On Wednesday evening, as our television relays images of long lines of people queuing to vote, keep this in mind: since 2012, America has closed 20% of its polling places. Crucial swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia have collectively lost 400 Election Day polling places since 2010. Five of the six polling places in Warren County Georgia, have been closed since a notorious Supreme Court ruling in 2014 (Shelby County v Holder) effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act that had been the main legislative achievement of the 1960s US civil rights movement.

Today, there is only one polling place left in the entirety of Warren County, an area of nearly 300 square miles. Keep Warren County in mind on Wednesday night if you hear pundits talking about Kamala Harris’ “failure” to deliver the black vote. Warren County’s population is 58% black, and it voted heavily for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

In state after state, it has been made as hard as possible for eligible Americans who do not own a car and who do not possess the stringent ID documentation required by some states in order to cast a valid vote. Too few voting places is only one of the hurdles in place to suppress the vote, but it is an important one. As the ABC news report (linked to above) says:

When researchers examined the impact of polling station location on voter turnout, they found that when the distance to a voting place increases by a quarter of a mile, up to 5% of voters stop going to the polls. Additional research has demonstrated that lacking access to a personal vehicle is one of the largest drivers of inequality in voter participation.

Eligible voters can be purged from the rolls via bogus “updating” processes that the Supreme Court has just condoned. This has resulted in some 1,600 apparently valid voters being dis-enfranchised in Virginia. Currently, 36 states demand that voters bring identification documents to the voting place. These can include photo IDs, and/or birth certificates. Obviously, many low income people (who tend to vote Democrat) lack access to these forms of ID.

Even if people bring them, on Election Day, the rules can still disqualify them e.g. if after marriage, names changed and the name on the drivers’ licence doesn’t match the name on the birth certificate or utility bill, or if those addresses don’t match the address on the voter registration – because say, people moved house recently – the vote may still be voided. The option of then casting a provisional vote will be available only in some states e.g. that option does not exist in Idaho or Minnesota.

In Pennsylvania, if you were an early voter and mailed in your vote, you will have had to remember to put your vote in a “secrecy” envelope, and then put that envelope inside another envelope. Mailed in ballots that are not double-enveloped are declared void. Moreover, in a to and fro legal battle that concluded only days ago, the state Supreme Court has just ruled that Pennsylvania voters must have written the correct date on the inner envelope and signed it. Any mail-in voters who failed to do so – because a lower court had ruled they didn’t have to – will now have their votes disqualified. In Ohio, the Republican attorney-general has also tried to disenfranchise naturalised Americans by making special citizen declaration requirements mandatory.

These measures to put restrictions around voting were preceded by laws passed to inhibit voter registration:

Since the 2020 election, at least six states have passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives. Many groups view the laws — enacted by Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee — as an existential threat to their work, and several have shut down operations rather than risk financial penalties or prison time.

But wait, there’s more. In 2020, the BBC found some voters had been queuing for up to eleven hours to cast their ballot. But here’s the thing: it will be 24 degrees in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday. Yet if you’ve been queuing for hours and anyone – a friend, a family member – brings you so much as a glass of water or a sandwich while you wait, this puts your vote at risk of being disqualified as an illegal form of “line warming.”

Yes. Elon Musk can hand out a million bucks to lure voters to a Trump rally, but offering a glass of water or a granola bar or a rain hat to help people stay in line for hours in sweltering heat (or rain) is officially outlawed in some states, including Kentucky and… in New York, which failed to repeal its century-old “line warming” bylaw, until ordered mid-year to waive the bylaw, in the wake of court action.

The pretext for all of these draconian rules – and I’ve mentioned only a smattering of them and the lawsuits that they continue to trigger – is supposedly to ensure that non-eligible people do not vote. Since they lost in 2020, Republicans have made election denialism one of their constant themes. Donald Trump and his disciples allege that millions of non-eligible people voted in 2020 and “stole” the election. No credible evidence exists to support these claims:

The Brennan Center has found that in the 2016 election there were just 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast — or about one in a million. An audit of Georgia’s voter rolls last week revealed that just 20 noncitizens were registered out of more than 8.2 million people.

Regardless, the Republican Party has worked day and night to instill in the American public the fear that their Election Day system is flawed, and at risk of fraud from aliens. Those fears are based on myths. Illegal voting in US elections has always been so scarce as to be virtually non-existent. The real targets of these strategies put in place by Republican state legislatures (and by the Trump--appointed electoral body in Georgia) are not to foil the phantom hordes of undocumented aliens sneakily trying to vote. The real and quite deliberate aim is to suppress the vote of eligible Americans who are likely to vote for the Democrats.

