US President Donald Trump’s campaign website on Tuesday was hacked by cryptocurrency scammers.

Trump campaign website broken into by hackers

With a week left for&nbsp;the<a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">&nbsp;US elections</a>,&nbsp;the two leaders — the current Republican candidate and President&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;and his Democrat rival and former Vice President&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>&nbsp;— have started the last eg of election campaigning and are also covering the states which hold a minority of their party support.

The American voters have created history with <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-american-voters-make-history-more-than-70-million-cast-ballots-338468">more than 70 million voters casting ballot</a> a week before the November 03 elections — a number that could lead to the highest voter turnout in percentage terms in more than a century.&nbsp; As of now, the opinion polls are showing Joe Biden to be the frontrunner, but realistically speaking both the leaders have a fair chance of winning.

The United States has a total of 50 states out of which few hold more importance than the rest. These states are called "swing states" — also known as "battlegrounds" informally.&nbsp;In the elections this year, these states comprise of 15 major states. These result for these states cannot be determined as of now as the states work in a balance and can lead to either&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;or&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;winning the claim on the White House for the next four years.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-surge-in-can-i-change-my-vote-donald-trump-says-trend-refers-to-him-338447">Also read|&nbsp;Voters' remorse? Surge in 'can I change my vote' as US election nears</a>

The rest of the states are ones which have, in a way, already established their winner. Places such as&nbsp;New York and California are the areas where Trump&nbsp;cannot secure a win, while he can be crowned as undefeated in the Republican majority states such as&nbsp;Alabama or Oklahoma.

A swing states thi year is Arizona. The state has only voted for one Democrat — Bill Clinton&nbsp;(in 1996) — since 1952. In 2016,&nbsp;Donald Trump&nbsp;won this state with a margin of four percent. However, the state has seen a radical shift in its political atmosphere since 2016, and thus&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;also has a chance of winning the state this year.

Colarodo and Florida are the next two swing states with Colarodo having elected three Republican candidates and three Democrats in the past six years. Last time in 2016,&nbsp;Hillary Clinton&nbsp;has won the state in opposition to the ultimate winner,&nbsp;Donald Trump.&nbsp;Florida, too, has been one of the most unpredictable states in the history of the US elections.&nbsp;Trump, in 2016, won the election by&nbsp;1.19 per cent and&nbsp;Barack Obama by&nbsp;0.88 per cent in 2012.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-joe-biden-slams-donald-trump-on-coronavirus-blunder-338432">Also read|&nbsp;US Election 2020: Joe Biden slams Donald Trump on coronavirus blunder</a>

Georgia is another state which has usually favoured Republicans but has also helped&nbsp;Bill Clinton&nbsp;back in 1992. The recet political scenario is taking a shift which can change the results in the upcoming elections.

States such as Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Minnesota,&nbsp;Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina&nbsp;have supported&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;in the past and will be critical in the upcoming elections as the voters have been tad bit undecided this year. Texas has been a Trump supporter for the last four years. However,&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;has been putting in extra efforts to woo the Texas voters. However, Trump supporters have been vocal in upporting him this year too.

Each candidate's aim is to secure 270&nbsp;electoral votes, and each state's victory will put them a step closer to the swearing ceremony due in January 2021 at the White House.

The sudden shifts and the undecisive nature of the voters has been majorly due to the mail-in voting that has been adopted majorly by a lot of states this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The results of this year's elections can be delayed — a warning often highlighted by&nbsp;Trump.

With a week left for the US elections, the two leaders — the current Republican candidate and President Donald Trump and his Democrat rival and former Vice President Joe Biden — have started the last eg of election campaigning and are also covering the states which hold a minority of their party support.

With a week left for the US elections, the two leaders — the current Republican candidate and President Donald Trump and his Democrat rival and former Vice President Joe Biden — have started the last eg of election campaigning and are also covering the states which hold a minority of their party support. The American voters have created history with more than 70 million voters casting ballot a week before the November 03 elections — a number that could lead to the highest voter turnout in percentage terms in more than a century. As of now, the opinion polls are showing Joe Biden to be the frontrunner, but realistically speaking both the leaders have a fair chance of winning. The United States has a total of 50 states out of which few hold more importance than the rest. These states are called "swing states" — also known as "battlegrounds" informally. In the elections this year, these states comprise of 15 major states. These result for these states cannot be determined as of now as the states work in a balance and can lead to either Trump or Biden winning the claim on the White House for the next four years. Also read| Voters' remorse? Surge in 'can I change my vote' as US election nears The rest of the states are ones which have, in a way, already established their winner. Places such as New York and California are the areas where Trump cannot secure a win, while he can be crowned as undefeated in the Republican majority states such as Alabama or Oklahoma. A swing states thi year is Arizona. The state has only voted for one Democrat — Bill Clinton (in 1996) — since 1952. In 2016, Donald Trump won this state with a margin of four percent. However, the state has seen a radical shift in its political atmosphere since 2016, and thus Biden also has a chance of winning the state this year. Colarodo and Florida are the next two swing states with Colarodo having elected three Republican candidates and three Democrats in the past six years. Last time in 2016, Hillary Clinton has won the state in opposition to the ultimate winner, Donald Trump. Florida, too, has been one of the most unpredictable states in the history of the US elections. Trump, in 2016, won the election by 1.19 per cent and Barack Obama by 0.88 per cent in 2012. Also read| US Election 2020: Joe Biden slams Donald Trump on coronavirus blunder Georgia is another state which has usually favoured Republicans but has also helped Bill Clinton back in 1992. The recet political scenario is taking a shift which can change the results in the upcoming elections. States such as Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina have supported Biden in the past and will be critical in the upcoming elections as the voters have been tad bit undecided this year. Texas has been a Trump supporter for the last four years. However, Biden has been putting in extra efforts to woo the Texas voters. However, Trump supporters have been vocal in upporting him this year too. Each candidate's aim is to secure 270 electoral votes, and each state's victory will put them a step closer to the swearing ceremony due in January 2021 at the White House. The sudden shifts and the undecisive nature of the voters has been majorly due to the mail-in voting that has been adopted majorly by a lot of states this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The results of this year's elections can be delayed — a warning often highlighted by Trump.

Donald Trump vs Joe Biden: Swing states and their role in US Election 2020

Waving U.S. flags and beeping their horns, a car convoy carrying Republicans living in Israel, made its way on Tuesday (October 27) to the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in a show of support for Donald Trump and his party, bringing the race for the White House onto the streets of Israel a week before U.S. election,

Donald Trump supporters rally at US embassy in Jerusalem

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">US election</a> 2020, the market of prediction is running wild.

The latest and perhaps the wildest prediction has been made by the Republican presidential candidate himself.

Trump has claimed that his party will retake control of the&nbsp;House&nbsp;of&nbsp;Representatives on November 3.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-surge-in-can-i-change-my-vote-donald-trump-says-trend-refers-to-him-338447">Voters' remorse? Surge in 'can I change my vote' as US election nears</a>

Speaking in reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,&nbsp;Trump told reporters at the White&nbsp;House, ''After the election, we'll get the best stimulus package you've ever seen, because I think we're going to take back the House because of her."

Trump had made a similar prediction last week as well saying, "I think we are going to win the House.&nbsp;"We'll see. But I think we are going to win the House."

However, if nonpartisan political handicappers are to be believed the prediction is likely to fail.

David Wasserman,&nbsp;the polling guru who forecasted Republican candidate Donald Trump's 2016 win, is betting on Democratic candidate Joe Biden this time.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-polling-guru-who-forecasted-donald-trumps-2016-win-reveals-this-years-winner-338228">US election 2020: Polling guru who forecasted Donald Trump's 2016 win, reveals this year's winner</a>

"Overall, we're revising our outlook in the House from a Democratic net gain of five to ten seats to a gain of between five and 15 seats," he said.

Nathaniel Rakich,&nbsp;an elections analyst at <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-forecast-thinks-democrats-will-keep-the-house-and-maybe-even-gain-seats/">FiveThirtyEight</a>, said&nbsp;"Democrats have between a 92 and 97 percent chance of keeping control of the House."

Biden leads Trump nationally by 10 percentage points, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. The national online survey, conducted October&nbsp;23 to 27, found that 52 per cent&nbsp;of likely voters said they were backing Biden, while 42&nbsp;per cent&nbsp;&nbsp;were voting for Trump.

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the US election 2020, the market of prediction is running wild.

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the US election 2020, the market of prediction is running wild. The latest and perhaps the wildest prediction has been made by the Republican presidential candidate himself. Trump has claimed that his party will retake control of the House of Representatives on November 3. Also read: Voters' remorse? Surge in 'can I change my vote' as US election nears Speaking in reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump told reporters at the White House, ''After the election, we'll get the best stimulus package you've ever seen, because I think we're going to take back the House because of her." Trump had made a similar prediction last week as well saying, "I think we are going to win the House. "We'll see. But I think we are going to win the House." However, if nonpartisan political handicappers are to be believed the prediction is likely to fail. David Wasserman, the polling guru who forecasted Republican candidate Donald Trump's 2016 win, is betting on Democratic candidate Joe Biden this time. Also read| US election 2020: Polling guru who forecasted Donald Trump's 2016 win, reveals this year's winner "Overall, we're revising our outlook in the House from a Democratic net gain of five to ten seats to a gain of between five and 15 seats," he said. Nathaniel Rakich, an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, said "Democrats have between a 92 and 97 percent chance of keeping control of the House." Biden leads Trump nationally by 10 percentage points, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. The national online survey, conducted October 23 to 27, found that 52 per cent of likely voters said they were backing Biden, while 42 per cent were voting for Trump.

US election 2020: President Donald Trump's wildest prediction till date

Joe Biden holds 'drive-in' rally a week before US election 2020

Ivanka Trump shared a photo of herself and husband Jared Kushner holding their mail-in ballot. While Donald Trump earlier claimed a flood of mail ballots would lead to fraud.

Ivanka Trump shares a picture of her mail-in ballot

With a week left for the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">US elections</a>,&nbsp;the current President of the United States&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;has once again questioned the authenticity of the mail-in voting as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>&nbsp;is promoting the same.

While&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;is repeatedly questioning whether or not the mail-in votes are fair, his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner defied their father and opted for mail-in voting rather than casting&nbsp;in-person vote.

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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CG0IkZOBpWj/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_blank">I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for??? #Trump2020 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸</a>

<p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A post shared by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ivankatrump/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px;" target="_blank"> Ivanka Trump</a> (@ivankatrump) on <time datetime="2020-10-26T17:09:13+00:00" style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;">Oct 26, 2020 at 10:09am PDT</time>
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Ivanka Trump uploaded a picture on her official Instagram account which shows her and Jared Kushner holding their vote envelopes in hand while&nbsp;Donald Trump i sitting in his chair onboard the Air Force One. The picture is captioned, "I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for???"&nbsp;

She also posted the same image on her Twitter account.

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I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for???<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Trump2020?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Trump2020</a> 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 <a href="https://t.co/vEGIs2yZM0">pic.twitter.com/vEGIs2yZM0</a>
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/1320775685514772480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 26, 2020</a></blockquote>
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As soon as the picture surfaced, social media users of Facebook and Twitter started trolling Ivanka as she has, on various occasions, protested against mail-in voting, matching her father's tune of the mail ballots being a means of corruption and 'massive fraud' used by his rival&nbsp;Joe Biden.&nbsp;

The picture soon became a laughing stock with many users calling Trump&nbsp;a little more scary-looking than usual. Some internet theories also started assuming that the man pictured is a body double of&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;— a theory which holds no truth.

This was in direct contrast with Trump's&nbsp;personal narrative, as&nbsp;Trump, himself, opted for in-person voting in Florida over the weekend and on Monday, too, claimed that the mail-in ballots will lead to frauds. The same question was raised by the president on Tuesday. "It’s the only way we can lose in my opinion is massive fraud,"&nbsp;Trump said in Allentown. "It’s the fake ballots right? The phony ballots that are all crooked as hell."

