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A momentous U.S. presidential election headed to a nail-biting conclusion Wednesday, as President Donald Trump once again defied opinion polls and put up a fierce fight to keep the White House.

Well after midnight, it was unclear who would win the race, the outcome likely to be decided by one or two states, or even a single congressional district.

It was one of the most bitterly contested U.S. political campaigns in the post-war era and ultimately came down to a relatively few key votes — after record turnout by Americans in the middle of a pandemic.

Any possibility of a landslide for either side evaporated as the night wore on, the votes were slowly counted and the numbers lined up in surprising ways.

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• A divided America braces for violence as it waits for Presidential election results
• Early counts show no major momentum for Trump or Biden in bitterly fought battle
• If 2016 was about the electoral college, in 2020 it is about the early vote
• Matt Gurney: No matter the outcome of the U.S. election, Canada needs to get serious about the Western alliance

Democratic challenger Joe Biden seemed on the way to stealing Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes, but Trump captured the key prize of Florida and was leading in the three former “blue wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. If he won those states and others where he led, the election would be his.

But as Tuesday turned to Wednesday, large chunks of the vote in those states, including in heavily Democratic areas, remained to be counted, offering a sliver of hope for Biden.

The former vice president made an early morning appearance to claim that, despite trailing in key areas, he would eventually prevail.

“I believe we’re on track to win the election,” he told supporters shortly before 1 a.m. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. But we’re feeling good about where we are.”

Trump Tweeted at about the same time, insisting that he would triumph.

“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” he posted, without explaining how or by whom the election was being stolen. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”

U.S. TV networks reporting on the returns had to contend with a whole new pattern in how the vote came in, making races harder to read. The vast numbers of ballots cast in advance — believed to favour the Democrats — were counted first in some places, later in others.

But just before 12:30 p.m., Biden led the Electoral College vote by 205-139, the score representing expected results for each candidate in safe states. A total of at least 270 votes captures the White House.

Returns streamed in as a deeply divided nation waited on tenterhooks for the extraordinary election’s outcome.

But the final result could take days to come after a remarkable surge of advance voting, likely delays in counting ballots and a legal campaign by Trump and his allies against various pandemic-related voting protocols.

As results arrived surprisingly quickly from Florida, the lead bounced back and forth between Trump and Biden, typical of the kind of tight race for which the state is famous. Then the Republican steadily pulled ahead.

For Trump it was considered a must-win, its 29 Electoral College votes considered essential to his returning for another four years as president.

In other swing states, Trump won Ohio, and clung to a lead in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin. He also had a solid advantage in Georgia, which Biden had hoped to snatch away.

With the prospect of the two all but tying, it was possible the race could come down to one segment of a lightly populated state. Unlike almost all other states, Maine allots its Electoral College votes by congressional district, meaning a split favouring one or other candidate could seal a tight race.

 

More than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots before polling places opened on the actual election day Tuesday, with citizens voting by mail in unprecedented numbers or in person at advanced polls.

More streamed to the polls Tuesday amid fears of unrest and violence that did not seem to come to fruition, but will continue to be a spectre hanging over the election’s aftermath.

Some experts predicted 160 million overall could exercise their franchise, about 67 per cent of the U.S. electorate and the highest in a century.

But the integrity of America’s democratic system came under question as never before, with court rulings on the process even on Tuesday. For months, Trump has insisted there would be fraud because of the widespread use of mail-in ballots and counting that could continue for days after Nov. 3.

The size of turnout on election day was itself being closely watched as an indicator of where the vote could head, with Republicans traditionally less likely to vote in advance.

Opinion surveys suggested a comfortable lead nationally for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and a tighter advantage in several of the battleground states. Those are key to winning 270 or more Electoral College votes, the majority that decides who enters the White House under the American system.

Polls put Biden an average of about eight percentage points ahead.

But while Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, they lost the White House in two of those contests — 2016 and 2000. And Trump captured narrow victories in a number of swing states last election, defying polls that suggested Hillary Clinton was ahead in those races.

The campaign pitted two starkly opposing visions for the United States and how to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, which became a central theme of the election.

Trump presided over a first term that was marked by chaos and conflict, his inflammatory style blamed for fanning the flames of white supremacy, threatening longstanding international alliances and encouraging an angry, polarized political conversation.

He was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — but found not guilty by the Republican-led U.S. Senate — after pressuring Ukraine’s president to help him dig up dirt on alleged corruption by Biden’s son Hunter.

Trump touted his success in fuelling a robust economy before the pandemic hit earlier this year, cutting taxes and putting America first in foreign relations. In blunt and often insulting terms, he warned that a vote for Biden would usher in socialist policies and an administration content to let violent, leftist protesters run rampant.

Biden hit hard and often at Trump’s allegedly cavalier approach to the pandemic. The president failed to encourage lockdowns and mask-wearing that have helped curb COVID-19’s spread in countries like Canada, while actively denigrating scientific experts and their advice, the former vice president stressed repeatedly.

Biden painted the election as not only a referendum on Trump’s tumultuous first term, but a fight for which values define the United States.

He claimed he would strive to unite the country, standing up for both blue and red states if he took over the White House.

The candidates — Trump, 74, and Biden, 77 — also marked a historically elderly choice for American voters. Their running mates, Vice President Mike Pence, 61, and Kamala Harris, 56, brought the tickets’ average age down somewhat.

Meanwhile, polls suggested that the number of states whose Electoral College votes were up for grabs had expanded.

They included the one-time “blue-wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that Trump flipped from the Democrats last time and Florida, a perpetual toss-up in recent history. But Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas were also considered competitive this time.

The remainder of states are typically sure things for each camp, meaning the toss-ups determine who is president.

• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP

Justin Trudeau was asked by a reporter on Tuesday whether he condemns the publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad.

“No,” he said, definitively in French. “I think it is important to continue to defend freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Our artists help us to reflect and challenge our views, and they contribute to our society.”

Lest there was any room for confusion about the prime minister’s free speech credentials, he reinforced the point in English. “Our journalists, our artists have an important challenge function in our society and we need to leave them free to do their work. I have always believed that and I’ve always said it.”

At least he had the decency to look sheepish.

Because, of course, that’s not what he has always said.

Those with prodigious memories will recall it was last Friday that the prime minister said something quite different.

When he was asked at last week’s press conference whether we should be able to laugh at religion or make fun of the Muslim prophet, Trudeau defended freedom of expression but said there are limits on those freedoms. “We do not have the right to shout ‘fire!’ in a movie theatre crowded with people,” he said. In a pluralistic, diverse society, people have to be aware of the impact of their words and actions, particularly on groups that experience discrimination, he added.

In the aftermath of the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty for showing his class some Charlie Hebdo cartoons that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, it was a response that discounted the barbarity of the assault on Western values such as freedom of thought.

• Chris Selley: Trudeau's 'watch your tongues' advice is offensive on many levels
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It smacked of Trudeau’s rather academic reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing seven years ago, when, after the new Liberal leader had mused about the “root causes” behind the attack, prime minister, Stephen Harper, accused him of “committing sociology.”

On Monday, Quebec Premier Francois Legault made it known he “totally disagreed” with Trudeau’s equivocation on freedom of expression, despite his own government’s stance on the wearing of religious symbols by teachers and civil servants in its own secularism law.

Instead, Legault backed French President Emmanuel Macron, who has vocally supported the right to make fun of religion.

On his Facebook page on Tuesday, the Quebec premier revealed that he received a call from Macron, thanking him for his support in defending freedom of expression, a posting all the more delicious because it is clear that Trudeau did not get one.

It appears the prime minister’s sociological musings did not resonate with Canadian voters either, given the course correction on Tuesday.

