Mail-in ballot counting likely to delay presidential election outcome

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Mail-in ballot counting likely to delay presidential election outcome

Fox News senior correspondent Eric Shawn details the latest mail-in balloting confusion on 'The Story'

This is a rush transcript from “The Story with Martha MacCullum” October 28, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARTHA MACCALLUM, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: That's a party. I think it's a good idea. Thank you Bret. Good evening everybody. Welcome to THE STORY. I'm Martha McCallum and it is a tale of two very different strategies in the final days as the election ticks down here.

I also want to mention to you tonight that later in the show we will speak with Glen Greenwald of The Intercept and Sohrob Ahmari of The New York Post about the very consequential hearings today on Capitol Hill where Jack Dorsey of Twitter was grilled over why he blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story so stick around for that.

That's going to come up later in the hour but first actually election, front and center as President Trump crosses the country with a stop in Las Vegas, two back to back events today in Arizona as he fights to keep that state in his column. Joe Biden stayed in Delaware today.

He did go out to vote. There he is voting in Wilmington, Delaware with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. No official campaign events for him today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This election is a choice between a Trump super recovery and a Biden depression. You will have a depression, the likes of which you've never seen before. Maybe 1929.

JOE BIDEN (D) PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He makes a lot of big announcements but they don't hold up. He gets his photo op and he gets out. He leaves everyone else to suffer the consequence of his failure to make a responsible plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: Six more days and some pollsters indicate a path for the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Battleground states though are really very close. I caution people, however, four years ago to this minute, it was advantage Hillary Clinton and so there's still eight days to go.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Him personally going to these locations and drawing people out particularly in the semi-rural and rural areas where they need to paw those votes up, that's going to come back home in a big way to Donald Trump on election night and I don't think these polls are picking that up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: So will it. Take a look at The Cook Political Report now calling Texas a tossup and though the Biden campaign sees Georgia now in reach as well, this new Monmouth poll shows residents there expect a Trump win by a margin of 51 to 42. Tonight we will speak with Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics and then we will bring in Victor Davis Hanson.

He wrote a piece today called Trump versus Biden, a run down. He has two great pieces this week and we're going to talk to him in just a minute but we want to start with Tom Bevan over at Real Clear.

Tom, good to see you tonight so obviously there are arguments being made on both sides. There are six days to go here. What makes the most sense to you at this point?

TOM BEVAN, CO-FOUNDER, REAL CLEAR POLITICS: Well I mean the range of outcomes is you know anywhere from a Biden blow out to a Trump win and I think the way this race is trending look, in the last few days Trump has seen some significant closure in Florida, in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania and certainly at the national level as well.

So I think this race is trending toward being very close, being very competitive in a lot of these battleground states. I think it's going to be a long night on election night and maybe after that.

MACCALLUM: Yes. The president said the other day that he's living it all on the field and I think that's pretty clear. It's hard to imagine anybody working harder in the home stretch of this campaign, whether or not it will pay off for the incumbent, we don't know. What about Texas? You think that that's true that Texas is a tossup at this point, moved into that category by Cook?

DEVAN: Well, I mean the problem with that is that Cook has moved Texas into the tossup category where Trump is leading by 2.5 percent and they've got Biden ahead by 2.2 percent in our average in Arizona and they've got that category, leans down. So there's not a whole lot of consistency in doing of these two states.

Look, I think Texas is - it's a state that is - Trump is probably going to win it but it's going to be closer than - than it was certainly four years ago. There's an awful lot of time and money being spent on there but the latest polls look like Trump has a small but fairly stable lead in Texas.

MACCALLUM: And I saw a Michigan poll today that was pretty astounding.

Trump trailing by 17 in Wisconsin rather, excuse me among likely voters.

That's a pretty widespread.

DEVAN: Yes, I mean that poll's ridiculous. Nobody thinks Trump's going to lose Wisconsin by 17. We had another poll out today that had it at one point but the Marquette University law school poll which is sort of considered the gold standard came out today and had it at five points.

Four years ago they had Hillary Clinton, their final poll had Hillary Clinton up six points. It was 46 to 40. This time around it's Biden plus five, 48 - 43 and so the question is you know can Trump overperform in Wisconsin like he did four years ago? Have the folks at Marquette University Law school adjusted their methodology to try and capture the vote more accurately this time around?

