ohio. “It’s time to take back our democracy.”
On his final campaign stops, Trump has sought 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 locking you down, while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn,” he told a rally in Iowa.
The air of apprehension has been deepened by repeated threats from Trump that he would seek to portray all votes not counted by election night as illegitimate. He said “we are going in with our lawyers” as soon as voting closes.
Vote-counting routinely continues for days and sometimes weeks after a US election, but the result is usually called by news agencies based on projections from incomplete counts. That is less likely to be possible this time because of the heavy early and postal voting.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
