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      Where to watch US election day live results in Australia

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      It’s been dubbed the most important US presidential election in recent history – one everyone in the world, including Australians, will be watching with great anticipation.
      Held amid a historic pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 220,000 Americans, and the most widespread civil rights protests in US history, this is an election that will define the course America takes.
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      What will a Biden victory – who has vowed to take action on climate change – mean for Australia’s climate policy?
      What will a Trump victory mean for far right extremism, which has become a growing threat in Australia since his last election victory?
      How will either of them handle increasingly tense relations with our biggest trading partner, China, which has already placed Australian industries – such as barley and wine – in the crosshairs?
      A lot is at stake, not just for the US, but indeed for Australia, the Asia-Pacific region, and the entire world.
      Election day is Tuesday 3 November but for the Australians watching, most of the action will be taking place on Wednesday 4 November.
      So if you’re staying home or venturing out to a party, how and where can you watch the US election results live in Australia?
      Who will be televising it?
      Just like with past elections, Australian television stations will be holding special election day coverage. ABC TV, SBS, channels Seven, Nine and Ten will all be covering the election.
      The coverage begins at roughly 11am across the board, with ABC and Channel Seven starting earlier at 10am, and most going on until around 5.00pm.
      On cable, you’ll be able to watch rolling election coverage on BBC, CNN, Sky News, Fox News, and Al Jazeera English.
      Can I follow live results and commentary online?
      Of course there will be extensive coverage online.
      The Guardian will be running a liveblog covering the election throughout the day, in addition to the continued extensive US election coverage and will include a live results tracker.
      Major news broadcasters in the US such as NBC, ABC and CBS are expected to livestream their election coverage on YouTube, as they did in 2016.
      Traditional news publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and digital platforms like Vice and Huffington Post, also held livestreams for election coverage in 2016.
      You’ll also be able to read live blogs at most major news platforms. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News and Fox News will all be running a live blog on the night.
      Where are watch parties being held in my city?
      Adelaide
      Gilbert St Hotel, 88 Gilbert St, Adelaide.
      UniBar, Union House, Ground The University of Adelaide, Adelaide.
      Brisbane
      Pig & Whistle, Riverside Centre 123 Eagle St, Brisbane City.
      Canberra
      PJ O’Reilly’s, 52 Alinga St, Canberra.
      The Well, University of Canberra, 20 Telita St, Bruce.
      Melbourne
      Online watch party only.
      Perth
      The Windsor Hotel, 112 Mill Point Rd, South Perth.
      Sydney
      3 Wise Monkeys, 555 George St, Sydney.
      Cheers Sports Bar, 561 George Street, Sydney.
      CPAC, Doltone House, Darling Island, Pyrmont.
      There’s a relative dearth of election viewing parties this year, mostly due to the ongoing pandemic.
      Nonetheless, there are a couple of events being held across the country.
      Democrats Abroad, an official arm of the Democratic party, has organised watch parties across the country. In Brisbane, they’ll be at Pig & Whistle, in Sydney they’re at 3 Wise Monkeys, and in Canberra they’ll be at PJ O’Reilly’s. They’ll also be hosting parties in Adelaide and Perth, but unfortunately for Melburnians, they’ll be hosting an online watch party.
      A group of American expats in Sydney have also organised a bi-partisan watch party at Cheers bar, with the group encouraging people to “chuck a sickie” to join them.
      At the University of Canberra, a student group has organised a watch party at The Well. Similarly, students at the University of Adelaide have put together a watch party at the UniBar.
      Also in Adelaide, an election watch party is being hosted at the Gilbert St Hotel, with attendees encouraged to join up and cry “tears of joy or fear”.
      Finally, CPAC, Australia’s largest conservative conference, will be doubling up as a de facto election watch party. The initial allocation of tickets has been exhausted, although the conference is advertising a “standby” ticket if restrictions ease next week.
      What time will polls close in the US?
      Poll opening and closing times varies state-to-state, but they all open between 6am and 9am, and close between 7pm and 9pm local time.
      For Australians, that roughly translates to polls opening at 9pm AEST on 3 November and the latest poll, that being in Alaska, closing at 3pm AEST on 4 November.
      What are the key states to keep an eye on?
      Because of the presidential voting system, where a president is decided by how many electoral college votes they win, a handful of swing states will probably be where the election is won or lost.
      Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and Iowa are the states you’ll need to keep an eye on, with a majority of them having flipped from supporting Obama to Trump in 2016.
      When will the victor be announced?
      Over 70 million Americans have already voted, more than half of the people who voted in 2016, with experts expecting a historic turnout.
      Counting begins on election day, which means that throughout the day, winners will be declared in each state once a candidate has a clear lead there, and results are usually declared on election day, by 10pm ET in the US.
      That means a winner would normally be declared between 1pm and 3pm on Wednesday. However, with so many people voting by mail, the result could potentially still be up in the air by the end of the day.
      The numbers of people voting by mail is unprecedented, and coupled with the challenges of holding an election during a pandemic, it could be anyone’s guess when we’ll formally get a victor. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden supporters won't believe in victory until it is theirs | Greg Jericho