We're not going to know that answer until after the votes are cast.

MACCALLUM: So one of the big issues here obviously Tom is that you've got almost 70 million people who've already voted and you have both campaigns making assessments about who those voters are and gleaning a lot of information from that, almost more so than the polls at this point. How do you calibrate that?

DEVAN: Yes, I think it's pretty dangerous. I mean certainly the pollsters, when they're asking a question, they're asking people whether they've already voted and getting the responses but it's become a real sort of parlor game for folks to try and read the tea leaves on these early voting numbers and divine from that what the election outcome is going to be.

I think it's very dangerous because in a lot of instances, we just don't know whether these are voters who would have turned out on election day that are now turning out early so it's a cannibalization of their vote or in some cases we don't know party registrations so there are lot of reasons that I think trying to extrapolate the early votes to an election outcome is really, really tricky and dangerous.

MACCALLUM: The only vote that really counts is the final count, when they start opening up all those envelopes. In some places they already have. We expect we're going to get North Carolina and Florida relatively early in the evening and those will I think tell a big chunk of this story and then we'll see where it goes after that. Tom, thank you so much. Always good to talk to you.

DEVAN: Thanks Martha.

MACCALLUM: Also joining me Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of 'The Case for Trump.' Great to have you with us this evening Victor.

One of the unknowns that you write about is this whole issue of all of these millions and millions of Americans who have already voted and then the parlor game as Tom Bevan puts it of trying to figure out who they likely are based on where they're voting from and how early they're voting and whether or not those who are left over can change this dynamic. What do you think?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION: Yes, I think there's too many unknowns and we don't know - we keep seeing our polls that suggest the minority vote, particularly the African-American vote might have gone up, 8 to 12 or 1 and that would make a big difference in these swing states, that these urban voters would not be able to balance or countervene the rural voters.

But yet that doesn't appear in the regular polls. We don't know the effect Martha of maybe a million college students in the - These states have the biggest universities in the United States, Michigan, Ohio state, Florida, Arizona, what's the effect of the semi and complete lockdowns were and speaking of somebody who spent my life on campus, polling day on campus is Halloween.

It's rallies, it's mass voting, it's polls on campus, everybody is registered in there. We don't know the effect on that at all. We don't know effect when you say early voting, everybody use this term 70 percent has to be democratic to withstand the election day way for Republicans but we don't know when a person says they're a Democrat or Republican, how they're going to vote in a weird year like this.

I think it is clear, it's kind of Orwellian though because the way I think most people feel they're just being fuddled because in 2016, they were told that this was - this was going to happen and while the national polls were knocked out off, on the state polls they were way off 2-3-4-5-6 and yet those with the so called credible polls.

Reuters, Politico, The Hill, et cetera and then the outlier polls were pretty accurate. Maybe not so much on the national but even there but really accurate on the state. Now we go four years later and the Trafalgar poll, the Inside Advantage poll, the Democracy Institute, Rasmussen, Ogbe, they are showing a race very close or within the margin of error, in some cases Trump winning and yet we're told, they can't be credible like the ones that were discredited in 2016 even though they were credible.

And so everybody says well, OK and then they look at it empirically, they look at signs and enthusiasm and they have no idea what's going on but what I look for is, the polls that were wrong have they produce credible evidence to show us why they were wrong. Have they altered their methodologies or are they coming out and being transparent that there is such a thing as a silent Trump voter.

This is how we reworded our questions, this is how we redid our samples and you don't hear much of that at all. It's almost as if they learned nothing and forgotten nothing and it reminds me of the Mueller investigation a lot.

For 22 months, we were told bombshell, walls are closing in, the Dream Team is going to - and we believed it and then every day, it didn't turn out the way the media told us.

MACCALLUM: Yes, so sure. I mean I think so many people are so wary of talking to anyone or breaking their privacy which they feel is infringed upon all the time on social media and everyone else in their lives so I think that's going to be one of the biggest dynamics out there. I wonder you know if people are right about what they see in this early vote count.

Before I let you go, one of the sections of your piece that I thought was so interesting, talked about foreign policy in the future and what we haven't - haven't learned about what that might look like in a Biden administration. Can you just give us a quick thought on that before we let you go tonight Victor?