No wonder. A cornerstone of liberal democracies for the past 160 years has been the English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” – that individual freedom should only be infringed to prevent harm to others.

In the struggle between liberty and authority, Mill said that if the state is to err, it should do so on the side of liberty.

Some Muslims might find the Charlie Hebdo cartoons distasteful, even outrageous, but the cartoonists should not be silenced, far less killed, simply for causing offence.

More recently, it has been pointed out that demagogues and conspiracy theorists have used language as a vehicle for emotion, rather than meaning.

Critics of Mill on the left think those trying to sow fear or promote prejudice should somehow be muzzled.

But Mill argued that silencing an opinion is wrong, even if the opinion is wrong, because a marketplace of ideas will see truth triumph over falsehood.

A real-life test of that theory, involving 239 million American voters as arbiters, is currently underway.

In another chapter of his book On Liberty, Mill was concerned about the tyranny of the majority, forcing its will on the minority.

Quebec’s Bill 21 arguably violates the harm principle by making Muslims and Sikhs target for bigotry.

But religious adherents across Canada are free to worship and are at liberty to protest anything they consider an abomination.

They have the right to be offended but not the right to impose their religious feelings on others.

Trudeau got it wrong. Imagine if Canada had been attacked and the French president had tempered his sympathies for the atrocity with musings on possible justifications or root causes.

It seems the prime minister is a belated convert to the harm principle. But in this case the main principle is that nothing should be done that harms his prospects of re-election.

• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, speaking at 12:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday, said it was going to take time to figure out the winner of the presidential race, but that the Democrats are feeling good about Tuesday night’s results.

“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won the election, that’s the decision of the American people,” he said.

The former vice-president, coming out to cheers and honking car horns, made his remarks as the race for president remained tight, with multiple networks and newswires holding off on declaring several key battleground states for either candidate.

In the lead-up to election day, there was much speculation that Trump would prematurely declare victory. The president remained quiet online for much of Tuesday, until coming to life just after Biden spoke, saying he, too, would soon speak.

Trump tweeted, without providing any evidence, that, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter subsequently curtailed the spread of his tweet, telling readers that it contained disputed information.

We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020

Then early Wednesday, Trump falsely claimed that he had won the U.S. election — with millions of votes still uncounted.

“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said. “This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and others are counting legally cast votes. It is routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day.

The road to victory for Biden, as of early Wednesday, remained unclear. Ditto for Trump, although there were very few surprises when compared to results from 2016. No states, as of the time Biden took to the mic, had switched hands from 2016.

Biden, as Tuesday became Wednesday, held some 205 electoral college votes to Trump’s 136, though Texas and Florida — both heavily leaning towards Trump — and Pennsylvania — a toss-up — have a combined 87 electoral votes up for grabs. A candidate needs 270 of the 538 electoral college votes to take the presidency.

In several key states, waits to process mail-in ballots — which are expected to lean Democrat — will mean delays in knowing the true winners, and could perhaps see victories materialize for Democrats in unexpected states.

“It ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted,” Biden told supporters in Delaware. “Keep the faith guys, we’re gonna win this.”

As Tuesday’s presidential election day dawned in Washington, D.C., a new “non-scalable” fence had been erected around the perimeter of the White House during the night, in anticipation of civil unrest before the day was done.

In parts of the U.S. capital, storefronts were boarded over and federal buildings, such as the Treasury Department, were fenced in. D.C. Police rallied officers and equipment and acknowledged unrest is expected, “regardless of who wins,” said the chief. George Washington University warned students to stock up on a week’s worth of food and medicine, as if a hurricane is heading to town.

Perhaps there is.

Plenty of scenes have been playing out in the United States to stoke fears of the improbability of a peaceful post-election America, no matter who wins the presidential vote.

If Trump loses, will he refuse to accept the result and try to remain in office? Will he rally zealous supporters, some of whom are better armed than many nations, to protect him?

If Trump wins, will his zealous detractors take to the streets in protests that inevitably will bring violence and destruction?

Or will all the angst and fear of unrest, or outright insurrection, turn out to be this year’s pre-result fantasy, akin to 2016’s certainty of Hillary Clinton’s victory?

Is America really a nation of well-armed sore losers?

Things — alarming things — are being thought and said out loud about the prospect for a smooth acceptance of the election results, things that sound as if the scene is a fragile, war-torn country rather than the world’s oldest continuous democracy.

“We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” says an article penned by five academics, led by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative policy think tank, drawing from research tracking public opinion trends.

“Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election — especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process — could generate violence and bloodshed,” Diamond and colleagues wrote in Politico.

“We do not pull this alarm lightly.”

• The Post's live coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election
• Landslide or drawn-out brawl? Your hour-by-hour guide to an election night like no other

The International Crisis Group, an independent organization that monitors global violence, often focusing on failing states, issued a report on the United States in the campaign’s closing days.

“The ingredients for unrest are present,” the report warns.

The United States faces risks that have doomed other countries: stark political polarization bound to issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups built around political agendas; and the unusually high chance of a contested election outcome.

“And most importantly,” the report says, “President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history.”

It is an odd place for the United States to be. The Crisis Group understands the apparent cognitive dissonance.

“The country faces an unfamiliar danger. While Americans have grown used to a certain level of rancour in these quadrennial campaigns, they have not in living memory faced the realistic prospect that the incumbent may reject the outcome or that armed violence may result.”

In its final pre-election poll, Gallup found a record high 64 per cent of voters afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses, almost equally by supporters of both Trump and Joe Biden; 77 per cent said stakes are higher in 2020 than in previous elections.

Pew Research Center, in its end-of-campaign polling, found that only half of Trump supporters thought the election would be properly run.

Previous Pew studies found the level of animosity in the United States between Republicans and Democrats was deeper and more personal. It was described as mutual “loathing”; 55 per cent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans and 47 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans.

These results suggest that even if this election passes without the nightmare scenarios being conjured, governing the country  will be more difficult, jaded and partisan.

Political and social unrest this year was pushed along by a deadly and ruinous pandemic, racial injustice and broad public protests amplified by rallying cries on social media. These events exacerbate the dangerous divide, yet none of them will just evaporate after the election results are tabulated.

“Civil war is here, right now,” declared the leader of a far right-wing militia group after a Trump supporter was killed in Portland, Oregon, calling others to rally to his side.

An antifa activist tweeted Tuesday: “The best way to stop a racist with a gun is an anti-racist with a gun. Because they’re not gonna stop having guns.”

The unnerving possibilities were laid bare last month when members of a Michigan militia group were arrested and accused of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, overthrow the state government and start a civil war.

Is this really all so new?

There was a similar vibe in America during the 1968 Presidential election, when Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat incumbent Democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey. There was a third candidate in the race, Alabama governor George Wallace, who championed racial segregation, a measure of the temperature of America at the time.

Civil unrest, protests, riots, polarization and outrageous violence preceded that vote. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that April, sparking protests and riots; U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated that June, while he was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, large-scale street fighting broke out between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police and the National Guard. Some of the visuals from it look like low-resolution pictures from 2020.

In the wake of that election, a domestic terrorist group formed in Michigan. The Weather Underground started attacking government buildings to protest imperialism and racism. The first thing they blew up was a statue.

It all sounds too familiar.

America survived. It has survived 44 peaceful transitions from one president to the next through 58 presidential elections.

Has America become significantly more fractured?

Has the last four years changed the country that much?

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

Nov 3 (Reuters) — As voting sites closed throughout the United States on Tuesday, exit polls conducted by Edison Research provided some insight on major issues driving the presidential vote and an early read on voter support.

Here are some highlights from the poll, which is based on in-person interviews with voters on Tuesday, in-person interviews at early voting centers before Election Day and telephone interviews with people who voted by mail.

