Early voting at the American Museum of Natural History Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation building
Featuring: Early Voting
Where: New York City, New York, United States
When: 03 Nov 2024
Credit: TheNews2/Cover Images
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Early voting has closed in New York City, with more than a million Big Apple residents casting a ballot.
Polls closed for early voters at 5 p.m. Sunday, after nine days. Just after 10:30 a.m. Sunday, the city’s Board of Elections said that a million early votes had been cast. That represents more than 20% of active registered voters in the five boroughs, according to state voter rolls.
New York legalized early voting in 2019 and put it into effect in time for the 2020 election, but many New Yorkers voted absentee in that race due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, over the past four years, voting early has become an ingrained fixture of the democratic process in the Empire State, even as many voters find themselves facing long lines.
“I think it’s very convenient in the sense that you can take your time now instead of the actual day,” said Marceline Herrera Marsalis, a resident voting at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon. “You know, Election Day is a longer line. It’s convenient, basically.”
Michael and Marceline Marsalis.Photo by Ben BrachfeldA line to get into the polling station at SUNY Downstate Medical Center on Nov. 3, 2024.Photo by Ben BrachfeldSarah Ungerleider and Harold McCummings.Photo by Ben Brachfeld
Polls will reopen on Tuesday for Election Day, with stations open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.. New Yorkers are voting not only in the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but also in New York’s races for Senate, House, State Senate, State Assembly, and Supreme and Civil Court judges.
Ballots may not be fully counted for several days before a winner is declared. Given what occurred after the last presidential election — when Trump’s numerous attempts to remain in power culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot — many New Yorkers aren’t expecting this chaotic election season to actually be over even when all the votes are tallied.
“We know what happened the last time someone didn’t take their loss,” said Harold McCummings, a Prospect Lefferts Gardens resident and Harris voter at SUNY Downstate. “We know what happens with sore losers in this country and the harm they can do.”
CHISINAU, Moldova — Moldovans cast votes in a decisive presidential runoff Sunday that pits pro-Western incumbent Maia Sandu against a Russia-friendly opponent, as ongoing claims of voter fraud, electoral interference, and intimidation threaten democracy in the European Union candidate country.
In the first round held Oct. 20, Sandu obtained 42% of the ballot but failed to win an outright majority. She faces Alexandr Stoianoglo, a former prosecutor general, who outperformed polls in the first round with almost 26% of the vote.
Polling stations closed locally at 9 p.m. (1900 GMT), by which time 1.68 million people — about 54% of eligible voters — had cast ballots, according to the Central Electoral Commission. Moldova’s large diaspora also turned out in record numbers, with more than 315,000 casting ballots by the time local polls closed.
A poll released by research company iData indicates a tight race that leans toward a narrow Sandu victory, an outcome that might rely on Moldova’s diaspora. The presidential role carries significant powers in areas such as foreign policy and national security and has a four-year term.
Moldova’s diaspora played a key role in a nationwide referendum also held on Oct. 20, when a narrow majority of 50.35% voted to secure Moldova’s path toward EU membership. But the results of the ballots including Sunday’s vote have been overshadowed by allegations of a major vote-buying scheme and voter intimidation.
Instead of winning the overwhelming support that Sandu had hoped, the results in both races exposed Moldova’s judiciary as unable to adequately protect the democratic process.
On Sunday, Moldovan police said they have “reasonable evidence” of organized transportation of voters — illegal under the country’s electoral code — to polling stations from within the country and from overseas, and are “investigating and registering evidence in connection with air transport activities from Russia to Belarus, Azerbaijan and Turkey.”
“Such measures are taken to protect the integrity of the electoral process and to ensure that every citizen’s vote is cast freely without undue pressure or influence,” police said.
Moldova’s foreign ministry said on Sunday afternoon that polling stations in Frankfurt, Germany and Liverpool and Northampton in the U.K. had been targeted by false bomb threats, which “intended only to stop the voting process.”
Stanislav Secrieru, the president’s national security adviser, wrote on X: “We are seeing massive interference by Russia in our electoral process,” which he warned had a “high potential to distort the outcome” of the vote.
Secrieru later added that the national voter record systems were being targeted by “ongoing coordinated cyberattacks” to disrupt links between domestic polling stations and those abroad, and that cybersecurity teams were “working to counter these threats and ensure system continuity.”
Moldova’s Prime Minister Dorin Recean said that people throughout the country had received “anonymous death threats via phone calls” in what he called “an extreme attack” to scare voters in the former Soviet republic, which has a population of about 2.5 million people.
After casting her ballot in Chisinau, Sandu said “today, more than ever, we must be united, keep our peace, keep our vote, keep our independence”.
“Thieves want to buy our vote, thieves want to buy our country, but the power of the people is infinitely greater,” she told reporters.
Outside a polling station in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, 20-year-old medical student Silviana Zestrea said the runoff would be a “definitive step” toward Moldova’s future.
“People need to understand that we have to choose a true candidate that will fulfill our expectations,” she said. “Because I think even if we are a diaspora now, none of us actually wanted to leave.”
In the wake of the two October votes, Moldovan law enforcement said that a vote-buying scheme was orchestrated by Ilan Shor, an exiled oligarch who lives in Russia and was convicted in absentia last year of fraud and money laundering. Shor denies any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors say $39 million was paid to more than 130,000 recipients through an internationally sanctioned Russian bank to voters between September and October. Anti-corruption authorities have conducted hundreds of searches and seized over $2.7 million (2.5 million euros) in cash as they attempt to crack down.
In one case in Gagauzia, an autonomous part of Moldova where only 5% voted in favor of the EU, a physician was detained after allegedly coercing 25 residents of a home for older adults to vote for a candidate they did not choose. Police said they obtained “conclusive evidence,” including financial transfers from the same Russian bank.
On Saturday at a church in Comrat, the capital of Gagauzia, Father Vasilii told The Associated Press that he’s urged people to go and vote because it’s a “civic obligation” and that they do not name any candidates.
“We use the goods the country offers us — light, gas,” he said. “Whether we like what the government does or not, we must go and vote. … The church always prays for peace.”
On Thursday, prosecutors raided a political party headquarters and said 12 people were suspected of paying voters to select a candidate in the presidential race. A criminal case was also opened in which 40 state agency employees were suspected of taking electoral bribes.
Cristian Cantir, a Moldovan associate professor of international relations at Oakland University, told AP that whatever the outcome of the second round, it “will not deflate” geopolitical tensions. “On the contrary, I expect geopolitical polarization to be amplified by the campaign for the 2025 legislative elections.”
Moldovan law enforcement needs more resources and better-trained staff working at a faster pace to tackle voter fraud, he added, to “create an environment in which anyone tempted to either buy or sell votes knows there will be clear and fast consequences.”
Savlina Adasan, a 21-year-old economics student in Bucharest, said she voted for Sandu and cited concerns about corruption and voters uninformed about the two candidates.
“We want a European future for our country,” she said, adding that it offers “many opportunities, development for our country … and I feel like if the other candidate wins, then it means that we are going ten steps back as a country.”
A pro-Western government has been in power in Moldova since 2021, and a parliamentary election will be held in 2025. Moldova watchers warn that next year’s vote could be Moscow’s main target.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moldova applied to join the EU. It was granted candidate status in June of that year, and in summer 2024, Brussels agreed to start membership negotiations. The sharp Westward shift irked Moscow and significantly soured relations with Chisinau.
Since then, Moldovan authorities have repeatedly accused Russia of waging a vast “hybrid war,” from sprawling disinformation campaigns to protests by pro-Russia parties to vote-buying schemes that undermine countrywide elections. Russia has denied it is meddling.