DAVIS HANSON: Yes, Joe Biden keeps saying he has a plan but all he has to do is, identify particularly where Trump went wrong because he says it's disaster. So my question is would you take the embassy back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

Would you tell the Assad dynasty, you're going to have the Golan Heights.

Would you say to China, you know what, we want to detone, let's just call office trade war or recalibration, go back to the way it was before Trump came into office. Let's tell the NATO allies, we've been a little bit too excessive. If you don't want to pay the 2 percent of your defense obligation, that's OK with us.

I could go on a long list but you get the impression that Biden says there's no plan, that's a disaster but he - but he wouldn't - he doesn't have a plan to replace what Trump is and I don't think he's going to say to Saudi Arabia, please don't come out in the future and recognize Israel or United Arab Emirates.

Just take that back, that's not helpful. Let's get the Palestinians back in the center of the whole Middle East question as they've been for the last

70 years. So there's just this generic, sort of like the COVID crisis. He didn't - he didn't have a plan but then when you ask him exactly travel ban, respirators, ventilators, what would you've done exactly different?

There's no detail that's forthcoming and that's - I think that's significant.

MACCALLUM: Well, I think there's--

DAVIS HANSON: I don't think he has a plan and I have a feeling that he's going to be under a lot of -

MACCALLUM: We didn't get a foreign policy debate which we usually -

DAVIS HANSON: - pressure from the - yes to keep what's the status quo with Trump if he were to win.

MACCALLUM: Interesting. Victor, thank you very much. We didn't get a foreign policy debate in this round and we haven't had a lot of pressing questions for Joe Biden either so all right, so thanks to Victor Davis Hanson and Tom Bevan tonight. So coming up, we've got over 73 million votes that are already in. It's extraordinary, right? Because last time you had

136 million total.

Now you've got 70 something million already in and we're six days away so is the mail reliable? There's a lot of people very concerned about this.

What's real in those fears? What's not? We'll talk to the head of the Federal Election Commission and get some answers next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MACCALLUM: More than 73 million Americans have already voted in the 2020 election but now some are striking fear in the hearts across the country that the mail service has conspired against your vote.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: You want it in on time, those need to be brought in in person by hand if you want to make it in time now. We have been talking for months now about this election as the first big national vote by mail election because of the pandemic.

But not anymore, that part of it is over. In part because they really did purposefully monkey wrench the post office to make that simple and safe solution not work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: Ellen Weintraub is the commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Election Commission. She joins me now. Ellen, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Can you sort that out for us because we were told by the postmaster that there's nothing to worry about in this process.

Obviously, there is a deadline that you have to get your vote in the mailbox by but how worried should people be?

ELLEN WEINTRAUB, COMMISSIONER, FEC: Well, as you know there were measures taken back in July by the Post Office to cut back on service, to shorten the hours, not do overtime, not allow extra trip and there was a recent decision just today from a DC judge saying that he was taking over and ordering the postal service to go back to the old rules to reinstitute the longer hours, whatever is necessary in order to make sure that the election mail in particular gets delivered.

Now we are less than a week away from the election and I think under any circumstances, I would be nervous about entrusting my ballots to the mail at this point just because delays can happen and it might not get there on time. The rules are different in every state and in some states, the mail - the ballot has to be received by election day so actually if I've already voted, I'd try--

MACCALLUM: Well, there has been - Ellen, there has been a lot of - I'm sorry, we have a little bit of a delay, there's been a lot of time you know. Everybody - I mean my ballot arrived several weeks ago. I filled it out and put it in a voter box and we're looking at one of them on the screen. It was really - it was very easy and you've got 73 million Americans who have already voted and six more days to go find the ballot box.

So it seems to be a bit of a stretch to say that you know that people aren't able to vote, isn't it?

WEINTRAUB: Well obviously, people are voting. We're seeing massive turnout and that is a great thing so I think anybody who has their ballot in hand should do whatever they can to get it in on time. As I said I think just in the normal course of mail, a delay could take more than a week so if people haven't mailed their ballot in yet and they're planning on using an absentee ballot, I would do a drop box just like you did, that's what I did.

