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      Federal Judge Rules Undated Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania Must Be Counted

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      The judge said that a state law requiring voters to date the return envelope violated the voting protections of the Civil Rights Act.A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled on Monday that mail-in ballots that are received on time but are undated should be counted, arguing that a state law rejecting such votes violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.The ruling was an opening victory for voting rights groups in a case with national implications heading into the 2024 election, as Republicans and conservative advocacy groups continue to push for stricter voting laws.“We applaud today’s court decision,” said Susan Gobreski, a vice president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, which is a plaintiff in the case. She added: “Pennsylvania citizens must have complete and unfettered access to the ballot box, free from unnecessary obstacles or interference.”The ruling is likely to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court’s most conservative members have previously supported the state law that requires voters to write the date on the return envelope when sending in their ballots.The Republican National Committee, a defendant in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In a 77-page opinion, Judge Susan Paradise Baxter of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania said that the law violated the voting protections of the Civil Rights Act because the requirement that voters date their ballots was not “material to the act of voting.”“The provision protects a citizen’s right to vote by forbidding a state actor from disqualifying a voter because of their failure to provide or error in providing some unnecessary information on a voting application or ballot,” Judge Baxter wrote in her opinion, adding that “the ballots of the individual plaintiffs should be counted because their statutory rights have been violated.”Judge Baxter was first nominated for her position by President Barack Obama and was ultimately appointed by President Donald J. Trump.A protracted legal battle has raged over the validity of undated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered state officials a week before the 2022 election to refrain from counting ballots that were undated, after the Republican National Committee and other party-aligned groups sued to block those votes from being counted.The N.A.A.C.P. and several other voting rights groups then sued to reverse the order, arguing that failing to count votes because of a missing or incorrect date would potentially disenfranchise thousands of voters. More

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      In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

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      Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More

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      Pennsylvania Election Results 2023

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      With Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, limited to two terms, Cherelle Parker, a fellow Democrat who is a former state legislator and City Council member, is favored to win in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1. If elected, she would become the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold […] More

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      Biden faces calls not to seek re-election as shock poll rattles senior Democrats

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      Senior Democrats have sounded the alarm after an opinion poll showed Joe Biden trailing the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in five out of six battleground states exactly a year before the presidential election.Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Biden ahead in Wisconsin, according to a survey published on Sunday by the New York Times and Siena College. Biden beat Trump in all six states in 2020 but the former president now leads by an average of 48% to 44% across these states in a hypothetical rematch.Additional findings released on Monday, however, showed that if Trump were to be convicted of criminal charges against him, some of his support in some swing states would erode by about 6%, which could be enough to tip the electoral college in Biden’s favour.Even so, the survey is in line with a series of recent polls that show the race too close for comfort for many Trump foes as voters express doubts about Biden’s age – the oldest US president in history turns 81 later this month – and handling of the economy, prompting renewed debate over whether he should step aside to make way for a younger nominee.“It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm,” David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “He’s defied CW [conventional wisdom] before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party – not ‘bed-wetting,’ but legitimate concern.”Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation and a former Republican official, tweeted: “It’s time. President Biden has served our country well. I’m confident he’ll do so for the next year. But it’s time for an act of personal sacrifice and public spirit. It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation. It’s time for Biden to announce he won’t run in 2024.”Andrew Yang, who lost to Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, added: “If Joe Biden were to step aside, he would go down in history as an accomplished statesman who beat Trump and achieved a great deal. If he decides to run again it may go down as one of the great overreaches of all time that delivers us to a disastrous Trump second term.”The New York Times and Siena poll suggests that Biden’s multiracial and multigenerational coalition, critical to his success in 2020, is decaying. Voters under age 30 favour the president by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Trump’s edge in rural regions.Black voters – a core Biden demographic – are now registering 22% support in these states for Trump, a level that the New York Times reported was unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times. The president’s staunch support for Israel in the current Middle East crisis has also prompted criticism from young and progressive voters.Survey respondents in swing states say they trust Trump over Biden on the economy by a 22-point margin. Some 71% say Biden is “too old”, including 54% of his own supporters. Just 39% felt the same about Trump, who is himself 77 years old.Electability was central to Biden’s argument for the nomination three years ago but the poll found a generic, unnamed Democrat doing much better with an eight-point lead over Trump. Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota has launched a long-shot campaign against Biden in the Democratic primary, contending that the president’s anaemic poll numbers are cause for a dramatic change of course.Next year’s election could be further complicated by independent runs from the environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr and the leftwing academic Cornel West.Trump is dominating the Republican presidential primary and plans to skip Wednesday’s third debate in Miami, Florida, in favour of holding a campaign rally. He spent Monday taking the witness stand in a New York civil fraud trial. He is also facing 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions.The Biden campaign played down the concerns, drawing a comparison with Democratic incumbent Obama’s 2012 victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Biden’s spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said in a statement: “Predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later. Don’t take our word for it: Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama only for him to win handedly a year later.”Munoz added that Biden’s campaign “is hard at work reaching and mobilizing our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and Maga [Make America great again] Republicans’ unpopular extremism. We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”The margin of sampling error for each state in the Sunday poll is between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points, which is greater than Trump’s reported advantage in Pennsylvania.Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast and a former conservative radio host, wrote on X: “Ultimately, 2024 is not about re-electing Joe Biden. It is about the urgent necessity of stopping the return of Donald J Trump to the presidency. The question is how.” More