___
McGrath reported from Bucharest, Romania. Associated Press writer Nicolae Dumitrache in Comrat, Moldova, contributed to this report.
Amid the home stretch to election day, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials issued a new warning on foreign interference. On Friday, they declassified intelligence and confirmed Russia is behind a fabricated viral video spreading lies about early voting. Moscow denied the claims.
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The rallying call urges all the Spanish-speaking and corrido-loving sapphics, butchonas, jotas and vaqueeras, to grab their boots and meet up at Little Joy Cocktails for a carne asada-style, family party every fourth Sunday of the month, featuring spins by DJ Lady Soul, DJ French and DJ Killed By Synth.
In Los Angeles, these three disc jockeys have embraced the word buchona, adding the ‘t’ as a play on the word butch.
The free event, now locally known as Butchona, is a safe space for all the Mexican and Spanish music-loving lesbians to gather on the last Sunday of every month.
Buchona is usually a term used in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries to describe a woman who is a boss– someone who exudes dominant energy or marries into a powerful position.
“I didn’t know how well [the idea for Butchona] was going to be received and my favorite part of all that, has been the looks everyone has been bringing,” said Rocio Flores, who goes by DJ Lady Soul.
(Photo Courtesy of Adelyna Tirado) DJ Lady Soul poses outside of Little Joy Cocktails in her butchona outfit.
The event that started only a few months ago, brings in dozens of dressed-up jotas. The ‘looks’ that the crowds bring are reminiscent of how dad’s, tíos, and their friends dressed at Mexican family parties: a tejana, cowboy boots, giant belt buckle and a beer in hand.
Dressing up in these looks is a way to show wealth and status to earn the respect of other males in a male-dominated and -centered culture– that is until now.
This traditionally male, Mexican, cultural identity, is something that has never been embraced or accessible to women or gender non-conforming people. The giant belt buckles that are traditionally custom-made and specific to male identities like head of household, ‘only rooster in the chicken coop’ and lone wolf, are only part of the strictly cis-gendered male clothes that dominate the culture.
The embroidered button-ups, belt buckles and unique cowboy hats –all come together to create the masculine looks that are now being reclaimed by women and gender nonconforming people at the event curated by three queer, Mexican DJs, who once had a little idea that could.
Flores, 37, (she/her), Gemini, says that to her the term butchona describes a woman who is a little ‘chunti,’ a little cheap in the way she dresses– but in a queer way.
“That title also means that you’re a badass,” she said. “I want to look like that señor, I want to look like that dude and now I feel like I could, so why not?”
Flores says that now she feels like she can embrace and reclaim that cultural identity, but it wasn’t always that easy.
At first, her family upheld the traditional cisgender roles that forced her to dress more feminine, but she always wanted to dress like her cousins and her tíos.
“Now, I’m like: ‘Fuck that!’ I’m going to wear the chalecos and the Chalino suits,” she said in Span-glish.
The Chalino suits are traditional, Mexican, suits that were worn and popularized by Chalino Sanchez, known as the King of corridos—a genre of music that is said to have originated on the border region of Texas, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, Mexico.
“It felt good to break into the DJ scene, but what I always noticed was that the lesbian culture was always lacking,” said DJ Lady Soul. “I would mainly see gay males at parties and a lot of male DJs.”
According to Zippia–a career site that sources their information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the U.S. Census–23.5 percent of disc jockeys are women, 16 percent are LGBTQ+ and only 12.7 percent are Hispanic or Latin American.
What has always been a traditionally machista music genre and scene, is now being embraced by a growing number of queer women and non-male DJs in Los Angeles.
For Fran Fregoso, who goes by DJ French, 33, (they/she), Taurus– embracing their cultural identity came a lot easier because of their late uncle who sort of paved the way for them to come out as queer and be more accepted than he was as the first openly out queer person in their family.
(Photo by Adelyna Tirado)Dj French poses in their vaquero-style outfit.
Their music journey began listening to the 90s grunge, alternative, hip-hop and metal music played by their older siblings at home.
“Then I met Vanessa [DJ Killed By Synth], and she introduced me to the industry,” said DJ French.
DJ French felt the acceptance and support to enter this music space and decided to embrace their cultural roots by playing music that they grew up listening to at family parties. They booked their first gig with Cumbiatón LA, a collective of DJs and organizers who host Latin American parties across Los Angeles, often centering queer DJs and other performers.
“When [Lady Soul and Killed By Synth], brought this idea up to create Butchona, I was like: ‘Oh, I’m in 100 percent’,” they said. “Because I love playing corridos and banda music because that’s a core memory from my childhood and family parties.”
Banda, corridos, cumbias and other traditional music is a big part of Mexican culture, even as gendered and male-centered as it has been, it is embraced by all.
“I know a lot of people in our queer, Latino, community love that music too, but they also want to be in a safe space,” they said. “That’s where we decided to make an environment for our community to dance and be themselves.”
Vanessa Bueno, 40, (she/her), Libra, who goes by DJ Killed By Synth, says her journey started about 20 years ago when she started DJing for backyard parties in East L.A. and across L.A. County.
(Photo by Adelyna Tirado)DJ Killed By Synth playing her set.
Her family is from Guadalajara, so she says that growing up she also had a lot of family parties with corridos and banda blaring in the background of memories with the many cousins she says she lost count of.
“A lot of the music we heard was bachata, banda, cumbia and even some 80s freestyle,” said Bueno.
Even while she had a ‘little punk rocker phase,’ she says she couldn’t escape that Spanish music her family played ritualistically at family get-togethers.
When they began their music journey–back in the AOL, Instant Messenger days, they played a lot more electronic music, hence the name Killed by Synth. At first, it was just a username, but then it became her DJ name.
“Later down the line, comes [the idea for] Butchona came about, and me, Rocio and French collaborated,” she said. “It’s kind of always been my goal to create these safe spaces for women and queer people, and I had been in the scene long enough to where people were willing to answer my calls to work with them to make it happen.”
For Bueno, it was natural for her to build community and embrace this part of their culture later on in her career when she saw a need for queer, Latin American-centered club spaces with family party vibes.
She started hosting Latin American-style parties, blending music, culture, and food and attracting the exact audience she envisioned. With these events, Bueno aimed to reclaim her Mexican identity and foster a sense of family and community at these events.
“We’re here to build a safe space to embrace the music and kind of not think about the machismo that is tied to it and celebrate who we are,” said Bueno.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics, California, Texas, New York, Arizona and Washington rank the highest in employment rates for disc jockeys in 2023. There is also a recent trend in more women DJs–the study does not include gender nonconforming DJs–booking twice as many gigs as men in event spaces and concerts that host DJ sets.
“It feels like we’re barely cracking into these safe spaces and expanding our horizons a little bit,” said DJ French. “I hope this inspires other people to also create safe spaces like Butchona.”
The next Butchona event will be on Sunday, Oct. 27 and will feature all three DJs playing corridos, banda, cumbia and all the classics, for a chunti Halloween party.
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump has spent months laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the 2024 election if he loses — just as he did four years ago.
At rally after rally, he urges his supporters to deliver a victory “too big to rig,” telling them the only way he can lose is if Democrats cheat. He has refused to say, repeatedly, whether he will accept the results regardless of the outcome. And he’s claimed cheating is already underway, citing debunked claims or outrageous theories with no basis in reality.
“The only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It’s the only thing that can stop us,” he said at an event in Arizona late Thursday night.
