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      Trump and Musk-fueled falsehoods and threats backdrop US election

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      Americans went to the polls on Tuesday against a backdrop of misinformation – much of it suspected of originating in Russia – as the FBI warned of fake videos and non-credible threats of terrorism aimed at disrupting the US presidential election and discouraging voting.These tensions were stoked by Donald Trump supporters, and the former US president himself. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s most vocal surrogate, tweeted a video of support that appeared to reference the far-right QAnon ideology.The video, showing footage of the January 6 insurrection and featuring Van Halen’s song Jump as a soundtrack, came after an earlier social media post from the entrepreneur that repeated elements of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy from the 2016 presidential election.“The hammer of justice is coming,” read that earlier post.The flood of untruths was fed by Trump on Tuesday as he falsely claimed he had a “big lead” in opinion polls while casting doubt on the reliability of voting machines. Having already baselessly claimed that there was Democratic “cheating” in Pennsylvania, the Republican nominee said it was “an outrage” that it took so long to count votes in swing states.The former president also took liberties with the truth in an early election day video on his Truth Social platform. In an apparent reference to transgender boxers, the video featured Trump complaining that “men could beat up women and win medals” – a supposed example of how American values had collapsed under Joe Biden’s presidency, which the Republican has tied to his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.The disinformation and false statements from the Trump campaign came as voting in one key battleground state, Georgia, already faced disruption following what appeared to fake bomb threats against at least two polling stations.The threats were made against polling stations at Etris Community Center and Gullatt elementary school in Union City, on the outskirts of Atlanta, according to Fulton county police. Union City’s population is nearly 90% Black, according to the US Census Bureau, fuelling suspicions that the threats were aimed at disrupting a cohort expected to mainly vote for Harris.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, told journalists that the “non-credible” threats came from Russia.“We identified the source, and it was from Russia,” he said, saying he believed that the source had been a Russian troll farm.“They’re up to mischief, it seems, and they don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election,” he added. “Anything that can get us to fight amongst ourselves – they can count that as a victory.”The bomb threats followed a warning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] on Monday that Russia, Iran and China were involved in efforts at election disruption but that Russia was “the most active threat”.“Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences, judging from information available to the IC [intelligence community],” an ODNI statement said.“These efforts risk inciting violence, including against election officials. We anticipate Russian actors will release additional manufactured content with these themes through election day and in the days and weeks after polls close.”In line with that statement, the FBI on Tuesday dismissed a video – made to look like a news clip and purporting to emanate from the bureau – advising Americans to “vote remotely” due to a “high terror threat” at poling stations.“This video is not authentic and does not accurately represent the current threat posture or polling location safety,” the bureau said.It also disavowed a separate video falsely depicting a political rigging voting among prison inmates.In a statement, the FBI said there were “two instances of its name and insignia being misused in promoting false narratives surrounding the election,” USA Today reported.The second video features a fake FBI press release alleging that officials at five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona rigged voting among inmates and conspired with a political party. “This video is also not authentic, and its contents are false,” the FBI said.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Five US election officials on what they’re expecting: ‘There’s a conspiracy theory for everything’

