Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: With more than 101.1 million early votes cast in person and by mail before the polls even opened on Election Day, the 2020 presidential campaign was shaping up to be one for the record books, on pace to attract the highest turnout in more than a century. The huge turnout appeared to be spurred by the momentous issues that have upended the lives of nearly every American, including the surging coronavirus outbreak and the struggling…

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Politico reports: Election administrators and regular Americans were bracing for Election Day chaos — warned to expect violence, malfunctions, long lines and disinformation. Instead, they got something else entirely: a fairly smooth election process across the country. Though some problems have emerged — even serious ones like election equipment failures — there were not, by early Tuesday evening as a first round of states was set to close their polls, any major disruptions to the democratic process, election observers said,…

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Gregory H. Shill writes: In Texas on Friday, dozens of vehicles driven by supporters of President Donald Trump formed a “Trump Train” on Interstate 35, and several of them surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus, slowing it and attempting to force it off the road. One viral video shows a truck with pro-Trump and Blue Lives Matter banners striking a Biden staffer’s vehicle. After the FBI announced an investigation of the coordinated operation, Trump thanked the perpetrators, declaring, “In my…

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The Atlantic reports: Abraham Enriquez speaks with the clarity of a levelheaded TV anchor. The 25-year-old Latino from Lubbock, Texas, was the first in his family to be born in the United States, after his grandparents immigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and brought his then-2-year-old mother with them. He visits his family across the border at least once a year for service trips with his grandparents’ church. When we talked recently about the state of American politics, I recognized…

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Murray Waas reports: On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall…

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The Daily Beast reports: Drivers in a pro-Trump caravan shouted obscenities as they cruised through an intersection near Jennifer Merritt’s home in Larchmont, New York, on Sunday. Some flipped the bird at bystanders. Then one of Merritt’s neighbors saw something more alarming than rude hand gestures. “That guy has a gun!” the woman told Merritt of a man in a black pickup truck. As the COVID-19 pandemic wears on and the election looms, fans of President Donald Trump have increasingly…

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Barton Gellman writes: A wretched presidential campaign has played out at last, but Election Day is not how this story ends. Unable to overtake his opponent in the polls, Donald Trump decided months ago to run against the election itself. That race does not conclude when the ballots are counted. Trump has raged against fictional plots to steal his victory, maligning routine procedures such as voting by mail and counting ballots until there are no more to count. His rage…

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Olga Khazan writes: Some experts are worried that the period following this election may become as chaotic and violent as the early 1970s. Extremists recently plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Militias have recruited police and soldiers into their ranks. The president has encouraged his supporters to monitor polling places, has told the extremist Proud Boys to “stand by,” and has agreed to a peaceful transfer of power only with heavy caveats. “All the signs are pointing to a…

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse. Consequently, most…

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Reuters reports: Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts. Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement…

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