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Tag: Election 2020

  • Fact vs. Fiction: Did Georgia Admit 315,000 Illegal Votes in the 2020 Election?

    Claim via Social Media (Bongino Inc):

    A viral meme claims that because Fulton County admitted more than 315,000 votes were associated with unsigned tabulator tapes, Georgia “admitted” those votes were illegally counted and that the 2020 election result was invalid.

    Explanation:

    This claim is false. Fulton County acknowledged that more than 130 tabulator tapes from early in-person voting in the 2020 election were unsigned, a violation of Georgia election rules, not statutes. As reported by NewsFactsNetwork and 11Alive, state and county officials stressed this was a procedural documentation error, not evidence of illegal votes, altered totals, or missing ballots.

    The unsigned tapes covered more than 315,000 ballots, but tabulator tapes are supplemental records, not the official vote count. Votes were recorded through multiple redundant systems, including encrypted memory cards, centralized tabulation, audits, and recounts. Georgia conducted a full statewide hand recount and subsequent machine recounts, all of which confirmed President Biden’s 11,779-vote victory.

    Georgia law requires counties to certify election results even when procedural errors occur, a position upheld by courts and reinforced by the Georgia Court of Appeals, as reported by AP News. The State Election Board referred the matter to the Attorney General for possible administrative sanctions, not to invalidate votes.

    Conclusion:

    Fact or Fiction? Fiction. Fulton County did not admit to 315,000 illegal votes. The issue involved unsigned paperwork, not unlawful ballots or a changed election outcome.

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  • Biden’s diverse coalition of support risks fraying in 2024

    Biden’s diverse coalition of support risks fraying in 2024

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat-turned-Independent long known for his centrist views, voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But as Biden’s reelection campaign begins, Lieberman is preparing to recruit a third-party candidate capable of defeating the Democratic president.

    “Centrists and moderates feel that he’s governed more from the left than they hoped,” Lieberman, a leader of the group, No Labels, said of Biden in an interview. “He hasn’t been able to be the unifier that he promised to be.”

    Biden’s political challenges are not confined to voters in the middle. In the days since he formally launched his 2024 campaign, key members of the sprawling political coalition that lifted him over former President Donald Trump in 2020 are far from excited about the prospect of four more years. That underscores the test confronting Biden as he aims to motivate the coalition of African Americans, Latinos, young people, suburban voters and independents to show up for him again.

    John Paul Mejia, the 20-year-old spokesman for the progressive Sunrise Movement, says Biden has simply not done enough to ensure the young voters who rallied behind him in 2020 would do so again.

    “Young people are starving for more,” Mejia said, pointing to Biden’s recent decision to approve two controversial fossil fuel projects in Alaska. “Biden has to demonstrate the extent to which he’s willing to be a fighter. We’ve seen this sort of two-step on the promises he made to young people.”

    Biden has also struggled to fulfill key promises to Black voters, perhaps the most loyal group in his political base. While he tapped Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, he has been unable to follow through on pledges to protect voting rights against a wave of Republican-backed restrictions or enact policing reform to help stop violence against people of color at the hands of law enforcement.

    “There’s work to be done,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, a 42-year-old African American former civil rights attorney who joined Congress in January. “I’m not going to sugar coat it.”

    Crockett recalled the palpable excitement among the Black community for Barack Obama’s reelection. With Biden, there’s “a number of people who are concerned and scared” largely because of his age, while others are “indifferent and waiting,” despite what she described as Biden’s overall strong record of achievement.

    Nearly 18 months before Election Day 2024, however, it’s unclear how much this lack of enthusiasm will weigh on Biden’s reelection prospects. For all the concern, no high-profile Democratic primary challengers have emerged, and none are expected to. To date, only progressive author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are mounting symbolic challenges to Biden, who has the official support of the Democratic National Committee.

    Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden’s chief rival in the 2020 primary, told The Associated Press just hours after Biden announced that he was endorsing the president and encouraged other progressive leaders to do so as well.

    “I intend to do everything I can to see that he is reelected,” Sanders said in an interview.

    Instead of excitement for the 80-year-old president’s reelection, leaders from key factions in Biden’s coalition report a serious sense of duty — and fear of the alternative. Trump is currently considered the favorite to claim the Republican presidential nomination, although he’s facing opposition from a half dozen rivals.

    “It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump or whoever the Republican candidate might be,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of discontent in this country. There’s a lot of anger in this country.”

    Indeed, 74% of U.S. adults believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted a week before Biden’s announcement.

    The poll found that only about half of Democrats think Biden should run again. Despite their reluctance, 81% of Democrats said they would probably support Biden in a general election if he is the nominee. That includes 41% who said they definitely would and 40% who said they probably would.

    The warning signs in the Biden coalition are clear.

    Just 41% of Black adults want the Democratic president to run again, and only 55% said they are likely to support him in the general election if he is the nominee. Among Latinos, only 27% want Biden to run again in 2024 and 43% said they would definitely or probably support him.

    Younger Democrats also remain a reluctant part of Biden’s coalition, the AP-NORC poll shows.

    Just 25% of those under age 45 said they would definitely support Biden in a general election, compared with 56% of older Democrats.

    Still, an additional 51% of younger Democrats say they would probably vote for Biden in a 2024 general election.

    Meanwhile, just 14% of independents — adults who don’t lean toward either party, who represent a small percentage of the American electorate — want Biden to run again. And only 24% said they’d support him in the general election if he is the Democratic nominee.

    Biden’s team dismisses the numbers, yet acknowledges that in a party as diverse as the Democrats, some may have other preferred candidates for president. It’s just that none of those other people can win, they say, adding that while Biden might not be someone’s first choice, he’s often everyone’s second.

    They cite one of Biden’s favorite political aphorisms: “Don’t judge me against the Almighty, judge me against the alternative.”

    Their confidence is grounded in Biden’s experience in 2020, when he was written off by much of the party, until it unified around him at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as a consensus candidate best positioned to defeat Trump. While Biden aides are expecting a rematch with Trump, he intends to cast all Republicans as embracing Trump-ism, both as a hedge in case another GOP candidate emerges as the party’s standard-bearer and to broadly define the Republicans in an effort to help down-ballot Democrats.

    Meanwhile, Biden himself has been open about there being more to do — it’s in his campaign rallying cry “finish the job” — and his aides believe it is essential for him to highlight what else he wants to do with another term in office, believing that presidents who solely focus on their records lose reelection.

    Biden has begun holding events to highlight popular components of his agenda that got left on the cutting room floor during the Democrats’ legislative blitz over the last two years. Last week, he held a Rose Garden gathering to showcase his efforts to boost the affordability and quality of child and long-term care. And he’s pushing for tougher gun laws after recent high-profile shootings and to write into law a national right to abortion.

    Both are proposals his aides believe have the backing of most Americans — and are of particular importance to the Democratic coalition — but are unlikely to pass unless Democrats also win significant congressional majorities.

    Aiming to address the intra-party concerns, Biden’s campaign on Monday released a new ad it said was targeted at the “Biden coalition” of suburban women, Black and Latino voters, and swing and independent voters, that both lists what he’s gotten done in office and what more he wants to do.

    In the White House, Biden advisers, particularly chiefs of staff Ron Klain and now Jeff Zients, have kept close ties to grassroots groups across the Democratic firmament. He just secured an endorsement for reelection from the progressive group MoveOn, which said, “This moment requires urgency to solidify behind President Biden and show unified resolve to defeat MAGA and build on the progress of the last two years.”

    At a donor event in Washington on Friday, Biden’s efforts to highlight his support from all swaths of the party were on display, with young progressive Rep. Maxwell Frost joining more establishment lawmakers like Sens. Chris Coons and Bob Casey. Investor Tom Steyer, who was among the Democrats who challenged Biden in 2020, also attended.

    Allies said one key reason why the president selected Julie Chavez Rodriguez as his campaign manager was her ability to maintain close ties with a wide swath of the Democratic coalition during her time as White House director of intergovernmental affairs.

    “This is not a time to be complacent,” Biden said in his announcement video as he vowed to fight for freedom and warned of MAGA extremists and others who support banning abortion and books.

    Meanwhile, Lieberman said he would likely soon begin interviewing potential candidates for No Label’s third-party alternative to Biden and the eventual Republican nominee.

    Already, No Labels has secured a spot on the presidential ballot in four states, including swing states Arizona and Colorado. Lieberman noted that the group would not field a candidate if polling suggested the so-called unity ticket does not have a viable path to the presidency.

    “If No Labels does not run a bipartisan unity ticket, and the two candidates are Trump and Biden, to me, it’s an easy choice,” Lieberman said. “I will vote for Biden.”

    ___

    Peoples reported from New York. AP writer Hannah Fingerhut contributed.

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  • Biden’s moves on Alaska drilling, TikTok test young voters

    Biden’s moves on Alaska drilling, TikTok test young voters

    TEMPE, Ariz. (AP) — Recent moves by President Joe Biden to pressure TikTok over its Chinese ownership and approve oil drilling in an untapped area of Alaska are testing the loyalty of young voters, a group that’s largely been in his corner.

    Youth turnout surged in the three elections since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, helping Biden eke out victories in swing states in 2020, pick up a Democratic Senate seat in the 2022 election and stem potential losses in the House.

    But the 80-year-old president has never been the favorite candidate of young liberals itching for a new generation of American leadership. As Biden gears up for an expected reelection campaign, a potential TikTok ban and the Alaska drilling could weigh him down.

    Meanwhile, his plan to wipe out billions of dollars in student loan debt is in jeopardy at the Supreme Court. The effort, announced shortly before last year’s midterms, was an attempt by Biden to keep a promise he made after defeating progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary campaign in 2020.

    The risk for Biden is less that young left-of-center voters will vote Republican and more that they would sit out an uninspiring election altogether.

    “I’m a Democrat, but I’m not voting for Biden,” said Mark Buehlmann, a 20-year-old Arizona State University student who said he likely would abstain if Biden is the Democratic nominee, as expected. “He’s maybe capable of doing a good job, but he’s not capable of gathering the troops, rallying the people. Especially the Democratic voter base. I don’t think he’s a strong candidate.”

    TikTok allows users, 150 million of whom are in the United States, to post short, creative videos for friends and strangers. Its algorithm has an uncanny ability to figure out what interests its users and serve up videos they’ll enjoy. It’s become a supremely popular — some say addictive — place for young people to find entertainment and community.

    Western governments are growing increasingly worried that TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, might give browsing history or other data about users to China’s government or promote propaganda and disinformation. The U.S. and other nations have banned TikTok from government-owned devices, as have several states.

    The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, part of Biden’s Treasury Department, has threatened to ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stake in the app, according to a Wall Street Journal report this month.

    Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but the move was blocked in court and later rescinded when Biden took office and ordered an in-depth study of the issue.

    ByteDance says it’s working to address security concerns and has plans to route traffic through servers owned by Oracle, a Silicon Valley-based tech company.

    Biden administration officials insist that political concerns aren’t weighing into the national security review underway, but they’re also not blind to it.

