Tag Archives: Presidential Election

Is the Media propagandizing the possibility of a Civil War?

Trump vs Harris

Important Takeaways:

  • One in four Americans fear a civil war could break out following the presidential election, a new poll has found.
  • A YouGov poll of 1,266 registered voters has found that 84 percent of citizens believe America is more divided today than ten years ago.
  • Of the bipartisan voters surveyed for The Times newspaper in the UK, 27 percent say they fear violence is ‘very or somewhat likely’ after ballots are cast for the next President in 11 days.
  • Twelve percent of respondents claimed to know someone who ‘might take up arms’ if they believed Donald Trump is ‘cheated’ of an election victory. Five percent said they knew someone who would do the same for Kamala Harris.
  • The new poll follows a bombshell prediction of a psychological catastrophe across the country if Trump beats Harris.
  • Voters believe that the upcoming bid for the White House is ‘very likely’ (6 percent) or ‘somewhat likely’ (21 percent) to cause a second civil war.
  • [Dr. Ben Carson] We need to understand that we are not each other’s’ enemies in this country. And it is only the political class that derives its power by creating friction. It is only the media that derives its importance by creating friction… that uses every little thing to create this chasm between people. This is not who we are.

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United States to combat Russian influence in the 2024 presidential election

US-Attorney-General-Merrick-Garland

Important Takeaways:

  • Two employees of Russian state media, Russia Today (RT), were indicted, dozens of internet domains were seized for “malign influence campaigns” and a new visa restriction policy was introduced as part of the efforts to check foreign influence.
  • According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department on Wednesday, two senior employees of the state-funded RT used shell companies and fake identities to pay $10m to a Tennessee-based media operation to create content benefitting Russia.
  • US Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters that the operation involved millions of followers and never disclosed that it was being directed by Moscow while falsely claiming it was being funded by a private investor.
  • According to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury, sanctions were imposed on a total of 10 individuals and two entities.
  • The State Department has also imposed visa restrictions on the designated individuals and offered a reward of up to $10m for information pertaining to foreign interference in the US election.
  • Moscow allegedly wants to see Trump become president for a second time because the Republican candidate has repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine.
  • US authorities have said their efforts to counter interference operations are ongoing.

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Ex-CIA official warns of Chinese election interference in Taiwan: If taking control from within doesn’t work, military engagement is an option

Taiwan Soldiers

Important Takeaways:

  • Xi Jinping wants to ‘hollow out Taiwan from within,’ ex-CIA official warns
  • China’s ruling Communist Party is preparing for war over Taiwan, but President Xi Jinping would much rather take control of the U.S.-backed Island democracy without a military clash.
  • His plan, for now, is to tilt the Taiwanese presidential election in January in Beijing’s favor.
  • That’s the assessment of David Sauer, a former U.S. intelligence officer with deep experience in the region. He said China’s strategy is to “hollow out Taiwan from within” and “create chaos” around the election to seat a president who will push the island toward unification with the communist mainland.
  • Beijing will expand its operation using “a combination of information warfare, military intimidation, political and economic manipulation,” he said during an appearance this week on “The Washington Brief,” a monthly virtual forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation.
  • Chinese propaganda will also “frame the election as a choice between peace and war.”
  • In the wake of the election, China will assess whether to engage in military action or proceed with coercion tactics toward whatever Taiwanese government takes power, he said.

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Syria’s Assad hails vote, derided by opponents, as re-defining revolution

BEIRUT (Reuters) -Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Friday that those who voted in Wednesday’s presidential election have brought back the true meaning of revolution after it was tarnished by “mercenaries”.

“You have saved its reputation and relaunched it,” Assad said in a televised speech one day after he was announced as the winner with 95% of the vote.

The government sees the election, dismissed by the opposition and the West as a farce, as a statement that Syria is functioning normally despite a decade-old civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven 11 million people – about half the population – from their homes.

