Biden promises to do “whatever it takes to bring down inflation” while Republicans say they will investigate his management if they win in Congress
With anxiety and prayers in mind, Americans vote this Tuesday in the most existential and uncertain mid-term elections in recent history. This is one of the reasons why more than 42 million voters (according to monitoring by the NBC network) have already expressed their opinion in advance, both in person and by mail, although the bulk of citizens will exercise their right this Tuesday at thousands of polling places spread across all 50 states.
The geographical extension of the country, with different time zones from coast to coast, and the complexity of some territories will mark the counting of ballots tonight. It is not an electoral dawn as it can happen in Spain in a legislative one. The president himself, Joe Biden, recently warned that the final results “will be known in a few days.” Different people in charge of the electoral system have echoed this idea and recalled, as in previous elections, that the delays in some states are the result of the difficulties of the recounts and “it does not mean that something disastrous is happening,” according to the secretary Acting State of Pennsylvania Leigh M. Chapman, in response to Republican leaders already predicting a equivalence between voter delay and voter fraud. In the case of Pennsylvania itself, the final result of the 2020 presidential election was known within twenty days. In Michigan it took three days.
The elections of two years ago were precisely crucial for the approval since then of new vote restriction laws in more than twenty states and the reconfiguration of many electoral districts to the benefit of the Republicans. For this reason, far-right extremism plays this Tuesday with greater advantages than ever. In Florida, for example, organizations that facilitate voter registration or African-American families have denounced the impositions and confusion created by Governor Ron DeSantis’s new laws, which risk many voters with difficulties to vote to suffer harsh fines.
On the other hand, and as confirmed by the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, the current risk of suffering internal electoral threats is considered greater and more complex than ever. Federal agencies and the FBI have tried harder than ever in this perverse electoral climate sown since Trump’s defeat in 2020 to verify that all infrastructure has not been altered by hostile actors and sabotage or problems in the count or census are ruled out. . Two years ago, the former Republican president falsely claimed that hackers had manipulated the voting machines in favor of Biden. Donald Trump’s Republicans, by the way, have obtained the support of billionaire Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, breaking the platform’s traditional political neutrality.
In a broad perspective, political violence has always been part of the history of the United States, and worse than better, the country has survived in the past moments of national gravity such as the assassinations of President John Kennedy, and his brother Bobby Kennedy, or of leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among many others. Not to mention a century earlier, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln himself, which took place just after the civil war at a time of maximum division and great instability in the country.
Shock and sense of insecurity
Even so, the new generations have not experienced anything approaching a national commotion and a sense of insecurity similar to what is currently experienced in American society. In addition to the angry and hateful speeches that analysts highlight as one of the reasons for this feeling of general disturbance, there is also the weight of the assault on the Capitol, very present in all sectors of the population. To a large extent, millions of voters go to the polls this Tuesday under that syndrome.
Likewise, the majority of the white population has not suffered from the experience of voting restriction laws or electoral intimidation, such as the one that has traditionally weighed on minorities, especially Afro-Americans, Latinos and Asians, for whom little of all this is new. Voter restriction laws known as Jim Crow, or the usual KKK (Ku klux Klan) raids of intimidating violence in neighborhoods before elections, remain fresh in the memory of most.
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