US President Donald Trump, seeking re-election this year, and some of his fellow Republicans have voiced opposition to expanded voting by mail, citing concern over ballot fraud – a worry that Democrats dispute.

Democrats have said election procedures will need to change this year because many voters will be reluctant to stand in long lines or enter crowded polling sites for fear of infection. In recent years, Democrats also have accused Republicans of pursuing policies in some states to make voting more difficult in a bid to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters.

Congressional Democrats are pushing for additional funding for election aid to states in the next round of coronavirus-response legislation expected to be crafted by lawmakers in the coming weeks.

Democrats control the House of Representatives while Republicans control the Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed seeking $2 billion to $4 billion in fresh election-related aid to states. Republicans have said they are open to considering some additional emergency funding if the $400 million in such aid approved in legislation passed on March 27 proves inadequate.

The focus of Democrats is on providing money so states can establish or expand existing “vote-by-mail” options under legislation requiring them to offer the option of mail-in ballots as an alternative to voting in person.

Wisconsin’s April 7 Democratic presidential primary was marred by numerous polling sites being closed due to staffing shortages caused by the pandemic while long lines of voters dressed in makeshift protective gear waited for hours to cast ballots. The state carried out the election after Republican legislators successfully sued to block the Democratic governor’s plan to postpone the voting for public health reasons.

Democratic US Senator Amy Klobuchar, spearheading the vote-by-mail effort along with House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, also a Democrat, dismissed Republican charges that they are trying to run the 50 states’ elections from Washington.

“We’re trying to make the elections safe, that’s all we’re doing,” Klobuchar said in a telephone interview, referring to the pandemic.

There has been a “sea change,” Klobuchar said, in attitudes outside of Washington toward voting by mail. Klobuchar noted that Republican Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire has announced mail-in voting in his state in November if coronavirus remains a threat.

Klobuchar ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination and is considered a potential vice-presidential running mate for the party’s presumptive nominee Joe Biden.

Any election mandate from Washington sparks controversy in an American democracy in which a patchwork of state voting procedures are the hallmark of elections.

“You can’t use a crisis like this … To push the nationalization of elections,” said Representative Rodney Davis, the senior Republican on the House Administration Committee, which oversees federal aid to states on election security.

“What may work in an urban area may not work in a rural area,” Davis said in a telephone interview.

Most states have varying degrees of partial mail-in ballots. Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington State – send every voter a vote-at-home ballot.

Trump during an April 7 coronavirus briefing said that “mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country.” He acknowledged he cast an absentee ballot by mail last month in Florida’s Republican primary.

“Now, mail ballots – they cheat. Okay? People cheat,” Trump said.

“They’re fraudulent in many cases,” Trump added, without offering evidence.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month found that 72% of US adults, including 79% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, supported a requirement for mail-in ballots as a way to protect voters in case of a continued spread of the coronavirus.

Democrats have said experience shows that mail-in voting has not generated significant fraud and Republicans can fare as well as Democrats in such elections.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, estimated the cost for boosting vote-by-mail capabilities at $1.5 billion. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School estimated it at closer to $2 billion.

In the 2016 presidential election, around 130 million votes were cast. Turnout this year could exceed that, according to some forecasts. In addition to the presidential race, a third of US Senate seats and all of the House seats are up for grabs, along with various state and local contests.

The national expansion of voting by mail would require states to procure millions of mail-in ballots and machinery to handle the returned ballots, pay for postage and train workers in just a few months, a House Democratic aide said.

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Steyer exited the race after he failed to claim victory in South Carolina, a state he invested heavily in, hoping it would turn around his sputtering run.

“I said if I didn’t see a path to winning that I’d suspend my campaign,” he said. “And honestly, I can’t see a path where I can win the presidency,” he added, CNN reported.

The businessman’s decision comes after disappointing showings in the race’s first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. In Nevada, Steyer outspent the rest of the Democratic field on advertisements by more than $13 million.

Tom Steyer spent more than $200 million on advertising for his presidential campaign and contributed about $155 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. But the power of Steyer’s money was partially blunted late in his campaign by the entrance of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has spent more than $500 million on ads in a few short months, effectively watering down Steyer’s omnipresence.

