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      The Guardian view on America’s electoral college: time to scrap an antidemocratic relic | Editorial

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      The last two presidential elections have raised serious questions about the strength of American democracy and, unfortunately, Tuesday’s election may deepen these concerns. Central to this issue is the electoral college, which allows Americans to elect their president indirectly through state-appointed electors. Though the electoral college has stirred controversy for more than 200 years, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory – despite losing the popular vote by 3 million – intensified the sense that the system undermines democratic principles. It would be gut-wrenching to see the unhinged, vengeful and power-hungry Mr Trump win because of the electoral college’s antidemocratic result.Yet that might happen. Post-civil war, four presidents – all Republicans – have lost the popular vote yet won the White House via the electoral college. Mr Trump’s 2024 campaign has seemed intent on repeating this feat or creating enough chaos to push the election to the House of Representatives, where Republican delegations are likely to prevail. His strategy relies on divisive rhetoric, marked by inflammatory and often discriminatory themes. Rather than bridging divides, he aims to deepen them – seeking an electoral college win by rallying his most fervent supporters.With numerous legal challenges expected, the final election outcome may be delayed for days. In 2020, despite losing the popular vote by 7 million, Mr Trump refused to concede and sought to undermine the certification process. The electoral college’s complex mechanics allow room for exploitation, a vulnerability that Mr Trump appears willing to leverage, even if it means inciting violence. Now he is laying the groundwork for future claims of fraud with a barrage of lies, preparing to cry foul if he loses again.Under the electoral college, candidates must secure 270 electors, a majority of the 538 at stake, in order to win. Supporters argue that by granting each state a set number of electoral votes and adopting the winner-take-all system in all but two states, the electoral college compels candidates to engage with diverse regions across the country. In theory, this fosters nationwide attention, but in practice it often fails to achieve this goal. Kamala Harris and Mr Trump have focused their efforts in the large, competitive states. Ms Harris has concentrated her efforts on the “blue wall” of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – which current polls suggest would be enough to put her in the White House. Mr Trump needs just Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. In Pennsylvania alone, the Harris and Trump campaigns have collectively spent $576m in political advertising.In his book Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America, the historian George C Edwards III points out that Gallup polls over the past 50 years show most “Americans have continually expressed support for the notion of an official amendment of the US constitution that would allow for direct election of the president”. It isn’t a fantasy. In 1969, the House passed such an amendment with a strong bipartisan vote, backed by Richard Nixon. Three-fourths of states signalled support. But it was killed in the Senate by a filibuster led by southern senators who feared that a popular vote would empower African Americans. The most prominent effort to get rid of the electoral college today is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Tim Walz, Ms Harris’s running mate, backs scrapping the present system. Is it possible to abolish the electoral college? It shouldn’t need the nightmare of a second Trump presidency to reform this antidemocratic relic of the 18th century.

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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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      When do polls close on election day, Tuesday, 5 November 2024?

