ГОЛОВНЕ

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With Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election upon us, it is far from certain that either President Donald Trump or his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, will emerge as the clear winner on election night.While Biden is leading Trump by a cumulative average of 8 percentage points in national polling, the Democrat’s lead shrinks to just a few points in a number of battleground states crucial to determining the winner in America’s unique system of indirect presidential election.This has raised the odds that the election results could be delayed until all the ballots are officially tallied and certified. To be sure, a winner could well be declared if either Trump or Biden comes out on top with a large margin of votes.But if the results are too close to call in some states, the ballots there could be subject to a recount and potential legal challenges, a process that could take weeks, if not longer, to sort out.“There’s nothing magical about Election Day or election night in terms of the legal requirements of finding out who won,” said James Gardner, a law professor and election law expert at the University of Buffalo. “What you have to do is go through the complete electoral process and count all the votes. And (if) that takes a few days or more, then we just wait.”Tom Spencer, a veteran Republican election lawyer and vice president of the Lawyers Defense Fund, agrees that the impending electoral contest won’t be over until all the ballots are counted.“I think that experienced election lawyers know that results change predicated upon when the ballots come in,” said Spencer, who served as co-counsel for the George W. Bush presidential ticket during the 2000 vote recount in Florida.Hundreds of lawsuitsFor American voters, this has been a year of confusion as Republican and Democratic lawyers have filed hundreds of lawsuits over voting by mail and other rules during the pandemic, making this election cycle the most litigated in history.With the looming possibility that the presidential election outcome could be decided in the courts rather than at the ballot box, both the Trump and Biden campaigns have enlisted high-powered lawyers who have already begun running through various post-election scenarios.“We have been planning for any post-election litigation and recounts for well over a year and are extraordinarily well-positioned,” Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement to VOA. “With the help of our national network of attorneys, the RNC has been beating the Democrats in court for the last several months and that will continue should they attempt to sue their way to victory in November.”A Biden campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. In an Oct. 9 tweet, Democratic lawyer Marc Elias wrote, “Republicans are spending $20 million to make voting more difficult in the middle of a pandemic that has cost over 200,000 lives.”If any of the election results for president, members of Congress or state offices are close, losing candidates have two “remedies” available to them, Gardner said.The first is a vote recount. Currently, 21 states allow for automatic recounts if the margin between the two opposing candidates is less than 1%, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In other states, a losing candidate can request a recount.A recount “simply repeats, with greater care, the counting of ballots that were in the initial pool of ballots,” Gardner said.If a recount does not change the results – they rarely do – the losing candidate can launch what is known as an election contest, essentially filing a legal challenge, Gardner said. This is the phase where the losing candidate can dispute the validity of ballots or practices used in counting the votes, triggering court battles that could take weeks and potentially end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.State and federal courts all the way up to the Supreme Court have been busy for months dealing with more than 300 cases stemming from the primary and general election campaign – many of them having to do with mail-in voting and changes in procedures at polling places in response to the coronavirus pandemic.This week, the Supreme Court allowed election officials in the battleground states of  Pennsylvania and North Carolina to accept mail-in ballots that arrive three to six days after the election, respectively, after refusing to affirm Wisconsin’s six-day ballot receipt extension.“You could very well have a situation like we had in 2000 with ballot examination and counting teams going through thousands of ballots with observers from both parties looking over their shoulders,” Gardner said.Late-arriving ballotsOne potential area of post-election dispute will likely involve mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a citizen advocacy organization.As of Friday, there were still many millions of outstanding mail-in ballots. That means ballots that arrive after Election Day may not count in some states.In Pennsylvania and Minnesota, two battleground states that accept mail-in ballots after Election Day, election officials will segregate late-arriving paper votes. How to dispose of those ballots could become the main issue in subsequent court cases. North Carolina, another key state, may do the same, Albert said.“I think there will be an attempt to segregate those ballots to possibly have them thrown out,” Albert said.Rejected mail-in ballotsRejected mail-in ballots could become another focus of any post-election litigation.During every U.S. presidential election, hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots are discarded by election officials for a variety of reasons, from arriving after the deadline to missing a proper signature on the outer envelope.But this year, because of the ramp-up in absentee voting, a lot more ballots face rejection, with minority and first-time voters disproportionately affected, according to experts. In North Carolina and Florida, respectively, more than 10,000 and 15,000 ballots face rejection.Although voters in 30 states including Florida are given an opportunity to “cure” or correct problems with their ballots, voters in 20 other states are not afforded that opportunity. That means election officials can toss ballots without informing voters about the defects.“I think there will be large disagreements and lots of wrangling over which of those ballots should count and which of the absentee voters should be able to correct any errors in their ballots,” Albert said.Ballot drop boxesBallots placed in drop boxes across the country are another category of voting facing potential litigation.While some states have long used free-standing boxes to collect ballots, this year 40 states will use them, according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.The expanded use of drop boxes has become a major flashpoint in the debate over voting access during the pandemic and a focus of litigation in at least three states: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.While Democrats and voting rights advocates say drop boxes make it easier for voters to cast their ballots without exposing themselves to the virus, President Trump and Republicans have railed against them, describing them as a potential ballot security risks and trying to limit their number. In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott has limited the number of drop boxes to one per county.While election officials have sought to reassure voters regarding the security of drop boxes, Republicans continue to argue that they pose problems. In Texas, litigation continues over whether ballots dropped in a collection box were secure enough to be counted, Albert, of Common Cause, said.“I think there are going be arguments that drop boxes were not secure and therefore none of the ballots should count,” she said.   