NEW STRENGTH WITH LATINOS

In an emerging story on election night, Republican President Donald Trump was showing some surprising strength with Latino voters in key states such as Florida and Texas.

In Florida, according to exit polls, Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden were splitting the Latino vote. In 2016, Trump only won four out of 10 Latino voters in his race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Overall, he was winning three of 10 nonwhite voters versus winning just two of 10 four years ago.

Trump maintained his advantage among white voters. According to Edison Research exit polls, six in 10 white voters said they cast ballots for Trump, unchanged from 2016.

The Trump campaign made winning over Cuban-American voters in populous South Florida a top priority by emphasizing the administration’s hardline policy toward Cuba and Venezuela.

In Texas, four in 10 Hispanics voted for Trump, up from three in 10 in 2016, according to exit polls in that state.

Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among nonwhite voters, Trump had received a slightly higher proportion of the nonwhite vote than he did in 2016. The poll showed that about 11% of African Americans, 31% of Hispanics and 30% of Asian Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 among all three groups.

OLD TRUMP BASE ERODING

Trump may need his improved performance with nonwhite voters to offset losses within his traditional political base. He appears to have lost support among white men and older people in Georgia and Virginia, key parts of the Republican’s voter base, according to Edison polls.

While Trump is still winning the majority of those voters, some of them switched to supporting Biden, the exit polls showed.

Edison’s polls showed Trump winning seven in 10 white men in Georgia, down from an eight-in-10 advantage over Clinton in 2016. While Trump is winning six in 10 voters who are at least 65 years old in Georgia, that is down from seven in 10 four years ago.

Final election results from both states have yet to be tallied, but Biden has been projected to win Virginia. Clinton also won the state in 2016.

In Virginia, Trump was winning six in 10 whites without college degrees, down from seven in 10 in 2016. Trump was also winning six in 10 white men in Virginia, down from seven in 10 in 2016.

In more encouraging news for the president, Trump was winning six in 10 voters in Virginia who have an income of $100,000 or more.

COVID CONCERNS

The national Edison Research poll results revealed deep concern about the coronavirus pandemic that has infected more than 9.4 million people in the United States this year and killed more than 230,000.

While only two of 10 voters nationally said COVID-19 was the issue that mattered most in their choice for president, half of U.S. voters believe it is more important to contain the coronavirus even if it hurts the economy.

Trump has made the full opening of the U.S. economy a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, even as infections continue to rise. Biden has claimed Trump is undeserving of a second term because of his handling of the pandemic.

In the national exit poll, four out of 10 voters said they thought the effort to contain the virus was going “very badly.” In the battleground states of Florida and North Carolina, five of 10 voters said the national response to the pandemic was going “somewhat or very badly.”

Six of 10 said the pandemic had created at least a moderate financial hardship. Seven in 10 said wearing a face mask in public was a “public health responsibility” versus three in 10 who saw it as a personal choice.

The poll found that nine out of 10 voters had already decided whom to vote for before October, and nine out of 10 voters said they were confident that their state would accurately count votes.

Other issues that were top of mind for voters included the economy, racial inequality, crime and safety, and healthcare policy.

Edison compiles exit polls and live election results for the National Election Pool media consortium.

(Reporting by Chris Kahn and James Oliphant; Additional reporting by Dan Burns and Tiffany Wu; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Lincoln Feast and Peter Cooney)

Reuters, 11/03/20 22:48

As Tuesday’s presidential election day dawned in Washington, D.C., a new “non-scalable” fence had been erected around the perimeter of the White House during the night, in anticipation of civil unrest before the day was done.

In parts of the U.S. capital, storefronts were boarded over and federal buildings, such as the Treasury Department, were fenced in. D.C. Police rallied officers and equipment and acknowledged unrest is expected, “regardless of who wins,” said the chief. George Washington University warned students to stock up on a week’s worth of food and medicine, as if a hurricane is heading to town.

Perhaps there is.

Plenty of scenes have been playing out in the United States to stoke fears of the improbability of a peaceful post-election America, no matter who wins the presidential vote.

If Trump loses, will he refuse to accept the result and try to remain in office? Will he rally zealous supporters, some of whom are better armed than many nations, to protect him?

If Trump wins, will his zealous detractors take to the streets in protests that inevitably will bring violence and destruction?

Or will all the angst and fear of unrest, or outright insurrection, turn out to be this year’s pre-result fantasy, akin to 2016’s certainty of Hillary Clinton’s victory?

Is America really a nation of well-armed sore losers?

Things — alarming things — are being thought and said out loud about the prospect for a smooth acceptance of the election results, things that sound as if the scene is a fragile, war-torn country rather than the world’s oldest continuous democracy.

“We are increasingly anxious that this country is headed toward the worst post-election crisis in a century and a half,” says an article penned by five academics, led by Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a conservative policy think tank, drawing from research tracking public opinion trends.

“Our biggest concern is that a disputed presidential election — especially if there are close contests in a few swing states, or if one candidate denounces the legitimacy of the process — could generate violence and bloodshed,” Diamond and colleagues wrote in Politico.

“We do not pull this alarm lightly.”

• The Post's live coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election
• Landslide or drawn-out brawl? Your hour-by-hour guide to an election night like no other

The International Crisis Group, an independent organization that monitors global violence, often focusing on failing states, issued a report on the United States in the campaign’s closing days.

“The ingredients for unrest are present,” the report warns.

The United States faces risks that have doomed other countries: stark political polarization bound to issues of race and identity; the rise of armed groups built around political agendas; and the unusually high chance of a contested election outcome.

“And most importantly,” the report says, “President Donald Trump, whose toxic rhetoric and willingness to court conflict to advance his personal interests have no precedent in modern U.S. history.”

It is an odd place for the United States to be. The Crisis Group understands the apparent cognitive dissonance.

“The country faces an unfamiliar danger. While Americans have grown used to a certain level of rancour in these quadrennial campaigns, they have not in living memory faced the realistic prospect that the incumbent may reject the outcome or that armed violence may result.”

In its final pre-election poll, Gallup found a record high 64 per cent of voters afraid of what will happen if their candidate loses, almost equally by supporters of both Trump and Joe Biden; 77 per cent said stakes are higher in 2020 than in previous elections.

Pew Research Center, in its end-of-campaign polling, found that only half of Trump supporters thought the election would be properly run.

Previous Pew studies found the level of animosity in the United States between Republicans and Democrats was deeper and more personal. It was described as mutual “loathing”; 55 per cent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans and 47 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans.

These results suggest that even if this election passes without the nightmare scenarios being conjured, governing the country  will be more difficult, jaded and partisan.

Political and social unrest this year was pushed along by a deadly and ruinous pandemic, racial injustice and broad public protests amplified by rallying cries on social media. These events exacerbate the dangerous divide, yet none of them will just evaporate after the election results are tabulated.

“Civil war is here, right now,” declared the leader of a far right-wing militia group after a Trump supporter was killed in Portland, Oregon, calling others to rally to his side.

An antifa activist tweeted Tuesday: “The best way to stop a racist with a gun is an anti-racist with a gun. Because they’re not gonna stop having guns.”

The unnerving possibilities were laid bare last month when members of a Michigan militia group were arrested and accused of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, overthrow the state government and start a civil war.

Is this really all so new?

There was a similar vibe in America during the 1968 Presidential election, when Republican candidate Richard Nixon beat incumbent Democratic vice president Hubert Humphrey. There was a third candidate in the race, Alabama governor George Wallace, who championed racial segregation, a measure of the temperature of America at the time.

Civil unrest, protests, riots, polarization and outrageous violence preceded that vote. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that April, sparking protests and riots; U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated that June, while he was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, large-scale street fighting broke out between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police and the National Guard. Some of the visuals from it look like low-resolution pictures from 2020.