With a week left for the US elections, the current President of the United States Donald Trump has once again questioned the authenticity of the mail-in voting as Joe Biden is promoting the same.

With a week left for the US elections, the current President of the United States Donald Trump has once again questioned the authenticity of the mail-in voting as Joe Biden is promoting the same. While Trump is repeatedly questioning whether or not the mail-in votes are fair, his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner defied their father and opted for mail-in voting rather than casting in-person vote. View this post on Instagram I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for??? #Trump2020 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 A post shared by Ivanka Trump (@ivankatrump) on Oct 26, 2020 at 10:09am PDT × Ivanka Trump uploaded a picture on her official Instagram account which shows her and Jared Kushner holding their vote envelopes in hand while Donald Trump i sitting in his chair onboard the Air Force One. The picture is captioned, "I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for???" She also posted the same image on her Twitter account. I’ll give you one guess who we’re voting for???#Trump2020 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/vEGIs2yZM0 — Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) October 26, 2020 × As soon as the picture surfaced, social media users of Facebook and Twitter started trolling Ivanka as she has, on various occasions, protested against mail-in voting, matching her father's tune of the mail ballots being a means of corruption and 'massive fraud' used by his rival Joe Biden. The picture soon became a laughing stock with many users calling Trump a little more scary-looking than usual. Some internet theories also started assuming that the man pictured is a body double of Trump — a theory which holds no truth. This was in direct contrast with Trump's personal narrative, as Trump, himself, opted for in-person voting in Florida over the weekend and on Monday, too, claimed that the mail-in ballots will lead to frauds. The same question was raised by the president on Tuesday. "It’s the only way we can lose in my opinion is massive fraud," Trump said in Allentown. "It’s the fake ballots right? The phony ballots that are all crooked as hell."

US Election 2020: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner opt for mail-in voting as Donald Trump questions authenticity

As the<a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election"> US elections</a> inch closer to the November 03 deadline, the two leaders —&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>&nbsp;— have fast-tracked their election campaigns and are urging more people to cast their votes.&nbsp;

Several Hollywood actors, sports legends and other celebrities, too, are encouraging Americans to opt for mail-in voting and/or go to the voting booth and cast their ballots marketing this to be one of the most important elections in the history of US politics.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/donald-trump-vs-joe-biden-which-celebrity-is-backing-whom-in-the-us-presidential-elections-333505">Also read|&nbsp;Donald Trump Vs Joe Biden: Which celebrity is backing whom in the US presidential elections</a>

With this push to the locals, the Americans have created history with more than 70 million Americans casting their vote in early voting, and the number is still increasing as the November 03 deadline inches closer.

According to the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/us-election">US&nbsp;Elections Project</a>, the tally of more than 70 million is half the total amount of the turnout from the 2016 election when&nbsp;Donald Trump&nbsp;and Hillary Clinton&nbsp;campaigned against each other, with Clinton winning in opinion polls but losing in main elections.

As per the Tuesday tally, this record-breaking number — which is increasing with every passing hour — could lead to the highest voter turnout in percentage terms in more than a century.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-surge-in-can-i-change-my-vote-donald-trump-says-trend-refers-to-him-338447">Also read|&nbsp;US election 2020: Surge in 'can I change my vote'; Donald Trump says trend refers to him</a>

This new number shows the newly-found interest of the American voters in the US election 2020, which could be due to the uprising caused by the 'Black Lives Matter' protests that crowded the streets of the US, or the rising death toll caused by the novel coronavirus — which Trump has been alleged to downplaying. This number also shows that people are trying to avoid the crowd on the election day (November 03) adopting to vote early to make sure they do not contract the deadly virus — which is expected to bring another surge with the onset of winters.

The opinion polls are showing Biden as the lead runner, as of now with more of Democrat supporters opting for mail-in voting — a system that&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;has openly criticised and questioned repeatedly. As of now, Democrats hold a rough majority of&nbsp;two-to-one in the early voting numbers, with Republicans rapidly narrowing the gap with in-person voting in the last few weeks.

Observing the trend of early voting this year,&nbsp;Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US Elections Project, is predicting the total turnout of the US elections to be nearly 150 million this year,&nbsp;representing 65% of those eligible to vote, the highest rate since 1908.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/gravitas-us-election-2020-americans-are-breaking-early-voting-records-338422">Also watch|</a>

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As the US elections inch closer to the November 03 deadline, the two leaders — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — have fast-tracked their election campaigns and are urging more people to cast their votes.

As the US elections inch closer to the November 03 deadline, the two leaders — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — have fast-tracked their election campaigns and are urging more people to cast their votes. Several Hollywood actors, sports legends and other celebrities, too, are encouraging Americans to opt for mail-in voting and/or go to the voting booth and cast their ballots marketing this to be one of the most important elections in the history of US politics. Also read| Donald Trump Vs Joe Biden: Which celebrity is backing whom in the US presidential elections With this push to the locals, the Americans have created history with more than 70 million Americans casting their vote in early voting, and the number is still increasing as the November 03 deadline inches closer. According to the US Elections Project, the tally of more than 70 million is half the total amount of the turnout from the 2016 election when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigned against each other, with Clinton winning in opinion polls but losing in main elections. As per the Tuesday tally, this record-breaking number — which is increasing with every passing hour — could lead to the highest voter turnout in percentage terms in more than a century. Also read| US election 2020: Surge in 'can I change my vote'; Donald Trump says trend refers to him This new number shows the newly-found interest of the American voters in the US election 2020, which could be due to the uprising caused by the 'Black Lives Matter' protests that crowded the streets of the US, or the rising death toll caused by the novel coronavirus — which Trump has been alleged to downplaying. This number also shows that people are trying to avoid the crowd on the election day (November 03) adopting to vote early to make sure they do not contract the deadly virus — which is expected to bring another surge with the onset of winters. The opinion polls are showing Biden as the lead runner, as of now with more of Democrat supporters opting for mail-in voting — a system that Trump has openly criticised and questioned repeatedly. As of now, Democrats hold a rough majority of two-to-one in the early voting numbers, with Republicans rapidly narrowing the gap with in-person voting in the last few weeks. Observing the trend of early voting this year, Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US Elections Project, is predicting the total turnout of the US elections to be nearly 150 million this year, representing 65% of those eligible to vote, the highest rate since 1908. Also watch| ×

US Election 2020: American voters make history in early voting; more than 70 million cast ballots

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the US election 2020,&nbsp;more than 70 million people have cast their&nbsp;ballots.

Raising worries about conceivable elector terrorising, Trump has been encouraging his allies to go the surveys and "watch cautiously".

The Republican presidential candidate has been telling his supporters that his re-election campaign will have people&nbsp;watching&nbsp;the&nbsp;polls "like crazy" on November 3.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-american-voters-make-history-more-than-70-million-cast-ballots-338468">American voters make history; more than 70 million cast ballots</a>

"Both law enforcement and yourselves and everybody," he told a large crowd at an airport in Londonderry near the city of Manchester.

Republicans are mobilising thousands of volunteers to watch early voting sites and ballot drop boxes leading up to November's election, part of an effort to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud.

Some voting-rights activists are concerned such encounters could escalate in a tense year that has seen armed militias face off against protesters in the nation's streets.

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Here's the historical backdrop of "survey viewing" and how the training may take on new importance in the midst of a flood in mail balloting prodded by the coronavirus pandemic and Republican President Donald Trump's unconfirmed cases that mail casting a ballot is filled with misrepresentation.&nbsp;

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-how-are-votes-counted-in-the-presidential-election-335422" hreflang="en">US election 2020: How are votes counted in the presidential election?</a>

WHAT IS POLL WATCHING?&nbsp;

Survey watchers are essential for US&nbsp;races going back to the eighteenth century, with their exercises constrained by state laws and nearby principles. Individuals from the two players watch out for the democratic - and one another - to ensure things go easily.&nbsp;

State laws call eyewitnesses inside surveying places various things and appoint them various jobs. In certain spots, the survey "watchers" are not quite the same as "challengers," who can call attention to individuals they speculate aren't legitimate electors. In different states, survey watchers additionally do the difficult.&nbsp;

Then again different principles set limits on how close hardliner allies can remain outside surveying places, as they attempt to prepare to uphold for their applicants with signs, flyers, and other promoting.&nbsp;

Grumblings about excessively forceful survey watchers are normal. In some cases, spectators have utilized the capacity to challenge electors' capabilities in manners that oppress minorities, which has brought about some court activities to end those practices.&nbsp;

In a 1999 city political decision in Hamtramck, Michigan, for instance, challengers from a city bunch called "Residents for a Better Hamtramck" tested 40 Arab-Americans who had "brown complexion and particularly Arabic names," who were then constrained by political decision authorities to make a vow to demonstrate they were residents, as indicated by a US&nbsp;Equity Department assent order. The city consented to gather information laborers, and a government inspector was selected to regulate city decisions through 2003.&nbsp;

In 1981, a Republican activity put outfitted men in regalia decorated with "Voting form Security Task Force" outside surveying places in generally minority territories during a New Jersey state political decision. After that episode, the RNC consented to an assent order that restricted its polling form security tasks.&nbsp;

That declaration terminated in 2018 after a government judge declined Democratic endeavors to reestablish it.&nbsp;

This year points the principal official political race in almost forty years in which the RNC can take part in polling form security exercises without earlier audit and endorsement.&nbsp;

WHAT ARE THE RULES?&nbsp;

Guidelines on who can "watch" casting a ballot and the forces allowed these eyewitnesses, change from state to state. In Pennsylvania, for instance, survey watchers can watch the political decision - checking turnout and casting ballot machines - and furthermore challenge electors by taking their interests to political decision authorities. Nonetheless, these challenges for the most part are banished from collaborating straightforwardly with citizens, or from making meritless difficulties that hinder casting a ballot.&nbsp;

Capabilities for survey laborers likewise change. They regularly should be enrolled citizens; in certain states, they should be affirmed ahead of time by political race authorities. North Carolina necessitates that survey laborers be of "acceptable good character."&nbsp;

Eyewitnesses likewise are allowed by law in states that lead races generally via mail. In Oregon, for instance, the law says gatherings and competitors can support eyewitnesses to watch political race laborers open voting forms and tally them, however, these screens must carry on such that "won't meddle with an organized system."&nbsp;

Allies of gatherings and up-and-comers may remain outside surveying stations with flags and other political promoting, an action known as "electioneering." But that additionally is dependent upon laws that fluctuate from state to state.&nbsp;

For the most part, these supporters must keep specific good ways from the passage, so as not to pester or scare electors.&nbsp;

In Ohio, the fringe is 100 feet, and it should be set apart by two little American banners. In Florida and Georgia, the limit is 150 feet.&nbsp;

WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS YEAR?&nbsp;

The COVID-19 pandemic methods uncommon quantities of Americans will cast a ballot via mail and not face to face in 2020.&nbsp;

President Trump has made unwarranted cases that these polling forms will be polluted by extortion. His mission is trying to select a huge number of volunteers to search for anomalies,&nbsp;for example, individuals dropping off more than one voting form in states like Pennsylvania where that, by and large, isn't permitted.&nbsp;

This exertion is trying democratic laws planned around the face to face balloting on Election Day, political race specialists said. There is no rulebook for screens attempting to enter early surveying destinations, or conceivably testing citizens in open who are attempting to drop off their polling forms, said Terry Madonna, a political theory teacher at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.&nbsp;

This current fall's political race will be the first in almost 40 years where the Republican National Committee will be free from an assent order that confined its capacity to take part in facilitated survey watching exercises. Leftists are worried that could open the entryway for Republicans to take part in a similar sort of elector terrorizing that brought about the assent order in any case in the mid-1980s.