    Both political parties have reoriented around staking out tougher economic and security positions on China’s rise, and Biden has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to take action against TikTok.

    In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo offered hyperbolically, “The politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”

    But it’s clear that the Biden White House and his likely reelection campaign are keenly aware of the app’s massive domestic reach and demographic skew toward Democratic-leaning younger voters.

    Highlighting Biden’s balancing act, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a progressive New York Democrat popular on the left, held a news conference this past week with TikTok creators who have built popular and profitable channels on the social network “in support of free expression.”

    Lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for nearly six hours Thursday over data security and harmful content. They responded skeptically during a tense House committee hearing to his assurances that the app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.

    “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said.

    In interviews at Arizona State, one of the largest college campuses in the U.S. and a contributor to Biden’s narrow 10,000-vote win in the swing state, young people described a TikTok ban as somewhere between an annoyance and an inevitability — but not something that would change their views of the president.

    “Most people don’t really think about those kinds of things,” Lucas Vittor, a 19-year-old business administration student from Houston, said of a TikTok ban. “I think that they’ll probably just see it as, ‘He’s an oppressive leader, an old dude, he doesn’t know about social media.’”

    If TikTok disappears, another app will emerge to capture the attention of young people, Vittor predicted. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and Instagram, have incorporated similar algorithm-driven video features, though some find them clunky compared with TikTok.

    “It’s not really Biden’s issue,” said Ginny Xu, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student from Goodyear, Arizona. “It’s more of a bipartisan thing — ‘safety’ from China.”

    Losing access to TikTok would be disappointing, Xu said, but it wouldn’t dissuade her from voting for Biden if there’s no better Democratic choice.

    Her friend, 20-year-old chemical engineering student Maddie Bruce, agreed.

    “I just am not a big Joe Biden fan,” Bruce said. She would prefer to see another Democrat run, but she would still vote for Biden, she said.

    Forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent to sell its stake in the U.S. company could provide a convenient middle ground: minimizing the national security threat while avoiding having access to the app cut off for tens of millions of users.

    The young have never voted at the same rates as their parents and grandparents, but their participation has ticked up markedly since the start of the Trump presidency.

    The 2018 and 2022 midterms brought the highest levels of youth turnout of the past three decades, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, which studies young voters.

    And when they do vote, young people vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

    Biden won 63% of voters age 18 to 24, compared with 34% for Trump, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate. Republican House candidates did better with young voters in last year’s midterms, but Democrats still had a 14-percentage point advantage, winning voters 24 and younger 54% to 40%.

    “If Democrats are looking for their secret weapon, young voters are it,” said Jack Lobel, spokesperson for Voters of Tomorrow, which organizes young voters online and in person. “For Democrats especially, who already have young voters basically on their side, we are the untapped potential that campaigns are looking for.”

    A TikTok ban might irritate a lot of young voters, but Biden can point to a strong record of standing up for young people’s interests, Lobel said.

    Biden has tried to offer relief from student loan debt and has advocated for abortion rights. He signed a massive climate spending bill along with the most sweeping gun violence bill in decades.

    Marisol Ortega, a 21-year-old journalism student from Glendale, Arizona, said many of her peers are looking for someone younger and more exciting, even if they’ll likely hold their nose and vote for him.

    “Joe Biden has been a name in American politics for a very, very long time,” Ortega said. “I think people are just kind of ready for something new.”

    Still, the Biden administration irked environmentalists and young people by approving the huge Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.

    Young activists have been particularly active in pushing to drastically reduce oil drilling and move away from reliance fossil fuels. Before the president’s decision, a #StopWillow campaign garnered millions of views on TikTok urging Biden to block the project.

    “He has delivered a lot for young people, and that’s why our advice to the administration was, ‘This is not the right direction to head on this issue,’” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, a youth organizing group.

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    AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

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    This story was first published on March 25, 2023. It was updated on March 27, 2023, to correct that the 2018 and 2022 midterms, not 2020, brought the highest levels of youth turnout of the past three decades.

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  • Biden rallies workers in Wisconsin after big speech

    Biden rallies workers in Wisconsin after big speech

    DeFOREST, Wis. (AP) — Fresh from his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden rallied supporters in Wisconsin on Wednesday, preparing for an expected reelection announcement this spring and trying to shore up the backing of working-class voters who have edged away from Democrats in recent years.

    “Fighting for the sake of fighting gets us nowhere,” Biden said at a training facility run by the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “We’re getting things done.”

    Workers lined up in orange shirts and hard hats behind the president as he spoke. A banner that said “union strong” hung to the side.

    Biden, who beat Donald Trump in 2020 by a narrow margin in Wisconsin, talked about helping workers make “a couple more bucks” and preventing them from “getting stiffed” by companies that “play us for suckers.”

    “My economic plan is about investing in people and places that feel forgotten,” said Biden, who pointed to new federal funding for a bridge and electric buses in Wisconsin.

    His trip was one stop in the traditional post-State of the Union blitz, where the president, vice president and Cabinet officials fan out across the country to promote his themes from the speech. Biden’s next stop is Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, where he’s expected to discuss proposals to safeguard Social Security and Medicare, and lower the cost of health care.

    At the training center, Biden met workers and apprentices who are learning how to do the jobs that are being created as a result of several pieces of major legislation, some of them passed with Republican support, that Biden has signed into law.

    The measures include trillions of dollars for pandemic relief, rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure, jump-starting the semiconductor chip industry in the United States, and boosting climate change and health care initiatives.

    “He’s got us in his mind, and it’s good to hear,” said Casey Kvalo, an underground pipe worker from DeForest. As for the job creation Biden promoted Tuesday evening, “he’s right on point about it and it’s exciting to hear,” Kvalo said.

    Tony Kurkowski, a Milwaukee highway worker and union member, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the president’s visit and focus on workers.

    “With a lot of politicians, it’s easy to take the vote for granted and once they get in have their own priorities, but it’s good to see he’s coming back to labor,” he said.

    Biden’s State of the Union night also included heckling by some Republicans, who called him a “liar” and demanded that he “secure the border” with Mexico.

    Vice President Kamala Harris brushed off those interruptions in an interview with “CBS Mornings” before jetting to Atlanta for her own event on Wednesday.

    “The president was in command and he focused on the American people as opposed to necessarily the gamesmanship that was being played in the room,” she said.

    In her remarks at Georgia Tech, Harris touted investments in the green economy and the administration’s fight against damage from climate change.

    “We’re looking at at least a trillion dollars to hit the streets of America to address some of these issues,” she said.

    She declared that this is “a moment where we should think of it not being about incremental change and slowly moving the needle but embarking, jumping onto a new plateau” and “establishing a whole new industry, a clean-energy economy.”

    Biden has said he intends to run for a second term in 2024. A formal announcement is expected in the coming months, though a majority of Democrats now think one term is plenty, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

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    Associated Press writer Harm Venhuizen contributed from DeForest.

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  • Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard writing book on leaving Democrats

    Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard writing book on leaving Democrats

    NEW YORK (AP) — Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii who clashed often with her party and eventually left it, has a memoir coming out Oct. 10.

    Gabbard’s memoir, currently untitled, is the first of a two-book deal with Regnery Publishing, the longtime conservative publisher. Regnery is calling the book the “full story of her electrifying break” with the Democrats. Gabbard served in the House of Representatives from 2013-2021, and over time would become a prominent critic of party leadership, including on its support for Ukraine against the Russians. Gabbard once called Hillary Clinton the “embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.” She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ run against Clinton for the 2016 presidential party nomination and briefly ran herself for the 2020 election before dropping out and backing the eventual winner, Joe Biden.

    In recent years, she was a frequent guest on the Fox network and is now a paid contributor. Last October, she left the Democrats, saying they were dominated by an “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke Democratic Party ideologues,” and supported numerous Republican candidates in the fall’s elections.

    “This book will share my experiences at the highest level of Democratic politics, and why I can no longer call myself a Democrat,” Gabbard, 41, said in a statement Monday. “Today’s Democratic Party is unrecognizable from the party I joined 20 years ago.”

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  • Concerns over prayer breakfast lead Congress to take it over

    Concerns over prayer breakfast lead Congress to take it over

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Prayer Breakfast, one of the most visible and long-standing events that brings religion and politics together in Washington, is splitting from the private religious group that had overseen it for decades, due to concerns the gathering had become too divisive.

    The organizer and host for this year’s breakfast, scheduled for Thursday, will be the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, headed by former Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.

    Sen. Chris Coons, a regular participant and chairman of the Senate ethics committee, said the move was prompted in part by concerns in recent years that members of Congress did not know important details about the larger multiday gathering.

    Coons, D-Del., said that in the past, he and Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the committee’s vice chairman, had questions about who was invited and how money was being raised.

    The annual event “went on several days, had thousands of people attending, and a very large and somewhat complex organization,” Coons said in an interview. “Some questions had been raised about our ability as members of Congress to say that we knew exactly how it was being organized, who was being invited, how it was being funded. Many of us who’d been in leadership roles really couldn’t answer those questions.”

    That led to lawmakers deciding to take over organizing for the prayer breakfast itself.

    Pryor, president of the new foundation, said the COVID-19 shutdown gave members a chance to “reset” the breakfast and return it to its origins — a change he said had been discussed for years.

    “The whole reason the House and Senate wanted to do this was to return it to its roots, when House members and Senate members can come together and pray for the president, pray for his family and administration, pray for our government, the world,” Pryor said.

    Pryor said members of Congress, the president, vice president and other administration officials and their guests are invited to Thursday’s prayer breakfast, which will be held at the visitors’ center at the Capitol. He anticipated between 200 and 300 people would attend.

    Pryor said he hoped the smaller event will regain the intimacy that is similar to the weekly nondenominational prayer gatherings on Capitol Hill. Groups of senators and representatives have long held unofficial meetings for fellowship and to temporarily set aside political differences.

    The prayer breakfast addressed by the president has been the highlight of a multiday event for 70 years. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to attend, in February 1953, and every president since has spoken at the gathering.

    The larger event, put on by a private religious group called the International Foundation, has always been centered around “the person and principles of Jesus, with a focus on praying for leaders of our nation and from around the world,” the group’s spokesman, A. Larry Ross, said in an email.

    More than 1,400 people are registered for the two-day event, with one-third of those from outside the United States.

    President Joe Biden, who has spoken at the breakfast the past two years, is set to do so again. In 2021, he made remarks from the White House during a virtual breakfast the month after the building was attacked by supporters of former President Donald Trump intent on trying to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

    At last year’s address from the Capitol, Biden talked about the need for members of Congress to know one another more personally.

    “It’s hard to really dislike someone when you know what they’re going through is the same thing you’re going through,” he said.

    In recent years, questions about the International Foundation, its funding and attendees had led some to reconsider the involvement of Congress.

    Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., stopped coming in 2016 because the event “had become an entertainment and lobbying extravaganza rather than an opportunity for spiritual reflection,” a Kaine spokeswoman wrote in an emailed response to questions. Kaine will attend Thursday.

