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      Oakland mayor and county’s district attorney ousted in historic recall

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      Voters have ousted Oakland’s mayor and the region’s progressive district attorney, in a major political shake-up for the northern California port city. It’s the first time in modern history that voters here have ousted leadership from either position.Sheng Thao, the mayor, and Pamela Price, the district attorney for Alameda county, were both the target of recall campaigns, launched amid discontent over the city’s challenges: a spiralling housing crisis, rising costs and the departure of the city’s last remaining major league sports team.But the recall campaigns particularly centered on residents’ enduring frustrations about the area’s crime rates. Like many cities in the US, Oakland experienced a surge in violent crime during the pandemic, one that took longer than elsewhere to subside. Statistics had shown both violent and non-violent crime finally trending down – before the election, the Oakland police announced a 30% drop in homicides this year compared to 2023. Non-fatal shootings were down 20% and robberies were down 24%. Still, many residents remained deeply frustrated.The overwhelming support for both recalls came amid a broader sentiment in the state that crime had become out of control. Californians also supported a tough-on-crime measure, Prop 36, to enact harsher penalties for retail theft, property crimes and drug offenses and undo some of the landmark criminal justice reforms from a decade ago. They also voted down Prop 6, a measure to ban forced prison labor. Foundational Oakland Unites, a committee set up to fund signature gathering before the mayoral recall, sent residents a “Common Sense Voter Guide” that encouraged a yes on 36 and no on 6.While the campaigns tapped into deep frustrations among residents, they were funded in large part by a handful of the region’s wealthy residents. Over the summer, the local news site the Oaklandside revealed that Philip Dreyfuss, a hedge-fund manager who lives in the wealthy enclave of Piedmont, had been the biggest funder to the effort to recall the mayor. Ron Conway, a billionaire tech investor, was another major funder.Thao, the mayor, came into office just two years ago, the first Hmong American to lead a major city. She faced opposition from the start of her tenure, including from the city’s police department – she fired the police chief early in her term – and her moderate opponent in the mayoral contest.“People are fed up with crime and homelessness,” Dan Lindheim, a former Oakland city administrator and now professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, told the Guardian in October. “And they want to hold somebody accountable. It was like: ‘We don’t like what they’re doing, so – symbolically – it’s off with their heads.’”Criticism intensified after the FBI raided Thao’s home in a sprawling corruption investigation. The agency has neither implicated the mayor in any wrongdoing, nor absolved her of involvement. Thao has maintained her innocence.“It was just piling one thing on top of another,” Lindheim said. “That was the seal of death for her mayoral position.”In a statement last week, Thao said she was proud of her administration’s accomplishments and was “committed to ensuring we stay on track by supporting a smooth transition”.Price, the district attorney for Alameda county, which includes Oakland, was also ousted in a recall campaign that began just months after she took office. She was the first Black woman to hold the job. A former civil rights attorney, Price had come into office promising to reform the justice system, stop “over-criminalizing” young people and hold law enforcement to better account.The Alameda county board of supervisors is expected to appoint an interim district attorney.Thao must vacate the office as soon as election results are certified on 5 December and the Oakland city council declares a vacancy at its next meeting, Nikki Fortunato Bas, the city council president, said in a statement.A special election for a new mayor will be held within 120 days, or roughly four months.Until then, Bas will serve as interim mayor, unless she wins a seat on the Alameda county board of supervisors. As of Monday, Bas was trailing in that race. More

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      Mississippi mayor claims bribery charges are ‘political prosecution’

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      The mayor of Mississippi’s capital city said on Wednesday that he had been indicted in an alleged bribery operation, and he said it was a “political prosecution” to hurt his 2025 campaign for re-election.“My legal team has informed me that federal prosecutors have, in fact, indicted me on bribery and related charges,” Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the Jackson mayor, said in a video statement on Wednesday, WJTV and other news outlets reported. “To be clear, I have never accepted a bribe of any type. As mayor, I have always acted in the best interests of the city of Jackson.”Lumumba, a Democrat, has been mayor since 2017. An indictment was not immediately available on Wednesday in federal court electronic records.The charges come after undercover FBI agents posing as real estate investors invited the mayor to a fundraiser in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 April, WLBT reported. The agents said they wanted to develop property in downtown Jackson and help fund the mayor’s re-election campaign.Jackson city councilmember Angelique Lee, a Democrat, resigned in August and pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges as the result of the same FBI investigation.Lumumba said his legal team will “vigorously defend me against these charges.“We believe this to be a political prosecution against me, primarily designed to destroy my credibility and reputation within the community,” he said.The Jackson city council president, Virgi Lindsay, released a statement asking Jackson residents to be patient after the mayor’s indictment, WAPT reported.“I remind myself that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system,” said Lindsay, a Democrat. “Therefore, I will remain steadfastly focused on the work of our city council, and trust the legal system to unfold without undue commentary from me.” More

