[Music starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Right now, millions of Americans are voting for their next President.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter # 1:

“More than 70 million Americans have now cast their ballots in the US Presidential election. We have got record numbers continuing to turn up to cast their votes.”

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #1:

“Personally, this is probably the most important election of my life.”

RUBY:

It has been an election campaign like no other, overshadowed by a pandemic, with nearly 10 million recorded cases of coronavirus and over 230,000 deaths.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter # 2:

“The country is now averaging more than 73,00 new cases a day…”

RUBY:

Covid-19 has been the key political battleground

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Even without the vaccines, we are rounding the turn, it’s going to be over.”

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“He says we are, you know, we are learning to live with it, people are learning to die with it.”

RUBY:

Racial justice protests, sparked by ongoing police violence, have also defined the US in 2020.

Archival Tape -- [Crowd chants: “I can’t breathe”]

RUBY:

It’s against this backdrop that US voters make a choice between Donald Trump...

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“Keep America Great.”

RUBY:

And Joe Biden.

Archival Tape -- Joe Biden:

“United we can and will overcome this season of darkness in America.”

RUBY:

Polls show Joe Biden with a strong lead, but there are warnings that might not be enough for him to beat Donald Trump. And, in the dying days of the campaign, Trump has warned that a close or uncertain result could spark chaos.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“We are not going to know, and you are going to have bedlam in our country.”

RUBY:

Behind the scenes, both parties have been locked in a battle over voting rights. There are widespread concerns about misinformation campaigns and organised efforts to stop people from voting.

Today, Senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton, on the fight against voter suppression, and why, no matter who wins, the US is facing a fractured future.

[Music ends]

RUBY:

Rick, we're finally at the end of one of the most tumultuous and most significant election campaigns in U.S. history. There’s growing concern that the result could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. What has Donald Trump been saying about the voting process?

RICK:

What’s both fascinating and disturbing in terms of this election is that the result has been cast into doubt well before we even know what that result is.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”

RICK:

Donald Trump has been happy to stoke fears of electoral fraud in a nation that no longer trusts anything except mistrust.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“There’s fraud, they’ve found them in creeks. They’ve found some with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump, just the other day in a waste-paper basket.”

RICK:

And he’s repeatedly warned the election could be rigged.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that.”

RICK:

The polls are looking really bad for Donald Trump.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter #3:

“Our final NBC Wall Street Journal poll completed overnight shows Joe Biden leading president Trump by 10 points among registered voters…”

RICK:

Now, obviously, we know that the polls can be incredibly wrong as per 2016. But at the moment, they look bad and Donald Trump seems to know that.

Archival Tape -- Donald Trump:

“We do very little polling, because I’m not a huge believer in polling. I think you go out there and you fight and you don’t really need polls.”

RICK:

In the US, the vote can and does come down to very slim margins in very specific states. And that's why so much energy is placed on suppressing votes in specific states by those who would seek to maintain the power.

So while the actual campaign has been going on with both candidates holding rallies and debating policy, as you would expect, there's been a kind of a shadow campaign behind the scenes.

The focus of the campaign has become about who can vote, and a key battleground has been mail-in ballots, which is what we would call postal votes.

RUBY:

Okay, so there's this shadow campaign to try and suppress votes, and therefore change the outcome of the election. Part of that is to do with postal votes, which have never before played such a large role. So is the fear here that those votes just won’t get counted?

RICK:

Yeah, and this all began a couple of months ago. You'll remember that there were directions for postal boxes to be removed from certain neighbourhoods by the Trump appointed postmaster general. And that started to stoke these fears that the Trump administration was actually attempting to reduce the amount of postal votes sent in.

Archival Tape -- CBS Newsreader:

“The Trump administration is facing accusations of intentionally crippling the U.S. Postal Service to interfere with the upcoming election.”

RICK:

And given that we're also in the middle of a pandemic, particularly in the United States, where they just recorded their worst week in terms of new infections, residents also feared losing access to no contact mail in options.

Archival Tape -- CBS Newsreader:

“The president defended his hand-picked U.S. Postmaster General, Lewis DeJoy, who changed policies to trim the budget by banning overtime and added trips to deliver the mail.”

