A Michigan man attempted to block two women wearing hijabs from entering their polling place Tuesday morning, prompting Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum to call the interaction an act of voter intimidation.
In an email to Mother Jones, voter Ron Fox—who witnessed the scene—said a man outside of the polling place pulled two women out of line to examine their voter registration cards and appeared to be directing them to another poling location.
”I would say that there was at least some profiling going on as the two women in question were the only ones he singled out while I was in line,” Fox told Mother Jones, stressing that the man “seemed polite.”
“When I finished voting, there were two polling officials that were asking him to leave,” Fox wrote. “He was refusing. He then entered the polling place, presumably to attempt to obtain permission to remain.”
Fox said the man lacked an identifying sticker provided to elected offices in Ingham county; he reported the poll watcher to Byrum, who said she considers the man’s actions "targeting individuals and harassing them and trying to convince them that they shouldn't be voting.”
"It doesn't pass the smell test .. so it needed to be addressed by law enforcement," Byrum said.
During a live shot outside a high school in in Phoenix, Arizona, a teenage protester disrupted the broadcast by edging into the camera frame and shouting, "Fuck Joe Arpaio!"
Arpaio is the legendarily racist and corrupt sheriff of Maricopa County, who has been running county law enforcement in suburban Phoenix like a tin pot dictator for two decades -- in spite of multiple findings of illegal misconduct and resulting censures from state and federal courts.
He is currently running for re-election against Democratic candidate for Sheriff Paul Penzone. Poll numbers show that Penzone is winning. If unseated, Arpaio will lose access to the state and federal resources he has used to fight the civil and criminal complaints against him.
After an unpredictable and bitter campaign season, Wall Street is eyeing its preferred 2016 election outcome: a Hillary Clinton presidency offset by a Republican-controlled Congress.
Evidence of the market's clear inclination for a Clinton victory has been seen at key junctures in the race, such as when stock futures surged in the moments after the first presidential debate, which was widely seen as a win for the former secretary of state.
"The S&P 500 futures exploded higher," recalled Gregori Volokhine, president of Meeschaert Capital Markets. "It was obvious which candidate the market prefers."
That preference also was on display in response to news about Clinton's email investigation, including Sunday, when stock futures spiked higher after the FBI cleared the Democratic candidate in the latest review of emails linked to her private server.
Analysts view Clinton as a known quantity who is likely to maintain many of the policies of President Barack Obama. In contrast, Republican Donald Trump is viewed as a wildcard with no public service record and a penchant for lambasting everything from free trade deals to the Federal Reserve to people who contradict him.
A surprise win by Trump, who has consistently trailed in the polls, could spur a sharp negative reaction Wednesday, although markets could steady after that.
"The big move would be caused just by the unknown of what he might do and the perception that he's volatile," said Michael Scanlon, managing director of Manulife Asset Management.
"Then the reason I temper that and say it would be short-lived is that we still have a government with checks and balances. It's not like he's being elected king or anything like that."
- Market likes gridlock -
While the market has shown it favors Clinton in the White House, that does not extend to Democrats in Congress.
When Clinton appeared to pull away significantly from Trump in polls last month, some analysts expressed worry that a Democratic congressional sweep could lead to efforts to tax business more heavily, or take other steps viewed as anti-growth.
The market is accustomed to having a Democratic president offset by a Republican Congress and views a change to that equilibrium as a potential threat.
On Monday, "the market rallied on the assumption that the GOP should manage to retain control of one house, if not both houses, of Congress, thereby ensuring an environment of continued political gridlock," said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare.
"It's a view we suspect that doesn't register quite as neatly on Main Street, where millions and millions of votes will be cast today on the basis of wanting to see some meaningful changes."
As far as election evening trading, several leading banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Credit Suisse, plan to provide US staff overnight in expectation that volume will be elevated.
"JPMorgan will have some traders staffed on the New York trading desks during the night hours, ready to support our Asia trading teams manage any potential spikes in volume," a spokesman said. "That is similar to what we did for the Brexit vote."
Although US stock markets will be closed when the election results begin to come in, there are many other available avenues to trade, including the foreign exchange market and the S&P 500 futures market.
Trading volume likely will rise in spurts as key results are announced, such as critical swing states in the presidential contest, including Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.
