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Police brace for potential Election Day unrest in a year when ‘everything is uncertain’

InternationalOct 25. 2020 As campaign season heads into its fraught, final days, police departments across the country are bracing for Election Day, mobilizing officers as they prepare for the possibility of voter intimidation, unrest or violence.  

By The Washington Post · Mark Berman · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
 As campaign season heads into its fraught, final days, police departments across the country are bracing for Election Day, mobilizing officers as they prepare for the possibility of voter intimidation, unrest or violence. 

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These preparations include extensive planning exercises, efforts to monitor early-voting sites and concerns about how long any unrest could last if the election results are not immediately known or challenged in court. 

While law enforcement agencies routinely plan for elections, officials say this year’s preparations are unusually extensive because of the sheer levels of anxiety and toxicity across the country – with fears that a modern American election could give way to potential violence.

“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in modern times,” said Andrew Walsh, a deputy chief with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. 

Tens of millions of Americans have cast ballots at early-voting sites, and tensions and accusations of voter intimidation have already flared up during this process. 

Many Americans still plan to turn out on Election Day, so law enforcement officials have conducted drills involving multiple agencies to try to game out what could happen. Police officials in multiple cities stressed that they have no information about specific threats relating to the election, but are instead preparing to make sure they are ready. 

“When you look at previous elections, there’s always been the concern when you have large crowds . . . we know [that] can be a target for someone who has an agenda,” Walsh, who runs the Las Vegas police’s homeland security division, said in an interview. The difference, he said, is the “magnitude” of the election and the weight people are attaching to it. 

Walsh said law enforcement officials have to consider three distinct periods around the election. First is early voting period, which offers an extended stretch of public gatherings and possible friction, followed by Election Day itself, which could offer much the same in a concentrated single period. 

Then comes the third, most uncertain period: however long it might take for an outcome to be declared. That window, experts say, could offer the greatest risk for potential danger. 

“We just don’t know how long this is going to take, or what this is going to look like, once this is over . . . and no matter who wins, somebody’s not going to be happy,” Walsh said. 

David Brown, the Chicago police superintendent, said at a news conference that city officials have held three tabletop exercises and plan at least one more “so we can have the best response regardless of whatever scenario happens on Election Day.”

He said many other cities are doing the same. 

“We are all in conversations with our counterparts across the country about what we might expect. But everything is uncertain. And so we’re trying as best we can to anticipate any hazard that might happen,” he said. 

Those potential hazards, Brown said, range from bad weather to large protests to gatherings that could include “embedded agitators that might loot or cause violence or destroy property.” 

In New York, authorities conducted a tabletop exercise in recent weeks looking at the time leading up to Election Day and the following day, according to John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. 

The exercise included “natural disasters, protests, violence, suspicious packages, explosive devices” among the litany of scenarios the department contemplated. He emphasized at a briefing this week that there is no credible threat to New York City or Election Day. 

President Donald Trump repeatedly has attacked the integrity of the election, making false claims about voter fraud and urging his supporters to monitor activity at the polls, while his administration has warned about the danger posed by extremists who could target election-related events.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a threat assessment released earlier this month that domestic violent extremists could target events connected with the presidential campaigns, the election or the post-election period. It wrote that “campaign-associated mass gatherings, polling places, and voter registration events, would be the most likely flash points for potential violence.”

As part of their preparations to protect such gatherings, police have begun shifting personnel to ensure larger numbers of officers are deployed or available. 

Police in Madison, Wis., are planning on having significantly more staffing for this election than previous ones, and they are also undergoing greater preparations, Victor Wahl, the acting police chief, said in an interview. 

In prior years, Wahl said, officers might get reminders before elections about things like electioneering and polling places, just because that was not something they dealt with every day. 

“Certainly this year, what we’ve gone through the last few months, the national climate and things like that, we’re spending a lot more time on it,” Wahl said.

Police across the country have limited time off around Election Day to keep officers around. In Dallas, all sworn personnel must wear uniforms in case they need to be deployed, a spokesman said. 

Officials in Phoenix and Portland, Ore., said they would increase staffing, while the Los Angeles Police Department also said they were prepared to deploy more officers as they anticipate possible protests. Some departments said they were ready to shift deployments as needed by circumstances on the ground, while others declined to detail their staffing or operational plans.

D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham told local lawmakers that within law enforcement, “it is widely believed that there will be civil unrest after the November election regardless of who wins,” as well as during the inauguration in January.

Preparations are also extending to polling locations and early voting. Police in Charlotte said they would check on polling areas there, while the Miami-Dade police – who noted they are only allowed in polling locations to vote or if allowed by precinct clerks – said they would add early-voting sites to patrol routes to keep an eye for any issues. 

In New York, where early voting begins Saturday, Terence Monahan, chief of department for the NYPD, said at a news conference that his force would have “a presence everywhere people come to vote” to make sure everyone can safely cast their ballot. 

When asked if police could remain impartial there after the largest New York City police union endorsed Trump, he said his officers would take no side while on the job.

“When we put on this uniform, we are apolitical,” Monahan said. “We have no stance one way or the other.”

Trump also sparked criticism with his call over the summer to have law enforcement officials patrol voting sites, a tactic that historically was used to scare voters of color. 

“There are many folks who are rightly triggered and intimidated by just the sight of armed police in and around the polls,” said Craig B. Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project.

Police and law enforcement officials often spent recent elections trying to stay away from polling sites specifically to avoid giving the impression of any voter intimidation, said Gregory Shaffer, a former FBI agent. 

This year, Shaffer said, he thinks police will likely need to be more focused on the streets, particularly given the potential for clashes between opposing groups. Police will likely be on standby, he said, and may do things including pre-staging riot police on buses near possible protest sites.

The most worrisome time frame heading into November is likely not the election itself but the post-election period, said Irfan Nooruddin, a Georgetown University professor and an expert in democratization and international politics.

When violence happens in other countries around an election, he said, it is usually after the vote, “in which the losing side, or the side that expects to lose, doubles down using violence to delegitimize the process.”

Shaffer, the ex-FBI agent, said this year is the first time “that police are really, I think, in fear of what may happen on Election Day.” Shaffer also said he believes police officers hope the election is not drawn out or close, regardless of who wins.

“They’re all hoping for a landslide for one of the candidates and so a decision can be made quickly, so the country can move forward and their city can move forward,” he said.

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Trump’s historic assault on the civil service was four years in the making

InternationalOct 24. 2020President Trump 

By The Washington Post · Lisa Rein, Josh Dawsey, Toluse Olorunnipa · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE· 
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s extraordinary directive allowing his administration to weed out career federal employees viewed as disloyal in a second term is the product of a four-year campaign by conservatives working from a little-known West Wing policy shop. 

Soon after Trump took office, a young aide hired from the Heritage Foundation with bold ideas for reining in the sprawling bureaucracy of 2.1 million came up with a blueprint. Trump would hold employees accountable, sideline their labor unions and give the president more power to hire and fire them, much like political appointees. 