RICK:

So despite all of these fears, a lot of people have actually already cast their early postal votes. There have been almost 50 million mail-in ballots alone. And it is here where the contest becomes this bare knuckle brawl for supremacy.

And to help understand why, it's worth looking at a couple of key states. So if you look at Wisconsin, there have been these attempts actually by lower courts to provide a bit of a Covid-19 inspired buffer, which would allow for votes that arrive after Election Day to be counted. But that was blocked by the Supreme Court.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter # 4:

“A group of Wisconsin voters and disability rights groups joined by national and state democrats had sued the state’s legislature to get the mail in ballot deadline extended in light of postal delays amid the global health crisis.”

RICK:

So now it's the case that unless the postal vote arrives on time, as in by the close of Election Day, it won't be counted. And that will limit the amount of valid votes cast.

And in Pennsylvania, another key state that was won by Trump by just 44 thousand votes, Republicans have also fought attempts to provide some leniency as to when postal votes are considered eligible.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter # 5:

“The Pennsylvania lawsuit at the heart of the ruling, is one of dozens of legal challenges nationwide targeting mail-in voting, backed by the Trump campaign.”

RICK:

In fact, they've gone back to the Supreme Court for a second time, hoping that the confirmation of a new ultra conservative justice in Amy Coney Barrett will get them over the line to crush that as well.

RUBY:

Okay, so the end result of all of this is that some postal votes in some state won't end up counted? That is, if they arrive after Election Day.

RICK:

Yeah, and that's right. And, you know, to put that in context, the Supreme Court doesn't like changing election rules close to an election, but most of these cases have been fought on the harrowing and unique circumstances of this pandemic, where people are actually afraid of catching Coronavirus because the nation hasn't fought it off or beaten it.

And the people most affected in terms of the death rates and infection rates are low income minority voters, particularly African-Americans and Latinx communities. So you can understand why there's been such a rush for mail in ballots, and that's where all of the fighting is now taking place.

And we've also got these other examples. So some states, such as Texas and Ohio, have placed limits on the number of ballot collection points to just one per county. So many voters face over an hour’s round trip just to drop off their vote. In fact, it's almost two hours round trip, it's 161 kilometres in some places.

When you take a step back and look at all of this from a global point of view, all of these strategies work to suppress the votes of people who are actually trying to cast their ballot.

But there's really another big issue here, and that's the attempts to actually reach people before they consider posting a vote or get into a ballot box at all.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Reporter #6:

“And considering Michigan was decided by fewer than 10 thousand votes in 2016, discouraging 12 thosuand likely Democrats to vote could have a massive effect.”

RICK:

And that has been perfected since 2016. And it's, you know, the dark art of mass disinformation, using technology, using social media.

Archival Tape -- Dana Nessel:

“These robocalls alone could impact who our next president is.”

RICK:

And that has really come home to roost during this election.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

RUBY:

Rick, after the last US election in 2016, it became clear that there had been foreign interference - particularly from Russia - to spread misinformation. To what extent has that been happening again this time around?

RICK:

Well, there's no doubt that there have been attempts to spread misinformation, again, from Russia and Iran, but also many suspect from internal and domestic actors.

And, you know, while there have been some attempts by social media platforms to curb the spread of misinformation on the scale we saw in 2016 and to increase transparency, it's still happening. And in fact, it's become much more sophisticated. So, again, it's people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and people of colour who have been targeted by these misinformation campaigns.

Archival Tape -- Robocall recording:

“Did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of the public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants?”

RICK:

A really good example is in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where minority voters have been receiving robocalls falsely warning them that mail-in voting would result in the harvesting of their private information to be sold to debt collectors and to the police.

Archival Tape -- Ross Jones

“The robocall making its way through Detroit makes claims that are outright false and incendiary. Today, Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said the call is using racially charged stereotypes to deter voting by mail.”

RICK:

And Associate Professor Keesha Middlemass, from Howard University, has been looking into this.

Archival Tape -- Keesha Middlemass:

“And we know from 2016, you shave off 1 or 2 per cent in a few communities and that can literally change the outcome of the election.”