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      After a historic US election cycle that saw the incumbent president step down from his party’s ticket and two assassination attempts against the Republican presidential nominee, voters are (finally) casting their ballots.Tens of millions of Americans will have already voted by the time that polls close on 5 November, but tens of millions more will cast ballots in person on election day. In 2020, more than 200 million Americans voted in the presidential race, as turnout hit its highest level since 1992.This year, election experts expect voter turnout to be similarly robust, with Americans eager to make their voices heard in what will probably be a very close contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Voters will also have the opportunity to weigh in on thousands of other elections happening at the federal, state and local levels.As voters head to the polls, here’s a guide on how to navigate an election night that is guaranteed to be eventful:6pm ET: polls start to closeThe first polls will close in eastern Kentucky and much of Indiana at 6pm ET. Democrats’ expectations are low in the two Republican-leaning states: Trump is virtually guaranteed to win both, and Republicans are expected to easily hold most of the two states’ House seats as well.7pm ET: polls fully close in six states, including GeorgiaAmericans will get their first clues about the outcome of the presidential race at 7pm ET, when polls close in the battleground state of Georgia. Joe Biden won Georgia by just 0.2 points in 2020, after Trump carried the state by 5 points four years earlier. This year, Trump appears to have a slight advantage over Harris in the Peach state, but a strong night for Democrats could put Georgia in their win column again.As Georgia starts to count its ballots, polls will also close in Virginia, where both parties hope to flip a House seat. Republicans are looking to expand their narrow majority in the House, and the results in Virginia’s second and seventh congressional districts could give an early indication of the party’s success.7.30pm ET: polls close in North Carolina, Ohio and West VirginiaNorth Carolina represents one of the largest tests for Harris, who has run neck and neck with Trump in the state’s polling. Trump won North Carolina by 1 point in 2020 and 3 points in 2016, and a loss in this battleground state could doom the former president. Democrats also expect a victory in the North Carolina gubernatorial race, given the recent revelations about Republican Mark Robinson’s disturbing internet activity.Meanwhile, the results in Ohio and West Virginia could decide control of the Senate. Republicans are expected to pick up a seat in West Virginia, where the independent senator Joe Manchin decided against seeking re-election; and the Democratic incumbent, Sherrod Brown, is facing a tough race in Ohio. If Republicans win both races, that would erase Democrats’ current 51-49 advantage in the Senate.8pm ET: polls fully close in 16 states, including PennsylvaniaThis will represent a pivotal moment in the presidential race. Whoever wins Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes is much more likely to win the White House, a fact that both nominees acknowledged as they held numerous campaign events in the state.“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said at a rally in September. “It’s very simple.”Pennsylvania will also host some of the nation’s most competitive congressional races. If it is a good night for Republicans, they could flip the seat of the incumbent Democratic senator Bob Casey, who is facing off against the former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick.But if Democrats have an especially strong night, they may set their sights on Florida, where the final polls close at 8pm ET. In addition to Harris’s long-shot hopes of flipping a state that Trump won twice, the Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is looking to unseat the Republican senator Rick Scott, who has maintained a polling advantage in the race. An upset win for Mucarsel-Powell could allow Democrats to maintain their Senate majority.8.30pm ET: polls close in ArkansasThere won’t be much suspense in Arkansas, as Trump is expected to easily win the solidly Republican state. Arkansas does have the distinction of being the only state where polls will close at 8.30pm ET, but most Americans’ attention will be on the results trickling in from battleground states by this point in the night.9pm ET: polls fully close in 15 states, including Michigan and WisconsinThis will be the do-or-die moment for Harris. In 2016, Trump’s ability to eke out narrow victories in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin sent him to the White House, but Biden won all three battlegrounds four years later.Harris’s most likely path to 270 electoral votes runs through Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this year, so Trump could secure a second term if he can pick off even one of those states.Michigan and Wisconsin will also play a potentially decisive role in the battle for Congress. Democrats currently hold two Senate seats in the states that are up for grabs this year, and Republican victories in either race could give them a majority. Michigan’s seventh congressional district, which became an open seat after Elissa Slotkin chose to run for the Senate rather than seek re-election, has been described as “the most competitive open seat in the country”.In New York, where polls also close at 9pm ET, Democrats have the opportunity to flip several House seats that Republicans won in 2022. If they are successful, it could give Democrats a House majority.10pm ET: polls fully close in Nevada, Montana and UtahHarris hopes to keep Nevada in her column, as Democratic presidential candidates have won the state in every race since 2008. Trump previously led Nevada polls, but Harris has closed that gap in the final weeks of the race.Another two Senate races will come to a close at this point in the night as well. In Nevada, the Democratic incumbent, Jacky Rosen, is favored to hold her seat, but her fellow Democratic senator Jon Tester’s prospects appear grim in Montana.If Republicans have not already clinched a Senate majority by the time Montana’s polls close, this may be the moment when they officially capture control of the upper chamber.11pm ET: polls fully close in four states, including CaliforniaWhile Harris is virtually guaranteed a victory in her home state of California, the state’s House races carry important implications for control of Congress. Five House Republicans face toss-up races in California, according to the Cook Political Report, so the state represents Democrats’ biggest opportunity to regain a majority in the chamber.12am ET: polls close in Hawaii and most of AlaskaBy the time polls close in Hawaii and most of Alaska, Americans should have a much better sense of who will be moving into the White House come January. But if 2020 is any indication, the nation may have to wait a bit longer to hear a final call on who won the presidential race.In 2020, the AP did not declare Biden as the winner of the presidential election until 7 November at 11.26am ET – four days after the first polls closed. And in 2016, it took until 2.29am ET the morning after election day to declare Trump as the winner.Given how close the race for the White House is expected to be, Americans might have to settle in for a long night – or even week – to learn who their next president is. More