In the wake of that election, a domestic terrorist group formed in Michigan. The Weather Underground started attacking government buildings to protest imperialism and racism. The first thing they blew up was a statue.

It all sounds too familiar.

America survived. It has survived 44 peaceful transitions from one president to the next through 58 presidential elections.

Has America become significantly more fractured?

Has the last four years changed the country that much?

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

Largely counted out by opinion polls, President Donald Trump put up a fierce fight Tuesday to keep the White House, closing in on the key prize of Florida and mounting a stiff defence in other battleground states.

One of the most bitterly contested, momentous elections in U.S. history wound toward a suspenseful finish as votes cast in a variety of different ways were slowly but steadily counted.

Any possibility of a landslide for either side seemed more and more unlikely as the night wore on, and the numbers lined up in surprising ways.

Biden seemed on the way to stealing Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes by 10:30 p.m., but Trump was leading in the three former “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Those are considered crucial to deciding the race, and opinion polls had showed the Democrats ahead in each.

U.S. TV networks reporting on the returns had to contend with a whole new pattern in how the vote came in, making races harder to read. The vast numbers of ballots cast in advance — believed to favour the Democrats — were counted first in some places, later in others.

The former vice president had a slim advantage in the Electoral College vote by 10:30 of 98-95, the score representing expected results for each candidate in safe states. A total of at least 270 votes captures the White House.

Returns streamed in as a deeply divided nation waited on tenterhooks for the extraordinary election’s outcome.

But the final result could take days to come after a remarkable surge of advance voting, likely delays in counting ballots and a legal campaign by Trump and his allies against various pandemic-related voting protocols.

As results streamed in surprisingly quickly from Florida, the lead bounced back and forth between Trump and Biden, typical of the kind of tight race for which the state is famous. Then the Republican steadily pulled ahead.

For Trump it was considered a must-win, its 29 Electoral College votes considered essential to his returning for another four years as president.

In other swing states by mid-evening, Trump was on top in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia, the latter two considered likely wins for the Democrats.

Trump also had a solid advantage in Georgia, which Biden had hoped to snatch away.

More than 100 million Americans had cast their ballots before polling places opened on the actual election day Tuesday, with citizens voting by mail in unprecedented numbers or in person at advanced polls.

More streamed to the polls Tuesday amid fears of unrest and violence that did not seem to come to fruition, but will continue to be a spectre hanging over the election’s aftermath.

Some experts predicted 160 million overall could exercise their franchise, about 67 per cent of the U.S. electorate and the highest in a century.

But the integrity of America’s democratic system came under question as never before, with court rulings on the process even on Tuesday. For months, Trump has insisted there would be fraud because of the widespread use of mail-in ballots and counting that could continue for days after Nov. 3.

• U.S. presidential election 2020 live: Trump leads Biden narrowly in Florida, other key states neck-and-neck
• A divided America braces for violence as it waits for Presidential election results
• Early counts show no major momentum for Trump or Biden in bitterly fought battle
• If 2016 was about the electoral college, in 2020 it is about the early vote
• Matt Gurney: No matter the outcome of the U.S. election, Canada needs to get serious about the Western alliance

The size of turnout on election day was itself being closely watched as an indicator of where the vote could head, with Republicans traditionally less likely to vote in advance.

Opinion surveys suggested a comfortable lead nationally for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and a tighter advantage in several of the battleground states. Those are key to winning 270 or more Electoral College votes, the majority that decides who enters the White House under the American system.

Polls put Biden an average of about eight percentage points ahead.

But while Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, they lost the White House in two of those contests — 2016 and 2000. And Trump captured narrow victories in a number of swing states last election, defying polls that suggested Hillary Clinton was ahead in those races.

The campaign pitted two starkly opposing visions for the United States and how to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, which became a central theme of the election.

President Trump presided over a first term that was marked by chaos and conflict, his inflammatory style blamed for fanning the flames of white supremacy, threatening longstanding international alliances and encouraging an angry, polarized political conversation.

He was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives — but found not guilty by the Republican-led U.S. Senate — after pressuring Ukraine’s president to help him dig up dirt on alleged corruption by Biden’s son Hunter.

Trump touted his success in fuelling a robust economy before the pandemic hit earlier this year, cutting taxes and putting America first in foreign relations. In blunt and often insulting terms, he warned that a vote for Biden would usher in socialist policies and an administration content to let violent, leftist protesters run rampant.

Biden hit hard and often at Trump’s allegedly cavalier approach to the pandemic. The president failed to encourage lockdowns and mask-wearing that have helped curb COVID-19’s spread in countries like Canada, while actively denigrating scientific experts and their advice, the former vice president stressed repeatedly.

Biden painted the election as not only a referendum on Trump’s tumultuous first term, but a fight for which values define the United States.

He claimed he would strive to unite the country, standing up for both blue and red states if he took over the White House.

The candidates — Trump, 74, and Biden, 77 — also marked a historically elderly choice for American voters. Their running mates, Vice President Mike Pence, 61, and Kamala Harris, 56, brought the tickets’ average age down somewhat.

Meanwhile, polls suggested that the number of states whose Electoral College votes were up for grabs had expanded.

They included the one-time “blue-wall” northern states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that Trump flipped from the Democrats last time and Florida, a perpetual toss-up in recent history. But Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas were also considered competitive this time.

The remainder of states are typically sure things for each camp, meaning the toss-ups determine who is president.

• Email: tblackwell@postmedia.com | Twitter: tomblackwellNP

Newsrooms are considering how they’re going to handle any attempt by Donald Trump to declare victory in the U.S. election, even if votes from key states haven’t been counted, The Guardian reports .

It presents a bit of an issue: When the president speaks, it’s news. If the president is declaring victory when he might not have a victory … well that’s also newsworthy.

It’s not altogether clear what Trump will actually do. He’s hinted in recent days that lawyers will be rushing in Tuesday night to secure the election results and he’s prevaricated when asked flat-out by reporters whether or not he would concede the election. But there have also been news reports that he will just go right ahead and declare he’s won if he pulls some critical states. Which, when the press finds out he’s going to speak, presents them with a problem.

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As always with Trump — doubly so on election night — it’s just not clear what he might say once he’s behind the lectern. Some, such as Vivian Schiller, a former president and CEO of National Public Radio, told the Guardian that one way to tackle the issue would be to take the president live, but cut away if he starts lying and take it to commentators.

“Explain why such a premature declaration of victory is both wrong and dangerous,” she told the Guardian.

Social media outlets, the Guardian reports, have also stepped up their strategies:

Twitter has a label that will say official sources haven’t called things the same way; Facebook will say: “votes are being counted. The winner … has not been projected.”

The issue is doubly important because it’s not a certainty the results of the election will be known by the end of Tuesday night — or by print deadlines in the case of many newspapers. The number of mail-in ballots, especially in key states, mean there could be several days worth of delays before official results are known.

In 2016, the electoral college delivered a surprising outcome to the U.S. presidential election. In 2020, it could be the early vote.

By U.S. election day on Tuesday, roughly 100 million ballots had already been cast at advance polls or by mail-in voting, breaking all previous advance voting records and a likely factor delaying a clear winner in the high-stakes contest between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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More broadly, analysts expected voter turnout to be around 65 per cent, higher even than in 2016, and the highest voter turnout in a century.

Unlike in Canada, where Elections Canada manages federal elections, in the United States, every state operates its own voting system. This means, quite simply, there are numerous rules, varying by state, that determine when advance votes can be cast and counted.

“There are some places where we think there will be some potential several-day delays in the bulk of the counting,” said John Fortier, director of governmental studies at the Washngton, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center and author of Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises and Peril .