Steyer spent considerable time and money in South Carolina, and there were signs his investment was paying off. The billionaire businessman spent more than $22 million on television and radio ads in the state, hoping that direct and persistent outreach to black voters could cut into former Vice President Joe Biden’s strength with the powerful voting bloc. A recent Monmouth University poll found Steyer at 15% in the state, neck-and-neck with the race’s front-runner Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and behind Biden.

Steyer said he supports reparations for African Americans and pledged he would if elected, establish a commission on race led by African Americans aimed at coming up with solutions.

Before officially launching his campaign in July, Steyer operated as a funding force in Democratic politics. He spent millions bankrolling candidates and organizations that promoted liberal causes and the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Steyer starred in self-funded television commercials calling for Congress to remove Trump from office. Those ads were powerful in the early states, where voters who backed Steyer said they liked the fact that he spearheaded the impeachment effort.

The longtime Democratic donor, whose net worth reached $1.6 billion this year according to Forbes, said he would make tackling the global climate crisis a top priority of his administration and vowed to combat what he called the “undue influence” of corporate power on the US economy. He called for a $15 minimum wage, congressional term limits and the repeal of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that eased restrictions on corporate campaign spending. Steyer said he would repeal the Trump tax cuts and install a 1% wealth tax on those whose net worth is above $32 million.

Steyer broke with progressive leaders on “Medicare for all,” and said he would prefer to build on the current system, as it exists under the Affordable Care Act, and push for a public option, or a government-backed insurance plan.

In the end, though, Steyer’s campaign became a case study of how even hundreds of millions in personal spending cannot directly lead to success in a presidential election.

Steyer did get a burst of attention in the final days of his campaign, turning in his most aggressive debate performance on Tuesday. And on the eve of the South Carolina primary, a video of Steyer dancing onstage with rapper Juvenile at an event in South Carolina went viral.

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Early returns showed Sanders dominating among young people and Latinos, who make up nearly one-third of the electorate in Nevada. The Vermont senator also won several downtown Las Vegas caucus sites, underscoring his strong support among the labor union rank and file who are a powerful force in Nevada politics.

“In Nevada, we’ve just put together a multigenerational, multiracial coalition, which is going to not only win in Nevada, it’s going to sweep this country,” Sanders said to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at a rally in San Antonio, The Hill reported.

The Nevada win comes after Sanders narrowly defeated former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire. Sanders and Buttigieg effectively split the delegates haul from the Iowa caucuses earlier this month.

Sanders will now move past Buttigieg and take his first delegates to lead of the year on Saturday.

His victory in Nevada on Saturday showcased his support from the racial minorities that will play a huge role in determining the outcome of the nominating fight.

While Iowa and New Hampshire are more than 90 percent white, Nevada is 30 percent Latino and 10 percent black. The Silver State also has the US’ fastest-growing Asian American population.

Sanders struggled to win over voters of color in the 2016 Democratic primary, which ultimately led to his defeat against Hillary Clinton.

But this time around, polls show Sanders has built strong support from Latino voters. A Univision survey released last week found Sanders at 33 percent support among Hispanics, ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden, who was at 22 percent.

And while Biden has been buoyed in the race by his support from African American voters, who make up more than half of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina, new polls find Sanders making big gains in the state, narrowing the former vice president’s lead.

The latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found Sanders and Biden in a statistical tie among black voters, with no one else running close.

Sanders led rivals by double-digits in Nevada heading into the caucuses, although the state is notoriously difficult to poll. Turnout was high, with more than 75,000 participating in early caucuses, nearly matching the entire turnout for 2016, when Clinton took 20 delegates to Sanders’s 15.

The Vermont senator did not campaign much Nevada in the week leading up to the caucuses, although about 2,000 people attended his Friday night rally in North Las Vegas at an outdoor amphitheater.

Sanders chose instead to begin campaigning vigorously in the Super Tuesday states that will vote on March 3, when about one-third of all delegates will be allocated.