MACCALLUM: Yes, we've got pictures of them on the screens. I know there are some places where they're more less plentiful than others but you've got six days to go, find one of those boxes and it seems like it's going actually pretty well by now with 73 million already voted. So in Pennsylvania, the decision to say that you cannot reject a ballot if the signatures don't match up, what do you think about that?

Isn't that one of the reasons that we sign our ballots so that it can be looked at against the book like we've always done?

WEINTRAUB: Well, there is so much litigation going on throughout the country in Pennsylvania. They also have the problem of the naked ballots where people don't put their ballots in the inner envelope. I don't want to get into the details of what's going on in each state.

I think the big picture issue is that there are measures in place throughout the country to ensure that the ballots are secure and that they come from the people that they are supposed to come from and that people can trust the system and have faith in the results.

MACCALLUM: OK, you know in terms of counting how many days after do you think it makes sense to be able to count and how are we going to be in a situation where examining postmarks on these envelopes to make sure that they were actually sent by November 3?

WEINTRAUB: Again, that varies from one state to the next. Some places, the ballots have to be received by election day. Other states have provisions in place that as long as it's postmarked by election day and received within a certain number of days after that, they will continue to count them.

As you know the official results are never in on election night. That often takes weeks but that usually takes weeks in order for the official results to be certified so the important thing is that every citizen should try and vote and have their vote counted.

MACCALLUM: Yes, get your envelope in. There's a lot of places where you can do just that safely and easily and 73 million people have figured it out so I think everybody else should be able to too. Ellen, thank you very much.

Good to have you here tonight.

WEINTRAUB: My pleasure.

MACCALLUM: Trump 2020 Senior Advisor Mercedes Schlapp on the campaign strategy to the finish line, coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MELANIA TRUMP, FIRST LADY, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: As a mother, I'm grateful for a president who believes in strong families. As an independent woman, I'm grateful for a president who has championed not only women but working mothers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: First Lady making her solo campaign debut in the final week of this race as polls show that it might be too little too late to turn around the president's support among women voters. A new poll shows that while Trump is 17 points behind Biden in Wisconsin, he is lagging with women by a staggering 30 points in that state which is also a state that has been hit very hard by COVID lately and that's also having an impact in Wisconsin.

Joining me now Mercedes Schlapp, Trump 2020 campaign senior adviser and has been one of the key people in the Trump for Women strategy. Mercedes, it's good to have you with us tonight. Thank you very much for being here.

MERCEDES SCHLAPP, TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: Thank you. Thank you so much.

MACCALLUM: So my first question for you is you know I see Melania Trump there, the First Lady and the president talks about her a lot in the campaign trail. She gave a speech at the RNC that that had such a positive feedback and I think a lot of us that we would see a lot more of her on the campaign trail so why didn't we and could she have made a difference?

SCHLAPP: Well, I think she makes a difference every day in the great work that our First Lady does to champion causes for our children. Obviously her Be Best Program initiative has been so strong in dealing with a variety of issues regarding how can we help improve our children's lives.

I mean, she's such an incredible example for women and for our families as she has played this prominent role at the White House as the First Lady and we also have amazing women surrogates out there.

I was - I've been traveling with Ivanka Trump. We have our Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Lara Trump is on the trail and let me tell you, they talk so eloquently about why President Trump's vision of growing this economy, of standing up for American families and American workers is so critical and why we need to reelect this president.

And so we've been out there in our women for Trump bus tours -

MACCALLUM: No, I know you have but I'm just looking at some of these gaps and - yes so I mean, I just wanted to know why we hadn't seen more of Melania Trump and I guess it's - you know it's because the other folks were out there and maybe she did not want to do a lot of stuff on the campaign trail.

Let's look at this. This is President Trump in Michigan and this got a lot of attention in terms of his - the way he speaks about women sometimes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: You know what else. I'm also getting your husbands, they want to get back to work, right? They want to get back to work. We're getting your husbands back to work and everybody wants it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: So 47 percent of the work force in Michigan is women, almost half of the work force is women so you know are statements like that not working to the president's benefit with these women voters with the numbers that we're seeing?

SCHLAPP: Well, what's not working is when Joe Biden is pushing a lockdown message of not getting our men and women back to work because 75 percent of American workers don't have the luxury of staying at home.