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      Giuliani shows up to vote in Mercedes he was supposed to give to poll workers

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      Rudy Giuliani turned up to vote in Florida for Tuesday’s presidential election in a Mercedes Benz convertible that a court had ordered him to surrender more than a week ago as part of a $148m settlement to two Georgia poll workers he defamed.The 1980s car, once owned by the actor Lauren Bacall, is among the assets of the disgraced former New York mayor and vocal Donald Trump acolyte that Giuliani is deliberately hiding from their reach, according to a letter their attorney, Aaron Nathan, sent to the judge in the case.Additionally, Nathan said, the contents of Giuliani’s $5m Manhattan apartment to which the pair are also entitled were stripped out some weeks ago in contravention of the judge Lewis Liman’s receivership order. Nathan said Giuliani had deliberately ignored the court’s deadline for handing over the assets.“[Giuliani] has yet to reveal where the vast majority of the receivership property is actually located, despite repeated requests to his counsel,” said the letter, sent on behalf of the poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.“That silence is especially outrageous given the revelation that the defendant apparently took affirmative steps to move his property out of the New York apartment in recent weeks, while a restraining notice was in effect. Furthermore, despite the cooperative pose [he] put on in his letter of October 29, the receivers’ inquiries since that time have been met predominantly with evasion or silence.”In addition to the Upper East Side apartment, Giuliani was ordered to turn over several items of New York Yankees memorabilia and about two dozen luxury watches.In response to the letter, Liman has ordered Giuliani to appear at a hearing in New York on Thursday. Giuliani’s attorney, Kenneth Caruso, has requested a delay so his client can fulfill an obligation to host a radio broadcast from Florida that evening.Giuliani, wearing a New York fire department hat and stars-and-stripes shirt, was pictured arriving at the polling site in Palm Beach on Tuesday in the passenger seat of the Mercedes SL500. He spoke to reporters but had no comment about the settlement.Caruso, in a court filing last week, denied Giuliani was being obstructive. “[He] is, and will remain, ready to comply” with Liman’s order, Caruso said – but claimed that Giuliani, who filed for bankruptcy last year, had not received information about how to deliver it, the Hill reported.Nathan said that claim was “misleading”.Giuliani’s spokesperson Ted Goodman, meanwhile, told the Hill in a statement that he “has made available his property and possessions as ordered” and that he had put a “few items” into storage over the past year.Anything else that was removed was related to Giuliani’s nightly livestreams, Goodman claimed, asserting it was therefore outside the settlement. A separate lawsuit over Giuliani’s Palm Beach apartment is ongoing.In a subsequent statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Goodman said Giuliani had made efforts to hand over the car.“Our lawyers have requested documentation to transfer over the title of the vehicle, and haven’t heard back from opposing counsel,” he said.“This is yet another attempt to render Mayor Rudy Giuliani – a man who has improved the lives of more people than almost any other living American – penniless and homeless. The weaponization of our once-sacred justice system should concern every American, regardless of partisan political affiliation.”Separately Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security, appeared to defend the disbarred lawyer’s retention of the Mercedes Benz in his own statement.“Mayor Giuliani is an 80-year-old man with a bad knee and 9/11-related lung disease, relies on this vehicle as his primary means of transportation in Florida, where there is no mass transit system like New York City’s,” he said.“He currently holds an active Florida driver’s license. The way he is being pushed toward poverty by those targeting him, after all he has done for this country, is appalling and it is clearly politically motivated.”In July, a judge dismissed Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, clearing the way for Freeman and Moss to begin collecting the settlement. But Nathan said in the letter dated Monday that Giuliani had “refused or been unable to answer basic questions about the location of most of the property”.He wrote: “The visit to the apartment, which all parties understood to be for the purposes of assessing the transportation and storage needs for the receivership property contained therein, instead revealed that the apartment was substantially empty.”Freeman and Moss said they received death threats and constant intimidation following the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden when Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused them of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night.The pair were formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing, and a jury ruled Giuliani owed them $148m for spreading lies about them.The pair subsequently settled similar defamation lawsuits with far-right media outlets the Gateway Pundit and One America News.Giuliani has sometimes been an attorney for Trump, who is running for the presidency again on Tuesday in a contest pitting him against Kamala Harris. 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      In Saginaw, where children are dying of gun violence, local races loom large