Democrats fear he may do the same thing this year before the race is called. He wouldn’t answer a question Friday in Dearborn, Michigan, about those Democratic concerns, instead pivoting to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump has made election lies central to his 2024 campaign, issuing fevered warnings about fraud while promising to take retribution against people he sees as standing in his way.
This year, he is backed by a sophisticated “election integrity” operation built by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that has filed more than 130 lawsuits already and signed up more than 230,000 volunteers being trained to deploy as poll watchers and poll workers across the country on Election Day.
Here’s a look at Trump’s strategy to sow doubt in this year’s election and the facts behind each claim.
THE CLAIM: Trump has alleged, without evidence, that Democrats have allowed millions of migrants to enter the country illegally so that they can be registered to vote. In an interview with Newsmax in September, Trump alleged such efforts were already underway.
“They are working overtime trying to sign people, illegally, to vote in the election,” he claimed. “They’re working overtime to sign people and register people — many of the same people that you just see come across the border. Which is probably their original thought, because why else would they want to destroy our country?”
THE FACTS: It takes years for newcomers to become citizens and only citizens can legally cast ballots in federal elections. Isolated cases of noncitizens being caught trying to vote — like a University of Michigan student from China arrested for allegedly casting an illegal ballot — do not reflect a larger conspiracy.
Research has shown noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots is extremely rare and usually done by mistake.
THE CLAIM: Trump has pointed to Democratic efforts to secure the votes of Americans living abroad as another opportunity for fraud. He’s alleged that they are “getting ready to CHEAT!” and ”want to “dilute the TRUE vote of our beautiful military and their families.”
THE FACTS: The former president has himself campaigned for the votes of Americans overseas, promising to end so-called “double taxation” for people who often pay taxes in the country where they reside as well as to the U.S. government.
THE CLAIM: Trump has begun to suggest that Harris might have access to some kind of secret inside information about the outcome of a race that has yet to be decided.
Since the vice president took a day off from the trail to sit for interviews with Telemundo and NBC, he has repeatedly suggested, “Maybe she knows something we don’t know.”
In Michigan last weekend, he suggested there is no way Harris would be campaigning with Beyoncé — one of the biggest stars in the world — if the race were really as close as polls suggest.
“Number one, they cheat like hell. So maybe they know something that we don’t, right?” he said. “They might know something that we don’t, I don’t know. Why the hell would she be celebrating when you’re down? Maybe — never thought of that — maybe she knows something we don’t. But we’re not going to let it happen.”
THE FACTS: There is no evidence to support a Democratic conspiracy. Indeed, Trump fanned fears of his own inside planning at a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden when he looked at House Speaker Mike Johnson and talked about a “little secret” they had.
Johnson, before becoming speaker, took the lead in drafting a widely panned brief seeking to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss and echoed some of the wilder conspiracy theories to explain away his loss.
Asked about Trump’s reference to a “little secret,” Johnson issued a statement that included the following: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared — and I don’t intend to share this one.” (He later told an audience that it related to “one of our tactics on get-out-the-vote,” according to The Hill. Trump’s campaign issued a statement noting he had “done countless tele-rallies” to help bolster Republican congressional candidates.)
THE CLAIM: Trump in recent days has turned his ire on Pennsylvania, a state that both campaigns view as critical, and where he’s claimed cheating is already underway.
Earlier this week, he claimed York County, Pennsylvania, had “received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-In Ballot Applications from a third party group.” He has also pointed to Lancaster County, which he claimed had been “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person. Really bad ‘stuff.’”
During a campaign event in Allentown on Tuesday, the former president said: “They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster. They’ve cheated. We caught ’em with 2,600 votes. No, we caught them cold. 2,600 votes. Think of this, think of this. And every vote was written by the same person.”
THE FACTS: In Lancaster, County District Attorney Heather Adams, an elected Republican, has said election workers raised concerns about two sets of voter registration applications because of what she described as numerous similarities. Officials are now examining a total of about 2,500 forms.
To be clear, Lancaster is looking into voter registration applications, not “votes.” Lancaster officials said some forms contained false names, suspicious handwriting, questionable signatures, incorrect addresses or other problematic details, but did not say they were all written by the same person.
York County Chief Clerk Greg Monskie confirmed this week that his county was reviewing suspect forms. County Commissioner Julie Wheeler issued a statement saying voter registration forms and mail-in ballot applications were among a “large delivery containing thousands of election-related materials” that the county elections office received from a third-party organization.
Officials in the state say the discovery and investigation into the applications — not votes — is evidence the system is working as it should.
THE CLAIM: Trump has threatened severe consequences for those engaged in what he deems “unscrupulous behavior.”
In one social media post that falsely cites “the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” he has warned that, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
The posts go on to threaten “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior,” including election officials, lawyers, and donors, whom he says “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
THE FACTS: Judges, election officials and even Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, have all affirmed that there was no widespread cheating in the 2020 election.
If he’s elected again, Trump has vowed to go after rivals he has deemed “enemies from within,” including saying he would appoint a special prosecutor to target Biden. That’s more than a theoretical threat given that when he was president, Trump repeatedly pressed for investigations into perceived political adversaries.
While the Justice Department does have checks in place meant to ward off political influence, Trump could appoint leaders who would facilitate cases being opened at his behest.
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Associated Press writers Christine Fernando in Chicago, Adriana Gomez Licon in Dearborn, Michigan, and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
A man in a white van circled an early voting site in Loxahatchee, Florida, and shouted antisemitic and racist slurs at a group of people campaigning outside. A man who went to vote in Orangeburg, South Carolina, brawled with election workers after he was asked to remove his Trump hat. A man in Tempe, Arizona, was arrested for shooting up a DNC office three times.
These are just some of the disturbing incidents that have taken place in the last 10 days alone.
WIRED is tracking how disinformation and heightened political rhetoric is spilling out into the real world as Election Day nears, manifesting in acts of sabotage, intimidation, and violence. Please reach out via this form with tips.
Authorities are on high alert for election-related violence this year. Since 2020, election workers have faced a constant barrage of threats, harassment, and stalking at such a level that the DOJ formed a special division just to investigate those types of threats. A series of intelligence memos reported by WIRED indicate that officials are bracing for potential chaos and sabotage from “insider threats,” as well as possible attacks on voting infrastructure for the 2024 US election. The V-Dem Institute, a political-science think tank based in Sweden that takes a data-driven approach to evaluating democracies around the world, put out a report predicting a “relatively high likelihood of electoral violence” for the election.
We’ve compiled a total of 13 recent confirmed incidents so far, and we’ll keep updating as we go.
10/22/2024 — Tempe, Arizona
Jeffrey Michael Kelly, 60, was arrested and detained on terrorism charges in connection with three shootings outside a Democratic National Committee office over the course of two weeks in late September. Police said he also affixed razor blades and bags of white powder labeled “biohazard” to anti-Democrat signs erected around his home. They discovered 250,000 rounds of ammo, 120 firearms, and a grenade launcher when they searched his home, and believe he was prepping for a “mass casualty event.”
10/23/2024 — Phoenix, Arizona
A USPS box was set on fire, and approximately 20 mail-in ballots were damaged. Dieter Klofkorn, 35, was taken into custody on suspicion of arson. His motive is not currently known.
10/24/2024 — Loxahatchee, Florida
A group of people were campaigning for a Jewish local Democratic candidate outside a public library, which was an early voting site. Nicholas Farley, 30, allegedly drove around the site in a white van shouting antisemitic and racist slurs at the campaigners. Later, when questioned by deputies, Farley touted the name of a neo-Nazi website, continued to make racist and antisemitic remarks, and said he uses those slurs toward anyone who “commits crime and don’t support America and patriots like him,” The Palm Beach Post reported.
