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      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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      ‘He could go to jail’: for Donald Trump, election day is also judgment day

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      Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.In the 1970s Trump and his father were sued by the justice department for racial discrimination after refusing to rent apartments to Black people in predominantly white buildings. His property and casino businesses, including the Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, filed for bankruptcy several times in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trump University, a business offering property training courses, faced multiple lawsuits for fraud, misleading marketing and false claims about the quality of its programmes. In 2016 Trump settled for $25m without admitting wrongdoing.View image in fullscreenThe Donald J Trump Foundation, a charitable organisation, was investigated and sued for allegedly using charitable funds for personal and business expenses. Trump eventually agreed to dissolve the foundation with remaining funds going to charity.Trump and his company were ordered to pay more than $350m in a New York civil fraud trial for artificially inflating his net worth to secure favourable loan terms. He is also known to have paid little to no federal income taxes in specific years which, although technically legal, was seen by some as bordering on unethical.But Trump became a fixture of the New York tabloids and hosted his own reality TV show, The Apprentice. Blair added: “His early realisation was that if you get famous, if you get large, people will get out of the way. He spent the first part of his career as a real estate developer, making himself seem the embodiment of enormous tycoon-level success even though, in fact, many things he did weren’t successful and his father kept bailing him out.“But he put across that impression and he rode that fame express that he had created for himself over a remarkable number of obstacles all the way to The Apprentice, which set him up permanently as the image of this unstoppable always-on-top tycoon and people are in awe of that. All of which could be described as branding.”Trump’s private life is no more savoury. Trump has reportedly cheated on all three of his wives. More than two dozen women have come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against him, most recently the former model Stacey Williams, who told the Guardian that Trump groped her in 1993 as Jeffrey Epstein watched in what felt like a “twisted game” between the two men.During the 2016 election campaign, an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women by their private parts. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Then last year a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5m.Trump’s presidency and its aftermath were no less morally compromised. He made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper, spanning everything from the crowd size at his inauguration to the result of the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenHe became the first president to be impeached twice, first for withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate his political opponents, then for instigating a coup on 6 January 2021 following his defeat. He also became the subject of not one but four criminal cases, any one of which would have been enough to scuttle the chances of any other White House hopeful.In May Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels, making him the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes. Sentencing is scheduled for 26 November (the judge delayed it from 18 September after the Republican nominee asked that it wait until after the election).What was billed as the trial of the century has already begun to fade from public consciousness and played a relatively modest role in the election campaign. Jonathan Alter, a presidential biographer who was in court for every day of the trial, recalled: “I’ve covered some big stories over the years but there was nothing like the drama of watching the jury foreperson say, ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty’ 34 times and Donald Trump looking like he was punched in the gut.”Alter, who describes the experience in his new book, American Reckoning, reflects on how Trump has been able to act with impunity for so long. “It’s a combination of luck, galvanised defiance and the credulousness of a large chunk of the American people,” he said. “Demagoguery works. Playing on people’s fears works. It doesn’t work all the time but we can look throughout human history to political figures and how demagoguery and scapegoating ‘the other’ works.”Alter, who covered the trial for Washington Monthly magazine, added: “We’ve had plenty of demagogues, scoundrels and conmen in politics below the level of president. Trump has been lucky to escape accountability but the United States has been lucky that we haven’t had something like this before. The founders were very worried about it. They felt we would face something like this for sure.”The US’s system of checks and balances has been racing to keep up. Trump was charged by the special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss to Joe Biden in the run-up to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. The former president and 18 others were also charged by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, with taking part in a scheme to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia.Trump was charged again by Smith with illegally retaining classified documents that included nuclear secrets, taken with him from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office in January 2021, and then obstructing government demands to give them back.With a such a caseload, it was widely assumed that Trump would spend this election shuttling between rallies one day and trials the next. But the courtroom campaign never really happened since, true to past form, he found ways to throw sand in the gears of the legal system and put off his moment of reckoning.View image in fullscreenOr he simply got lucky. In Georgia, it emerged that Willis had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade, prompting demands that she be removed. Smith’s federal election case was thrown off track for months by a supreme court ruling that presidents have immunity for official actions taken in office. The classified documents case was thrown out by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, although Smith is appealing and the charges could be reinstated.Such delays have made it easier to forget just how much of an outlier Trump is. Past presidential brushes with the law consisted of Ulysses S Grant being fined for speeding his horse-drawn carriage in Washington and Harry Truman receiving a ticket for driving his car too slowly on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1953. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate scandal and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.Meanwhile the standard for presidential aspirants has been high. Joe Biden’s first run for the White House fell apart amid allegations that he had plagiarised a speech by Britain’s Labour leader Neil Kinnock. During the 2000 campaign, a last-minute revelation that Republican candidate George W Bush had a drunk driving conviction that he concealed for 24 years generated huge headlines and was seen as a possible gamechanger. Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 defeat on an FBI investigation into her email server that produced no charges.Trump, by contrast, once memorably boasted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. He has done everything but yet still finds himself within touching distance of a second presidency.Indeed, he has repeatedly flipped the script, citing the cases against him as evidence that he is a martyr of sinister deep state forces. In this version it is Democrats, not Trump, who are the threat to democracy. Claiming solidarity with others who feel a sense a grievance, he often says: “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.”The Georgia case produced the indelible image of Trump’s mugshot, with the former president staring defiantly at the camera. Within hours it had been transformed from a badge of shame into a literal badge for sale, along with posters, T-shirts and other merchandise that is still sported by his fans at rallies with slogans such as “Convicted felon” or “Never surrender”.View image in fullscreenJohn Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “For reasons that I don’t understand, every time he gets indicted his poll numbers have gone up. The reason is people have very negative attitudes about Biden and they think he has weaponised the justice system – which I don’t think he’s done – but Trump has convinced people he’s a victim.“Every time he gets indicted again, he just uses it as more proof that he’s oppressed. It’s ridiculous but he has turned it. Like a good conman, he’s taken a seemingly impossible argument and made it worth a lot to him.”This judo move, turning the opponent’s weight against them, might explain why Democrats have not emphasised Trump’s criminal record to the degree that might once have been expected.Early on, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, did shine a light on Trump’s misdemeanours, drawing a contrast with her past as a courtroom prosecutor by stating: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”The line drew cheers but was absent from her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, which focused instead on likening Trump to a “petty tyrant” who would sow chaos and division. Indeed, some have taken the view that even criminal convictions pale in significance compared with the threat of a would-be fascist.But Moe Vela, a lawyer and a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said he wishes that Trump’s criminal past had been given greater emphasis by the Harris campaign. “I am extremely surprised we have not heard about that more,” he said. “He is a convicted felon. I thought it should have been said more often in the litany of grievances about him because I thought it was like low-hanging fruit.”Can Trump’s luck hold one more time? He has waged another White House campaign riven with extremism and racism, divisiveness and violent language, earning comparisons with fascists from the past. If elected, he is expected to use all the levers of power at his disposal to squash the outstanding cases against him; last week he boasted that he would fire his nemesis Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. But if Trump is defeated by Harris, his legal perils will again gather like a dark cloud.Vela added: “If he loses this election, I pray to God that she does not in any way pardon him. I hope that our judicial system functions effectively and properly in taking all of these cases through to fruition. Some of them may come out where he is not convicted, but if conviction is the result, he should be punished just like anybody else. No one in this country is above the law.”That point was illustrated by the New York case, in which even a former president stood trial and was held to account. The system worked. Alter reflected: “That was very inspiring, the wisdom of the judge and jury, who took their responsibilities very seriously. It gave me a lump in my throat. It made me realise we’re not done.” More

