28 2GM Thursday October 15 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
Georgia voters has already cast their
ballot, a record, and on the first day of
early voting in Harris County, the big-
gest in Texas, 128,000 people voted,
compared with 68,000 in 2016.
The Democrats have deployed theObamas to turn out the vote, with the
former president recording informa-
tion films on how to cast ballots tailored
to each of 24 states. His wife, Michelle,
teamed up with the basketball star
LeBron James to provide transport, Joe Biden in Florida this week. LeakedMore than 14 million Americans have
already voted for their next president,
with long queues at polling stations
suggesting that the clash between Pres-
ident Trump and Joe Biden could beat
the biggest turnout on record despite
the pandemic.
The surge of early in-person voting
reflects strong feelings stirred by the
Trump presidency but also concerns
over the reliability of postal voting and
fears of chaos on election day, Novem-
ber 3, with Mr Trump encouraging his
supporters to patrol polling stations.
With 19 days to go, Mr Trump, 74, is
throwing everything he can at his
Democratic rival to try to overturn Mr
Biden’s ten-point average polling lead.
In an echo of the dirty tricks furore
over stolen Democratic party emails in
the 2016 election, the Trump campaign
leaked emails purporting to show that
Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, introduced a
Ukrainian business contact to his
father while he was vice-president. Mr
Biden has denied talking to Hunter
about his son’s work on the board of a
Ukrainian gas company and his cam-
paign said yesterday that there was no
record of the meeting in his schedule.
Mr Trump is stepping up his rally ap-
pearances, adding two more in swing
states on Saturday to follow one today
and two on Friday, as he implores
voters to back him.
“Suburban women, will you please
like me? Please? Please? I saved your
damn neighbourhood, OK?” Mr
Trump begged at a rally in Pennsyl-
vania, a crucial state that he won nar-
rowly in 2016 but where Mr Biden has
a seven-point average polling lead.
“The vaccines are coming soon, the
therapeutics and frankly the cure,” Mr
Trump said. “We’re rounding the turn
on the pandemic, we understand it.
Hey, I just had it, here I am. Now I’m
immune, they tell me.”
Infection figures told a different story
yesterday, with new weekly cases rising
in 33 states, steady elsewhere and going
down in none.
Each state sets its own rules on early
voting, with queues forming in Texas
and Tennessee yesterday, after the all-
day lines that formed in Georgia as
polls opened this week. One in ten
Queues of early voters put
US on path to record poll
Analysis
T
he queues of
Americans
waiting
hours to
vote, weeks
before the election
concludes, are not
always a sign of poor
administration. Above
all they show a voting
public that is both
enthusiastic and
worried (Henry
Zeffman writes).
The enthusiasm
seems to be higher
than ever. Asked by
Gallup to gauge their
keenness for voting,
71 per cent of
Americans said last
week that they were
more keen than usual.
Only 18 per cent said
they were less keen, a
53-point gap. Before
the 2016 election that
gap was nine points.
This year’s figure
looks more like 2008,
when the gap was 49.
That election had the
highest turnout since
the 1960s, and many
think this year’s will
surpass it.
The early rush to
vote also reflects fear.
Early in the pandemic
Democrats invested
considerable energy
in persuading their
supporters to register
for postal votes.
Democratic officials
in many states
expanded eligibility
for voting by mail.
Some Democrats nowregret that decision,
having failed to
anticipate that by this
stage many voters
would be waiting in
socially distanced
supermarket queues
just as happily as they
might wait to vote.
The party’s
concerns about that
strategy were
supercharged over the
summer by cutbacks
to the postal service
implemented by Louis
DeJoy, President
Trump’s appointee as
postmaster-general,
which critics said
would slow the
delivery of postal
votes, perhaps leaving
some uncounted.
Primary elections
also showed that
teaching voters who
had never cast a ballot
by mail to meet the
various requirements
— in some states
signatures areneeded, in others it is
witness signatures, in
others secrecy
envelopes — was not
always easy. In New
York about one in five
postal votes was
discarded then the
results took six weeks
after courts ordered
those votes to be
counted after all.
When people vote
in person, they make
a conscious decision
to avoid any of those
fates. By voting before
election day, they may
also be reflecting
fears that Trump
supporters will heed
his call to patrol
polling stations on
November 3.
Yet we should not
ignore administrative
failings that in some
areas appear wilful.
Long queues are signs
of enthusiasm; all-day
lines are signs of poor
procedures.food and personal protective equip-
ment to encourage people to turn out.