10/24/2024 — San Antonio, Texas
Jesse Lutzenberger, 63, allegedly assaulted an elderly election worker at a polling place who repeatedly asked him to remove his MAGA hat. He’s since been charged with injury to an elderly person. One recurring flashpoint for violence appears to be state laws that bar voters from wearing political attire to polling places (21 states have such laws on the books).
10/25/2024 — Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Election workers flagged more than 2,500 mail-in ballots as fraudulent. The ballots contained names of candidates from different political parties, and officials suspect that they were sent in as part of a coordinated operation to erode trust in the voting process. The incident is under investigation.
10/26/2024 — Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
GOP headquarters in Montgomery County received a bomb threat. State police are investigating.
10/28/2024 — Vancouver, Washington & Portland, Oregon
Ballot drop boxes in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, were set on fire using incendiary devices. A third, undetonated device was found by another drop box in Vancouver. Investigators say that signs saying “Free Gaza” were discovered nearby, but cautioned that those shouldn’t necessarily be an indication of motive, as the suspect could have left them to deflect blame towards leftists.
10/28/2024 — Delaware County, Pennsylvania
MAGA activist Val Biancaniello was taken into custody for disruptive and belligerent behavior that seemed intended to influence other voters while waiting in line at a polling place. Video of Biancaniello being arrested went viral, and the GOP are claiming that it’s evidence of “voter suppression” targeting Trump supporters.
10/28/2024 — Redding, California
A landlord was fired from his position after bragging in a post on Reddit that he was using ballots belonging to former tenants to cast additional votes for Trump. The local district attorney told Action News Now that she’s weighing criminal charges.
10/29/2024 — Neptune Beach, Florida
Caleb James Williams, 18, showed up to an early voting location with a group of young men, holding a Trump sign and brandishing a machete towards a group of female Harris voters. He’s facing aggravated assault charges.
10/30/2024 — Champaign, Illinois
A fight at a polling place broke out when an election worker told a man in a Trump hat that he wasn’t allowed to wear political merchandise while voting. The man reportedly pulled out a camera and started recording the election worker, and then got into an altercation with another voter.
10/30/2024 — Orangeburg, South Carolina
A man wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” hat was told he couldn’t vote at his polling place while wearing it. Video shows that he quickly became aggressive, a fight broke out, and he launched towards poll workers, mostly Black women. Some workers had to pin back his arms to prevent him from striking their colleagues.
10/30/2024 — Westminster, Maryland
An election leader successfully obtained a “peace order” against a local GOP official and activist who was reportedly harassing election workers during early voting.
WIRED also noted several arrests for incidents that took place prior to our dataset’s timeframe (starting October 21). On October 21, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force unsealed an indictment charging a Pennsylvania man who threatened a state political party representative who was recruiting poll watchers. The affiliation or identity of the party representative was not revealed in court documents, but investigators say the suspect threatened to hunt and skin him alive.
On October 29, Madison County authorities in Indiana arrested Larry L. Savage Jr., 51, a former GOP candidate for the US Congress, for stealing several election ballots during a voting machine test, and then trying to spread disinformation online about the machines being faulty.
PHOENIX — Employees for Arizona’s most populous county are taking on extra shifts to help election workers with an around-the-clock operation to process early ballots that are an unusually long two pages.
Election officials in Maricopa County must verify each voter’s signature on early ballot envelopes and then remove the ballot pages so they can be prepared for actual counting. The county was unsure how long it would need to keep up the 24-hour operation, which kicked off Thursday night.
“As predicted, the first two-page ballot since 2006 has affected election administration, especially for the hard-working bipartisan boards who are separating the ballot pages from the affidavit envelopes,” said Jennifer Liewer, Maricopa County deputy elections director for communications.
“In addition to election workers already on staff, county workers are stepping up to assist with the process,” she said
Liewer said early Thursday evening that the number of people helping out would fluctuate as they are trained, but that eventually between 150 and 200 people are expected to be used for the additional shifts.
“The county employees who are assisting with the night shifts are doing so outside of their normal job responsibilities,” she said. “We are also utilizing Maricopa County Public Health Medical Reserve Corps members.”
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said earlier this week that ballots have been received from 1 million voters, a number approaching 40% of the nearly 2.6 million people registered.
Election officials in the presidential battleground state have urged people to vote early, or make a plan if they opt to cast their ballots in person on Election Day, which is Tuesday.
Early voting, particularly by mail, has long been popular in Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters submitted their ballots before Election Day in 2020, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
Voters who received their ballots in the mail also can drop them off in person at polling sites or in a drop box.
Maricopa County mail ballots that arrive after Friday or that are dropped off at the polls generally won’t be tabulated until after Election Day, a fact that means it is often more than a week before the results of tight races are known.
Arizona has 4.36 million registered voters as of the Oct. 7 deadline to vote in next week’s election, according to a recent tally released by the Secretary of State’s Office.
Many counties outside Maricopa also will use a two-page ballot. The exact length will vary even in a single county because the ballots incorporate local contests.
Election officials in counties around the state have warned of possible delays at polling places. Maricopa County officials have said vote-counting machines could jam if both pages of the ballot are not fed separately into the on-site tabulation machine.
Maricopa County’s ballot alone will average 79 contests for local, state and federal races, as well as statewide ballot propositions.
Leah Feiger: I absolutely hear that. Obviously though, this is a different environment, right? We have experienced a fracturing of media and social platforms that we have never seen before.
Stacey Abrams: Absolutely.
Leah Feiger: In many ways, to me, it feels like tech platforms have abdicated responsibility in this election cycle.
Stacey Abrams: Yes, absolutely.
Leah Feiger: Elon Musk doesn’t just own X. He’s actually been using it to spread election conspiracies, and letting other major influencers do the same. How does the Harris campaign deal with that, and what do you make of the role that Musk has played in this election?
Stacey Abrams: So, the podcast I do called Assembly Required, we had Esosa Osa on to talk about disinformation. The reason this matters is that it’s not just Elon Musk. It’s that Meta and other platforms have weakened their filters. So, Elon Musk has been aggressively and intentionally a disinformation factory.
Leah Feiger: Machine, truly incredible to watch.
Stacey Abrams: He is becoming his own industry of life. So, he deserves his own specific place in ignominy.
Leah Feiger: Fair.
Stacey Abrams: Let’s put it that way. We should be angry. We should be concerned, but we should also be aware that while he is the loudest version of this terrible dark star, he’s not alone. So, to your point, our obligation is to hold all of these tech platforms accountable. You should not be permitted to weaken the protection that you owe the people. If you are going to hold yourself out as a purveyor of information, you are obligated to ensure that that information at least meet the basic smell test. Unfortunately, we have seen multiple tech platforms abdicate that responsibility. So, while I am more than happy to castigate and hold Elon Musk particularly accountable for taking terrible and making it worse, we also have the responsibility on the other side of this election to evaluate everyone who was willing to take this Wild West situation, and make it worse.
Leah Feiger: I mean, absolutely. Yesterday, we came out with a big article about how militias are organizing on Facebook, and you know what? Facebook is actually auto generating pages for militias. It’s messy to say the least. Obviously with the Musk thing, he comes with the benefit of just an absolute ton of cash. That has been also wild to watch about his cash for registration sweepstakes. There’s just a lot happening there that I am constantly wondering, “Is the Harris campaign doing enough to counteract, and can they?”