ARE GUNS ALLOWED?&nbsp;

In a year that has seen equipped civilian armies stand up to protestors, some democratic rights advocates are anxious about the arrival of firearm hauling bunches appearing outside surveying places.&nbsp;

Some landmark states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Virginia, are purported open-convey states where residents can convey firearms straightforwardly in broad daylight. There are no laws on the books in those states unequivocally denying individuals from conveying guns into surveying places.&nbsp;

All things considered, state and government laws make it unlawful for anybody to attempt to scare citizens.&nbsp;

Casting a ballot rights associations to state they will have a large number of legal counselors remaining by who might mediate with nearby authorities or look for court requests to stop such movement.

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the US election 2020, more than 70 million people have cast their ballots.

With less than a week to go for the final showdown between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden for the US election 2020, more than 70 million people have cast their ballots. Raising worries about conceivable elector terrorising, Trump has been encouraging his allies to go the surveys and "watch cautiously". The Republican presidential candidate has been telling his supporters that his re-election campaign will have people watching the polls "like crazy" on November 3. Also read: American voters make history; more than 70 million cast ballots "Both law enforcement and yourselves and everybody," he told a large crowd at an airport in Londonderry near the city of Manchester. Republicans are mobilising thousands of volunteers to watch early voting sites and ballot drop boxes leading up to November's election, part of an effort to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud. Some voting-rights activists are concerned such encounters could escalate in a tense year that has seen armed militias face off against protesters in the nation's streets. Here's the historical backdrop of "survey viewing" and how the training may take on new importance in the midst of a flood in mail balloting prodded by the coronavirus pandemic and Republican President Donald Trump's unconfirmed cases that mail casting a ballot is filled with misrepresentation. Also read: US election 2020: How are votes counted in the presidential election? WHAT IS POLL WATCHING? Survey watchers are essential for US races going back to the eighteenth century, with their exercises constrained by state laws and nearby principles. Individuals from the two players watch out for the democratic - and one another - to ensure things go easily. State laws call eyewitnesses inside surveying places various things and appoint them various jobs. In certain spots, the survey "watchers" are not quite the same as "challengers," who can call attention to individuals they speculate aren't legitimate electors. In different states, survey watchers additionally do the difficult. Then again different principles set limits on how close hardliner allies can remain outside surveying places, as they attempt to prepare to uphold for their applicants with signs, flyers, and other promoting. Grumblings about excessively forceful survey watchers are normal. In some cases, spectators have utilized the capacity to challenge electors' capabilities in manners that oppress minorities, which has brought about some court activities to end those practices. In a 1999 city political decision in Hamtramck, Michigan, for instance, challengers from a city bunch called "Residents for a Better Hamtramck" tested 40 Arab-Americans who had "brown complexion and particularly Arabic names," who were then constrained by political decision authorities to make a vow to demonstrate they were residents, as indicated by a US Equity Department assent order. The city consented to gather information laborers, and a government inspector was selected to regulate city decisions through 2003. In 1981, a Republican activity put outfitted men in regalia decorated with "Voting form Security Task Force" outside surveying places in generally minority territories during a New Jersey state political decision. After that episode, the RNC consented to an assent order that restricted its polling form security tasks. That declaration terminated in 2018 after a government judge declined Democratic endeavors to reestablish it. This year points the principal official political race in almost forty years in which the RNC can take part in polling form security exercises without earlier audit and endorsement. WHAT ARE THE RULES? Guidelines on who can "watch" casting a ballot and the forces allowed these eyewitnesses, change from state to state. In Pennsylvania, for instance, survey watchers can watch the political decision - checking turnout and casting ballot machines - and furthermore challenge electors by taking their interests to political decision authorities. Nonetheless, these challenges for the most part are banished from collaborating straightforwardly with citizens, or from making meritless difficulties that hinder casting a ballot. Capabilities for survey laborers likewise change. They regularly should be enrolled citizens; in certain states, they should be affirmed ahead of time by political race authorities. North Carolina necessitates that survey laborers be of "acceptable good character." Eyewitnesses likewise are allowed by law in states that lead races generally via mail. In Oregon, for instance, the law says gatherings and competitors can support eyewitnesses to watch political race laborers open voting forms and tally them, however, these screens must carry on such that "won't meddle with an organized system." Allies of gatherings and up-and-comers may remain outside surveying stations with flags and other political promoting, an action known as "electioneering." But that additionally is dependent upon laws that fluctuate from state to state. For the most part, these supporters must keep specific good ways from the passage, so as not to pester or scare electors. In Ohio, the fringe is 100 feet, and it should be set apart by two little American banners. In Florida and Georgia, the limit is 150 feet. WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS YEAR? The COVID-19 pandemic methods uncommon quantities of Americans will cast a ballot via mail and not face to face in 2020. President Trump has made unwarranted cases that these polling forms will be polluted by extortion. His mission is trying to select a huge number of volunteers to search for anomalies, for example, individuals dropping off more than one voting form in states like Pennsylvania where that, by and large, isn't permitted. This exertion is trying democratic laws planned around the face to face balloting on Election Day, political race specialists said. There is no rulebook for screens attempting to enter early surveying destinations, or conceivably testing citizens in open who are attempting to drop off their polling forms, said Terry Madonna, a political theory teacher at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. This current fall's political race will be the first in almost 40 years where the Republican National Committee will be free from an assent order that confined its capacity to take part in facilitated survey watching exercises. Leftists are worried that could open the entryway for Republicans to take part in a similar sort of elector terrorizing that brought about the assent order in any case in the mid-1980s. ARE GUNS ALLOWED? In a year that has seen equipped civilian armies stand up to protestors, some democratic rights advocates are anxious about the arrival of firearm hauling bunches appearing outside surveying places. Some landmark states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Virginia, are purported open-convey states where residents can convey firearms straightforwardly in broad daylight. There are no laws on the books in those states unequivocally denying individuals from conveying guns into surveying places. All things considered, state and government laws make it unlawful for anybody to attempt to scare citizens. Casting a ballot rights associations to state they will have a large number of legal counselors remaining by who might mediate with nearby authorities or look for court requests to stop such movement.

US election 2020: The history and rules of poll watching

The Second Presidential Debate2020 brought much needed relief for American voters. But was it successful in influencing the pool of undecided voters? WION reports

Americans react to final Trump-Biden showdown | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

Violence broke out at a 'Jews for Trump' rally in New York, after Anti-Trump protesters clashed with the supporters. Eggs were hurled at Donald Trump's lawyers & ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani. WION reports

Pro & Anti-Trump protesters clash | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

No more Debates or Town halls. Just 7 days to the US Election. And Over 60 million Americans have already cast their ballots. A few states are opening early voting now & others are winding down to prepare for the big Election day. Who will America choose? WION reports

Record-shattering avalanche of early voters | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

The campaign for the US presidential election has entered its final week.

With one week to go until Election Day, 66 million Americans -- wary of the health dangers of crowded polling booths, and energised by a race framed as critical to the future of the country -- have already voted.

The number of early ballots far surpasses the total of 58 million pre-election votes in 2016.

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump was hopscotching across the Midwest and will be visiting the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Arizona and Nevada in the coming days. His Democratic challenger Joe Biden was campaigning in the once reliably Republican state of Georgia, and was further scheduled to travel to Georgia, Atlanta and Warm Springs.

Biden is also slated to hold a socially distanced drive-in car rally in Atlanta, Georgia's largest city. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by five points in Georgia in 2016 but polls have him running neck-in-neck with Biden in the Peach State.

Biden campaign has high hopes of switching Georgia from Red to Blue and also winning the two US Senate seats up for grabs.

Trump was to finish the day with a campaign rally in Omaha, Nebraska, in a sign that he expects a potentially tight White House race where every Electoral College vote counts.

Ahead of Trump's visit to Michigan, the Biden campaign lashed out at his handling of the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 225,000 people dead in the United States.

"President Trump's mismanagement of this pandemic has devastated Michigan," it said.&nbsp;

"Cases are surging, hundreds of thousands are out of work, and there's no end in sight.

"Eight months into this crisis, he still has no plan to get the virus under control, no interest in listening to the scientists, and no ability to lead our country through this moment," the Biden campaign said.&nbsp;

"With one week left until the election, Michiganders can finally put an end to the chaos, failure, and division that has defined Donald Trump's presidency."

Election tracking website RealClearPolitics has Biden up 7.6 points in an average of national polls and leading Trump by nine points in Michigan.&nbsp;

Trump dismissed the polls in a tweet on Tuesday and accused the media of focussing on the Covid-19 pandemic to hurt his chances for reelection.

"The Real Polls are now saying that I am WINNING!" he said.

"Until November 4th., Fake News Media is going full on Covid, Covid, Covid. We are rounding the turn," he said.

Trump also touted the confirmation of his latest Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, as a landmark victory for conservatives.

"This is a momentous day for America, for the United States Constitution and for the fair and impartial rule of law," he said at the swearing-in ceremony of the 48-year-old Barrett Monday night.

But amid this, the shooting of another Black man in Philadelphia catalysed into protests overnight. The White House said meanwhile that it was closely following the situation.

The Philadelphia shooting was the latest to spark anger in the United States, which has seen a wave of protests for racial justice since the police killing of George Floyd in May in Minnesota.

Trump has focussed on the unrest to bolster his claims to be the "law-and-order" candidate in his election battle against Biden.

(with inputs)

The campaign for the US presidential election has entered its final week. With one week to go until Election Day, 66 million Americans -- wary of the health dangers of crowded polling booths, and energised by a race framed as critical to the future of the country -- have already voted.

The campaign for the US presidential election has entered its final week. With one week to go until Election Day, 66 million Americans -- wary of the health dangers of crowded polling booths, and energised by a race framed as critical to the future of the country -- have already voted. The number of early ballots far surpasses the total of 58 million pre-election votes in 2016. On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump was hopscotching across the Midwest and will be visiting the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Arizona and Nevada in the coming days. His Democratic challenger Joe Biden was campaigning in the once reliably Republican state of Georgia, and was further scheduled to travel to Georgia, Atlanta and Warm Springs. Biden is also slated to hold a socially distanced drive-in car rally in Atlanta, Georgia's largest city. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by five points in Georgia in 2016 but polls have him running neck-in-neck with Biden in the Peach State. Biden campaign has high hopes of switching Georgia from Red to Blue and also winning the two US Senate seats up for grabs. Trump was to finish the day with a campaign rally in Omaha, Nebraska, in a sign that he expects a potentially tight White House race where every Electoral College vote counts. Ahead of Trump's visit to Michigan, the Biden campaign lashed out at his handling of the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 225,000 people dead in the United States. "President Trump's mismanagement of this pandemic has devastated Michigan," it said. "Cases are surging, hundreds of thousands are out of work, and there's no end in sight. "Eight months into this crisis, he still has no plan to get the virus under control, no interest in listening to the scientists, and no ability to lead our country through this moment," the Biden campaign said. "With one week left until the election, Michiganders can finally put an end to the chaos, failure, and division that has defined Donald Trump's presidency." Election tracking website RealClearPolitics has Biden up 7.6 points in an average of national polls and leading Trump by nine points in Michigan. Trump dismissed the polls in a tweet on Tuesday and accused the media of focussing on the Covid-19 pandemic to hurt his chances for reelection. "The Real Polls are now saying that I am WINNING!" he said. "Until November 4th., Fake News Media is going full on Covid, Covid, Covid. We are rounding the turn," he said. Trump also touted the confirmation of his latest Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, as a landmark victory for conservatives. "This is a momentous day for America, for the United States Constitution and for the fair and impartial rule of law," he said at the swearing-in ceremony of the 48-year-old Barrett Monday night. But amid this, the shooting of another Black man in Philadelphia catalysed into protests overnight. The White House said meanwhile that it was closely following the situation. The Philadelphia shooting was the latest to spark anger in the United States, which has seen a wave of protests for racial justice since the police killing of George Floyd in May in Minnesota. Trump has focussed on the unrest to bolster his claims to be the "law-and-order" candidate in his election battle against Biden. (with inputs)

Campaigning for US presidential election enters final week

The confirmation on Monday of Justice Amy Coney Barrett all but ensures a durable conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years to come and provides the capstone on the Trump administration’s broader effort to push the entire federal judiciary solidly to the right.