They need to go to their place of employment and when Joe Biden is pushing a lockdown message of from his basement and from his multi house, I really don't want to hear it. In our cases, we want to make sure as the president has said, this is about the Trump boom.

This is about getting Americans back to work safely and responsibly. I had one quick instance where we were on an airplane, the pilot comes out and says for you all it's a flight. For us and for my flight crew, it's a paycheck and thank you for flying. Why? Because for Americans we're resilient and we're strong. We want to defeat this virus and at the same time we want to make sure we continue to build a strong economy, which is exactly what we're seeing under President Trump's leadership.

MACCALLUM: Well, we hope that men and women will get back to work and get their jobs back. That's what everybody wants in this country. Mercedes, thank you very much. Good to see you tonight.

SCHLAPP: Thank you so much. Great to see you.

MACCALLUM: So joining me now is Pete Buttigieg, Biden campaign surrogate and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Good to have you with us this evening.

You know, we talked at the beginning of the show, Mayor Pete, about the schedule. Obviously, you couldn't have more different schedules. The president is in a different state every three hours. And Joe Biden was in Delaware. We talked about this before you and I. You know, is that the way to do this in the home stretch and why isn't he --

(CROSSTALK)

FMR. MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), SOUTH BEND, INDIANA: Well, I'm pretty sure he would be --

MACCALLUM: getting out there more?

BUTTIGIEG: Yes, I'm pretty sure he was in Georgia yesterday. He was in Delaware where he was voting.

MACCALLUM: That's correct.

BUTTIGIEG: I think he's coming to Florida soon. And obviously his strategy is working given that the Biden-Harris campaign is pulling ahead. We're also not taking anything for granted, which is why you're going to continue to see not just Joe Biden and Kamala Harris but folks like me out there pounding the ground. Because we want to make sure that we get out every vote.

MACCALLUM: So just to be clear, the Trump has made -- Trump campaign has made eight stops since Sunday. Today is Wednesday. The Biden campaign stops have been two --

BUTTIGIEG: Yes.

MACCALLUM: -- and as you say, he is going to be back on the road tomorrow.

And you know, as you say, this is a very competitive race so it may turn out that less is more in this race. We'll see. But it's clearly something that all the strategists will be examining. With regard to the fracking --

(CROSSTALK)

BUTTIGIEG: Yes, I'm not even sure those visits from Donald Trump are really helping him though, right? Like you look at Omaha.

MACCALLUM: Maybe, maybe not.

BUTTIGIEG: He left his supporters freezing in the cold, which is a great metaphor for how he's treated his supporters more generally across the country. And in Arizona, you got a bunch of people in a rally that has the potential to be a spreader event, which kind of symbolizes his inability to lead us that out of this pandemic --

(CROSSTALK)

MACCALLUM: Yes, we've heard that line a lot. You know, I mean, it's fine.

BUTTIGIEG: -- because it doesn't seem that care for the health and safety of his supporters. So, I don't think these events are really helping him.

MACCALLUM: It may or may not be. And like I said, we'll see whose strategy turns out to be the right one. It maybe that in this environment it's better to --

BUTTIGIEG: Yes.

BUTTIGIEG: -- to do less and stay home more. So, we'll see.

With regard to the issue on fracking, this is something that I think really was the biggest take-away perhaps from the final debate, this issue of transitioning away from oil as a country. Are you concerned that that is what is causing some of the tightening that we're seeing in some of these rust belt states?

BUTTIGIEG: I think one of the reasons why we're seeing him to continue to have very strong support especially in the Midwest where I come from and really in a lot of states that normally Democrats can't even compete in is that he understands that climate change is real and he put forth a way to deal with it that supports workers in the energy industry through this transition.

Look, nobody in my age or younger, I expect maybe most Americans period, no one really thinks that we're going to have the exact same energy profile in

2050 that we do in 2020. Now you can either pretend that's not a reality just like the president wants to pretend the pandemic is not a reality, or you can get the American people and the American economy ready for it by ensuring that workers who are working today --

(CROSSTALK)

MACCALLUM: Well, I mean, I would just point out one thing about that.

BUTTIGIEG: -- in the energy industry will continue to be able to do it.