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      What if Trump’s campaign is cover for a slow-motion coup? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      The candidates’ closing campaign messages could not be more different | Margaret Sullivan

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      In recent days, the Republican nominee for president of the United States has driven around in circles in a garbage truck, pretended to work at McDonald’s and presided over a rally in which Puerto Rico was called a floating island of garbage.Outrageous, of course – but then it got worse. On Thursday, talking on stage with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Donald Trump went after the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who opposes his re-election and has campaigned with Kamala Harris: “Let’s put her with a rifle with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.”Cheney characterized this as “how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death.”Meanwhile, in the final days of her campaign, Harris continued to call for unity, progress and inclusion. In a sweeping speech at the Ellipse in Washington DC before a huge and appreciative crowd, she warned of Americans losing their fundamental freedoms if they submit to the will of the “petty tyrant” mentioned above.With only a few days left of this exhausting campaign, the candidates’ closing statements could not be more different. There’s violent, hateful rhetoric and threats of retribution from one side. There’s inclusion, sanity and promises of good will on the other. Autocracy on the one hand; the preservation of democracy on the other.And yet, according to the polls – if you choose to believe them – the presidential race is tied.The oft-cited Cook Political Report issued its final projection: “Too close to call. Harris heads into Election Day with 226 electoral votes in Likely or Solid Democrat, and Trump with 219 in Likely or Solid Republican. Seven states and their 93 electoral votes are too close to call, with neither candidate having a lead larger than one or two points in any state.”You’d think, then, that these final days would matter. That mysteriously undecided voters would finally figure things out, or that some last-minute political bomb would explode – like the Access Hollywood audio followed by the FBI’s reopening of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation in the last days of the 2016 campaign.But no one should have bothered to wait.At this point, nothing can make a bit of difference. For some observers, this is not a new realization.“That’s where I’ve been ever since 2015: feeling like language is pointless,” wrote David Roberts, formerly of Vox, who writes the Volts newsletter about clean energy and politics. “Like the reality I inhabit is so far from the reality Trump supporters inhabit that discourse between us is impossible or at least futile. The divide is unbridgeable.”And this is the background as voters make their way to their election sites, with many of them voting early to avoid chaos or danger on Tuesday. Each side is claiming the early voters as theirs.And right to the end, the most powerful of the mainstream press keeps trying to equalize the unequal.Both the New York Times and the Washington Post led their websites with Joe Biden’s verbal fumble in which he may, or may not, have referred to Trump supporters as garbage.And both placed that story above the fold on Thursday’s print front pages. The Post’s hefty two-column headline dominated the lead position: “Biden’s ‘garbage’ remark has Harris seeking distance.” The Times struck the same note: “Biden Misstep Delivers Grist to Harris Foes.”The headlines themselves demonstrate the flawed news judgment. “The news hook is literally that it provided ‘grist’ to Republicans,” and this in effect “outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad faith actors,” wrote Greg Sargent of the New Republic.Sure, Biden’s untimely gaffe is a legitimate story. But this important? Certainly not when you consider how the Times handled its own scoop – that the former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, believes Trump is a fascist and a danger to the nation. That one went to page A12.Meanwhile, Trump drives around in a garbage truck, issues death threats and says he’s planning to protect American women from their own healthcare decisions “whether the women like it or not”.No October surprise could have superseded the media’s reflexive false equivalence or the cult-like adoration of Trump’s followers.But, as my father used to urge, keep the faith.If there’s any justice or decency left – and I trust there is – Harris will leave the pollsters and the pundits scratching their heads after a November surprise. Her historic victory.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      As I vote for president, I’ll be thinking of what Amanda Zurawski told me | Sophie Brickman