    The gathering came under heightened criticism in 2018 when Maria Butina, a Russian operative, pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiring to infiltrate conservative U.S. political groups with the aim of advancing Russian interests. According to court documents, she attended two breakfasts in hopes of setting up unofficial connections between Russian and U.S. officials.

    It took on political undertones with Trump shattering the custom of the address being a respite from partisan bickering. He used his 2020 speech to criticize his first impeachment and attack political opponents, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

    Earlier this month, the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter signed by 30 groups to the White House and members of Congress asking them to boycott the event because of questions about the International Foundation.

    The organization’s co-president, Annie Laurie Gaylor, said the foundation’s basic concerns with the breakfast remain despite the split with the larger religious gathering.

    “For decades, FFRF has protested the appearance of the National Prayer Breakfast being a quasi-governmental gathering, which pressures the president and Congress to put on a display of piety that sends a message that the United States is a Christian nation,” she wrote.

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  • NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

    NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

    A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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    All votes counted in Maricopa County, despite online claims

    CLAIM: Uncounted ballots that got mixed with counted ballots at voting sites in Arizona’s Maricopa County were not included in the final midterm election results.

    THE FACTS: While such ballots were mixed at two separate voting centers on Election Day, they were properly vetted and accurately tabulated, officials said. During November’s midterm elections, a printing malfunction caused tabulation machines at dozens of voting sites in Maricopa County to reject ballots on Election Day. Poll workers advised voters whose ballots were rejected to put them in a secure drop box referred to as “door 3” or “box 3” to be counted later at the county’s central tabulation facility. And while poll workers were trained to keep such yet-to-be-counted votes separate from those tabulated on-site, the ballots were “returned together,” Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. As the state certified its results this week, posts continued to circulate on social media falsely claiming that those ballots were never counted in the final results, with users citing a video of a self-described poll observer speaking at a Nov. 28 Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting. The woman in the video said that such ballots were combined at her voting site located “off of Camelback and 7th street.” “They commingled the un-tabulated ballots of drawer 3 with the tabulated ballots,” the woman says in the clip, referring to box 3. “There is no way to ever sort that and track that. Those are lost votes. Those are lost voices.” But, as the county explained in the days after the election, there is a way to sort and track such ballots, and the votes were counted in the final results. Additionally, such ballot mixing only occurred at two voting locations: Desert Hills Community Church in North Phoenix and the Church of Jesus Christ of LDS in Gilbert, according to Gilbertson. There is no record of such ballot mixing occurring at other voting centers, and the county never received a report of the issue occurring at the voting site described by the woman, Gilbertson told the AP by phone on Wednesday. An attempt to reach the woman who made the claim during the Nov. 28 meeting was unsuccessful. At the sites where mixing did occur, affected ballots were isolated and audited to make sure no votes were missed or double counted, Gilbertson wrote in an email this week. That process, called audit reconciliation, involves checking that the total number of ballots from a given vote center matches with the number of voters who checked-in at the site. Observers from both political parties were present. All Election Day ballots are required to undergo the process. “We have redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once,” Gilbertson wrote. “This process ensures that no ballot was double counted and that all ballots cast at the Vote Center were counted.” In a November report responding to questions from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Elections Department similarly asserted it “retabulated the entire batch of ballots” from the two affected voting centers to ensure the accuracy of the count. Gilbertson said in the days after the election that similar mistakes have been made before, and the process to address it has been in place for decades, the AP reported. “Every single polling location in Maricopa County has a reconciliation audit that’s completed for every single election,” said Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the county election department. “It’s been that way literally for 30 years or more.”

    — Associated Press writer Josh Kelety in Phoenix contributed this report.

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    Patent application doesn’t show COVID test was developed in 2015

    CLAIM: A COVID-19 test patent application is dated 2020 but was actually filed in 2015.

    THE FACTS: The patent application, for a system to determine if someone has a viral infection such as COVID-19, notes that a related provisional patent application was filed in 2015. But while the earlier provisional application is related to the technology in the 2020 application, it made no mention of COVID-19. Social media users are sharing the inaccurate claim through a meme, which implies that COVID-19 was actually known years before it emerged in late 2019. The meme also suggests such information is being censored on social media. “The patent of the covid testkit is hold by Richard A. Rothchild,” a meme shared on Instagram reads, incorrectly spelling the last name of the inventor, Rothschild. “It’s dated in 2020 but was filled 10/13/2015 and it’s called US2020279585(A1).” But the patent application in question was filed in May 2020 and describes a method of using biometric data to “to determine whether the user is suffering from a viral infection, such as COVID-19.” Under a section titled “Related U.S. Application Data,” the application makes note of a provisional application filed on Oct. 13, 2015. What that means, though, is that the patent is related to the provisional application that was filed years ago. They are not one in the same. A provisional application is essentially a placeholder for an intention to file a formal patent application, said Jonathan D’Silva, an assistant professor of clinical law and director of the Intellectual Property Law Clinic at Penn State University. Inventors may file a provisional application for different reasons, such as raising money or publicly disclosing their idea as they work on it, he said. The provisional application in 2015 was for a “System and Method for Using, Processing, and Displaying Biometric Data.” The 2020 patent application, meanwhile, was a “continuation-in-part” of a previous patent application, which means that new material was added, D’Silva said. In this case, the new material included the references to COVID-19. “Generally, you don’t have to guess what was in these other patent applications,” he said, since they’re publicly available. And in the earlier parent applications, “there was no mention of COVID-19.”

    — Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in Philadelphia contributed this report.

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    Post distorts facts on registered voters in Arizona

    CLAIM: Arizona has 9,871,525 registered voters but its population is 7,270,000.

    THE FACTS: The state had about 4 million registered voters, which is millions less than its population of about 7 million people. A popular Instagram post is using the erroneous claim to suggest potential election fraud in the state, which has been home to midterm election controversy. “9,871,525 is the number of registered voters in AZ according to FB,” the post reads, “AZ population is 7,270,000.” A caption with the post reads, “ballot harvesting?” — the pejorative term for ballot collection. The laws around dropping off ballots for other voters varies by state and in Arizona, only caregivers, family members or household members can drop off a ballot for someone else. But the post’s claim about registered voters in Arizona is false. Arizona actually logged 4,143,929 voters for the Nov. 8 midterm elections, according to data from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office. The total population in Arizona was 7,276,316, according to a July 2021 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau.

    — Angelo Fichera

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    Fabricated tweets originated from account impersonating Hallie Biden

    CLAIM: President Joe Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie Biden tweeted that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. She also tweeted that on election night, first lady Jill Biden phoned election workers to stop counting ballots and “rush in fake ballots.”

    THE FACTS: The account that made these tweets is “fraudulent,” said the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children, whose board Hallie Biden chairs. President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election, earning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. The fabricated tweets attributed to Hallie Biden — the widow of the president’s deceased son Beau Biden — resurfaced after circulating in past months. The fake tweets claim that on election night in 2020, Jill Biden was on the phone with “state legislators and the people who tabulate the vote” to stop the count and execute a deal to “rush in fake ballots.” “President Trump won that election and my entire family knows it,” one of the fabricated tweets reads. “Ms. Hallie Biden does not have a Twitter account,” the foundation said in an emailed statement. “Any account bearing her name is fraudulent.” An internet archive search for the Twitter account that posted the tweets, @HallieBiden, shows that it was suspended for violating the platform’s rules between late August and early September 2022. The platform had a policy against impersonation, which it has continued to prioritize under new ownership. Archived versions of the account show that it posted numerous false and unverified claims about the election being stolen and about Presidents Biden and Obama and their families.

    — Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.

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    Traffic plan in Oxfordshire, England, isn’t a ‘climate lockdown’

    CLAIM: The county of Oxfordshire, England, which includes the city of Oxford, is imposing a “climate lockdown” that will confine residents to their neighborhoods.

    THE FACTS: Oxfordshire has approved a plan to put “traffic filters” on some main roads, restricting drivers’ access during daytime hours and freeing up space for buses, cyclists and pedestrians. But car owners can apply for daylong permits to bypass the new rules, and many other vehicles are exempt. All parts of the county will remain accessible by car, officials said. Last week, local leaders in Oxfordshire voted to try a new traffic reduction system in an effort to reduce congestion in the county’s namesake city. Some on social media have since likened the scheme to stringent government COVID-19 containment policies. “UK. – Oxfordshire Council, part of the 15 minute city club, has passed a plan to trial a Climate lockdown,” tweeted one user, alongside a screenshot of an article warning that “residents will be confined to their local neighbourhood.” The plan “would control movements in a gated city, allowing only 100 car journeys in & out per car & monitoring all movements,” the tweet continued. But Oxfordshire’s “traffic filters” will not block access to any part of the city of Oxford or the rest of the county, let alone lock people in their neighborhoods, the county government told The Associated Press. “Everywhere in the city will still be accessible by car,” Paul Smith, spokesperson for the Oxfordshire County Council, wrote in an email. “Nobody will need permission from the county council to drive or leave their home.” The “traffic filters” are license plate recognition cameras, not physical barriers. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., drivers in private cars will be automatically fined if they cross through the filters without a permit. Motorists who live in Oxford will be able to apply for 100 daylong permits to drive through the filters per year. The “15 minute city club” referenced by one of the misleading tweets is an unrelated urban planning framework under which city residents would ideally be able to reach essential services within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their home. Officials with the city of Oxford have separately proposed pursuing these goals. But some on social media have incorrectly linked the two, suggesting the traffic rules will also bar residents from leaving their neighborhoods. The city and county emphasized in a joint statement that the traffic restrictions will not “be used to confine people” to a given area. “Everyone can go through all the filters at any time by bus, bike, taxi, scooter or walking,” the statement added. Many vehicles, like vans and motorcycles, are exempt from the new rules. Disabled drivers and first responders will likewise not be affected. Drivers who lack a permit will also still be able to access all of the city without being fined. They “might just need to use a different route or drive through the ring road to avoid the traffic filters,” Smith wrote.

    — Associated Press writer Graph Massara in San Francisco contributed this report.

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  • Democratic Sen. Warnock wins Georgia runoff against Walker

    Democratic Sen. Warnock wins Georgia runoff against Walker

    ATLANTA (AP) — Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election Tuesday, ensuring Democrats an outright majority in the Senate for the rest of President Joe Biden’s current term and capping an underwhelming midterm cycle for the GOP in the last major vote of the year.

    With Warnock’s second runoff victory in as many years, Democrats will have a 51-49 Senate majority, gaining a seat from the current 50-50 split with John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania. There will be divided government, however, with Republicans having narrowly flipped House control.

    “After a hard-fought campaign — or, should I say, campaigns — it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock, 53, told jubilant supporters who packed a downtown Atlanta hotel ballroom.

    “I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children,” declared Warnock, a Baptist pastor and his state’s first Black senator. “Georgia, you have been praying with your lips and your legs, your hands and your feet, your heads and your hearts. You have put in the hard work, and here we are standing together.”

    In last month’s election, Warnock led Walker by 37,000 votes out of almost 4 million cast, but fell short of the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff. The senator appeared to be headed for a wider final margin in Tuesday’s runoff, with Walker, a football legend at the University of Georgia and in the NFL, unable to overcome a bevy of damaging allegations, including claims that he paid for two former girlfriends’ abortions despite supporting a national ban on the procedure.

