Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s presidential election victory in Brazil has spurred renewed hope for the future of the world’s largest rainforest, as the left-wing leader pledged to combat the climate crisis and reverse some of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s policies.
Shortly after being declared the winner on Sunday evening, Da Silva, better known as Lula, said “Brazil is ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis,” especially by protecting the Amazon rainforest.
“In our government, we were able to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent. Now, let’s fight for zero deforestation,” Lula, who previously served as president from 2003 to 2010, wrote on Twitter.
Brazil’s president-elect had campaigned on a promise to protect the Amazon, which is critical to the global fight against climate change and has seen years of increased destruction under Bolsonaro’s administration.
The far-right former army captain had pushed for more mining and other development projects in the Amazon, saying they would stimulate the economy.
But rights groups had accused Bolsonaro of gutting Brazil’s environmental and Indigenous protection agencies, leading to an uptick in deforestation and violence across the sprawling Amazon region.
Greenpeace Brazil on Monday called on Lula to follow through on his campaign promises and rebuild the government agencies tasked with protecting the environment, among other measures it deemed “urgent”.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged Lula to put human rights at the centre of his incoming government’s policies, including by strengthening “law enforcement to fight the destruction of the Amazon, and threats and attacks against forest defenders”.
Indigenous leaders had for years raised alarm over the threats their communities face in the South American nation, particularly in areas with little government oversight that farmers, miners, poachers and others are seeking to control and exploit.
Brazil is home to more than 800,000 Indigenous people from over 300 distinct groups, according to data from the last census in 2010 cited by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) rights group.
The Indigenous Missionary Council recorded 305 cases of “possessory invasions, illegal exploitation of resources and damage to property” on Indigenous territories last year, affecting 226 Indigenous lands in 22 Brazilian states. That was up from 109 such incidents in 2018, the year before Bolsonaro took office – a 180 percent increase.
Andrea Carvalho, a senior research assistant at HRW in Brazil, told Al Jazeera earlier this year that the escalation of attacks on Indigenous people and their lands “is driven by disastrous policies related to the protection of the environment and Indigenous rights”.
Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate website, said in a report last month that a Lula election victory could see deforestation drop by 89 percent in the Brazilian Amazon over the next decade – avoiding the destruction of approximately 75,960 square kilometres (29,328 square miles) of rainforest by 2030.
Lula could face tough political opposition in areas where Amazon deforestation is happening, however, while he also must deal with the difficulty of policing vast areas.
Bolsonaro had been backed by major business interests, including loggers, miners and other groups exploiting Brazil’s natural resources, throughout his administration as well as in this year’s elections.
“Agribusiness has been clearly adopting an anti-Lula stance,” Roberto Ramos, a social sciences professor at Roraima Federal University, told the Reuters news agency.
On Monday, truckers and other protesters blocked highways in several Brazilian states in an apparent protest over Bolsonaro’s election defeat.
Burning tyres, as well as vehicles such as trucks, cars and vans were blocking several points in the central-western agricultural state of Mato Grosso, which largely supports Bolsonaro, reported the company that manages the highway in the state.
Road blockages were also seen in at least five other states, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, according to local media.
Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of international relations, told Al Jazeera that Lula – who won by a razor-thin margin of 50.9 percent support to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent on Sunday – will need to work hard on reconciliation given how polarised Brazil has become.
“Basically 50 percent of Brazilians are very afraid his return to power. This is a very polarised country, it’s a frustrated country,” said Stuenkel, from the Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Sao Paulo. “I think it’s a volatile moment now, and Lula will have to choose his words very carefully.”
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilians delivered a very tight victory to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a bitter presidential election, giving the leftist former president another shot at power in a rejection of incumbent Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right politics.
Da Silva received 50.9% of the vote and Bolsonaro 49.1%, according to the country’s election authority. Yet the morning after the results came in — and congratulations had poured in from world leaders — Bolsonaro still had yet to publicly concede or react in any way, even as truckers blockaded some roads across the country in protest.
Bolsonaro’s campaign had made repeated — unproven — claims of possible electoral manipulation before the vote, raising fears that, if he lost, he would not accept defeat and try to challenge the results.
For da Silva, the high-stakes election was a stunning comeback. His imprisonment for corruption sidelined him from the 2018 election won by Bolsonaro, who has used the presidency to promote conservative social values while also delivering incendiary speeches and testing democratic institutions.
“Today the only winner is the Brazilian people,” da Silva said in a speech Sunday evening at a hotel in downtown Sao Paulo. “It’s the victory of a democratic movement that formed above political parties, personal interests and ideologies so that democracy came out victorious.”
Da Silva is promising to govern beyond his party. He says he wants to bring in centrists and even some leaning to the right, and to restore the kind of prosperity the country enjoyed when he last served as president from 2003-2010. Yet he faces headwinds in a politically polarized society.
Bolsonaro’s four years in office have been marked by proclaimed conservatism and defense of traditional Christian values. He claimed that his rival’s return to power would usher in communism, legalized drugs, abortion and the persecution of churches – things that didn’t happen during da Silva’s earlier eight years in office.
This was the country’s tightest election since its return to democracy in 1985, and the first time that a sitting president failed to win reelection. Just over 2 million votes separated the two candidates; the previous closest race, in 2014, was decided by a margin of roughly 3.5 million votes.
Some of Bolsonaro’s supporters outside his home in Rio on Sunday night screamed about electoral fraud. And overnight, truck drivers who backed Bolsonaro blocked several roads across the country, including a stretch of the Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo highway, local media reported. Videos posted on social media early Monday morning showed traffic at a complete halt. Similar reports popped up in several other states.
Da Silva’s win extended a wave of recent leftist triumphs across the region, including Chile, Colombia and Argentina.
The president-elect will inherit a nation straining against itself after he is inaugurated on Jan. 1, said Thomas Traumann, an independent political analyst who compared Sunday’s results to Biden’s 2020 victory.
“The huge challenge that Lula has will be to pacify the country,” he said. “People are not only polarized on political matters, but also have different values, identity and opinions. What’s more, they don’t care what the other side’s values, identities and opinions are.”
Among world leaders offering congratulations on Sunday night was U.S. President Joe Biden, who in a statement highlighted the country’s “free, fair, and credible elections.” The European Union also commended the electoral authority for its effectiveness and transparency throughout the campaign.
Bolsonaro had been leading throughout the first half of the count and, as soon as da Silva overtook him, cars in the streets of downtown Sao Paulo began honking their horns. People in the streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema neighborhood could be heard shouting, “It turned!”
Da Silva’s headquarters in downtown Sao Paulo hotel only erupted once the final result was announced, underscoring the tension that was a hallmark of this race.
“Four years waiting for this,” said Gabriela Souto, one of the few supporters allowed in due to heavy security.
Outside Bolsonaro’s home in Rio, ground-zero for his support base, a woman atop a truck delivered a prayer over a speaker, then sang excitedly, trying to generate some energy as the tally grew for da Silva. But supporters decked out in green and yellow barely responded. Many perked up when the national anthem played, singing along loudly with hands over their hearts.
For months, it appeared that da Silva was headed for easy victory as he kindled nostalgia for his presidency, when Brazil’s economy was booming.
Bolsonaro’s administration has been widely criticized for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years. But he has built a devoted base by presenting himself as protection from leftist policies that he says infringe on personal liberties while producing economic turmoil and moral rot. He sought to shore up support in an election year with vast government spending.
“We did not face an opponent, a candidate. We faced the machine of the Brazilian state put at his service so we could not win the election,” da Silva told the crowd in Sao Paulo.
Da Silva built an extensive social welfare program during his tenure at president that helped lift tens of millions into the middle class. The man universally known as Lula left office with an approval rating above 80%, prompting then U.S. President Barack Obama to call him “the most popular politician on Earth.”
But he is also remembered for his administration’s involvement in vast corruption revealed by sprawling investigations.
Da Silva was jailed for 580 days for corruption and money laundering. His convictions were later annulled by Brazil’s top court, which ruled the presiding judge had been biased and colluded with prosecutors. That enabled da Silva to run for president for the sixth time.
Da Silva has pledged to boost spending on the poor, reestablish relationships with foreign governments and take bold action to eliminate illegal clear-cutting in the Amazon rainforest.
“We will once again monitor and do surveillance in the Amazon. We will fight every illegal activity,” da Silva said in his speech. “At the same time, we will promote sustainable development of communities in the Amazon.”