Mr Biden appears to be doing well in
the fight for the older vote. In Florida, a
crucial state where voters aged 65 and
older make up a fifth of the electorate,
Mr Trump beat Hillary Clinton to their
votes by 17 points. A Washington Post-
ABC News poll in Florida found Mr
Trump with an eight-point advantage
over Mr Biden among senior citizens, of
52 to 44 per cent. A New York Times-
Siena College poll in the state found a
narrower gap, with 47 per cent for Mr
Biden and 45 per cent for Mr Trump.
Mr Biden, in Florida on Tuesday,
said: “So many lives have been lost un-
necessarily because this president cares
more about the stock market than he
does about the wellbeing of seniors.”
Mr Trump told his Pennsylvania ral-
ly: “Biden cares more about illegal
aliens than he cares about your senior
citizens.” Later he tweeted a photo-
shopped image of Mr Biden’s face on an
elderly person among a group in wheel-
chairs with the caption “Biden for Pres-
ident” but with the P crossed out to spell
“resident”.
The emails supposedly taken from a
laptop belonging to Hunter Biden were
published in the New York Post, which
reported that they came from a hard
drive copied by an unnamed computer
repair shop and handed to Rudy Giuli-
ani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, who
spent months digging for information
on Mr Biden Jr to use against his father.
In one email, a Ukrainian business-
man described as an “adviser to Buris-
ma”, the gas company that put Hunter
Biden on its board, thanked him for
“giving an opportunity to meet your
father”. In September last year Mr Bid-
en told Fox News: “I have never spoken
to my son about his overseas business
dealings.”
A campaign spokesman said: “We
have reviewed Joe Biden’s official
schedules and no meeting, as alleged by
the New York Post, ever took place.”
Mr Biden and Mr Trump will hold
rival TV town hall meetings at the same
time tonight after their second debate
was cancelled amid a row over the pres-
ident’s health. The ABC network is to
host Mr Biden taking questions from an
audience in Pennsylvania while NBC
will broadcast a similar event with Mr
Trump in Miami.United States
David Charter Washington
Queues in Austin, Texas, on the first day of voting
First in line
States with early
in-person votingSeptember
OctoberHighest turnout in presidential
elections since 19641964 Lyndon Johnson (Dem)
1968 Richard Nixon (Rep)
2008 Barack Obama (Dem)
64.1%
60.7%
57.1%
Total votes cast in 2020 so far
...in 2016 at the same stage
14.5m
1.4m
Total votes cast in 2016
138.8m (55.5% turnout)2020 postal votes so far
4.6m4.6m
Of which 2.6m (56%)
are from registered
DemocratsAt leastRussia has threatened to break ties with
the EU in the row over the poisoning of
Alexei Navalny, President Putin’s big-
gest domestic foe.
Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister,
issued the warning after the EU’s top
diplomats agreed to impose new sanc-
tions in response to an alleged Kremlin
plot to kill Mr Navalny, 44. He collapsed
on a flight across Russia in August and
was flown to Berlin for treatment.
Last week the chemical warfare
Moscow threatens to cut ties as EU sanctions Putin allies
watchdog said that he had been target-
ed with a form of novichok, a nerve
agent developed in the Soviet era.
Among at least five senior officials
sanctioned were Alexander Bortnikov,
the head of the FSB spy agency, and
Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of
staff in the presidential administration,
both close allies of Mr Putin.
The Kremlin has described accusa-
tions that it plotted the assassination at-
tempt as “absurd”. Yesterday Mr Lavrov
said: “Russia would like to understand
whether it is possible to have any busi-
ness at all with the EU under the current
circumstances. The people who are incharge of foreign policy in the West
don’t understand the need for mutually
respectful dialogue. Maybe we should
stop talking to them for some time.”
Mr Lavrov said that Russia would
impose retaliatory sanctions. Moscow
says that neither it nor the Soviet Union
ever produced novichok. Dmitry Pes-
kov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, said Russia
objected to the EU’s attitude after “the
incident with the Berlin patient”. He
added: “This dialogue [with the EU] is
seen in the Kremlin as necessary and
useful. But... it takes two to tango.”
Separately, Moscow denounced as a
“delusion” the claim that PresidentTrump and Mr Putin had struck a
“gentleman’s agreement” to sign a new
nuclear weapons treaty to replace Start,
which is due to expire next year. This
week Marshall Billingslea, Mr Trump’s
special envoy, flew to Helsinki stating
that the US had a verbal agreement that
Russia was ready to help Mr Trump
score a foreign policy victory.
Sergei Ryabkov, Mr Billingslea’s
counterpart, said: “If the Americans
need to tell their bosses they supposed-
ly made a deal with Russia before the
election, then they won’t get one.”
On Tuesday Norway blamed Russia
for a cyberattack on its parliament.Russia
Marc Bennetts Moscow
Catherine Philp
Alexei Navalny, with his wife Yulia, fell
ill on a flight across Russia in August