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      Tiffany Owens stood before the city council in Saginaw, Michigan, struggling to contain her anguish.“I hate this city because this city took away something that was so precious and dear to me. I’ve been living here all my life and I had to bury two of my kids. They out in Forest Lawn cemetery,” she said, her voice shaking with grief.“We just need y’all to do something. I don’t want another mother to have to stand here where I’m standing. It’s not fair that we all are here but I do not want another parent to have to go through this trauma, go through this pain.”Owens’ eldest son, Tamaris, was 12 years old when he was killed by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting. Her 26-year-old daughter, Tamarea, met a similar fate nine years later in 2021. Owens fears for the wellbeing of her remaining son.The family tragedy does not stop there. Owens’ niece, Tonquinisha McKinley, was killed outside her home during a family celebration before Tamarea’s high school prom in 2013.Behind Owens, other mothers held photographs of children murdered in one of the most dangerous cities in the US. Saginaw has at times had the highest crime rate of any city in Michigan during recent years, surpassing Detroit, with which it shares many of the same problems of industrial decline, deepening poverty and diminishing population over decades.More than 180 people have been murdered in the city of Saginaw over the past decade, most of them with guns, alongside hundreds of non-fatal shootings. About 20 people have been murdered so far this year.The bereaved mothers were pleading for action from Saginaw’s city council at its last meeting before local elections alongside the presidential ballot on Tuesday. For some, the local race is the more important of the two as they look to reverse their city’s decline while the Saginaw council stands accused of dithering and focusing on the wrong priorities. Others see Saginaw’s fate, and the safety of its families, as also inextricably tied to who gets into the White House.Tamara Tucker also spoke at the council meeting. She was still in high school when her 17-year-old brother was shot dead. Not long afterwards, she joined the support group Parents of Murdered Children to help her mother through a terrible time.Tucker remained a member when a few years later she, too, came to experience the grief of being a parent losing a child after her daughter was murdered.“I thought, my God, how can this be? Not again,” she told the Guardian.View image in fullscreenTucker’s daughter, MoeNeisha Simmons-Ross, was trying to prevent her boyfriend from leaving her Saginaw apartment with a gun. He shot her with it. She was pregnant with their child. The boyfriend was convicted of murder.That wasn’t the end. A few months later, Tucker’s younger sister was killed in Florida, and then her nephew in Saginaw.Tucker blames “selfishness” for the violence and the city’s failure to curb it.“It’s going to take the whole community to turn this around. I keep saying it, and I will say it until I’m blue in the face, it’s going to take the community caring. Apparently, there’s not enough children being murdered for them to actually say we got to do something about this,” she said.Barbara Clark went to college to get a degree in criminal justice in an effort to understand the causes of the violence in Saginaw and what to do about it after her son, Tommie Ford, was murdered at 17 years old by another teenager jealous of Ford talking to his former girlfriend.“I wanted to learn as much about the criminal justice system because I need to be able to talk to them in their language so I can know what you’re talking about when they tell me what you can and can’t do,” she said.Clark said that politicians, the police and people in other parts of Saginaw county were too often willing to blame parenting and gang culture for the killings so as to sidestep the part played by poverty, which runs at about 34% of the city’s population, and lack of resources.She ties the rise in murders, shootings and other crimes to Saginaw’s economic decline as more than a dozen car factories closed since the 1990s and the population fell sharply to about 45,000 today. Abandoned houses and bulldozed lots dot many streets on the lower-income east side of the city. Schools have been closed and consolidated. With a dwindling tax base, the city government cut back on services including recreational facilities.“Everything that was there to help those young people, to go to recreation centres, to do anything, has been shut down, decimated. All the schools here are gone. The schools are now placed on the other side of town so you gotta be commuted to it,” she said.