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      Times/Siena College Polls: Methodology and How We Conducted Them

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      The Times/Siena College battleground polls released on Sunday and Monday were conducted over the past week in six swing states that are likely to decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Five of the states were won by Donald J. Trump in 2016 and then flipped by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Nevada, which has always been a close state, came down to less than one percentage point in the 2022 U.S. Senate election.These states also contain some of the coalitions that will be crucial next fall: younger, more diverse voters in states like Arizona, Georgia and Nevada; and white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who helped swing the election to Trump in 2016, and were central to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory. They also provide some geographic diversity.We interviewed 600 respondents in each state to ensure we had a large enough sample to speak to specific subgroups of voters within these states, including age, race and ethnicity, income, education level, and party affiliation. Taken together, these 3,600 respondents represent our largest sample size of swing state voters to date. This also includes more than 700 undecided voters, a group that will be even more consequential within these crucial states.This is not the first time we have focused on swing states this early in an election cycle. In 2019, the poll explored a similar set of states, reflecting the battleground at the time. The political moment was slightly different, with Democrats in the thick of a nominating contest that split the party between liberals like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and a moderate in Mr. Biden — and Mr. Trump was the incumbent president to beat.However, the goals of that poll were similar to this one. As Americans in key states across the political spectrum weigh their options, these polls shed light on the issues driving the election and voters’ appetites for the leading candidates. More

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      Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might

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      For Donald J. Trump, a new set of New York Times/Siena College polls captures a stunning, seemingly contradictory picture.His 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions have not significantly hurt him among voters in battleground states. Yet he remains weaker than at least one of his Republican rivals, and if he’s convicted and sentenced in any of his cases, some voters appear ready to turn on him — to the point where he could lose the 2024 election.Mr. Trump leads President Biden in five key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to the Times/Siena polls. He has eaten significantly into Mr. Biden’s advantages among younger, Black and Hispanic voters, many of whom retain positive views of the policies Mr. Trump enacted as president. And Mr. Trump appears to have room to grow, as more voters say they are open to supporting the former president than they are to backing Mr. Biden, with large shares of voters saying they trust Mr. Trump on the economy and national security. More

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      ‘I’m Not Superwoman’: Philadelphia’s Likely Mayor Urges Teamwork

