Elections

Barack Obama has delivered a stinging rebuke of president Donald Trump in a speech delivered in Philadelphia while campaigning for Joe Biden. Obama criticised Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis as well as divisive behaviour including retweeting conspiracy theories that you wouldn’t tolerate from  anyone “except from a crazy uncle”. The former president also praised the positivity shown during the pandemic and recent Black Lives Matter movement . “We see that what is best is us is still there, but we’ve got to give it voice.” More

Russia and Iran have obtained some US voting registration information and are attempting to sow unrest in the upcoming election, the government’s national intelligence director said in a rare news conference Wednesday night.“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence.The FBI director, Chris Wray, also spoke, saying the US will impose costs on any foreign countries interfering in the 2020 US election.Wray also warned against buying into misinformation about election results. “You should be confident your vote counts. Early unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said Wray.Democrats immediately took issue with Ratcliffe’s emphasis that Iran was sowing disinformation to harm Trump, characterizing the intelligence director as a “partisan hack”. Ratcliffe is a former Republican congressman and Democrats have been critical of his choice to selectively declassify documents to help Trump.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, said on Wednesday night that during a classified briefing he received on the interference “I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure, but rather to undermine the very wellspring of our Democracy.”“I’m surprised that DNI Radcliff said that at this press conference,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.Trump and many of his supporters have been among those spreading misinformation that votes aren’t going to be counted and alleging baselessly that ballots can easily be thrown out.Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas” – and warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely claiming to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the 3 November election, for which early voting is ongoing.Federal officials have long warned about the possibility of this type of operation, as such registration lists are not difficult to obtain.“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” Christopher Krebs, the top election security official at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Tuesday night after reports of the emails first surfaced.He urged voters not to fall for “sensational and unverified claims”, reminding them that ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. “The last line of defense in election security is you – the American voter.”While state-backed Russian hackers are known to have infiltrated US election infrastructure in 2016, there is no evidence that Iran, which cybersecurity experts consider to be an inferior actor in online espionage, has ever done so.Before the FBI news conference began, the top members of the Senate intelligence committee released a statement warning: “As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting.”The statement came from Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, and Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia.“State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that election 2020 is safe, secure and free from outside interference,” they said.Foreign misinformation campaigns are far from the only source of confusion and chaos as the US heads to the polls. Concerns of voter disenfranchisement have been widespread, with Republicans scoring victories Wednesday in their ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights. In a Wednesday night decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting.The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers of the ban said that curbside voting would help the state slow the spread of Covid-19 while allowing those most vulnerable to the disease to vote safely.The plaintiff in that case, Howard Porter Jr, is a Black man in his 70s with asthma and Parkinson’s disease. “So many of my [ancestors] even died to vote,” he testified to a District Court. “And while I don’t mind dying to vote, I think we’re past that – we’re past that time.”The Iowa Supreme Court also upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to correct voter applications with omitted information.Agencies contributed reporting More

US elections 2020

Former president told voters in swing state Pennsylvania: ‘What we do now these next 13 days will matter for decades to come’

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Barack Obama likens Donald Trump to ‘crazy uncle’ in Joe Biden rally speech – video

Barack Obama returned to the campaign trail on Wednesday to deliver a scathing – and occasionally humorous – condemnation of his successor while envisioning an America led by his former vice-president, Joe Biden.
Sleeves rolled and wearing a black mask that read VOTE, Obama assailed Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president.
“Eight months into this pandemic, cases are rising again across this country” Obama said at a drive-in rally in Philadelphia less than two weeks before election day. “Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself.”
Declaring this “the most important election of our lifetime”, Obama pleaded with Americans to deliver Biden a victory so overwhelming that Trump cannot seriously dispute the result. “What we do now these next 13 days will matter for decades to come,” he said.
Obama, who swept to the White House on an optimistic message of “hope and change,” acknowledged that progress was not always a straight line. “The fact that we don’t get 100% of what we want right away is not a good reason not to vote,” he implored.
His visit to Pennsylvania, one of three traditionally Democratic Rust Belt states that he won twice and Trump won in 2016, underscored its significance this cycle. Both candidates have lavished the state with frequent visits and a blitz of advertising. Biden holds a narrow lead in Pennsylvania, according to a RealClearPolitics average of state polls.
Seizing on a comment Trump made during a rally in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday, when he told supporters that he would not have been there if his campaign wasn’t trailing, Obama smiled mischievously: “Poor guy. I don’t feel that way. I love coming to Pennsylvania.”
Waving away the polls and punditry that have shown Biden widening his lead in recent weeks, Obama urged Black men and young progressives not to sit out this cycle.
“I don’t care about the polls. There were a whole bunch of polls last time,” he said. “Didn’t work out because a whole bunch of folks stayed at home.” More