RICK:

Dr. Middlemass told a forum that was run by the Brookings Institution early Thursday morning our time last week, that while immigration fear campaigns go out, particularly to Spanish speaking voters, black voters get a different one altogether.

Archival Tape -- Keesha Middlemass

“For the black community, the racial messages and misinformation is around ,‘oh, if you have a vote-in ballot, your information will be used to collect your back child support that’s in arrears’.

Or if you vote by mail, the government will use that information to get you on an old warrant. So these really racialised misinformation is used to target very particular communities to instill fear in them so they don’t vote.”

RUBY:

So Rick, what could the actual consequences of this kind of strategy be in terms of who comes out to vote?

RICK:

It's really fascinating because the dynamic in this election has changed so markedly since 2016. And, you know, looking to Dr. Ravi Perry, who's the chairperson of the political science department at Howard University.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Ravi Perry

“All of that, I think, has resulted in many D.C. voters east of the river, particularly those that are African-American, becoming that much more engaged this time around than they were four years ago.”

RICK:

And there's kind of like different factions of African-American voters. There are some who are kind of just so disillusioned by the fact that they continue to be targeted by these disinformation campaigns and they're kind of worn down by all of this effort. And yet the numbers don't lie. We've had extreme numbers of voter turnout amongst the African-American community, and it's almost like he was saying that they're over it, but they're over it in a way that makes them want to fight back. And this is their way of doing it.

Archival Tape -- Dr. Ravi Perry:

“And I do suggest that perhaps some of that is due to the fact that many folks are motivated by the concern that they see perhaps associated with this current administration and the level of misinformation that they may have experienced.”

RICK:

Maybe they were so, you know, just kind of apathetic in previous elections because it didn't feel like much was at stake. But now they've had four years of Donald Trump and they know that the stakes are high.

RUBY:

Mmm ok Rick, so we’ve got misinformation which is designed to stop people from voting, there's concerns about postal votes not being counted at all. So, what do you think all of this will mean when it comes to getting a result in the election, but also and more importantly, perhaps, the acceptance of that result?

RICK:

So in America, they've always had these tactics. Voter suppression is almost as old as the nation itself in many ways.

But the volume of disinformation, the sheer scale of the legal attempts to try and keep people in their place is unprecedented in this election.

And that's how the Republicans see themselves winning. It's almost like they've given up on the idea that they are there to represent the people of America because the people they want to vote for them will vote for them. And everyone else is fair game.

And if Joe Biden and the Democrats do win, the result may not be known on Tuesday night, which is Wednesday morning, our time. It may even be days or weeks.

And if Joe Biden doesn't win, then I mean, I can't even consider what, you know, Trump is able to achieve in his next four years. I mean, he's appointed more judges in a single term than any president in modern history at the same point in their tenure.

And more importantly, I think beyond that, this is happening all over the world in different parts. But the mindset of an entire generation is being poisoned by just this false narrative of division and hatred and the fact that everyone else is against them.

And once you've sewn that into a kind of a populace, it's very hard to unwind that. It's very hard to get the trust back into the institutions, into the positions like the president and the White House staff, because it's just been so utterly defaced in every way, shape or form.

And that's where the real battle is. And I honestly don't know what happens no matter who wins the election. I don't know how you unwind any of that.

RUBY:

Such a tense moment in time, Rick, for the U.S. and also for the rest of the world.

RICK:

Well, you yeah, I feel like people say things are a tipping point all the time, but this really does feel like a tipping point.

RUBY:

Later today, we’ll be releasing a special episode of 7am. I’ll be speaking to our reporter on the ground in the US, Oscar Schwartz

As the results start to come in, we’ll break down the initial figures. And we’ll discuss who is likely to become the next president of the United States.

Make sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app, and keep an eye on your feed.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

RUBY:

Also in the news today…

A terror attack in Vienna has left at least three people dead according to Austria's Interior Minister.

Among the three confirmed dead was one of the attackers, who was shot by police. It’s unclear how many attackers still remain at large. The attack took place on the last night before the city went into a Covid-19 lockdown.

And in NSW, the state government is urging residents in Sydney's south-west to come forward for testing if they have symptoms of Coronavirus. A new case yesterday was linked to an existing cluster in the west of the city.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see ya tomorrow.