48 2GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
President Trump’s claims of voting
fraud have been contradicted by his
own election security agency, which
called last week’s vote “the most secure
in American history”.
“There is no evidence that any voting
system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes or was in any way compromised,”
the Election Infrastructure Govern-
ment Co-ordinating Council (GCC)
said yesterday, as Mr Trump continued
to tweet debunked allegations that
software had “switched 435,000 votes
from Trump to Biden”.
Pressure is growing from Republi-
cans on Mr Trump, 74, to allow intelli-
gence and other handover briefings for
the incoming Biden administration,
which has been kept waiting for the
usual transition formalities to begin
while the president continues to
dispute the election result.
The extent of Joe Biden’s victory be-
came clear yesterday as news organisa-
tions called the states of Arizona and
Georgia for him, after holding back ini-
tially as the last votes were tallied, while
North Carolina was called for Mr
Trump. This meant Mr Biden ended up
with 306 votes in the electoral college,
with 270 required for the presidency.
Mr Trump, who has refused to con-
cede the election, appeared in public for
only the second time since his defeat be-
came clear, speaking at a presentation
on Operation Warp Speed, his push for
a coronavirus vaccine. He made only a
fleeting reference to the election, saying
“time will tell” who won.
Referring to his determination to
keep the country open despite rising
cases, which he again falsely blamed on
increased testing, he said: “Ideally we
won’t go to a lockdown. I will not go.
This administration will not be going to
a lockdown, hopefully, whatever hap-
pens in the future, who knows which
administration it will be, I guess time
will tell, but I can tell you this adminis-
tration will not go to a lockdown.”
The president declined to take ques-
tions after the presentation.
Mr Trump’s “election defence task
force” continues to appeal for money
from his supporters, who are receiving
several emails a day asking for cash.
One, sent in the name of Eric Trump,
the president’s middle son, said: “The
Democrats think that we’ll let them
trample the integrity of our election,
but they don’t understand the grit and
determination of the American people.
Can my father count on you?”
Mr Trump’s own security experts
told a different story. “The November 3
election was the most secure in Amer-
ican history,” said the GCC, part of the
Department of Homeland Security.
“While we know there are many
unfounded claims and opportunitiesare moving forward here at the White
House under the assumption there will
be a second Trump term.”
Kayleigh McEnany, the White
House press secretary, predicted a
“quite large” turnout in Washington
today for a “million MAGA march” —
Make America Great Again — in
support of Mr Trump. A counterprotestis also planned. Mr Trump teased that
he might appear, tweeting: “Heart-
warming to see all of the tremendous
support out there, especially the
organic rallies that are springing up all
over the country, including a big one on
Saturday in D.C. I may even try to stop
by and say hello.”
The international acceptance of MrIn the early hours of November 4, little
was clear about the result of the presi-
dential election. But one thing was evi-
dent: the polls had got it wrong again.
Florida had been thought to be in
play, with Joe Biden narrowly favoured.
Instead it swung to Mr Trump by a
greater margin than in 2016. Ohio,
which Mr Biden was considered to have
a shot at claiming back for his party,
stayed safely Republican. The genera-
tional Democratic desire to win Texas,
which polls suggested was plausible,
was revealed as chimeric.
Not that Nate Silver, the baseball
geek turned political prognosticator
behind the poll analysis website Five-
wrong for ever? Perhaps. What is most
confounding for pollsters is that they
believed they had worked out whatThe forecast for polling: it’s probably always going to be wrong
ThirtyEight, was taking any of the
blame. “If they’re coming after Five-
ThirtyEight,” he said on a podcast that
Wednesday morning, “then the answer
is f*** you, we did a good job!” Mr Silver
believed that Mr Biden’s lead was large
enough that even a very large polling
error would still result in victory for the
Democrat. And he was right about that.
Still, it is tricky to know the point of
polling that seems increasingly incapa-
ble of capturing what is going on in
America. The national polling error
was larger than in 2016. The final Five-
ThirtyEight polling average gave Mr
Biden a lead of 8.4 points, whereas at
present his lead is about 3.4 points,
albeit with some votes left to count.
So are American polls doomed to bethey got wrong in 2016 and had fixed it.
They had believed that the problem
was an undersampling of non-univer-
sity-educated voters.
By weighting their samples to reflect
the proportion of voters who attended
university, they believed they were ac-
counting for Mr Trump’s distinctive
strength in that demographic. When
they tested their new methods in the
2018 midterm elections, they seemed to
work very well.