This is particularly an issue in the swing states, key to either a Trump or Biden victory. The reason for delays is fairly simple: Some states say mail-in ballots must be in by election day; others accept them for days or weeks afterwards, if they’re postmarked prior to election day. Some states prepare to count in advance, others only begin on election day. Some states count more centrally, others leave it to municipal election authorities.

Already, there have been several lawsuits over advance voting, seemingly driven, at least in part, by the fact that this time around, it appeared Democrats were voting in advance more heavily than Republicans, with 48 per cent of advance votes from Democrats and 42 per cent from Republicans, according to a Vox analysis. Republicans, meanwhile, were more likely to vote in person on Tuesday.

In Texas, for example, there were lawsuits attempting to have drive-through votes disallowed. In Pennsylvania — perhaps the most important swing state — state Republicans attempted last month to stop votes from being counted after election day. The state Supreme Court allowed the votes to be counted; the Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States to issue a stay. They declined.

There were a number of factors driving advance turnout in 2020. The first and most obvious was the COVID-19 pandemic, which expanded accessibility to advance voting across the country. Another is that the stakes were so high, with Trump supporters determined to keep him in office, and his opponents eager to deliver a crushing victory to Joe Biden.

Data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, based out of Tufts University, point to significantly larger numbers of young voters in 2020 than in 2016, and they appear, at least in some states, to be taking up a larger share of the advance vote. In Texas, for example, voters aged 18 to 29 represented 13 per cent of the early vote, up from six per cent in 2016. Other states tracked similarly: In Florida, young voters cast 7.3 per cent of early ballots in 2016, and 9.6 per cent this year; in Michigan, where young voters cast just 2.5 per cent of early votes in 2016, they cast 9.4 per cent of all early votes in 2020.

Voters wait to cast their ballots at the Cranberry-Highlands Golf Club on November 3, 2020 in Butler County, Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. After a record-breaking early voting turnout, Americans head to the polls on the last day to cast their vote for incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

All of it makes for high drama in 2020 for a process that’s existed for some 150 years. Hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were cast during the American Civil War, when both Union and Confederate soldiers were able to cast ballots from the battlefields. The same happened during the Second World War for soldiers stationed overseas. More than three million absentee ballots were cast during the war.

While the late 1800s saw some civilians allowed to cast absentee ballots — mainly those who were too sick to go in person to the polling station — it wasn’t until 1978 that California became the first state to allow for mail-in voting for any reason at all.

Through the 1980s, some states also began to add advance polls. By 2016, 27 states allowed advance voting without an excuse; three states mailed out all ballots and the rest had a variety of required excuses.

What’s different about 2020 is that even in some states that did not allow in-person advance voting — say Missouri — exceptions have been made for the pandemic.

“There have been a lot of changes,” said Fortier.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson

The combination of the coronavirus pandemic and President Donald Trump’s accusations of mass voter fraud by Democrats has legal experts warning of the possibility of a contested presidential election.

Americans have selected a president 58 times. Four times, an inconclusive or disputed result tested the legal underpinnings of U.S. democracy.

1800: House votes 36 times to break a tie

The fourth U.S. presidential election ended in a tie, with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each receiving 73 electoral votes.

In that case, the U.S. Constitution leaves it to the House of Representatives to select the next president. Each state delegation gets a single vote in the so-called “contingent election.”

But when legislators began voting in February, 1801, neither Jefferson nor Burr was able to win the support of more than eight of the 16 states that existed at the time.

House members voted 35 times over a week, and each time Jefferson came up with eight votes, failing to win the needed majority. On the 36th try, Jefferson won 10 states and the House awarded him the presidency.

Burr, as the runner-up, became his vice president, under the rules at the time.

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1824: Contingent election

Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the most votes in the Electoral College among four presidential candidates, but did not receive the majority of 131 electoral votes required to win. The outcome led to a vote in the House of Representatives, which elected John Quincy Adams as president.

1876: Duelling electors

The most contentious and controversial presidential election in American history was arguably the 1876 contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.

In Southern states, the voting was marred by threats of violence from Democrats who aimed to keep black voters away from the polls. The Democrats also created ballots that carried pictures of famous Republican Abraham Lincoln to try to trick illiterate voters into choosing Tilden.

At the end of the tumultuous campaign, competing political camps in three states each sent two different slates of electors – one for Tilden, the other for Hayes – to Congress.

The dueling slates from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina arrived with varying degrees of authority; the Republican slate from Louisiana supporting Hayes was sent by the state’s governor while the Democratic slate backing Tilden was sent by that party’s gubernatorial candidate.

The election hinged on the disputed states. If their Republican electoral votes were counted, Hayes would be president. If the Democratic slates were counted, Tilden would be elected.

Since Congress then had no existing procedures to decide which of the disputed returns should be counted, it created a 15-member commission to settle the dispute, with five members each drawn from the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. That commission ultimately voted 8-7 along partisan lines to award each of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him the presidency.

Democrats accepted the result only after Republicans agreed to withdraw U.S. troops left over from the Civil War from Southern states. The compromise helped usher in the so-called “Jim Crow” era of legalized racial segregation and discrimination that would last another century.

A decade later, Congress enacted the Electoral Count Act that was meant to establish a roadmap for resolving disputed elections in the future, though exactly how it would work remains unclear because of ambiguities in the language, election scholars say. The law has never been tested or interpreted by the courts.

2000: The Florida recount

The most recent contested presidential election was the race between Republican George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat. By the end of Election Day, it was clear that contest would be decided by Florida’s 25 electoral votes.

As the polls closed in Florida, television networks declared that Gore had won the state handily. But as vote-counting went on into the night, they reversed themselves as Bush’s tally increased. By morning, the state’s count had Bush leading Gore by only a few thousand votes.

Gore’s campaign asked officials in four of Florida’s biggest counties to recount their ballots by hand, kicking off a weeks-long process of inspecting punch-card ballots. Three weeks after the election, Florida declared that Bush had won by 537 votes.

Gore contested that count, and the state’s highest court ordered a recount of thousands of ballots that had been rejected by counting machines because they were incompletely punched – leaving “hanging chads,” little pieces of paper clinging to the ballot.

The U.S. Supreme Court effectively halted that count on Dec. 12, six days before the Electoral College was to meet, ruling that the constitution had been violated by different counting standards being used in different counties.

Republican lawmakers in the Florida legislature were on the verge of selecting a slate of electors that would back Bush over Gore when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount. The court decision prompted Gore to concede the election, saying he wanted to spare the country further partisan infighting.

OTTAWA — Small business owners already hurting from COVID-19 shutdowns could struggle to stay afloat under the Liberal government’s new rent relief program, industry representatives say, as companies grapple with months of deferred rental payments.

Leading lobby groups including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (CCC) and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) have been calling on Ottawa to retroactively cover rental costs for business owners, arguing that a failure to cover previous months’ losses would kneecap hard-hit industries such as retail, hotels and food services. Many business owners were unable to access the Liberal government’s previous rent subsidy, even as some faced months of government-imposed pandemic lockdowns.

In new legislation tabled by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday, federal coffers will retroactively cover small business rent for the month of October.

But industry groups say the single month in back pay doesn’t make up for the structural failure of the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance (CECRA), the government’s previous rental relief program that went vastly underused ever since it was unveiled by former Finance minister Bill Morneau in April.

Bill C-9, tabled by Freeland on Monday, would introduce the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy (CERS) to replace the older program.

“CECRA was problematic from the start, and a large number of small businesses have struggled without access to any rent support for months,” said Alla Drigola, director of parliamentary affairs for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “We would have liked to see this CERS retroactive to the start of the CECRA program to ensure support is provided to the businesses that need it most.”

Lobby groups on Tuesday said they would press Ottawa for longer retroactive payments as rising cases of COVID-19 trigger a new round of lockdowns in major urban centres in Ontario and Quebec.