The president-elect has pledged to install a ministry for Brazil’s original peoples, which will be run by an Indigenous person.
But as da Silva tries to achieve these and other goals, he will be confronted by strong opposition from conservative lawmakers.
Unemployment this year has fallen to its lowest level since 2015 and, although overall inflation slowed during the campaign, food prices are increasing at a double-digit rate. Bolsonaro’s welfare payments helped many Brazilians get by, but da Silva has been presenting himself as the candidate more willing to sustain aid going forward and raise the minimum wage.
In April, he tapped center-right Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival, to be his running mate. It was another key part of an effort to create a broad, pro-democracy front to not just unseat Bolsonaro, but to make it easier to govern.
Building bridges among a diverse — and divided — country will be key to his success, said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo.
“If Lula manages to talk to voters who didn’t vote for him, which Bolsonaro never tried, and seeks negotiated solutions to the economic, social and political crisis we have,” Melo said, “then he could reconnect Brazil to a time in which people could disagree and still get some things done.”
———
Carla Bridi contributed to this report from Brasilia.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former president and president-elect, center, addresses supporters after winning the runoff presidential election in Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 30, 2022.
Tuane Fernandes/Bloomberg/Getty
Sao Paulo — Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for “peace and unity” after narrowly winning a divisive runoff election Sunday, capping a remarkable political comeback by defeating far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to accept defeat.
The victory marks a stunning turnaround for the charismatic but tarnished leftist heavyweight, who left office in 2010 as the most popular president in Brazilian history, fell into disgrace when he was imprisoned for 18 months on controversial, since-quashed corruption charges, and now returns for an unprecedented third term at age 77.
All eyes will now be on how Bolsonaro and his supporters react to the result after months of alleging — without evidence — that Brazil’s electronic voting system is plagued by fraud and that the courts, media and other institutions had conspired against his far-right movement.
“This country needs peace and unity,” Lula said to loud cheers in a victory speech in Sao Paulo.
“The challenge is immense,” he said of the job ahead, citing a hunger crisis, the economy, bitter political division, and deforestation in the Amazon.
He later addressed a tightly packed crowd of hundreds of thousands of supporters who flooded the city center clad in Workers’ Party red, vowing: “democracy is back.”
Bolsonaro, 67, was silent in the hours after the result was declared.
Incumbent Jair Bolsonaro of Liberal Party (PL) casts his vote at Vila Militar district on October 30, 2022 in Brasilia, Brazil.
BRUNA PRADO / Getty Images
“Anywhere in the world, the losing president would already have called to admit defeat. He hasn’t called yet, I don’t know if he will call and concede,” Lula told the massive crowd.
Some Bolsonaro supporters, gathered in the capital Brasilia, refused to accept the results.
“The Brazilian people aren’t going to swallow a faked election and hand our nation over to a thief,” said 50-year-old teacher Ruth da Silva Barbosa.
Electoral officials declared the election for Lula, who had 50.9 percent of the vote to 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro with more than 99.9 percent of polling stations reporting, in the closest race since Brazil returned to democracy after its 1964-1985 dictatorship.
Bolsonaro, the vitriolic hardline conservative dubbed the “Tropical Trump,” becomes the first incumbent president not to win re-election in the post-dictatorship era.
With no word from Bolsonaro, some of his key allies appeared in public to accept the results. They included the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Arthur Lira, who said it was time to “extend a hand to our adversaries, debate, build bridges.”
I send my congratulations to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections. I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead.
Congratulations for Lula poured in from U.S. President Joe Biden, as well as the French, British and other European leaders, and from the Russian and Chinese governments. Leaders from across Latin America also offered their congratulations.
Lula supporters around the country erupted into celebration Sunday evening.
“We’ve had four years of a genocidal, hateful government,” said Lula voter Maria Clara, a 26-year-old student, at a victory party in downtown Rio.
“Today democracy won, and the possibility of dreaming of a better country again.”
In Brasilia, the tearful crowd of Bolsonaro supporters — outfitted in green and yellow, the colors of Brazil’s flag which the ex-army captain has adopted as his own — fell to their knees to pray.
Bolsonaro surged to victory four years ago on a wave of outrage with politics as usual, but came under fire for his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — which left more than 680,000 dead in Brazil — as well as a weak economy, his polarizing style and attacks on democratic institutions.
Regardless of how the incumbent reacts, Lula will face huge challenges when he is inaugurated on January 1.
Bolsonaro’s far-right allies scored big victories in legislative and governors’ races in the first-round election on October 2, and will be the largest force in Congress.
On Sunday, Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister Tarcisio de Freitas clinched the governorship of Sao Paulo, the most populous and the wealthiest state in the country.
In his victory speech, Lula touched on gender and racial equality and the urgent need to deal with a hunger crisis affecting 33.1 million Brazilians.
“Today we tell the world that Brazil is back,” he said, adding that the country is “ready to reclaim its place in the fight against the climate crisis, especially the Amazon.”
He vowed to “fight for zero deforestation.”
Lula inherits a deeply divided country, with a hugely difficult global economic situation that looks nothing like the commodities “super-cycle” that allowed him to lead Latin America’s biggest economy through a watershed boom in the 2000s.
Lula’s win is “one of the biggest comebacks in modern political history,” tweeted Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly.
But the president-elect will face a hostile Congress and have “a weak government,” Winter told AFP.
None of that mattered for the time being to elated Lula supporters.
“Brazil is starting to stand upright again after four years of darkness. We were going through so many problems, so much fear,” Larissa Meneses, a 34-year-old software developer, told AFP at a joyful victory party in Sao Paulo.
“Now with Lula’s victory, I really believe things will start getting better. This is a day to laugh a lot.”
World leaders praise conduct of election after losing rival Jair Bolsonaro made baseless claims of electoral fraud.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won Brazil’s election by a whisker, defeating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in a closely-fought second-round vote.
Brazil’s election authority said Lula, a former union leader who was previously president between 2003 and 2010, secured 50.8 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election compared with 49.2 percent for Bolsonaro.
The 77-year-old tweeted a photo of his hand touching the Brazilian flag with the word ‘democracy’ written above in celebration of his victory, marking a stunning comeback for a politician who was jailed on corruption charges that were overturned by the Supreme Court last year.
Politicians from around the world have begun to send messages of congratulations on social media and through official statements.
Here are some of them.
Argentina President Alberto Fernandez
“Congratulations @LulaOficial! Your victory opens a new era for the history of Latin America. A time of hope that begins today. Here you have a partner with whom you can work to create a better life for all our peoples.”
Chile President Gabriel Boric Font
“Lula. Joy!”
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
“Lula won. The people of Brazil are blessed. There will be equality and humanity.”
US President Joe Biden
“I send my congratulations to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections. I look forward to working together to continue the cooperation between our two countries in the months and years ahead.”
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva failed to win in the first round, setting the stage for a bitter fight in a run-off against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro [Carl de Souza/AFP]
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
“The people of Brazil have spoken. I’m looking forward to working with @LulaOficial to strengthen the partnership between our countries, to deliver results for Canadians and Brazilians, and to advance shared priorities — like protecting the environment. Congratulations, Lula!”
French President Emmanuel Macron
“Congratulations @LulaOficial, on your election which opens a new page in the history of Brazil. Together we will join forces to address the many common challenges [we face] and renew the bond of friendship between our two countries.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles
“Brazilian citizens went to the polls to elect their new president in a peaceful and well-organised election.
Parabens @LulaOficial on your election!
I look forward to working together and advancing EU-Brazil relations with your government, and with new Congress & State authorities.”
Congratulations to @LulaOficial on winning Brazil’s historic election.
This is a victory for social justice, Indigenous rights and the future of humanity.
The global struggle for equality, democracy and peace goes on. Lula’s triumph proves that, together, we can win.
SAO PAULO — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has done it again: Twenty years after first winning the Brazilian presidency, the leftist defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro Sunday in an extremely tight election that marks an about-face for the country after four years of far-right politics.
With 99.9% of the votes tallied in the runoff vote, da Silva had 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1%, and the election authority said da Silva’s victory was a mathematical certainty. At about 10 p.m. local time, three hours after the results were in, the lights went out in the presidential palace and Bolsonaro had not conceded nor reacted in any way.
Before the vote, Bolsonaro’s campaign had made repeated — unproven — claims of possible electoral manipulation, raising fears that he would not accept defeat and would challenge the results if he lost.