The plan was a counterweight to the “deep state” Trump believed was out to disrupt his agenda. Coordinating labor policy for the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, James Sherk presented his bosses with a 19-page to-do list titled “Proposed Labor Reforms.” A top category was “Creating a government that serves the people.” 

The result this week threatens to be the most significant assault on the nonpartisan civil service in its 137-year history: a sweeping executive order that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government. Exactly which roles would be affected will be up to personnel officials at federal agencies, who were tasked on Friday with reviewing all of their jobs and deciding who would qualify.

The order, a year in the making after delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, came less than two weeks before Trump will ask voters for a second term. Still, it was not a last-minute idea or presidential whim. Rather, the wonky-sounding “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service” is a crowning achievement of conservative policy on the civil service. 

Civil service experts and union leaders have assailed the order as an effort to impose political loyalty tests on a nonpartisan workforce. The directive likely would not survive if Joe Biden is elected president. 

A day after issuing a directive crafted in such secrecy that senior officials across the government had no idea it was coming, Trump railed to donors that he presides over a government of miscreants. 

“Somebody said, President, what’s the toughest country to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea?” Trump told attendees at a fundraiser before Thursday’s debate in Nashville, saying it was harder to deal with officials inside his own government than with North Korea or Russia, according to one person who was there.

“No, the toughest country by far is dealing with the United States,” Trump said. “It’s true. These people are sick.” 

The president went on to denigrate civil servants who served in government before his election. 

“Well, you have a lot of people from past administrations, and they’re civil service. I fired some,” he said, referring to his efforts to purge several career diplomats and others who testified against him during last year’s impeachment hearings.

“I say some, just get rid of them,” the president continued. “We had a lot of them come to the floor during the impeachment hoax. You see them coming in with their bow ties and everything. It’s a weird deal,” Trump said. “We have some pretty deep-set, deep-seated people – we got a lot of them, and we got rid of a lot of them.”

Trump’s obsession with government employees he believes are against him has grown in recent months after his impeachment trial and the publication of the anonymous book “A Warning,” said four officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The book is a critical account of the Trump administration written by an unnamed person described as a senior administration official.

Trump has dispatched Johnny McEntee, a 30-year-old aide viewed as deeply loyal to the president, to cull disloyal employees from agencies, vet potential hires and report back on his findings. McEntee has frustrated a range of Cabinet secretaries and administration officials with his moves. But McEntee has told others he is sniffing out perceived disloyalty, making personnel moves and questioning aides for the president because too many officials have had their own agendas for too long.

The White House has declined to say how many jobs would be swept into a class of employees with fewer civil service rights, but civil service experts and union leaders estimated anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in the 2.1 million-strong workforce. Each administration names about 4,000 political appointees, who typically change with each administration.

On Friday, civil servants and their allies in Congress agonized over the possibility of being reclassified into a new job category that gives them no recourse to fight actions their supervisors take against them. Union leaders met with their attorneys to review their legal options. Experts on the civil service opined that the Trump White House had pushed yet another boundary in its expansive interpretation of a president’s power.

The White House began crafting the order a year ago, consulting with its attorneys and concluding that federal personnel laws give the president latitude to shift employees among different groups. 

“This was the fruit of a lot of hard work and due diligence to determine who could be considered a policymaking employee who was exempt from protections,” said Joe Grogan, the former Domestic Policy Council chief, who left the White House in May. 

The pandemic delayed the rollout, along with other planned initiatives, he said. But even if Trump loses the election and a Biden administration rescinds the order, “There’s a marker around this.”

The directive was so controversial that only a handful of senior administration officials were involved in putting it together. On a call among chiefs of staff across the government Wednesday morning, the order did not come up, according to one official on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal meetings.

On a separate call with about two dozen congressional aides Friday morning to discuss the executive order, officials with the Office of Personnel Management were unable to answer basic questions, several people on the call said.

“They kept falling back on, ‘We’ve had 48 hours to digest this,’ ” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., whose district includes thousands of federal employees. “This is a remarkable statement to make when you’re the government’s personnel operation.” 

He says he is drafting legislation to overturn the order and hopes to insert language doing the same in a government spending bill Congress is expected to approve in December. 

“We will stop this one way or another,” said Connolly, calling the order “an enormous abuse of presidential power.”

Sherk, in his 2017 memo, asserted that the Constitution gives the president virtually unlimited authority over the executive branch, including to hire and fire employees. His vision forms the backbone of Wednesday’s executive order. 

Sherk, who is now special assistant to the president for domestic policy, began by advancing an antilabor agenda for both the private sector and the government. In 2018, he was the power behind a set of executive orders that weakened collective bargaining rights, cleared a faster path to firing poor performers and blocked unions from working on matters involving employee representation on work time. The orders survived numerous court challenges.

Other proposals to reduce pay and benefits and hold the line on raises were less successful. 

Sherk declined to comment. But current and former administration officials described a frustration in the Trump White House that agencies often fail to address poor performers in government because the process is prolonged and does not always result in discipline or dismissal. The officials point to critical policymaking employees with high-profile roles that, when carried out poorly, can lead to widespread dysfunction at an agency.

“James’s frustration and that of a lot of people was ‘Pick up the damn pen and do what we told you to do so a year doesn’t go by and we don’t have anything,’ ” Grogan said. He referred to a “permanent class of civil servants that have protections that no other group of employees in America enjoys.”

Heritage alumni have played a role in shaping the White House’s policy on federal workers, making moves that have earned the full-throated support of the conservative group.

In addition to Sherk – who worked as a research fellow at Heritage beginning in 2006 – Heritage alum Michael Rigas has also worked to implement Trump’s push to overhaul federal workforce policy. Rigas, currently serving as the interim deputy director for management at the White House Budget office, has said publicly that the federal government needs to have more authority to take action against poor performers.

Rachel Greszler, a Heritage researcher, said the president’s executive order would help rectify a situation in which a president has less power than a private-sector chief executive to discipline or fire “managers who refused to carry out her directives or who took actions to thwart her initiative.”

“Federal workers who hold critical policy-related positions, with the power to significantly impact Americans’ lives, should not be immune from accountability,” she said. “This change is long overdue. It will result in better stewardship of taxpayers’ money, and could improve morale as federal workers show high levels of dissatisfaction with a lack of accountability.”

Some conservatives called the order an ineffective strategy to achieve their goal of reining in the federal workforce and making its hiring and discipline practices more reflective of the private sector.

Robert Shea, former associate director in the George W. Bush budget office, said the Bush administration never considered such a move in part because it may run aground of civil service laws passed by Congress. Shea said the advice of expert career employees would likely be ignored if the order took place. 

“And if the motive is something more sinister, then I think it does real damage to the civil service,” he said. “It would convert a swath of people into pretty much political appointee status. They would not enjoy the protections that career civil servants enjoy and therefore they would be at the behest of political appointees. ” 

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Fearful calls flood election offices as Trump attacks mail-in voting, threatening participation in GOP strongholds

InternationalOct 24. 2020Weber County Clerk/Auditor Ricky Hatch helps organize mail-in ballots at the Weber County Clerk’s Office in Ogden, Utah, on Oct. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Kim Raff 

By The Washington Post · Isaac Stanley-Becker, Tony Romm · NATIONAL, POLITICS, WHITEHOUSE 
Weber County, a majority-Republican community of 260,000 on the eastern shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, held its first by-mail election in 2013. The process gained such widespread confidence that by June of this year, more than 99% of ballots cast in the primary were placed in the mail or deposited in a drop box.