    “The numbers look like they’re not going to add up,” Walker, an ally and friend of former President Donald Trump, told supporters late Tuesday at the College Football Hall of Fame in downtown Atlanta. “There’s no excuses in life, and I’m not going to make any excuses now because we put up one heck of a fight.”

    Democrats’ Georgia victory solidifies the state’s place as a Deep South battleground two years after Warnock and fellow Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff won 2021 runoffs that gave the party Senate control just months after Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate in 30 years to win Georgia. Voters returned Warnock to the Senate in the same cycle they reelected Republican Gov. Brian Kemp by a comfortable margin and chose an all-GOP slate of statewide constitutional officers.

    Walker’s defeat bookends the GOP’s struggles this year to win with flawed candidates cast from Trump’s mold, a blow to the former president as he builds his third White House bid ahead of 2024.

    Democrats’ new outright majority in the Senate means the party will no longer have to negotiate a power-sharing deal with Republicans and won’t have to rely on Vice President Kamala Harris to break as many tie votes.

    National Democrats celebrated Tuesday, with Biden tweeting a photo of his congratulatory phone call to the senator. “Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected Ultra MAGAism, and … sent a good man back to the Senate,” Biden tweeted, referencing Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

    About 1.9 million runoff votes were cast in Georgia by mail and during early voting. A robust Election Day turnout added about 1.4 million more, slightly more than the Election Day totals in November and in 2020.

    Total turnout still trailed the 2021 runoff turnout of about 4.5 million. Voting rights groups pointed to changes made by state lawmakers after the 2020 election that shortened the period for runoffs, from nine weeks to four, as a reason for the decline in early and mail voting.

    Warnock emphasized his willingness to work across the aisle and his personal values, buoyed by his status as senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

    Walker benefited during the campaign from nearly unmatched name recognition from his football career, yet was dogged by questions about his fitness for office.

    A multimillionaire businessman, Walker faced questions about his past, including his exaggerations of his business achievements, academic credentials and philanthropic activities.

    In his personal life, Walker faced new attention on his ex-wife’s previous accounts of domestic violence, including details that he once held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. He has never denied those specifics and wrote of his violent tendencies in a 2008 memoir that attributed the behavior to mental illness.

    As a candidate, he sometimes mangled policy discussions, attributing the climate crisis to China’s “bad air” overtaking “good air” from the United States and arguing that diabetics could manage their health by “eating right,” a practice that isn’t enough for insulin-dependent diabetic patients.

    On Tuesday, Atlanta voter Tom Callaway praised the Republican Party’s strength in Georgia and said he’d supported Kemp in the opening round of voting. But he said he cast his ballot for Warnock because he didn’t think “Herschel Walker has the credentials to be a senator.”

    “I didn’t believe he had a statement of what he really believed in or had a campaign that made sense,” Callaway said.

    Walker, meanwhile, sought to portray Warnock as a yes-man for Biden. He sometimes made the attack in especially personal terms, accusing Warnock of “being on his knees, begging” at the White House — a searing charge for a Black challenger to level against a Black senator about his relationship with a white president.

    Warnock promoted his Senate accomplishments, touting a provision he sponsored to cap insulin costs for Medicare patients. He hailed deals on infrastructure and maternal health care forged with Republican senators, mentioning those GOP colleagues more than he did Biden or other Washington Democrats.

    Warnock distanced himself from Biden, whose approval ratings have lagged as inflation remains high. After the general election, Biden promised to help Warnock in any way he could, even if it meant staying away from Georgia. Bypassing the president, Warnock decided instead to campaign with former President Barack Obama in the days before the runoff election.

    Walker, meanwhile, avoided campaigning with Trump until the campaign’s final day, when the pair conducted a conference call Monday with supporters.

    Walker joins failed Senate nominees Dr. Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania, Blake Masters of Arizona, Adam Laxalt of Nevada and Don Bolduc of New Hampshire as Trump loyalists who ultimately lost races that Republicans once thought they would — or at least could — win.

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    Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy and Ron Harris contributed to this report.

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  • Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

    Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

    The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

    Discussion on prioritizing diversity drew such impassioned reaction at the committee gathering in Washington that DNC chair Jaime Harrison wiped away tears as committee member Donna Brazile suggested that Democrats had spent years failing to fight for Black voters: “Do you know what it’s like to live on a dirt road? Do you know what it’s like to try to find running water that is clean?”

    “Do you know what it’s like to wait and see if the storm is going to pass you by and your roof is still intact?” Brazile asked. “That’s what this is about.”

    The committee approved moving South Carolina’s primary to Feb. 3 and having Nevada and New Hampshire vote three days later. Georgia would go the following week and Michigan two weeks after that.

    The move marks a dramatic shift from the current calendar, which has had Iowa holding the first-in-the-nation caucuses since 1972, followed by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major overhaul of their primary calendar.

    The changes will still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely early next year, but it will almost certainly follow the rule-making committee’s lead.

    The revamped schedule could largely be moot for 2024 if Biden opts to seek a second term, but may remake Democratic presidential cycles after that. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides have begun making staffing discussions for his likely reelection campaign, even though no final decision has been made.

    The DNC also plans to revisit the primary calendar again before 2028 — meaning more changes could be coming before then.

    Biden wrote in a letter to rules committee members on Thursday that the party should scrap “restrictive” caucuses altogether because their rules on in-person participation can sometimes exclude working-class and other voters. He told also told party leaders privately that he’d like to see South Carolina go first to better ensure that voters of color aren’t marginalized as Democrats choose a presidential nominee.

    Four of the five states now poised to start the party’s primary are presidential battlegrounds, meaning the eventual Democratic winner would be able to lay groundwork in important general election locales. That’s especially true for Michigan and Georgia, which both voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020. The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1976.

    The first five voting states would be positioned to cast ballots before Super Tuesday, the day when much of the rest of the country holds primaries. That gives the early states outsize influence since White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting much of the rest of the country.

    Scott Brennan, a rules committee member from Iowa, said “small, rural states” like his “must have a voice in the presidential nominating process.”

    “Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party in newer generations,” Brennan said.

    The Republican National Committee has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential primary, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — have continued to frequently campaign there.

    House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat and one of Biden’s top supporters in Congress, said the president called him Thursday to inform him of his push to move his state up.

    “I didn’t ask to be first,” Clyburn said. “It was his idea to be first.”

    Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 boosted the candidate’s flagging presidential campaign just ahead of South Carolina’s primary, which he won big. That helped Biden shake off early losses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and eventually take the White House.

    “He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn said.

    Still, the vote by the rules committee has faced serious pushback, with some states vowing to ignore the changes altogether. That’s despite the panel approving language saying states could lose all of their delegates to the party’s national convention if they attempt to violate new rules.

    Iowa and New Hampshire have said laws in their states mandate them going before others, and they intend to abide by those, not DNC decrees. Only committee members from Iowa and New Hampshire objected to the proposal that passed Friday, with everyone else supporting it.

    Nevada, with its heavily Hispanic population, initially balked at sharing the second-place slot with New Hampshire, a state 2,500 miles away. Nevada committee member Artie Blanco’s voice cracked as she argued against the change.

    “If we want to build a strong relationship with Latinos,” Blanco said, “then Nevada must stand alone on a date and not have to share that date.”

    After more discussion, Blanco said later that she would support the new calendar. It was “not ideal” for her state to go the same day as another, she said, but “we accept what the will of the president is.”

    Harrison said the new slate of five early voting states will need to show they are working toward moving their primaries to those dates by early next year or risk losing their place. Some state legislatures set primary dates; others have their secretaries of state or the directors of their state parties do it.

    The DNC chair choked up after the vote as he talked about South Carolina once having been the site of the first attack of the Civil War and now being in line to lead off his party’s primary.

    “This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger,” Harrison said.

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    Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard contributed from Columbia, S.C.

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  • Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024

    Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024

    Before Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls.

    Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls.

    Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters. And while it might take months to figure out their full impact, GOP-backed voting laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions the way they did during the March primary in Texas.

    “The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

    Even though some voting experts’ worst fears didn’t materialize, some voters still experienced the types of routine foul-ups that happen on a small scale in every election. Many of those fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic voters.

    “Things went better than expected,” said Amir Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “But we have to say that with a caveat: Our expectations are low.”

    Badat said his organization recorded long lines at various polling places from South Carolina to Texas.

    There were particular problems in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Shortages of paper ballots and at least one polling location opening late led to long lines and triggered an investigation of the predominantly Democratic county by the state’s Republican authorities.

    The investigation is partly a reflection of how certain voting snafus on Election Day are increasingly falling on Republican voters, who have been discouraged from using mailed ballots or using early in-person voting by Trump and his allies. But it’s a very different problem from what Texas had during its March primary.

    Then, a controversial new voting law that increased the requirements on mail ballots led to about 13% of all such ballots being rejected, much higher compared with other elections. It was an ominous sign for a wave of new laws, passed after Trump’s loss to Biden and false claims about mail voting, but there have been no problems of that scale reported for the general election.

    Texas changed the design of its mail ballots, which solved many of the problems voters had putting identifying information in the proper place. Other states that added regulations on voting didn’t appear to have widespread problems, though voting rights groups and analysts say it will take weeks of combing through data to find out the laws’ impacts.

    The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law is compiling data to determine whether new voting laws in states such as Georgia contributed to a drop in turnout among Black and Hispanic voters.

    Preliminary figures show turnout was lower this year than in the last midterm election four years ago in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas — four states that passed significant voting restrictions since the 2020 election — although there could be a number of reasons why.

    “It’s difficult to judge, empirically, the kind of effect these laws have on turnout because so many factors go into turnout,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “You also have plenty of exaggeration on the Democratic side that any kind of change in voting laws are going to cause some major effect on the election, which has been proven not to be the case.”

    In Georgia, for example, Republicans made it more complicated to apply for mailed ballots after the 2020 election — among other things, requiring voters to include their driver’s license number or some other form of identification rather than a signature. That may be one reason why early in-person voting soared in popularity in the state this year, and turnout there dipped only slightly from 2018.

    Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, which advocates for tighter voting laws, said the fairly robust turnout in the midterm elections shows that fears of the new voting regulations were overblown.

    “We are on the back end of an election that was supposed to be the end of democracy, and it very much was not,” Snead said.

    Poll watchers were a significant concern of voting rights groups and election officials heading into Election Day. The representatives of the two major political parties are a key part of any secure election process, credentialed observers who can object to perceived violations of rules.

    But this year, groups aligned with conspiracy theorists who challenged Biden’s 2020 victory recruited poll watchers heavily, and some states reported that aggressive volunteers caused disruptions during the primary. But there were fewer issues in November.

    In North Carolina, where several counties had reported problems with poll watchers in the May primary, the state elections board reported 21 incidents of misbehavior at the polls in the general election, most during the early, in-person voting period and by members of campaigns rather than poll watchers. The observers were responsible for eight of the incidents.