"Looking at the last election, it seems fair to say that the result comes around midnight," said Erik Nelson, a foreign exchange analyst at Wells Fargo. "I would say around midnight we would get the most volatility as we get a little more sense of what is going on."
JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist of TD Ameritrade, will be monitoring multiple television screens and tracking political blogs.
"I'll be doing what every other loser trader does, sitting in front of my screen and trying to trade futures," he said. "There is going to be opportunity."
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday the group's publication of material linked to Hillary Clinton was not based on any desire to influence the U.S. election.
"In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself," Assange said in a statement released by his legal adviser at the Web Summit, a tech conference in Lisbon.
"This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election."
WikiLeaks has in the past few months published thousands of emails hacked from John Podesta, Democrat candidate Clinton's campaign manager.
Assange said Wikileaks had obtained no inside information about Republican candidate Donald Trump.
"We cannot publish what we do not have," he said.
"We are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us," Assange said.
"No-one disputes the public importance of these publications," he added.
"It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election."
Assange said WikiLeaks would continue to publish sensitive information regardless of who wins the U.S. election.
"The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers," he said.
Assange has been living in Ecuador's London embassy since mid-2012. A few weeks ago Ecuador's government acknowledged it had restricted his Internet access, arousing speculation it had been pressured by the United States because of the Clinton material.
Donald Trump's presidential campaign sued the state of Nevada on Tuesday and alleged that hundreds of voters in Clark County were illegally allowed to vote after early voting hours had ended.
Judge Gloria Sturman, who heard the campaign's case on Tuesday afternoon, sounded highly skeptical of the lawsuit -- and often seemed incredulous at the Trump camp's claims and requests.
In particular, she couldn't seem to believe that the Trump campaign was asking her to order Clark County officials to preserve early voting records from the date of November 4th 2016. Sturman answered this request by noting that officials are already obligated to preserve these records.
"What are you asking for?" she asked a Trump attorney at one point. "I can't obligate him to do something he's already obligated to do -- he's already obligated to do it!"
Sturman also blasted the Trump attorney's request to make a list of poll workers available to be interviewed by the campaign's attorneys to talk about when they cut off voting on Friday evening.
"I am not going to expose people doing their civic duty to help their fellow citizens vote to public attention, ridicule and harassment," she shot back at him.
The Trump campaign wants to make names of Nevada poll workers public. Judge's response: pic.twitter.com/tes99IMbbH
Finally, she was flabbergasted that the Trump campaign really wanted Clark County to figure out which ballots were cast by people who allegedly entered the voting line after 8 p.m. on Friday, and then refuse to count them until the campaign had resolved its dispute with the state.
"There's no way to do it," she explained.
The judge ended up denying the campaign's request to issue an order to preserve poll worker information for the campaign's review. The judge also noted that all requests to preserve specific early voting information should be made to the Nevada secretary of state -- and that the campaign didn't even bother trying to contact the secretary of state's office before barging into court.
In an appearance on Fox News Tuesday afternoon, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that he is getting reports of voter fraud from "various places."
When asked if he still believes the vote is "rigged," Trump replied, "It's largely a rigged system. And you see it all the polling booths, you know."
"Are you saying that you don't believe this will be over tonight?" he was asked.
"No, I'm not saying that," Trump replied. "I'm saying I have to look at what's happening, I have to look at reports that are coming in. There are reports that when people vote for Republicans, the entire ticket switches over to Democrats. You've seen that. It's happening at various places today, it's been reported."
"Vote flipping" is something that occurs every election, when some machines malfunction and post the opposite results of what an elector has chosen, according to Time magazine.
"Out of tens of millions of votes cast, there have been a few hundred reports of vote flipping every year for the past decade. This year is no exception. A handful of counties in North Carolina, Texas and Nevada have reported isolated problems with machines vote flipping in the last couple weeks," said Time, adding that the glitch happens infrequently enough as to be statistically invisible.
"We have to be careful, we have to see what it is," Trump said.
Given the fraught tone of the campaign, it’s no surprise that a poll from over the summer found that 81 percent of voters said they were afraid of one or both of the candidates winning.
For political candidates, why is it so effective to tap into voter fears? And what does the psychology research say about fear’s ability to influence behavior and decision-making?
How fear influences action
At its core, fear is an emotion that compels people to fight or take flight from a real or perceived threat.