But something has changed in Weber County, which now requires three full-time phone operators to field calls from residents “suddenly worried about voting by mail,” said Ricky Hatch, the county clerk and auditor. 

“Voters refer to ballots being thrown in a ditch, a river and dumpsters,” said Hatch, a Republican. They mention “dogs receiving ballots” and worry about things such as foreign interference and “rogue postal workers.” Some ask about dead people voting, he said.

Similar questions are flooding county offices nationwide, including many where residents have routinely voted by mail, said Hatch, who also chairs the election committee for the National Association of Counties. In many cases, the worries can be traced to baseless or alarmist statements by President Trump and posts on his Twitter feed. Others have been fed by headlines stripped of context and misleading reporting in the mainstream media, according to election administrators, voting rights advocates and experts in online communication.

The confusion and chaos follow a months-long campaign by Trump and his allies to sow doubt about voting by mail, a method of casting ballots that has been embraced in Democratic- and Republican-leaning states and has grown more popular this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet recent mail delays have contributed to unease about whether ballots will arrive on time and be counted. Mistrust on the left is also rooted in Republican efforts to curtail some voting options. Democrats appear to have channeled their fears into overwhelming turnout for early voting, while Republicans insist that they will make up ground on Election Day.

Trump in recent weeks has shifted his focus, tweeting less often about faulty ballots. But the partisan battle lines he drew on the issue seem to have had lingering effects in some places, and election officials say the controversy could depress turnout among Republicans. 

In a statement, Trump campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald said the president “has been fighting for months” to stop what she described as “last-minute election rule changes.” The campaign, she said, wants “every voter who can vote in person to do so, and for those who cannot to get their absentee ballot in early.”

Intensifying the mistrust, experts said, is the power and reach of social media. They said the quest to turn minor irregularities into signs of political malintent – enabled by an information ecosystem that rewards outrage and partisan groupthink – poses among the greatest threats to the integrity of the Nov. 3 election.

“The amplification of these kinds of stories can have, in and of itself, a suppressive effect,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The events in Utah, she said, show the ripple effects of attacks by Trump and his allies on “legal, safe, secure voting methods.”

Conflict over whether to expand opportunities to vote by mail has unfolded in battleground states from Wisconsin to North Carolina. But the most lasting consequence of the false and misleading narratives coursing through the Internet, often using real examples but exaggerating them to create the appearance of an alarming trend, could be a form of democratic backsliding in parts of the country where the widespread adoption of mail balloting has been shown to expand electoral participation.

“Obviously, the effort to question and undermine vote by mail has worked very well,” said Justin Lee, Utah’s director of elections, faulting the “national discussion” for what he and others described as an unprecedented level of confusion threatening to derail a well-functioning system in a Republican-controlled state.

Jason Stevenson, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, said even states with long histories of voting by mail were unable to insulate themselves from narratives about mail balloting emanating this summer from Washington. “I don’t post national stories about the election,” he said.

But a powerful feedback loop has made it impossible to tune out these national controversies. One-off incidents documented by local media are flowing to partisan voices, who use their online megaphones to reframe the details as indictments of the entire balloting process. The misleading narrative applied at the national level then filters back down to voters, causing them to distrust a system they have used for years. 

In Utah, details about a mishap began to emerge earlier this month. Local CBS and Fox affiliates quoted residents of Sanpete County – 150 miles south of Weber County – who said they were confused to find missing signature lines on their ballots.

The county clerk’s office sought to assuage voters, advising them of an easy fix: merely signing in a different location. Officials also promised to send postcards to residents informing them of how to remedy the oversight. County leaders did not respond to a request for comment.

The ballot printing error, caused by a vendor, illustrated the benefits of a by-mail system, not its drawbacks, said Lee, the state elections director. Faulty ballots distributed in person on Election Day may have been more difficult to remedy, he said. 

But the story quickly reverberated, amplified by conservative outlets and by pundits questioning the merits of voting by mail. The far-right website Breitbart cited the story from local Fox 13 – as well as a tweet from a reporter at KSL, an NBC affiliate – in an Oct. 14 story. The Breitbart piece positioned the glitch in Utah as part of an alarming pattern of election security issues affecting numerous states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.

A day later, Breitbart’s reporting gained the notice of the Dan Bongino Show, hosted by the former Secret Service agent and former congressional candidate. “It seems that almost daily we find stories about problems with mail-in voting,” an Oct. 15 story on the show’s website began, citing Breitbart. 

Bongino, an influential conservative pundit closely aligned with Trump, shared the piece on Twitter to his nearly 2.5 million followers. “It’s only going to get worse,” he wrote on Facebook. 

The story gained more than 35,000 interactions on Facebook, according to data from the digital analysis tool CrowdTangle, 35 times the number of likes, comments and shares amassed by the local CBS and Fox stories combined. It was shared in pro-Trump Facebook groups from Maine to Virginia to California, as well as by conservative-leaning marketing pages and communities with such titles as “Tea Party for Election Integrity.” Bongino’s show did not respond to a request for comment. 

The transformation of the Utah story – from a small-town technical mishap into purported proof of widespread voter fraud – illustrated to some experts the extent to which mainstream news reporting collides with the reach of social media sites and the agenda of influential political figures to stoke fear and reinforce the misconceptions of nervous voters.

A study released this month by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society offered fresh evidence of the dangers posed by homegrown misinformation. For months, Trump has generated entire news cycles that serve to cast doubt about mail-in voting, which mainstream outlets have at times covered uncritically, the report found. The president’s influential allies have eagerly shared these and other stories with their vast online audiences, enhancing their reach and fomenting fresh doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 vote. 

“With respect to mail-in voter fraud, the driver of the disinformation campaign has been Trump, as president, supported by his campaign and Republican elites,” said Yochai Benkler, who leads the center and co-wrote the report.

In these and other cases, Benkler said, misconceptions and hoaxes that take root in the White House come to frame reporting in mainstream and partisan news sources alike. Any development related to the process of voting becomes fodder in a competition for narrative control.

“The question is who picks up that formal announcement and reframes it, or retells it, as a narrative of rampant fraud,” he said.

Printing errors are not the only problems that have spooked voters throughout Utah, including Weber County, where Trump bested his Democrat Hillary Clinton by 20 percentage points in 2016. In a Facebook group hosting conversations for residents of Ogden, the county seat, comments from a right-wing YouTuber about the rejection of mail-in ballots in California led one user to doubt that the process was safe. 

Another resident asked whether the removal of mail-sorting machines, decried by Democrats, also worried any conservatives in the group. “If they can lose my package, they can easily lose my ballot,” a user commented. “See the issue here?” The Postal Service maintains that it has “ample capacity” to handle the increased volume of mail-in ballots anticipated this cycle.