    Voting experts were pleasantly surprised there weren’t more problems with poll watchers, marking the second general election in a row when a feared threat of aggressive Republican observers did not materialize.

    “This seems to be an increase over 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let down our guard.”

    One of the main organizers of the poll watcher effort was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran Republican election lawyer who joined Trump on a Jan. 2, 2020, call to Georgia’s top election official when the president asked that the state “find” enough votes to declare him the winner. Mitchell then launched an organization to train volunteers who wanted to keep an eye on election officials, which was seen as the driver of the poll watcher surge.

    Mitchell said the relatively quiet election is vindication that groups like hers were simply concerned with election integrity rather than causing disruptions.

    “Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be ‘Peaceful, Lawful, Honest,’” Mitchell wrote in the conservative online publication The Federalist. “Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process. It didn’t happen.”

    Voting rights groups say they’re relieved their fears didn’t materialize, but they say threats to democracy remain on the horizon for 2024 — especially with Trump announcing that he’s running again. Wendy Weiser, a voting and elections expert at the Brennan Center, agreed that things overall went smoother than expected.

    “By and large, sabotage didn’t happen,” Weiser said. “I don’t think that means we’re in the clear.”

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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  • Election conspiracists claim some races for local offices

    Election conspiracists claim some races for local offices

    As voting experts cheered the losses of election conspiracy theorists in numerous high-profile races on Election Day, Paddy McGuire prepared to hand over his office to one of them.

    McGuire, the auditor of Mason County in western Washington, lost his reelection bid to Steve Duenkel, a Republican who has echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Duenkel, who invited a prominent election conspiracist to the area and led a door-to-door effort to find voter fraud, defeated McGuire by 100 votes in the conservative-leaning county of 60,000.

    “There are all these stories about the election denier secretary of state candidates who lost in purple states,” said McGuire, referring to the state office that normally oversees voting. “But secretaries of state don’t count ballots. Those of us on the ground, whether we’re clerks or auditors or recorders, do.”

    Republicans who supported Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election lost bids for statewide offices that play key roles in overseeing voting in the six states that decided the last presidential election, as well as in races across the country.

    But an untold number won in local elections to control the positions that run on-the-ground election operations in counties, cities and townships across the country.

    “Without a doubt, election denial is alive and well, and this is a continuing threat,” said Joanna Lydgate of States United, a group highlighting the risk of election conspiracy theorists trying to take over election administration.

    Of the nine Republicans running for secretary of state who echoed Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election or supported his efforts to overturn its results, three won — all in Republican-dominated states.

    In Alabama, state Rep. Wes Allen isn’t even waiting to take office before making waves. Last week, he announced that once he becomes secretary of state he will withdraw from ERIC, a multistate database of voter registrations. The system is designed to notify states when voters need to be removed because they’ve relocated, but it’s become a target of election conspiracy theorists.

    Allen echoed those conspiracy theories during his campaign, but in a statement last week he instead said he was motivated by a desire to protect the privacy of Alabama voters. His call to exit ERIC drew a stark rebuke from the state’s outgoing secretary of state, John Merrill, a fellow Republican.

    “So, if Wes Allen plans to remove Alabama from its relationship with ERIC, how does he intend to maintain election security without access to the necessary data, legal authority, or capability to conduct proper voter list maintenance?” Merrill’s office said in a statement, referencing how ERIC flags when a voter has moved out of state and can be removed from Alabama’s rolls.

    In deeply conservative Wyoming, Republican Chuck Gray was the only candidate for secretary of state on the ballot. Once he won the GOP primary in August, his ascension was guaranteed.

    In Indiana, Diego Morales ousted the incumbent secretary of state, a fellow Republican, during the party’s nominating convention by echoing Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. He reined in his rhetoric during his successful general election campaign.

    Morales did not respond to a request for comment. He was the only one of 17 Republican election conspiracists in a group called the America First Secretary of State Coalition to win his general election race.

    The record is far murkier at the local level, where elections are actually run and ballots are counted.

    There are thousands of separate election offices in the U.S. In many states, elections are conducted by county offices overseen by clerks or auditors, though in some they are administered at the municipal level in cities or even townships.

    No organization tracks local election offices. The Democratic group Run for Something, alarmed at the prospect of election conspiracists occupying these posts, started an initiative to support candidates it dubbed “defenders of democracy” this year. It estimated 1,700 separate elections were being held either for posts to run elections, or for bodies such as county commissions that appoint election directors.

    Amanda Litman, co-founder of the organization, said the group was tracking 32 races where they supported candidates. Their candidate won in 17 races and lost in 12, while three have yet to be called. Most significantly, she said, they won eight races against election deniers, and lost only three.

    “It’s generally a good sign that when you’re able to make the stakes of the race about democracy, you win,” Litman said.

    Still, she added, it’s hard to track all the potential election conspiracy theorists who got into local office: “It’s a little bit unknowable.”

    Some prominent election conspiracy theorists did win local posts.

    In the Atlanta area, Bridget Thorne, who attended numerous meetings of the Fulton County Commission to talk about conspiracy theories revolving around the 2020 election, won a post on the commission. However, it’s dominated by Democrats, so she likely will have limited ability to bring pressure on the county’s elections department.

    In Washoe County, the swing area in Nevada that includes Reno, Republican Mike Clark won one of the five county commission seats. He told a local newspaper that “I don’t have any personal knowledge” of whether President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

    And in Mason County, Duenkel spread conspiracy theories about local and national elections. He helped lead a group of volunteers who went door-to-door checking for voters who didn’t live where they were registered, and claimed they had found thousands. A local television station retraced their steps and found numerous errors by the group.

    Still, every Republican on the ballot won Mason County this election. McGuire said he called Duenkel to congratulate him and left him a voice mail, but never got a call back. Duenkel also did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

    “He got more votes than me and he won,” McGuire said. “That’s what an election professional does — respect the will of the voters and stand behind the results, whether one is happy about the outcome or not.”

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    Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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    Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Trump bid nets tough reaction from some former media friends

    Trump bid nets tough reaction from some former media friends

    NEW YORK (AP) — Not all of his friends have abandoned him, but the harsh media reaction to former President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s seeking the top office again illustrates that if he wants his old job back, he has a lot of convincing to do.

    Just glance at some headlines: “Trump Shocks the World by Nearly Putting Us to Sleep,” said the RedState blog. “Old Mar-a-Lago Man Yells at Cloud,” said the American Conservative. “Donnie, Time to Go Away,” said Blue State Conservative. “Trump 3.0 is a Changed Man. He’s a Loser,” said the Washington Examiner.

    “No,” simply read the National Review headline.

    And those are conservative organizations.

    “I’ve been aggregating stories from right-wing media since 2017,” said Howard Polskin, founder of The Righting newsletter. “I’ve never seen Trump receive such negative coverage from these outlets. It’s not only negative, some of the headlines are downright insulting to him.”

    Consider Wednesday’s epic troll from the New York Post, the newspaper owned by conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch that has turned sharply against Trump since last week’s midterm elections.

    “Florida Man Makes Announcement,” was the headline running across the bottom of the front page, directing readers to an article on Page 26.

    “There is nobody who knows better than Rupert Murdoch that the way to upset Donald Trump is not to say his name,” Maggie Haberman, reporter for The New York Times and author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” said on CNN.

    The FoxNews.com website midday Wednesday was dominated by a picture of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, showered in red, white and blue confetti. It illustrated an article about the “enthusiastic response” DeSantis received at a GOP event.

    Readers needed to scroll down further for an article about Trump’s announcement.

    The Wall Street Journal, like Fox another Murdoch-controlled property, editorialized earlier in the week against another Trump run. But it played his announcement straight on Wednesday, giving it front-page play.

    Trump’s announcement coincided with Sean Hannity’s prime-time program on Fox News Channel, far and away the most popular media outlet for conservative viewers — and proof that Trump still has friends in powerful places and that there’s a long way to go before the next election. Hannity interrupted Trump two-thirds of the way through the announcement speech — not to abandon him, but to praise him.

    “This was an absolutely brilliant speech,” said Hannity guest Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor. “The best I’ve heard in a long time.”

    “It sounded presidential,” agreed analyst Joe Concha.

    Fox then returned to the speech.

    The Newsmax network aired Trump’s speech in full. Its website later wrote that in making the announcement, the former president was “turning a deaf ear to establishment calls to hold off or Democrat efforts to stop him.”

    CNN aired about a third of Trump’s speech live on Tuesday night before cutting it off. Analyst Tim Neftali said “this is TelePrompter Trump,” noting that he seemed to lack the energy he usually shows at rallies.

    “I have a feeling that the midterm is depressing him terribly,” Neftali said.

    MSNBC talked about Trump, but didn’t air the speech. Broadcast networks stuck with their regular programming.

    Mainstream news outlets pulled no punches. In the lead to its announcement story, The Washington Post described Trump as “the twice-impeached former president who refused to concede defeat and inspired a failed attempt to overthrow the 2020 election culminating in a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

    Similarly, the top to a story on NPR’s website said Trump “tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power.”

    A lengthy lead to The New York Times story said Trump’s “historically divisive presidency shook the pillars of the country’s Democratic institutions” and said he ignored the appeals of Republicans who blame him for the party’s poor showing in the midterms.

    In a news analysis, the Los Angeles Times said Trump “has reverted to a familiar tactic — meeting weakness with hubris.”

    Away from the coasts, the Houston Chronicle led the paper with an account of Trump’s announcement by The Associated Press. Neither the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and Las Vegas Sun in Nevada mentioned Trump on their front pages, and the Chicago Tribune teased an article inside the paper.

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  • Trump vs. DeSantis: A simmering rivalry bursts into view

    Trump vs. DeSantis: A simmering rivalry bursts into view

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have been on a collision course from the start.

    Eyeing the Florida governor as his most formidable foe within the Republican Party, the former president has sought to keep DeSantis in his place, often noting the role his endorsement played in lifting the relatively obscure congressman to the leader of one of America’s largest states.

    DeSantis, for his part, has long praised Trump and mimicked his style, but has notably declined to put aside his own White House ambitions as the former president prepares to seek his old job again. In the clearest sign of tension, the two held dueling Florida rallies in the final days of this year’s midterm elections. At his event, Trump unveiled his new derisive nickname for DeSantis, calling him Ron DeSanctimonious.

    The simmering rivalry between the Republican Party’s biggest stars enters a new, more volatile phase after the GOP’s underwhelming performance in what was supposed to be a blockbuster election year. DeSantis, who won a commanding reelection, is increasingly viewed as the party’s future, while Trump, whose preferred candidates lost races from Pennsylvania to Arizona, is widely blamed as a drag on the party.

    That leaves Trump in perhaps his most vulnerable position since he sparked the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As he moves forward with plans to announce a third presidential bid on Tuesday, Trump is turning to a playbook that has served him through decades of personal, financial and political turmoil: zeroing in on his enemies’ perceived weaknesses and hitting them with repeated attacks.

    “This is how President Trump fights,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime adviser who worked on Trump’s first campaign.