The win delivers Assad, 55, seven more years in power and lengthens his family’s rule to nearly six decades. His father, Hafez al-Assad, led Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000.

“You have redefined nationalism and that also means automatically redefining treason,” Assad said.

Assad’s years as president have been defined by the war that began in 2011 with peaceful protests before spiraling into a multi-sided conflict that has fractured the Middle Eastern country and drawn in foreign friends and enemies.

With the help of Russia and Iran, Assad has crushed the insurgency against him and regained control over 70% of territory but Syria is not at peace.

Turkey controls territory in the northwest where many of the four million people who fled Assad’s bombing see Ankara as their protector. The United States also has a small military presence in the northeast that underpins Kurdish forces in a region where major oilfields are located and much of the country’s wheat is grown.

The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the United States criticized Assad ahead of the election saying the vote would not be free or fair. Turkey, an Assad adversary, has also said the election was illegitimate.

China, Russia and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement congratulated him.

Assad on Thursday dismissed the criticism, saying that his enemies had “blindness of reason.”

(Reporting By Alaa Swilam and Maha El Dahan; editing by Grant McCool)

Explainer-What happens when the U.S. Electoral College meets on Monday?

WHAT IS HAPPENING ON MONDAY?

The winner of the U.S. presidential election is determined not by the popular vote but through a system called the Electoral College, which is mandated in the Constitution and allots “electoral votes” to states and the District of Columbia based on their congressional representation.

Before the election, state-level leaders of the two major parties selected people to serve as “electors.”

Technically, Americans are casting votes for those slates of electors, not the candidates themselves.

Those individuals are typically party loyalists who have pledged to support the candidate who got the most votes in their state.

There are 538 electoral votes, meaning 270 are needed to win the election.

Most electors are not household names, but the electors this year include Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, and Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former candidate for governor in that state.

Electors meet at a time and place selected by their state’s legislature. Nevada is meeting virtually this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Most states will livestream the ceremonies.

Electors will sign certificates showing their votes, which are sent to government officials including Vice President Mike Pence. Those certificates are paired with ones signed by governors showing the popular vote tallies, which have already been certified by all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Electoral votes will be officially tallied by a newly seated Congress on Jan. 6, in a special joint session that Pence will preside over.

At that point, the election is officially decided.

CAN ELECTORS DEFY THE POPULAR VOTE?

Yes, but that is a rare occurrence.

In 2016, seven of the 538 electors cast ballots for someone other than their state’s popular vote winner, an unusually high number.

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws intended to control rogue electors, or “faithless electors.” Some provide a financial penalty for a rogue vote, while others call for the vote to be canceled and the elector replaced.

COULD CONGRESS REFUSE TO ACCEPT BIDEN’S ELECTORAL VOTES?

It is theoretically possible, but such a move is extremely unlikely to work because Democrats control the House of Representatives.

A U.S. law called the Electoral Count Act allows individual members of the House and Senate to challenge the results during the Jan. 6 special session — a rarely used procedure.

Any objection to a state’s results must be backed by at least one House member and one senator.

The two chambers would then separate to debate the objections before voting on whether to reject the state’s results.

An objection must pass in both chambers by a simple majority.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Peter Cooney)

Trump declines to say if he still has confidence in Attorney General Barr

By Jeff Mason and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday declined to say whether he still had confidence in U.S. Attorney General William Barr after the Department of Justice chief this week said there was no sign of major fraud in last month’s presidential election.

Barr told the Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday the department found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. But Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said Barr had not searched for any evidence.

“Well he hasn’t done anything. So, he hasn’t looked,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “They haven’t looked very hard, which is a disappointment to be honest with you, because it’s massive fraud.”

Trump’s legal team has accused Barr of failing to conduct a proper inquiry or audit voting machines, a task that does not fall to the Justice Department during an election.

Barr told the AP there had been confusion over the department’s role in U.S. elections, and that civil lawsuits like those being pursued by Trump’s campaign were the appropriate legal venue.

