5: TEXAS REPUBLICANS TARGET ELDERLY LATINO VOTERS WITH FRAUD ACCUSATIONS
GOV. GREG ABBOTT of Texas boasted on Twitter last month that his attorney general had launched the state’s largest ever voter fraud investigation — targeting allegations of illegal electioneering in Fort Worth’s Tarrant County. “Texans will crack down on cheating at the ballot box,” Abbott wrote. “We will crush illegal voting.”
Coinciding with weeks of speeches in which Donald Trump implored Americans to distrust the results of this year’s election, news of the investigation was seized upon by outlets like Breitbart, Fox News, and Townhall as evidence of endemic voter fraud. Summing up the implications of the state’s investigation, Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said that fraud-obsessed Republicans “may finally have their white whale.”
The Intercept
4: Battle for Mosul: Peshmerga push into ISIL-held Bashiqa
Iraqi Kurdish forces have exchanged heavy fire with ISIL fighters as they move from two directions into the centre of Bashiqa, a town along a key supply route for the armed group on the way to Mosul.
The offensive to reclaim the town 13km east of Mosul city is the latest push in a broader offensive to drive the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant out of Iraq’s second-largest city, the group’s last major stronghold in the country.
Aljazeera
In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. “It’s a brand-new Jim Crow,” Palast says. “Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets.”
Democracy Now
2: Don’t Panic: The Election Isn’t Going to Doom America, No Matter Who Wins
It’s Election Day eve, and America is worried.
The part of America I live in—big-city, liberal, too many brunch places—is worried about Donald Trump. These are the people who obsessively check the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, who are talking only half-jokingly about leaving the US if the Republican wins, who have been calling Trump a fascist since last year. Every presidential election is always the most consequential election in history until the next one, but in 2016, the fear is not solely over Republicans taking control of the government, but of the end of democracy itself.
Everyone from Glenn Beck to documentarian Ken Burns has compared Trump to a Hitler-esque dictator. “America is a breeding ground for tyranny,” declared Andrew Sullivan in New York in May. “An American dictatorship is now a realistic possibility,” wrote Mario Loyola in the right-wing but anti-Trump National Review back in February. “Donald Trump undermines the legitimacy of our democracy,” was the headline for an October Boston Globe op-ed by Michael A. Cohen. “Donald Trump’s success reveals a frightening weakness in American democracy,” warned Ezra Klein in Vox on Monday. “This reads like hyperbole. But is it?” asks Klein.
Vice News
1: Russia to launch ‘large-scale’ airstrikes on Syria as Americans vote
Russia has threatened to launch “large-scale” cruise missile and airstrikes on Aleppo to coincide with the US election, according to media reports from Moscow.
The strikes, predicted in the 24 hours from Tuesday morning, would be targeted at the outskirts of the city where rebel groups have been seeking to break the Assad regime’s siege of opposition-held eastern districts. They would involve cruise missiles, carrier-based and land-based warplanes, the reports said.
A military source told the Gazeta.ru website: “While in previous cases, when missile attacks were launched from the Caspian Sea, there were dozens of targets destroyed, this time, in literally two to three days, hundreds of terrorist targets will be destroyed from long range.”
The Guardian