Restaurants Canada, which represents 30,000 firms, warned this summer that over half of Canadian eateries could go out of business between September and December as patios close down and as new lockdowns temporarily choke off cash flows.

“Not retroactively fixing rent relief’s original design flaw feels unfair and arbitrary and we will continue to advocate that this be fixed,” said Laura Jones, executive vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

She said the new rent program is “much better” than the previous program, but said it was a “disappointment to business owners” that retroactive payments would be limited to one month.

In a news release on Tuesday, the CFIB warned that new lockdowns are already starting to take hold on businesses. Just 66 per cent of companies that it recently surveyed are completely open, compared with 72 per cent two weeks ago. Just 42 per cent of the companies surveyed are currently fully staffed, compared with 48 per cent two weeks earlier.

Rent, along with labour, is among the biggest costs facing most small businesses, and lobby groups have been in regular negotiations with federal officials on the new rent relief program. Ottawa had to extend the CECRA program in September in order to provide supports to shut-down businesses — a move that was applauded by industry, but that only helped entrepreneurs who had already tapped into the program.

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Many were unable to access the benefit, as it required landlords to apply for the income supports rather than business owners themselves. Landlords often opted not to apply for the rental benefits.

The replacement CERS program would instead be accessible directly to business owners, covering up to 65 per cent of rent costs. An additional 25 per cent coverage will be available to businesses that have been forced into full shutdowns, for a total of 90 per cent coverage.

The new legislation will also extend the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) by six months to June 2021.

It expands a separate program for small businesses, the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA), to $60,000 per business from $40,000. Under the program, businesses apply for government-backed loans that, if paid back under a certain time frame, allow companies to retain one-third of the value of the borrowed money.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole on Tuesday called for “additional flexibility” in both the rent subsidy program and wage subsidy program, saying small businesses make up the “backbone” of the broader economy.

He targeted the older structure of the rent subsidy in particular, saying the requirement for landlords to apply for the program left thousands of businesses without support.

“Today there are tens of thousands of businesses in Canada that aren’t getting the help they need – at a time when Canada already has the highest unemployment in the G7,” O’Toole said.

Finally, the Ontario government has produced rational guidelines to replace its regime of poorly explained pandemic restrictions. Premier Doug Ford’s announcement Tuesday will provide welcome clarity for all Ontarians, but especially those whose jobs or businesses have been affected by the province’s 28-day shutdown of restaurants, gyms and cinemas.

The premier has been under increasing pressure from frustrated business owners who have complied with the province’s safe operating rules, have had no outbreaks, and yet were shut down nearly a month ago. As justification, the province offered mostly lame arguments, such as that gyms were implicated in two per cent of outbreaks, or when people gathered without masks, something bad could happen.

As the premier himself has observed, if you are going to take away someone’s living, you’d better have a good reason for it. Exactly. But the province fell far short of that, imposing restrictions without explaining exactly what factors and thresholds were considered.

The new plan sets the rules for living with the pandemic, rather than focusing all our energy on fighting it. It’s something we are going to have to do until there is a vaccine.

Instead of three stages, the province will offer five levels of pandemic response. The lowest, or green category still imposes restrictions on gatherings and behaviours, but they are modest. Most areas of Ontario fall into this category. Restrictions become slightly more substantial in the yellow category, which currently includes four public health units.

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Next is the orange level, which includes Toronto, Peel, Ottawa and York. Eastern Ontario is a new addition to this group. Under the new rules, those areas will see restaurants, gyms and cinemas open Saturday, except for Toronto, which has asked for an additional week. Beyond that, there is a restrictive red category, but no part of the province is in that now. The final category is lockdown.

Schools will remain open in every category except lockdown. The theory is that COVID cases in schools are the result of community transmission and they can be managed at the individual school level.

For each category the province has spelled out epidemiological, public health and health-system capacity measures. Included are things like the weekly case level per 100,000 population, positivity rate, transmission rate, hospital bed capacity and contact tracing capability. These are the factors restrictions should be based on, but without specific numbers that indicate the need for more restrictions, the province’s moves looked like voodoo, with perhaps a hint of astrology.

While the new rules set thresholds for moving from one stage to another, that is a decision that will still rely on the judgment of provincial and local public health doctors, who will weigh multiple factors, not just one number.

The new approach is the Ford government’s best expression of the oft-mentioned balance among the physical, emotional and economic concerns the pandemic has created. More than eight months into the pandemic, it’s the only rational way to approach the situation. That point was made Monday by Ottawa’s medical officer of health, Dr. Vera Etches. She said people need to “get back to living” and learn to co-exist with COVID-19 because it’s going to be with us for quite a while yet.

That’s inarguably true and would have been a sensible thing to say any time in the last several months, but Etches’s comments drew gasps of horror from those who still believe that COVID-19 numbers can, and must, be kept as low as humanly possible, regardless of the effect on other types of health care or the economy. That group will not be at all pleased with Ford’s announcement, especially as it came on a day when the province announced 1,050 new cases, another record.

None of this is to say that people don’t need to act sensibly, wear masks, wash their hands, and avoid big groups as much as possible. These are the safety measures that the new pandemic plan relies on for success.

Ford’s move shows that the government’s thinking has evolved considerably in the four weeks since he imposed new restrictions based on much lower case numbers. The new plan raises the threshold at which government will impose job-destroying economic restrictions. It also clarifies what factors and numbers will compel the government to impose restrictions in the future. Those are two big steps forward, and long overdue.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

 

Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of former Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, is asking the Federal Court to force the government to take her name off Canada’s no fly list.

She claims the effect is to unfairly ban her from Canada.

She filed documents seeking a judge’s order that her Charter rights were violated when she was denied boarding a flight from Europe last February.

That decision was in accordance with her status as a listed person under the Secure Air Travel Act. Under the legislation, this means Canada has reasonable grounds to suspect she will try to threaten transportation security or travel to commit a terrorism offence, such as participation, funding or recruitment for terrorist activities.

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Zaynab Khadr, 41, is the oldest child of the late Ahmed Khadr, an Egyptian-Canadian top al Qaida financier who was killed by Pakistani near the Afghan border in 2003. More than a year previously, his son Omar, then 15, was captured in a firefight with American troops in Afghanistan, held in Guantanamo Bay, transferred to Canada, released on bail, and eventually settled a lawsuit against the government of Canada for $10.5-million.

Zaynab has always been the most outspoken and overtly extremist of the children. She was born in Ottawa but moved to Pakistan as a child, where her father associated with the highest leadership of al Qaeda. She openly endorsed the 9/11 terrorism of al Qaeda as just desserts to its victims, and she was closely investigated by police, even to the point of having her laptop confiscated. She was never charged.

Her new lawsuit alleges the air travel ban was motivated only by her political views and what she has said, which allegedly violates her Charter freedoms. It also claims this ban effectively denies her the freedom to return to Canada and reunite with her children.

She was living in Sudan with her husband and children in 2017, according to documents filed by her brother Omar Khadr, as part of a request to have his own bail conditions modified to allow visits with her. She is reported to have been living in Georgia in 2018.

In September, the government denied her request to be removed from the list under the Secure Air Travel Act.

The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness gave “no reasonable basis to suspect she would engage or attempt to engage in an act that would threaten public transportation or to suspect she was travelling by air to commit certain terrorism offences,” the documents read.

The suit also names the Attorney General of Canada. It alleges Khadr has been deprived of the right to meet the case against her, violating the government’s duty of procedural fairness. The case, filed by Khadr’s lawyer Barbara Jackman, asks for a declaration that parts of the legislation are unconstitutional, or otherwise a remedy for Khadr, such as sending her case back for reconsideration. Khadr asks for no money other than the costs of the appeal, and asks to see the documentation behind her no fly listing. The government has not yet filed a response.