Asked if he still had confidence in Barr, Trump said: “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now. They should be looking at all of this fraud. This is not civil, he thought it was civil. This is not civil, this is criminal stuff. This is very bad criminal stuff.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the president’s remarks.

“We found far more votes than we need in almost all of these states. And I think I can say in all of these states, far more votes than we need to win every one of them,” Trump said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Steve Holland and Susan Heavey; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Trump campaign challenges election results in Wisconsin Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump campaign said it filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging Wisconsin’s results in the 2020 presidential election in the state’s Supreme Court, the latest in a series of legal challenges to the Nov. 3 election.

“Today’s suit includes four cases with clear evidence of unlawfulness, such as illegally altering absentee ballot envelopes, counting ballots that had no required application, overlooking unlawful claims of indefinite confinement, and holding illegal voting events called Democracy in the Park,” the campaign said in a statement.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Franklin Paul)

Pence urges Georgia Republicans to turn out in final Senate battleground

By Jeff Mason

CANTON, Ga. (Reuters) – Vice President Mike Pence charged into the final battle for control of the U.S. Senate on Friday, urging Republican voters in Georgia to come out in force for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in two hotly contested Jan. 5 runoff elections.

With state officials poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory over President Donald Trump, Pence joined a bus tour through suburban Republican strongholds north of Atlanta, with stops at two “Defend the Majority” rallies.

“Georgia, I got back on the bus today because we need you to stay in the fight,” Pence told hundreds of cheering supporters at an outdoor event in Canton. “Stay in the fight until we send David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler back to a Republican majority.”

Democrats hope that challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will emerge victorious in the tight contests to give them a Senate majority that can push Biden’s agenda through Congress next year.

“Vote, Georgia!” Pence said, pausing to tell the crowd the exact time and place where early in-person voting will begin in their community on Dec. 14. “Be in line and vote!”

With Trump no longer on the ballot, Republicans and Democrats both face challenges getting large numbers of voters to the polls in January.

Pence, who the White House said will make repeated visits to Georgia ahead of the runoffs, traveled with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, a cousin of the senator and a leading party figure who served as the first Republican governor of Georgia since the post-Civil War Reconstruction.

The vice president portrayed Perdue and Loeffler as integral parts of Trump’s agenda to cut taxes, reduce regulation, fund the military, secure the border and appoint conservative judges, including three U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Pence’s visit came at a time of infighting between Georgia Republicans.

Georgia has not elected a Democratic senator since 1996. But Republican confidence has been shaken by Biden’s narrow 49.5% to 49.2% lead over Trump, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in nearly three decades.

Loeffler and Perdue ruffled party feathers by calling jointly for the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, as the state conducted a series of vote recounts focused on the presidential contest.

Loeffler also fought a bitter contest against Republican rival Doug Collins in the months leading up to the Nov. 3 election and may have alienated some Collins supporters.

Democrats, who netted only one Republican Senate seat nationwide in the election, need both Georgia seats to give them 50 of the Senate’s 100 seats, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris wielding the tie-breaking vote.

Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election is also complicating matters for Republicans by making it hard to rally voters to hold the line against a Biden presidency. Pence did not mention Biden in his remarks, portraying Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instead as political villains.

“Let’s show the world what Georgia’s all about, that the agenda of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi is not the agenda of the people of Georgia,” Pence said.

The vice president vowed that Trump would continue to contest the results of the presidential election, and drew periodic chants of “Stop the Steal!” and Four More Years!”

He steered clear of references to the intensifying coronavirus pandemic in addressing supporters, only some of whom wore masks with little social distancing.

Campaign donors and outside groups are pouring money and resources into the state for two-month runoff election campaigns that could see well over $100 million in overall spending.

