Elections

Republicans had sought to block the counting of provisional ballots by voters whose mail-in ballots were deemed invalid. Democrats celebrated the ruling as a win in a crucial state.The Supreme Court cleared the way on Friday for some voters in Pennsylvania whose mail-in ballots had been deemed invalid to cast provisional ballots in person, rejecting an appeal by Republicans not to count such votes.Democrats immediately celebrated the decision, which like in many such emergency petitions was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as a victory in a state crucial to each party’s presidential and Senate hopes. It could affect thousands of mail-in ballots in a contest where the latest polls show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump virtually tied.The ruling was one in a string of court victories for Democrats, whose voters are more likely to use mail ballots and were therefore more likely to have had their votes tossed out if Republicans had succeeded in the case.“In Pennsylvania and across the country, Trump and his allies are trying to make it harder for your vote to count, but our institutions are stronger than his shameful attacks,” the Harris campaign said in a statement after the ruling. “Today’s decision confirms that for every eligible voter, the right to vote means the right to have your vote counted.”The Republican National Committee was “disappointed” in the court’s ruling, a spokeswoman said.In a brief statement attached to the court’s order, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the case was “a matter of considerable importance.” But he said the justices had no way to give the Republicans what they were asking for — a statewide block on allowing these provisional ballots.Only Butler County elections officials were parties to the case, he wrote, which meant the justices could not force elections officials in other counties to block those ballots. He was joined by two other conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Democrats had claimed that the advertising strategy may have violated federal election laws establishing strict limits on spending by national party committees to aid individual candidates.A federal judge ruled on Friday that Senate Republicans may continue to pump tens of millions of dollars into key swing state races in the final days of the 2024 campaign by employing an unusual advertising strategy that Democrats had claimed was potentially illegal.By reclassifying campaign ads as fund-raising appeals, Republicans have been able to avoid strict limits Congress has placed on spending by national party committees to aid individual candidates, helping to offset a significant fund-raising deficit they face in states with critical Senate races, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania.House Democrats’ campaign arm sued the Federal Election Commission for failing to stop the Republicans and sought to either ban the practice or clear the way to use it themselves.But Judge Randolph D. Moss, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, wrote Friday that he was “unpersuaded” to outlaw a practice that the commission had not. He said Democratic and Republican campaign committees — those that support Senate and House candidates — are “all on an even playing field” and the lack of action taken by the Federal Election Commission had not tilted it.His ruling could give Republicans a last-minute boost in the fierce contest for the Senate, where they are favored to pick up the one or two seats they need to regain control of the chamber, but where polls show that several races are close.Sean Cooksey, the Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, also welcomed the ruling. “This is a huge win for the rule of law and political speech!” he wrote on social media.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Wilson Castillo Diaz was arrested in New York in connection with the rape of a 5-year-old girl. On Friday, local Republicans blamed Democratic immigration policies.A Long Island man who was charged with raping a 5-year-old girl last month was in the country illegally, the police said Friday as local Republican officials sought to connect the disturbing case to the bitter debate over immigration just days before the presidential vote.The man, Wilson Castillo Diaz, 27, is a Honduran migrant who crossed into the United States via the Rio Grande Valley in 2014 before Border Patrol agents detained him, the police said. Mr. Castillo Diaz skipped an immigration hearing and was last living in Westbury, N.Y., the authorities said.Mr. Castillo Diaz was arrested on Oct. 22, but local officials did not publicize the case until Friday, days before the end of an election season in which immigration has played a central role.Former President Donald J. Trump has sought to stir nativist sentiment from the campaign trail, and the large influx of migrants in New York City has stoked fears of a surge in crime, though that largely has not been reflected by crime statistics.At a news conference on Friday, Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County Executive, said that the arrest of Mr. Castillo Diaz was the latest “illustration and evidence” of why authorities in his county closely watch for undocumented migrants.Mr. Blakeman, a Republican, said that the police waited more than a week to announce the arrest in order to protect the identities of the victim and her family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Nicolle Wallace, who was a White House communications director in George W. Bush’s administration, called on Friday for Mr. Bush to have a late-hour “change of heart” and speak out against former President Donald J. Trump.Speaking on her “Deadline: White House” program on MSNBC, Ms. Wallace said Mr. Trump’s violent language about former Representative Liz Cheney had pushed her to publicly raise the question she gets “asked more than any other” off the set: “Where is George W. Bush?”Ms. Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent Republican critics, and she has campaigned extensively for his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her father, Dick Cheney, who served as Mr. Bush’s vice president, has also said he would vote for Ms. Harris.On Thursday, Mr. Trump criticized Ms. Cheney for her hawkish foreign policy views and said she should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her” — a remark that drew condemnations from a number of leaders. On her program, Ms. Wallace seemed to be imploring her former boss to join that group.“These are the comments we’re talking about right now in the United States of America from someone running to hold the job he had,” Ms. Wallace said.Mr. Bush’s daughter Barbara also supports Ms. Harris and has knocked on doors for her in Pennsylvania.But Mr. Bush has ruled out endorsing in the presidential race, according to his office. Ms. Wallace said she hoped both Mr. Trump’s recent violent language and the endorsement of Ms. Harris by Mr. Bush’s daughter might sway him.“We have a right to hope that those who have stood for freedom and celebrated those who have protected it might have a last-minute change of heart in the closing hours of this campaign,” Ms. Wallace said on her program.Ms. Wallace said she had appealed directly to Mr. Bush’s office, and had been told that the former president would continue his silence. But she said that it felt “important” to make her appeal, and then showed a series of decades-old videos of Mr. Bush speaking about freedom.A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Freddy Ford, said on Friday that Mr. Bush had no comment on Ms. Wallace’s plea. Last month, Mr. Ford said in an email that Mr. Bush “retired from presidential politics many years ago” and would not endorse in the presidential race.Ms. Wallace said she was delivering her call in the spirit of a lesson Mr. Bush had imparted to her: “Leave everything I know how to do in service of our democracy and freedoms — the things he taught us to cherish — on the field.”In an interview last week with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, Ms. Cheney said she could not “explain why George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out.”“But I think it’s time,” Ms. Cheney said. “And I wish that he would.” More