“The allegations against the Appellant are based on her history of speech and association,” the appeal says. “The Appellant has never engaged in or threatened acts of violence, and her words have never had the effect of compelling or encouraging acts of violence.”

In 2009, Zaynab Khadr was married to Joshua Boyle, a supporter of the family who connected with her through mutual editing of a Wikipedia page about her. That marriage lasted only several months, and Boyle later married Caitlan Coleman, with whom he was abducted and held hostage in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were freed by the Pakistani military. Back in Canada, Boyle was later charged with many offences against her, including sexual assault, but cleared last year after a trial.

Jagmeet Singh waded into the U.S. election on Tuesday, saying U.S. President Donald Trump had failed to control the COVID-19 pandemic, putting Americans and the rest of the world at risk.

“I think it would be better for the world if Trump loses and I hope he loses today,” said Singh.

The leader of Canada’s New Democrats said Trump has flirted with white supremacy and endorsing violence, and emboldened racism and division “to an extent that we’ve not seen before.”

VOTE HIM OUT

In 4 years Donald Trump has:

• Placed kids in cages

• Fanned the flames of hatred and division

• Failed 230,000 Americans, left dead because of COVID-19

Trump makes the world a more dangerous place for all of us and I hope to see him lose.#Elections2020

— Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) November 3, 2020

Other Canadian leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have remained studiously quiet regarding the U.S. election. Trudeau said he would watch from the sidelines, and that he stands ready to work with whomever heads to the Oval Office after Tuesday’s election.

Erin O’Toole, the leader of the Conservatives, concurred, saying “this is a vote for Americans, not Canadians,” and added that were he prime minister, he’d work with either candidate.

Singh, though, broke with this logic and instead implored Americans to vote Trump out.

“We’re not in normal times,” Singh said. “What President Trump has done is so far beyond what is normal that it is a moral imperative that we have to speak out and make it really clear that what he has done in his presidency is wrong.”

Pollster Nate Silver has said that if Joe Biden doesn’t win Pennsylvania, he’s got a rough road to victory.

While that all may or may not be true, Pennsylvania is one of the swing states that pundits and analysts are paying attention to — and, there’s a weird quirk, because it’s possible, likely even, that we won’t even know the outcome in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night. That’s because of a probable delay in counting mail-in ballots.

The reason for this delay: Absentee ballot counting begins there on election day, whereas many other states started organizing ballots in advance. (Both the state’s governor and secretary of state have said this in recent days, saying the wait would be “days” to find out who won in Pennsylvania.)

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But anyhow: Pennsylvania was one of the states Donald Trump won in 2016; prior to that, it had consistently voted Democrat for president. And, when Trump won it, it was by less that one percentage point. Going into election day, Biden had a five point lead in the polls.

That might sound big, but in reality it could be a polling error; in 2016, as Silver points out, polls in this same state were off by 4.4 per cent. More to the point, perhaps, a few weeks ago, Biden had a seven point lead in the polls — so things have tightened up.

Basically, the way pollsters are looking at Pennsylvania, that state’s 20 electoral college votes could decide the election. Without getting too far into the nitty gritty of things, NPR is reporting that, basically, if Biden and Trump win the states they’re expected to win, they could end up with a 259-259 tie in the electoral college, meaning Pennsylvania would be the likely tiebreaker state.

Here’s the other thing: Silver also argues Pennsylvania matters as something of a bellweather. It is economically and demographically similar to other important swing states, such as North Carolina and Florida.

In other words, if Biden has a terrible night in Pennsylvania — or Trump a good one — that might suggest the same thing is happening in some of the other critical swing states. It would also raise some questions about Biden’s success in other Rust Belt states.

To win, Biden needs a variety of these states and, to put it mildly, he could really, really use Pennsylvania. If he doesn’t get it, the question of which states he will get is harder to answer, according to Silver’s analysis.

He has, in short, no “Plan B,” no second pathway into the Oval Office. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen. But it does make it trickier.

Oh: Polls close at 8 ET in Pennsylvania.

With COVID-19 precautions in place across the U.S., open space for voting stations is at a premium. From bars, to laundromats to car showrooms, here are some of the strangest locations that have been co-opted to act as polling stations across the country.

Friends Bar — San Francisco, California

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Su Nueva Lavanderia Laundromat — Chicago, Illinois

Grand Central Market — Los Angeles, California

St Louis City Library — St Louis, Missouri

Sam’s Auto Sales — Chicago, Illinois

Pantages Theatre — Los Angeles, California

Kings Theatre — Brooklyn, New York

Museum of Ice Cream — San Francisco, California

Shiekh Shoes — San Francisco, California

Outside of a building — Portland, Oregon

OTTAWA — Conservative MPs protested the Liberal government’s new assisted dying bill on Tuesday, grilling a trio of cabinet ministers who appeared at the justice committee to defend the legislation.

The Conservative caucus is split on the bill, with 78 of their 121 MPs voting against it at second reading, including Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. All other MPs voted in favour of the legislation, making it likely to pass the House of Commons easily.

The Liberals created the assisted dying regime in June 2016 in response to a Supreme Court of Canada decision, Carter v. Canada. The new legislation, Bill C-7, responds to a different Quebec Superior Court ruling in 2019 that found that the original law unconstitutionally restricted assisted death to terminally ill patients; if a person’s death was not “reasonably foreseeable” they could not have an assisted death, the ruling deemed, regardless of their level of pain and suffering.

The Liberal government decided not to appeal the Quebec decision. Bill C-7 expands the assisted death regime to comply with it, along with making a few other changes around the process of consenting to an assisted death.

At Tuesday’s committee, where Justice Minister David Lametti, Health Minister Patty Hajdu, and Employment and Disability Inclusion Minister Carla Qualtrough all appeared, Conservative MPs criticized the government for not fighting the court ruling.

“Instead of appealing, as we called on them to do, instead of appealing as the disability community called them to do, this government chose at the first possible opportunity to, in fact, not defend their own legislation,” said Conservative justice critic Rob Moore. He pointed to a letter signed by 72 disability advocacy organizations that was sent to Lametti protesting the removal of the foreseeable death requirement.

“The message that this legislation sends — that no longer do you need to be dying to access assisted dying — is a fundamental change in our country.” Moore said.

Lametti told Moore it was a difficult decision to accept the court ruling.

“We did hear various voices, including voices from the disability community,” Lametti said. “We took the decision, put quite simply, to reduce suffering. It was hard to see cases like Nicole Gladu and Jean Truchon, and Julia Lamb out west, and not see the suffering that they were going through with no recourse to medical assistance in dying that other Canadians had.”

Gladu and Truchon both had incurable degenerative diseases and their cases were the basis of the Quebec court ruling, while Lamb is a B.C. woman in her twenties with a neurodegenerative disease who had also challenged the law.

The Conservatives are also criticizing changes in Bill C-7 that relax some of the safeguards for people who are close to death.

The changes include dropping the requirement that a person must wait 10 days after being approved for an assisted death before receiving the procedure. The bill would also reduce the number of witnesses required to one from two, and drop the requirement that a person must be able to give consent a second time immediately prior to receiving the procedure.

Lametti said these changes were prompted in part by the case of Audrey Parker, a Halifax woman who had her assisted death earlier than she wanted to — before spending a final Christmas with her family — because she worried her mental capacity would deteriorate too much to give final consent if she waited.

“It was a gut-wrenching set of facts,” Lametti said. “And it resonated across the country, in English and in French, there was an outpouring of support for Audrey Parker and for the ability to give an advanced consent, or waiving final consent, as we have framed in this legislation.”

O’Toole, speaking with reporters in French earlier on Tuesday, said the Conservatives will be seeking amendments because Bill C-7 doesn’t do enough to protect vulnerable people.