Now it is much less clear what is at
fault, although there are embryonic
theories. David Shor, a Democratic
pollster, was one of the few who doubt-
ed whether 2016’s mistakes had been
corrected. He thinks that the persistent
problem is “partisan non-response” or,to put it more simply: Democrats
answer polls and Republicans don’t.
“Particularly after Covid-19, Demo-
crats got extremely excited and had
very high rates of engagement... this
translated to them also taking surveys,
because they were locked at home and
didn’t have anything else to do,” he told
the news website Vox.
By contrast, the kinds of voters
among whom Mr Trump has surged
have low “social trust”. They are not
hugely politically engaged in conven-
tional ways and do not tend to answer
surveys from unknown phone num-
bers. Since 2016 Mr Trump might have
made gains with the voters least likely
to answer polls and lost ground with
those most likely to.Henry Zeffman Washington Poor polling Biden
Florida Trump
Morning
Consult Nov 2 Actual resultWisconsin
ABC News Oct 28 Actual resultNational
Quinnipac Nov 2 Actual result52
45 485157
4049.5
48.854
4351
47Election was cleanest in history,
Trump supporters, many of them heavily armed, gathered in Richmond, Virginia,for misinformation about the process of
our elections, we can assure you we
have the utmost confidence in the
security and integrity of our elections,
and you should too.”
Two senior Homeland Security
officials are believed to have been fired
by the White House this week, and
Christopher Krebs, the political ap-
pointee in charge of cybersecurity who
set up a “rumour control” website to
correct election conspiracy theories,
said he feared he could be next. Mr
Krebs is thought to have angered the
White House by debunking claims
about a software fraud that supposedly
flipped votes to Mr Biden, calling it
“nonsense” and a “hoax”. On Thursday
he retweeted a message from a techno-
logy expert warning about “wild and
baseless claims about voting machines,
even if they’re made by the president”.
Chad Wolf, the homeland security
acting secretary, defied Mr Trump’s
order to fire Mr Krebs, the New York
Post reported. Half a dozen Republican
senators called on Mr Trump to allow
intelligence briefings for Mr Biden’s
team, insisting it would not be an
admission of defeat but a routine part of
the post-election process.
There was further pressure from
Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire donor to
Mr Trump’s campaign. His newspaper,
the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was the
first to endorse Mr Trump in 2016 but
has now urged him to concede. “The
president does a disservice to his more
rabid supporters by insisting that he
would have won the election [were it
not for] voter fraud. That’s simply false,”
it said in an editorial.
More than 150 former national
security officials signed a letter calling
for the Biden transition team to be
given access to the president’s daily
briefing and to begin security
clearances. They wrote: “Further de-
laying the Biden team’s ability to access
the president’s daily brief and other
national security information and re-
sources compromises the continuity
and readiness of our national leader-
ship, with potentially immense conse-
quences for our national security.”
Mr Trump’s inner circle continued to
insist yesterday they were heading for
victory as his team searched for fraud
claims that might hold up in court.
Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer,
tweeted: “There was too much fraud, in
too many places, to be a coincidence.”
Peter Navarro, the White House
trade adviser, told Fox Business: “WeChristian voters converted
Joe Biden’s victory over President
Trump owed much to the Democrat
making inroads with Christian
voters in crucial states.
While Mr Trump lost the popular
vote by more than 5 million, he
might have won with only narrow
shifts in votes in all-important Rust
Belt states. However, he was
hamstrung by a decline in support
from Christians, especially Catholics.
Mr Trump won white Catholic
voters nationwide by 15 points,
according to AP Vote Cast exit poll
data, a fall from the 33-point margin
he had over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
This might have cost him
especially in Wisconsin, scene of
one of Mr Biden’s victories in his
rebuilt blue wall, where 29 per cent
of people are Catholic.
Among white evangelicals Mr
Trump’s support fell from about 80
per cent in 2016 to between 76 per
cent and 78 per cent, perhaps
enough to cost him votes in other
key states.
In Michigan Mr Biden won 29 per
cent of white evangelical support
compared with Mrs Clinton’s 14 per
cent. In Georgia, where white
evangelicals make up about 35 per
cent of the electorate, Mr Biden won
14 per cent of evangelical support,
compared with Mrs Clinton’s 5 per
cent, according to analysis by
Politico. Mr Biden won the state,
which last voted for a Democratic
candidate in 1992, by 14,000 votes,
although it will have a recount.
Mr Biden attends Mass regularly
and will be only the second Catholic
president after John F Kennedy,
even though Catholicism is the
nation’s biggest denomination. Mr
Trump had claimed to have been
confirmed as a Presbyterian as a
child, but said last month that he
considered himself a non-
denominational Christian.United States
David Charter Washington