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      In Fulton county, Georgia, they’re on guard for efforts to undermine democracy from Republican members of the state elections board. In Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, they’re defending themselves as conspiracy theories swirl. And in Cochise county, Arizona, they’re preparing to certify the results shortly after one of their colleagues pleaded guilty to refusing to do so in the last election.Election officials are the first line of defense for democracy this election – and their job is anything but easy.For years, they have worked in relative obscurity as they administered the vote in a non-partisan way. But Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election unleashed a wave of harassment and pressure on these officials never seen before. Many have chosen to leave the profession, and those that have stuck around find themselves in a job that looks dramatically different from the low-profile one they once held.The Guardian has been following five election offices across the country for the last year, examining how staff turnover, election denialism and misinformation have affected their work, mental health and physical safety.On the eve of election day, we checked in with the officials, many in swing states, who will be working around the clock to ensure that all votes are counted.Fulton county, GeorgiaSheri Allen and Julie Adams rhetorically circled each other at the election board meeting like boxers in a ring.Allen, chairperson of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, and Adams, one of two recalcitrant Republican members of the board, were negotiating terms for which election documents Adams could inspect over the next week or two.But really, they were probing each other for an angle – some hidden danger or exposed weakness or intent behind their words.“I can see where this conversation is going,” Adams said at the board meeting last Wednesday, “but I want to renew the request that I have made, and I would like to see the reports from poll watchers, poll workers and voters that have had issues, complaints or comments, and how we react.”Allen is a personal injury attorney and approached Adams’s inquiries like a lawyer might. The two sparred over how to define a problem that should rise to the board’s notice, about whether Adams could have an electronic copy of the list of voters who had cast ballots in Fulton county – in order of their vote, by precinct – and whether she could be physically present as election workers popped the seals on the boxes of early vote ballots on election day.Under other conditions, Adams’s request to get reports in real time about problems at polling locations, or a list of voters who had cast a ballot, would raise no alarms.In Fulton county, the alarms never stop.After the 2020 election in Georgia, Trump and others issued florid and extravagant lies about Fulton county and the conduct of its poll workers. Though recounts showed that the election was fair and accurate, every error made by the county has been amplified by conservative partisans.County elections officials have been in a state of hyper-vigilance ever since, wondering which mistake might draw the heavens down upon them, or from which rock the next fountain of misinformation will spring.“With all that is on the line for this election, why would we keep throwing in additional new ways of doing things?” asked board vice-chairperson Aaron Johnson. “I’m on the record today; this is going to cause chaos. I don’t know that it’s intentional.”Adams, who works for a Trump-aligned group, sued the county earlier this year seeking a ruling to establish that she and other elections board members in Georgia had the legal right to refuse to certify an election if they think it didn’t meet their standards. A judge rejected that position, ruling instead that certification is a ministerial act mandated by the Georgia constitution.But Judge Robert McBurney also ruled that Adams has a right to review documents in advance of the certification vote, though a second judge in a separate case ruled that counties are not obligated to provide volumes of poll data and administrative paperwork to elections superintendents.At the board meeting on Wednesday, Adams’s request to have an electronic copy of the voter list was denied in a 3-2 vote. Allen cited security considerations. Instead, the county will make a hard paper copy available for her review, no phone recording allowed. If the elections director has to send a report to the secretary of state’s office about a polling problem, the board will get a note too. And Adams will be able to watch the first ballots come out of the box for counting at 2pm sharp on election day.Cochise county, ArizonaIn rural Cochise county, Arizona, a Republican haven along the US-Mexico border, there are Democratic candidates running for the three open county supervisor seats and a recorder position – something that hasn’t happened in recent memory.The Democratic activation came after several years of rampant election denialism culminated in criminal charges against two supervisors who initially refused to certify the county’s election results in 2022. Those charges followed attempts to hand-count ballots and after an experienced elections director quit over a hostile work environment. The county is on its fifth elections director since 2022.“I think it speaks volumes to the frustration that people have with their local government,” said Elisabeth Tyndall, the chair of the local Democratic party, that “people were willing to step up and run for those seats, even in light of all of the chaos”.One of the supervisors, Peggy Judd, recently agreed to a plea deal, accepting a misdemeanor charge that brings probation and a fine. The other supervisor, Tom Crosby, hasn’t done the same – and he refused to vote to certify the 2022 results even after a court required the county to do so.

