The US Presidential Election is Just Two Days Away

WEB DESK: With just two days of campaigning left, a record 90 million Americans have voted early in the US presidential election, data revealed on Sunday.

The high number of early voters, about 65% of the total turnout in 2016, reflects an intense interest in the contest as US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden campaigned across the country to try to convince the remaining undecided voters.

Concerns about exposure to the coronavirus at the busy Election Day voting places on Tuesday have also pushed up the numbers of people voting by mail or at early in-person polling sites.

The last date to vote for the US Presidential Election 2020 is November 3, however, the deadline to vote via mail or online has passed, Business Insider has reported.

As many as 19 states and the District of Columbia currently allow voters to register in person on Election Day if they have missed out on the deadline to register by mail or online, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“You can register to vote in-person on Election Day in California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming,” it said.

The Republican president is spending the closing days of his re-election campaign criticizing public officials and medical professionals who are trying to combat the coronavirus pandemic even as it surges across the United States.

Opinion polls show Trump trailing former vice president Biden nationally, but with a closer contest in the most competitive states that will decide the election. Voters say the coronavirus is their top concern.

Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud and has more recently argued that only the results available on election night should count. In a flurry of legal motions, his campaign has sought to restrict absentee balloting.

“I don’t care how hard Donald Trump tries. There’s nothing – let me say that again – there’s nothing that he can do to stop the people of this nation from voting in overwhelming numbers and taking back this democracy,” Biden said at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where he was joined by former President Barack Obama for their first 2020 campaign event together.

Trump held four rallies on Saturday in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where the campaigns are seeking to win over undecided voters in areas like the suburbs of Philadelphia and the “Rust Belt” west of the state.

“If we win Pennsylvania, it’s over,” Trump told a large rally in Reading before moving to another big gathering in Butler.

Officials in several states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, say it could take several days to count all of the mail ballots, possibly leading to days of uncertainty if the outcome hinges on those states.

A federal judge in Texas has scheduled an emergency hearing for Monday on whether Houston officials unlawfully allowed drive-through voting and should toss more than 100,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Harris County.

In Iowa, a new poll published on Saturday shows Trump has taken over the lead there just days before the election. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll shows Trump now leads Biden by seven percentage points, 48 percent to 41 percent. The results, based on a poll of 814 Iowa voters, suggests Biden has lost support among independent voters in the Midwestern state.

At a small, in-person rally in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Trump mocked his opponent for his criticism of the administration’s record of fighting COVID-19, which has killed more people in the United States than in any other country.

“I watched Joe Biden speak yesterday. All he talks about is COVID, COVID. He’s got nothing else to say. COVID, COVID,” Trump told the crowd, some of whom did not wear masks.

He said the United States was “just weeks away” from the mass distribution of a safe vaccine against COVID-19, which is pushing hospitals to capacity and killing up to 1,000 people in the United States each day. Trump gave no details to back up his remarks about an imminent vaccine.