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      A defining characteristic of progressive voters around the world is that they believe they can lose an election when ahead in the polls, and that they cannot win an election when they are behind in them.
      To be fair there is some justification for such belief. Progressives have become quite good at losing elections they should win.
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      As we all look to the US presidential election this coming week, those working, hoping, and praying for a Biden win remain ever distrustful of the polls that have Biden up by eight points.
      Maybe we should not trust them, but we all know that were Biden down eight points, no one would think there was any hope left.
      The different attitude was nicely summarised by former Republican party consultant Stuart Stevens, who told Battleground podcast last week:

      I seem to remember losing to the Democrats in the popular vote every time since 1988, except 2004, so it’s like ‘you guys are winning, we’re losing’ and I just think there is a timidity to the idea that this can’t be a huge victory for Joe Biden … If I ran the Democratic party I would say ‘Look, this is ours, there is more of us than them, we just have to go and take it … rout them, rout them from the field and know that you are just.

      It’s true that since 1988 the Democratic candidate has won the national vote in six of the seven presidential elections (and is almost certain to do so again this time). And yet they have won just four of those times.
      The US electoral system, with its allocation of winner-takes-all electoral college votes, is so disjointed from the national vote that 538’s Nate Silver estimates that if Biden was ahead 1% in the popular vote he would only have a 6% chance of winning the election.
      Add in legitimate concerns about voter suppression (both before and after the election) and Biden supporters won’t believe the victory is won until he has his hand on the Bible delivering the oath of office.
      And even then …
      After all, we are talking about a country in which Walmart has announced that it is temporarily taking ammunition and guns off its shelves out of fear of violence in the wake of the election result. It is such a stunning announcement you kind of gloss over that this means guns and ammunition are normally on the shelves of Walmart stores.
      We’re also talking about a country where 40% of Florida voters in a recent poll said they thought Donald Trump was “compassionate” and 43% thought he was “truthful”. Words no longer have meaning at such times.
      In the past month everyone has been waiting for an “October surprise”.
      But the Trump party’s (that rancid combination of the Republican party and conservative media) attempt to smear Biden by way of his son were as arousing to voters as watching Rudy Giuliani “tuck in his shirt” while lying on a bed.
      Only the deluded and the desperate cared.
      But what about good economic news that will turn voters back to Trump? Late this past week there were reports of “record” GDP growth figures, with headlines that in the September quarter America’s economy grew 33%.
      It didn’t.
      America for some bizarre reason likes to annualise quarterly growth. The economy actually grew 7.4% in the September quarter after falling 9% in June – both figures were records.
      The US economy remains 3.5% smaller than it was before the pandemic took hold. There are also 11 million fewer Americans employed than there were in February. That is not a boom.
      But nothing – neither the polls, the economy, nor the horrendous spread of the virus – will give Biden supporters any sense that the election is his to win.
      And fair enough – the stakes are too high.
      A Trump victory would signal the failure of the US democratic experiment and the triumph of authoritarianism. Given his administration’s utter inability to deal with the virus it would also mean not only many more deaths but also a brake on the global economy for many years to come.
      It would also end hopes for limiting climate change at a global level.
      On the other side of the ledger is the hope a Biden administration with a Senate majority might be able to undo some of the damage and do some good over the next four years.
      There is no balance, and so we hold on, hoping there remains some good news for 2020 to deliver. More

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      ‘I’m not voting for personality’: why this Pennsylvania county is the one to watch

