***Election Day - Early Voting*** 8 days

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Republicans crash Florida early vote, eating into Democrats’ lead

 

 

 

Kummude kummudu. Dems gallu address lekunda povali. 

@afacc123 @r2d2 

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47 minutes ago, Sucker said:

Republicans crash Florida early vote, eating into Democrats’ lead

 

 

 

Kummude kummudu. Dems gallu address lekunda povali. 

@afacc123 @r2d2 

Adi lekkante 

Republicans all the way

 

tatha kept the right sentinels at right place n time 

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Eyes turn to Texas as early voting surge surpasses 2016

 

 

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Texas has already cast nearly 7 million votes, more than anywhere in America, and Glen Murdoch couldn’t get his ballot in fast enough after becoming a U.S. citizen this summer.

“I was champing at the bit,” said Murdoch, who moved to Austin from Australia shortly after President Donald Trump took office, and cast a ballot last week to vote him out.

It’s a rush to the polls in Texas like seldom seen before.

Ten days before Election Day, Texans have already cast as many early votes as they did in 2016 and are nearly 80% of the way toward hitting the total — both early and on Election Day — counted four years ago. The voting bonanza has some Democrats optimistic that decades of low turnout and undisputed Republican dominance may soon be a thing of the past.

 

But what that it all means for Texas is far from clear. Voters don’t register by party in the state, making it difficult to know which party or presidential candidate has an edge. Polls are unusually close in Texas, but neither President Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden has swung through Texas, focusing on clear battleground states instead like Arizona and Florida.

The striking numbers are across the board — in big cities that are solidly Democrat, in tipping-point suburbs where Republicans are losing ground and, to a lesser extent, in heavily Latino counties along the border. In Harris County, home to Houston, more than 1 million votes have already been cast.

Democrats have long believed a breakthrough was only a matter of rousing millions of nonvoters, particularly within the state’s booming Latino population. Roughly 50% of voters currently registered to vote in Texas have never voted or vote infrequently, according to the voter information firm L2.

A turnout surge could come with major political consequences. Democrats believe they have a shot at winning control of the statehouse, a half-dozen competitive U.S. House races and a Senate seat, not to mention 38 electoral votes that could seal the deal for Biden.

Republicans say Democrats are getting way ahead of themselves as usual, but are also clear-eyed that the final turnout will likely be historic.

Derek Ryan, a GOP data analyst, predicted this week that Texas turnout would likely surpass 12 million, or roughly 3 million more voters than 2016 — more than the population of neighboring New Mexico.

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“It’s hard to say, ‘Yes, if we reach 12 million then Democrats win,’ because you never know,” said Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Texas Democratic Party. “But on balance, yes, if we reach 12 million voters we’ll win this election.”

 

Republicans don’t buy it. In Austin’s fast-growing suburbs, Williamson County went for Trump by 9 percentage points four years ago. GOP county chairman Steve Armbruster said most of the county’s nearly 370,000 registered voters now have no recent primary history. He feels confident the GOP will win a good chunk of them.

“I haven’t seen any kind of support or excitement or enthusiasm on the Democrat side,” Armbuster said after returning from a local Trump rally Saturday.

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Early vote total exceeds 2016; GOP chips at Dems’ advantage

 

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With nine days before Election Day, more people already have cast ballots in this year’s presidential election than voted early or absentee in the 2016 race as the start of in-person early voting in big states led to a surge in turnout in recent days.

The opening of early voting locations in Florida, Texas and elsewhere has piled millions of new votes on top of the mail ballots arriving at election offices as voters try to avoid crowded places on Nov. 3 during the coronavirus pandemic.

The result is a total of 58.6 million ballots cast so far, more than the 58 million that The Associated Press logged as being cast through the mail or at in-person early voting sites in 2016.

 

Democrats have continued to dominate the initial balloting, but Republicans are narrowing the gap. GOP voters have begun to show up as early in-person voting, a sign that many heeded President Donald Trump’s unfounded warnings about mail-voting fraud.

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On Oct. 15, Democrats registrants cast 51% of all ballots reported, compared with 25% from Republicans. On Sunday, Democrats had a slightly smaller lead, 51% to 31%.

The early vote totals, reported by state and local election officials and tracked by the AP, are an imperfect indicator of which party may be leading. The data only shows party registration, not which candidate voters support. Most GOP voters are expected to vote on Election Day.

Analysts said the still sizable Democratic turnout puts extra pressure on the Republican Party to push its voters out in the final week and, especially, on Nov. 3. That’s especially clear in closely contested states such as Florida, Nevada and North Carolina.

“This is a glass half-full, glass half-empty situation,” said John Couvillon, a Republican pollster who tracks early voting closely. “They’re showing up more,” he added, but “Republicans need to rapidly narrow that gap.”

In Florida, for example, Democrats have outvoted Republicans by a 596,000 margin by mail, while Republicans only have a 230,000 edge in person. In Nevada, where Democrats usually dominate in-person early voting but the state decided to send a mail ballot to every voter this year, the GOP has a 42,600 voter edge in-person while Democrats have an 97,500 advantage in mail ballots.