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      Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member, is poised to become the first woman to lead of America’s sixth-biggest city. Her to-do list is daunting.As one urban gardener after another beseeched Cherelle Parker to prevent the green spaces that they had spent years nurturing from being gobbled up by developers, she furiously took notes in her trademark spiral notebook and barely said a word.Eventually, Ms. Parker, the Democratic nominee for mayor, did address the neighborhood groups that had gathered on a chilly afternoon at Las Parcelas garden in north central Philadelphia. Yes, she would convene as many stakeholders as possible to come up with a solution. But a savior she was not.“I’m not Superwoman — I can’t fix everything up by myself,” she said as nearby construction clanged in the background. “I want to manage expectations.”Ms. Parker was talking about Philadelphia’s 450 community gardens, but she might as well have been referring to her 142-square-mile hometown.On Tuesday, Ms. Parker, a 51-year-old former state representative and City Council member, is favored to be elected mayor of Philadelphia and to be the first woman to lead the city and its 1.6 million residents.Should she win, she would have four years — or more likely eight, given that each of the last five mayors, all Democrats, won two terms — to grapple with the challenges bedeviling the nation’s poorest big city, headlined by gun violence, opioid overdoses and crumbling and chronically underfunded public schools.As a Black woman who was the daughter of a teenage mother and is now the mother of a Black son, Ms. Parker has said that she can relate to the everyday struggles faced by many of her neighbors.She has pledged to hire hundreds more police officers and bring back what she called “constitutional” stop-and-frisk, and she has been open in asking for help from the National Guard to tackle the open-air drug market that has made shootings common in the Kensington neighborhood.But with two-thirds of Philadelphians saying that the city is on the wrong track, what many residents say they want from their next leader, as much as any policy blueprint to navigate the city’s ills, is optimism and energy.Symbolism, after all, has always suffused a city whose history as a cornerstone of American democracy is so central to its identity. And Ms. Parker, as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, would be the face of the city in 2026, when the country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.“She’s very charming, she’s very charismatic — a calming presence,” said Cait Allen, president of the Queen Village Neighbors Association, which represents a historic and affluent area not far from Independence Hall. Citing Ms. Parker’s winning pitch in the intensely fought Democratic primary to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city” in the country, Ms. Allen, 37, said, “She was the candidate who seemed to prioritize reality over philosophy.”Jim Kenney, current mayor of Philadelphia, is leaving office after two terms.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesMs. Parker would succeed Mayor Jim Kenney, who is leaving office after two terms. Early in his tenure, Mr. Kenney shepherded in a soda tax to help fund pre-K education. More recently, the city’s finances have stabilized, and its bond rating has been upgraded.But against the wearying backdrop of the pandemic, Mr. Kenney’s second term has been overshadowed by the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd and by the proliferation of gun violence, such as a mass shooting in July that was exacerbated by a botched police response.In an interview, Mr. Kenney, 65, said that “there’s a cultural shift that needs to be made.”He added, “Not that I’m not progressive or that I’m not understanding of people of color’s struggles, but I’m still a white man.”Ms. Parker is a former English teacher from northwest Philadelphia who has a strong working relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro, a fellow Democrat. She will no doubt be integral to her party’s efforts to bolster turnout for President Biden, Senator Bob Casey and other Democrats in 2024, when Pennsylvania could affect the balance of power in the White House and Congress.Asked in an interview which mayors she hoped to emulate, she mentioned three: Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, for his stressing of economic opportunities; Sharon Weston Broome of Baton Rouge, who told Ms. Parker not to abandon “chemistry for credentials”; and Eric Adams of New York, for prioritizing “emotional intelligence” among members of his staff.“I do not like to see folks engaging in what I call ‘I know what’s best for you people’ policymaking,” she said. “Change is not supposed to happen to a community. Change happens in partnership with a community.”Her Republican opponent, David Oh, a former colleague on the City Council, would also make history if he pulled off an upset, becoming the city’s first Asian American mayor.David Oh, center, who has sought to woo immigrant voters, was at a City Hall ceremony celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turkey.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesA lifelong Philadelphian like Ms. Parker, Mr. Oh, 63, a former prosecutor, has mounted a spirited and unorthodox campaign, aimed at wooing immigrants, to overcome the daunting math in which registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.In an interview outside City Hall, after a flag-raising ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of Turkey as a republic, Mr. Oh noted his embracing of some positions to the left of Ms. Parker, such as limiting the use of stop-and-frisk. And unlike Ms. Parker, who counts the powerful building trade unions as a strong supporter, Mr. Oh opposes a proposed new basketball arena for the 76ers in downtown Philadelphia that local activists say would devastate Chinatown.He was disappointed, though, that Ms. Parker had only agreed to one debate.“It’s not about winning the election,” he said. “It’s about communicating to the voters. We must engage them in order to lift their spirits and put them behind a vision and a solution.”At a stylish coffee shop in a gentrifying part of West Kensington, Al Boyer, 24, and Alex Pepper, 38, both baristas, cited the opioid crisis and gun violence as top priorities for the next mayor.One man with a needle hanging out of his neck had recently died from an overdose across the street from the coffee shop. Just a few blocks away, groups of homeless people lay sleeping under blankets on the sidewalk along Kensington Avenue.Mr. Pepper said he supports establishing drug consumption sites supervised by medical and social workers — something Ms. Parker opposes. Still, Mr. Pepper said he would vote for her.“The lesser of two evils,” he said.Joel Wolfram More