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      US judge returns lawsuit against Elon Musk’s $1m voter scheme to state court

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      A federal judge on Friday denied an attempt by America Pac – the political action committee founded by Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency – to move to federal court a civil suit brought by the Philadelphia district attorney over a daily $1m prize draw for registered voters.The lawyers for Musk and his America Pac had argued that the lawsuit, which is seeking to halt the sweepstakes in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, needed to be resolved in federal court as it referenced the 5 November presidential election.But the presiding US district judge Gerald Pappert disagreed with that contention in a five-page opinion, writing that the motivations of the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, were irrelevant – and that his office had the power to bring the case in state court.“Having now considered the parties’ submissions, the court grants the motion and remands the case back to the Court of Common Pleas,” it said.The civil suit that names both Musk and America Pac alleges that a petition asking registered voters in battleground states to submit their address, phone number and emails in exchange for $47, as well as to enter a daily $1m prize draw, was a lottery scheme that was illegal under state law.The petition has separately attracted scrutiny from the US justice department, which warned America Pac that the lottery violated federal law as it in effect amounts to paying people to register to vote. But the civil suit was the first legal action taken to stop the scheme.As the petition asks people to pledge their support to the US constitution’s first and second amendments – big causes for Republicans – it is widely seen by election law experts as illegally encouraging Trump supporters to register to vote in swing states. In a close election, turnout by voters for the former president could tip the result.