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However, with NDP and Bloc Québécois support, the bill is likely to pass the Commons largely in its current form. It will also need to pass in the Senate, where support is more difficult to predict. There is a deadline of Dec. 18 before the current law is no longer in force due to the court ruling, though the court has already extended that deadline multiple times.

NDP MP Randall Garrison criticized Lametti for not moving faster on a mandated parliamentary review of the assisted dying law that would consider some of the other controversial issues that aren’t currently included in the regime.

This includes expanding assisted dying to cover mature minors (people under age 18 who have the capacity to fully consider their circumstances), people who are solely suffering from mental illnesses, and a wider use of advance directives for people who expect their mental capacity to diminish.

“You know that I agree with you in principle, we’re committed to that other review,”  Lametti told Garrison. “But my priority is C-7…I’m sorry that I can’t say more than that right now.”

With files from The Canadian Press

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt

As Americans head to the polls to vote in what has been called one of the most divisive elections in U.S. presidential history, law enforcement are keeping an eye on armed vigilante groups planning to commit any acts of disruption or violence at polling sites.

Extremist groups have been planning actions in key states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has been tracking extremists via social media. Those espousing an extremist right-wing idealogy have signalled that they will heed an earlier call by President Donald Trump for poll watchers to ensure the election remain fair. Meanwhile, left-wing groups have pledged to prevent people from engaging in voter suppression.

A report published last week by the MilitiaWatch and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that those three key states, along with Oregon and Georgia face the highest risk of experience violence from militia groups during the election. “Although many U.S. militias can be described as ‘latent’ in that they threaten more violence than they commit, several recently organized militias are associated with a right-wing ideology of extreme violence towards communities opposed to their rhetoric and demands for dominance and control,” the report states.

The report is titled “Standing By: Right-Wing Militia Groups and the US Election,” a reference to  Donald Trump ‘s “stand back and stand by,” which was viewed by many as an endorsement of far-right  hate group  the  Proud Boys .

Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina and California were also listed as states at moderate risk of militia violence.

Throughout the summer, ACLED tracked the activities of at least 80 militia, most of which are right-wing armed groups. It concluded that any instances of militia activity would likely take place in capital cities, peripheral towns, medium-population cities and suburban areas with centralized zones.

Swing states in the 2020 election are especially at risk, researchers added, having observed election violence and unrest to be more common in ‘competitive spaces’. Of the five states listed as high-risk , four are perennial swing states  — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin.

The armed groups, the report explained, take action via ‘hybrid tactics’, which combined urban and rural combat with public relations, propaganda and ‘security operations’ on online and physical platforms to communicate with others not part of the militia group. Researchers also observed a trend in which armed groups assign themselves ‘public protection’ roles alongside police departments and act to ‘supplement’ the work of law enforcement.

The ACLED report named nine militias as the “most active” in the U.S. that could take action leading up to or after the election, such as Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Light Foot Militia, Civilian Defense Force, American Contingency, Patriot Prayer, Boogaloo Bois and People’s Rights.

The leader of a Three Percenters group in Georgia told USA Today he has “troops” ready to go to polling places if he hears reports of voter fraud. The Three Percenters movement based on the false claim that only three per cent of Americans fought in the Revolutionary War against the British.

“We’re going in undercover to start with,” Justin Thayer said. “We don’t want to intimidate anyone, and we’re not aligned with any political party, but if we do discover fraud, we have guys on standby, and if we need to shut down a precinct, we will.”

Even if the threats don’t come to fruition,  experts say they could be enough to keep voters from heading to the polls.

State and federal law enforcement however say they have planned for any and every scenario; from major cities to rural outposts, officials have drawn up plans and conducted drills. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said emergency management and law enforcement officials have prepared for situations including arson, COVID-19 outbreaks and violence from Election Day through the presidential inauguration in January.

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“Win or lose,” she said, according to USA Today, “someone’s going to be unhappy.”

Michael Harrison, Baltimore police commissioner and vice president of the Police Executive Research Forum warned disrupters against harassing or intimidating voters. “I have a very clear message for any person who wants to disrupt this election: Do not try it here in Baltimore or anywhere in the country,” he told USA Today. “Do not try to frighten, intimidate or harass any voter. Collectively, we will stop you and we will hold you accountable.”

Despite past competitiveness, several groups may have formed alliances in the months leading to the election, the report added.“Militia groups and other armed non-state actors pose a serious threat to the safety and security of American voters,” the study reads. “Throughout the summer and leading up to the general election, these groups have become more assertive, with activities ranging from intervening in protests to organizing kidnapping plots targeting elected officials.”

However Sam Jones, a spokesman for ACLED, told the Independent that higher risk does not mean violence is inevitable

“Voters should not be intimidated,” Jones said. “Rather, we hope people are able to use the data to evaluate their own threat environment and organize locally to stay safe, reduce polarization in their communities and, ultimately, mitigate the risk of violence.”

It has been 11 years since an Ottawa teen vanished without a trace.

Initially thought to be a runaway, there appears to be no indication of what happened to Justin Rutter.

Dave Breakenridge is joined by Ottawa Citizen reporter Taylor Blewett about the circumstances around Rutter’s disappearance, why his family has concerns about the investigation, and whether his mother feels she’ll ever get closure.

Background reading:  ‘What happened to Justin Rutter?’: The Ottawa teen vanished 11 years ago. His disappearance remains a mystery

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#distro

Five American states could become battle grounds for militia groups carrying out acts of armed violence and protests on election day, a new study warns.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon are at highest risk of experiencing violence from militia groups during the 2020 U.S. election, says the report by MilitiaWatch and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

The report is titled “Standing By: Right-Wing Militia Groups and the US Election,” a reference to  Donald Trump ‘s “stand back and stand by,” which was viewed by many as an endorsement of far-right  hate group  the  Proud Boys .

“Although many U.S. militias can be described as ‘latent’ in that they threaten more violence than they commit, several recently organized militias are associated with a right-wing ideology of extreme violence towards communities opposed to their rhetoric and demands for dominance and control,” the report states.

Throughout the summer, ACLED tracked the activities of at least 80 militia, most of which are right-wing armed groups. It concluded that any instances of militia activity would likely take place in capital cities, peripheral towns, medium-population cities and suburban areas with centralized zones.

Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina and California were also listed as states at moderate risk of militia violence.

Swing states in the 2020 election are especially at risk, researchers added, having observed election violence and unrest to be more common in ‘competitive spaces’. Of the five states listed as high-risk , four are perennial swing states  — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin.

The report named nine militias as the “most active” in the U.S. that could take action leading up to or after the election, such as Three Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Light Foot Militia, Civilian Defense Force, American Contingency, Patriot Prayer, Boogaloo Bois and People’s Rights.

The armed groups, the report explained, take action via ‘hybrid tactics’, which combined urban and rural combat with public relations, propaganda and ‘security operations’ on online and physical platforms to communicate with others not part of the militia group. Researchers also observed a trend in which armed groups assign themselves ‘public protection’ roles alongside police departments and act to ‘supplement’ the work of law enforcement.

Despite past competitiveness, several groups may have formed alliances in the months leading to the election, the report added.“Militia groups and other armed non-state actors pose a serious threat to the safety and security of American voters,” the study reads. “Throughout the summer and leading up to the general election, these groups have become more assertive, with activities ranging from intervening in protests to organizing kidnapping plots targeting elected officials.”

However Sam Jones, a spokesman for ACLED, told the Independent that higher risk does not mean violence is inevitable

“Voters should not be intimidated,” Jones said. “Rather, we hope people are able to use the data to evaluate their own threat environment and organize locally to stay safe, reduce polarization in their communities and, ultimately, mitigate the risk of violence.”