The high-stakes election was a stunning reversal for da Silva, 77, whose imprisonment for corruption sidelined him from the 2018 election that brought Bolsonaro, a defender of conservative social values, to power.
“Today the only winner is the Brazilian people,” da Silva said in a speech at a hotel in downtown Sao Paulo. “This isn’t a victory of mine or the Workers’ Party, nor the parties that supported me in campaign. It’s the victory of a democratic movement that formed above political parties, personal interests and ideologies so that democracy came out victorious.”
Da Silva is promising to govern beyond his party. He wants to bring in centrists and even some leaning to the right who voted for him for the first time, and to restore the country’s more prosperous past. Yet he faces headwinds in a politically polarized society where economic growth is slowing and inflation is soaring.
This was the country’s tightest election since its return to democracy in 1985, and the first time since then that the sitting president failed to win reelection. Just over 2 million votes separated the two candidates; the previous closest race, in 2014, was decided by a margin of roughly 3.5 million votes.
The highly polarized election in Latin America’s biggest economy extended a wave of recent leftist victories in the region, including Chile, Colombia and Argentina.
As Lula spoke to his supporters — promising to “govern a country in a very difficult situation” — Bolsonaro had yet to concede.
Da Silva’s inauguration is scheduled to take place on Jan. 1. He last served as president from 2003-2010.
Thomas Traumann, an independent political analyst, compared the results to Biden’s 2020 victory, saying da Silva is inheriting an extremely divided nation.
“The huge challenge that Lula has will be to pacify the country,” he said. “People are not only polarized on political matters, but also have different values, identity and opinions. What’s more, they don’t care what the other side’s values, identities and opinions are.”
Congratulations for da Silva — and Brazil — began to pour in from around Latin America and across the world Sunday evening, including from U.S. President Joe Biden, who highlighted the country’s “free, fair, and credible elections.” The European Union also congratulated da Silva in a statement, commending the electoral authority for its effectiveness and transparency throughout the campaign.
Bolsonaro had been leading throughout the first half of the count and, as soon as da Silva overtook him, cars in the streets of downtown Sao Paulo began honking their horns. People in the streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Ipanema neighborhood could be heard shouting, “It turned!”
Da Silva’s headquarters in downtown Sao Paulo hotel only erupted once the final result was announced, underscoring the tension that was a hallmark of this race.
“Four years waiting for this,” said Gabriela Souto, one of the few supporters allowed in due to heavy security.
Outside Bolsonaro’s home in Rio, ground-zero for his support base, a woman atop a truck delivered a prayer over a speaker, then sang excitedly, trying to generate some energy as the tally grew for da Silva. But supporters decked out in the green and yellow of the flag barely responded. Many perked up when the national anthem played, singing along loudly with hands over their hearts.
For months, it appeared that da Silva was headed for easy victory as he kindled nostalgia for his presidency, when Brazil’s economy was booming and welfare helped tens of millions join the middle class.
But while da Silva topped the Oct. 2 first-round elections with 48% of the vote, Bolsonaro was a strong second at 43%, showing opinion polls significantly had underestimated his popularity.
Bolsonaro’s administration has been marked by incendiary speech, his testing of democratic institutions, his widely criticized handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years. But he has built a devoted base by defending conservative values and presenting himself as protection from leftist policies that he says infringe on personal liberties and produce economic turmoil. And he shored up support in an election year with vast government spending.
“We did not face an opponent, a candidate. We faced the machine of the Brazilian state put at his service so we could not win the election,” da Silva told the crowd in Sao Paulo.
Da Silva built an extensive social welfare program during his tenure that helped lift tens of millions into the middle class. The man universally known as Lula also presided over an economic boom, leaving office with an approval rating above 80%, prompting then U.S. President Barack Obama to call him “the most popular politician on Earth.”
But he is also remembered for his administration’s involvement in vast corruption revealed by sprawling investigations. Da Silva’s arrest in 2018 kept him out of that year’s race against Bolsonaro, a fringe lawmaker at the time who was an outspoken fan of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Da Silva was jailed for for 580 days for corruption and money laundering. His convictions were later annulled by Brazil’s top court, which ruled the presiding judge had been biased and colluded with prosecutors. That enabled da Silva to run for the nation’s highest office for the sixth time.
Da Silva has pledged to boost spending on the poor, reestablish relationships with foreign governments and take bold action to eliminate illegal clear-cutting in the Amazon rainforest.
“We will once again monitor and do surveillance in the Amazon. We will fight every illegal activity,” da Silva said in his acceptance speech. “At the same time we will promote sustainable development of the communities of the Amazon.”
The president-elect has pledged to install a ministry for Brazil’s original peoples, which will be run by an Indigenous person.
But as da Silva tries to achieve these and other goals, he will be confronted by strong opposition from conservative lawmakers likely to take their cues from Bolsonaro.
Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo, compared the likely political climate to that experienced by former President Dilma Rousseff, da Silva’s hand-picked successor after his second term.
“Lula’s victory means Brazil is trying to overcome years of turbulence since the reelection of President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. That election never ended; the opposition asked for a recount, she governed under pressure and was impeached two years later,” said Melo. “The divide became huge and then made Bolsonaro.”
Unemployment this year has fallen to its lowest level since 2015 and, although overall inflation has slowed during the campaign, food prices are increasing at a double-digit rate. Bolsonaro’s welfare payments helped many Brazilians get by, but da Silva has been presenting himself as the candidate more willing to sustain aid going forward and raise the minimum wage.
In April, he tapped center-right Geraldo Alckmin, a former rival, to be his running mate. It was another key part of an effort to create a broad, pro-democracy front to not just unseat Bolsonaro, but to make it easier to govern.
“If Lula manages to talk to voters who didn’t vote for him, which Bolsonaro never tried, and seeks negotiated solutions to the economic, social and political crisis we have, and links with other nations that were lost, then he could reconnect Brazil to a time in which people could disagree and still get some things done,” Melo said.
Polls in Brazil closed on Sunday afternoon in a polarizing presidential runoff election that pits an incumbent vowing to safeguard conservative Christian values against a former president promising to return the country to a more prosperous past.
The runoff shaped up as a close contest between President Jair Bolsonaro and his political nemesis, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Both are well-known, divisive political figures who stir passion as much as loathing.
The electoral authority had begun counting ballots and, because the vote is conducted electronically, the final result is usually available within hours after voting stations close.
The vote will determine if the world’s fourth-largest democracy stays the same course of far-right politics or returns a leftist to the top job — and, in the latter case, whether Bolsonaro will accept defeat. There were multiple reports of what critics said appeared attempts to suppress the turnout of likely da Silva voters.
Voting stations in the capital, Brasilia, were already crowded by morning and, at one of them, retired government worker Luiz Carlos Gomes said he would vote for da Silva.
“He’s the best for the poor, especially in the countryside,” said Gomes, 65, who hails from Maranhao state in the poor northeast region. “We were always starving before him.”
Because the vote is conducted electronically, the final result is usually available within hours after voting stations close in the late afternoon. Most opinion polls gave a lead to da Silva, universally known as Lula, though political analysts agreed the race grew increasingly tight in recent weeks.
For months, it appeared that da Silva was headed for easy victory as he kindled nostalgia for his 2003-2010 presidency, when Brazil’s economy was booming and welfare helped tens of millions join the middle class.
But while da Silva topped the Oct. 2 first-round elections with 48% of the vote, Bolsonaro was a strong second at 43%, showing opinion polls significantly underestimated his popularity. Many Brazilians support Bolsonaro’s defense of conservative social values and he has shored up support with vast government spending.
Candidates in Brazil who top the first round tend to win the runoff. But political scientist Rodrigo Prando said this campaign is so atypical that a Bolsonaro win could not be ruled out.
More than 150 million Brazilians are eligible to vote, yet about 20% of the electorate abstained in the first round. Both da Silva and Bolsonaro have focused efforts on driving turnout. The electoral authority prohibited any federal highway police operations from affecting voters’ passage on public transport.
Still, there were multiple reports of checkpoints and traffic stops. Television network Globo reported more than 500 stops, half of which were in the northeast region, a Workers’ Party stronghold. The party filed a request for the arrest of the highway police’s director and demanded the region’s polls remain open later.
Human Rights Watch, an international nonprofit, said in a statement it was “very concerned” about the reports.