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      High stakes for abortion rights as Pennsylvania votes on key judge pick

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      Pennsylvania voters will select a new member of the state’s supreme court on Tuesday in a judicial election that has become the unlikely focus of Republican billionaire donors, political action committees and abortion rights advocates.Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing off against Carolyn Carluccio, a conservative judge whose apparent opposition to abortion access has drawn the ire of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups.As McCaffery and Carluccio compete for a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court, total spending in the race surpassed $17m, according to the Associated Press – an unusually high price tag for an election that typically sees low voter turnout. But Democrats and abortion rights advocates hope Pennsylvania voters view Tuesday’s ballot as a proxy for reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania.“This election, Pennsylvania voters have a choice between Carolyn Carluccio, who has tried to hide her anti-abortion positions and dodge questions about the judiciary’s role in protecting abortion rights, and Daniel McCaffery, a proven champion of reproductive freedom,” said Breana Ross, campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Votes Pennsylvania.Abortion rights advocates hope to energize Pennsylvania voters by casting Carluccio as an existential threat to abortion access. This strategy delivered liberals a resounding victory in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year, when record numbers of voters turned out to elect Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat who pledged to defend abortion rights. Protasiewicz’s conservative opponent, Dan Kelly, refrained from voicing his opinion on voting rights.Carluccio’s campaign, taking its cues from Kelly’s unsuccessful playbook, has avoided sharing her views on abortion. After winning the primary election in May, Carluccio removed information about her opposition to abortion from her campaign website, according to a May report from the Keystone.Carluccio’s campaign site previously vowed to defend “all life under the law”.“When we redesigned our website, we chose to no longer include a résumé link. Judge Carluccio listed on her résumé that she would ‘defend all life under the law’, and she meant just that: under the law,” Rob Brooks, a spokesman for Carluccio’s campaign, told the Guardian.Carluccio has frequently branded herself as a non-political actor who operates outside the bounds of traditional partisanship.“I reject calls to rule based on partisan or ideological grounds and instead rule according to our laws,” Carluccio wrote in an August op-ed about her candidacy.Despite Carluccio’s insistence on her own ideological neutrality, her campaign has invited the support of distinctly rightwing groups. In a February letter to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, Carluccio disclosed that her candidacy was endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a leading anti-abortion group in the state.According to campaign finance reports, her campaign received over $4m from Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political organization funded by the billionaire GOP donor Jeffrey Yass.Pennsylvania Democrats said Carluccio is hiding her ties to the anti-abortion movement in a disingenuous bid for primary voters. The general electorate is supportive of abortion access – 64% of all Pennsylvania voters in the 2022 midterms said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to polling from the Associated Press.“Her campaign is clearly trying to portray her as acceptable to a primary audience,” said JJ Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive political consulting firm. “They know abortion is a motivator for voters, since the Dobbs decision, voters are more likely to engage in elections because of what is at stake for abortion.”But the stakes of Tuesday’s election are not straightforward. Unlike Wisconsin, where the threat of the 1849 near-total abortion ban loomed overhead, the outcome of Pennsylvania’s supreme court race will not directly affect abortion access in the state. Tuesday’s race will not change the composition of Pennsylvania’s high court – four of the seven seats on the current bench are held by Democrat-affiliated justices. Carluccio is operating in what appears to be a much less dire political environment than Kelly, whose campaign struggled to avoid the topic of abortion while Wisconsin was feeling the effects of the 1849 ban.Still, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice advocates said the abortion rights movement needs to look ahead to the 2025 election, when three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic justices will appear on the ballot.The long-term maintenance of Pennsylvania’s liberal supreme court majority is a priority for abortion rights advocates. In September, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a seven-figure advertisement campaign against Carluccio, the largest ad buy in the group’s history.As anxieties mount, abortion rights supporters are hopeful that Pennsylvania voters, as in Wisconsin, will heed the warnings offered by Planned Parenthood on the long-term consequences of Carluccio’s candidacy.Dr Benjamin Abella, a medical professor and emergency physician in Philadelphia, said voters like him are “paying attention” to Carluccio’s efforts to hide her campaign’s ties to rightwing anti-abortion groups.“The public understands that we should not be lulled into a false sense of security on abortion rights, especially if a judge is keeping quiet on their intentions and positions,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a safe state any more and that any and every election poses a risk.” More