MACCALLUM: Yes. I mean, we have gone through a period where fracking has allowed this country to become energy independent from the Middle East.

That's a tremendous dynamic change in geopolitical -- in the geopolitical environments in the world. Don't you think that that was a good change?

BUTTIGIEG: Yes. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, Joe Biden defeated some Democrats who were further to his left who called for an outright ban on fracking, which he opposes. I think his position is one that really resonates with the American people who understand that in the long run, we're going to need to continue to transition to more renewable energy, which is obviously not going to happen when the sitting president of the United States says climate change is a hoax and that wind mills kill birds.

And at the same time, he also has expressed support for that happening in a way that doesn't mean a ban on fracking. You know, if the Democratic Party wanted to choose a candidate --

(CROSSTALK)

MACCALLUM: Well, it would be interesting to see.

BUTTIGIEG: -- who was foreign outright total immediate ban, then they would have chosen somebody else.

MACCALLUM: Well, it is just his own words that confuse people, I think. But it's an evolving position. Thank you very much, Pete Buttigieg. Good to have you with us tonight as always.

BUTTIGIEG: Thanks. Good to be with you.

MACCALLUM: Thanks for coming by.

Coming up, Hunter Biden's former business partner laying out purported evidence that connects the dots between the family's business dealings and the 2020 Democratic nominee.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald joins us with his thoughts on the interview last night, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MACCALLUM: So, no official response from the Biden campaign after a former associate of Hunter Biden spoke out last night about what he says is evidence of a direct link between the former vice president and numerous business deals with China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries. Here's former Navy Lieutenant Tony Bobulinski on Tucker Carlson last night. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY BOBULINSKI, HUNTER BIDEN'S FORMER BUSINESS ASSOCIATE: I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying how are you guys getting away with this?

Like, aren't you concerned? And he -- he looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said plausible deniability.

I was sitting with Jim Biden and Hunter Biden and Joe came through the lobby with his security. Hunter introduced me as, this is Tony, dad, the individual I told you about that's helping us with the business that we're working on and the Chinese.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST: Here's a text message that you received from Hunter Biden. My chairman gave an emphatic no. I think we should all meet in Romania on Tuesday next week. So, you're hearing reporters say that chairman was in fact the Chinese government.

BOBULINSKI: That is Hunter Biden writing on his own phone, typing in that I spoke with my chairman, referencing his father.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: Joining me now, Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept. Glenn, good to have you with us tonight. Thank you for being here.

So, what was your reaction when you watched the interview with Tony Bobulinski? What stood out to you?

GLENN GREENWALD, CO-FOUNDER, THE INTERCEPT: Well, as a journalist, one of the things you look for obviously in a story like this aside from documentary evidence, much of which has been provided, is whether you have a source who, a, is willing to go on the record as he has previously done, but then, b, sit down and answer questions and provide detailed explanations about what it is that he's claiming happened, how it is that he knows that and what evidence exists that can substantiate what it is that he is saying.

So for him to sit down in an interview for an hour on prime time television and put his name as opposed to hiding anonymously like most of these source do on the other side, behind these accusations and say that he spoke directly to the vice president about the very deals that they were pursuing in China that Biden denies having any knowledge of obviously raises really important questions for the front-running presidential candidate that a healthy media ought to be asking.

MACCALLUM: Yes. Well, a healthy media ought to be asking those questions.

There's no doubt about it. Today we had an interesting exchange with Jack Dorsey of Twitter who prevented the healthy media and the rest of a lot of Twitter's public from seeing this story that was written by the New York Post, which kicked a lot of this off. Here's a piece of that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JACK DORSEY, CEO, TWITTER: We had hacked materials. We didn't want Twitter to be a distributor for hack materials. We found that the New York Post because it showed the direct materials, screen shots of the direct materials, and it was unclear how those were attained. That it felt -- that it fell under this policy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: Glenn, what did you think of that justification?

GREENWALD: Well, just first of all in general, I feel extremely uncomfortable as a journalist that Silicon Valley monopolist and heck over lords have become the regulators of our discourse. Why is Twitter and Facebook competent to make decisions about what it is journalistically sound that's sufficient for the American public to see before presidential

-- when did that become their role?