Psychological research has also shown that when we band together, the raw experience of fear – especially fear of a common enemy – can become amplified.
In the early 1980s, a group of psychologists developed a way to study and understand how fear influences how we think and what we do.
Psychologists have also found that when fear – instead of reason or critical thinking – influences our decisions, we make our worst mistakes.
Fear is in the message
As noted earlier, people will band together in response to a common threat. It’s also important to remember that the threat needs only to be perceived; it doesn’t need to be real.
For centuries, individuals campaigning for power – emperors, kings, business tycoons, politicians, military leaders – have used fear to frighten people enough so that they set aside level-headed thinking and act on their behalf.
The strategy is known as fear messaging, and it’s easy to recognize. It includes repeated name-calling and denigration of a person, group of people or nation. Those with different views and other cultures and ways of life are deemed a great threat or labeled as a common enemy. The most effective fear messaging uses grossly oversimplified and generally false statements to promote verbal assaults (for example, bullying and racist and sexist phrases) and even physical violence.
As part of their message, fear campaigners will also insist that they are the only ones who understand the common threat – and the only ones who can save the masses.
Campaign scare tactics
Let’s return to the presidential campaign.
Observe just one of Trump’s rallies and you will see that fear messaging – with all its violence, vulgarity, bigotry and divisiveness – is alive and thriving in America. Trump’s terrorism “plan” draws heavily from the scare tactics of the Cold War era, promises “extreme vetting” of immigrants, insists on an “ideological war” against radical Islam and promotes military acquisition of Middle Eastern oil fields. He has exploited the fear that many men have of women leaders and has subtly encouraged violence against Clinton.
Each candidate has tried to flip fears into votes. But one has made it a centerpiece of his campaign.
In an effort to fight fire with fire, Clinton has leveraged fear in her favor by encouraging voters to imagine the disastrous results of a Trump presidency. At a rally in Florida last week, she wondered aloud if the nuclear codes would be safe in his hands and hinted that black and Hispanic people might be in physical danger.
This is not to say that we should ignore what frightens us. But it’s also important to understand why something is frightening us and whether or not the threat is real.
Years ago, cognitive psychologist Dr. Dianna Cunningham told me that thinking creates emotion, and emotion creates behavior. She said it was our responsibility to know what we’re thinking; this way, we won’t do things we’ll later regret.
Cunningham’s main point is that fear is a reaction. But it’s also a choice, a choice that intelligent human beings have the privilege and responsibility to exercise.
Like reason and civility, fear is a choice. When casting your ballot, ask yourself: What will the consequences be? What role is fear playing in your decision? And is what scares you real?
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would have to "see how things play out" before accepting the results of Election Day, pointing to possible irregularities as he once again warned of a rigged system.
"We're going to see how things play out today. Hopefully they'll play out well and hopefully we won't have to worry about it, meaning hopefully we'll win," Trump said in a telephone interview on Fox News. "I want to see everything honest."
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by David Alexander)
A physical brawl broke out Tuesday at a polling place in Michigan after a man interjected himself into a verbal altercation between two women—one a Hillary Clinton supporter and the other a Donald Trump supporter.
According to WHAS-11, an ABC affiliate, the incident occurred in the Ypsilanti Township when two female voters who had just voted began arguing over their candidates.
"A male subject interjected himself into the argument, ended up pushing down one of the females and then more people started getting involved in this back and forth verbal altercation," Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office spokesman Derrick Jackson told the Detroit Free Press. "It all began with them arguing back and forth about their particular candidate.”
Authorities arrived at the polling location and de-escalated the tense scene. According to the spokesman, officers declined to arrest anyone for the brawl, but he noted a report will be forwarded to the county prosecutor.
Jackson said it’s unclear who the man was supporting.
Can you imagine how conservatives would react if a group of Black Panthers activists spent an entire day following around groups of Christian voters and filming their every move as they went to the polls?
That's what right-wing propagandist James O'Keefe is doing on Tuesday in Philadelphia, as he and his crew are now tailing a bus that was set up by a black pastor to bring voters to the polls.
"So we're behind this bus, which is like a pastor bus, busing people around to the polls in Philadelphia," O'Keefe says in a video posted on Twitter. "And we're going to be releasing video here today showing some people doing some improper things, busing people around, maybe they shouldn't be doing it."