“At some point, Republicans have to vote,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who tracks early voting on ElectProject.org. “You can’t force everyone through a vote center on Election Day. Are you going to expect all those Republicans to stand in line for eight hours?”

 

Campaigns typically push their voters to cast ballots early so they can focus scarce resources chasing more marginal voters as the days tick down to Election Day. That usually saves them money on mailers and digital ads — something the cash-strapped Trump campaign would likely want — and minimizes the impact of late surprises that could change the race.

Trump’s campaign has been pushing its voters to cast ballots early, but with limited success, delighting Democrats. “We see the Trump campaign, the RNC (Republican National Committee) and their state parties urging Trump’s supporters to vote by mail while the president’s Twitter account says it’s a fraud,”

But Bonier warned that he does not expect a one-sided election. “There are signs of Republicans being engaged,” he said. “We do expect them to come out in very high numbers on Election Day.”

That split in voting behavior — Democrats voting early, Republicans on Election Day — has led some Democrats to worry about Trump declaring victory because early votes are counted last in Rust Belt battlegrounds. But they’re counted swiftly in swing states such as Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, which may balance out which party seems ahead on election night.

Some of the record-setting turnout has led to long lines at early-vote locations and there have been occasional examples of voters receiving mail ballots that are incorrectly formatted. But on a whole, voting has gone relatively smoothly. With more than one-third of the 150 million ballots that experts predict will be cast in the election, there have been no armed confrontations at polling places or massive disenfranchisement that have worried election experts for months.

One sign of enthusiasm is the large number of new or infrequent voters who have already voted — 25% of the total cast, according to an AP analysis of data from the political data firm L2. Those voters are younger than a typical voter and less likely to be white. So far similar shares of them are registering Democratic and Republican.

They have helped contribute to enormous turnouts in states such as Georgia, where 26.3% of the people who’ve voted are new or infrequent voters, and Texas, which is expected to set turnout record and where 30.5% are new or infrequent voters.

The strong share of new and infrequent voters in the early vote is part of what leads analysts to predict more than 150 million total votes will be cast and possibly the highest turnout in a U.S. presidential election since 1908.

“There’s a huge chunk of voters who didn’t cast ballots in 2016,” Bonier said. “They’re the best sign of intensity at this point.”

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Amy Coney Barrett's first case as Supreme Court justice could be one that decides presidential election

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One of the first cases she could hear as a new Supreme Court justice could decide who wins the White House.

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When the Senate votes on Monday evening to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court, it will be just over a week before Election Day that will decide what both parties are portraying as the most important race in American history.

If Barrett is confirmed to become a member of the highest bench in the country – and, with Republicans easily having enough votes to confirm her, that seems to be a foregone conclusion – one of the first cases she could hear as a new Supreme Court justice could decide who wins the White House.

Courts at all levels have been deluged with cases relating to balloting in the run up to Election Day – and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic – but one in particular has garnered nation attention.

Republicans in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania want the Supreme Court to rule on whether ballots received after Election Day can be counted. With the state still very much up for grabs and its 20 Electoral College votes possibly being the key to who the country’s next president is, both Republicans and Democrats are heavily invested in what happens to those late-arriving ballots.

 

 

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The Supreme Court justices split 4-4 last Monday over a Republican plea to undo a state court order and force elections officials to ignore absentee ballots received after Election Day, Nov. 3. The tie vote left the Pennsylvania court order in effect and allows mailed ballots to be counted if they are received by Nov. 6. Chief Justice John Roberts and his three liberal colleagues voted to leave the court order in place.

With the possibility of Barrett, a conservative jurist, joining the bench and giving the Court a 6-3 conservative majority, Republicans are hopeful that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of ignoring the ballots received after Election Day.

Democrats, on the other hand, are decrying Barrett’s confirmation as a political act by President Trump to help him maintain the White House in a race that shows him consistently losing in the polls and as “voter suppression” tactic.

“One more vote, provided by a hard-right, Trump-nominated justice, could be the difference between voting rights and voting suppression,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said on Tuesday.

Trump already has signaled one reason for Barrett’s speedy nomination, just eight days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, was to have her confirmed and installed on the court in time for any election lawsuit that might reach the justices.

The court’s conservatives, Roberts included, have regularly sided with state officials who object when a federal court relaxes election rules, even if the changes arise from the coronavirus pandemic.

At the same time, the Supreme Court generally won’t disturb state court rulings that are rooted in state law.

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But civil rights lawyers and election law experts said the vote in the Pennsylvania case indicates at least four conservatives may be willing to look at state court election-related decisions in a way that calls to mind Bush v. Gore.

Pennsylvania Republicans relied in part on an opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas and two other conservative justices in Bush v. Gore to argue that the Supreme Court should get involved in the case because the state court had improperly taken powers given by the U.S. Constitution to state lawmakers when it comes to presidential elections. The court ruled for Bush on other grounds, that ballots were being handled differently across the state in violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

“Based on Judge Barrett’s record, there is every reason to believe that she would have been a fifth vote in favor of the Supreme Court overstepping its bounds and interfering with a non-federal issue that would have jeopardized voter access,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The group opposes Barrett’s confirmation.

The Senate on Sunday voted 51-48 to limit debate on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, setting up a vote on her confirmation for Monday evening.