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, top national security officials announced late on Wednesday, providing the first concrete evidence that the two countries are stepping in to try to influence the presidential election as it enters its final two weeks.Iran used the information to send threatening, faked emails to voters, said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, in an evening announcement from the bureau’s headquarters. Intelligence agencies had collected information that Iran planned to take more steps more steps to influence the vote, prompting the unusual timing of the briefing as an effort to deter Tehran.There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, either of which could affect the outcome of voting that has already begun across the country. The officials also did not make clear whether either nation hacked into voter registration systems.The material obtained by Iran and Russia was mostly public, according to an intelligence official, and Iran was using it as an opposing political campaign might. Some voter information, including party registration, is publicly available, and voters’ names may have been merged with other identifying material like email addresses from other databases, according to intelligence officials, including some sold by criminal hacking networks on the “dark web.”Still, the announcement that a foreign adversary, Iran, had tried to influence the election by sending intimidating emails was a stark warning. Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.Until now, some officials had insisted that Russia remains the primary threat to the election. But the new information, both Republican and Democratic officials said, demonstrates that Iran is building upon Russian techniques and trying to demonstrate that it, too, is capable of being a force in the election.Since August, intelligence officials have warned that Iran opposed President Trump’s re-election. They said Iran intended not to deter voters but to hurt Mr. Trump and mobilize support for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, by angering voters about the president’s apparent embrace of the Proud Boys in the first debate. More

Former President Barack Obama made a fiery first in-person campaign appearance on behalf of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Philadelphia on Wednesday, ridiculing President Trump for complaining about campaigning in Pennsylvania, contracting the coronavirus and hiding business dealings with China.“We know that he continues to do business with China because he has a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible?” Mr. Obama asked supporters who had been invited to hear him speak at a drive-in rally in the parking lot of a Philadelphia sports complex. He was referring to a recent New York Times report that revealed previously unknown financial holdings of the president’s — at a time when Mr. Trump is criticizing Mr. Biden’s ties to the country.“Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account?” said the former president, wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his voice straining. “Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election?”He added, “They would’ve called me Beijing Barry.”It is “not a great idea to have a president who owes a bunch of money to people overseas,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he had probably paid more in income taxes working a high school job at an ice-cream parlor than what Mr. Trump paid during each of his first two years as president — $750.Mr. Obama’s long-anticipated speech, the first of several he intends to deliver on behalf of Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, over the next two weeks, represented a complete reversal of his reluctance to engage Mr. Trump directly. More

People began lining up before dawn in downtown Milwaukee on Tuesday, the first day of early in-person voting in Wisconsin.

Like millions of Americans who decided to vote early, they were prepared to wait. Concerns about mail voting and the coronavirus have sent people to the polls earlier than ever.

In Milwaukee, many voters dragged out their parkas and gloves for the first time this season and settled in to wait. More

QAnon conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. Homespun “remedies” for the coronavirus sent via text messages on WhatsApp. Socialist and communist memes on Twitter. Anti-Black Lives Matter posts on Facebook.The universe of misinformation is not just widespread and vast. It is also bilingual.For several months, researchers and Democrats have worried increasingly about misinformation in Spanish being spread through social media, talk radio and print publications that target Latino voters.The problem has been particularly acute in South Florida, where a worrying loop of misinformation has gone from social media to mainstream and back again.Some of the most insidious messages have tried to pit Latinos against supporters of Black Lives Matter, by using racist language and tropes. But the distortions hardly stop there.Other news outlets have reported on the phenomenon in recent weeks, and taken together, the reports paint a picture of just how deep and wide the misinformation has spread.Last month, Politico published an article examining efforts to paint the billionaire Democratic fund-raiser George Soros as the director of “deep state” operations and exploring anti-Black and anti-Semitic efforts that have spread across Spanish-language channels in the Miami area. A local Univision station soon followed with its own article.A Florida public radio station found that conservative elected officials in Colombia were also helping to push the false idea that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a clone of left-wing dictators in Latin America, such as Hugo Chávez.This week, an article in the Boston Globe looked at how the spread of misinformation has driven a wedge between many younger Latino voters and their parents.It is still too early to tell just what impact, if any, the misinformation is having on who shows up to the polls and who they vote for. But many experts worry that the efforts will only increase in the final days of the campaign, in an attempt to suppress the votes of some Latinos. Understanding how the misinformation spreads in any language could prove key in interpreting the election’s results. More

Does Palantir See Too Much? The tech giant helps governments and law enforcement decipher vast amounts of data — to mysterious and, some say, dangerous ends. By Michael Steinberger On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue […] More