2020 US Election

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 30th October, 2020) Voter turnout in US election hits records - more than 80 million Americans have cast early votes for the November 3presidential election, data from the US Elections Project revealed on Thursday.

The data showed that as of Thursday afternoon, 80,061,661 registered US voters had cast ballots in the election, representing more than 58 percent of the turnout in 2016, when 138 million citizens voted.

So far more votes have been cast using mail-in ballots - 51.9 million - and 28.1 million votes have been cast in person, the data shows.

The US state of Wisconsin will mobilize about 400 National Guard troops to support local election officials working at polls in the days ahead and on the Election Day, November 3, the Office of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said in a press release.

"Approximately 400 Citizen Soldiers and Airmen from the Wisconsin National Guard will mobilize to state active duty in the coming days to support the Wisconsin Elections Commission and clerks across the state," the release said on Thursday.

The troops will report for work on Sunday in all 72 counties across the state to complete training by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and, on Monday, will assist with polling places set up, the release said.

Americans need to vote in person with the US election and not rely on mailed ballots to arrive on time, in part due to the Trump administration cutbacks in the US Postal Service, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.

"This weekend should be very interesting to see how many more people will vote in advance. I hope that people will not depend on the mail because they have done all they can to dismantle the postal system," Pelosi said, referring to the Trump administration attempts to cut US postal system's losses by streamlining and reducing service.

Court rulings in multiple US states have ordered the Postal Service to abandon cost-cutting plans that recently slowed mail delivery, citing the prospect that late-arriving ballots could disenfranchise voters.

US President Donald Trump's repeated allegations that voter fraud poses a threat to the presidential election risk undermining the public's perception that the vote will be legitimate, poll observers from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) said in an interim report.

Observers from the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Limited Election Observation Mission (ODIHR LEOM) underscored that the presidential campaign is being held in an atmosphere of sharp polarization and political division, and has been restricted by the coronavirus pandemic.

"The capacity to hold in-person campaign events has been significantly limited due to the pandemic. However, President Trump and the former Vice President Biden have both been able to hold some campaign rallies," the report said. "Many ODIHR LEOM interlocutors have expressed grave concerns about the risk of the legitimacy of the elections being questioned due to the incumbent President's repeated allegations of a fraudulent election process, and postal vote in particular."

FOX News political commentator Tucker Carlson has lashed out at colleagues from other US media for ignoring a news story that aired in his show Tuesday night about presidential candidate Joe Biden's alleged financial involvement with the Chinese Communist Party.

On Tuesday episode of the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, a former business partner of the Biden family, Tony Bobulinski, said that he had met with Joe Biden twice to discuss business deals with a Chinese energy company. Bobulinski shared an email exchange with Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, which suggests that 10 percent of each such deal went directly to the presidential candidate's pocket. Additionally, the Chinese government allegedly proposed multi-million-dollar interest-free loans to the Biden family, according to Bobulinski.

"Wednesday morning, the big papers completely ignored what Tony Bobulinski had to say. So did the other television networks. Not a single word about Bobulinski appeared on CNN or anywhere else. Newsweek decided to cover it but came to the conclusion that the real story was about QAnon somehow. This is Soviet-style suppression of information about a legitimate news story days before an election," Carlson said.