Speaking to reporters in Brasilia, the electoral authority’s president Alexandre de Moraes said the police force’s director had provided clarification that no stop lasted over 15 minutes, turnout wasn’t affected and polls would close at 5 p.m. local time, as scheduled.
“(Stops) were made in accordance with traffic laws and that stalled some voters, but all arrived to their voting places. No bus returned to its point of origin,” said de Moraes, adding that all traffic stops have since been suspended.
“If there was an abuse of power, that is an electoral crime. And we will look into that,” de Moraes said.
Gleisi Hoffmann, who leads the Workers’ Party, told reporters in Sao Paulo she doesn’t believe all voters stalled indeed cast their ballots, but also said her party doesn’t have an estimate as to how many people may have been deterred.
“We can’t think these voters arrived just because the highway police said so,” Hoffmann said in a press conference. “The head of the highway police is a militant of the Bolsonaro campaign.”
Bolsonaro was first in line to cast his vote at a military complex in Rio de Janeiro. He sported the green and yellow colors of the Brazilian flag that always feature at his rallies.
“I’m expecting our victory, for the good of Brazil,” he told reporters afterward. “God willing, we will be victorious this afternoon. Actually, Brazil will be victorious.”
Da Silva voted Sunday morning in Sao Bernardo do Campo, a city outside Sao Paulo, where he lived for decades and started his political career as a union leader. He wore white, as he often has during the campaign, rather than his party’s traditional red.
“Today we are choosing the kind of Brazil we want, how we want our society to organize. People will decide what kind of life they want,” da Silva told reporters. “That’s why this is the most important day of my life. I am convinced that Brazilians will vote for a plan under which democracy wins.”
The candidates presented few proposals for the country’s future beyond affirming they will continue a big welfare program for the poor, despite very limited fiscal room going forward. They railed against one another and launched online smear campaigns — with considerably more attacks coming from Bolsonaro’s camp.
On the eve of the election, Bolsonaro shared a video on Twitter of former U.S. President Donald Trump endorsing him, saying that he has secured Brazil’s universal respect on the world stage. Da Silva has specifically criticized Bolsonaro for the nation’s fallen stature abroad, highlighting the dearth of state visits and bilateral meetings.
“Don’t lose him, don’t let that happen,” Trump said in the video. “It would not be good for your country. I love your country, but it would not be good. So get out and vote for President Bolsonaro. He’s doing the job like few people could.”
His four years in office have been marked by proclaimed conservatism and defense of traditional Christian values. He claimed that his rival’s return to power would usher in communism, legalized drugs, abortion and the persecution of churches — things that didn’t happen during da Silva’s earlier eight years in office.
On Sunday, Livia Correia and her husband, Pedro, brought her two young kids to a voting station in Rio’s Copacabana neighborhood, where Bolsonaro supporters regularly rally. They all wore green-and-yellow shirts. Livia, 36, said she voted for Bolsonaro because he defends the things she holds dear: “family values, God and freedom of expression.”
Da Silva has homed in on Bolsonaro’s widely criticized handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and said the president failed to care for society’s neediest members. And he painted Bolsonaro as an opponent of the Amazon rainforest, given that he defanged environmental authorities and presided over a surge in deforestation.
But for many, the record of da Silva’s Workers’ Party is equally off-putting. A sprawling investigation revealed the party’s involvement in vast corruption scandals that ensnared top politicians and executives.
Da Silva himself was imprisoned for 19 months for corruption and money laundering. The Supreme Court annulled his convictions in 2019, on the grounds that the judge was biased and colluded with prosecutors. That did not stop Bolsonaro from reminding voters of the convictions.
The president’s tremendous digital mobilization was on display in recent days as his campaign introduced fresh — and unproven — claims of possible electoral manipulation. That revived fears that Bolsonaro could challenge election results should he lose — much like Trump, whom he admires.
For months, he claimed that the nation’s electronic voting machines are prone to fraud, though he never presented evidence, even after the electoral authority set a deadline for him to do so.
More recently, allegations focused on airtime for political ads. Bolsonaro’s campaign claimed that radio stations may have hurt their candidate by failing to air more than 150,000 electoral spots.
“If da Silva wins, we’re going to have a problem,” said Pedro Correia, 40, who joined his wife and two children in Copacabana.
At least 10 Republican candidates who won primaries for statewide or federal office this year have claimed they were in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of former President Donald Trump marched to the Capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power and the ensuing riot eventually turned violent. Five people died in connection with the riot, including a police officer. Another four officers died by suicide in the days, weeks and months after the assault on the Capitol.
All 10 non-incumbent candidates have denied or cast doubt on the 2020 election results. Three of the 10 candidates could win congressional seats in November, which would take them from election-denying protesters to sitting members of Congress. Another stands to become the chief election official in Arizona.
Democrats have spent little time or money focused on ads highlighting the Jan. 6 activities of these candidates. According to the ad-tracking firm, AdImpact, just $2.7 million out of $163 million of broadcast TV ad dollars went to House races where a candidate was at or near the Capitol on Jan. 6. In many cases, Democratic groups actually tried to boost some of the election-denying candidates during the primary season, calculating that they would be weaker opponents for Democrats in the general election.
Here’s a list of 10 candidates who were at or near the Capitolon Jan. 6:
In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Jose Luis Magana / AP
Congressional candidates
Derrick Van Orden, GOP nominee, Wisconsin, 3rd Congressional District
Derrick Van Orden, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin’s 3rd District, was among the demonstrators outside the Capitol, according to an op-ed he wrote for the LaCrosse Tribune and other published reports. In that op-ed, publisheda week after the attack, Van Orden wrote, “At no time did I enter the grounds, let alone the building.” He claimed to have been on the outside, saying he had “stood on the parapet that lines the perimeter of the grounds.” On Jan. 6, 2021, he also denounced in a tweet “all forms of political violence regardless of what side commits it.”
What initially started as a peaceful protest devolved into unlawful political violence.
When this happened, I left as I will not be party to illegal acts.
I categorically denounce all forms of political violence regardless of what side commits it.
The Daily Beast reported that photos from Jan. 6 show Van Orden “had to cross police barricades to reach that area.” Van Orden disputed the article but has offered no further clarification.
He has not responded to CBS News’ request for comment.
The Trump-endorsed candidate hopes to succeed Democrat Ron Kind, who has represented the 3rd District since 1997 and is retiring at the end of his current term. Kind beat Van Orden by less than three points in 2020. Van Orden, a former Navy Seal and actor, and state Sen. Brad Pfaff, a Democrat who represents Wisconsin’s 32nd District, are now vying for the open seat.
Although the district has been held by a Democrat for over two decades, projections by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics show the race is currently leaning in favor of Van Orden. Republican-aligned PACs are outspending Democrats in online and TV advertising. Axios also reported the House Majority PAC, which supports Democratic candidates, plans to cancel some of the remaining ad reservations for Pfaff. Pfaff countered with an ad highlighting Van Orden’s Jan. 6 activities, hoping to convince voters to reject him. The Associated Press reported, the Republican electorate in Wisconsin doesn’t appear to care about his connection to Jan. 6.
Sandy Smith, GOP nominee, North Carolina, 1st Congressional District
Sandy Smith, who is making her second run at a Congressional seat, tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021 “In DC fighting for Trump! Just marched from the monument to the Capitol!” Her participation didn’t deter Republican voters in the 1st District in North Carolina, despite the House GOP-aligned PAC running ads attacking her ahead of the Republican primary. She prevailed against seven other candidates in the May primary and went on to receive Trump’s endorsement last month.
In 2020, Smith also won the Republican primary but lost in the general election to Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield. After her defeat, she tweeted, “I ran for congress. Did better than anyone ever did in this district on the Republican side. Dominion was used in my district. My polling had me ahead. Yet somehow my opponent got truckloads of ballots without even campaigning. No audit. No precinct breakdown. Total sham! #NC01”. According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Dominion voting machines were not used in any elections in the state.
Butterfield, a long-time congressman and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, announced his retirement after redistricting made North Carolina’s 1st District friendlier to Republicans. Predictions indicate the race is leaning toward the Democratic nominee Donald Davis, a state senator who represents the 5th Legislative District.