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      Shortly before America’s first presidential election since the fall of Roe v Wade, I want to tell you the story of Amanda Zurawski, a bright light in the center of a perfect, horrendous storm.A little over two years ago, Zurawski was 18 weeks pregnant with her first child, a child she and her husband had conceived after a year and a half of fertility treatments. When she started leaking fluid and sought medical help, her doctors told her there was no chance the fetus would survive. But Zurawski lives in Texas, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country: in May of the previous year, the governor, Greg Abbott, had signed into law the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, which makes performing abortions after detection of embryonic or fetal cardiac activity, usually at six weeks, illegal. That was on top of several existing statutes. Then, in June 2022, Roe fell.And so Zurawski’s doctors told her that by the letter of the law – as far as they understood it; more on that later – in order to get the medical care she so desperately needed, either her daughter’s heart would have to stop, or her health would have to devolve into a “life-threatening situation”, something Zurawski has previous called “the most horrific version of a staring contest: whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter’s?”Her doctors advised her not to leave a 15-minute radius of the hospital lest her situation spiral, nixing the already unfathomable idea of getting into a car or on to a plane to seek help from a less restrictive state, and risking going into septic shock in the middle of the Texas desert, or 30,000ft up in the air. So she went home to grieve her impending loss and brace for what might come – during which time, Texas’s total abortion trigger ban went into effect, which made performing an abortion punishable by life in prison. And there Zurawski sat, waiting.The next day, she developed sepsis – a condition her doctors felt was extreme enough to protect them from unintentionally violating the new law, allowing them to induce labor – and after three days in the ICU, she emerged from the experience having almost died, with her own future fertility compromised, and galvanized to make a change about the inhumane laws.“I admittedly didn’t realize the ways in which an abortion truly is just healthcare,” Zurawski told me this week when I reached her by phone during her early morning walk with her sheepadoodle, Millie, in Austin, where she lives with her husband, Josh. “I couldn’t imagine that I would ever need or want one, since I was desperately trying to have a baby.”The first moment abortion laws and her own fertility journey intersected was early on in the IVF process. The likelihood of a multiples pregnancy increases when using IVF, but as she is not able to carry multiples, her doctor had discussed the possibility of needing to perform selective reduction surgery if more than one embryo implanted, something that is currently illegal in Texas.“So I was aware that these laws could affect us, but not from the perspective that I would need it to save my life, and be denied healthcare,” she told me. When she found herself in the unimaginable situation of being turned away from the hospital by doctors who wanted to help her, but weren’t sure they could, her eyes opened, and she and Josh vowed to fight.Zurawski became the lead plaintiff in the landmark case, Zurawski v Texas, which sued the state of Texas to clarify the “medical emergency” exception in the law – a riveting and harrowing new documentary about the case follows Zurawski and two fellow plaintiffs through the legal fight – and soon found herself catapulted on to the national stage. Her natural charisma, straight talk, and tragic story calcified into a perfect trifecta with the power – so hopes Kamala Harris, who made her a campaign surrogate – of firing up the electorate.“Humanizing it is what’s really getting people to sit up and pay attention,” Zurawski told me. “When you see a face and a real human who’s been impacted by this, it’s impossible to say, ‘This is reasonable, this is exactly what we want for our country.’” She paused to take a breath. “That’s barbaric.”One of the most powerful scenes in the documentary shows Zurawski at home with her parents, her mother saying that she’s always voted Republican, but won’t after seeing her daughter almost die.“Will I say they’re converted Democrats? No!” Zurawski told me, laughing, as she huffed her way up a hill. “But I do think they are single-issue voters, at least in this election. It opened up their eyes a little bit to the legislature, and how laws are written, and how bans go into effect, and the real implications.”The real implications of, say, “medical exceptions” to a near-total abortion ban?“They don’t work! Categorically!” she scoffed, citing the multiple patient plaintiffs in her case, alongside other women who have died in our country awaiting care their doctors are prohibited, by law, from providing. “Every pregnancy is inherently unique. Where else in healthcare do we put a blanket rule over where you can and cannot receive treatment?”In her work over the years since she lost her pregnancy, she’s found that one key to changing minds lies in reframing the conversation from “pro-life” v “pro-choice” to one about healthcare access.“For 50 years, the right worked really hard to politicize and weaponize and stigmatize the word ‘abortion’,” she said. You say pro-choice or pro-life, and people are already on a side. But some of the time, she pointed out, people simply don’t understand what it means to be on one side or the other.“I’ll be at a rally, and someone will come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t realize that in 1985, when I had a D&C’” – a dilation-and-curettage surgical procedure that removes tissue from the uterus after miscarriage – “‘that’s an abortion.’ That’s the same as abortion care!”As Zurawski has crisscrossed the country, campaigning for the Harris-Walz ticket, another part of her family has also moved: her embryos. In February, the Alabama supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children”. Zurawski, living in a state that has a similar political climate – one in which city councils have enacted abortion travel bans, in effect criminalizing the use of cities’ roads and highways to seek abortion care – panicked, and rushed to move them to a safer place.“The implications of the ruling are just staggering,” she said. But, by some estimates, she admits that moving the embryos is itself a stopgap measure. “If Trump is elected, it doesn’t matter where the embryos are, or where we are. He will unleash chaos.”She cited Project 2025, a rightwing policy manifesto for Trump’s second term that indicates plans not only to restrict birth control access and block access to abortion pills and medical equipment, but also potentially ban IVF and surrogacy in certain states.“Well, Josh and I have to use a surrogate now because of what my body went through. It’s like they’re saying, you’re out of luck!” She paused, catching her breath on the other end of the phone, perhaps reaching the top of a hill. “It could theoretically prevent us from having children.”So, what’s to be done? Watch the documentary. Share her story. Vote. Fight.

      Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age and the novel Plays Well With Others More

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      Fraud, lawsuits, chaos: how Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 election

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      Donald Trump has left little doubt that he will contest the results of the 2024 election if he loses.Election lawyers and voting rights experts are bracing for an aggressive effort by the former president in the days after the election to challenge the results while votes are still being counted. But unlike 2020, when Trump’s effort after the election seemed a bit haphazard, experts say they’re seeing a much more organized effort that stretches from the courts to local groups organizing election deniers to work the polls.Here are a few key ways Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 vote:Seeding doubt about fraudFor months, Trump and allies have been spreading the false idea that there is fraud impacting the election.On the campaign trail, Trump has seized on a report that officials in Lancaster county are investigating a batch of 2,500 voter registration applications for possible fraud. The district attorney has said that investigators have discovered some fraudulent applications, but has not said how many or the nature of the fraud. Trump has distorted that limited information to claim that there are fraudulent votes. “They‘ve already started cheating, 2,600 votes, he said. Every vote was written by the same person. It must be a coincidence,” he said at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, last Tuesday.Nationally, a key pillar of Republicans’ claims has been the falsehood that non-citizens are voting and could sway the election. Elon Musk, the billionaire who is a key Trump ally in the campaign, has played a significant role in amplifying this claim. Several studies have shown that non-citizen voting is extremely rare.“If the fraud theme of 2020 was: ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated,’ the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting,’ and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an interview in October.Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuitsOver the last few months, the Republican National Committee and other GOP-aligned groups have filed a number of lawsuits in swing states claiming that states are not properly monitoring their rolls for ineligible voters. They have made eye-popping claims, including that states have more registered voters than eligible citizens and that non-citizens are on the rolls.Many of these suits have already been dismissed. But even though Republicans are losing the cases, voting rights experts see an ulterior motive in filing them.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the watchdog group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”

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      Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that he sees the lawsuits as an effort to give an imprimatur of legal authority to false claims.“I do think you’re going to see after the election if people are upset about the outcome, pointing to: ‘We’ve been saying for the last eight months that they had bloated rolls and dead people on the rolls, non-citizens on the rolls, and the courts didn’t do anything about it,’” he said.Berwick and his colleagues have referred to the cases as “zombie lawsuits” that Trump and allies could try and point to again after the election. While experts are confident this won’t succeed because the claims will still be false, it could continue to seed doubt and provide a pretext for local officials to try and refuse to certify the vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSowing chaos during a long vote countJust like in 2020, it is unlikely that the US will know the winner of the election on election night. State laws in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two swing states, still prohibit election officials from counting mail-in votes until election day, and election officials are already setting expectations that counting could last long past Tuesday.Trump plans to declare that the vote against him is rigged and point to the slow vote count as evidence, Rolling Stone magazine reported in October.Pressure on local election officials not to certify the voteIf Trump loses the election, there will likely be enormous pressure put on local election officials not to certify the results of the election.Long overlooked, certification is the bureaucratic process of making official the vote tallies at the local and state level. Those charged with certifying the vote are typically boards composed of elected or appointed officials. If a candidate wants to challenge the election results, states allow them to do so in separate legal processes outside of certification.Certification has long been considered a mandatory, non-discretionary responsibility. But in 2020, the Trump campaign and allies targeted Republicans at the local and state level and pressured them not to certify the results. None of those efforts worked in 2020, but Republicans have spent the last four years targeting positions that hold power over certification. At least 35 officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 will have a role over certifying the vote this fall, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.Voting litigators are preparing to go to court to force local officials to certify, and they say that the law is unequivocally on their side. More