“A lot of people want to say the parents ain’t doing their job. That may be true in some cases but not in all. There are some parents, for instance us, we are doing the best that we can do. But when you have limited funds, there’s only so much you can do. You’re looking at a poverty level of people in the inner city that things are happening to the family. What needs to happen is for the city of Saginaw to bring things back in for these young people to do, give them a chance.”There was plenty of sympathy for the mothers from city council members. One expressed condolences for the family of the latest victim, 14-year-old Keyvon Bentley, who was killed at the end of October.Council member Michael Flores, who is not running for re-election, read the names of some of those killed.View image in fullscreen“The thing that hurts me the most as a public official is that we lose Saginaw’s future constantly throughout every year that I’ve been here,” he said. “And a lot of the murder victims that I just listed off were 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 … It’s the saddest thing that I’ve experienced on council.”But there was little commitment to specific change even from those members up for re-election.Criticism of the council has focused on how it is spending $52m in grants under Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa). The council used half of the funds to fill a budget shortfall.The council’s plan for the rest of the money includes $10m to support “community centres, childcare and youth development”. But how that will be spent is still unresolved, to the frustration of campaigners.Flores told the Guardian the city “lacks either the imagination or the ability” to provide opportunities for young people, including initiatives to help those who are otherwise drawn into “a life of crime to be able to produce money for their families”.He said the council was too focused on allocating money to develop upscale housing, in the hope of drawing higher-income residents to the city, at the expense of affordable homes that would improve the lives of lower-income families. He pointed to a recent case where the council spent $3m to upgrade a building only to sell it to a developer for $1,000 to convert it to relatively upscale condos while rejecting a higher offer that would have brought more affordable housing.“The council always has the opportunity to be on the side of the people or be on the side of outside developers that want to come in and get tax abatement or tax credits for developing. We never tend to give it to the people that really need the help,” he said.Carly Hammond is a union organiser running for a seat on the council who is campaigning for more Arpa money to be spent on facilities for young people.“There is a lot that the city council can do to combat youth violence and create youth opportunities. Back in the 1960s, there used to be much more robust after-school youth education programmes, community centres, funded by the city,” she said.View image in fullscreen“A lot of these organisms and concepts were strategically dismantled. Rebuilding them takes a whole lot. Youth development means investing in neighbourhoods.”Hammond accuses the council of hiding behind its own bureaucracy to explain why it is not doing more on affordable housing and support for community organisations. She also accuses the council of leaving some federal money on the table from the community development block grant because it failed to put together the proper documentation.“The lack of investment overall in the community is felt most by the children. They just feel like there’s no future. If you hear parents and young people talk about this, they’re asking for direct action. They’re not asking for sympathy,” she said.The council also heard from Matthew Carpus, president of the Saginaw police union. He said officers on the force long ago lost confidence in the city’s police chief and council to address crime.“Most victims in this city don’t speak out. Either they move out of the city or they suffer in silence. Very few come to these meetings because, like officers, they feel you’re not going to do anything,” he said.“Not only isn’t it being solved, it’s not getting better, it’s trending in the wrong direction. We need to try something different.”Flores wants to see more of the Arpa money spent on policing.“I have done many ride-alongs with police officers. For the amount of area that they have to cover, they’re drastically understaffed,” he said. “There were calls, some of them domestic violence calls and the like, that just weren’t able to be picked up because there were more pressing issues in the moment.”The city has brought in the state police to patrol parts of Saginaw but Clark said that had resulted in little more than racially profiled stop-and-searches of cars.“It’s not helping. Instead of them doing what they were brought in to do, which is community service, they’re targeting. If these young men are blessed to have a nice car with nice rims and dress nice, you’re definitely targeted. If your car is dressed, made up a certain type of way, they’re definitely going to pull you over,” she said.Clark is looking to the new council to change the trajectory. But she said the presidential election would be decisive because while Biden has directed financial support to lower-income communities, she expects Trump to do just the opposite.“Who’s in the White House does affect us because it, I won’t say it trickles down, it starts down and works it way up. They come for our programmes before they do anybody else’s programme. They will cancel our programme before they cancel anybody else’s programmes,” she said. More