Trust in reliable mail delivery once united the parties in places such as Weber County. 

“In the past, voting in person was something you did if you spilled coffee on your ballot,” said Lacy Richards, the county’s Republican chairwoman. 

Now, insistence by some on casting a ballot in person – inspired by the president’s call to his supporters to doubt the existing system, even to test it by voting twice – threatens to overwhelm voting-day infrastructure, some fear. 

Across Utah, concerns about mail balloting have grown so severe that as many as 22% of likely voters plan to vote in person, according to a Y2 Analytics survey earlier this month. That would represent double the share of voters who normally participate in person, Hatch said, warning that the state, ordinarily equipped for a fully mail-in system, “does not have enough equipment in place to handle that many voters on one day.” He envisioned long lines and health risks, as well as the possibility that “voters who can’t wait that long to vote will be disenfranchised simply because they won’t return their ballots the same way they’ve been returning them for years.”

“If they come in person at that rate, our system will be overwhelmed, and those who have aggressively expressed concerns about voting will have needlessly fulfilled their own prophecy,” Hatch said.

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5 crucial questions with 10 days to go until Election Day

InternationalOct 24. 2020President Donald Trump, left, speaks during the final presidential debate with former Vice President Joe Biden on Oct. 22, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By The Washington Post · Aaron Blake · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
The final 2020 presidential debate is officially in the books, which means we’re now in the home stretch of the campaign. With 10 days to go, as of Saturday morning, the race appears to be Joe Biden’s to lose.

But as 2016 showed, the closing days of a campaign can be a feast of the unexpected. It was about at this point, for instance, that then-FBI Director James Comey injected a late disclosure about Hillary Clinton’s emails that Democrats to this day (rightly or wrongly) blame for her loss.

Given the stage we now find ourselves in, it’s worth a reset. Below are some key questions for the week and a half ahead.

1. Are the polls off – and by enough?

This is the biggest question of all – not necessarily because of how likely it is, but because of how necessary it is for the result to be in doubt.

President Donald Trump’s deficit, which is about eight to 10 points in national polling averages, is without precedent in the 21st century. The last time a candidate was trailing by this much this late, in fact, was in the 1980s. There were no surprises back then, but what about now?

A few things: The first is that the polls can be off, especially in key states where methods are less refined, surveys less frequent and voters more unpredictable. But as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote earlier this month, they’d need to be even more wrong than in 2016, by virtue of Trump’s larger deficit. What’s more, the polls were arguably even more flawed in 2012, but in the opposite direction. We don’t really talk about that because the shift was toward a bigger win for the expected winner (Barack Obama) rather than swinging the race, but it’s still significant.

So surprises are clearly possible.

The second point is that we’re holding this election in circumstances with no precedent in the past 100 years. The continued coronavirus pandemic has pushed more voters (many more of them Democratic-leaning ones) to mail-in voting. When it comes to in-person voting on Election Day, though, it stands to reason that voters who haven’t already voted could tilt more Republican, by virtue of their lower level of concern about the virus.

There’s also the fact that, whatever advantage Democrats might glean from early voting (which we’ll get to shortly), there are issues about how promptly mail-in votes will be delivered by overburdened mail carriers and about ongoing legal issues surrounding how strict the rules will be for accepting them, including if they arrive after Election Day.

Will it be nearly enough to change the outcome? It seems doubtful. But surprises do happen, and everyone needs to anticipate the unexpected in the current climate.

2. How much does early voting help Democrats?

What has become abundantly clear in recent days is that, whatever happens from here on out, Democrats probably have built an unprecedented early advantage in the votes cast before Election Day – both via mail and in-person early voting.

According to early voting data collected by The Post, turnout in most states has already eclipsed the final early-voting tallies in 2016, and in several states, early-voting turnout is already more than half of total 2016 turnout. In Texas, 71 percent of all ballots cast in 2016 have been cast in 2020. In North Carolina, 56 percent. In Georgia, 55 percent. In Florida, 50 percent. And that’s just the competitive states.

Data nationally and in some of these states indicate that these early votes have a significant and in some cases very strong Democratic lean, given that Democrats have embraced mail-in voting much more than Republicans. In North Carolina, the ballots cast are 42 percent Democratic and 29 percent Republican. In Florida, the Democrats’ edge is 44 percent to 35 percent. In Arizona, it’s 41 percent to 35 percent. In Iowa, it’s 51 percent to 31 percent, according to data from the United States Election Project. And in Pennsylvania, it’s a stunning 71 percent to 20 percent.

Early turnout is also especially striking amount young voters, who commonly vote at lower levels and may be unregistered with a party, but lean significantly toward Democrats when voting. 

There is a school of thought that early voting doesn’t necessarily favor one party over another – that often voters who take advantage of it would otherwise be very likely to vote on Election Day. What we’ve seen from these numbers, though, suggests record turnout ahead. And higher turnout generally favors Democrats, given that people who are infrequent voters tend to tilt toward the Democrats. (Trump has warned about higher turnout from mail-in voting making it impossible for Republicans to win elections.)

And again, unprecedented circumstances leading to unprecedented results.

3. Are there even enough votes for Trump to win over?

One very important way in which the 2020 election is different from Trump’s come-from-behind win in 2016 is this: Fewer voters are up for grabs.

Trump made his comeback four years ago in large part because he won over voters who were undecided or flirting with third-party candidates. The RealClearPolitics polling average at this point had Clinton ahead 44.9 percent to 41 percent when third-party candidates were included and 47.2 percent to 42.5 percent they were excluded. That’s as much as 14 percent of voters who hadn’t fully committed to either major-party candidate who could be swayed in the final days.

By contrast, Biden’s edge today in the RCP average is 50.8 percent to 42.8 percent when third-party candidates are included and about the same – 50.7 percent to 42.8 percent – when they are excluded. That leaves only about 6 percent of voters who are truly up for grabs.

Trump in 2016 won late-deciding voters by double digits in all the key states decided by about one point or less: Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But apparently fewer of them are even available this time. His surprising win owed in part to flawed polls, but also to these late deciders, and there are apparently far fewer of them this time to help him overcome an even bigger polling deficit.

4. Can Trump overcome Biden’s huge likability edge?

And to the extent that these voters are available, are they actually going to go with the incumbent? That’s a major question for one big reason: Biden is nowhere near Clinton’s unpopularity.

Another big reason Trump won in 2016 was that voters who disliked both candidates tilted strongly toward him – and they were a significant chunk of the electorate, about one in five nationally.

One of the undersold aspects of the 2020 race is that Biden is nowhere near Clinton’s level of unpopularity, which by Election Day 2016 rivaled Trump’s. And in fact, he actually has become more popular as the race has worn on – something that would’ve seemed pretty inconceivable early on and especially in our current political climate.

Is it possible that enough voters are available to change the race, especially if the polls are wrong? Sure. But unlike in 2016, many of them will also need to be voting for a candidate they dislike over a candidate they like.

5. How decisive is it?

This one is more about the aftermath than the actual result, but it’s increasingly relevant as we head into the final days.