The change, starting next Friday, lifts a dominant player in artificial intelligence over its chip-making rival, which has struggled to keep up.The chip-maker Nvidia will soon replace its rival Intel in the Dow Jones industrial average, S&P Dow Jones Indices said on Friday, reflecting Nvidia’s dominance in the world of artificial intelligence.S&P Dow Jones Indices, which maintains the stock index, said in a statement that the change would take place before the opening of trading next Friday “to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry.”Nvidia established an early foothold in the A.I. revolution, tailor-making its chips for machine learning tasks and building a community of A.I. programmers who were eager to develop their technology on the company’s hardware. The bet paid off. Nvidia now accounts for the majority of A.I. chip sales and has become the second-most-valuable company in the world, slightly trailing Apple at $3.32 trillion after trading hours on Friday.Intel, which makes the chips that serve as the brains of most computers, once considered buying Nvidia. But its board resisted the acquisition, and Nvidia went on to become a dominant player in the A.I. boom while Intel struggled to keep up. Intel’s market capitalization has fallen below $1 trillion.“The thing that we understood is that this is a reinvention of how computing is done,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and one of its founders, told The New York Times last year. “And we built everything from the ground up, from the processor all the way up to the end.”A recent stock split at Nvidia prompted speculation that it would replace Intel on the Dow Jones. In June, Nvidia unveiled a 10-for-one stock split that would make it easier for a retail investor to buy into the company without diluting its valuation.Spokeswomen for Nvidia and Intel declined to comment. More

The countdown to the election feels like an Advent calendar with a dubious remark behind each door.Vice President Kamala Harris almost never talks about what it would mean to elect a female president, nor does she speculate about why women disproportionately support her candidacy.Former President Donald Trump is talking plenty.In the past two days, he has vowed to be a protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He said that if he won the presidential election, he would want Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who is a vaccine skeptic, to work on “health and women’s health.” And, speaking with Tucker Carlson last night in Glendale, Ariz., Trump imagined a supremely violent fate for Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman who has become a prominent surrogate for Harris.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”The remark was graphic even by the standards of Trump, who has always seen provocation as a feature, not a bug, of his political style. And it fed right into Democrats’ efforts to frame the election — the first presidential contest since the fall of Roe v. Wade — as a reckoning over bigger questions of freedom, control and women’s fundamental place in society.“Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president,” Harris said today on the tarmac in Madison, Wis.Trump’s defenders say he was simply making a statement about Cheney’s past support for American involvement in overseas conflicts. But the episode seemed like yet another gift from Trump and his allies to Democrats — making the final countdown to the election feel like an Advent calendar with a sexist, violent or otherwise politically dubious remark behind each door.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

One of the great things about revisiting a classic is hearing from readers about how they first stumbled upon a beloved author and the notable encounters they’ve had with that author’s seminal work. Do you have a fond memory of reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” or another one of Gabriel García Márquez’s books? Share them here.[Click here to go back to the main book club hub.] More

Grab a snack, do your laundry and cast a ballot.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.Every Election Day, millions of adults line up to vote at schools, community centers, libraries and other public buildings. But sometimes election officials don’t have enough places. To make sure everyone is able to get to a polling location that’s convenient, officials have to get creative, asking local business owners to lend space. Here are five unusual spots where Americans will pick the next president.Wash, Dry, Fold, VoteThe City of Chicago doesn’t own a building in the neighborhood of Chicago Lawn, so Wash Smart Laundry is helping out by tucking polling booths among the washers and dryers. It’s making it easier for people in the area to cast their ballots. And it has been good for business, too, says Andrea Castillo, the manager. New customers have been coming in after hearing that they can do their laundry and their civic duty at the same time. But occasionally they get a little confused: When they’re asked to show their ID to vote, some people accidentally show their laundry card instead.Presidents and PastriesDuring the 2020 election, early in the pandemic, San Francisco officials wanted to spread out polling stations to reduce crowds. So they asked La Boulangerie, a cafe and bakery, to donate space, and things worked out so well that the place decided to keep doing it. This will be the third time half the cafe is emptied out to squeeze in six voting booths. Jennifer Cusguen, a manager, says the staff likes helping the community by making it easier to vote. And they’ve learned an important lesson: Voters love almond croissants. This year, they’ll stock extras so they don’t sell out again.Tomi UmWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More