But then specifically about the judgment in question, I'm a journalist who reported two major stories that were based on material obtained in an unauthorized manner by myself. One the Snowden story back in 2014 --

MACCALLUM: That's right.

GREENWALD: -- that won every major journalism award in the country and then a story last year that we reported all throughout last year in 2020 about the Bolsonaro government based on materials that were hacked from the telephones of the most powerful officials in Brazil showing extreme levels of corruption that we ended up publishing.

If this is the new standard that social media companies are going to block reporting based on information when they can't ascertain what the source is, that would mean they should be blocking links to the New York Times reporting about Trump's tax returns since nobody knows how Donald Trump -- how the New York Times got those materials.

MACCALLUM: Yes. It's a great question.

GREENWALD: It should mean that they should be blocking every major journalism story in the world from WikiLeaks to the Pentagon papers to the Snowden reporting. It's a really repressive standard that these social media companies are imposing being egged on by Democratic senators and their allies in the media. That to me is the most alarming thing. Those are the people who are advocating lead in the way and calling for more censorship.

MACCALLUM: Yes, I couldn't agree more. And you know, one element of THE STORY is how the information was procured. The other element is whether the actual information is legitimate and credible. That's really the most important element of THE STORY. And in this story, it is becoming increasingly evident that this was generated by Hunter Biden and we've heard absolutely nothing to the contrary from the Biden family or any member of the Biden family in terms of delegitimizing any of this information so far. So that's what we have to go on.

Glenn Greenwald, thank you. Good to have you with us tonight.

So, the New York Post is still blocked on Twitter over its reporting of this story. When press on claims of censorship today, here was the response from CEO Jack Dorsey once again. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): You're still blocking the New York Post. You haven't change it.

DORSEY: We have changed it. They can log in to their account to leak the --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari responds to that live, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MACCALLUM: Senator Ted Cruz today hammering Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the handling of the Hunter Biden story and the New York Post locked Twitter account.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DORSEY: The enforcement action however of blocking your both in tweets and in D.M. in direct messages, we believe was incorrect. And we changed it --

(CROSSTALK)

CRUZ: Today, right now, the New York Post is still blocked from tweeting two weeks later.

DORSEY: Yes. They have to log in to their account which they can do at this minute, delete the original tweet, which fell under our original enforcement actions and they can tweet the exact same material from the exact same article and it will go through.

CRUZ: You can censor the New York Post, you can censor Politico, presumably you can censor the New York Times or any other media outlet. Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MACCALLUM: So, there's that. Joining me now, someone at the center of this controversy. Sohrab Ahmari, the New York Post editor. Sohrab, good to have you with us tonight.

SOHRAB AHMARI, OP-ED EDITOR, NEW YORK POST: Thanks for having me.

MACCALLUM: So, you heard Jack Dorsey there. He says it's very easy. Thanks for being here, very easy for you to get back in to the Twitter account for the New York Post. All you have to do is delete the original post, and then he says that you can put the same exact material back up. What do you say to that?

AHMARI: I say that sounds like high tech racketeering. We're being blackmailed the way an old mob boss would do as we say on in our editorial on the cover of tomorrow's paper. And you can find it at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__nypost.com&d=DwICAg&c=cnx1hdOQtepEQkpermZGwQ&r=3QZVZXZV7EMrpGQjRUaaMKikQPMHYll_z4ZjL6kI3Y4&m=CNmZ8wCF3U8sovpdoXrLBcDzQHK4Z1ekvjJpijUY7e8&s=CI6R9h-IqyJkA6bj2tNv8bMpu8ZfNP-cwh8WQkWU5wo&e=  right now. It sounds like you're saying, well, nice paper you got there. It would be a shame if you couldn't reach your two million followers on our platform.

At a time when we know from the testimony today that neither Twitter nor Facebook have any evidence that this was in fact hacked material as they initially ascertained. Lawmakers pressed Mr. Dorsey, they said, what evidence that this is hacked? We know it's not hacked because it's a recovered laptop. And he had no evidence. So, why would we have to delete our tweet? It wasn't in violation of the original policy.

MACCALLUM: I mean, it's really -- it's comical if it wasn't so serious.

What is the process that they went through to determine that this information was gleaned from hacked material? I mean, how did they make that assessment?