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      The suit also accuses Musk and America Pac of violating state consumer protection laws by deploying deceptive or misleading statements. For instance, Krasner contends that winners are not random, as advertised, because multiple winners have been people who showed up at Trump rallies.Musk’s defenders say it is simply a contest open to registered voters. In theory, they say, Democrats registered to vote in battleground states can complete the petition and have a chance to win the $1m lottery.The petition is perhaps the most public of the various strategies employed by America Pac to bolster Trump’s candidacy. The Super Pac now leads the crucial get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of the Trump campaign as Musk searches for more ways to help the former president return to the Oval Office.The ground game effort has suffered from some setbacks. The Guardian has previously reported that tens of thousands of Trump voters might not be reached after America Pac’s internal systems flagged that 20 to 25% of door knocks reported in Arizona and Nevada may have been fraudulent. More

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      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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      Elon Musk skips hearing as $1m election giveaway case moves to federal court

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      Elon Musk failed to show up to a required hearing in a Philadelphia case challenging his $1m-a-day sweepstakes. His absence would have risked contempt of court had the case continued in Pennsylvania court, but it was moved to federal court in response to a motion filed by Musk’s attorneys, who did attend the hearing. No hearings were immediately scheduled in the federal case.Judge Angelo Foglietta agreed that Musk, as a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, should have attended the hearing in person, but he declined to immediately sanction the tech mogul. Musk’s attorney said his client could not “materialize” in the courtroom with notice only given the night before.Krasner’s team challenged the notion that the founder of SpaceX could not make it to Philadelphia, prompting a quick retort from the judge.“Counsel, he’s not going to get in a rocket ship and land on the building,” Foglietta replied.On Wednesday, the judge had ordered all parties to attend the Thursday morning hearing, including Musk. Musk’s attorneys had filed a motion to shift the suit from Pennsylvania state court to federal court in a filing late that day, which was granted shortly after Musk did not appear.Lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office requested the case be returned to state court, calling the move to the higher court a “cowardly” delay tactic meant to “run the clock until election day”. The federal judge assigned to the case ordered Musk’s attorneys to respond by Friday morning. Musk’s counsel had argued that state court was not the proper venue and that the Philadelphia district attorney was engaging in thinly veiled electioneering.“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means,” the Tesla CEO’s attorneys wrote.In the original suit, Krasner argued that Musk’s petition and associated contest were “indisputably violating” specific Pennsylvania laws against illegal lotteries. Musk’s attorneys said he was engaging in legally protected political speech and spending.John Summers, an attorney for the DA’s office, told the judge on Thursday that Musk’s Pac had “brazenly” continued the sweepstakes despite the lawsuit, awarding about 13 checks of $1m since the contest began, including one the day of the hearing.“They’re doing things in the dark. We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random,” Summers said. “It’s an outrage.”The cash giveaways come from Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the vital swing state, which is seen as a key to victory by both Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris.Krasner, a Democrat, filed suit on Monday to stop the America Pac sweepstakes, which is set to run through election day and is open to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition supporting the constitution. Musk has been tweeting photographs of the winners holding novelty checks.Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, saying he is tasked with protecting the public from both illegal lotteries and “interference with the integrity of elections”.Election law experts have raised questions about whether Musk’s drawing violates a federal law barring someone from paying others to vote. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group. More

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      Judge extends in-person voting option in Pennsylvania after Trump lawsuit

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      A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday sided with Donald Trump’s campaign and agreed to extend an in-person voting option in suburban Philadelphia, where long lines on the final day led to complaints voters were being disenfranchised by an unprepared election office.A lawsuit demanding an extension of Tuesday’s 5pm deadline in Bucks county until today was filed this morning after long queues outside the county’s election offices on the last day for applications led to security guards cutting off the line and telling some of those waiting they would not be able to apply.Videos of the scenes were widely circulated on social media, fuelling rumours of voter suppression.The Trump campaign was joined by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick in the lawsuit alleging that voters waiting outside election offices for mail ballots were turned away empty-handed and ordered to leave after the deadline expired at 5pm on Tuesday.“This is a direct violation of Pennsylvanians’ rights to cast their ballot – and all voters have a right to STAY in line,” the Trump campaign said.Judge Jeffrey Trauger said in a one-page order that Bucks county voters who want to apply for an early mail ballot now have until Friday.The queues for late mail ballots were a result of Pennsylvania not having an early on-site voting system at designated spots, as is the case in some other states. Instead, voters can apply for ballots on-demand at election offices before filling them out and submitting them on the spot, a procedure that takes about 10 minutes.The flood of late applicants overwhelmed electoral workers in Bucks county’s administration building in Doylestown, leading to a long queue which was cut off at around 2.45pm on Tuesday, according to CBS.