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      A steady stream of voters arrived to deliver their sealed ballots at an early voting drop-off box inside the courthouse in the Pennsylvania city of Easton, a diverse community in Northampton county which could be pivotal in deciding who wins the key battleground state – and the White House.
      Northampton county, a mixed rural-urban area with about 300,000 habitants, has backed the winning presidential candidate all but three times since 1920. As Northampton county goes, so do Pennsylvania’s precious 20 electoral votes, according to electoral history.
      It is the political bellwether county in a crucial swing state which helped deliver victory to Donald Trump in 2016. Northampton county was among just 206 out of 3,141 nationwide that backed Barack Obama twice and then flipped for Trump.
      But with less than a week to go before election day, the polls here are mixed and too close to call. The campaign signs scattered across the picturesque county seem pretty evenly spread between the president and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, and so do the votes being cast at the courthouse.
      Voting for Biden is Shelene Monroe, a 48-year-old business analyst. “Trump has divided us as a nation, severed relationships with our partners while aligning himself with dictators, and shown a total lack of leadership,” said Monroe, who voted for Democratic candidates in the down-ballot races. More

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      US election roundup: Trump and Biden swing through battleground states

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      The two US presidential candidates swung through northern battleground states on Friday amid signs that the coronavirus pandemic was once more threatening to overcome hospital capacity in several US regions.
      Donald Trump was due to hold a succession of airport rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while Joe Biden was scheduled to have drive-in rallies in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
      The trip to Minnesota marked a rare defensive move for the Democratic challenger, who held a low double-digit lead in new polls published with four days left of the election campaign. Hillary Clinton narrowly held Minnesota in 2016 and the latest polls show Biden with a five-point margin.
      But he told reporters: “I don’t take anything for granted. We’re going to work for every single vote up until the last minute.”
      The president insisted the state was vulnerable.
      “I think it’s going to flip for the first time since 1972,” he said, claiming he had stopped rioting there following the police killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.
      Before setting out from Washington on Friday morning, Trump railed against the supreme court for ruling to allow election officials in North Carolina to accept votes received by 12 November as long as they are postmarked by 3 November.
      “This decision is CRAZY and so bad for our Country. Can you imagine what will happen during that nine day period,” Trump said on Twitter.
      He has been similarly critical of a parallel supreme court decision this week to allow Pennsylvania to extend its count. His new appointee to the court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not take part in the decisions as, according to the court, she had not had time to review the arguments.
      Behind in the polls, the Republicans have put significant effort in campaign endgame focusing on procedural and legal attempts to suppress the turnout or the vote count. Trump has said he wants a result on 3 November, but by law states have until 8 December to finalise their returns. More

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      How Will Joe Biden Approach Iran?

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      Addressing months of speculation over the future of US policy toward Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on September 22 at the UN General Assembly, “We are not a bargaining chip in the US elections and domestic policy.” Earlier this year, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said if he is elected, the US will rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the Iran nuclear deal — which the current administration withdrew from in May 2018. This set of the rumor mills about a major shift in Washington’s handling of Iran.

      The JCPOA was signed in 2015 by the P5+1 group — the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany — and the Iranians in a diplomatic effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet today, the agreement is standing on its last legs. US President Donald Trump, who campaigned against the agreement during the 2016 presidential election, has imposed a policy of maximum pressure on Iran in order to force it to negotiate a better deal.

      360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

      READ MORE

      For the Trump administration, an improved agreement would address Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and its expansionist policies in the Middle East — two issues that the Obama administration and the European Union failed to incorporate in the JCPOA. This infuriated US allies in the Middle East, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which in particular has been on the receiving end of Iran’s destabilizing actions in the Gulf.

      With the presidential election on November 3, the question of whether US policy toward Iran will change should Biden win the keys to the White House is attracting the attention of pundits and policymakers in the Arab region. 

      Joe Biden’s Position on Iran

      Biden, who was vice president under the Obama administration, explained in a recent op-ed his proposed position regarding Iran. He said, “I have no illusions about the challenges the regime in Iran poses to America’s security interests, to our friends and partners and to [Iran’s] own people.” He listed four key principles as he outlined his approach.

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      First, he promised that a Biden administration would prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Second, he committed himself to rejoin the JCPOA if Iran returns to “strict compliance with the nuclear deal,” and only as “a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” In Biden’s words, these negotiations would aim at strengthening and extending the nuclear deal’s provisions and addressing “other issues of concern.” Third, he made a commitment to “push back against Iran‘s destabilizing activities” in the Middle East, which threaten US allies in the region. He also promised to continue to use “targeted sanctions against Iran‘s human rights abuses, its support for terrorism and ballistic missile program.”

      Finally, he said, if the Iranians choose to threaten vital American interests and troops in the region, the US would not hesitate to confront them. Despite this, Biden wrote that he is “ready to walk the path of diplomacy if Iran takes steps to show it is ready too.”

      But Will His Policy Be Any Different to Trump’s?