WASHINGTON — Hacking a local election system in the United States wouldn’t be easy, and secretly altering votes on a scale massive enough to change the outcome of the presidential race would be impossible, election officials have said, thanks to decentralized systems, paper records for nearly all ballots, exhaustive reviews, legal due process and decades of work by American election officials, volunteers and citizens.
But foreign actors and domestic extremist groups looking to meddle in next week’s election can target a much weaker link: voters’ perceptions and emotions. Those intent on undermining confidence in U.S. democracy don’t have to change any votes if they can convince enough Americans not to trust the outcome.
It’s a possible scenario particularly concerning to intelligence analysts and officials tasked with protecting America’s election: An adversary tries to hack a state or local election system and then releases a document — perhaps a fake one or even material that is publicly available — and suggests it’s evidence of vote rigging.
Or, a video is crafted showing someone supposedly hacking into a ballot scanner, voting machine or a state voter registration system. But it hasn’t happened, and it would not be true.
It’s called a perception hack, which may or may not include an actual breach of voting systems but is made to appear that has happened. In some cases, minor information might be stolen — enough for a video to appear legitimate — but it does not change votes. A related threat involves fake footage supposedly depicting election workers destroying ballots.
Governments at all levels have worked to strengthen election infrastructure in recent years. The human brain, however, remains hard to defend.
“I think that’s almost certain to happen,” former CIA political analyst Adam Darrah said when discussing the risk of perception hacks.
Darrah, now vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity company ZeroFox, said misleading people into thinking election systems are vulnerable is a lot easier than actually hacking into them. ”It’s a way to induce panic. We are very technically resilient. Our emotional resilience, our hypersensitivity, that’s still a challenge.”
Narrow margins of victory or delays in vote counting could heighten the risk that a perception hack could fool a large number of voters, further polarizing the electorate, raising the risk of political violence and potentially complicating the transfer of power in January.
Intelligence officials warned last week that Russia and Iran may consider encouraging violent protests in the U.S. following the election. The nation’s intelligence community and private analysts agree that while the Kremlin is backing former President Donald Trump, Moscow’s ultimate goal is to divide Americans and undermine U.S. support for Ukraine and the NATO alliance.
America’s adversaries focus on disinformation in part, officials say, because they understand the country’s election infrastructure is too secure to hack successfully.
Despite the findings of intelligence officials, both Russia and Iran have rejected claims that they are seeking to influence the U.S. election.
“We have never interfered, we are not interfering, and we do not intend to interfere,” a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
Even without a foreign power’s involvement, isolated stories of long lines at the polls, ballot mix-ups or other irregularities could be held up as proof that elections can’t be trusted.
It happened in 2020, when Trump amplified claims about election problems, helping lead to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters trying to disrupt certification of the election.
The former Republican president has spent months laying the groundwork to challenge the results of this year’s election if he loses. And he has worked to convince his supporters that the only way he can lose is if Democrats cheat, urging them to deliver a victory “too big to rig.”
“They cheat,” Trump said at a Michigan rally last month. “That’s the only way we’re going to lose, because they cheat. They cheat like hell.”
Just as in 2020, the days immediately after the election are likely to be the most critical, as results are announced and Americans come to the end of a contentious race.
It’s then that authoritarian nations or domestic anti-democratic groups will look to whip up distrust in an effort to spur people into action, said Paul Barrett, a New York University law professor who studies online discourse and polarization.
“They’re happy to see Americans at the throats of other Americans,” Barrett said. “We saw that in 2021, and I have tremendous anxiety that we will see a repeat.”
In response, national security and election officials across the country have moved to expose disinformation and quickly knock down rumors. Top intelligence officials have held multiple briefings outlining foreign threats, while cybersecurity and election officials have explained why election systems are secure.
Last week, a video purporting to show someone destroying mail ballots in Pennsylvania began spreading on social media. Bipartisan election officials in Bucks County quickly debunked the video, and intelligence officials linked it to a Russian campaign behind other videos seeking to smear Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“That video was debunked pretty quickly on multiple news sites, and I know that Bucks County immediately got out in front of it and basically explained why it was a fake and why voters should have confidence,” said Kim Wyman, former secretary of state in Washington state who also has worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
“But the problem is — now it exists out there,” she said. “And we know that it will continue to be circulated between now and probably Inauguration Day.”
Americans can help prevent a successful perception hack by not spreading election hoaxes any further. Disinformation experts urge voters to consult a variety of sources of information, be skeptical of anonymous social media claims and turn to their own state and local officials for the facts.
Uncertainty and emotions will be running high in the days after voting ends — exactly the conditions foreign adversaries and domestic extremists need to undermine trust.
“Our foreign adversaries are looking to attack our democratic process to further their own objectives, and we need the help of all Americans in ensuring they are not successful,” said CISA senior adviser Cait Conley. ”Americans should be confident that their votes will be counted as cast. They should also know that our foreign adversaries will try to make them believe otherwise.”
“We encourage everyone to remain vigilant, verify the information they consume, and rely on trusted sources like their state and local election officials,” she added.
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Cassidy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
Jerome Whitfield fills out his ballot at the in-prison voting station set up at the Denver Detention Center, Oct. 30, 2024.
Kiara DeMare/CPR News
Jerome Whitfield didn’t know he could vote.
“I thought my background may prevent me from that, but by the grace of God and everything else, I’m able to,” he said this week.
Whitfield registered to vote, filled out his ballot and dropped it off all within the same hallway — not too far from his pod at the Denver County Detention Center, where he’s awaiting his sentencing.
“I’ve been here for a couple months now,” Whitfield said. “[Voting] makes me feel like I’m still involved in the community out there.”
Jerome Whitfield, an inmate at the Denver Detention Center, after registering to vote and receiving his ballot, Oct. 30, 2024.Kiara DeMare/CPR News
Many people, both those inside the system and out, don’t know who exactly is eligible to vote.
But people in custody who aren’t serving felony sentences, people in pre-trial detention and people deemed eligible by the clerk and recorder’s office can all vote.
Denver’s Clerk and County Recorder Paul López said he often hears that people with felonies don’t vote because they believe they can’t.
“That’s false. We want to make sure that folks can confidently be able to say, ‘Yes, I’m registering to vote, even as somebody who has been convicted of a felony in the past,’” López said.
The Denver County Detention Center is the leading force behind making in-person voting more accessible in jails throughout the state.
López and Elias Diggins, the Denver sheriff, worked together with the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and the League of Women Voters during the previous presidential election to ensure that incarcerated people who were eligible to vote could do so.
Expanding voter access statewide
Their efforts in 2020 caught the attention of the rest of the state, and SB24-072 was passed this legislative session.
The bill requires clerks to make their best efforts to work with their county’s sheriff to facilitate voting for eligible incarcerated people.
“We had no idea that what started in Denver would now be something that’s done in jails across Colorado,” Sheriff Diggins said. “So today, we’re happy to continue to be a leader in this field.”
Since Denver is a pioneer in jail voting, CCJRC, the sheriff’s office and election officials have been training other counties leading up to election day.
“We’re all working together to make sure this goes smoothly and well. So we’ve paired together to do trainings for other clerk’s offices who have never done this before,” Giddings said. “(We) would just run mock in-person voting events for their jails and kind of run ’em through all the different scenarios that could happen.”
Raul Vidaurri (left) filling out his ballot at the Denver Detention Center, Oct. 30, 2024. The in-person voting program at Denver’s jail is the first time the 36-year-old has cast a ballot.Kiara DeMare/CPR News
What voting in a jail looks like, and means to those there.