J.R. Majewski, GOP nominee, Ohio, 9th Congressional District
Still from House Majority PAC ad showing GOP congressional candidate JR Majewski on Jan. 6, 2021
Screengrab via YouTube.com
“When everything started to happen…we all left. I was responsible for 60-70 people at the Capitol. I had multiple people get injured but I made sure they made it back to our hotel. It was a terrible experience,” Majewski said in an interview with Toledo TV station WTOL in April 2021. “It was one that was supposed to be great.”
But as a candidate, Majewski’s record has come under scrutiny for other reasons. He claimed that he served the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan. Military records obtained by the Associated Press revealed that he never deployed to Afghanistan. The AP said that Majewski’s campaign, when asked about his records, “did not directly address questions about his claim of deploying to Afghanistan.” A subsequent AP report noted that his campaign claimed that he was demoted and punished after a “brawl,” but military records and show that he was, in fact, demoted and punished for drunk driving on a U.S. air base in Japan. Majewski, according to the AP, acknowledged in a statement that he had been punished for drunk driving but did not say why his campaign had attributed his demotion to a brawl.
Last month, the National Republican Congressional Committee, withdrew ads for Majewski.
Although the Republican party “has no hesitation about backing candidates who either were there at the Capitol or who endorsed the ridiculous election lies of Donald Trump,” Sabato surmised that they are merely “being pragmatic” in light of the popularity of these candidates with GOP voters. The race is now leaning in favor of Majewski’s Democratic opponent, incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur.
Leon Benjamin Sr., GOP nominee, Virginia, 4th Congressional District
Leon Benjamin Sr., a pastor and military veteran, ran uncontested in the Republican primary and now he heads to the general election as the GOP candidate for Virginia’s 4th Congressional District. It’s his second attempt to unseat Democratic incumbent, Rep. Donald McEachin. In 2020, McEachin defeated Benjamin by over 22 points, but Benjamin continues to claim that the election was stolen.
According to photos and a live-stream video he posted on Facebook,Benjamin was in Washington on Jan. 6. The photos show him at the Ellipse during Trump’s speech and near the Capitol.He wrote, “Virginia we are ready for the next step. Do not lose heart. Leadership is coming out of you: those who love America, Fair and Just Elections, God, Family and Constitutional Republic! #PatriotParty#benjamin4congress#FlipTheFourth.”
Jo Rae Perkins, GOP nominee, Oregon, U.S. Senate
Jo Rae Perkins, is making another longshot bid for U.S. Senate in Oregon, after an unsuccessful campaign in 2020 against incumbent Democrat Jeff Merkley. Records show Perkins first filed to run for U.S. Senate in Oregon in 2013.
In the May 2022 primary, Perkins beat six other Republican candidates. Now, she’s facing incumbent Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden has held the position since 1996 and is up 17 points, according to a recent Civiqs poll.
Perkins has touted Q-Anon conspiracy theories and election lies. She also attended Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, and she told CBS Portland affiliate KOIN that she walked up to the exterior of the Capitol building but did not enter. Perkins falsely claimed members of Antifa were at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Jeff Zink, Arizona, 3rd Congressional District
“I can give you a first-hand account” of Jan. 6, said Jeff Zink, the GOP nominee for Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District. Zink, an “America First” Republican, is running against Democratic incumbent Rep. Ruben Gallego.
Zink has said he did not enter the Capitol and didn’t participate in the violence. “At no time did I, nor my son Ryan enter the building, trespass or damage any property of the United States,” he told Texas station WCBD. Furthermore, the allegations that my son physically assaulted ANYONE are completely unfounded, without evidence or merit, and politically motivated.”
But his son, Ryan Zink, was indicted for obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds and multiple counts of disorderly conduct. Ryan Zink pleaded not guilty on all counts. The FBI statement of facts shows Ryan Zink saying in a video, “We knocked down the gates! We’re storming the Capitol! You can’t stop us!” Jeff Zink said his son was “incarcerated for six weeks.”
Tina Forte, New York, 14th Congressional District
Republican Tina Forte’s prospects of beating popular Democratic incumbent Alexandra Ocasio- Cortez are slim in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez beat her Republican challenger by a 44.2-point margin.
Still, Forte won the August Republican primary against challenger Desi Joseph Cuellar with over 65% of the vote. As of Sept. 30, she has raised nearly $1 million, according to federal campaign finance data.
On Jan. 6, Forte live-streamed video near the Capitol with other demonstrators. The video shows her standing in front of a poster of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with fangs. In a statement, Forte wrote, “I absolutely did NOT enter the Capitol building.” Last month, NY1 spoke with Forte, who said she joined demonstrators in Washington on Jan. 6 “to shine light on the election.” She added, “I’m not going to say I regret it because I don’t.”
Statewide candidates
Three Republican nominees seeking statewide office in 2022, were also among the rally-goers and rioters in Washington on Jan. 6. Polling shows one of the demonstrators could be the next secretary of state in Arizona.
Mark Finchem, GOP nominee, Arizona, secretary of state
Mark Finchem, the current state representative for Arizona’s 11th Legislative District and the Republican nominee for secretary of state, was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. The Arizona Mirror reported that images of Finchem captured that day showed him walking in front of the east steps of the Capitol. In a recent interview with CBS News, when asked why he was in Washington, Finchem responded that he was “representing [his] constituents.” He declined to acknowledge if President Joe Biden’s presidential win was legitimate. Finchem was also subpoenaed and interviewed by the Jan. 6 House select committee, as a “witness,” he clarified.
As secretary of state, Finchem would oversee Arizona’s elections through the 2024 election. He assures his “commitment is to just follow the law,” but added, “we also need to have an elections procedure manual that reflects current law.” Current Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is running for governor in Arizona against Republican Kari Lake.
Several candidates, including Doug Mastriano and Dan Cox, arranged for buses to drive demonstrators to Washington on Jan. 6. Mastriano, a Republican state senator and GOP gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, spent thousands of dollars on chartered buses and posted an event on Facebook charging $10-$25 for bus rides to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to NPR member station WHYY.
Mastriano said he did not cross police lines at the Capitol and left when the protests turned violent, which he does not condone. According to a Senate Judiciary Committee report, video footage shows Mastriano and his wife on the grounds of the Capitol behind police lines. Democrats have called on Mastriano to release the footage taken on his phone on Jan. 6 to prove his version of events.Mastriano briefly spoke with the Jan. 6 House select committee in August but soon after filed a lawsuit, against the committee, for refusing to allow him to record the testimony.
A CBS News Battleground Tracker poll released in October showed Mastriano trailing his Democratic challenger Josh Shapiro, by double digits.
Dan Cox, GOP nominee, Maryland governor
On Jan. 6, Dan Cox, a Maryland state delegate and the Republican nominee for governor of Maryland, called then-Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor,” In a statement after the attack, Cox wrote in Maryland Matters that because it was so crowded that the group he was with “could not approach the capitol” and “left early for the bus ride home and of course did not participate in any violence.”
Democrats boosted Cox, who was endorsed by Trump ahead of the Republican primaries in the heavily Democratic state. Cox beat Kelly Shulz, the Republican candidate endorsed by Maryland’s term-limited Gov. Larry Hogan. Now, Cox faces Democrat Wes Moore in the race for governor.
Cox, who has touted election lies and conspiracy theories, is trailing Moore by 32-points, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. Hogan, a moderate Republican, has harshly criticized Cox, calling him a “QAnon whack job.” In a recent interview with CBS News, Hogan said, “It should be a huge year for Republicans. But we haven’t always nominated the strongest candidates for a general election.”
Supporters of former president of Brazil and presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attend his final rally before the election on Oct. 29, 2022 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lula da Silva will face incumbent Jair Bolsonaro on Oct. 30 in the final round of the presidential election.
View Press | Corbis News | Getty Images
Brazil’s heated presidential race has tightened ahead of a Sunday vote, several opinion surveys showed on Saturday, with right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro eroding a slight advantage for leftist challenger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in most polls.
Surveys by pollsters Datafolha and Quaest both showed Lula with 52% of valid votes against 48% for Bolsonaro, down from a 6 percentage-point lead three days prior, putting the incumbent in striking distance of a come-from-behind victory.
A survey by pollster MDA showed Lula’s edge slipping to just 2 percentage points, equal to the margin of error for the poll commissioned by transport sector lobby CNT.
Most polls still suggest Lula is the slight favorite to come back for a third term, capping a remarkable political rebound after his jailing on graft convictions that were overturned.
But Bolsonaro outperformed opinion polls in the first-round vote on Oct. 2, and many analysts say the election could go either way.