Its work has been so fast and so effective that there is only one vacancy now in the appellate courts: the seat left open by Barrett’s promotion.

But President Donald Trump and Republicans risk becoming victims of their own success. Without the specter of a liberal court to motivate conservative voters anymore, they may find themselves without the issue that played a crucial role in Trump’s unexpected victory four years ago and has fortified his political base throughout a tumultuous first term.

“It’s like the dog catching the car,” said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which handicaps elections and is forecasting a difficult environment for Republicans up and down the ballot.

On a larger level, there is the risk of getting complacent. Republicans feel satisfied that they appear to have prevailed in their decades-long quest to install more conservatives on the courts. Then there is the issue that the Barrett confirmation was uneventful and anticlimactic — not exactly the kind of spectacle that gets people marching in the streets.

Normally, a Supreme Court confirmation fight is an occasion that seizes the country’s attention and energizes partisans left and right. But the fact the entire country knew Barrett’s confirmation was a virtual lock took away any sense of mystery or intrigue.

“There was no drama,” Cook said. “After about three days it became clear there was pretty much nothing the Democrats could do. So it just didn’t get legs. And there is just so much else going on.”

Privately, Republicans have expressed some disappointment that there was very little of the partisan fury and indignation that erupted during the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018. The Kavanaugh hearings included a sexual assault allegation against him from his high school years, and became a remarkably emotional and divisive culture war clash that raised questions of class and privilege, gender roles and the presumption of belief extended to victims of sexual assault.

Though Kavanaugh forcefully denied the charges, and his allies accused Democrats of a vicious smear campaign, Republicans also believe the hearings awakened their voters a few weeks before the midterm elections at a point when polls were showing low enthusiasm on their side and many donors were remaining on the sidelines.

That November, Republicans gained a total of two Senate seats. In red states like North Dakota, the Kavanaugh issue helped put already difficult races even more out of reach. Donors who had written the party off started signing checks again.

Strategists said they could not be as certain that conservative voters will view the court with the same urgency as they have before. And they are seeking new ways to motivate their base.

“Right now we’re fat and happy,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a group that strategizes with Republican senators and the White House on judicial confirmations. “We have the first true conservative majority on the Supreme Court in 80 years. The president has done such an outstanding job on judicial appointments that we are out of federal circuit seats to fill. So Republicans could be complacent while Democrats are fired up.”

But Davis has not given up on the court as the path to igniting fervor on his side. He is pinning his hopes on court packing.

“Court packing is so much more of a culture fight,” Davis said, describing the Republican messaging on the issue, which encompasses a variety of proposals to reform the structure of the judiciary such as adding new justices to the Supreme Court and expanding the lower courts.

He ran through a list of rights that he thought an expanded court would jeopardize: religious expression, free speech, gun ownership. “Court packing is an extreme, clear and present danger,” he said.

Trump and Republicans in races across the country are amplifying those claims. Speaking at a campaign rally on Monday afternoon in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the president warned that his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, would “pack the Supreme Court with radical justices who will shred your Second Amendment and pro-life and so many other things.”

He mentioned Barrett’s nomination only in passing. And he did not bring up the issue of the Supreme Court — the issue many conservative voters see as his greatest achievement — at all during the final presidential debate last week.

Few other Republican candidates are mentioning the Barrett confirmation in their campaigns, instead going after Democrats with exaggerated claims about a plot by “far-left Democrats like Nancy Pelosi” to pack the courts, as an ad by the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Kansas put it. As speaker of the House, Pelosi has no official role in court confirmations, which the Senate handles. And Biden has not said he supports any plan to add judges to the courts, but he has proposed studying the issue through a bipartisan commission if elected.

When Trump started running for president five years ago, the idea that he could be in a position to pick the next justice on the Supreme Court was enough to alarm many conservatives. They worried he didn’t understand how important the issue was, questioned the sincerity of his opposition to abortion and considered it a very real possibility that he would name his sister, a retired federal judge, to the bench.

But in the spring of 2016, as he was wrapping up the nomination, he released a list of noted conservative judges and lawyers he promised to stick to when nominating someone that helped give him credibility on the issue. And conservatives turned out, determined to prevent a Supreme Court shaped by Hillary Clinton that would perhaps forever foreclose overturning Roe v. Wade, which established a legal right to abortion.

The court as an issue helped Trump win 81% of the white evangelical vote. And his commitment to it throughout his first term — along with his willingness to talk about the issues so bluntly and declare his desire to see Roe undone, which Republicans typically did not say even if they believed it privately — has forged a seemingly unbreakable bond with social conservatives.

Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, said that those trends appeared likely to hold in this election. Nearly 9 in 10 white evangelicals say they are “absolutely certain” to vote, he said, and the share of white evangelicals who support the president remains high — 79%.

Jones believes there is room to grow. “At this point in the game in 2016, that number was only 69%,” he said.

Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, cited “unprecedented enthusiasm” for Barrett’s nomination among grassroots conservatives and said her place on the bench would bring about “a much-needed change from the activist drift of the court.”

A significant number of people could, however, see the court as an issue that makes them vote for Biden. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero to many liberals, was a galvanizing event unlike almost any other this year for Democrats.

Senate Democrats also played their weak hand during the confirmation more cautiously and strategically than Republicans anticipated. Instead of raising questions about Barrett’s religious convictions as a conservative Catholic and how that shaped her jurisprudence, which Republicans had expected and prepared for, Democrats were mostly focused on framing a Barrett confirmation as the death knell of the Affordable Care Act and the coverage it provides for preexisting medical conditions.

“That didn’t excite the conservative base,” said Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project.

But what can, he said, is a vote in the Senate to confirm a sixth conservative to the court — and a reminder that the election a week away could nullify that and all the work conservatives have done with the courts over the last four years.

“With our voters, we’ve been reminding them that if Trump loses and we lose the Senate, the Democrats are intent on packing the court,” he said. “We can lose this in a blink — one week after we won it — and I think that’s a powerful message.”

The confirmation on Monday of Justice Amy Coney Barrett all but ensures a durable conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years to come and provides the capstone on the Trump administration’s broader effort to push the entire federal judiciary solidly to the right.

The confirmation on Monday of Justice Amy Coney Barrett all but ensures a durable conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years to come and provides the capstone on the Trump administration’s broader effort to push the entire federal judiciary solidly to the right. Its work has been so fast and so effective that there is only one vacancy now in the appellate courts: the seat left open by Barrett’s promotion. But President Donald Trump and Republicans risk becoming victims of their own success. Without the specter of a liberal court to motivate conservative voters anymore, they may find themselves without the issue that played a crucial role in Trump’s unexpected victory four years ago and has fortified his political base throughout a tumultuous first term. “It’s like the dog catching the car,” said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which handicaps elections and is forecasting a difficult environment for Republicans up and down the ballot. On a larger level, there is the risk of getting complacent. Republicans feel satisfied that they appear to have prevailed in their decades-long quest to install more conservatives on the courts. Then there is the issue that the Barrett confirmation was uneventful and anticlimactic — not exactly the kind of spectacle that gets people marching in the streets. Normally, a Supreme Court confirmation fight is an occasion that seizes the country’s attention and energizes partisans left and right. But the fact the entire country knew Barrett’s confirmation was a virtual lock took away any sense of mystery or intrigue. “There was no drama,” Cook said. “After about three days it became clear there was pretty much nothing the Democrats could do. So it just didn’t get legs. And there is just so much else going on.” Privately, Republicans have expressed some disappointment that there was very little of the partisan fury and indignation that erupted during the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018. The Kavanaugh hearings included a sexual assault allegation against him from his high school years, and became a remarkably emotional and divisive culture war clash that raised questions of class and privilege, gender roles and the presumption of belief extended to victims of sexual assault. Though Kavanaugh forcefully denied the charges, and his allies accused Democrats of a vicious smear campaign, Republicans also believe the hearings awakened their voters a few weeks before the midterm elections at a point when polls were showing low enthusiasm on their side and many donors were remaining on the sidelines. That November, Republicans gained a total of two Senate seats. In red states like North Dakota, the Kavanaugh issue helped put already difficult races even more out of reach. Donors who had written the party off started signing checks again. Strategists said they could not be as certain that conservative voters will view the court with the same urgency as they have before. And they are seeking new ways to motivate their base. “Right now we’re fat and happy,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a group that strategizes with Republican senators and the White House on judicial confirmations. “We have the first true conservative majority on the Supreme Court in 80 years. The president has done such an outstanding job on judicial appointments that we are out of federal circuit seats to fill. So Republicans could be complacent while Democrats are fired up.” But Davis has not given up on the court as the path to igniting fervor on his side. He is pinning his hopes on court packing. “Court packing is so much more of a culture fight,” Davis said, describing the Republican messaging on the issue, which encompasses a variety of proposals to reform the structure of the judiciary such as adding new justices to the Supreme Court and expanding the lower courts. He ran through a list of rights that he thought an expanded court would jeopardize: religious expression, free speech, gun ownership. “Court packing is an extreme, clear and present danger,” he said. Trump and Republicans in races across the country are amplifying those claims. Speaking at a campaign rally on Monday afternoon in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the president warned that his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, would “pack the Supreme Court with radical justices who will shred your Second Amendment and pro-life and so many other things.” He mentioned Barrett’s nomination only in passing. And he did not bring up the issue of the Supreme Court — the issue many conservative voters see as his greatest achievement — at all during the final presidential debate last week. Few other Republican candidates are mentioning the Barrett confirmation in their campaigns, instead going after Democrats with exaggerated claims about a plot by “far-left Democrats like Nancy Pelosi” to pack the courts, as an ad by the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Kansas put it. As speaker of the House, Pelosi has no official role in court confirmations, which the Senate handles. And Biden has not said he supports any plan to add judges to the courts, but he has proposed studying the issue through a bipartisan commission if elected. When Trump started running for president five years ago, the idea that he could be in a position to pick the next justice on the Supreme Court was enough to alarm many conservatives. They worried he didn’t understand how important the issue was, questioned the sincerity of his opposition to abortion and considered it a very real possibility that he would name his sister, a retired federal judge, to the bench. But in the spring of 2016, as he was wrapping up the nomination, he released a list of noted conservative judges and lawyers he promised to stick to when nominating someone that helped give him credibility on the issue. And conservatives turned out, determined to prevent a Supreme Court shaped by Hillary Clinton that would perhaps forever foreclose overturning Roe v. Wade, which established a legal right to abortion. The court as an issue helped Trump win 81% of the white evangelical vote. And his commitment to it throughout his first term — along with his willingness to talk about the issues so bluntly and declare his desire to see Roe undone, which Republicans typically did not say even if they believed it privately — has forged a seemingly unbreakable bond with social conservatives. Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, said that those trends appeared likely to hold in this election. Nearly 9 in 10 white evangelicals say they are “absolutely certain” to vote, he said, and the share of white evangelicals who support the president remains high — 79%. Jones believes there is room to grow. “At this point in the game in 2016, that number was only 69%,” he said. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, cited “unprecedented enthusiasm” for Barrett’s nomination among grassroots conservatives and said her place on the bench would bring about “a much-needed change from the activist drift of the court.” A significant number of people could, however, see the court as an issue that makes them vote for Biden. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero to many liberals, was a galvanizing event unlike almost any other this year for Democrats. Senate Democrats also played their weak hand during the confirmation more cautiously and strategically than Republicans anticipated. Instead of raising questions about Barrett’s religious convictions as a conservative Catholic and how that shaped her jurisprudence, which Republicans had expected and prepared for, Democrats were mostly focused on framing a Barrett confirmation as the death knell of the Affordable Care Act and the coverage it provides for preexisting medical conditions. “That didn’t excite the conservative base,” said Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project. But what can, he said, is a vote in the Senate to confirm a sixth conservative to the court — and a reminder that the election a week away could nullify that and all the work conservatives have done with the courts over the last four years. “With our voters, we’ve been reminding them that if Trump loses and we lose the Senate, the Democrats are intent on packing the court,” he said. “We can lose this in a blink — one week after we won it — and I think that’s a powerful message.”

