US presidential elections: Intimidation and violence in air as heated campaign draws to close

WASHINGTON: The

ugliest election campaign

in modern US history is drawing to a close with intimation of violence and intimidation of

Democrats opposition

and its voters, implicitly endorsed by President Trump, coming to the fore 48 hours before the final round of balloting begins on Tuesday.


Still significantly behind in polls, Trump on Saturday approvingly tweeted a video of a convoy of trucks and cars bearing flags and banners supporting him as they surrounded a

Biden campaign bus

on the road in Texas in an effort to browbeat Democrats. “I LOVE TEXAS!” Trump wrote alongside a video accompanied by music whose lyrics included the rap song “Welcome to the Red Kingdom.”

The Biden campaign said the convoy attempted to run its bus off the highway and forced them to cancel engagements in a state where polls show the two sides in a dead-heat, with a win or loss for either side being decisive in the Presidential race.

The intimidation came even as Trump said there would be bedlam and “very bad things” could happen in the country if results were not declared on election night, even through there is no legal or constitutional requirement to do so, and the “projection” of results has purely been a media exercise for nearly a century. Contrary to Trump’s assertion, formal results are always declared and certified by state officials (not the media) after all ballots have been counted, often several days after Election Day.

“I think it’s highly likely you’re not going to have a result…We’re going to be waiting, November 3 is going to come and go, and we’re not going to know. And you’re going to have bedlam in our country,” Trump predicted in a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, whose 20

electoral votes

is key to both sides as they push towards the 270 needed to win the White House.

The US President’s statements and tactics suggest he and his party believe the only way they can win is delegitimizing mail-in ballots that are counted after November 3, a process courts have largely approved. More than 90 million voters, approximately two-thirds of the expected turnout, have already voted in the election, and roughly 2/3rds of the 90 million are in the form of mail-in ballots, which tend to favor Democrats because its voters are more mindful of the

pandemic

.

Discounting and delegitimizing a significant portion of those ballots could pave way for a Republican victory, particularly if Trump’s tactic of having his supporters flood the polls on Election Day succeeds.

As part of this overall strategy, Republicans in Texas petitioned a federal court on Friday to reject over 100,000 ballots cast through drive through voting in Democrat-leaning Harris County, arguing it is an illegal expansion of curbside voting that a Texas court had allowed because of the pandemic.

Such lawsuits could tie-up tallying of votes after polls close on November 3, allowing Trump to claim victory on the basis of counts from in-person voting.

In raucous rallies that are now widely seen as Covid-19 superspreaders (see accompanying story), Trump has been exhorting his base to turn up in big numbers to vote in person to turn the tide that show him 6-8 points behind Biden in nationwide popular vote and trailing or tied in several battleground states. A couple of outlier polls show the race narrowing slightly, with one poll showing him jumping into a 7 point lead in Iowa - earlier considered a toss-up state. That won’t be sufficient to power him to a victory – if all ballots are counted. And it certainly will not matter if Texas turns blue.