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Three Big Things

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  • Washington DC gears up for possible election chaos with metal fencing around VP’s home and business boarded up

    Washington DC is gearing up for potential chaos following Election Day as authorities assembled barriers around government buildings – including the vice president’s residence – and business owners boarded up storefronts over the weekend.

    The series of security measures come on the eve of the high-stakes presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — which has exposed deep divisions and heightened tensions in the US.

    The Secret Service placed 8-foot-high metal fences around the White House, and Harris’ home at the Naval Observatory though officials warned there are no specific threats of violence at this time, the Washington Post reported.

    The metal fencing was also around the Treasury Department complex and adjacent parts of Lafayette Square while the Capitol had temporary bike-rack barriers around its perimeter, according to the newspaper.

    Physical security measures are also reportedly set to be placed outside the West Palm Beach convention center in Florida.

    “The Secret Service is working closely with federal, state and local partners in Washington, DC and Palm Beach County, Florida to ensure heightened levels of Election Day safety and security,” the agency told the Washington Post Sunday.

    “These enhancements are not in response to any specific issue but are part of wide ranging public safety preparations for Tuesday’s election.”

    Private business and property owners have also worked to board up street-level windows and entrances in the event violence erupts in DC.

    Eric J. Jones, of the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, told the publication that retailers are concerned about looting and damage.

    “We’re not expecting full-fledged pandemonium like we saw after Jan. 6, [2021,] or four years ago,” he said.

    “I’m getting constant emails and text messages because people are really engaged. … People would rather be overprepared and have nothing happen, as opposed to the alternative,” said Jones, who is the association’s vice president of government affairs.

    Admiral Security Services is expected to have 2,000 private security guards work 12-hour shifts at properties around the city, its executive vice president Leon Beresford told the Washington Post.

    The growing apprehension comes four years after the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol and May 2020 George Floyd protests that spiraled into violence. Mayhem also erupted before and after Trump’s 2017 inauguration where protesters smashed downtown windows and clashed with police.  

    Government buildings were also guarded with security fencing leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

    In addition to the newly installed fencing, DC police announced that starting Monday at 7 p.m. there will be street closures and parking restrictions in anticipation of Harris’ election night party on Howard University’s campus.  

    All of the city’s available 3,300 police officers are reportedly expected to work 12-hour shifts through the election. 


    See more here: Washington DC gears up for possible election chaos with metal fencing around VP's home and business boarded up

  • A federal error could swing the election

    Democracy is a strange sport; 156 million Americans vote, and in the end the result is potentially decided by a few hundred thousand people miscounted four years ago.  

    A series of errors in the 2020 US census has effectively taken electoral college votes from states likely to back Donald Trump, and apportioned them to states likely to vote for Kamala Harris instead. With the polling margins razor thin, this could be enough to tip the balance from the Republicans to the Democrats.

    States receive electoral college votes based on the number of Senators and Representatives they send to Congress, with the number of Representatives in turn being based roughly on a state’s population. If the census is wrong, so is the resulting distribution of seats.

    The 2020 census – disrupted by the pandemic – is estimated by the Census Bureau itself to have undercounted the population of Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, while overcounting the populations of Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah.

    Donald Trump and his supporters should be seething at this. All but one of the undercounted states has voted Republican in recent elections: Florida since 2016, Arkansas and Tennessee since 2000, Mississippi and Texas since 1980. The only exception is Illinois, which has been blue since 1992.

    Meanwhile, the overcounted states lean largely blue. Delaware – home to President Joe Biden – has voted Democrat since 1992, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island since 1988, and Minnesota since 1976. The exceptions are Ohio (red since 2016) and Utah (1968).

    Feed these over- and undercounts through the system used to apportion electoral college votes, and analysis from the Heritage Foundation suggests that the results look something like this: Colorado was given one elector more than it should have received, Florida received two too few, Texas one too few, while Minnesota and Rhode Island each cling on to a vote they should have lost.

    Had the Census found just 26 fewer people in Minnesota, then the state would have missed out on an elector; it’s now believed that the population was overcounted by about 217,000. Similarly, Florida and Texas needed about 172,000 and 189,000 more residents respectively to each get an additional vote; they were undercounted by approximately 761,000 and 560,000 respectively.

    With polling for the election on a knife-edge, it’s not hard to draw out a scenario where this is enough to sway the overall result. Texas and Florida are expected to vote Republican; Minnesota, Colorado and Rhode Island Democrat, depriving Trump of three electoral college votes while handing three to Harris.