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      ‘A once-in-a-generation change’: Oregon’s biggest city prepares for monumental overhaul of government

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      When voters in Portland, Oregon, head to the polls next month, they will be tasked not only with selecting new leaders, but also the implementation of a monumental overhaul of the city’s government.Two years ago, residents moved to fundamentally alter their local government structure and adopted what experts have described as some of the most “expansive voting reforms” undertaken by a major US city in recent decades. Come November, the city will use ranked-choice voting to elect a mayor and a larger, more representative city council as Portland moves from a commission form of government to one overseen by a city administrator.The shake-up comes after challenging years for Portland in which the city of 630,000 grappled with a declining downtown, rising homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, growing public drug use and the continued economic impacts of the pandemic years.While some news coverage has portrayed the shift as Portlanders rejecting the city’s historically progressive values, those involved with the project counter that residents are embracing democratic reforms that will lead to a more equitable government better equipped to solve the city’s problems.“It was really clear that this system was, as operated, very inequitable,” said Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, a non-profit that was a key proponent of the effort.“And the challenges in governing are going to be felt the most by those who already have been marginalized in our political system.”Now the city waits to see what the “once-in-a-generation” change will mean for its future.Since 1913, Portland has used a commission form of government. The commission consisted of five people elected citywide and who were responsible for passing policies and also acting as administrators in charge of city departments.The system was briefly popular in other major US cities, but then largely abandoned, said Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University.“Most cities who adopted that form of government realized there were problems with it,” he said. “Someone may be good as a legislator but it doesn’t make them good as an administrator.”View image in fullscreenAnd Portland’s system had long failed to adequately represent different demographics in the city, Lee said. The city’s elected officials historically have been white men from more affluent areas where residents are more likely to have a higher income and own their homes, according to the Sightline Institute. In 2017, only two people of color had ever been elected to the city council.Under the charter system, simple decisions – such as where to put a bike lane – were politicized, said Shoshanah Oppenheim, the charter transition project manager.“It was based on the political tide,” said Oppenheim, who is also a senior adviser in the city administrator’s office.For more than a century, Portlanders rejected attempts to reform the commission system, but that changed when the 10-year review of the city charter coincided with upheaval and challenges of the pandemic years.The pandemic exacerbated the existing limitations of the city’s form of government, according to a report from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation chronicling Portland’s reforms.Meanwhile, Portland was the site of widespread racial justice protests and an ensuing federal crackdown, the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic was slow, and residents grew increasingly disillusioned with their leaders’ ability to make meaningful progress tackling homelessness and drug abuse.Those challenges created an opportunity to have meaningful conversations about elections and government, Lee said.Clucas echoed that sentiment: “I think the public was looking and happy to take on some sort of change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCommunity leaders had spent years educating themselves about electoral reform, and saw an opportunity to create change in the city, the report stated.With support from community organizations and local activists, the commission brought a measure before voters that would make key changes to the city’s system, allowing voters to rank local candidates in order of preference, expand the city council from five to 12 representatives elected from four newly created districts, and move to a system of government overseen by a professional city administrator.Despite criticism about the complexity of the measure and opposition from political leaders and the business community, 58% of voters approved the package of reforms proposed by the commission.Although the timing coincided with major changes and social issues, Lee said the reforms were not reactionary and instead an example of Portland being willing to try new things, which ties into Oregon’s long history of democratic reforms aimed at making government more participatory.“It was a message about change, but it was definitely a hopeful one,” she said. “It was always about these changes will make our government more effective and equitable.”The city has spent the last two years preparing for a project unlike anything Portland has seen before,Oppenheim said. “We had a really short timeline … It’s been an all-hands-on-deck approach,” she said. “There is no playbook. We are making it up as we go along.”Next month, voters will decided among more than 100 candidates for 12 council seats and 19 candidates for mayor. A recent poll from the Oregonian suggested a once-longshot candidate, whose campaign has focused on ending homelessness, is well positioned to win.In a poll of roughly 300 voters from early October, before election packets were sent out, two-thirds responded that they understood how voting works very well or somewhat well. People tend to understand the system right away given that they rank things every day, Oppenheim said.The city has also developed a voter education program to inform residents about the changes and trained operators on its information line how to explain ranked-choice voting.The hope is that voters will feel the increased power of their vote, Lee said. “Every vote has a lot of power. Your constituents’ voices really matter. Their second- and third-choice rankings actually really matter.”After the election, the other major test comes next year when Portland’s new government takes the reins. “We want to be ready on day one so all the city business can continue,” Oppenheim said.“Portlanders have huge expectations for change and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better,” Oppenheim said. “They want a more representative government. We have it in our power to deliver that.” 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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      Pennsylvania officials investigating 2,500 voter registrations for fraud