AHMARI: It's completely unaccountable and this is what -- this is the problem with big tech, which is why I'm happy that lawmakers on the Hill today pressed Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. But they have far too much power and control over what we see and what we think. And it's increasingly partisan power that seems to -- the ratchet is only one sided.

It only seems to target the right.

In this case, just before an election when we found an apparent case of corruption. Which as you noted, Martha, neither Mr. Joe Biden nor Mr.

Hunter Biden has denied the authenticity of the e-mails. Neither has denied the ownership of the laptop.

And now we have an on-the-record source who was on one of the e-mail threads that we have reported out saying yes, they're real.

MACCALLUM: Yes.

AHMARI: So, again, what policy have we violated and what will happen if the only journalism that's allowed is journalism that the subject of the story permits? That's called public relations. That wouldn't be journalism anymore.

MACCALLUM: Exactly. I want to show everybody this quote from Matt Taibbi in his op-ed in the New York Post and get a quick thought from you on the other side of it. He says, editors have been telling staffers that any effort to determine whether or not the Biden laptop material is true or to ask the Biden campaign to confirm or deny the story will either not be allowed or put through heightened fact-checking procedures. On the other hand, if you want to assert with that any evidence at all that the New York Post story is Russian interference, you can essentially go straight into print.

Your thought on that.

AHMARI: It's just incredibly shameful that so many of our colleagues have not stood with us in solidarity. I just hope that they never end up on the same side of this.

MACCALLUM: Yes. It's a great point. In many ways, it may have brought more attention to this story, but the fact that there are no questions asked on this is reprehensible across the board. It's a legitimate story. And we will continue to follow it here.

Thank you so much, Sohrab. Good to have you with us tonight.

So how the process of counting your mail-in ballots could lead to election night cliff-hangers? We're going to explain a lot about this process because we all have a lot of questions. And that's coming up next. So stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MACCALLUM: It looks like the Supreme Court has ruled that North Carolina can take mail-in ballots until November the 9th, so the process of counting, all of these ballots varies from state to state. And for those that don't start until election day like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, it could mean that we might get a delay in that final result.

Fox News senior correspondent Eric Shawn has THE STORY for us tonight.

Eric?

ERIC SHAWN, FOX NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Martha. You're right, the record number of mail-in ballots means we will likely not know the election winner right away. The avalanche of mail-in ballots across the country now is nearing tonight five -- 50 million -- 50 million according to the U.S. Elections Project. That is almost double the number of people who had voted in person so far.

But you know, every state starts counting the ballots as they arrive, some by locked cannot even begin that process until the polls close on Tuesday night. So, we could know the results in the key states of Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Colorado rather quickly because those are among the six states that have been counted for just over a week now.

Well five other states including, Iowa, New Jersey, and parts of Texas well, they've started with a little bit less time. But that monster list, the majority, 37 states do not start counting until election day arrives, that morning or after the polls close next Tuesday night.

They include the key battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, mostly Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

But despite the confusion, voting rights groups are helping voters sort it all out. The Washington, D.C. based lawyers' committee for civil rights under law says it has deployed 23,000 volunteers at polling places across the country and set up a hot line for campaigns that received more than

7,000 calls each day.

The most common complains are from voters who don't receive their mail-in ballots, those long lines and delays of course and voting machine snafus.

The voting hotline by the way is 866 or vote. Kristen Clarke is the group's president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KRISTEN CLARKE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL LAWYERS' COMMITTEE: Sometimes those long lines are attributable to officials just not making enough sites available, but sometimes those long lines are the result of machines that have not malfunctioned or co-workers who are new and may not be well trained.

So, we want people to call that 866 our vote hotline whenever they encounter or experience a problem.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHAWN: Well, (Inaudible) and experts say neither candidate can really declare a victory on election night. And if it's this quicker, well some states gave mail-in ballots a grace period of 10 days after election day.

Illinois two weeks and -- Martha, get this, Washington State, almost three weeks about time already there I guess carve the turkey. can you believe that?

MACCALLUM: My gosh.

SHAWN: Back to you.

MACCALLUM: Put the copy (ph) on. Thank you very much, Eric. That's THE STORY of Wednesday, October 20th, 2020. THE STORY continues as always, so we'll see you back here tomorrow night.

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