‘Fat and happy’ with a conservative court, are Republicans losing a winning issue?

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trumps-pick-amy-coney-barrett-sworn-in-as-supreme-court-justice-at-white-house-338166">Donald Trump's pick Amy Coney Barrett sworn in as Supreme Court Justice at White House</a> 
 
<img src="https://cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_page/public/2020/09/27/161880-amy-coney-barrett.jpg?itok=uvySTIh8" />

President Donald Trump’s pick for the US Apex Court Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice in a ceremony at the White House late on Monday."I know you will make us all very, very proud," US President Donald Trump said at the swearing-in ceremony.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/wont-forget-silence-of-some-states-says-france-after-teachers-beheading-338170">Won’t forget ‘silence’ of some states, says France after teacher’s beheading</a> 
 
<img src="https://cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_page/public/2020/10/22/166193-untitled-design-13.jpg?itok=q7nzhki6" />

French Minister for Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian criticised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for not having expressed any condemnation or solidarity following the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty, who murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/head-of-us-military-academy-resigns-amid-systemic-racism-probe-338163">Head of US military academy resigns amid ‘systemic racism’ probe&nbsp;</a> 
 
<img src="https://cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/styles/story_page/public/2020/10/27/166788-us-general.JPG?itok=EQosRnKG" />

The superintendent of a top US military academy resigned from his post-Monday after the Virginia governor ordered an investigation into accusations of systemic racism at the school.

&nbsp;

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Donald Trump's pick Amy Coney Barrett sworn in as Supreme Court Justice at White House President Donald Trump’s pick for the US Apex Court Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice in a ceremony at the White House late on Monday.

Donald Trump's pick Amy Coney Barrett sworn in as Supreme Court Justice at White House President Donald Trump’s pick for the US Apex Court Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice in a ceremony at the White House late on Monday."I know you will make us all very, very proud," US President Donald Trump said at the swearing-in ceremony. Won’t forget ‘silence’ of some states, says France after teacher’s beheading French Minister for Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian criticised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for not having expressed any condemnation or solidarity following the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty, who murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in class. Head of US military academy resigns amid ‘systemic racism’ probe The superintendent of a top US military academy resigned from his post-Monday after the Virginia governor ordered an investigation into accusations of systemic racism at the school.

Morning news brief: Macron's war against 'radical Islam', US election and more

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government request to drop Donald Trump as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a writer who said the president falsely denied raping her in a Manhattan department store a quarter century ago.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan refused to let the government substitute itself for Trump as a defendant in former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll`s lawsuit.

Kaplan`s decision is a defeat for Trump, because dropping him as a defendant would have shielded him from liability and likely doomed Carroll`s defamation claim.

Acting at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, the Department of Justice has argued that Trump acted in his official capacity when denying Carroll`s accusations, and therefore could not be sued personally for defamation.

But the judge said Trump was not an "employee of the government" entitled to be shielded from Carroll`s claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Kaplan also said Trump did not make his statements within the scope of his "employment" as president.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Carroll`s lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government request to drop Donald Trump as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a writer who said the president falsely denied raping her in a Manhattan department store a quarter century ago.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government request to drop Donald Trump as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a writer who said the president falsely denied raping her in a Manhattan department store a quarter century ago. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan refused to let the government substitute itself for Trump as a defendant in former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll`s lawsuit. Kaplan`s decision is a defeat for Trump, because dropping him as a defendant would have shielded him from liability and likely doomed Carroll`s defamation claim. Acting at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, the Department of Justice has argued that Trump acted in his official capacity when denying Carroll`s accusations, and therefore could not be sued personally for defamation. But the judge said Trump was not an "employee of the government" entitled to be shielded from Carroll`s claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Kaplan also said Trump did not make his statements within the scope of his "employment" as president. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Carroll`s lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Judge rejects US request to shield Trump from rape accuser's defamation lawsuit

The White House is celebrating Halloween, Donald Trump is signing pumpkins, New Yorkers are clashing over ideologies & Borat Sagdiyev has turned political. WION's Palki Sharma gets you the latest updates from US Election 2020.

Gravitas: Why is Borat trending in America?

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate handed President Donald Trump a major pre-election political victory on Monday by confirming his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, with the White House planning a celebratory event afterward.

US Senate confirms Trump's Supreme Court pick Barrett

The US President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> has expressed his opinion about the controversial&nbsp;Borat Sagdiyev character, claiming he was never a fan of the actor-producer&nbsp;Sacha Baron Cohen.

Trump has often faced criticism for his style of leadership, and that is similar to the style portrayed by&nbsp;Sacha Baron Cohen. A few weeks before the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">US election</a>, a clip from the British comedian's new movie put Trump's&nbsp;lawyer Rudy Giuliani in a tough spot in which he is on screen in a "faked" interview with a woman and can be seen indulging in flirting (and more).

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Talking about the clip and Cohen, Trump said he always found Cohen to be a "creepy guy".

Recalling an incident from 15 years ago, Trump told few journalists aboard Air Force One&nbsp;that "years ago, you know, he tried to scam me. And I was the only one who said no way. That's a phony guy. And I don't find him funny."

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/borat-bounces-back-just-ahead-of-us-elections-337006">Also read|&nbsp;Borat bounces back just ahead of US elections</a>

However, the president did not provide any further details about his encounter with Cohen.&nbsp;

In a 2003 interview, Baron Cohen -- playing the wannabe gangster Ali G -- pitched a business venture to Trump: special gloves for eating ice cream.

Cohen has also indirectly taken a hit at Trump by jokingly lashing out at the media and calling them&nbsp;&nbsp;"fake news media" — a term used a lot by President Trump.

Giuliani,&nbsp;however, has declined these allegations claiming he was only "tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate."

The US President Donald Trump has expressed his opinion about the controversial Borat Sagdiyev character, claiming he was never a fan of the actor-producer Sacha Baron Cohen.

The US President Donald Trump has expressed his opinion about the controversial Borat Sagdiyev character, claiming he was never a fan of the actor-producer Sacha Baron Cohen. Trump has often faced criticism for his style of leadership, and that is similar to the style portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen. A few weeks before the US election, a clip from the British comedian's new movie put Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani in a tough spot in which he is on screen in a "faked" interview with a woman and can be seen indulging in flirting (and more). Talking about the clip and Cohen, Trump said he always found Cohen to be a "creepy guy". Recalling an incident from 15 years ago, Trump told few journalists aboard Air Force One that "years ago, you know, he tried to scam me. And I was the only one who said no way. That's a phony guy. And I don't find him funny." Also read| Borat bounces back just ahead of US elections However, the president did not provide any further details about his encounter with Cohen. In a 2003 interview, Baron Cohen -- playing the wannabe gangster Ali G -- pitched a business venture to Trump: special gloves for eating ice cream. Cohen has also indirectly taken a hit at Trump by jokingly lashing out at the media and calling them "fake news media" — a term used a lot by President Trump. Giuliani, however, has declined these allegations claiming he was only "tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate."

Donald Trump calls Borat actor, Sacha Baron Cohen, 'creepy' and 'phony guy'

With only eight days to go until the U.S. election, Los Angeles residents are taking advantage of early voting and turning out to cast their ballots before Election Day.

US Election 2020: Record overall turnout expected in 2020 polls

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is planning to spend around $15 million on television advertising in Texas and Ohio during the final week of the presidential campaign to help Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeat the incumbent president, Donald Trump.

Statewide ads in Texas and Ohio will run from Wednesday through November 3.

Bloomberg previously vowed to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune to support Biden in Florida though his super PAC, Independence USA, and other Democratic groups.

The former New York City mayor lost to Biden in a crowded field for the Democratic nomination.

Bloomberg asked his team to see polling data from multiple states and after reviewing the numbers on Monday decided to invest additional money to support Biden in Texas and Ohio, the spokesperson said by email, confirming a report in the New York Times.

Bloomberg will also increase pro-Biden advertising in Florida, fortifying a campaign that began mid-September with daily ads in 10 Florida media markets.

The Texas ads, in English and Spanish, will focus on Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ohio ads will focus on the pandemic plus the economy and Biden`s "build back better" theme, the spokesperson said.

Trump won Texas and Ohio in his 2016 election, and holding on to both states is crucial to his re-election prospects. As the second and seventh most populous states, both are prizes in the state-by-state contests that decide the presidential race.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is planning to spend around $15 million on television advertising in Texas and Ohio during the final week of the presidential campaign to help Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeat the incumbent president, Donald Trump.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is planning to spend around $15 million on television advertising in Texas and Ohio during the final week of the presidential campaign to help Democratic candidate Joe Biden defeat the incumbent president, Donald Trump. Statewide ads in Texas and Ohio will run from Wednesday through November 3. Bloomberg previously vowed to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune to support Biden in Florida though his super PAC, Independence USA, and other Democratic groups. The former New York City mayor lost to Biden in a crowded field for the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg asked his team to see polling data from multiple states and after reviewing the numbers on Monday decided to invest additional money to support Biden in Texas and Ohio, the spokesperson said by email, confirming a report in the New York Times. Bloomberg will also increase pro-Biden advertising in Florida, fortifying a campaign that began mid-September with daily ads in 10 Florida media markets. The Texas ads, in English and Spanish, will focus on Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Ohio ads will focus on the pandemic plus the economy and Biden`s "build back better" theme, the spokesperson said. Trump won Texas and Ohio in his 2016 election, and holding on to both states is crucial to his re-election prospects. As the second and seventh most populous states, both are prizes in the state-by-state contests that decide the presidential race.

Bloomberg planning to fund late $15 million push to help Biden in Ohio, Texas

New Jersey tech entrepreneur Arun Bantval is U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden`s top fake-news watchdog on messaging service WhatsApp about the Democrat and his Indian American running mate Kamala Harris.

Messages on WhatsApp, owned by Facebook Inc, are confidential and cannot be seen by moderators who police misleading memes, claims and other content on the social media giant`s flagship platform. Two billion users rely on WhatsApp`s free app to chat with individuals and groups of up to 256 people.

Bantval, 56, who chairs the Biden campaign`s five-member rapid response team focused on South Asian voters, has tracked dozens of concerning messages of unknown origin and crafted about 50 rebuttal graphics and texts over the last three months.

His team and similar ones at nonpartisan groups are trying to fill WhatsApp`s moderation void by joining big WhatsApp groups and asking community leaders to report items.

Fighting fake news on social media such as Facebook and Twitter has become standard practice for campaigns. But apps for secret messaging such as WhatsApp have flown under the radar despite serving as a crucial political forum among middle-aged Indians, Latinx and other immigrant groups.

South Asian voters, mostly Indian Americans, will be pivotal in the Nov. 3 contest in swing states such as Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania where results will be close and predict the national outcome, researchers and nonpartisan voting advocacy groups say.

About 72% of Indian-American registered voters plan to back Biden, according to a September survey by Carnegie Endowment. But South Asian Biden supporters and nonpartisan activists worry that misinformation on WhatsApp will affect turnout and support.

"There`s just a lot of inaccurate information for an already confusing process," said Chavi Khanna Koneru, executive director of nonpartisan group North Carolina Asian Americans Together. "And this year is different for everybody because we`re relying on virtual connections more than ever."

Each day, users can receive hundreds of memes, videos, voicemails and texts spanning greetings, social invitations and political propaganda. Users regularly forward shocking and humorous messages, with the original sender`s name automatically stripped, making it hard to trace them.

"It`s almost like going viral on Facebook," Bantval said.