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      Tyndall said, despite the upheaval, she trusts the elections department to carry out a successful election. About 100 ballots in one precinct were missing a supervisor’s race, an error that the county rectified by sending corrected ballots to those affected and having some on hand on election day at the polls. It was a “fixable mistake” that Tyndall said the county remedied fairly.Still, the specter of refusing to certify looms over the 2024 results – as jurisdictions around the country toy with the idea of whether they have to sign off on election results, a non-discretionary task. Judd’s probation lasts through the certification, and prosecutors said that timing was intentional to ideally prevent a repeat of 2022. Crosby, who has been the more vocal elections critic, hasn’t indicated his plans.“Honestly, it will be very difficult for them to not certify,” Tyndall said.Hillsdale county, MichiganAbe Dane is hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.Dane, who administers elections in Hillsdale county, Michigan, has spent the last four years challenging the election-related disinformation and conspiracy theories that have taken hold in his conservative community all while getting ready to run his first presidential election.“We’re not a heavily staffed office, and most of our staff are dealing with everything outside of elections,” said Dane. “So it’s a lot, but I have a wonderful group of township and city clerks that I’m very close with.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThis year, Dane has full confidence in the local election officials running the show in the small towns and cities that make up Hillsdale county. That wasn’t always the case.In 2020, the clerk in Adams Township was drawn into Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election. Scott didn’t only accept Trump’s claims of a stolen election. She believed Michigan’s presidential election had been corrupted by nefarious forces in favor of Joe Biden, who many in Hillsdale county could not believe won the 2020 election. Egging her on was Stefanie Lambert, a Michigan lawyer who in the wake of the 2020 election took on numerous cases challenging the results.After the election, the state of Michigan alleges Scott and Lambert illegally turned over private voter data to an outside group in their search for fraud – for which they currently face multiple felony charges. When Scott refused to turn over voting equipment for mandatory maintenance, the state stripped her of her authority to administer elections in 2021. Two years later, voters ousted her in a recall election that was widely viewed as a test of the power of election denialism in the deep-red community.Scott, who challenged Dane in the Republican primary for the position overseeing elections in Hillsdale county, enjoys the support of a small but vocal coterie of activists who maintain their belief that the 2020 election was stolen. After Scott and a slate of so-called America First candidates lost their primary elections in August, Dane says the group has quieted down. But that hasn’t stopped the flow of conspiracy theories, which he says “disseminate from the top down”.“I still have people that I know, love and respect in my circles that believe some of the stuff, and I have to continually try and either bite my tongue, or if the opportunity presents itself, try and educate them on what the facts are,” said Dane.Dane has been preparing security measures for months in advance of the election, coordinating with local law enforcement officials to continually monitor polling places on election day. But he says he is more concerned about the bread-and-butter of election administration – processing early and absentee ballots, helping poll workers adapt to new processes and technology, and preparing for inevitable human errors.Luzerne county, PennsylvaniaLuzerne county, an industrial battleground in north-eastern Pennsylvania, is facing a wave of conspiracy theories on the eve of the election.In late October, the county was doing some routine shredding of documents. When someone spotted the truck for the shredding company in front of the county’s office building, which also houses its election offices, it set off conspiracy theories. Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, quickly started hearing online that the county was shredding ballots, which of course wasn’t true.“There’s a conspiracy theory for everything,” she said. “There is nothing that we can say or do that will convince the people who believe in conspiracies to change their minds. I feel badly for those people. I don’t know how you live that way.”Crocamo is also worried about violence. During the early voting period, she had to call a sheriff to the elections office because two people were fighting. Someone called a bureau employee a racial slur. Another person spit on an employee.She said the county was adding barriers to control traffic into the office. Government employees will be required to go through a metal detector on election day.Scott Pressler, a conservative activist who has been registering voters in the state, suggested there was voter registration fraud in the county. As officials in another county investigate possible fraudulent registrations, Pressler suggested that there could be something amiss about voter registrations that were dropped off at the registration deadline by Beth Gilbert McBride, a voting rights organizer. McBride served as head of the Luzerne county election office in 2022 when it ran out of paper on election day.The claim was amplified by the Gateway Pundit, the influential far-right website that has become a powerful vector of election misinformation. Days later, the Luzerne county district attorney said that between 20 and 30 forms had been dropped off at the deadline, and none of them were fraudulent.Shasta county, CaliforniaVoting in Shasta county, a conservative stronghold in far northern California, will largely proceed as normal.That’s disappointing to the small but vocal group of residents who hoped to see radical changes in the community of 180,000 people that has attracted national attention for its far-right politics and embrace of election denialism.A band of local activists convinced of widespread voter fraud and stolen elections have been relentless in their efforts to uncover evidence of tampering. The group successfully lobbied officials, some of whom have also spread election misinformation, to throw out the county’s voting machines and institute a hand-count system. When the head of the elections office retired, the county replaced her with someone who had no experience and who election skeptics thought would be sympathetic.They believed they would be able to remake the voting system, but their efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. State lawmakers thwarted plans for a hand-count system with a bill preventing counties from using manual tallies in most elections. The new elections clerk has pushed back against proposals that would violate election law and said he won’t make any major changes to county election processes.At a tense and widely attended meeting of the county’s governing body last week, several expressed disappointment in the registrar of voters.“You cannot certify the election next Tuesday, no matter what happens because of what’s happening in that office,” one man said, asking officials to “put pressure on” the registrar.There’s discontent among that group, said Jeff Gorder, a retired county public defender, but after years of upheaval and violent rhetoric in the area things feel surprisingly calm: “It seems to be a milder environment right now.”Some elected officials have continued to sow doubt, though. Patrick Jones, a county official who was recently voted out of office, suggested to journalists that if Trump does not win it would be due to cheating.“It’s pretty obvious to most of us that he should easily win this and if they cheat him out of it again I think the response from the public is going to be very different unfortunately,” he said. “They can certainly cheat but there’ll be a price for that.”Still, Nathan Blaze, a local activist and chef, said he expects election day will proceed without issue. He plans to act as an observer at the elections office to ensure that workers there, who have faced increased harassment in recent years, can do their jobs without interference. More