The final opinion surveys by pollsters IPEC and AtlasIntel, however, showed Lula holding a stable and slightly larger lead.
IPEC showed the leftist ahead by 54% to 46% of valid votes, excluding undecided voters and those planning to spoil their ballots. AtlasIntel, among the most accurate pollsters in the first round, showed Lula’s lead holding at 7 percentage points.
Bolsonaro wrapped up his campaign in the key state of Minas Gerais, leading a motorbike rally with supporters. Lula walked with thousands of backers on one of Sao Paulo’s main avenues after telling foreign reporters his rival was not fit to govern.
Supporters of Brazil’s President and presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, take part in a motorcade during protest against the Supreme Court, the ministers of the Superior Electoral Court and against censorship, in Brasilia, Brazil, October 29, 2022.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The deeply polarizing figures also attacked each other’s character and record in their final televised debate on Friday night. Bolsonaro opened the debate by denying reports he might unpeg the minimum wage from inflation, announcing instead he would raise it to 1,400 reais ($260) a month if re-elected, a move that is not in his government’s 2023 budget.
With their campaigns focusing on swaying crucial undecided votes, analysts said the president gained little ground in the debate to win a race that polls had shown roughly stable since Lula led the first-round voting by 5 percentage points.
That result was better for Bolsonaro than most polls had shown, giving him a boost of momentum to start the month, but the past two weeks of the campaign have presented headwinds.
A week ago, one of Bolsonaro’s allies opened fire on federal police officers coming to arrest him.
On Sunday, one of his closest associates, Congresswoman Carla Zambelli, chased a Lula supporter into a Sao Paulo restaurant at gun point after a political argument in the street, videos on social media showed. Zambelli told reporters she knowingly defied an electoral law that bans the carrying of firearms 24 hours before an election.
In their first head-to-head debate this month, Lula blasted Bolsonaro’s handling of a pandemic in which nearly 700,000 Brazilians have died, while Bolsonaro focused on the graft scandals that tarnished the reputation of Lula’s Workers Party.
On Friday night, both candidates returned repeatedly to Lula’s two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, when high commodity prices helped to boost the economy and combat poverty. Lula vowed to revive those boom times, while Bolsonaro suggested current social programs are more effective.
President Biden — accompanied by one of his granddaughters, a first-time voter — cast his midterm ballot on Saturday.
In-person early voting in his home state of Delaware, where Mr. Biden regularly returns for weekends, began Friday. Democrats nationwide have encouraged voters to take advantage of early voting, either by mail-in ballots or at precincts where available to maximize turnout.
Mr. Biden said he was feeling good about the midterms, which will decide control of Congress for the next two years.
U.S. President Biden and his granddaughter Natalie Biden after they voted early in Wilmington, Delaware, on Oct. 29, 2022. Natalie Biden is a first-time voter and daughter of the late Beau Biden.
TASOS KATOPODIS/AFP via Getty Images
In the final days before the Nov. 8 elections, Mr. Biden plans to step up his campaign travels with scheduled trips to Pennsylvania, Florida, New Mexico and Maryland to stump for Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates.
“I’m going to be spending the rest of the time making the case that this is not a referendum. It is a choice. A fundamental choice,” he said. “A choice between two very different visions for the country.”
Mr. Biden voted alongside his granddaughter Natalie, who is 18 years old. He also voted in Delaware last month, when he made a quick, one-day trip for the state’s Sept. 13 primaries.
Delaware has no competitive congressional races this cycle.
UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council voted unanimously Friday to extend the U.N. political mission in Libya for a year and urged key institutions and parties in the divided north African country to agree on a road map to deliver presidential and parliamentary elections as soon as possible.
The resolution adopted by the U.N.’s most powerful body urged “dialogue, compromise and constructive engagement” aimed at forming “a unified Libyan government able to govern across the country and representing the whole people of Libya.”
Libya plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The oil-rich nation has been split between rival administrations in the east and west, each backed by rogue militias and foreign governments.
The country’s current political crisis stems from the failure to hold elections in December 2021 and the refusal of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who led a transitional government in the capital, Tripoli, in the country’s west, to step down. In response, the country’s east-based parliament appointed a rival prime minister, Fathy Bashagha, who has for months sought to install his government in Tripoli.
The resolution reaffirmed the Security Council’s “strong commitment to an inclusive Libyan-led and Libyan-owned political process, facilitated by the United Nations and supported by the international community,” that leads to elections as soon as possible. It backs the resumption of efforts to resume intra-Libya talks to create conditions for elections.
Gabon’s U.N. ambassador, Michel Xavier Biang, the current council president, said the three African nations on the council — Gabon, Kenya and Ghana — “have the sense of having contributed to an important milestone towards the stabilization of a major African state.”
“Through this vote, we are sending a message to the Libyan people and that message is clear that the U.N. is standing by their side,” Biang said. “This is also a message to the Libyan authorities and all political stakeholders who have an opportunity to create a momentum that would lead to restoring hope in Libya.”
The council welcomed the appointment of a new U.N. special envoy, Abdoulaye Bathily, after a nine-month search amid increasing chaos in Libya.
Russia had refused to extend the mandate of the U.N. mission in Libya, known as UNSMIL, for more than three months until a new special representative was chosen. So UNSMIL’s 12-month extension until Oct. 31, 2023, was a vote of confidence for the former Senegalese minister and diplomat.
Bathily told the council Monday he plans to follow up on commitments by Libya’s political rivals at the end of a meeting last week that reportedly include the need to hold elections and ensure that the country has a single executive power as soon as possible.
He said he plans to talk to leaders of the east-based parliament, the House of Representatives, and west-based High Council of State in the coming weeks “to understand” the agreements announced at the end of their Oct. 21 meeting in the Moroccan capital, Rabat.
According to the Moroccan Press Agency and the North African Post, the speaker of the east-based parliament, Aguila Saleh, and the head of the Supreme Council, Khaled al-Meshri, agreed to implement a mechanism on criteria for leadership positions agreed to at talks in Morocco in October 2020.
Saleh was quoted as saying the rivals also agreed “to ensure that there is a single executive power in Libya as soon as possible” and to relaunch dialogue to achieve an agreement about the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections. The elections need to respect “a clear roadmap and legislation, on the basis of which the polls will be held,” he was quoted as saying at a press briefing after the meeting.
The Security Council’s resolution underlined “the importance of an inclusive, comprehensive national dialogue and reconciliation process.”
Council members expressed concern at the security situation in Libya, particularly recurring clashes between armed groups in the Tripoli region that have caused civilian casualties and damaged civilian infrastructure.
They emphasized “that there can be no military solution in Libya” and called on all parties to refrain from violence.
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.”
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.”
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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.
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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Associated Press photographer Ross D. Franklin contributed to this report.
Why has The Associated Press tallied votes and declared winners in U.S. elections since the middle of the 19th century? Because no one else does.
Unlike the case in other democracies, the Founding Fathers didn’t establish a national clearinghouse for counting the vote, and the states all do it a little differently.
So every U.S. election night, The Associated Press counts the nation’s votes, tallying millions of ballots and determining which candidates have won their races. It’s been done that way since 1848, when the AP declared the election of Zachary Taylor as president.
Basically, no one wanted to wait for weeks to find out who won elections.
The Founding Fathers set up the Electoral College — a series of state elections to pick the president — to empower states in terms of their own elections processes. But they didn’t stand up a centralized entity to count every citizen’s vote.
Instead, each state determines its own voting rules, laws and procedures, including when polls close, which means counting doesn’t happen all at once.
“Once we split it into 50 parts, with 50 sets of rules, it’s a big job to try to compile all of that,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “Especially if you’re aiming to get a timely report out.”
News organizations began tallying votes themselves, including the AP, which AP Election Decision Editor Stephen Ohlemacher said began with “our own version of the Pony Express,” gathering vote totals from far-flung areas in the 1848 election. As technology evolved, so did that process, with AP eventually transmitting vote counts by teletype to centralized race-calling operations on the East Coast.
Even in general elections, states used to vote on different days, until the advanced technology of knowing how other places had voted led to the practice of a single Election Day.
U.S. television networks began doing their own analyses in the 1960 race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, examining data and calling winners one state at a time.
AP now uses a network of thousands of stringers and vote center clerks who take feeds, scrape official state websites for data and electronically add up votes across the country.