Trump has made it clear that he’s raring to go when it comes to questioning the legitimacy of the election – particularly when it comes to mail-in votes, which he has baselessly claimed are prone to widespread fraud. He has gone so far as to also baselessly claim that there’s no way he can lose without such fraud.

Trump made similar allegations in 2016, possibly setting the stage to be a thorn in the side of a President-elect Clinton if he lost.

The question is why he’s doing it now and how much it takes hold. Does Trump truly just believe this stuff, or is he looking for a way to explain his loss and rally a movement around him after the election? There are even suggestions that he might resist leaving office, which he has fomented by declining to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

Democrats want to win, first and foremost. But Trump’s comments have created a premium on Biden winning decisively and erasing virtually any doubt – however ill-founded – about the legitimacy of his win. It’s an impossibly ugly and regrettable situation, but it has real implications for how the country will move forward and just how much Trump’s movement might matter in the months and years after the election.

And if Biden truly is the favorite that he appears to be, it may be the most significant question come next month.

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Mastercard, MatchMove and Idemia to pilot fingerprint biometric card in Asia

InternationalOct 24. 2020The F.Code Easy card will make transactions more convenient and secure. PHOTO: MASTERCARD 

By Prisca Ang
The Straits Times/ANN

SINGAPORE – Keying in a personal identification numbers (PIN) or signing a credit card bill may be a thing of the past if consumers take to a biometric card that uses fingerprint authorisation instead.

Mastercard has partnered augmented identity firm Idemia and Singapore-based fintech startup MatchMove to pilot this card in Asia.

The F.Code Easy card will make transactions more convenient and secure, and reduce touch points in public places, said the companies on Wednesday (Oct 21).

Biometric credentials are stored on a chip on the card, and not a central database, for improved privacy and security.

The battery-free card harvests energy from payment terminals to power its fingerprint sensor and is ISO-certified by Mastercard for security and compliance. It was developed by Idemia in line with Mastercard’s specifications.

Digital payments start-up MatchMove will issue 200 to 500 biometric cards to employees of Mastercard, Idemia and MatchMove in the fourth quarter of this year. They will use the cards for transactions and live demonstrations during the pilot run.

MatchMove told The Straits Times that it is targeting a take-up of 2,000 to 3,000 F.Code Easy cards in Singapore next year. The firm is part of a consortium that has submitted an application for a digital full bank licence to the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Mastercard said the pilot will involve prepaid cards, but F.Code Easy could be used for any credit, debit or prepaid programme.

The biometric card can also be used at ATMs outside Singapore. It can be used at all point-of-sale terminals that accept Mastercard-branded cards.

A Mastercard spokesman said: “For merchants, no hardware changes are necessary and the POS terminal infrastructure does not require any modifications or upgrades.”

Cardholders receive their cards together with a battery-operated enrolment device, which securely and conveniently stores their fingerprint templates on the card. Once this is done, the card is biometrically activated.

When shopping and paying in-store, the cardholder simply taps or inserts the card at the retailer’s payment terminal while placing a finger on the embedded sensor. The fingerprint is verified against the stored fingerprint template on the card and if the biometrics match, the cardholder can be successfully authenticated and the transaction approved.

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Huawei reports 9.9% rise in first three quarters’ revenue

InternationalOct 24. 2020Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, unveiled the company’s Mate 40 series 5G smartphones. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] 

By Ma Si
China Daily/ANN

Huawei Technologies Co said on Friday that it recorded 671.3 billion yuan ($98.7 billion) in revenue in the first three quarters of this year, marking an increase of 9.9 percent over the same period last year despite the US government’s intensified crackdown on the company.

Huawei said its net profit margin in this period was 8.0 percent, and its business results basically met expectations.

“As the world grapples with COVID-19, Huawei’s global supply chain is under intense pressure and its production and operations face significant challenges. The company continues to do its best to find solutions, survive and forge forward, and fulfill its obligations to customers and suppliers,” Huawei said in a statement.

The company added that information communications technology, or ICT, has become a cornerstone of modern society and the main driver behind sustainable social, economic, and environmental development.

“Huawei believes that rapid and healthy development within the ICT industry will rely on open collaboration and mutual trust across the global industry, so it will continue working closely with its global partners and using its innovative ICT technologies to create greater value for customers despite the complex situation it is currently facing. The company will continue contributing to pandemic responses, economic growth, and social progress,” the company added.

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Laos to launch fast-track immigration service for China soon

InternationalOct 24. 2020Wattay International Airport in Vientiane is a popular entry point to the country. Laos expects to implement a fast-track immigration service with China next week. 

By Souksakhone Vaenkeo
Vientiane Times/ANN

Laos is set to begin a fast-track immigration service next week that will allow Chinese nationals to cross the border more easily with shorter quarantine time amid the travel restrictions in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Several brand-new measures are expected to be employed to facilitate travel for Chinese nationals while ensuring that the coronavirus is kept in check, Vice Chairman of the National Taskforce for Covid-19 Prevention and Control, Dr Phouthone Meuangpak, said on Wednesday.  

Incomers are expected to spend a shorter time in quarantine and will be allowed to quarantine at home instead of undergoing the normal 14-day compulsory quarantine at government-designated centres or hotels.

The required quarantine period is still under discussion and the taskforce will meet for further talks in the coming days.

Authorities are also considering the use of electronic devices that would monitor incomers around the clock about their whereabouts, said Dr Phouthone, who is Deputy Minister of Health.

“One option is that they (new arrivals) quarantine at home and take their temperature every morning and evening,” he told a press conference. 

Prior to entering Laos, incomers are required to be tested for Covid-19 and those with negative results (provided within 72 hours before their departure) are eligible to enter the country. Upon their arrival, travellers are required to have another test.

“If the virus is not detected, people can quarantine at home,” the deputy minister said, adding that a shorter quarantine period would mean that new arrivals could begin work sooner.

In the future, this policy will also apply to citizens of countries with no recent outbreak of Covid-19, he added.

The taskforce is currently working with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to identify countries that have no community or cluster outbreaks.

“If we can identify the countries that have no community outbreak, then we can also initiate the fast-track immigration system for their nationals,” Dr Phouthone said, adding that this would only be set in motion following a bilateral agreement between both countries involved.

Authorities are studying the possibility of a shorter quarantine period in line with WHO’s guidance.

Some countries have reduced the quarantine time from 14 to 10 days, and some have cut it to seven days.

The taskforce will meet in coming days to review and revise the current virus prevention measures before making any changes in November. The government updates the measures every month based on the situation surrounding the pandemic.

“Anyway, we will not take any risks,” Dr Phouthone said.

He addressed the press conference to inform reporters about the latest confirmed case of Covid-19 in Laos, after a man returning from studies in Russia tested positive for the virus on October 20.  

Asked if Laos would tighten up the measures the government relaxed last month given this latest case, Dr Phouthone said this would be decided during upcoming talks.

He added that the government’s intention was to re-open the country to ease the impact on the economy, while ensuring the virus was kept at bay.