— (@)
Bradley Moss, an attorney who specializes in litigating national security matters, notes that O'Keefe seems to be clearly engaging in voter intimidation, as many people will feel unnerved having a car follow them around and film them as they go to vote.
— (@)
In fact, as the Washington Post's guide on voting laws makes clear, the definition of voter intimidation includes when "a voter is being followed and photographed or has his license plate numbers recorded" -- which is just what O'Keefe is doing in this video.
Nonetheless, O'Keefe promises that he and his Project Veritas goons are operating "undercover" across the country to expose the horrors of voter fraud in urban environments. While it's unlikely they'll turn up any "game-changing bombshells," they will likely provide fodder for conspiracy theorists via deceptively edited videos.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sued the registrar of voters in Clark County, Nevada over a polling place in Las Vegas that had been allowed to remain open late last week to accommodate people who were lined up to vote.
Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are in a close contest to win Nevada in Tuesday's election after a long and contentious campaign. Nevada is one of several states that permits early voting and Las Vegas is viewed as a base of support for Clinton, a former U.S. Senator from New York and former secretary of state.
Nevada state law says voters who are in line at 8 p.m., when the polls close, must be allowed to cast their ballots.
The lawsuit, filed in a Nevada state court on Monday, said election officials violated state law because they allowed people to join the line after 8 p.m. at a polling location at a Latino market.
Representatives for Clark County could not immediately be reached for comment. Representatives for the Clinton campaign also could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.
In the lawsuit Trump, a New York businessman and reality TV personality who has never previously run for political office, asked that the ballots from that polling place be kept separate from other votes, pending any future legal challenges to the results in the state.
David Bossie, Trump's deputy campaign manager, said on MSNBC that the lawsuit was not aimed at suppressing the Hispanic vote.
"This is a lawsuit about the rules of the game," he said.
(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco, additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Nate Raymond in New York; editing by Grant McCool)
Who says Twitter doesn’t lead to change? Eric Trump, son of Donald Trump, deleted a picture of his ballot this morning after Electionland pointed out that ballot pictures are illegal in the state of New York, where he voted. He has deleted his tweet, but not before our tweet was retweeted more than 900 times:
For what it’s worth, posting pictures like this continues to be illegal because of concerns over ballot privacy. In theory, someone could buy your vote or otherwise coerce you into voting for a specific candidate, and ask you to take a picture of it to prove it. Regardless of pressure, if you live in New York please do not tweet pictures of your ballot. If you live elsewhere, check this handy guide to see if you can post a ballot selfie.
The 2016 Presidential Election has been anything but boring. The United States watched as a woman won the nomination for one major party, a former reality TV star for the other, and the media frenzied over Russia's alleged obstruction of the democratic process.
As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, the Russia-Trump-Rigged Election story gets slightly more interesting. The Moscow Times reported that Russian media is paying very close attention to the U.S. elections and is helping Russians — who currently live in Russia — to report suspicious voting activity directly to the Trump campaign.
Russia has already had an unusual role in America's race for the White House, and became central to the election when the Clinton camp claimed that Russian spies targeted the DNC, stealing and leaking thousands of emails to WikiLeaks.
The Russian government and media have not confirmed their alleged role in the U.S. Election. However, on November 8, state-backed Russian news is involving itself and its audience in the day's events by offering viewers of Gazeta.ru a live election blog, as well as Donald Trump's campaign hotline.
The outlet reportedly offered the information for its coverage so that Russians (living in Russia) who are following along could report polling violations directly to the Trump campaign — even though they aren't actually present at polling places.
— (@)
Trump has already made repeated calls in the last months of his campaign about necessary poll monitoring for voter fraud. He has suggested that the election will be rigged, and has refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election in the case that he loses.
The major problem with Trump's rhetoric goes far beyond himself. If he won't accept his loss as fair and takes to Twitter to express his discontent, that's one thing.
However, Trump's supporters have made calls for an armed revolt if their candidate loses. And perhaps that's something that the Russian state is interested in exploiting.
But even as Russian media appears to be interested in America's presidential election, most people are pretty disinterested.
BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg wrote on Twitter, "Russian state radio invites listeners to "Choose a US President" via text. 28% vote for Trump, 4% for Clinton. 68% don't care. #Election2016"