There is a national elections entity, the Federal Election Commission, which regulates some aspects of federal elections, like administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws, and financing of federal campaigns. But the FEC has no oversight over election results, laws or vote counting.
Have there been problems?
Yes. In 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune famously splayed “Dewey Defeats Truman” across the front page when early numbers made it look like Thomas Dewey was ahead. The tide turned, and President Harry S. Truman defied pollsters by scoring an upset victory.
In 2000, the major TV networks and the AP called Florida for Democrat Al Gore, relying largely on Election Day polling. As the votes were counted everyone reversed course. The networks declared that Republican George W. Bush had carried the state, only to later retract that decision, too.
The AP held off on making the second call, deeming the race too close. More than a month later, a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court stopped a recount and locked in Bush’s narrow victory.
“It was a very tense situation,” Ohlemacher said. “Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to not make a call.”
There were criticisms after the contentious 2020 presidential election, which saw challenges to the results from then-President Donald Trump and his allies in a number of states where he lost. After the AP and the major networks called the presidential race for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump tweeted: “Since when does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be?”
Touting baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the days after the election, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the media have no official role in deciding who becomes the U.S. president.
That’s true, but it doesn’t appear there are any major moves to change that system.
And while control of the U.S. House and Senate are hotly contested in this year’s midterm elections, the fact that a presidential race isn’t on the ballot could alleviate concerns about the media’s role, Edmonds said.
“The question about who will control the House or Senate, that almost rises to the level of who will be elected president, though,” he said.
There are still formalities after counts and calls
Winners may have been called, and concessions may — or may not — have been made, but voting itself is over when polls close on Election Day. There’s still more work to do, as local election officials count and verify results through the canvass and certification process.
That means that race calls are made before results are official. But the AP only declares a winner when it’s certain that the candidate who’s ahead in the count can’t be caught.
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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will cast his midterm election ballot this weekend in his home state of Delaware, where in-person early voting begins Friday.
The White House said Biden will vote alongside his granddaughter Natalie, 18, who is a first-time voter. The Democratic president is casting his ballot as his party is facing an uphill battle to hold on to control of Congress and as Democrats have made a priority of encouraging their supporters to vote early in jurisdictions where it is available to maximize turnout.
Biden’s trip to his polling place comes as he is spending a long weekend at his Wilmington home. He’ll make a brief trip to nearby Philadelphia on Friday night to attend an event for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party with Vice President Kamala Harris. A Democratic official said the fundraiser will raise $1 million for the state party, with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in a close race against GOP nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz for a critical U.S. Senate seat.
Last month, Biden made a quick last-minute trip to Wilmington to cast his ballot in the state’s Democratic primary. At the time, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden’s schedule required the brief Air Force One jaunt to Wilmington to vote.
“He thought it was important to exercise his constitutional right to vote, as I just mentioned, and set an example by showing the importance of voting,” she told reporters. “He also had the opportunity to say hello to poll workers and thank them for their work. And we know how under attack poll workers have been these past several years.”
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.
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.”
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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
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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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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — If a president’s most precious commodity is time, there is no place more valuable politically for the White House this midterm year than Pennsylvania.
An energized President Joe Biden returned Friday to the Keystone State, his 15th visit since he took office, this time to attend a fundraiser with Vice President Kamala Harris and other leaders to boost Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman, gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro and other Pennsylvania Democrats.
The president laid out the stakes immediately, cautioning the Nov. 8 midterm elections were “not a referendum, it’s a choice, a choice between two vastly different visions of America.”
“Democracy is on the ballot this year,” he went on. “Along with your right to choose, and your right to privacy. And the amazing thing is they’re saying it out loud.”
The Pennsylvania seat has for months been the most likely pick-up opportunity for Democrats in the evenly-divided Senate, but as prospects darken for Democratic incumbents elsewhere, a win here is becoming an even more urgent insurance policy for the party to cling to Senate control.
“It’s not hyperbole to suggest all eyes are on Pennsylvania,” Biden said.
The White House has showered attention on the Keystone State — Biden’s birthplace — in the final weeks before the election, and officials are preparing for another visit next week. Harris told the crowd the party needs to pick up just two more seats to pass major Democratic agendas on abortion rights and voting rights.
“Two more seats,” Harris said, putting up two fingers. “Just two more seats. One of them, right here.”
The Friday event came three days after Fetterman — recovering from a stroke earlier this year that he says nearly killed him — had a shaky showing in his sole debate against Republican Mehmet Oz. He spoke smoothly before the crowd in his trademark hoodie and jeans, saying he wanted to bring all Americans the same kind of quality health care that saved his life.
“So I may not say everything perfectly sometimes, but I’ll always do the right thing if you send me to Washington, D.C.,” he said to a standing ovation.
The dinner at the Pennsylvania Convention Center is the state party’s biggest fundraiser of the year, and party officials said the $1 million raised is the most ever for the dinner. Attendees included U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, and U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, for whom Biden headlined a virtual fundraiser earlier this week.
In his remarks, Biden focused his attacks against congressional Republicans, honing in on GOP plans to raise prescription drug costs, cut Medicare and Social Security, and pass a nationwide abortion ban. Republicans, if they win, will get rid of the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions, energy tax credits and the corporate minimum tax of 15%, he warned.
“That’s their plan, among other things. It’s reckless, it’s irresponsible, it’ll make inflation much worse. It will badly hurt middle class Americans,” the president said.
In the Senate race, polls show a close race between Fetterman and Oz. The Democrat’s debate performance shocked some viewers and sowed concerns among party leaders. A day later, he delivered a smooth 13-minute stump speech in Pittsburgh as his campaign tried to downplay Tuesday’s performance, saying Fetterman has always been lousy at debates and that the closed-captioning system he used as an aid was faulty.
Ravi Balu, a dentist who is the party’s vice chair in Westmoreland County, in western Pennsylvania, heard from a number of friends who were worried or surprised by Fetterman’s performance. He said he told them that, whatever Fetterman’s lingering issues from the stroke, that he will recover and will always be more “relatable” to regular people than Oz.
“It’s a thing he took a big risk on,” Balu said. “But I also think he got a lot of the sympathy from people.”
The White House stressed again this week that Biden – through his personal conversations with the lieutenant governor – believes Fetterman is physically capable to serve in public office, and cited analyses from independent medical experts who have said his halting speech did not indicate an issue with his cognitive functions.
“John IS Pennsylvania,” Biden said Friday, adding: “John leaves nobody behind.”
Biden viewed parts of the Tuesday night debate and “thought Lt. Governor John Fetterman did great,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in an e-mail Friday.
In the meantime, Fetterman’s campaign and national Democratic groups are directing attention elsewhere and pouring money into TV ads with a debate clip of Oz in which he says “I want women, doctors, local political leaders” to decide the fate of a woman’s right to an abortion.
The statement — which spread rapidly across social media immediately after the debate — was meant to frame Oz’s opposition to a federal ban that would pare back abortion access in Pennsylvania, even though he opposes abortion. But Democrats say it’s proof that Oz wants politicians in doctors’ offices and exam rooms with women.
Biden brought up the moment on Friday, and his puzzled look over the comments were greeted with a huge laugh from the crowd.
“You heard it right: ‘local political leaders,’” he said. “Look the bottom line is this, if Republicans gain control of Congress and pass a national ban on abortion, I will veto it. But if we elect to the Senate two more Democrats and keep control of the house, we’re going to codify Roe v. Wade in January so it’s the law of the land.”
Biden’s approval ratings are sagging in Pennsylvania similarly to the rest of the nation, begging the question of whether his presence is good for Democrats in a year when Republicans have political winds at their back.
But Biden won heavily in 2020 in Philadelphia and its four suburban “collar” counties — including winning over Republican moderates — and that boosted him to victory over former President Donald Trump.
The Democratic president likely remains popular there.
Democratic political strategist Mark Nevins said that energizing voters in Philadelphia and its heavily populated suburbs — home to one in three registered Pennsylvania voters — “is a cornerstone to a Democratic win in Pennsylvania in the Senate race and in the governor’s race, and frankly in some of these suburban races as well.”
Even if there is some debate about whether Biden can help on the campaign trail, “the one area that’s a constant is his ability to help raise funds. Presidents can help there. There’s no debate that they’ll take the help of a president in fundraising in these very costly races,” said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown.
Biden also has treated Pennsylvania as something of a home base.