    In the days since Tuesday’s election, Trump has made racist remarks about Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another potential Republican presidential candidate, saying his name sounds Chinese. He’s blasted coverage from Fox News, which, like much of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, has shifted its tone on Trump in recent days. But much of his vitriol is directed at DeSantis, a sign of the threat Trump perceives from the Florida governor.

    In a lengthy statement, Trump knocked DeSantis as an “average REPUBLICAN governor with great Public Relations” and voiced fury that DeSantis has not publicly ruled out challenging him.

    The approach recalls Trump’s strategy in 2016, when he cleared a field of nearly a dozen rivals with a scorched-earth approach that included insulting his then-rival Ted Cruz’s wife’s appearance and claiming that his father may have played a role in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (Cruz later became a top ally in Congress.)

    His attacks only become more ruthless when he found himself against the wall. After the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump used vulgar language to brag of sexual assault, he responded by inviting the women who accused his rival Hillary Clinton’s husband, the former president, of rape and unwanted sexual advances to a presidential debate.

    “The strategy worked in 2016, no doubt about it. The difference now, and I say this with all respect for Ron DeSantis, he’s never entered the ring with a pugilist like Donald Trump,” said longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, who ran his 2016 primary campaign. “Mike Tyson has an old saying: Everyone had a plan until you get punched in the face.”

    The question is whether the insults will land differently when it comes to DeSantis. Among many of Trump’s most loyal backers, DeSantis is seen as a member of the same team. In interviews over the last year at Trump’s rallies and other conservative gatherings, Trump supporters often said they see DeSantis as Trump’s natural successor. Many voiced disbelief that the two men would ever run against each other because they seem so closely aligned.

    DeSantis’ allies expect the governor to make a presidential announcement after the state legislative session, which ends in May. Until then, they expect him to focus on governing and avoid engaging directly with Trump, as he has done this week.

    Regardless of when a formal presidential campaign is announced, DeSantis’ supporters are encouraging him to take advantage of the interest he’s generating at the moment. Some point to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a cautionary tale, noting he generated widespread attention in 2012 as a potential presidential candidate. He demurred, and by the time he sought the White House in 2016, the energy had shifted to Trump.

    “If you want to run for president, you’ve got to take your shot when it presents itself,” said Matt Caldwell, a vocal DeSantis ally in Florida.

    DeSantis won reelection by a nearly 20-point margin, performing well even in many longtime Democratic strongholds. That victory, his supporters say, demonstrates the extent of his political appeal beyond the GOP’s hardcore base, which stands in contrast with Trump. Caldwell noted that DeSantis’ coalition included Latinos and suburban voters, voting blocs that Trump has largely alienated.

    “The coalitions he’s built, the bridges he’s built, the voting groups that never touched a Republican before have now embraced Republicans and Republicanism in the form of the DeSantis administration,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist who served as DeSantis’ inaugural chairman and also raised millions for Trump. “He is certainly a leader and someone that I think has demonstrated the type of coalition building that we need to win back the White House.”

    Above all, Republican strategists say voters are looking for a winner.

    Conservative radio host Erick Erickson, who has vacillated on Trump over the years, said many of his listeners are ready for DeSantis.

    “They love Trump, thank him, wish him well and are ready to part ways,” Erickson said. “Trump voters like Trump because they like winners who fight. That’s exactly how they perceive DeSantis. The only guy between the two who is a loser is Trump.”

    Sensing weakness, some Republican establishment insiders have begun a series of preliminary conversations about how to use their resources to stop Trump in 2024, realizing that a crowded primary field might simply divide the electorate and allow Trump an easier path to the nomination. There is little sign the Republican establishment is ready or able to unify behind DeSantis or any single Trump alternative, however, even as some prominent Republicans begin to openly decry Trump as a political liability.

    Other potential 2024 candidates, meanwhile, are waiting in the wings, with some hoping Trump and DeSantis will bloody each other so badly that voters will be eager for a less pugilistic alternative.

    Sarah Longwell, a Trump critic who leads the Republican Accountability Project, said she’s for “anybody but Trump” in 2024, but she’s not necessarily excited about DeSantis.

    “I hope there is a robust Republican primary,” Longwell said. “I certainly want every Republican to run against Trump. But I also think the Republican Party can and should do better than a cheap imitation of Trump, which is what I think Ron DeSantis is.”

    Next week, DeSantis will be among several 2024 Republican prospects gathering in Nevada for a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. The guest list includes former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and term-limited Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. Trump declined an invitation.

    The Republican Jewish Coalition’s primary benefactor, Miriam Adelson, has vowed to stay neutral in the 2024 Republican primary, even after the group aggressively supported Trump in the last election.

    Hogan, a fierce Trump critic for years, is increasingly expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination himself.

    “Going forward, there is going to be a battle between whether we are the party that stands for common-sense conservative leadership, or whether we are the party than answers to the whims of one person,” Hogan told The Associated Press. “I am sick and tired of the losing and grifting. It’s time to get back to winning.”

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. And learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections.

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  • Why was I given a provisional ballot?

    Why was I given a provisional ballot?

    Why was I given a provisional ballot?

    Provisional ballots are issued to voters at a polling location when there are eligibility questions that prevent them from casting a regular ballot on Election Day.

    “They are a fail-safe method to ensure that everyone who is registered to vote gets to cast a ballot,” says Charles Stewart III, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Lab in Boston.

    The ballots, which are sometimes known as “challenge” or “affidavit” ballots, are currently offered in all but three states — Idaho, Minnesota and New Hampshire. Those states, however, offer same-day registration, which allows residents to both register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day.

    Each state sets its own guidelines for when provisional ballots are required and how they’re processed.

    The most common reasons they’re offered include when an election official challenges a voter’s eligibility or when a voter’s name isn’t found on the list of eligible voters, they lack proper identification or do not reside in the precinct in which they’re attempting to vote, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which publishes a nationwide analysis following every general election.

    Provisional ballots are set aside for review after polls close on Election Day, but the delay in counting them has led to confusion and allegations of voter fraud in recent elections.

    Former President Donald Trump and other election skeptics, for example, questioned why vote counts in some states continued to grow long after polls closed in 2020.

    Some have also suggested that being required to fill out a provisional ballot means someone else has already fraudulently voted in your place and that your vote won’t ultimately be counted.

    But all provisional ballots are reviewed by election officials in every election, says the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group that serves lawmakers across the country. If a ballot is deemed legitimate, it will be counted, regardless of how wide the margin of victory in an election might be, the organization said.

    Election officials are also required to inform voters whether their provisional ballot was counted and the reason if it’s rejected. This is usually in the form of a toll-free telephone number or an online tool.

    As provisional ballots are verified, they’re added to the final tally, Stewart said.

    “If all you do is compare the vote totals from election night to the totals with the provisional ballots added, it might look like someone has been stuffing the ballot box,” he said in an email. “Instead, people who voted on Election Day are simply having their vote counted after Election Day.”

    Provisional ballots represent an increasingly small share of all votes cast, comprising less than 1% of all votes in 2020, down from 1.4% in 2016 and 1.7% in 2012, the two most recent presidential elections, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s most recent analysis.

    Overall, roughly 1.7 million provisional ballots were cast nationwide in 2020, of which about 78% were ultimately counted and about 21% were rejected, the commission found.

    ___

    The AP is answering your questions about elections in this series. Submit them at: FactCheck@AP.org.

    What happens if a ballot is damaged or improperly marked?

    How do states ensure dead people’s ballots aren’t counted?

    Can noncitizens vote in U.S. elections?

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  • Mishaps, distrust spur Election Day misinformation

    Mishaps, distrust spur Election Day misinformation

    Voters casting ballots in Tuesday’s pivotal midterms grappled with misleading claims about glitchy election machines and delayed results, the final crest of a wave of misinformation that’s expected to linger long after the last votes are tallied.

    In Arizona, news of snags with vote tabulators spawned baseless claims about vote rigging, which quickly jumped from fringe sites popular with the far-right to mainstream platforms. It didn’t matter that local officials were quick to report the problem and debunk the theory.

    In Pennsylvania, election officials pushed back on baseless claims that delays in counting the vote equate to election fraud. But the conspiracy theory spread anyway, thanks in part to former President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and other prominent Republicans who have amplified the idea.

    There was lots of other misinformation too: false claims about ballots cast by non-citizens or pre-filled registration forms; hoaxes about voting machines and tales of suspicious Wi-Fi networks at election offices. In some cases, the false claims provoked responses including calls for violence against local officials.

    The states and facts involved were all different, but most of the misinformation aimed at voters this year had the same drumbeat: American elections can no longer be trusted.

    “People were looking for things to go wrong to prove their preconceived notions that the election was rigged,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan organization that tracks misinformation. ”And there are always things that go wrong.”

    If 2020 is any guide, many of the claims the emerged Tuesday will persist for days, weeks and even years, despite efforts by election officials, journalists and others to debunk them.

    There was a sharp uptick in social media posts Monday and Tuesday claiming Democrats would use delays in vote tallying to rig elections throughout the country, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a firm that tracks disinformation.

    Some of the posts originated on websites popular with Trump supporters and adherents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.

    The increased popularity of mail ballots is one reason why results can take a while. In key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, election officials cannot begin counting mail ballots until Election Day, guaranteeing delays.

    “We have never certified an election on election night,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a non-profit group that has been tracking election misinformation. “This is nothing new. It’s just people trying to undermine faith in elections.”

    Misinformation about voting and elections has been blamed for a widening political divide, decreased trust in democracy and an increased threat of political violence like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    The same false claims fueled the campaigns of candidates who reject the outcome of the 2020 election, including Republican gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. Several GOP nominees for secretary of state positions overseeing elections have also said they supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power.

    Though not on the ballot, Trump helped spread many of the leading false claims on Tuesday. Using his TruthSocial platform, he amplified the conspiracy theories from Pennsylvania and Arizona. “Another big voter tabulation problem in Arizona,” he wrote. “Sound familiar???”

    The false claims seen in 2022 are likely to stick around and become part of the misinformation facing voters in the presidential election, said Morgan Wack, a University of Washington disinformation researcher and part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaborative research group focused on election misinformation.

    “We will almost certainly see this again in 2024,” Wack said.

    Most major social media platforms announced plans to combat election misinformation and provide voting resources to users. It was a different story on fringe platforms like Gab, where misinformation and even threats of violence were easy to spot Tuesday.

    Twitter was of particular concern to disinformation researchers given its new owner, Elon Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist who has spread misinformation himself.

    One analysis of bots and fake accounts on Twitter found a significant increase in discussion of election fraud in the week before the election. The number of automated or fake accounts posting about “stolen elections” doubled in the sample reviewed by researchers at Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm.

    Officials with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Tuesday they were monitoring for foreign attempts to sow doubt about the election but saw no evidence the efforts were paying off.

    Russia, China and Iran have all mounted disinformation operations targeting U.S. politics and will likely increase their efforts ahead of 2024, according to Craig Terron, director of global issues at Insikt Group, a division of the Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

    Terron said the Kremlin likely sees such meddling as justified, given U.S. support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.