    If Trump wins in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada, while Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania break to Harris – a result that would only take a fractional polling shift in a single state – then the Democrats will win the election with 270 electoral college votes to 268, and Donald Trump would have been deprived of victory by the errors of the federal bureaucracy.

    Hopefully, this won’t matter. As the pollster Nate Silver has pointed out, it’s more likely that on the night we will find out the polls were slightly off in one direction or another, and that the vote will turn from a neck and neck race into a one-sided parade. But the idea that an election could be determined by simple errors in the census rather than by the actual votes of American citizens is dispiriting.


    Read the rest of the story here: Will Trump win the election? A federal error could deny him victory

  • Candidates for hotly contested Alabama congressional seats make closing arguments

    MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - Candidates in the closely watched Alabama 2nd Congressional District race made their closing arguments Monday in a contest that could help decide control of the House of Representatives.

    Republican Caroleene Dobson and Democrat Shomari Figures have combined to spend nearly $2 million in a race that has drawn national attention because it is one of a few dozen that are considered competitive. It is the first election since a panel of federal judges last year ordered the district to be radically redrawn

    The new district now has a black plurality and includes most of the city of Mobile, northwest Mobile County and runs through the Black Belt to Montgomery County and then across the Georgia line.

    Dobson, a real estate lawyer from Montgomery, spent the morning in Mobile touring the Women’s Resource Center on Downtowner Loop, across from a now-closed abortion clinic. The center provides support to pregnant women.

    Democrat Shomari Figures, a former Justice Department official and scion of a prominent political family in Mobile, campaigned between his hometown and the norther n stretches of the district in Montgomery.

    Dobson used her campaign stop to talk about health care.

    “As many of you know, about a third of Alabama’s 67 counties are described as maternity care deserts,” she told reporters. “Over the past few years, there have been several counties that have closed their or downsized their maternity services.”

    Dobson noted that includes the maternity ward at Monroe County Hospital, near where she grew up.

    Dobson said she hopes to sponsor House versions of two bills offered by U.S. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Montgomery): The More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed, or MOMS Act, which aims to improve access to pre- and post-natal resources; and the IVF Protection Act, which would cut Medicaid funding to states that ban in vitro fertilization. Both bills have languished in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    “I’m committed to doing what I can to ensure that we have more funding, more access to resources, and that moms are aware of the resources out there,” she said.

    Figures said those proposals are the wrong approach.

    “I don’t think we should be banning Medicaid funds, because the people that need Medicaid the most are not the people who could generally afford IVF in the first place,” he said.

    Figures said he supports federal legislation that would offer Alabama the same deal it rejected after the Affordable Care Act passed under former President Barack Obama – 100 percent federal funding of expanded Medicaid for the first three years. He criticized Alabama’s Republican Legislature refusing to expand the program to people who do not earn enough money to qualify for subsidized private insurance plans.

    “We’re seeing hospitals literally closed because of that decision,” he said. “And look, Medicaid expansion is not the permanent solution, but we know that all of those hospitals that have shut down would still very likely be open if Medicaid had been expanded. We know that Medicaid expansion would provide healthcare coverage opportunities to at least 300,000 more people in Alabama.”

    Dobson on Monday continued efforts to tie Figures, a former Justice Department official, to the Biden administration’s legal challenge of Alabama’s law prohibiting hormones, puberty blockers and other gender-reassignment treatments for transgender youth.

    “Alabama put that law in place to protect our minors,” she said. “So it shouldn’t be an issue, but my opponent and his DOJ in 2022 sued the state of Alabama to overturn our laws.”

    Figures said the litigation was not something he worked on during his time at the Justice Department. And he said he believes Alabama “should be able to take steps that are necessary in that space.” But he added that transgender health care, along with transgender athletes in sports, are a distraction from more important issues.

    “My opponent wants to sit here and talk about things that have literally never happened in the history of the state of Alabama,” he said “And that is just an issue that’s meant to divide. It’s meant to drum up fear. It’s meant to demonize a particular group of people.”

    Dobson said she is cautiously optimistic about Tuesday.

    “We are very hopeful about tomorrow, very excited about tomorrow,” she said. “We have a message that resonates with folks across the district, regardless of whether they’re Democrat, Republican.”

    Figures said he believes he is the right choice.

    “We have an opportunity to send someone to Washington that’s going to put a level of focus and care and concern on issues that matter here at home, issues that are hitting you every single day,” he said.


    READ MORE: Candidates for hotly contested Alabama congressional seats make closing arguments

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