Republicans have formed a fundraising network called the Georgia Battleground Fund led by scores of party celebrities including members of Congress, former governors and ambassadors. A source said the fund is seeking millions of dollars from donors in big states like Florida and Texas.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, an honorary fund co-chair, chipped in $1 million for the Georgia races during a Zoom call on Thursday with 60 other House members that raised $2.7 million overall in just 30 minutes, according to a person familiar with the event.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Georgia and David Morgan in Washington; additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw in Wilmington, Delaware; writing by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone, Alistair Bell and Sonya Hepinstall)

Georgia to re-count presidential election ballots by hand

By Jason Lange and Julia Harte

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Georgia will re-count all paper ballots cast in the Nov. 3 presidential election by hand, the state’s top election official said on Wednesday, a mammoth task that must be completed by Nov. 20.

Democrat Joe Biden secured more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to gain the presidency on Saturday by winning Pennsylvania after four tense days of counting, delayed by a surge in mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. Adding Georgia would only add to Biden’s margin of victory.

Republican President Donald Trump has refused to concede defeat and has said – without citing evidence – that the voting was marred by fraud.

The vote count in Georgia showed Biden ahead of Trump by just 14,101 votes out of some 5 million across the state. With the margin so small, a recount is needed, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference.

“You actually have to do a full hand-by-hand recount of all because the margin is so close,” Raffensperger said. “We want to start this before the week is up.”

“People will be working lots of overtime over the next coming weeks,” he said.

Officials will work in pairs, sorting stacks of ballots into piles and counting them under the watch of observers from both political parties, Raffensperger said. The piles will include ballots cast in person and by mail, he said.

“That’s how it’s going to be all the way through, and you’re going to tally it all up. It’s a big process,” he said.

The scale of the endeavor is such that if counting takes place round-the-clock, officials will have to count more than 23,000 ballots an hour in the nine days before the deadline for the results to be certified.

A study by the non-partisan group Fair Vote found that out of 31 statewide recounts between 2000 and 2019, the outcome changed in only three of them. More often, the winner won by a tiny bit more. On average, they shifted the outcome by 0.024%, Fair Vote found – a much smaller margin than Trump would need. Biden currently leads Trump in Georgia by 49.5% to 49.2%.

Georgia’s two U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, on Monday called on Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, to resign over his management of the election. They presented no evidence of fraud, however.

(Reporting by Jason Lange, Julia Harte and Tim Ahmann in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sonya Hepinstall)

Georgia state likely to go through recount in presidential election, secretary of state says

By Simon Lewis and Daphne Psaledakis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Georgia’s secretary of state on Friday said he expects a recount due to the small margin for the presidential election in the battleground state, where Democrat Joe Biden has a small lead over Republican President Donald Trump.

The presidential candidates each had 49.4% of counted ballots, though Biden was ahead by 1,579 votes as of Friday morning with 4,169 left to count, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, said.

“With a margin that small, there will be a recount,” Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, told reporters.

Officials said about 9,000 military and overseas ballots were still outstanding and could be accepted if they arrive on Friday and are postmarked on Tuesday or earlier.

There are two ways of seeking a recount in Georgia. A presidential candidate who loses by 0.5% of the vote or less can force a recount by sending a written request to the secretary of state, or a candidate can ask the secretary of state to conduct one by alleging a “discrepancy or error” in the vote tabulation. In that case, state law gives the secretary discretion about whether to conduct a recount.

Local election officials in Georgia also can conduct recounts in their counties if they think there is a discrepancy in the results.

The Southern state switched to new touch-screen voting machines this year. After a voter makes their choices, the machine produces a marked paper ballot that’s fed into a scanner that counts the vote.

Absentee voters – hundreds of thousands this year – filled out the same ballots, which also were fed into the scanners. If the scanner cannot read the ballot, a bipartisan group of election officials reviews it to determine whether or how it should be counted.

A recount essentially repeats that process, and in the past has not made big changes in the results.

Because of that, a recount is considered unlikely to have a big effect on the state’s vote totals.

(Reporting by Simon Lewis, Daphne Psaledakis and Brad Heath; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)