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It’s the final day before the US presidential election, and the last opportunity for the candidates to deliver their pitch to voters.
The polls continue to show Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump running neck-and-neck, both nationally and in most swing states.
Harris says ‘every single vote matters,’ in her final campaign rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania while Trump pledges to lead America to ‘new heights of glory’ during his last rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The candidates have spent the last days of their campaigns in battleground states, which polls show will be critical in deciding who wins the White House.
Research contradicts Trump’s claim that migrants fuel crime
Trump has again linked immigration to high crime rate, but the data doesn’t back that up.
Research at Stanford University in California last year showed that “immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are US-born individuals who are white”. They also were 60 percent less likely to be imprisoned than the overall US-born population.
The American Immigration Council also compared crime and demographic data from 1980 to 2022 and found that as the immigrant share of the US population grew, the crime rate dropped.
Despite Republican claims that a “migrant invasion” has been under way at the US-Mexico border under the Biden administration, arrivals have dropped.
In September, the last month for which data is available, US Border Patrol recorded about 53,900 “encounters” between ports of entry at the southwest border. That’s 7 percent fewer than a month earlier and a 75-percent drop from September 2023.
Why does it take so long to declare a winner?
As Trump repeats false claims of elections being rigged against him and questions why election results aren’t available on the night of voting, here is some information about how election results are announced.
The process of “calling” winners and losers in each state is not necessarily based on exact vote tallies, but on projections made by analysts who look at polling and how vote counts are shaping up in key precincts or counties.
If a candidate is expected to win a certain state from the get-go, that can be projected as soon as polls close or shortly after that.
If it is a closely contested state or it is not obvious who the winner is at a state’s poll closing time, then projections of winners will be delayed as analysts watch the vote tallies come in.
If the count is close – or if there are any vote-counting problems – this can slow down the timing of a projection.