The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition (CCJRC) was inside the Denver County Detention Center on Wednesday helping people register to receive their ballots.
The group set up two stations across the hallway from each other, both with people completing the registration process, and one with the ballot drop box.
At 36 years old, Raul Vidaurri voted for the first time, something he feels is pushing him in the right direction.
“It’s enlightening. Very enlightening,” Vidaurri said. “I got into a bit of a situation, but I’m glad to be in here, get my head right. [This is] like a new start, a new beginning.”
CCJRC has been working with the Denver Clerk’s office and the detention center to not only streamline the in-prison voting process, but also to make sure the people participating are properly informed.
“This year’s ballot has multiple criminal justice reform issues on it,” said Kyle Giddings with CCJRC. “And so the people who will be directly impacted by that should be able to have their voices heard and their ballots cast.”
During previous elections, the first day CCJRC set up the voting stations in jails and detention centers was always the busiest. And this year is no different.
“It’s been crazy busy- the turnout. Every pod has a large group of people that want to make sure their voices are heard in their communities and heard in the presidential race. So we’re having huge turnout rates here in Denver so far,” Giddings said.
The detention center averages about 1,200 inmates at a time. While not all of them are eligible to vote, most of the ones who are, do.
“These are folks who want to have a voice in the election. And as long as that’s the case, we are going to make sure that they receive a ballot,” López said.
The people voting from inside the Denver detention center aren’t always voting for races in Denver County. Like everyone else, they are voting to their registered address. For example, Whitfield is voting in El Paso County.
He said he’s planning to keep voting for the future.
“Not even for just my future, for my kids’s future and my family’s future,” Whitfield said. “If you can vote, vote. It may not be making much change, but go ahead and do it.”
Drones, snipers, razor wire, sniffer dogs, body armor, bulletproof glass, and 24-hour armed security.
This is not a list of protections in place for a visit by the president of the United States nor the contents of a shipment to frontline troops fighting in Ukraine. This is a list of the security measures election officials in counties across the US have had to implement ahead of Tuesday’s vote as a result of the unprecedented threats they have faced in recent years.
Officials are putting in place the typical final measures to ensure the smooth operation of an election, but beyond checking that they have enough ballots and that machines are working properly, officials are now faced with having to monitor for threats and make sure they have done everything they can to protect themselves and their staff.
“Given the current political environment, the possibility that an event may occur has increased, and our election professionals have responded in kind,” says Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County who is now a senior adviser at the nonprofit Bolstering Elections Initiative. “Efforts focusing on the physical security of the voters, election workers, and staff by putting in bulletproof glass, panic buttons, razor wire, and fencing are fairly common, as is the installation of surveillance cameras and systems, cyber protections, and training on de-escalation techniques and response drills.”
Nowhere in the US is the militarization of the election process more evident than in Maricopa County.
The fourth largest county in the nation, Maricopa became ground zero for election denial conspiracists in recent years, after GOP lawmakers sanctioned a bogus recount in 2021, run by the Florida company Cyber Ninjas.
As a result, the county has for years been putting increased security measures in place. “We’re a fortress now,” Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County Recorder, told WIRED back in February, outlining how he had to navigate security fencing, metal detectors, and security checks in order to get into his office.
As the 2024 election approaches, the measures Maricopa officials are putting in place have been ratcheted up significantly.
Officials have added a second layer of security fencing to protect election offices, as well as concrete k-rails, which means election workers will be bused in from offsite locations due to reduced parking spaces. At the country’s tabulation center, every door will be fitted with metal detectors, floodlights will be installed, and on election day the center will be protected by a ring of snipers deployed on roofs around the building, election officials told NBC.
DENVER — Voting system passwords were mistakenly put on the Colorado Secretary of State’s website for several months before being spotted and taken down, but the lapse did not pose an immediate threat to the upcoming election, said state election officials Tuesday.
The passwords were only one of two that are needed to access any component of Colorado’s voting systems, and are just one part of a layered security system, said Jack Todd, spokesperson for the the Secretary of State’s office, in a statement. The two passwords are “kept in separate places and held by different parties,” he said.
“This is not a security threat,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in an interview on 9News Tuesday evening. She said her office is investigating, that not all of the passwords in the spreadsheet were active and there is no reason to believe there’s been a security breach.
Griswold said workers are changing passwords, looking at access logs and chain of custody books.
She frequently calls Colorado the gold standard for election security, though there have been some hiccups in the past. The error has brought criticism from the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party at a time of heightened scrutiny of the country’s election systems, though U.S. elections remain remarkably reliable.
Colorado law requires that election equipment is surveilled and stored in secure rooms — access to which is guarded, tracked and logged. Colorado voters fill out paper ballots, which are audited after the election.
Election officials learned last week that the spreadsheet, which held the passwords in a hidden tab, was available online. Once the lapse was discovered, Todd said, they acted immediately and informed the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association, Matt Crane, told 9News that while the lapse was concerning, the association was satisfied with the Colorado Secretary of State’s response.
Chairman of the Colorado GOP, Dave Williams, sent a letter to the department Tuesday demanding that, among other things, the secretary of state confirm that the exposed passwords have since been changed.
Earlier this month, a Colorado county clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced to nine years behind bars for a data-breach scheme based in false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
SEATTLE — Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington, where hundreds of ballots were destroyed.
The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire in one ballot drop box at about 3:30 a.m. and determined an incendiary device had been placed inside. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said a fire suppressant inside the drop box protected nearly all the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots.
A few hours later, across the Columbia River in Vancouver, television crews captured footage of smoke pouring out of a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.
Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey in Vancouver told The Associated Press that the ballot drop box at the Fisher’s Landing Transit Center also had a fire suppression system inside, but for some reason it wasn’t effective. Responders pulled a burning pile of ballots from inside the box, and Kimsey said hundreds were lost.
“Heartbreaking,” Kimsey said. “It’s a direct attack on democracy.”
There were surveillance cameras that covered the drop box and surrounding area, he said.
The last ballot pickup at the transit center drop box was at 11 a.m. Saturday, Kimsey said. Anyone who dropped their ballot there after that was urged to contact the auditor’s office to obtain a new one.
The office will be increasing how frequently it collects ballots, Kimsey said, and changing collection times to the evening, to keep the ballot boxes from remaining full of ballots overnight when similar crimes are considered more likely to occur.
An incendiary device was also found on or near a ballot drop box in downtown Vancouver early on Oct. 8. It did not damage the box or destroy any ballots, police said. The FBI and other agencies had been investigating.
Washington and Oregon are both vote-by-mail states. Registered voters receive their ballots in the mail a few weeks before elections and then return them by mail or by placing them in ballot drop boxes.
In Phoenix last week, officials said roughly five ballots were destroyed and others damaged when a fire was set in a drop box at a U.S. Postal Service station there.
WASHINGTON — American voters are approaching the presidential election with deep unease about what could follow, including the potential for political violence, attempts to overturn the election results and its broader implications for democracy, according to a new poll.
The findings of the survey, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, speak to persistent concerns about the fragility of the world’s oldest democracy, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election results inspired a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
About 4 in 10 registered voters say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about violent attempts to overturn the results after the November election. A similar share is worried about legal efforts to do so. And about 1 in 3 voters say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about attempts by local or state election officials to stop the results from being finalized.
Relatively few voters — about one-third or less — are “not very” or “not at all” concerned about any of that happening.