      In relation to Saudi Arabia, Biden issued a statement on the second anniversary of the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in which he said, “Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

      Although Biden’s approach is a departure from Trump’s maximum pressure on Iran and with regard to Saudi Arabia in its intervention in Yemen, it is possible that Biden might end up — at least concerning Iran —applying Trump’s same tactics. This is partly because, according to Biden himself, Iran has stockpiled 10 times as much enriched uranium since Trump has been in office. This is further complicated by the fact there is no guarantee that Iran will surrender its stockpiles to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

      Additionally, Iran has repeatedly declared that it will not negotiate additional provisions to the JCPOA, which is in direct conflict with Biden’s intention to put enforce additional restrictions on Tehran. Moreover, putting pressure on Iran to end its destabilizing regional activities, as Biden has promised, would certainly lead to points of confrontation between the two countries, especially in Iraq and Syria. If any of these scenarios take place, a Biden administration would be forced to impose even tougher sanctions on Iran with the help of EU countries.

      Three Key Factors

      Biden’s decision to rejoin the JCPOA rests on three issues. The first is the balance of power within Congress between the Republicans and the Democrats. The second is how Iran fits into his overall policy toward China. Finally, the position of the Saudi kingdom and its allies regarding any future agreement with Iran would play a key role.

      First, it is well known that members of Congress from both parties resisted then-President Barack Obama’s policy of negotiating with Iran and insisted on reviewing any agreement before the US would ratify it. For this reason, a majority in Congress passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act in 2015, which forced the president to send any agreement he reaches with Iran to the US Congress for review.

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      When the P5+1 hit a breakthrough with the JCPOA, Obama sent the draft agreement to Congress as per the act, but the nuclear deal was neither approved nor rejected. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly opposed the deal. Yet Republicans in the Senate could not block the agreement because they did not have a 60-vote majority to move forward with a vote against the JCPOA. In other words, almost half of Congress — which consists of the House and the Senate — were against the Iran deal.

      If Biden becomes the 46th US president and decides to rejoin the agreement, he will face the same dilemma as Congress will have to review the JCPOA yet again, a process that will create tension between the president and Congress. Though considering the president needs Congress to pass domestic reforms related to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the US economy, Biden would most likely not be in rush to act on Iran.

      Second, Biden would link the deal with Iran with his policy toward China. As president, Biden will continue Obama’s Pivot to Asia policy of redirecting the US military presence from the Middle East and other regions toward East Asia to confront China’s growing influence in the region.

      Meanwhile, Beijing has expanded its position in the Gulf where it has established several strategic partnerships, which are essential to connect China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to markets in Europe. With Iran’s signing of a strategic comprehensive partnership agreement with China in 2016 and its move to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Iran is very much part of the BRI.

      Thus, a Biden administration will likely tie Iran to its China containment policy. That is to say, any US policy that aims to weaken China will have to incorporate some pressure on the Iranians to be effective, including maintaining existing sanctions on Iran. Further, Iranian ties with China will push the US under Biden’s leadership to strengthen its relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in order to prevent China from extending its influence into the Middle East. The Biden administration cannot do so without taking into consideration the interests of Saudi Arabia, which are linked to the kind of agreement the US may strike with Iran.

      Finally, while the US has become self-sufficient in terms of oil supply, the world economy is still reliant on Saudi oil exports. Saudi Arabia is also the heart of the Muslim world, and it maintains control over 10% of global trade that passes through the Red Sea. The kingdom’s significance as a stabilizing factor in the Middle East is also increased with the demise of Syria, Iraq and the domestic troubles in Egypt, not to mention the challenges that Turkey is causing for the US in the region.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Accordingly, a Biden administration cannot afford to turn its back on Saudi interests. Such a policy would force Saudi Arabia to diversify its security, which would undoubtedly include strengthening its relations with China and other US rivals like Russia. This is something the US cannot afford to happen if it wishes to effectively confront its main competitors — China and Russia.

      As for Yemen, there is no reason that prevents Saudi Arabia and a Biden administration from reaching an agreement. In 2015, the kingdom intervened in Yemen to prevent Iran from threatening its southern borders. Saudi Arabia wants the war to end sooner rather than later, and it wants the Yemenis to thrive in their own state. However, the Yemen conflict is connected to the Iranian expansionist policies in the Middle East, and Biden’s administration would have to address this in its approach toward Iran.

      When adding to these reasons the fact that the conservatives won the Iranian parliamentary elections in early 2020 and are poised to win the presidential election in June 2021, it is highly doubtful that Iran will accept a renegotiated nuclear deal with the US.

      For all these reasons, returning to the JCPOA is unlikely.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More