Texas and California are the biggest delegate prizes on Super Tuesday. Sanders campaigned in California on Friday and he spent Saturday in Texas, where he’ll hold three rallies over the next 24 hours.

Polls find Sanders leading in both California and Texas, and the progressive senator could build on those leads in the coming days, following his momentum in the early states to vote so far.

The Buttigieg campaign and advisers to former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg are warning that if the party does not coalesce around an alternative to Sanders before March 3, he could build an “insurmountable” delegates lead.

In his Las Vegas concession speech, Buttigieg warned that Sanders would be a general election disaster and could cost the party down-ballot seats.

“Sen. Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans,” Buttigieg said.

And he warned that Sanders had fomented a divisive movement that would turn away potential new voters.

 “Sen. Sanders’s revolution has the tenor of combat, division, and polarization, a vision where whoever wins the day, nothing will change the toxic tone of our politics,” he said.

But Sanders’s critics have been making that case for some time and it hasn’t slowed him yet.

And the divided field of eight candidates has made it difficult for anyone rival to rise to the top and challenge Sanders, which will likely raise pressure on some low-performing candidates to drop out.

Bloomberg has spent about a half-billion dollars on a national ad campaign that boosted him in the polls ahead of this week’s debate in Las Vegas. He is the only candidate on the airwaves in all 14 Super Tuesday states.

But Bloomberg’s disastrous debate performance in Las Vegas, in which he was battered by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over accusations he has made past sexist remarks and overseen a toxic work environment for women, threatens to inflict significant damage to his campaign.

The candidates will debate again on Tuesday ahead of the Saturday primary in South Carolina.

The Vermont senator has a hostile relationship with many of the national party leaders who are frequent guests on cable news shows. Sanders’s critics have been warning in stark terms that nominating a self-described democratic socialist will lead the party to certain defeat against President Trump in November.

That hostile relationship is expected to be a major theme of the race in the weeks ahead.

“I know there’s some fear about Bernie and the … democratic socialist moniker,” said Don Seiersen, a freelance creative director and Sanders supporter who caucused at Palo Verde High School in Las Vegas. “But you know, 2016 was a surprise for everybody, at least for me, and 2020 can be as well. Now seems like the opportunity for some change, and to jump on it. We may never get this opportunity again.”

There was some unease on full display at caucus sites across Nevada among supporters of Sanders’s rivals.

“While I’m enthusiastic about Bernie’s vision, I think that it is an unrealistic vision,” said Anthony Ripamonti, a private banker and Buttigieg backer.

But Ripamonti said he’ll back Sanders “100 percent” if he’s the nominee.

Jenn Merchant, a Warren backer who picked Sanders as her second choice, dismissed criticism from Buttigieg, who has warned that Sanders’s demand for a revolution would leave a lot of mainstream Democrats feeling squeezed out of the party.

“I kind of want a revolution,” Merchant said.

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“The colleagues in all polling stations are counting votes and drafting minutes,” Seyed Esmaeil Mousavi said on Saturday.

“God willing, after counting the ballots cast at the stations, the results will be announced to the Elections Headquarters,” he said, adding, “We will inform the public of the results of each constituency according to the routine process in the Election Headquarters.”

He further expressed hope that the results of most of the constituencies will be announced on Saturday, saying that in large cities, they are trying to be able to announce the results by Sunday.

The nationwide votes for the parliament and the midterm elections of the Assembly of Experts officially began in Iran on Friday morning and closed at midnight.

In comments after voting just minutes after beginning the elections, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei described the election day as a “national celebration” and a day to “restore the civil rights of the nation”.

Ayatollah Khamenei also emphasized that participation in the election is a “religious duty”.

“The election guarantees the country’s national interests, and whoever is interested in the country’s national interests must take part in the election,” the Leader added.

Having gone through a formal qualification process by Iran’s Guardian Council, a total of 7,148 candidates, including dozens of Iranians from the religious minorities, are running for the parliament. There are 290 seats in the parliament up for grabs.

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The campaignings ended at 8:00 am (0430 GMT Thursday) and any campaigning beyond this time is a violation of election regulations, Iranian Election Committee said in a statement on Wednesday, Press TV reported.

