According to the site maintained by Michael McDonald who is keeping track of early voting, in the 2016 election, 47,015,596 people voted early out of a total of 136,669,276, which works out to about 34.4%.

For this year’s election, as of today, 52,643,908 early votes have been cast, rocketing past the 2016 total with still another 10 days left to go, and the numbers have been rising at the rate of about 3-4 million votes a day. While that rate will likely drop as the days go by, we might well see over half the votes handed in before election day, even allowing for more total votes being cast in this election than 2016. This is clearly a sign of both determination to vote as well as the belief that many minds are well and truly made up.

McDonald also provides data on the party affiliation of the people requesting ballots and who have returned them, provided that that information is provided by the state.

I am getting a huge amount of election related material in the regular mail, much more so than when I was in Ohio. Much of it is related to the many ballot initiatives in California but most of it is arriving after I have voted. It seems like the campaigns were either caught by surprise by the popularity of early voting or felt that the only persuadable people are those who wait until the last minute.

I watched the debate last night and it was much better than the first one simply because it could not have got worse. Believe it or not, for the most part Trump did tone it down as his advisers had promised. He did not interrupt Joe Biden as much though he did refuse to listen to the moderator when she tried to limit the length of his responses. What he did as usual was to reel off lies, make up stuff, and refuse to answer some questions, and keep veering off into accusing Joe Biden and his family of getting payments from foreign governments.

Biden got in some good shots at Trump for not having any plan to replace Obamacare and for being utterly callous about the suffering of so many people due to covid-19.
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A Dutch security researcher has said that he had gained access to Trump’s Twitter account by guessing the password. What was it, you ask? “maga2020!”. Yes, really.

Victor Gevers, a security expert, had access to Trump’s direct messages, could post tweets in his name and change his profile, de Volkskrant reported.

Gevers – who previously managed to log into Trump’s account in 2016 – gained access by guessing Trump’s password. Maga2020, a popular tag for Trump’s re-election campaign, was Gevers’ fifth attempt – and it worked.

“I expected to be blocked after four failed attempts. Or at least would be asked to provide additional information,” Gevers told de Volkskrant.
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Remarkably, it wasn’t the first time Gevers has gained access to the president’s Twitter account. In 2016 he and two others guessed Trump’s password, and got into his account.

Back then Trump’s password was “yourefired”, according to Vrij Nederland.

I find it hard to imagine that even Trump would use such an obvious password but with Trump, there seems to be no lower limit for incompetence.

People outside the US are confused, with good reason, about how US elections work and one of the mysteries is how the results are ‘called’. In most countries, after the votes are tallied, an official certifying body declares the winner. While there are often exit polls that might predict the outcome before the official announcement, in practice the official call usually comes so quickly after the count that it does not matter.

But in the US, there is another layer between the vote count and the official certification because what voters are voting for are members of something called the Electoral College and it is these people who then vote for the president about a month later, although they are expected to vote according to how their state voted on election day. Since the result only becomes official on January 6, 2021 when Congress formally certifies the electoral college votes that were cast on December 14, we see that there is a two month gap between election day and the final certification.
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As the days wind down to November 3, people who are following this election closely can be excused for getting more tense. In general, opinion polls tend to tighten as election day approaches. The media likes an exciting race so they will greatly highlight any new poll result that shows the underdog gaining ground and the gap closing. For the campaigns, they have to strike a delicate balance between warning their supporters against the danger of complacency with being too alarmist so that their supporters get depressed and think it is hopeless and decide it is not worth voting.
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