    “Immediately after the US midterm elections, and into 2023 and beyond, the Russian government will very likely attempt to plan and execute malign influence efforts,” Terron wrote in an email to the AP. “In particular, we expect to see campaigns aimed at undermining the next two years of President Biden’s term.”

    ___

    AP writer Haleluya Hadero in New York contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of misinformation at https://apnews.com/hub/misinformation. Follow the AP for full coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics. And check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms.

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  • Group can monitor Arizona ballot drop boxes, US judge rules

    Group can monitor Arizona ballot drop boxes, US judge rules

    PHOENIX (AP) — A federal judge Friday refused to bar a group from monitoring outdoor ballot boxes in Arizona’s largest county where watchers have shown up armed and in ballistic vests, saying to do so could violate the monitors’ constitutional rights.

    U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi said the case remained open and that the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans could try again to make its argument against a group calling itself Clean Elections USA. A second plaintiff, Voto Latino, was removed from the case.

    Liburdi concluded that “while this case certainly presents serious questions, the Court cannot craft an injunction without violating the First Amendment.” The judge is a Trump appointee and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization.

    Local and federal law enforcement have been alarmed by reports of people, including some who were masked and armed, watching 24-hour ballot boxes in Maricopa County — Arizona’s most populous county — and rural Yavapai County as midterm elections near. Some voters have complained alleging voter intimidation after people watching the boxes took photos and videos, and followed voters.

    Arizona law states electioneers and monitors must remain 75-foot (23-meter) from a voting location.

    “Plaintiffs have not provided the Court with any evidence that Defendants’ conduct constitutes a true threat,” the judge wrote. “On this record, Defendants have not made any statements threatening to commit acts of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

    The Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans said it was disappointed.

    “We continue to believe that Clean Elections USA’s intimidation and harassment is unlawful,” it said, shortly before filing an appeal.

    Liburdi issued his ruling two days after a hearing on the first of two similar cases. The attorney for Clean Elections USA had argued that such a broad restraining order would be unconstitutional.

    A second lawsuit involving charges of voter intimidation at drop boxes in Arizona’s Yavapai County has since been merged with the first one.

    Sheriff’s deputies are providing security around the two outdoor drop boxes in Maricopa County after a pair of people carrying guns and wearing bulletproof vests showed up at a box in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. The county’s other 24-hour outdoor drop box is at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in downtown Phoenix, which is now surrounded by a chain link fence.

    Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, has called on voters to immediately report any intimidation to police and file a complaint with his office. Arizona’s secretary of state this week said her office has received six cases of potential voter intimidation to the state attorney general and the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as a threatening email sent to the state elections director.

    The U.S. attorney’s office in Arizona has vowed to prosecute any violations of federal law but said local police were at the “front line in efforts to ensure that all qualified voters are able to exercise their right to vote free of intimidation or other election abuses.”

    “We will vigorously safeguard all Arizonans’ rights to freely and lawfully cast their ballot during the election,” the office said Wednesday. “As the several election threat-related cases pending federal felony charges from alleged criminal activity arising out of our State show, acts which cross the line will not go unaddressed.”

    Tensions were heightened Friday afternoon outside the drop box in Mesa, where one voter drove up on a motorcycle, deposited his ballot, then made an obscene gesture at an Associated Press photographer and a local TV news crew stationed in a parking lot across the street. The journalists identified themselves as working news media to a second man who drove by later in an SUV. He told them he was filming them and would report them to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

    Meanwhile, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, an Arizona state agency, voted unanimously Thursday to have its legal counsel seek a court order if necessary to stop the monitoring group from using the “Clean Elections” name. The commission created in 1998 to provide voters with nonpartisan elections information said it has been barraged with angry calls from people confusing it with the monitoring group.

    The second lawsuit that was folded into the first case involves ballot boxes in Arizona’s Yavapai County, where the League of Women Voters alleges voters have been intimidated by Clean Elections USA, along with The Lions of Liberty and the Yavapai County Preparedness team, which are associated with the far-right anti-government group Oath Keepers.

    Luke Cilano, a Lions of Liberty board member, said the organization had dropped its “Operation Drop Box” initiative on Wednesday “due to being lumped in with people who don’t adhere to the law and our rules of engagement.”

    Cilano said the “official stand down order” to all members was in response to the pending litigation.

    “Our goal is not to scare people and keep them from voting,” he said. “We love our country very much.”

    Cilano said The Lions of Liberty is in no way associated with Clean Elections USA. He said his group is connected to the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, but the team was not involved in ballot box monitoring.

    Similar groups around the United States have embraced a film that has been discredited called “2000 Mules” that claims people were paid to travel among drop boxes and stuff them with fraudulent ballots during the 2020 presidential vote.

    There’s no evidence for the notion that a network of Democrat-associated ballot “mules” has conspired to collect and deliver ballots to drop boxes, either in the 2020 presidential vote or in the upcoming midterm elections.

    ——

    Associated Press photographer Ross D. Franklin contributed to this report.

    ____

    Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

    Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

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  • Hand vote count stops, but Nevada county vows to try again

    Hand vote count stops, but Nevada county vows to try again

    LAS VEGAS (AP) — A rural Nevada county roiled by voting machine conspiracy theories stopped its unprecedented effort Friday to hand count ballots cast in advance of Election Day.

    But Nye County officials vowed to reshape their plan and seek another go-ahead from the Nevada Supreme Court, after justices ruled late Thursday that counting methods used this week violated rules they set to prevent the county from allowing early disclosure of election results.

    “Yesterday’s Supreme Court order requires us to make some changes to our hand count process,” Nye County officials said in a statement issued Friday that promised to “resume as soon as our plan is in compliance with the court’s order and approved by the secretary of state.”

    No counting had been scheduled Saturday or Sunday, county spokesman Arnold Knightly said.

    Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada said Friday they stood ready to challenge any effort to restart the hand tallies next week. They don’t believe there’s any hand-counting scenario that would pass legal muster.

    “Our position has always been that a general election is not an appropriate avenue for conducting experiments with election processes and it has become increasingly clear that there is no path forward for this hand counting process under the law,” said Sadmira Ramic, ACLU of Nevada’s voting rights attorney

    Volunteers spent hours Wednesday and Thursday hand counting hundreds of mail ballots before the court issued a unanimous three-page opinion siding with objections raised by the ACLU.

    The civil rights advocacy group accused Nye County officials of failing to prevent public release of early results before polls close to in-person voting Nov. 8. It argued that reading candidates’ names aloud from ballots within hearing distance of public observers violated the court rule.

    On Wednesday, The Associated Press and other observers, including some from the ACLU, watched as volunteers were sworn in and split into groups in six different rooms at a Nye County office building in Pahrump, 60 miles (96 kilometers) west of Las Vegas.

    Some teams the AP observed spent about three hours each counting 50 ballots. Mismatches, where all three talliers didn’t have the same number of votes for a candidate, led to recounts.

    Immediately following the court’s Thursday decision, Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske and Mark Wlaschin, the state’s top election officials, ordered the count to stop until after polls close on Nov. 8.

    “No alternative hand-counting process may proceed,” Cegavske said a letter to interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf, until the counting method complies with the Supreme Court’s Oct. 21 order.

    Cegavske has been a GOP critic of voter-fraud conspiracy theories that fueled hand tallying of ballots in the state. She defended results of the 2020 election as reliable and accurate, was censured by her party for her stance, and is not seeking reelection.

    The sprawling county between Las Vegas and Reno, is home to about 50,000 residents, including about 33,000 registered voters. The county reported receiving nearly 4,700 ballots as of Wednesday.

    Ballots cast early — in-person or by mail — are typically counted by machine on Election Day, with results released after polls close. In most places, hand counts are used after an election on a limited basis to ensure machine tallies are accurate.

    Nye County commissioners voted to hand-count all ballots after complaints by residents echoing nearly two years of conspiracy theories related to voting machines and false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

    Trump won 69% of the vote in Nye County, but Democratic President Joe Biden won Nevada by about 2.4%.

    Kampf plans to use Dominion voting machines as the primary vote tabulators for this election, but has floated the idea of scrapping the machines in future elections. The effort to begin the hand count of mail ballots is a nod to the time the process takes and a bid to meet a state certification deadline on Nov. 17.

    Nye is the most prominent county in the U.S. to change its vote-counting process in reaction to the conspiracy theories — even though there has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of machines in the 2020 election, including in Nevada. The decision prompted the long-time county clerk to resign. Kampf was appointed to replace her.

    Nevada has one of the most closely watched U.S. Senate races in the country, as well as high-stakes contests for governor and the office that oversees elections.

    The Republican nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, has repeated unsubstantiated election claims and said he wants to spread hand-counting to every Nevada county.

    Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, vowed to continue to challenge any hand-counting attempt in Nye County or elsewhere.

    “While Nye County’s actions might be a sign of things to come, our response to their actions is also a sign of things to come,” Haseebullah said. “We will combat all efforts to destroy our democracy up and down Nevada. We welcome the fight.”

    ____

    Associated Press writers Scott Sonner and Gabe Stern in Reno, Nevada, contributed to this report. Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Stern on Twitter: @gabestern326

    ____

    Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ___

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  • Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon

    Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon

    The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.

    David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.

    DePape was arrested at the Pelosi home early Friday. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expected to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elder abuse.

    Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

    “David was never violent that I seen and was never in any trouble although he was very reclusive and played too much video games,” Gene DePape said.

    He said he hasn’t seen his stepson since 2003 and tried to get in touch with him several times over the years without success.

    “In 2007, I tried to get in touch but his girlfriend hung up on me when I asked to talk to him,“ Gene DePape said.

    David DePape was known in Berkeley as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to be clothed in public.

    Gene DePape said the girlfriend whom his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a child with a different woman, his stepfather said.

    Photographs published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday identified DePape frolicking nude outside city hall with dozens of others at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not respond Friday to calls or emails.

    A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian flat in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a talk show on local public-access TV called “Uncensored 9/11,” in which she appeared naked and pushed conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”

    A pair of web blogs posted in recent months online under the name David DePape contained rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities and global elites.

    An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.

    “Big Brother has deemed doing your own research as a thought crime,” read a post that appeared to blend references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

    In an Aug. 25 entry titled “Gun Rights,” the poster wrote: “You no longer have rights. Your basic human rights hinder Big Brothers ability to enslave and control you in a complete and totalizing way.”

    The web hosting service WordPress removed one of the sites Friday afternoon for violating its terms of service.

    On a different site, someone posting under DePape’s name repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real and displayed an illustration of a zombified Hillary Clinton dining on human flesh.

    There appeared to be no direct posts about Pelosi, but there were entries defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West who recently made antisemitic comments.

    In other posts, the writer said Jews helped finance Hitler’s political rise in Germany and suggested an antisemitic plot was involved in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

    In a Sept. 27 post, the writer said any journalists who denied Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

    ___

    AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington and Breaking News Investigative Reporter Bernard Condon from New York. Reporters Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

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  • Democrats cautiously campaign on Jan. 6, democracy threats

    Democrats cautiously campaign on Jan. 6, democracy threats

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaking last year on the House floor, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan angrily bemoaned the lack of bipartisanship after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and said Republican opposition to an investigative commission was a “slap in the face” to the law enforcement officers assaulted by then-President Donald Trump’s supporters that day.