Iran’s parliamentary elections and the midterm elections for the Assembly of Experts – a body whose members designate the country’s Leader – are to be held simultaneously on February 21.

Campaigns officially started last Thursday and the candidates had one week to win the people’s support for their candidacy. Following the campaigning, there will be a 24-hour silence period until voting begins on Friday morning.

More than 7,000 candidates are competing to enter the parliament. A winning candidate must have at least 20 percent of the votes cast in their constituency in order to become lawmakers for a four-year term.

A total of 57,918,000 people are eligible to cast their ballots. There would be one lawmaker at Majlis per each 190,000-strong segment of the Iranian population.

Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said Wednesday that a total of 55,000 polling stations and over 200 constituencies have been prepared across the country’s 31 provinces for the people to cast their votes.

He said that his ministry is fully prepared to hold the elections, which he described as “a manifestation of people’s participation in (determining) the country’s destiny.”

On Tuesday, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the secretary of Iran’s Guardian Council (GC), which is in charge of supervising elections, called on observers of the votes to help executive committees hold “healthy and lawful elections” under close scrutiny and without interference in the voting process.

In a message addressed to the monitors of the elections, Ayatollah Jannati said all observers, regardless of their political or factional inclinations, had to apply the rule of law and avoid bias.

All observers are obliged to make sure that the candidates are financially healthy and therefore less prone to fraud, he added.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has upped attacks against Bloomberg in recent days, began the pile on by saying Bloomberg couldn’t draw the diverse voter turnout needed to beat President Donald Trump in November.

“Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York City of stop and frisk, which went after African-American and Latino people in an outrageous way,” Sanders said. “That is not a way you’re going to grow voter turnout.”

Wednesday marked Bloomberg’s debut on the debate stage after qualifying earlier this week, setting the stage for a more contentious showdown. The former mayor stayed relatively quiet as the other candidates pounced at the opportunity to attack his record.

Elizabeth Warren jumped in next with a fiery charge, criticizing Bloomberg for his alleged comments about women.

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against,” Warren said. “A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and no I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk.”

Amy Klobuchar chimed in to say she welcomed the opportunity to debate Bloomberg on the stage, and said she didn’t think he should “be hiding behind his TV ads.” She also took a jab at the Bloomberg campaign’s memo from this morning, suggesting other candidates need to “get out of the way” so that he can take on Trump.

“And I’m not going to do that because a campaign memo from Mayor Bloomberg said this morning, that the only way we get a nominee is if we step aside for him. I think we need something different than Donald Trump. I don’t think you look at Donald Trump and say, we need somebody richer in the White House,” Klobuchar said, Politico reported.

Bloomberg had the opportunity to respond to the early onset of attacks, but he took his moment to redirect the conversation to his central message that he is the one to beat Trump in November.

 “I am a New Yorker. I know how to take on an arrogant conman like Donald Trump that comes from New York. I’m a mayor, was a mayor. I know how to run a complicated, diverse city, the biggest, most diverse city in this country” Bloomberg said. “I’m a manager, I knew what to do after 9/11 and brought the city back stronger than ever. And I’m a philanthropist who didn’t inherit his money but made his money. And I’m spending that money to get rid of Donald Trump, the worst president we’ve ever had. And if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and my kids.”

Joe Biden took Bloomberg’s response as an opportunity to argue that he is “better positioned to beat” the president. He took another jab at Bloomberg, saying the former mayor “didn’t get a lot done” in New York.

Pete Buttigieg was the last of the crew to weigh in, and he used his moment to draw Sanders into the fray.

“We have got to wake up as a party. We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg — the two most polarizing figures on this stage,” Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg continued: “And most Americans don’t see where they fit if they’ve got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire that thinks money ought to be the root of all power. Let’s put forward somebody who actually lives and works in a middle-class neighborhood, in an industrial Midwestern city. Let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a Democrat. Look, we shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out. We can do better.”

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TEHRAN (Iran News) – Bernie Sanders won New Hampshire high-stakes Democratic primary on Tuesday, according to US network projections, leaving rivals including party stalwart Joe Biden in his wake as he staked his claim to challenge President Donald Trump in November.

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