WhatsApp said its role in U.S. politics is small. But political misinformation on WhatsApp in Brazil, India and elsewhere prompted the service beginning in 2018 to limit recipients when forwarding messages.

It also introduced a chatbot that users can message to access fact checks by internationally recognized organizations.

But when Reuters queried the system for topics in messages sent to South Asian voters, it generated zero results. 
WhatsApp also said users can search the web from heavily forwarded messages to find relevant fact checks, though Reuters again found no related results.

A campaign spokeswoman for Republican incumbent Donald Trump said WhatsApp was not a focus for its social media staff. But some misleading messages on the app target him over racial justice policies and alleged extramarital affairs, according to Indian voters from both parties.

"There`s more on the Democratic candidates, but there is fake news about the Republican side, too," said Kannan Srinivasan, an Orlando businessman.

TAPPING INTO FEARS

It is unclear where WhatsApp misinformation originates or whether the examples observed by Bantval and others are part of organized efforts. They said spelling and wording suggest some authors are Indian residents who view Trump as better for bilateral relations.

Messages seen by Reuters and sent to swing-state voters portray Biden`s views on Pakistan, Islam, China, taxation and policing in ways debunked by fact-checking groups.

Bantval said the misrepresentations preyed on older Indian immigrants concerns about crime, wealth and religion.

Other messages sent to South Asian voters in Texas and North Carolina, seen by Reuters, contain false claims that ballots will not count when voters select a Democrat in every contest or when election officials sign dropped off ballots.

Koneru estimated her North Carolina group spends about 15% of its time correcting inaccuracies about voting procedures on WhatsApp and other popular services compared with 2% during the 2016 presidential election.

"We do our best to jump in and clarify but there`s so many WhatsApp groups," she said.

New Jersey tech entrepreneur Arun Bantval is U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden`s top fake-news watchdog on messaging service WhatsApp about the Democrat and his Indian American running mate Kamala Harris.

New Jersey tech entrepreneur Arun Bantval is U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden`s top fake-news watchdog on messaging service WhatsApp about the Democrat and his Indian American running mate Kamala Harris. Messages on WhatsApp, owned by Facebook Inc, are confidential and cannot be seen by moderators who police misleading memes, claims and other content on the social media giant`s flagship platform. Two billion users rely on WhatsApp`s free app to chat with individuals and groups of up to 256 people. Bantval, 56, who chairs the Biden campaign`s five-member rapid response team focused on South Asian voters, has tracked dozens of concerning messages of unknown origin and crafted about 50 rebuttal graphics and texts over the last three months. His team and similar ones at nonpartisan groups are trying to fill WhatsApp`s moderation void by joining big WhatsApp groups and asking community leaders to report items. Fighting fake news on social media such as Facebook and Twitter has become standard practice for campaigns. But apps for secret messaging such as WhatsApp have flown under the radar despite serving as a crucial political forum among middle-aged Indians, Latinx and other immigrant groups. South Asian voters, mostly Indian Americans, will be pivotal in the Nov. 3 contest in swing states such as Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania where results will be close and predict the national outcome, researchers and nonpartisan voting advocacy groups say. About 72% of Indian-American registered voters plan to back Biden, according to a September survey by Carnegie Endowment. But South Asian Biden supporters and nonpartisan activists worry that misinformation on WhatsApp will affect turnout and support. "There`s just a lot of inaccurate information for an already confusing process," said Chavi Khanna Koneru, executive director of nonpartisan group North Carolina Asian Americans Together. "And this year is different for everybody because we`re relying on virtual connections more than ever." Each day, users can receive hundreds of memes, videos, voicemails and texts spanning greetings, social invitations and political propaganda. Users regularly forward shocking and humorous messages, with the original sender`s name automatically stripped, making it hard to trace them. "It`s almost like going viral on Facebook," Bantval said. WhatsApp said its role in U.S. politics is small. But political misinformation on WhatsApp in Brazil, India and elsewhere prompted the service beginning in 2018 to limit recipients when forwarding messages. It also introduced a chatbot that users can message to access fact checks by internationally recognized organizations. But when Reuters queried the system for topics in messages sent to South Asian voters, it generated zero results. WhatsApp also said users can search the web from heavily forwarded messages to find relevant fact checks, though Reuters again found no related results. A campaign spokeswoman for Republican incumbent Donald Trump said WhatsApp was not a focus for its social media staff. But some misleading messages on the app target him over racial justice policies and alleged extramarital affairs, according to Indian voters from both parties. "There`s more on the Democratic candidates, but there is fake news about the Republican side, too," said Kannan Srinivasan, an Orlando businessman. TAPPING INTO FEARS It is unclear where WhatsApp misinformation originates or whether the examples observed by Bantval and others are part of organized efforts. They said spelling and wording suggest some authors are Indian residents who view Trump as better for bilateral relations. Messages seen by Reuters and sent to swing-state voters portray Biden`s views on Pakistan, Islam, China, taxation and policing in ways debunked by fact-checking groups. Bantval said the misrepresentations preyed on older Indian immigrants concerns about crime, wealth and religion. Other messages sent to South Asian voters in Texas and North Carolina, seen by Reuters, contain false claims that ballots will not count when voters select a Democrat in every contest or when election officials sign dropped off ballots. Koneru estimated her North Carolina group spends about 15% of its time correcting inaccuracies about voting procedures on WhatsApp and other popular services compared with 2% during the 2016 presidential election. "We do our best to jump in and clarify but there`s so many WhatsApp groups," she said.

Fake news spread on WhatsApp to Indian Americans plays stealth role in US election

More than 60 million Americans have cast ballots in the US&nbsp;presidential election with seven days to go, a record-breaking pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US&nbsp;Elections Project on Monday.

The tally is the latest sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as well as voters’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to COVID-19, which has killed about 225,000 people across the United States.

EARLY VOTING IN AMERICAN POLITICS

Early voting also known as advance polling or pre-poll voting, is a convenient voting process for citizens to cast their vote prior to the scheduled election day. For the United States America, early voting is similar to absentee voting and the pre-polling period varies from state-to-state. &nbsp;

The process of early voting was introduced for Americans living outside the country and for the members of the military, merchant marine, and their families. American citizens have a varied option to vote early. Ballots, mail, fax, email and even on web portals. But since the beginning of the 2020 election cycle and the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, mail-in voting has suddenly become a subject of controversy.

WHAT IS MAIL-IN VOTING?

Americans have been voting by mail in the U.S. For close to a hundred years now, but it has never been an issue as it in the 2020 election. And there are two reasons for this. &nbsp;

The numbers of voters who vote early has increased in recent years and with the pandemic casting a shadow over the presidential polls, the democrats have pushed for citizens to vote by mail. With the election day inching closer, the early voter turnout is breaking records almost every day. In the 2016 presidential election, approximately 33 million votes were cast via mailed out ballots. Which makes for about a quarter of all ballots cast across the country.

And 2020 is witnessing a staggering increase in the early voter turnout, even in states which didn’t usually use mail-in voting. &nbsp;

The second reason for the mail-in ballot voting becoming an issue is the president of the United States Donald Trump. Trump and his team have repeatedly been claiming that the widespread mail-in voting will inevitably lead to "Fraud”. They're very little evidence for that. But despite trump's unsubstantiated claims, the number people running out to voter early is historic this year. &nbsp;With a highly polarised election inching towards its end, all hopes lie on the vote count &amp; result announcement. &nbsp;

More than 60 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with seven days to go, a record-breaking pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Monday.

More than 60 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with seven days to go, a record-breaking pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Monday. The tally is the latest sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as well as voters’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to COVID-19, which has killed about 225,000 people across the United States. EARLY VOTING IN AMERICAN POLITICS Early voting also known as advance polling or pre-poll voting, is a convenient voting process for citizens to cast their vote prior to the scheduled election day. For the United States America, early voting is similar to absentee voting and the pre-polling period varies from state-to-state. The process of early voting was introduced for Americans living outside the country and for the members of the military, merchant marine, and their families. American citizens have a varied option to vote early. Ballots, mail, fax, email and even on web portals. But since the beginning of the 2020 election cycle and the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, mail-in voting has suddenly become a subject of controversy. WHAT IS MAIL-IN VOTING? Americans have been voting by mail in the U.S. For close to a hundred years now, but it has never been an issue as it in the 2020 election. And there are two reasons for this. The numbers of voters who vote early has increased in recent years and with the pandemic casting a shadow over the presidential polls, the democrats have pushed for citizens to vote by mail. With the election day inching closer, the early voter turnout is breaking records almost every day. In the 2016 presidential election, approximately 33 million votes were cast via mailed out ballots. Which makes for about a quarter of all ballots cast across the country. And 2020 is witnessing a staggering increase in the early voter turnout, even in states which didn’t usually use mail-in voting. The second reason for the mail-in ballot voting becoming an issue is the president of the United States Donald Trump. Trump and his team have repeatedly been claiming that the widespread mail-in voting will inevitably lead to "Fraud”. They're very little evidence for that. But despite trump's unsubstantiated claims, the number people running out to voter early is historic this year. With a highly polarised election inching towards its end, all hopes lie on the vote count & result announcement.

US election 2020: The controversy behind early voting

With exactly one week to go for the US election 2020,&nbsp;Dave Wasserman, the polling guru who forecasted Republican candidate Donald Trump's 2016 win, is betting on Democratic&nbsp;candidate Joe Biden this time.

Wasserman believes that while polls are more stable in comparison to four years ago, President Trump is underperforming and though the race may tighten in the upcoming week, his path looks increasingly difficult.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-election-2020-opinion-polls-show-joe-biden-holding-substantial-lead-337842/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by a solid margin in Wisconsin and maintains a narrower advantage in Pennsylvania with just over a week until November 3.

<img alt="Trump" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="9d39d742-f6eb-4801-a174-3455da9357a2" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Capture%208256_0.PNG" />

Wasserman has predicts that&nbsp;six states,&nbsp;Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona,&nbsp;will play critical roles in deciding whether Trump wins a second term in office or if Biden ousts him.

He highlighted the possibility of&nbsp;the race getting&nbsp;closer to where it was in September, which was when Biden had an average lead of more like 7 or 8 points than 10.&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/who-will-be-americas-future-us-election-2020-new-york-direct-338147/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Trump does not have a lot of margin for error&nbsp;as Biden has a much more stable lead in comparison to Hillary Clinton for years ago.

Biden's lead increased in October after Trump, who faced criticism for downplaying coronavirus pandemic as a ''flu'' and a ''hoax'', himself contracted the novel virus.

As COVID-19 hits swing states, Biden and Trump showed sharp contrast. While Trump said America was turning the corner in the fight against COVID-19 and mocked Biden's more cautious campaigning style. Biden&nbsp;warned that the cold months ahead could be even harsher due to a resurgence of the virus, which has killed more people in the United States than anywhere else and is on the rise in several battleground states.

Wasserman says that in 2016, polls chronically undersampled Trump’s base of support, and that led a lot of the media astray. And the polls are far from perfect in US election 2020 as well as&nbsp;there’s a lot of disagreement between online polls and live-interview polls.

With exactly one week to go for the US election 2020, Dave Wasserman, the polling guru who forecasted Republican candidate Donald Trump's 2016 win, is betting on Democratic candidate Joe Biden this time.