It’s where he spent part of his childhood, it’s where he’s campaigned countless times for himself and other Democrats and it’s where Democrats called him “Pennsylvania’s third senator” during his 36 years in the Senate from next door in Delaware.
JACKSON, Miss — A Mississippi legal organization is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state’s provision permanently banning people convicted of certain felonies from voting.
The Mississippi Center for Justice is petitioning the Supreme Court two months after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down its lawsuit challenging voting restrictions set forth in Mississippi’s 1890 state constitution. If successful, the lawsuit could grant voting rights to thousands of people permanently banned from casting ballots as a result of felony convictions.
“At a time when our state and nation are struggling with the vestiges of a history of racism, it is important that the United States Supreme Court step in to address this remaining vestige of the malicious 1890 plan to prevent an entire race of people from voting in Mississippi,” said Rob McDuff, the attorney who brought the lawsuit for the Mississippi Center for Justice.
Section 241 of the Mississippi Constitution strips voting rights from people convicted of 10 felonies, including forgery, arson and bigamy. The state attorney general issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony-level shoplifting and felony-level bad check writing.
Attorneys who challenged the provision had argued the authors of the state’s Jim Crow-era constitution showed racist intent when they chose which felonies would cause people to lose the right to vote, picking crimes they thought were more likely to be committed by Black people.
The lawsuit dates back to 2017. In a news release, MCJ said it filed the suit on behalf of two Black men — Roy Harness and Kamal Karriem. Harness is a military veteran who was convicted of forgery in 1986 and Karriem is a former Columbus city council member who was convicted of embezzlement in 2005, the organization said. Both men served their sentences but still cannot vote.
In their August ruling, a majority of 5th circuit judges said the plaintiffs “failed to meet their burden of showing that the current version of Section 241 was motivated by discriminatory intent.”
“In addition, Mississippi has conclusively shown that any taint associated with Section 241 has been cured,” the majority wrote.
Seven judges of the 17-member panel dissented. Judge James Graves — who is Black and from Mississippi — wrote that the majority of the appeals court had upheld “a provision enacted in 1890 that was expressly aimed at preventing Black Mississippians from voting” and that the court had done so “by concluding that a virtually all-white electorate and legislature, otherwise engaged in massive and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, ‘cleansed’ that provision in 1968” by adding crimes that were considered to be race-neutral.
In 1950, burglary was removed from the list of crimes that would strip people of voting rights. Murder and rape were added to the list in 1968. Attorneys representing Mississippi argued those changes “cured any discriminatory taint on the original provision.”
Under the state constitution’s original provision, lesser crimes the authors thought were more likely to be committed by Black people stripped people of voting rights, while murder and rape did not.
To regain voting rights in Mississippi now, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or must win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. Legislators in recent years have passed a small number of bills to restore voting rights.
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Michael Goldberg 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 him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has a message for U.S. Republicans making election promises to slash Ukraine’s support: That will only empower China.
Stoltenberg pushed his point in an expansive interview with POLITICO this week, in which the military alliance’s chief made the case for a long-term American presence in Europe and a widespread boost in defense spending.
“The presence of the United States — but also Canada — in Europe, is essential for the strength and the credibility of that transatlantic bond,” Stoltenberg said.
Yet anxiety is coursing through policy circles that a more reticent U.S. may be on the horizon. The upcoming U.S. midterm elections could tip control of Congress toward the Republicans, empowering an ascendant, MAGA-friendly Republican cohort that has been pressing to cut back U.S. President Joe Biden’s world-leading military aid to Ukraine.
Stoltenberg warned that Kyiv’s recent battlefield gains would not have been possible without NATO allies’ support. And he appealed to the more strident anti-China sentiment that runs through both major U.S. political parties.
A victorious Russia, he said, would “be bad for all of us in Europe and North America, in the whole of NATO, because that will send a message to authoritarian leaders — not only Putin but also China — that by the use of brutal military force they can achieve their goals.”
Stoltenberg, however, expressed optimism that the U.S. would not soon vanish from Europe — or from Ukraine. Indeed, a contingent of more establishment Republicans has supported Biden’s repeated requests to send money and arms to Ukraine.
“I’m confident,” the NATO chief said, “that also after midterms, there will still be a clear majority in the Congress — in the House and in the Senate — for continued significant support to Ukraine.”
Difficult decisions ahead
The charged debate is the product of a troubling reality: Russia’s war in Ukraine appears likely to drag on for months as budgets tighten and economies wane.
In Washington, that discussion is intensifying ahead of elections slated for November 8. And a chorus of conservatives is increasingly reluctant to spend vast sums on aid to Ukraine. Since the war began, the U.S. has pledged to give Ukraine more than $17 billion in security assistance, well above what Europe has collectively committed.
Stoltenberg said that he is confident Washington will continue aiding Ukraine “partly because if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wins in Ukraine, that will be a catastrophe for the Ukrainians.”
A Ukraine soldier fires a US-made MK-19 automatic grenade launcher towards Russian positions at a front line near Toretsk in the Donetsk region of Ukraine | Dave Clark / AFP via Getty Images
But he also stressed the China connection at a moment when Beijing is top of mind for many American policymakers — including some of the same conservatives raising questions about the volume of assistance to Ukraine.
The Biden administration recently described China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” in its national security strategy.
And the document explicitly ranks China above Russia in the longer term: “Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and it is a source of disruption and instability globally but it lacks the across the spectrum capabilities of” China.
Still, the collision of Russia’s long war in Ukraine, domestic U.S. political pressures and the growing focus on Beijing are reinvigorating a long-standing burden-sharing debate within NATO.
In 2014, NATO allies agreed to “aim to move towards” spending 2 percent of their economic output on defense by 2024. With that deadline looming — and the recognition that military threats only seem to be rising — leaders are grappling with what comes next. Will they raise the target number? Will they word the spending goals differently?
“I expect that NATO allies will at the summit in Vilnius next year make a clear commitment to invest more in defense,” Stoltenberg said while noting that “it’s a bit too early to say” what precise language NATO allies will agree to.
NATO allies themselves have taken varying approaches to China, with some still adopting a much softer line than Washington.
Stoltenberg acknowledged these divergences. But he argued the alliance had made progress on confronting Beijing, emphasizing NATO’s decision earlier this summer to explicitly label China a challenge in its long-term strategy document.
It is “important for NATO allies to stand together and to address the consequences of the rise of China — and that we agree on, and that’s exactly what we are doing,” he said.
Yet while allies have agreed to “address” China’s rise, they haven’t figured out who should foot the bill for those efforts. Some U.S. lawmakers, academics and experts are advocating for Europe to take the lead in managing local security challenges so the U.S. can focus more on the Indo-Pacific.
Daniel Hamilton, a U.S. State Department official during the 1990s NATO enlargement wave, dubs it “greater European strategic responsibility.” This approach, added Hamilton, now a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, would involve European allies providing, within 10 years, “half of the forces and capabilities” needed “for deterrence and collective defense against Russia.”
European allies, some experts argue, are simply too comfortable in their reliance on Washington.
“European members of NATO have over-promised and under-delivered for decades,” said Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, a leading international affairs scholar. Europeans, he said, “will not make a sustained effort to rebuild their own defense capabilities if they can count on the United States to rush to their aid at the first sign of trouble.”
Over the next decade, Walt added, “Europe should take primary responsibility for its own defense, while the United States focuses on Asia and shifts from being Europe’s ‘first responder’ to being its ‘ally of last resort.’”
Stoltenberg pushed back against such a strict division of labor.
Decoupling North America from Europe “is not a good model, because that will reduce the strength, the credibility of the bond between North America and Europe.”
He did, however, lean on NATO’s European allies — which will include most of the Continent west of Russia once Finland and Sweden’s memberships are approved — to keep upping their defense spending.
“I strongly believe that European allies should do more,” he said, adding that he has been “pushing hard” on the topic. “The good news,” he noted, “is that all allies and also European allies have increased and are now investing more.”
Still, simple math shows that Europe is not close to being self-sustaining on defense.
“The reality is that 80 percent of NATO’s defense expenditures come from non-EU allies,” Stoltenberg said. The alliance’s ocean-spanning, multi-continent layout also “makes it clear that you need a transatlantic bond and you need non-EU allies to protect Europe.”
“But most of all,” Stoltenberg stressed, “this is about politics — I don’t believe in Europe alone, I don’t believe in North America alone.”