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Pompeo to visit Indonesia for bilateral talks, dialogue with Islamic youth group

InternationalOct 24. 2020

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

By Nina A. Loasana and Dian Septiari
The Jakarta Post/ANN

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to visit Indonesia next week, with an itinerary that includes a bilateral meeting and attending an event held by an Islamic youth group, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi has said.

“We have continued to discuss the preparations, including during my meeting [on Wednesday] with the new US ambassador to Indonesia, Sung Yong Kim,” Retno told journalists on Thursday.

In addition to attending bilateral meetings, Pompeo is set to attend a dialogue on religion and civilization organized by GP Ansor, the youth wing of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), she added.

“The commitment to increase our partnership with the US is reflected through the intensive visits from officials of both countries even amid the pandemic,” she said. Pompeo’s expected trip to Jakarta comes following Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto’s visit to Washington, DC, for a meeting with US Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week.

In September, US Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James H. Anderson also visited Indonesia and met with Retno and Prabowo.

“The delegations from the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) will also visit Indonesia this week,” Retno said.

The US and Indonesia have agreed to further tighten defense and maritime security cooperation between the two countries following a meeting between Prabowo and Esper, during which they discussed regional security, bilateral defense priorities and defense acquisitions, the US Department of Defense reported in a statement issued on Oct. 16.

Retno expressed hope that Pompeo’s visit would strengthen the bilateral ties between Indonesia and the US. “The US is one of Indonesia’s important partners. We hope to continuously build a strong and beneficial partnership with the US,” she said.

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Debate brings new energy to Trump

InternationalOct 24. 2020Gino Benford, 7, from Johnstown, Pa., attends a Trump rally in the Villages, Fla. Both campaigns are planning to make their final pitches in Florida and other swing states in the coming days. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post 

By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey, Philip Rucker, Sean Sullivan · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
WASHINGTON – An upbeat President Donald Trump moved swiftly Friday to capitalize on what his campaign saw as a well-executed debate performance, cutting an ad that includes Biden stumbling over energy policy, touting a record day of digital fundraising and considering adding events to his schedule in the campaign’s final days. 

“I thought I did great,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. 

Joe Biden and his allies took a different tack, seeking to refocus the conversation on the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which the campaign believes is overwhelmingly the most important issue to voters. 

In a speech in Wilmington, Del., Biden hardly mentioned the debate and instead talked about Trump’s handling of the contagion, saying, “The president quit on you.”

With their last direct matchup in the rearview mirror and the scheduled events of the campaign now over, both teams plunged into a final, unscripted stretch, with fewer opportunities to make a fresh argument to the American people – or to stumble. 

Trump hopes that holding several massive rallies over the next few days can help him drive home the themes from the debate, in which he used unverified news reports to cast Biden as corrupt, said the former vice president has little to show for his five decades in Washington and sought to paint Biden as a big-government liberal.

But in a contest that has remained remarkably stable, the president faces challenges to any effort to reset the race with 10 days to go. Millions of voters have already cast ballots, and few remain undecided. The Trump campaign has less money to spend than Biden’s, and coronavirus cases are spiking in many places, underlining the Democratic message.

Still, Trump’s camp worked Friday to amplify Biden’s inartful response during an exchange on energy policy, when the former vice president said on the debate stage that he would “transition” away from the oil industry. 

Jason Miller, a senior strategist on the Trump campaign, called that a “massive stumble” that “probably will put the nail in the coffin for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania,” a state both campaigns view as must-win and where Biden has held a consistent lead.

Trump advisers suggested that the moment could also help them in other industrial Midwestern states, including Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Biden supporters dismissed the notion that the comment was some kind of game-changer. The Democrat clearly did not mean he would shut down the oil industry in the short term, they said, and in any case the energy industry is already shifting toward renewables on its own.

“Joe Biden is right: We need to transition off of fossil fuels to stop the climate crisis and prevent needless pain and death,” said Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group that has sometimes been critical of Biden. “The reality is the oil industry is already bleeding jobs.”

Still, Biden’s team appeared to sense at least a potential danger. The candidate moved quickly to clarify his remarks, telling reporters after the debate that he was referring to ending federal oil subsidies, not the industry itself. On Friday, campaigning in Atlanta, Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, fended off questions about his remarks.

“The president likes to put everything out of context,” Harris said. “But let’s be clear: What Joe was talking about was banning subsidies, but he will not ban fracking.”

Some Democrats in oil states distanced themselves from Biden’s comments. “Here’s one of the places Biden and I disagree,” said Rep. Kendra Horn, D-Okla., who is in a tight race. “We must stand up for our oil and gas industry.”

“I disagree with VP Biden’s statement tonight,” tweeted Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, D-N.M. “Energy is part of the backbone of New Mexico’s economy.”

Some Biden allies acknowledged that it wasn’t a good moment. “That was by far the only thing that could be categorized as a slip-up,” said former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. 

Other Democrats said the comment would not change how most voters see Biden – or Trump. “We’ve been talking about getting rid of the subsidies around fossil fuel for a long, long time,” said Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio. “Trump is trying to make a little bit more of it than it was.”

Beyond the energy flare-up, Trump conducted himself with more decorum in Thursday’s debate than in the previous faceoff, avoiding some of the interruptions and rancor from that exchange, and he offered sharper attacks on Biden’s long government service than he had in the past.

On Friday the president said he thought that his aggressive posture in the first debate was “more effective in terms of business and life” but that his more sedate performance Thursday was “obviously a more popular way of doing it.”

“You know, I wanted to play by the rules,” Trump said of the second debate. “They felt very strongly about it. It’s two different styles. I’m able to do different styles, you know, if you had to. But this seemed to be much more popular.”

Biden supporters said the president was benefiting from extremely low expectations after his bullying performance in the first debate. “Trump did better than he did last time, but all he had to do is show up and shut his mouth,” Rendell said. 

Biden sought to steer the focus back to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, criticizing his suggestion that the country is “rounding the corner” as coronavirus cases spike across the nation.

“If this is success, what’s a failure look like?” Biden said. 

The Democrat outlined the steps he would take to combat the crisis, including implementing mask mandates, expanding testing capacity and ensuring that a vaccine, when ready, is distributed fairly.

“Imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when you can enjoy dinner with your friends and your family and maybe even go out to a movie,” Biden said.

Both candidates plan to spend the final days of the campaign making their closing arguments in swing states. Trump will head to his adopted home state of Florida for a series of rallies and to cast his own ballot. In the coming days, he also plans to hold events in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

Biden has scheduled stops over the weekend in Pennsylvania and will appear on an episode of the popular podcast “Pod Save America.” His campaign plans to repeat its longtime message that Trump’s botching of the coronavirus makes him unfit for the White House.

But after weeks of bad news – from troubling polls to money struggles to leadership changes – the Trump camp seized on the debate as a glimmer of hope.

The campaign said Friday that it had raised about $26 million via online donations after the debate, the reelection effort’s largest digital fundraising day and a number that eclipsed donations that came in around the previous debate. 