“I thought after Jan. 6 of 2021, the GOP would have the sense to reject him as a candidate,” Aostara Kaye, of Downey, California, said of Trump. “And since they didn’t, I think it just emboldened him to think he can do anything, and they will still stick with him.”
Nearly 9 in 10 voters said the loser of the presidential election is obligated to concede once every state has finished counting its votes and legal challenges are resolved, including about 8 in 10 Republicans. But only about one-third of voters expect Trump to accept the results and concede if he loses.
Democrats and Republicans have widely divergent views on the matter: About two-thirds of Republican voters think Trump would concede, compared to only about 1 in 10 Democrats.
The same concern does not apply to Harris. Nearly 8 in 10 voters said Harris will accept the results and concede if she loses the election, including a solid majority of Republican voters.
Members of both parties have broad concerns about how American democracy might fare depending on the outcome of the November election.
Overall, about half of voters believe Trump would weaken democracy in the U.S. “a lot” or “somewhat” if he wins, while about 4 in 10 said the same of Harris.
Not surprisingly, Americans were deeply divided along ideological lines. About 8 in 10 Republicans said another term for Trump would strengthen democracy “a lot” or “somewhat,” while a similar share of Democrats said the same of a Harris presidency.
About 9 in 10 voters in each party said the opposing party’s candidate would be likely to weaken democracy at least “somewhat” if elected.
Kaye, a retired health care system worker, called Trump an “existential threat to the Constitution.” One prospect she said frightens her is that if Trump wins, he likely will not have the guardrails in his new administration that were in place in the last one.
Republican voter Debra Apodaca, 60, from Tucson, Arizona, said it’s Harris who is a greater threat to democracy. She said President Joe Biden’s administration has placed too great a priority on foreign aid and shown a lack of concern for its own people.
“Our tax dollars, we’re just sending it everywhere. It’s not staying here. Why aren’t we taking care of America?” she said. “Why should we pay taxes if we’re just sending it away?”
That lack of concern also includes the border, she said, adding that a Harris win would be “the end to the Border Patrol.”
Part of what divides voters on their views of American democracy is the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and who is to blame. Democrats and independents are much more likely than Republican voters to place “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility on Trump.
Susan Ohde, an independent voter from Chicago and a retiree from the financial sector, said she’s concerned that “crazy people will buy the misinformation that they’re given,” leading to another such attack.
Giovanna Elizabeth Minardi of Yucaipa, California, said other issues are more important in this year’s election. She said her chief concern is the economy and feels that high prices, especially in her home state, are chasing off businesses and creating a dependency on government. It’s a dependency Harris wants to continue, said Minardi, a children and family services advocate.
Views about the Jan. 6 attack are not the only ones where voters split along ideological lines. Following Trump’s lead, a majority of Republicans maintain that Biden was not legitimately elected. Nearly all Democrats and about 7 in 10 independents believe Biden was legitimately elected.
This year’s presidential campaign has highlighted one aspect of the American political system that some believe is undemocratic — the use of the Electoral College to elect the president rather than the popular vote. Trump and Harris have concentrated their campaign events and advertising in seven battleground states that represent just 18% of the country’s population.
About half of voters think the possibility that a candidate could become president by winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote is a “major problem” in U.S. elections. As with many other issues, the question also reveals a partisan divide: About two-thirds of Democrats say the potential for an Electoral College-popular vote split is a major problem, compared to about one-third of Republicans.
Debra Christensen, 54, a home health nurse and Democrat from Watertown, Wisconsin, is opposed to the Electoral College that could give Trump the White House even if he loses the popular vote for the third time.
“In this day and age with technology what it is, why can’t we have one person one vote?” she said.
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The poll of 1,072 adults was conducted Oct. 11-14, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for registered voters is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
BOULDER — Shedeur Sanders flu under the radar. Dude practiced one day last week. One. Before he went viral, No. 2 felt viral.
“It was tough out there getting the chemistry back with everybody,” the CU Buffs’ QB1 explained early Sunday morning, having powered through influenza to throw for 323 yards in a 34-23 win over Cincinnati. “Because you lose weight, you lose strength, you lose a lot of things.”
Not touch. Not zip. Not feel. Not mojo. Shedeur completed his first 15 passes. In a half. Against a good Cincinnati team. Against a Bearcats defense that allowed 19 completions to Texas Tech last month — over a whole game.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, addressed a crowded town hall Saturday in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he downplayed the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot and suggested mail ballots were a “recipe for fraud.”
In response to a man who asked Musk what his message was to young voters who worry “that voting for a second Trump presidency will lead to democratic backsliding,” Musk replied, “The media tries to characterize Jan. 6 as some sort of violent insurrection, which is simply not the case,” he said, prompting applause from the crowd. More than 100 law enforcement personnel were injured in the attack, some beaten with their own weapons, when a mob of Trump supporters who believed his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of votes.
“It’s not as though the Jan. 6 protests had no merit, they had some merit,” Musk continued. “I disagree with the magnitude of what they did, but it’s not as though there were no issues,” said Musk.
Musk claimed that people “who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves a threat to democracy,” a comment that was also received with applause by the crowd of several hundred people packed into the ballroom. Many more watched the event on X, the social media platform Musk purchased two years ago.
Trump, he said, “did actually tell people to not be violent.” While Trump did tell the crowd on Jan. 6 to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” he also encouraged them to “fight like hell” to stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming the president.
Musk spent nearly two hours taking questions from town hall participants. The freewheeling session inside a ballroom at a hotel in downtown Lancaster touched on a dizzying range of topics, from space exploration and the Tesla cybertruck to immigration and the efficacy of psychiatric drugs. The town hall was part of Musk’s efforts through his super PAC to help boost Trump in swing states ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election against Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump has said he’d give Musk a role in his administration if he wins the presidency.
Musk was largely praised by the town hall crowd as a visionary and solicited for advice and thoughts about education, arm wrestling, tax loopholes and whether he’d buy the Chicago White Sox. (He said he was a tech guy and had to pick his battles.) Trump won Lancaster County in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and he won Pennsylvania in 2016 against Hillary Clinton but lost it in 2020 to Joe Biden.
Musk said he was in favor of “not heavy handed” regulation of artificial intelligence and railed against “woke religion” as “fundamentally an extinctionist religion.” He said the U.S. birth rate is a significant concern.
He said he believes Jesus was a real person who lived about 2,000 years ago and, when asked for the best advice he’s ever received, replied: “I recommend studying physics.”
Musk, the world’s richest man, has committed more than $70 million to boost Trump in the election and, at events on behalf of his super PAC, has encouraged supporters to embrace voting early. Still, echoing some of Trump’s misgivings about the method, Musk raised his own doubts about the process. He called mail ballots “a strange anomaly that got popularized during COVID,” and he went on to say of mail voting that “really, you have an obvious recipe for fraud and inability to prove fraud.”
LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA – OCTOBER 26: SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk speaks during an America PAC town hall on October 26, 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Samuel Corum / Getty Images
There are a number of safeguards to protect mail-in ballots, with various ballot verification protocols, including every state requiring a voter’s signature.
He also called town hall participant Judey Kamora to the stage to give her a large $1 million check, part of his promotion to give away $1 million a day to a voter in a swing state who has signed his super PAC’s petition backing the U.S. Constitution.
Musk made no mention of the Justice Department’s recent warning that his $1 million sweepstakes could violate federal election law. Nor did he comment on a Wall Street Journal report that the tech billionaire has maintained regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The giveaways are just fine with Josh Fox, 32, a UPS driver from Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.
“That’s cool,” Fox said, waiting to get into the rally earlier Saturday. “It would be nice to have it.”