On Election Day…

US election results tend to start rolling in around 1pm on Wednesday. Keep the time zones in mind. The first returns will be from along the Eastern seaboard, before gradually moving westwards. Returns from thinly populated rural areas (mainly Republican) will also come in earlier than from big inner city booths (mainly Democrat.) North Carolina is going to give one of the early indications of Trump and Harris’s relative strengths.

Since Florida is among the states that allows mail ballots to be counted before election day, there will be a deluge of results from Florida, early on. Be wary of feeling premature despair. Florida is not a swing state anymore. Moreover, how Hispanics vote in Florida will not necessarily reflect how they will vote in say, a genuine swing state like Arizona.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, the Democratic strongholds are situated in their major cities –namely in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and in the counties (Fulton, Gwinnett) in or near Atlanta. Those results usually come in fairly late. Meaning: if Kamala Harris is going to win a close election, it is likely to be in a late run via inner city polling places, a reality which – unfortunately – will feed into bogus conspiracy theories about stolen elections.

Also, keep this in mind: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are two of the six states that forbid the counting of mail ballots before Election Day, so the returns from there could also be relatively slow. In Georgia, a Trump-appointed electoral board had demanded that the votes must be hand-counted to see if they match the machine ballot count. But the courts have intervened and scrapped this requirement, with the presiding judge agreeing with the appellants that the requirement was a deliberate attempt to sow confusion, and to discredit the election outcome.

Was the recent Iowa poll that showed Harris narrowly winning the state a rogue poll? Probably. But then again, Iowa did just pass into law a strict abortion ban that kicks in six weeks after conception, a time frame in which many women may have only just discovered they are pregnant. Iowa and three other states ban abortion after six weeks, on top of 14 other states that ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy. If Harris does win, it will be mainly because of women’s outrage over the loss of their power to make reproductive decisions about their own bodies.

In some states, women activists have succeeded in putting referenda questions on abortion access on the ballot – although in Alabama, this ballot initiative was arbitrarily thrown out by the Republican state legislature even though it met all of the legal conditions for inclusion. Ten states have abortion initiatives on the ballot.

With Trump promising to usher in a new era of Christian power, and his deputy J. D. Vance demonising women without children, an attack on access to birth control and the revoking of women’s right to vote may well be next on the agenda. Scrapping the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrined the right of women to vote has also long been a goal of the Republican Party’s religious extremists. 

Path to the White House

Finally…what states (and what areas within them) will be decisive? If, as expected, Trump wins Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina on top of the usual list of red states, this would deliver him 268 electoral votes, and Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes would then get him up and over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes required to win the Presidency. In all likelihood, Harris will need to win all three Rust Belt states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – to succeed.

You can track the vote counts via the websites of each state legislature, although if you can afford the paywall, Nate Cohn and his crew at the New York Times are very quick with results, and with picking the result trends coming through in the data.

In Pennsylvania, I’d look in particular for returns in Delaware, Bucks, Chester and Montgomery counties – these contain many of the peri-suburban communities that will decide the final outcome, given that Trump has such an iron grip on rural areas, and among white men without college degrees.

State-wide in Pennsylvania, the metropolitan areas of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia contain 53% of the total state vote, but they contributed 63% of Biden’s overall vote in Pennsylvania in 2020. Meaning: Harris will have to do as well as Biden, or better, in urban/suburban Pennsylvania, and among those with college degrees.

Fighting for Senate Control

Besides the presidential vote, the balance of power in the lower house of Congress (where the Republicans enjoy a small majority) and in the Senate (where the Democrats have a razor-thin majority) are also up for grabs. The Republicans can reasonably expect to win the Senate. Three Senate contests in particular are worth watching closely: Democrats Jon Tester in Montana, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio are fighting for survival. Brown is a capable party heavyweight, and he would be a major loss to the Democrats.

In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego has for months been holding onto a narrow lead over Kari Lake, a darling of the far right who probably would have been Trump’s vice-presidential choice had she not (surprisingly) lost the race for Arizona governor in 2022. Lake is closing in though. If it is Trump’s night, Lake will probably win in Arizona and go on to become a leading light in his next administration.

Ultimately, if Harris wins the presidency, she is likely to face a hostile Senate and Congress. It's not impossible to govern in that situation, via presidential decrees and vetoes. But conversely, if Trump wins the White House, all of the checks and balances in the American political system – Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court – are also very likely to be under his control.

There will be no guard rails to limit another Trump presidency. Moreover, Trump would then have another chance to cement in a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for generations to come. Few people will shed tears at reports that Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are expected to retire within the next four years - but if re-elected, Trump would then be able to appoint their youthful, extremely conservative replacements, to a life long tenure.

IMO, that is almost as scary as the thought that an anti-science crackpot like Robert Kennedy Jnr may well be soon in charge of the US healthcare and science systems. There’s a lot at stake tomorrow.

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