The infusion comes at a critical time. This week Trump was forced to cancel $24.6 million worth of ad buys in 10 states, pulling the most money out of TV in Florida and Ohio – two must-win states – and yanking some ad reservations in Pennsylvania, according to Advertising Analytics, which tracks spending on television spots.

Biden, who has outraised Trump in the past few months, has added $16 million to his television budget for the final days of the campaign, according to the firm. The biggest chunks are going to Florida, where his campaign is deploying former president Barack Obama over the weekend, and Pennsylvania. 

There’s also a stark difference in ad buys that are already slotted for the next two weeks. Biden has paid for ads worth $43.6 million, while Trump is at $12.4 million, meaning he will have a harder time projecting his message on the airwaves.

The campaign’s basic dynamic, Biden suggested, is far more important than Trump moderately restraining himself in a single debate.

“A slight change of tone from the president for one night doesn’t cover up the lies he told,” Biden tweeted. “It doesn’t change the fact that over 220,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 on his watch. We can’t take another four years of Donald Trump’s failed leadership.”

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Spin, hyperbole and deception: How Trump claimed credit for an Obama veterans achievement

InternationalOct 24. 2020Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris (center) and Cindy McCain pay respects to the service of American Indian veterans at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz., on Oct. 8, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Ashley Parker · NATIONAL, HEALTH, POLITICS, NATIONAL-SECURITY 
WASHINGTON – The first time President Donald Trump claimed false credit for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act – which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014 – was on June 6, 2018. That day, as Trump signed the Mission Act, a modest update to the bipartisan VA Choice legislation, he seemed to conflate the two.

“So it’s now my great honor to sign the VA Mission Act, or as we all know it, the Choice Act, and to make Veterans Choice the permanent law of our great country,” the president said, standing in the Rose Garden. “And nobody deserves it more than our veterans.”

In the coming weeks, Trump began systematically erasing from the legislation’s history not just Obama but also the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who not only co-sponsored the VA Choice Act but also was so instrumental in passing the Mission Act that he is one of three senators for whom the act is officially named.

That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming – as he did at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio, in March 2019 – that McCain, his frequent political rival, failed to make any progress on the VA Choice Act.

“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it,” Trump said.

More than two years after signing the Mission Act, which made limited changes to the much broader Obama veterans law, Trump has repeated some version of his VA Choice Act mistruth more than 156 times, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, eventually claiming full credit for the bill codified by his predecessor.

“We’ve got Choice approved,” Trump told a Fox-affiliate reporter in Michigan in January. “I mean, nobody thought we could possibly get Choice approved. We have Veterans Choice approved.”

And, with that, Trump’s alternative history was complete.

– – –

Nearly four years into the presidency, Trump has made more than 22,000 false or misleading claims, according to The Post’s Fact Checker – falsehoods that go well beyond mere political exaggeration. He has obfuscated, he has deceived, and he has spun. Trump’s mendacity has become a hallmark of his presidency.

The president’s handling of the VA Choice legislation offers a crystalline window into the anatomy of a Trump lie: the initial false claim, the subsequent embellishment and gilding, the incessant repetition and the clear evidence that he knows the truth but chooses to keep telling the falsehood – all enabled by aides either unwilling or unable to rein him in.

“A lot of the problem with the president is he’s just using the wrong words,” said Jeremy Butler, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan veterans advocacy and support group. “He’s calling it ‘Choice,’ when he means the Mission Act, but to the average listener, the Mission Act doesn’t mean anything, but ‘Choice’ does.”

Butler said Trump’s inaccurate language also undermines his efforts on improving veteran care: “The real question is: Is this legislation working? Is it doing what it needs to be doing? But it’s hard not to get sucked into misstatements and mistruths and half-truths, whether it’s intentional or not.”

Trump has used the VA Choice assertion in part to create a false sense of accomplishment and to elevate himself while diminishing McCain and Obama.

As Trump repeated the mistruth, he grew bolder, claiming falsely that the legislation had, as he said at one 2018 event, “eluded us for 40 years? 50 years?” He also downplayed McCain’s role, using the legislation as a cudgel to attack the former Vietnam prisoner of war and diminish his contributions.

“I disagree with John McCain on the way he handled the vets, because I said, ‘You got to get to Choice,’ ” Trump said as he departed for Marine One in May 2019. “He was never able to get Choice. I got Choice.”

His rhetoric also had the benefit of minimizing the role of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a co-sponsor of VA Choice with McCain and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.

Research shows that Trump’s repetition of a false claim may help cement it as appearing to be true, at least to the casual observer, said Daniel Effron, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School who studies the psychology of lies.

“If you repeatedly hear the same false claim and you don’t know whether it’s true or not, you might guess that it’s true,” Effron said. “If you tell people the same falsehood a number of times, people will start to believe it.”

TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, said Trump’s deception on VA Choice is indicative of the president’s problematic behavior more generally.

“All he cares about is his own political future,” Ducklo said. “Donald Trump doesn’t actually care about veterans and military families – he uses VA Choice as a political talking point to help himself.”

– – –

White House officials and allies of the president say that when Trump talks about VA Choice, he is not actually referring to the bill Obama signed but to the general concept of providing veterans with more choice when it comes to their health care – not unlike school choice.

The VA Choice bill largely sprang up in response to a massive Veterans Affairs scandal in 2014, in which scheduling staff at VA hospitals across the country had been instructed to falsify their waiting lists to cover up the long waits for even basic care. The problem was especially pronounced at one VA medical center in Phoenix. According to an interim independent report by VA’s inspector general, officials at the Phoenix hospital falsified records, and veterans waited 115 days on average for an initial primary care appointment. Some died while waiting.

Most stakeholders agree that VA Choice – a bipartisan compromise that expanded veterans’ ability to go to private doctors – was a flawed if well-intentioned program that required an update and expansion at some point. And in June 2018, Trump signed just that in the form of the Mission Act.

The newer legislation makes it easier for veterans to seek private care and offers improvements such as allowing veterans to see non-VA doctors for primary care if their drive to a VA facility is more than 30 minutes, rather than 40 miles, or if their wait for an appointment is more than 20 days, rather than 30. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, an additional 640,000 veterans each year will seek care outside the VA system, and the legislation requires VA to negotiate a contract for veterans to seek care at private walk-in clinics.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement that Trump’s improvements to the VA system go well beyond what Obama accomplished during his two terms.

“After finding in 2015 that as many as 307,000 veterans could have died waiting for care on Obama and Biden’s watch, another 2017 VA Inspector General report found that President Obama created ‘several barriers’ to veterans receiving outside care,” McEnany wrote. “President Trump fixed Obama’s broken VA and offered actual, permanent choice to millions of veterans.”

McEnany was citing a statistic that was fact-checked as false when Trump first started using it in 2015. The number is derived from a database that predates the Obama administration, and there is no evidence that so many veterans died waiting for care.

Privately, Trump aides and veterans groups had mixed reactions to the way Trump has talked about the veterans legislation. At least one White House staffer raised the issue several times, said a former administration official, recognizing that, at the very least, Trump’s false claims would cause fact-checking problems for the administration.