    Ryan has trodden more carefully this year as he runs for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, a onetime battleground state that has trended rightward in the Trump era. At a recent debate, his Republican opponent, JD Vance, charged that Ryan has an “obsession” with the insurrection and called the Jan. 6 House committee’s investigation a “political hit job” on Trump.

    “I don’t want to talk about this any more than anybody else,” Ryan shot back. “I want to talk about jobs. I want to talk about wages. I want to talk about pensions … but, my God, you’ve got to look into it.”

    Ryan’s cautiousness is a reflection of the political divide that remains nearly two years after the violent Capitol insurrection spurred by Trump’s lies of a stolen 2020 presidential election. Many Republicans still falsely believe the vote count was rigged against Trump, and GOP lawmakers have repeatedly downplayed the violent attack, which left at least five people dead, injured more than 100 police officers and sent lawmakers running for their lives.

    But some Democrats’ reluctance to talk about Jan. 6 on the campaign trail is an acknowledgement that voters are primarily focused on pocketbook issues, like gas prices and rising inflation, in a midterm year that is typically a referendum on the president in power. That dynamic has created a delicate balance for Democrats, especially those like Ryan who are running in more Republican-leaning areas or swing states.

    “The public sees this as something in the past, whereas they are dealing with inflation right now,” says GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who has conducted focus groups on the Jan. 6 attack. If you can’t afford to feed your family or fill your tank with gas, Luntz says, “arguing something that happened two years ago isn’t prone to be high on your list.”

    Still, some candidates are betting that voters will care.

    Independent Evan McMullin, a former Republican running against Utah Sen. Mike Lee, has made the issue a central part of his campaign. In a debate this month, McMullin said Lee had committed a “betrayal of the American republic” after it was revealed that the GOP senator had texted with White House aides ahead of the insurrection about finding ways for Trump to overturn his defeat. Lee demanded an apology, which McMullin did not offer, and noted that he had voted with most senators to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

    McMullin also appeared with Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel, at an event in Salt Lake City. Speaking to an audience that included supporters carrying signs that read “Country First,” the two men framed the midterms as a fight for democracy.

    “If you’re Mike Lee, it’s still acceptable to say that Donald Trump is the future of the party and the leader of the party,” Kinzinger said.

    In a debate earlier this month, Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., defended her work as a member of the House Jan. 6 panel by saying it is “the most important thing that I have done or ever will do” professionally, beyond her military service. Her campaign later ran an ad showing footage of her opponent, Republican Jen Kiggans, refusing to say whether Biden was fairly elected.

    “I’m not your candidate if you stand with insurrectionists,” Luria said at the debate. “I’m not your candidate if you’d rather have Donald J. Trump as president again.”

    In Wisconsin, Democrat Brad Pfaff is struggling against his opponent, Republican Derrick Van Orden, but is betting that more people will vote against Van Orden if they find out that he was among the Trump supporters outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. One Pfaff ad shows images of the violence and a veteran criticizing Van Orden.

    Another ad in Wisconsin targets Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who is running for reelection and has repeatedly downplayed the violence of the attack. “Ron Johnson is making excuses for rioters who tried to overthrow our government,” a police officer says in the ad, paid for by Senate Majority PAC, which is associated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

    Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says that the democracy issue has proven salient among Democratic voters, particularly among older and suburban women who have less favorable views of Trump. “They are talking about it as a get-out-the-vote issue,” Lake said.

    John Zogby, also a Democratic pollster, agrees that the threat to democracy is a top-tier issue for many Democrats. But he has seen less interest among the independent voters who could decide the most competitive elections.

    “I don’t know that it gains any new voters for Democrats,” Zogby says.

    Like Ryan, the chair of the House spending subcommittee that oversees the Capitol Police, some Democrats who have been outspoken about the insurrection while in Washington have been talking about it less on the campaign trail.

    New Hampshire Rep. Annie Kuster and Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee have spoken about their post-traumatic stress from being trapped in the House gallery as rioters tried to beat down the doors on Jan. 6. Now in competitive reelection races, neither has focused much on the attack or threats to democracy — though both have occasionally mentioned it.

    Kildee noted that police protected him that day in a debate against his opponent, Republican Paul Junge, as he spoke about his opposition to efforts to defund law enforcement. “People wearing uniforms saved my life on Jan. 6,” Kildee said. “I know what the police can do.”

    Answering a question on support for Ukraine, Kuster said that she thinks the United States also needs to fight for democracy at home and that she is a “survivor, witness, victim of the insurrection on Jan. 6 in our Capitol.”

    Vermont Rep. Peter Welch, who was trapped alongside Kuster and Kildee and others that day, has chosen a different strategy as he runs for Senate in his liberal-leaning state. He talks about his experience often.

    Asked about the committee’s work in a recent debate, Welch told the audience that “I was there” and that it was a violent assault on the peaceful transfer of power.

    “A big issue in this election is the American people coming together and fighting to preserve that democracy that has served us so well,” Welch said.

    His opponent, Republican Gerald Malloy, responded that criminals should be held to account but that Americans have a right to peacefully assemble.

    “I am not calling this an insurrection,” Malloy said.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Sam Metz in Salt Lake City; Tom Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; Kathy McCormick in Concord, N.H.; and Will Weissert and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. And check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterm.

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  • Obama, campaigning in Georgia, warns of threats to democracy

    Obama, campaigning in Georgia, warns of threats to democracy

    COLLEGE PARK, Ga. (AP) — Former President Barack Obama returned to the campaign trail Friday in Georgia, using his first stop on a multi-state tour to frame the 2022 midterm elections as a referendum on democracy and to urge voters not to see Republicans as an answer to their economic woes.

    It was a delicate balance, as the former president acknowledged the pain of inflation and tried to explain why President Joe Biden and Democrats shouldn’t take all the blame as they face the prospects of losing narrow majorities in the House and Senate when votes are tallied Nov. 8. But Obama argued that Republicans who are intent on making it harder for people to vote and — like former President Donald Trump — are willing to ignore the results, can’t be trusted to care about Americans’ wallets either.

    “That basic foundation of our democracy is being called into question right now,” Obama told more than 5,000 voters gathered outside Atlanta. “Democrats aren’t perfect. I’m the first one to admit it. … But right now, with a few notable exceptions, most of the GOP and a whole bunch of these candidates are not even pretending that the rules apply to them.”

    With Biden’s approval ratings in the low 40s, Democrats hope Obama’s emergence in the closing weeks of the campaign boosts the party’s slate in a tough national environment. He shared the stage Friday with Sen. Raphael Warnock, who faces a tough reelection fight from Republican Herschel Walker, and Stacey Abrams, who is trying to unseat Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who defeated her narrowly four years ago.

    Obama will travel Saturday to Michigan and Wisconsin, followed by stops next week in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

    For Obama personally, the campaign blitz is an opportunity to do something he was unable to do in two midterms during his presidency: help Democrats succeed in national midterms when they already hold the White House. For his party, it’s an opportunity to leverage Obama’s rebound in popularity since his last midterm defeats in 2014. Their hope is that the former president can sell arguments that Biden, his former vice president, has struggled to land.

    Biden was in Pennsylvania on Friday with Vice President Kamala Harris and plans to be in Georgia next week, potentially in a joint rally with Obama and statewide Democratic candidates. But he has not been welcomed as a surrogate for many Democratic candidates across the country, including Warnock.

    “Obama occupies a rare place in our politics today,” said David Axelrod, who helped shape Obama’s campaigns from his days in the Illinois state Senate through two presidential elections. “He obviously has great appeal to Democrats. But he’s also well-liked by independent voters.”

    Obama tried to show off that reach Friday. The first Black president drew a hero’s welcome from a majority Black audience, and he offered plenty of applause lines for Democrats. But he saved plenty of his argument, especially on the economy, for moderates, independents and casual voters, including a defense of Biden, who Obama said is “fighting for you every day.”

    He called inflation “a legacy of the pandemic,” the resulting supply chain disruption and the Ukraine war’s effects on global oil markets — a sweeping retort to Republican attempts to cast sole blame on Democrats’ spending bills.

    “What is their answer? … They want to give the rich tax cuts,” Obama said of the GOP. “That’s their answer to everything. When inflation is low, let’s cut taxes. When unemployment is high, let’s cut taxes. If there was an asteroid heading toward Earth, they would all get in a room and say, you know what we need? We need tax cuts for the wealthy. How’s that going to help you?”

    Biden has sought to make similar arguments, and was buoyed this week with news of 2.6% economic growth in the third quarter after two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

    Yet Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist, said Obama is better positioned to convince voters who haven’t decided whom to vote for or whether to vote at all.

    “If it’s just a straight-up referendum on Democrats and the economy, then we’re screwed,” Smith said. “But you have to make the election a choice between the two parties, crystallize the differences.”

    Obama, she said, did that in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections “by winning over a lot of working-class white voters and others we don’t always think about as part of the ‘Obama coalition.’”

    Obama left office in January 2017 with a 59% approval rating, and Gallup measured his post-presidential approval at 63% the following year, the last time the organization surveyed former presidents. That’s considerably higher than his ratings in 2010, when Democrats lost control of the House in a midterm election that Obama called a “shellacking.” In his second midterm election four years later, the GOP regained control of the Senate.

    Still, Bakari Sellers, a prominent Democratic commentator, said Obama’s broader popularity shouldn’t obscure how much his “special connection” with Black voters and other non-white voters can help Democrats.

    The Atlanta rally brought Obama together with Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator in Georgia history, and Abrams, who’s vying to become the first Black female governor in American history.

    In Michigan, Obama will campaign in Detroit with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is being challenged by Republican Tudor Dixon, and in Wisconsin he’ll be in Milwaukee with Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, who is trying to oust Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. Each city is where the state’s Black population is most concentrated. Obama’s Pennsylvania swing will include Philadelphia, another city where Democrats must get a strong turnout from Black voters to win competitive races for Senate and governor.

    With the Senate now split 50-50 between the two major parties and Vice President Kamala Harris giving Democrats the deciding vote, any Senate contest could end up deciding which party controls the chamber for the next two years. Among the tightest Senate battlegrounds, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are three where Black turnout could be most critical to Democratic fortunes.

    Axelrod said Obama’s turnabout from his own midterm floggings to being Democrats’ leading surrogate is, in part, a rite of passage for any former president. “Most of them — maybe not President Trump, but most of them — are viewed more favorably after they leave office,” Axelrod said.

    Notably, during Obama’s presidency, former President Bill Clinton was the in-demand heavyweight surrogate, especially for moderates trying to survive Republican surges in 2010 and 2014.

    Axelrod said Obama and Clinton have a similar approach.

    “What Clinton and Obama share is a kind of unique ability to colloquialize complicated political arguments of the time, just talk in common-sense terms,” Axelrod said. “They’re storytellers.”

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    Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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    This story has been corrected to show Abrams, not Kemp, is trying to unseat the governor.

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