With exactly one week to go for the US election 2020, Dave Wasserman, the polling guru who forecasted Republican candidate Donald Trump's 2016 win, is betting on Democratic candidate Joe Biden this time. Wasserman believes that while polls are more stable in comparison to four years ago, President Trump is underperforming and though the race may tighten in the upcoming week, his path looks increasingly difficult. Democratic presidential challenger Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by a solid margin in Wisconsin and maintains a narrower advantage in Pennsylvania with just over a week until November 3. Wasserman has predicts that six states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, will play critical roles in deciding whether Trump wins a second term in office or if Biden ousts him. He highlighted the possibility of the race getting closer to where it was in September, which was when Biden had an average lead of more like 7 or 8 points than 10. Trump does not have a lot of margin for error as Biden has a much more stable lead in comparison to Hillary Clinton for years ago. Biden's lead increased in October after Trump, who faced criticism for downplaying coronavirus pandemic as a ''flu'' and a ''hoax'', himself contracted the novel virus. As COVID-19 hits swing states, Biden and Trump showed sharp contrast. While Trump said America was turning the corner in the fight against COVID-19 and mocked Biden's more cautious campaigning style. Biden warned that the cold months ahead could be even harsher due to a resurgence of the virus, which has killed more people in the United States than anywhere else and is on the rise in several battleground states. Wasserman says that in 2016, polls chronically undersampled Trump’s base of support, and that led a lot of the media astray. And the polls are far from perfect in US election 2020 as well as there’s a lot of disagreement between online polls and live-interview polls.

US election 2020: Polling guru who forecasted Donald Trump's 2016 win, reveals this year's winner

In the last gasp on the campaign season, Donald Trump is barreling across the country with back-to-back rallies. With just 8 days to US Election 2020, Will Trump's 2016 political strategies work?

Will Trump's 2016 strategies work? | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

With a steady lead in polls & a massive cash advantage, Joe Biden & Kamala Harris are carefully surveying the states & strategizing their moves. Just 8 days to US Election 2020, should Joe Biden go big or play it safe post 2016 lessons?

Who will be America's future? | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

In the midst of a polarised election in the history of America, SCOTUS is going through a parallel reality. Final confirmation vote on Amy Coney Barrett is on the horizon with choosing a Supreme Court Justice so close to US Election 2020. WION reports

Final vote for judge Barrett's confirmation | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

With a bit of rejiggering, President Trump & Melania Trump played host to super heroes, unicorns, princesses & even a miniature version of themselves. The south portico at White House was decorated with shades of autumn & Pumpkins. WION brings you the highlights from The HALLOWEEN CELEBRATION

White House hosts Halloween | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Like nearly half of all the eligible voters in her county in 2016, Keyana Fedrick did not vote.

Four years later, politics has permeated her corner of northeastern Pennsylvania. Someone sawed a hole in a large Trump sign near one of her jobs. The election office in her county is so overwhelmed with demand that it took over the coroner’s office next door. Her parents, both Democrats born in the 1950s, keep telling her she should vote for Joe Biden. Anything is better than President Donald Trump, they say.

But Fedrick, who works two jobs, at a hotel and at a department store, does not trust either of the two main political parties, because nothing in her 31 years of life has led her to believe that she could. She says they abandon voters like “a bad mom or dad who promises to come and see you, and I’m sitting outside with my bags packed and they never show up.”

That is why Fedrick does not regret her decision in 2016 to skip the voting booth. In fact, she plans to repeat it again this year — something that she and a friend have started to hide from people they know.

“We said we’re just going to lie, like ‘Oh yeah, I voted,” she said. “I don’t feel like getting crucified for what I think.”

As the presidential campaign reaches its final week, early-voting turnout in a number of states has been higher than last time, mail-in ballot requests are surging and some are predicting the highest turnout in many decades. But if history is any indication, a significant portion of Americans will not participate, a signal of distrust and disillusionment with the political system that spans the partisan divide.

Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. But since the 1960s, between a third and a half of eligible voters have stayed home during presidential elections, one of the lowest rates among America’s developed peers. Since the early 1900s, the high point for presidential turnout was in 1960, when 63.8% of eligible adults voted, according to the United States Elections Project that tracks voting data back to 1789. Most recently, the highest peak was in 2008, when 61.6% turned out.

An analysis of Census Bureau survey data from the 2016 election shows a deep class divide: Americans who did not vote were more likely to be poor, less likely to have a college degree, and more likely to be a single parent than the people who voted. They were also less likely to be in the labor force.

The data give a comprehensive look at who voted and who did not, and while no two elections are the same, it points to patterns for why some people are more likely to vote than others.

Not voting has been a feature of the American political landscape for decades. But with razor slim margins in a number of swing states last time, nonvoters have taken on an outsize importance: Even a small victory in converting some of them may tip the scales.

Consider Pennsylvania. More than 3.5 million eligible voters in the state did not cast ballots for president in the 2016 election, a number that dwarfed Trump’s slender margin of 44,292. Monroe County, the Pocono Mountain vacation spot where Fedrick lives, is a microcosm of the state. About 56,000 eligible adults stayed home, more than 100 times Hillary Clinton’s 532-vote margin of victory.

In interviews in Monroe County this month, some of the people who did not vote in 2016 said they planned to vote this year. The stakes were too high to miss it, they said.

“I never thought I’d be bothered with this crap, but now it really counts,” said Jack Breglia, 49, a retired tow truck driver in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. He could not remember the last time he voted but said he planned to vote for Trump this time.

But many others said they would not. They expressed a profound distrust of politics and doubted their vote would have an effect. They felt a sense of foreboding about the country and saw politics as one of the main forces doing the threatening. Many were not particularly partisan and said they shrank from people who were.

“I try to avoid it because it gets angry and nasty,” said Susan Miller, 42, a waitress at Compton’s Pancake House in Stroudsburg, who said she had voted once in her life, for Barack Obama in 2008.

One predictor of political engagement is growing up in a family that talked about politics. Miller did not. And she is so sick of the one person in her life who is loudly insisting that she vote — an aunt who supports Trump — that she has started simply pretending that she will.

Like many people interviewed for this article, Miller was scrambling to pay rent and buy groceries. Monroe County’s unemployment rate stood at around 13% in August, as the pandemic bit into the county’s tourism industry. Her tips have fallen by half and she is now working for Instacart to make up the difference. Two close relatives have died of COVID-19.

“Politics? It’s the least of my worries,” she said.

She said she would vote again “if the right person came in.”

But Biden is not that person, she said. Miller said she had not watched any of the debates or kept up with the candidates.

“I’m just trying to make it through,” she said.

In recent decades, richer, more educated people are far more likely to vote. In the 2016 analysis, about three quarters of those living in households earning at least $150,000 voted, compared with less than half of those in households earning less than $25,000. About 76% of college graduates voted, compared with 52% of people with just a high school degree.

Marriage mattered, too: Just 45% of single women who had children and were eligible to vote cast ballots compared with 70% of married mothers.

Jennifer Martin, 46, a single mother waiting in line in her car at the Pleasant Valley Ecumenical Network food pantry in Sciota, Pennsylvania, said last time she voted she was in her 20s. Politics, she said, has little relevance to her life. The two political parties seemed about the same.

A recent study found that people like Martin who do not follow politics closely have different concerns from those who do. For example, they say that low hourly wages are among the most important problems facing the country. For hard partisans, who are more likely to vote, the issue barely registers.

“I work at a day care where they pay their workers nothing,” she said. “That’s why I have to come to places like this to feed my family.”

Might the election change things?

“I’m not interested in it,” she said.

Fedrick was one of those who stayed away in 2016, but not because she was not following the news. She has become increasingly angry at the American political system, which she believes is tilted against Black people like her and people who are poor.

She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, whose failing schools and violent streets prompted her parents — an art teacher and a city bus driver — to move to East Stroudsburg when she was 12.

College was a stretch financially. She said she has tried twice for associate degrees, but has not finished either. She ended up with $5,000 in debt. At 31, she is still living with her mother.

Her father, who grew up in rural Georgia in the 1960s, keeps telling her things have gotten better. Government can be responsive, even if it is slow. Voting matters.

She sees no evidence of progress. Minimum wage has been stuck for more than a decade and the problems of police violence against Black people, joblessness and incarceration only seem to get worse.

“We need to break up with the system,” she said. “This system wasn’t designed for us to win.”

Just 47% of African Americans under 30 voted in 2016, compared with nearly 70% of those over 65, a pattern of youth disenchantment common to Americans of all races and ethnicities

Many interviewed in Monroe County said they felt their vote did not matter, pointing to the contested 2000 presidential election and to Trump losing the popular vote. Some said they thought powerful insiders were the ones who really decided.

“We love you and we wish you good luck,” said Fannie Sanchez, 44, a New York-born daughter of Columbian immigrants, of voters. People who do not vote “already saw that there’s something being maneuvered back there. We just unplug ourselves.”

Sanchez is part of a demographic that also had low turnout in 2016: American-born Hispanics. She said in 2008 she swallowed her cynicism and cast the first vote in her life, for Obama.

“I had to just close my eyes and say, ‘If this is fake, I don’t care. I want to be part of this.’”

But she did not vote for him again. Politicians are noisy, but ultimately of no use.

“They rent space in my brain and they frustrate me, but in the end, they do what they want anyway,” she said.

The sheer toxicity of politics is also having an effect. Kyle Marsh, 23, an operations manager for a beer wholesaler, is not particularly political, but most around him are. His mother, a nurse, is furious at Trump. His friends are angry, too. On Instagram recently, one said, “imagine being dumb enough to vote for the worst person in history?” The post made him uncomfortable: He has a friend who likes Trump. But he kept quiet.

“Do you know how many friends I’d lose if I say something?” he said. Voting means being part of the outrage. That is why he will opt out.

Others see a reason to vote this time. Latoya Garrison, a single mother who works nights at a factory putting safety seals on cosmetics, did not vote in 2016. But the coronavirus changed her mind this time. Her tips waitressing at the Roasted Tomato dwindled to $30 a day, and this fall, a social services agency helped her pay rent.

“I’m looking for who is more into controlling this virus, so we can go back to normal,” she said. “I don’t care about anything else.”

The week before last, she voted by mail for Biden.

EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Like nearly half of all the eligible voters in her county in 2016, Keyana Fedrick did not vote. Four years later, politics has permeated her corner of northeastern Pennsylvania.

EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Like nearly half of all the eligible voters in her county in 2016, Keyana Fedrick did not vote. Four years later, politics has permeated her corner of northeastern Pennsylvania. Someone sawed a hole in a large Trump sign near one of her jobs. The election office in her county is so overwhelmed with demand that it took over the coroner’s office next door. Her parents, both Democrats born in the 1950s, keep telling her she should vote for Joe Biden. Anything is better than President Donald Trump, they say. But Fedrick, who works two jobs, at a hotel and at a department store, does not trust either of the two main political parties, because nothing in her 31 years of life has led her to believe that she could. She says they abandon voters like “a bad mom or dad who promises to come and see you, and I’m sitting outside with my bags packed and they never show up.” That is why Fedrick does not regret her decision in 2016 to skip the voting booth. In fact, she plans to repeat it again this year — something that she and a friend have started to hide from people they know. “We said we’re just going to lie, like ‘Oh yeah, I voted,” she said. “I don’t feel like getting crucified for what I think.” As the presidential campaign reaches its final week, early-voting turnout in a number of states has been higher than last time, mail-in ballot requests are surging and some are predicting the highest turnout in many decades. But if history is any indication, a significant portion of Americans will not participate, a signal of distrust and disillusionment with the political system that spans the partisan divide. Voting is fundamentally an act of hope. But since the 1960s, between a third and a half of eligible voters have stayed home during presidential elections, one of the lowest rates among America’s developed peers. Since the early 1900s, the high point for presidential turnout was in 1960, when 63.8% of eligible adults voted, according to the United States Elections Project that tracks voting data back to 1789. Most recently, the highest peak was in 2008, when 61.6% turned out. An analysis of Census Bureau survey data from the 2016 election shows a deep class divide: Americans who did not vote were more likely to be poor, less likely to have a college degree, and more likely to be a single parent than the people who voted. They were also less likely to be in the labor force. The data give a comprehensive look at who voted and who did not, and while no two elections are the same, it points to patterns for why some people are more likely to vote than others. Not voting has been a feature of the American political landscape for decades. But with razor slim margins in a number of swing states last time, nonvoters have taken on an outsize importance: Even a small victory in converting some of them may tip the scales. Consider Pennsylvania. More than 3.5 million eligible voters in the state did not cast ballots for president in the 2016 election, a number that dwarfed Trump’s slender margin of 44,292. Monroe County, the Pocono Mountain vacation spot where Fedrick lives, is a microcosm of the state. About 56,000 eligible adults stayed home, more than 100 times Hillary Clinton’s 532-vote margin of victory. In interviews in Monroe County this month, some of the people who did not vote in 2016 said they planned to vote this year. The stakes were too high to miss it, they said. “I never thought I’d be bothered with this crap, but now it really counts,” said Jack Breglia, 49, a retired tow truck driver in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. He could not remember the last time he voted but said he planned to vote for Trump this time. But many others said they would not. They expressed a profound distrust of politics and doubted their vote would have an effect. They felt a sense of foreboding about the country and saw politics as one of the main forces doing the threatening. Many were not particularly partisan and said they shrank from people who were. “I try to avoid it because it gets angry and nasty,” said Susan Miller, 42, a waitress at Compton’s Pancake House in Stroudsburg, who said she had voted once in her life, for Barack Obama in 2008. One predictor of political engagement is growing up in a family that talked about politics. Miller did not. And she is so sick of the one person in her life who is loudly insisting that she vote — an aunt who supports Trump — that she has started simply pretending that she will. Like many people interviewed for this article, Miller was scrambling to pay rent and buy groceries. Monroe County’s unemployment rate stood at around 13% in August, as the pandemic bit into the county’s tourism industry. Her tips have fallen by half and she is now working for Instacart to make up the difference. Two close relatives have died of COVID-19. “Politics? It’s the least of my worries,” she said. She said she would vote again “if the right person came in.” But Biden is not that person, she said. Miller said she had not watched any of the debates or kept up with the candidates. “I’m just trying to make it through,” she said. In recent decades, richer, more educated people are far more likely to vote. In the 2016 analysis, about three quarters of those living in households earning at least $150,000 voted, compared with less than half of those in households earning less than $25,000. About 76% of college graduates voted, compared with 52% of people with just a high school degree. Marriage mattered, too: Just 45% of single women who had children and were eligible to vote cast ballots compared with 70% of married mothers. Jennifer Martin, 46, a single mother waiting in line in her car at the Pleasant Valley Ecumenical Network food pantry in Sciota, Pennsylvania, said last time she voted she was in her 20s. Politics, she said, has little relevance to her life. The two political parties seemed about the same. A recent study found that people like Martin who do not follow politics closely have different concerns from those who do. For example, they say that low hourly wages are among the most important problems facing the country. For hard partisans, who are more likely to vote, the issue barely registers. “I work at a day care where they pay their workers nothing,” she said. “That’s why I have to come to places like this to feed my family.” Might the election change things? “I’m not interested in it,” she said. Fedrick was one of those who stayed away in 2016, but not because she was not following the news. She has become increasingly angry at the American political system, which she believes is tilted against Black people like her and people who are poor. She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, whose failing schools and violent streets prompted her parents — an art teacher and a city bus driver — to move to East Stroudsburg when she was 12. College was a stretch financially. She said she has tried twice for associate degrees, but has not finished either. She ended up with $5,000 in debt. At 31, she is still living with her mother. Her father, who grew up in rural Georgia in the 1960s, keeps telling her things have gotten better. Government can be responsive, even if it is slow. Voting matters. She sees no evidence of progress. Minimum wage has been stuck for more than a decade and the problems of police violence against Black people, joblessness and incarceration only seem to get worse. “We need to break up with the system,” she said. “This system wasn’t designed for us to win.” Just 47% of African Americans under 30 voted in 2016, compared with nearly 70% of those over 65, a pattern of youth disenchantment common to Americans of all races and ethnicities Many interviewed in Monroe County said they felt their vote did not matter, pointing to the contested 2000 presidential election and to Trump losing the popular vote. Some said they thought powerful insiders were the ones who really decided. “We love you and we wish you good luck,” said Fannie Sanchez, 44, a New York-born daughter of Columbian immigrants, of voters. People who do not vote “already saw that there’s something being maneuvered back there. We just unplug ourselves.” Sanchez is part of a demographic that also had low turnout in 2016: American-born Hispanics. She said in 2008 she swallowed her cynicism and cast the first vote in her life, for Obama. “I had to just close my eyes and say, ‘If this is fake, I don’t care. I want to be part of this.’” But she did not vote for him again. Politicians are noisy, but ultimately of no use. “They rent space in my brain and they frustrate me, but in the end, they do what they want anyway,” she said. The sheer toxicity of politics is also having an effect. Kyle Marsh, 23, an operations manager for a beer wholesaler, is not particularly political, but most around him are. His mother, a nurse, is furious at Trump. His friends are angry, too. On Instagram recently, one said, “imagine being dumb enough to vote for the worst person in history?” The post made him uncomfortable: He has a friend who likes Trump. But he kept quiet. “Do you know how many friends I’d lose if I say something?” he said. Voting means being part of the outrage. That is why he will opt out. Others see a reason to vote this time. Latoya Garrison, a single mother who works nights at a factory putting safety seals on cosmetics, did not vote in 2016. But the coronavirus changed her mind this time. Her tips waitressing at the Roasted Tomato dwindled to $30 a day, and this fall, a social services agency helped her pay rent. “I’m looking for who is more into controlling this virus, so we can go back to normal,” she said. “I don’t care about anything else.” The week before last, she voted by mail for Biden.

They did not vote in 2016. Why they plan on skipping the election again

By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Virginia, to launch one.

The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner.

The three had pinned their hopes for reelecting the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.

The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.

As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Bender and Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Areddy interviewed Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.

Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.

While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.

Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Trump told aides on a conference call that day.

His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal.

“The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.

Finally, Bobulinski got tired of waiting.

“He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Bannon said.

At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the debate as Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings.

When Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.

As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Areddy and Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.

Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Murray said in an emailed statement.

And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.

The Gatekeepers Return

The McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation — a far cry from the coordinated “disinformation” machinery feared by liberals.

But it’s also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence.

It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn’t. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades.

By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn’t control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read — and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn’t mean much.

But the past two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion.

Perhaps the most influential media document of the past four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.”

Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by writer Peter Schweizer.

Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.

And the fact that Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Bannon’s nightmare, and Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.

“SO USA TODAY&nbsp;DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News.

“This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.

The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.

We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant.

“For years, we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press,” wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. “Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.”

On the Other Side of the Gate

There’s something amusing — even a bit flattering — in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you’ve seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period.

But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. “The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will &lt;em&gt;inevitably&lt;/em&gt; see — not to ignore it,” my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience.

This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war — a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election’s outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden — a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Herschmann, Passantino and Schwartz weren’t exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience.

I’d prefer to put my faith in Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.

By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Virginia, to launch one.

By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Virginia, to launch one. The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner. The three had pinned their hopes for reelecting the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president. The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said. As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Bender and Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Areddy interviewed Bobulinski. They began drafting an article. Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities. While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Trump told aides on a conference call that day. His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal. “The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline. Finally, Bobulinski got tired of waiting. “He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Bannon said. At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the debate as Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings. When Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents. As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Areddy and Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported. Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Murray said in an emailed statement. And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast. The Gatekeepers Return The McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation — a far cry from the coordinated “disinformation” machinery feared by liberals. But it’s also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence. It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn’t. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades. By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn’t control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read — and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn’t mean much. But the past two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion. Perhaps the most influential media document of the past four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.” Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by writer Peter Schweizer. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month. And the fact that Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Bannon’s nightmare, and Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent. “SO USA TODAY DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News. “This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook. The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media. We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant. “For years, we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press,” wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. “Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.” On the Other Side of the Gate There’s something amusing — even a bit flattering — in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you’ve seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period. But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. “The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it,” my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience. This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war — a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election’s outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden — a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Herschmann, Passantino and Schwartz weren’t exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience. I’d prefer to put my faith in Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.

Trump had one last story to sell. The Wall Street Journal wouldn’t buy it

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Joe Biden's son, Hunter did ''made very good money in Ukraine'' but Moscow is not aware of anything criminal about his&nbsp;past business.

Putin's rejection of US President&nbsp;Donald Trump's criticism of the Biden family business comes with almost a week to go for the US election 2020 on November 3.

Trump, who is trailing behind Biden in opinion polls, has used the debates to make accusations that&nbsp;Hunter Biden engaged in unethical practices in Ukraine. No evidence has been verified to support the allegations, and Joe Biden has called them false and discredited.

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-election-2020-opinion-polls-show-joe-biden-holding-substantial-lead-337842/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Putin, who has praised Trump in the past for saying he wanted better ties with Moscow, has said Russia will work with any US&nbsp;leader while noting what he called Joe Biden's "sharp anti-Russian rhetoric".

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/covid-hit-trump-team-slams-failure-biden-337891" hreflang="en">Covid-hit Trump team slams 'failure' Biden</a>

Putin&nbsp;appeared less friendly towards Trump in remarks broadcast by Russian state TV on Sunday. In what may be seen by some analysts as an attempt to try to curry favour with the Biden camp, he took the time to knock down what he made clear he regarded as false allegations from Trump about the Bidens.

"Yes, in Ukraine he (Hunter Biden) had or maybe still has a business, I don't know. It doesn't concern us. It concerns the Americans and the Ukrainians," said&nbsp;Putin.

"But well yes he had at least one company, which he practically headed up, and judging from everything he made good money. I don't see anything criminal about this, at least we don't know anything about this (being criminal)."

Putin&nbsp;also reacted with visible irritation when asked about comments Trump has made concerning&nbsp;Putin's ties to the former mayor of Moscow, and to an alleged payment made to Hunter Biden by the ex-mayor's widow.&nbsp;Putin&nbsp;said he knew nothing about the existence of any commercial relationship between Hunter and the woman. Joe Biden says the accusation about his son is not true.

US&nbsp;intelligence agencies concluded that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 US&nbsp;presidential election to tilt the contest in Trump's favour, an allegation Moscow has denied.

Russia has also dismissed accusations by US&nbsp;intelligence agencies of trying to interfere with this year's election too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Joe Biden's son, Hunter did ''made very good money in Ukraine'' but Moscow is not aware of anything criminal about his past business.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Joe Biden's son, Hunter did ''made very good money in Ukraine'' but Moscow is not aware of anything criminal about his past business. Putin's rejection of US President Donald Trump's criticism of the Biden family business comes with almost a week to go for the US election 2020 on November 3. Trump, who is trailing behind Biden in opinion polls, has used the debates to make accusations that Hunter Biden engaged in unethical practices in Ukraine. No evidence has been verified to support the allegations, and Joe Biden has called them false and discredited. Putin, who has praised Trump in the past for saying he wanted better ties with Moscow, has said Russia will work with any US leader while noting what he called Joe Biden's "sharp anti-Russian rhetoric". Also read: Covid-hit Trump team slams 'failure' Biden Putin appeared less friendly towards Trump in remarks broadcast by Russian state TV on Sunday. In what may be seen by some analysts as an attempt to try to curry favour with the Biden camp, he took the time to knock down what he made clear he regarded as false allegations from Trump about the Bidens. "Yes, in Ukraine he (Hunter Biden) had or maybe still has a business, I don't know. It doesn't concern us. It concerns the Americans and the Ukrainians," said Putin. "But well yes he had at least one company, which he practically headed up, and judging from everything he made good money. I don't see anything criminal about this, at least we don't know anything about this (being criminal)." Putin also reacted with visible irritation when asked about comments Trump has made concerning Putin's ties to the former mayor of Moscow, and to an alleged payment made to Hunter Biden by the ex-mayor's widow. Putin said he knew nothing about the existence of any commercial relationship between Hunter and the woman. Joe Biden says the accusation about his son is not true. US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election to tilt the contest in Trump's favour, an allegation Moscow has denied. Russia has also dismissed accusations by US intelligence agencies of trying to interfere with this year's election too.

US election 2020: Vladimir Putin rejects Donald Trump's criticism of Hunter Biden's business

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