But the president and his speechwriters were wedded to the language of “VA Choice,” the language of the Obama-era bill, in part because they believed the public didn’t know what exactly the Mission Act meant and felt “choice” was a more appealing term, according to this official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions.

Others in Trump’s orbit said that using the Obama law’s name accurately conveyed the spirit of both bills and Trump’s ultimate goal – offering veterans more choice and options when it came to their health care.

For some Republicans, Trump’s co-opting of VA Choice was so thorough that they didn’t realize the initial legislation had been signed into law under Obama.

During the Republican National Convention in August, several speakers said, unprompted, they wanted to mention VA Choice in their remarks because they believed it was a “big deal” and an area where Trump had done “a great job,” said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

Trump himself mentioned the topic during his acceptance speech in Charlotte, saying, “We also passed VA Accountability and VA Choice.” The first reference pertains to a 2017 accountability law that made it easier for VA to fire employees for misconduct.

“Our great veterans,” Trump continued, “we’re taking care of our veterans.”

– – –

Butler said he’s not sure why Trump continues to claim credit for VA Choice, but he and his team “learned pretty quickly that it’s not worth the time or effort to focus on that part of the discussion.”

“If you’re going to focus the little bit of time that we get to interact with the VA, or even less time we get to spend with the White House, if we’re going to spend that little bit of time trying to split hairs, trying to say, ‘Well, Obama passed VA Choice, and then you passed the Mission Act,’ you’re really going down a rabbit hole,” Butler said. 

If anything frustrates some veterans, Butler added, it is how Trump talks about the importance of respecting and honoring veterans, “but then does seem to have this ongoing personal feud with the memory of Sen. McCain.”

The animosity is so pronounced that, last month, Cindy McCain, the senator’s widow, endorsed Biden – an expression of support that came as Trump was speaking at a rally in Moon Township, Pa., where he again claimed sole credit for the VA Choice legislation shepherded by McCain and passed under Obama.

Robert McDonald, Obama’s VA secretary when he signed VA Choice, said he ultimately only cares that veterans receive the quality medical care they deserve.

“My point of view is simple: I don’t care who gets credit,” said McDonald, a fellow at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and a member of the Biden campaign’s transition team. “Our job was to improve outcomes for veterans. That was our job.”

Others, however, view Trump’s rhetoric as more problematic. Will Goodwin, director of government relations for VoteVets, a liberal political action committee that supports veteran candidates and mobilizes the veteran vote, said he believes the president is “actively lying and doesn’t care” and that such an approach toward veterans issues is emblematic of bigger challenges.

“Delivering for veterans requires constant attention from the White House on both the legislative front and how the department operates, and if the president can’t even remember the name of the largest VA legislation to pass in the last decade, how can he possibly be a competent administrator of the VA?” Goodwin said. “That’s kind of the crux of the problem with this.”

Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a senior adviser to Obama when the VA Choice law was passed, said the sheer pointlessness of the false claim makes it all the more galling. “He could just as easily say, ‘I passed the Mission Act,’ and that would be just as politically beneficial,” he said. “Either he likes lying too much to stop lying, or his staff is too afraid to tell him he’s wrong so he keeps on perpetuating this falsehood.”

Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser for Concerned Veterans for America – a veterans advocacy group that is part of the conservative Koch political network – offered a different perspective, saying that one of Trump’s key 2016 campaign promises was giving veterans more choice, which Trump ultimately delivered.

“As implemented, the Obama administration law didn’t give veterans true choice,” Caldwell said. “The president deserves a lot of credit for making progress on this issue.”

He suggested the current progress on providing veterans with more health-care options is really an outgrowth of an inadvertently “strong synergy” between Trump and John McCain.

“Bizarrely, had you not had Sen. McCain being such a strong advocate for it, and if you had not had President Trump being such a strong advocate for it, you likely would not have the Veterans Choice we’re seeing now,” Caldwell said. “President Trump deserves significant credit for Veterans Choice, and so does Sen. McCain, and it doesn’t make sense to argue over who deserves more credit because without either one, you wouldn’t have the Veterans Choice we have now.”

For all his attempts to usurp credit for VA Choice, Trump continues to trail Biden in most polls when it comes to the military, as well as his overall trustworthiness.

An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll from September found that 47 percent of U.S. adults said Biden would do a better job on supporting and respecting the military and veterans, compared with 42 percent who said Trump would perform better. A July Quinnipiac poll found 51 percent of voters disapproving of how Trump handled the military and 41 percent approving – a low point in his approval rating on the military in the Quinnipiac poll, which had him more evenly divided in early 2019.

A May 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of Americans trusted Trump “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to make the right decisions about the use of military force, while a 56% majority said they trusted him “not much” or “not at all.” The same Pew survey, however, also found that 58% of veterans said they trusted Trump to make the right decisions about the use of military force.

Meanwhile, voters have penalized Trump for his litany of mistruths. A September CNN poll asked Americans which of the two candidates was more honest and trustworthy: 53 percent named Biden, and 36 percent said Trump. And in an August Fox News poll that asked about Trump’s honesty, 61 percent of registered voters said Trump was not honest and trustworthy, while 36 percent said he was.

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In recent weeks, there have been some efforts to push Trump and his team to modulate their language on VA Choice, even slightly. In response to rigorous fact-checks in the media, aides have at times tweaked the president’s prepared remarks to say “Mission Act” rather than “VA Choice,” a senior administration official said.

Pete Hegseth, a “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host and Army veteran, has pressed the argument on his show and in conversations with Trump that the VA Choice law didn’t offer veterans real choice, but that Trump’s updates to the legislation have done so, according to one person familiar with the private conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

In a video Trump shared on Twitter this month, he seemed to echo Hegseth: “For more than 45 years, they were trying to get Choice,” the president said. “Obama gave you a weak version that didn’t work. It was a joke. I gave you the Mission Act, which is phenomenal, and it’s worked out fantastically well.”

Speaking to reporters in early September, the president again criticized McCain but this time was more precise in talking about the veterans legislation.

“The VA is running much better now – and we did with the Mission Act, and the Accountability, and all the things we’ve done for the VA,” Trump said.

Two days later, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he was pressed by Dana Bash about Trump’s false statements on the topic of VA Choice. “Now, I know President Trump expanded it in 2018,” Bash said, “but why does he insist on repeating that he’s responsible for passing it, when it was President Obama?”

Wilkie called the issue one of “semantics” but also said that the Mission Act ultimately “expands choice to all veterans” – and is catchier to say.

“Choice is much easier to understand than the Mission Act, which was the title that the Congress put on the president’s program, because it’s an acronym that has six or seven different words in it,” Wilkie said. “But what we are talking about is permanent choice, not what the Obama administration, Obama-Biden, foisted on the country.”

Before long, though, Trump resumed falsely boasting that he passed VA Choice. The line has become a staple of recent campaign rallies in front of crowds from Macon, Ga., to Prescott, Ariz.

Speaking in Erie, Pa., two weeks before Election Day, Trump bragged again about the legislation that passed under Obama: “And for our great veterans, we passed VA Choice and VA Accountability,” Trump said.

The falsehood was greeted with cheers from the crowd.