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Host Carol Castiel sits down with two female representatives, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, a Democrat from the state of New York and the Chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and Congresswoman Susan Brooks, a Republican from the midwestern state of Indiana, to discuss their respective legislative achievements and what is at stake in the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.
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Trees on top of buses and cars. Roofs ripped off homes. Boats pushed onto the highway by surging seawater. Hundreds of thousands of people left in the dark.The remnants of Hurricane Zeta were far from land over the Atlantic on Friday, but people across the South were still digging out from the powerful storm that killed six people.The wind effects of Zeta, which came ashore in Cocodrie, Louisiana, and barreled northeast, were felt all the way from the Gulf Coast to southern New Jersey. At the height of the outages, as many as 2.6 million people were without power across seven states from Louisiana to Virginia. Utility crews were out assessing the damage and fixing it.In Louisiana, one of the hardest hit areas was Grand Isle, a barrier island community south of New Orleans. Governor John Bel Edwards called the damage there “catastrophic” and ordered the Louisiana National Guard to fly in soldiers to assist with search-and-rescue efforts.Dodie Vegas, who with her husband owns Bridge Side Marina on Grand Isle, said damage was minimal at their waterside complex of cabins, campgrounds and docking facilities, but the rest of the island wasn’t so lucky.”As far as you can see, going down the island, the power lines are cracked in half,” she said by phone Thursday after riding out the storm with family. She described torn-off roofs and scattered debris: “The middle of the island looks like a bomb was dropped.”Members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers survey levee damage along Grand Isle, La., Oct. 30, 2020. Gov. John Bel Edwards says the damage from Hurricane Zeta was “catastrophic” in Grand Isle, a barrier island community south of New Orleans.FatalitiesA man was electrocuted in New Orleans, and four people died in Alabama and Georgia when trees fell on homes, authorities said, including two people who were pinned to their bed. In Biloxi, Mississippi, a man drowned when he was trapped in rising seawater.Officials repeatedly stressed that the risks were not over — pointing out that fatalities often come after a storm has passed, from things like breathing toxic generator fumes or being electrocuted by downed power lines.Zeta was the 27th named storm of a historically busy year, with more than a month left in the Atlantic hurricane season. It set a new record as the 11th named storm to make landfall in the continental U.S. in a single season, well beyond the nine that hit in 1916. And the coronavirus pandemic has only made things more difficult for evacuees.”Our heart breaks because this has been a tough, tough year,” said Edwards, whose state has taken the brunt of the hurricanes.Every storm is different, and with Zeta the biggest threat was its winds. The hurricane intensified quickly and was just shy of a major, Category 3 storm when it hit the Louisiana coast.The howling gale toppled trees and knocked limbs off stately oaks in New Orleans, and in Mississippi the storm surge whipped up by the winds tossed a shrimping boat into a front yard.Olivia Mancing and Zachery Quale talk outside Flora Gallery and Coffee Shop near a downed tree in the street after Hurricane Zeta swept through New Orleans, Oct. 29, 2020.Trees block roadsMayor Sheldon Day of Thomasville, Alabama, said hundreds of trees fell in roads and on homes, while some gas station canopies blew over.”At one point, every major thoroughfare was blocked by trees,” Day said.Many people were still assessing the damage.Keith Forrest of Bridge City, Louisiana, was launching a boat with his nephew in Lafitte, Louisiana, on Thursday to try to get to his fishing camp.”I got a phone call because the roof blew off one camp,” Forrest said.With just a few days until the November 3 election, there were concerns about whether the storm would affect voters’ ability to get to the polls.Far fewer early voters showed up after the storm in Pascagoula, Mississippi, a court clerk said, and power failures in two Georgia counties disrupted voting. In Louisiana, getting power back to polling centers was a priority, as was letting voters know quickly if there were any changes to locations come Tuesday.In Georgia, a group of civil rights organizations asked the governor to extend early voting hours Friday.A collapsed building is seen after Hurricane Zeta swept through New Orleans, Oct. 29, 2020.No electricity, no workIn the remote area of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, commercial fisherman Acy Cooper said his boats survived the storm. But without electricity, he feared operations could be shut down as long as two weeks.”Without no lights, none of the docks can work,” he said. “Everything’s automated now — the scales and the conveyors.”The heightened storm activity has focused attention on climate change, which scientists say is causing wetter, stronger and more destructive storms.And as bad as the 2020 hurricane season has been, it isn’t over. Forecasters said disturbed air off the northern coast of South America could become a tropical depression and head toward Nicaragua by early next week — a forecast not lost on Louisiana’s governor.”Let’s not pray it on anybody else,” Edwards said. “Let’s just pray it away from us.”
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