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      Trump and Harris Focus on Economy as They Campaign in Southern States

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      The candidates outlined vastly different messages in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, with Donald J. Trump exaggerating how bad the recent jobs report was and Kamala Harris promising to bring down costs.Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump swept through Southern states on Saturday, outlining sharply divergent economic messages for voters in top battlegrounds and, in Mr. Trump’s case, solidly blue Virginia.Mr. Trump, after a week in which controversies often overshadowed his closing argument, traveled to North Carolina and Virginia, where he gave rambling speeches in which he tried to turn the race back toward immigration, the economy and transgender issues.Ms. Harris began her day at a rally in Atlanta, where she focused on her plans to bolster the economy, an approach that her advisers say has been intentional in the last days of a coin-flip race.At an event that featured food trucks and a performance by the Georgia-born rapper 2 Chainz, she said her first goal as president would be “to bring down the cost of living for you” through tax cuts and measures like expanding Medicare to help cover home care. She emphasized that message soon after at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., saying that Mr. Trump would fight for “billionaires and big corporations.”Mr. Trump, in his speeches at an airport in Gastonia, N.C. and an arena in Salem, Va., pounced on Friday’s labor report showing that employers added just 12,000 jobs last month.“These are depression numbers, I hate to tell you,” he said in Gastonia, wildly distorting the picture of what is actually a healthy economy and leaving out that the latest figures were driven down by hurricanes and a labor strike.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

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      in US Politics

      Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes

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      Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More

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      in US Politics

      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More

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      in Elections

      Play: Election-Night Bingo

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      Listen up for these terms as the votes roll in. Find them on the board to be the night’s big winner.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.After months and months and months of hearing about it, the election is finally here! Every four years, millions of Americans cast their ballots for president. Then, they wait and watch for the results on election night. It’s exciting! But also kind of … a lot.The news is a jumble of numbers, some very intense maps and a bunch of politics wonks talking a mile a minute about “exit polls” and “returns.” Not the most kid-friendly introduction to participatory democracy. But like most things, the more kids understand what’s going on, the more interesting it can be.That’s where this game comes in. Think of it as a mash-up of bingo and a language scavenger hunt. LINGO!InstructionsPrint out the bingo board and the definitions of the terms on it. Skim the terms to familiarize yourself.Set a timer for 30 minutes and settle in for an evening of election excitement.Anytime you read or hear one of phrases from the board, check it off. Check your printout (or scroll below) to read the explanation, too!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

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      in US Politics

      Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro barred from practicing law in New York

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney for Donald Trump, has been suspended from practicing law in New York and could be disbarred just days after pleading guilty in what prosecutors claim was an effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.Chesebro was charged in 2023, alongside Donald Trump and 17 others, with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law relating to alleged efforts by the defendants to “knowingly and willfully” join a conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election in the state.In the decision this week to suspend Chesebro’s law license, a panel in New York concluded that he had been “convicted of a serious crime”. The order reads: “Having concluded that respondent has been convicted of a serious crime, we accordingly suspend respondent from the practice of law in New York on an interim basis.”It defers to a court determination of whether a judgment of conviction has become “final” in Chesebro’s Georgia criminal proceeding.Chesebro pleaded guilty to a single felony charge in October 2023: conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and 100 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution, write an apology letter to Georgia’s residents and testify truthfully at any related future trial.Fellow attorney Sidney Powell separately pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy and will serve six years of probation, pay a fine of $6,000, and write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents.Last week, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, who is also a defendant in the Georgia election interference case, was ordered by a judge in a separate defamation case to turn over his Manhattan apartment, a Mercedes and a variety of other personal possessions to two Georgia election workers who won a $148m judgment against him.Giuliani was previously disbarred in July 2024. More

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      Five days out, Arab Americans are split on Harris v Trump: vote ‘strategically’ or ‘morally’?