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      Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, told a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Tuesday that Democratic election officials were trying to suppress Republican votes.“Democrat election officials are seeing our numbers. They’re seeing our turnout. They are seeing us breaking early vote records across Pennsylvania,” he said. “They are terrified. And they want to stop our momentum. We are not going to let them suppress our votes.”In a statement, Bucks county admitted there had been some “miscommunication” from officials, resulting in those waiting “briefly being told they could not be accommodated”. But this was subsequently corrected, allowing them to submit applications.“Contrary to what is being depicted on social media, if you are in line by 5pm for an on-demand mail-in ballot application, you will have the opportunity to submit your application for a mail-in ballot,” the county said.The legal action raised the prospect of further possible controversy after election day in Pennsylvania – arguably the most important battleground state in next Tuesday’s election – after Trump baselessly accused election officials of cheating.“Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, without providing evidence. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”The allegation was dismissed by Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, who accused the former president of seeking to undermine public trust in the integrity of election officials.“In 2020, Donald Trump attacked our elections over and over,” posted Shapiro, who was Pennsylvania’s attorney general four years ago when Trump tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. “He’s now trying to use the same playbook to stoke chaos … we will again have a free and fair, safe and secure election – and the will of the people will be respected.”Most polls show Kamala Harris with a tiny lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, which has more electoral college votes than any other battleground state and which both candidates have campaigned in more than any other state. More

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      Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report

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      Elon Musk briefly worked illegally in the US after abandoning a graduate studies program in California, according to a Washington Post report that contrasted the episode with the South African multibillionaire’s anti-immigration views.The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who has in recent weeks supported Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency while promoting the Republican White House nominee’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site, has previously maintained that his transition from student to entrepreneur was a “legal grey area”.But the Washington Post reported Saturday that the world’s wealthiest individual was almost certainly working in the US without correct authorization for a period in 1995 after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300m four years later.Legal experts said foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company even if they are not getting paid. The Post also noted that – prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks agains the US in 2001 – regulation for student visas was more lax.“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Leon Fresco, a former US justice department immigration litigator, told the outlet.But the Post also acknowledged: “While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.”Musk has previously said: “I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work. I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.”Musk employs 121,000 people at Tesla, about 13,000 at SpaceX and nearly 3,000 at X. The scrutiny of his immigration status after dropping out of Stanford comes after Trump has touted his desire for Musk to play a high-profile role focused on government efficiency in a second Trump administration if voters return him to office at the expense of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.Musk in turn has accused the vice-president and her fellow Democrats of “importing voters” through illegal and temporary protected status immigration. During a recent Trump campaign appearance, he compared the US-Mexico border to a “zombie apocalypse” – even as he had also previously described himself as “extremely pro immigrant, being one myself”.Bloomberg News recently published an analysis of more than 53,000 posts sent from Musk’s X account, finding that the entrepreneur’s output turned increasingly political this election year.“In 2024, immigration and voter fraud has become Musk’s most frequently posted and engaged with policy topic, garnering about 10bn views,” the outlet said. “Musk posted more than 1,300 times about the topic overall, with more than 330 posts in the past 2 months alone.”Bloomberg described Musk – who paid $44bn for X, then Twitter, in 2022 – as the platform’s single most important influencer and has reportedly ordered site engineers to push his posts into users’ feeds. That makes Musk “the most widely read person on the site today”, Bloomberg said. More

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      Trump says he would fire Jack Smith ‘within two seconds’ of becoming president

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      Donald Trump said on Thursday he would order the immediate firing of the special counsel Jack Smith if he were re-elected in the November election in the clearest expression of his intent to shut down the two criminal cases brought against him.The remarks from Trump, who remains in a tight race for the presidency against Kamala Harris with 12 days until the election, came in a conversation with the conservative podcast host Hugh Hewitt, who asked whether Trump would pardon himself or fire the special counsel.“Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said of Smith, who last year charged the former president in Florida over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Trump also said in the interview that he had been given immunity from the US supreme court, a reference to its ruling earlier this year that found former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions related to the office of the presidency.The power to fire the special counsel formally rests with the attorney general, but Trump has made no secret of his intention to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who would agree to withdraw the justice department from the two pending criminal cases.Trump has previously tried to fire prosecutors who have investigated him personally. During his first term, he repeatedly tried to fire the special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Trump’s ties to Russian interference in the 2020 election.He ultimately backed off after the White House counsel, Don McGahn, disagreed with Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller and threatened to quit if Trump continued to press ahead with his order to shut down the Mueller investigation.Multiple current and former Trump advisers have suggested there would be no such hurdles in a second term. Trump, the advisers said, would simply call his loyalist attorney general to involve himself at the justice department as he wished, without pushback from career officials.Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition team and the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive, has repeatedly said anyone who wanted to join the second Trump administration – at the justice department or elsewhere – would need to be personally loyal to him.“This concept of doing what you want to do because I don’t think he’s right, throwing banana peels, you get fired in America, you get fired in every company,” Lutnick told Bloomberg TV last week.“Donald Trump loves conversation, he loves to get all sides of the idea. But then you make your choice and you go where the elected president of the United States goes,” Lutnick said. “Anybody who says otherwise – I don’t even know what they’re talking about, this is make-believe politics.”The Harris campaign said that Trump’s latest comments indicate he thinks he is above the law. The campaign also pointed to the former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, who said he believed Trump met the definition of a fascist. Harris said she agreed with that statement. More