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      Officials in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, are investigating about 2,500 voter registrations after election workers discovered signs that they may be fraudulent.The registrations under investigation were dropped off in two batches just before Pennsylvania’s voter-registration deadline on Monday. Election workers contacted the district attorney’s office after they noticed several suspicious applications that contained the same handwriting, signatures for voters that didn’t match what was on file, and inaccurate personal identifier information, including names, addresses, social security and driver’s license numbers, said Heather Adams, the district attorney, during a press conference on Friday.Investigators also spoke with voters who said they had not requested or filled out the forms that were turned in, she said.The announcement comes as voting is already under way in Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state for both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris this election. Lancaster county, known for its Amish population, voted for Trump by nearly 16 points in 2020.Adams did not say how many applications her office had reviewed so far, but said that 60% of them had been fraudulent. She acknowledged that there were some legitimate applications in the batch and said those registrations would be processed.The effort appears to be associated with a large-scale canvassing group – she did not identify which one – and said that two other counties in the state are investigating a similar issue. The canvassers were paid, a common practice. Officials did not say whether there was a partisan breakdown in the applications.“It really shouldn’t matter. If there’s voters on the books that shouldn’t be, it increases the chance that we’re gonna have voter fraud,” Williams said.The announcement comes days after the county was accused of wrongfully holding up voter-registration applications from students. More

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      ‘The law is clear’: US states signal willingness to prosecute election crimes

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      Some US states are sending strong signals to county and local officials who might be tempted to intervene illegally in the 5 November election or refuse to certify results: fail to do your duty and risk criminal charges or hefty financial penalties.In at least five of the seven battleground states that could determine whether the next US president is Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump, top election and law enforcement officials have investigated, indicted and even jailed officials who tried to interfere with the vote or delay certification of results, a necessary but largely ceremonial step.County officials have also been warned that failing to certify results on time could force their local governments to foot the bill for unnecessary audits or recounts.The increased oversight of local election officials is aimed at preventing unfounded claims of fraud from slowing the certification of election results, which in turn could interfere with Congress’s certification of the presidential election results in a highly charged partisan atmosphere.Four years after Trump tried to overturn his 2020 defeat, officials in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as in solidly Democratic Colorado, said they have become far more adept at handling those who overstep their authority, even with Trump still repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that he will lose in November only through fraud.States that fail to certify results by certain deadlines could be left out of the state-by-state electoral college process that formally determines the winners of US presidential elections.“The law is clear and we won’t tolerate anyone not following it for any reason,” Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said in an interview. “There are times and places for challenging election results. The certification process is not one of them.”In this high-stakes election, the biggest of the swing states, Pennsylvania, has already overruled a county official, the Luzerne county manager, Romilda Crocamo, who tried to prevent the use in her district of drop boxes, where early voters can deposit their mail-in ballots.

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      The state attorney general, Michelle Henry, a former Republican appointed to her role last year by the state’s Democratic governor, said in an interview that her office would enforce election laws.“Should anyone not comply with the statutes, we will investigate that and there will be consequences … There’s both criminal and civil actions that could be taken to maintain the integrity of the process.”In Wisconsin, the criminal division of the state justice department is investigating Wausau’s mayor, Doug Diny, for removing a locked, empty drop box from outside city hall in September. Diny, a non-partisan conservative backed by Republicans, told reporters at the time that he did not feel the box was secure where the city clerk had placed it.The Wisconsin attorney general, Josh Kaul, a Democrat, also said his office would enforce election laws.“It’s our expectation that election officials will follow the law,” Kaul said in an interview. “But if we receive concerns that that won’t be the case, we’re prepared to act.”In Michigan’s Macomb county, where Republicans unsuccessfully sued to overturn the 2020 election results, three assistant clerks in the city of St Clair Shores face felony charges for allegedly allowing four residents to vote twice in the state’s 6 August congressional and state primary election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, filed charges punishable by up to five years in prison against all seven.“Despite common talking points by those who seek to instill doubt in our election process, double voting in Michigan is extremely rare,” Nessel said in a statement. “Nevertheless, the fact that four incidents occurred in a municipality of this size raised significant concerns.“Michigan election laws were tightened in the aftermath of the 2020 vote.Delta county canvass board members Bonnie Hakkola and LeeAnne Oman, both Republicans, voted against certification of a local recall election on 14 May, after seeing nearly identical voting margins in three different races.State authorities responded two days later, with a stern letter. The two individuals ultimately resigned. The results were certified.Meanwhile, two Republican officials from Arizona’s Cochise county face felony election interference charges, alleging they delayed the canvass of votes in the 2022 elections.And in Nevada, the secretary of state, attorney general and a district attorney intervened recently to swiftly resolve an impasse over a county’s certification of a primary election’s results.In Colorado, in one of the starkest examples, a Republican former Mesa county clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced to nine years in prison this month, after being convicted of illegally tampering with voting machines in 2020. More