Fox, who plans to vote for Trump, dismissed any suggestion the money may violate federal election rules.
“It’s about driving in support and driving in people who are in support of the Constitution,” Fox said.
In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump dug in on his false claims about voting, election fraud and his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Rogan helped encourage some of these claims.
The interview, released late Friday, came on the same day that the former president, on his social media network, re-posted threats to prosecute lawyers, voters and election officials he deems to have “cheated” in the 2024 election.
Here’s a look at some of the claims by the Republican nominee for president and the truth.
Trump did lose the 2020 election
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I won by like — they say I lost by like — I didn’t lose.”
THE FACTS: Trump did lose in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the race were investigated repeatedly.
Trump’s own attorney general said there were no signs of significant fraud. The Republican-run state Senate in Michigan, one of the swing states where Trump claimed fraud occurred, came to the same conclusion after a lengthy investigation. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau in Wisconsin, ordered by the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature in another state Trump claimed to have been defrauded from winning, also found no substantial fraud.
Rogan chortled when Trump was arguing, correctly, that his loss was close. Trump lost the election narrowly in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had flipped, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and gotten enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.
Trump misstated that margin as 22,000 votes.
Judges ruled against Trump on the merits repeatedly
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What happened is judges don’t want to touch it. They would say, ‘you don’t have standing.’ They didn’t rule on the merits.”
THE FACTS: That’s not true. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 lawsuits trying to overturn the election.
A group of Republican-affiliated election lawyers and legal scholars reviewed all 64 of the Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found only 20 of them were dismissed by judges before a hearing on the merits. In 30 cases, the rulings against Trump came after hearings on the merits.
In the remaining 14 cases, the report for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution found, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even got to the merits phase. “In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims,” the report states.
Almost every state already uses paper ballots
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We should go to paper ballots.”
THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan both argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the United States should rely on paper ballots. Trump even cited his billionaire tech mogul supporter Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for such a change.
Almost all of the country already made that switch, however.
In 2020, more than 90% of the election jurisdictions in the U.S. used paper ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The next year, the federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines to recommend every jurisdiction use paper.
The only state not to use a voting system with paper ballots or a paper trail of any sort is Republican-run Louisiana.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Republicans and Democrats encouraged mail voting during the pandemic
WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”
THE FACTS: Trump’s central argument is that a grand Democratic conspiracy changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic to make mail voting more popular and that the conspirators then rigged the election against him through those mail votes. That’s not what happened.
When the pandemic first hit during the 2020 presidential primary in March, Republican and Democratic election officials quickly switched to encourage mail voting to avoid crowded polls. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump turned against it, claiming it would lay the seeds for potential fraud.
In doing so, Trump was returning to his usual playbook, claiming that any election he doesn’t win is fraudulent. He made that claim about the first contest he lost, Iowa’s 2016 Republican caucus. He even claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voting by illegal immigrants, though a presidential commission he empaneled to find evidence of it disbanded without finding any proof.
The 2020 election was free of significant fraud
THE FACTS: Isolated cases of voters fraud have long occurred, but in modern times have not reached the levels needed to sway a national election. An Associated Press review found fewer than 475 cases in all six battleground states that Trump lost by more than a combined 300,000 votes — far too little to change the outcome.
LANCASTER, Pa. — Tech mogul Elon Musk, speaking at a town hall Saturday night in Pennsylvania to support Republican Donald Trump, played down the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and exhorted supporters to cast votes early in the presidential swing state while describing mail ballots as a “recipe for fraud.”
The freewheeling session inside a ballroom at a hotel in downtown Lancaster touched on a dizzying range of topics, from space exploration and the Tesla cybertruck to immigration and the efficacy of psychiatric drugs. The town hall was part of Musk’s efforts through his super PAC to help boost Trump in swing states ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election against Democrat Kamala Harris.
Musk, whom Trump has vowed to give a role in his administration if he wins next month, spent nearly two hours taking questions from town hall participants. While most were laudatory and covered a variety of topics, one was particularly pointed: A man wanted to know what Musk would say to concerns from voters that Trump’s election could lead to democracy backsliding in the U.S. considering his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
While calling it a fair question, Musk also said that the Jan. 6 attack by Trump’s supporters has been called “some sort of violent insurrection, which is simply not the case” — a response that drew applause from the crowd. More than 100 law enforcement personnel were injured in the attack, some beaten with their own weapons, when a mob of Trump supporters who believed his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of votes.
Musk also claimed that people “who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves a threat to democracy,” a comment that was also cheered by the crowd of several hundred people packed tightly into the ballroom. Many more watched the event on X, the social media platform Musk purchased two years ago.
Trump, he said, “did actually tell people to not be violent.” While Trump did tell the crowd on Jan. 6 to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” he also encouraged them to “fight like hell” to stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming the president.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has committed more than $70 million to boost Trump in the election and, at events on behalf of his super PAC, has encouraged supporters to embrace voting early. Still, echoing some of Trump’s misgivings about the method, Musk raised his own doubts about the process. He said that, in the future, mail ballots should not be accepted, calling them a strange anomaly that got popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic and raising the prospect of fraud.
There are a number of safeguards to protect mail-in ballots, with various ballot verification protocols, including every state requiring a voter’s signature.
The question about Jan. 6 was an outlier during the back-and-forth with the crowd in which Musk was repeatedly praised as a visionary and solicited for advice and thoughts about education, arm wrestling, tax loopholes and whether he’d buy the Chicago White Sox. (He said he was a tech guy and had to pick his battles.)
Musk said he was in favor of “not heavy handed” regulation of artificial intelligence and railed against “woke religion” as “fundamentally an extinctionist religion.” He said the U.S. birth rate is a significant concern.
He said he believes Jesus was a real person who lived about 2,000 years ago and, when asked for the best advice he’s ever received, replied: “I recommend studying physics.”
He also called a woman to the stage to give her a large $1 million check, part of his promotion to give away $1 million a day to a voter in a swing state who has signed his super PAC’s petition backing the U.S. Constitution.
The giveaways are fine with Josh Fox, 32, a UPS driver from Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.
“That’s cool,” Fox said, waiting to get into the rally earlier Saturday. “It would be nice to have it.”
Fox, who plans to vote for Trump, dismissed any suggestion the money may violate federal election rules.
“It’s about driving in support and driving in people who are in support of the Constitution,” Fox said.
MINNEAPOLIS — Leading cyber security experts will meet for a three-day summit in the Twin Cities this week— just days ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
For the 14th year, the Cyber Security Summit will highlight research, achievement and innovation in the area of online protection.
The event draws in experts from both the private and public sector.
“Cyber security affects everybody,” said Elizabeth Stevens, the event’s communication’s director. “This is something that is going to be just essential.”
1,000+ participants will take place in workshops over the course of the week. For board member Mark Ritchie, the event couldn’t be coming at a better time.
“These cyber questions are serious,” he said.
Ritchie, Minnesota’s former Secretary of State, said the office has and continues to do everything possible to keep elections safe and secure.
“It’s how we keep the trust – and I’m hopeful that Minnesota always puts those two things together,” he said. “We have the most effective, professional, skilled, trained and skilled people on our team protecting our elections. We’re not going to allow someone next door, or someone around the world to manipulate or change or in any way impact our elections.”
With 10 days left until Election Day, more than 35 million Americans have participated in early voting. Of those, more than 19 million have voted by mail. In all, nearly 65 million mail-in ballots have been requested. But election officials in one state found mail-in ballots sent in fraudulently.
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