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      It’s a Saturday afternoon at Al Madina Halal market and restaurant in Norcross, Georgia, and the line is four people deep for shawarma sandwiches or leg of lamb with saffron rice and two sides.A television on the wall by a group of tables has Al Jazeera correspondents reporting from several countries on a split screen about Israel’s attack on Iranian military targets the day before.Mohammad Hejja is drinking yogurt, surveying the bustle in the store he bought in 2012. There are shoppers and employees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco and other countries – a clear sign of what makes surrounding Gwinnett county, with nearly a million residents, the most diverse in the south-east.Hejja has Jordanian and US citizenship, but his family is Palestinian. Soldiers of the nascent nation of Israel drove his grandparents out of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe caused by Israel’s creation.Asked about how he expects his community to vote when Americans head to the polls next week, he says: “Everybody is confused about this election.” His No 1 concern is to “stop the war”, referring to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and recent attacks on Lebanon.The issue is top of mind for Arab American voters nationwide. Some polls suggest Arab Americans could abandon the Democrats in droves over the Biden administration’s support for Israel; elsewhere, advocates and community leaders are urgently organizing to prevent a Donald Trump victory, warning about impacts in the Middle East and on domestic issues such as immigration if the GOP candidate is re-elected.Less than a week from 5 November, one thing is certain: “You cannot assess Arabs as a coherent voting bloc,” says Kareem Rifai, a Syrian-American graduate student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Rifai, who co-founded the University of Michigan Students for Biden chapter in 2020, calls himself a “foreign policy voter”, and is sticking with the Democratic candidate this cycle due to the party’s “strong stance on Russia”.Rifai weighed in on the Arab American vote on X recently, saying he was “pulling out my Arab Muslim from Metro-Detroit card” to let non-Arabs know that people hailing from across the Arab world have differing takes on the upcoming election.“Pro-Hezbollah socially conservative Arab community leaders … are not representative of Arab Americans in the same way that secular liberal Arabs or Christian anti-Hezbollah Arabs, etc, etc, are not representative of all Arab Americans,” Rifai wrote.At the same time, before this year, Arab Americans were clearer in their preference for Democrats – at this time in 2020, Joe Biden led Trump by 24 points, and exit polls showed that more than 85% of Arab American voters backed Democrats in 2004 and 2008.Today, Arab American voters seem more willing to look past Trump’s ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries – and his vow to reimpose a ban if re-elected – as well as his staunch support for Israel.Michigan, Rifai’s home state, is home to an estimated 392,000-plus Arab Americans – one of 12 states in which 75% of the nation’s estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans live.But as if to underscore its swing state status, dueling endorsements of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have come from Michigan in the last week alone. Over the weekend, a Yemeni-American organization upheld Trump as capable of “restoring stability in the Middle East”. The following day, a group assembled at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Michigan, to back Harris, calling her “the first to call for a ceasefire and also to call for Palestinian self-determination”. (The statement also noted that “Arab Americans are not a single-issue people, we care about the environment, an existential issue for families and children, workers, rights and a fair wage, civil rights, women’s rights and so much more.”)Also in the last week, dozens of “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Progressive” leaders in Arizona issued a statement backing Harris, underlining that support for an arms embargo on Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza has mainly come from Democrats. “In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement,” the statement says.Arizona is home to an estimated 77,000 Arab Americans, according to the Arab American Institute.Meanwhile, back in swing state Georgia – with its estimated 58,000 Arab Americans – the staterepresentative Ruwa Romman spoke about her choice to vote for Kamala Harris.Romman is the first Muslim woman elected to the Georgia statehouse and the first Palestinian to hold public office in the state’s history. Speaking with fellow Muslims and Arabs about this election “feels like talking about politics at a funeral”, she wrote in a recent article for Rolling Stone.She believes that organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo would be easier under a Harris administration. “I don’t know how advocating for Palestine would survive under Trump,” she said, adding that many of her constituents – including immigrants – would suffer if he were re-elected.Over at Al Madina, owner Hejja was arriving at a different conclusion. His wife has aunts in Gaza; she had not been able to reach them in three weeks. “The minimum thing we can do is pray five times a day,” he said.As for the election, he said: “If the president of the United States wants to stop the war, he can – with one phone call to Israel. He has the power.” Hejja believes “if Trump wins, Netanyahu will stop the war … [Trump] said he wants peace, and I believe him.”About 12 miles south-west, at Emory University – site of some of the harshest police responses to pro-Palestinian protests early this year – the Syrian-American senior Ibrahim had already sent an absentee ballot to his home state of Kentucky, marked for the Green party’s Jill Stein. “I see it as an ethical decision,” he said of his first time voting for president.“Voting for an administration that is supporting genocide crosses an ethical red line,” he added, referring to Harris.Fellow student Michael Krayyem, whose father is Palestinian, said he would “probably be voting down-ballot” on 5 November, but not for president. “I can’t support Kamala Harris because of what her administration has done to my people,” he said.Romman says she feels this dilemma facing fellow Arab Americans deeply. At the same time, she says: “Ultimately, in this election, I view voting as a strategic choice, and no longer a moral one.” More