Republicans in Crucial Swing State Suffer Massive Blow Before Election

Republicans have been dealt a setback in how mail-in ballots are counted in the battleground state of Nevada.

The Nevada Supreme Court ruled Monday that absentee ballots without a postmark can be counted for up to three days after Election Day on November 5, rejecting a challenge from the Republican Party to have them thrown out. A majority of the court found that Nevada law allowing the counting of ballots if the postmark date “cannot be determined” also applied to envelopes without a postmark.

It’s not known how many ballots will be affected by the decision. Republicans cited one county receiving 24 such ballots during the primary election earlier this year. In their opinion, the court justices said that the GOP failed to provide any evidence that ballots without a postmark indicated fraud, that such ballots were more likely to come from a particular political party, or that the state can’t properly address concerns about the ballots’ security. 

“Rejecting timely mail ballots because of postal service omissions cuts against the strong public interest in exercising the right to vote,” the justices in the main opinion wrote. Twenty-two states and territories count late-arriving ballots, but Nevada is the only battleground state to accept ballots so late.

In August, the Republican National Committee tried to get a lower Nevada court to block the counting of ballots without a postmark, but the judge in that case said the RNC lacked standing to sue. The RNC then appealed to the state’s highest court, which put the case on a fast track and heard arguments on October 8. Republicans also tried to sue the state in federal court over postmarks and were unsuccessful. The GOP has appealed, but a decision isn’t likely to come before November 5.

The state of Nevada went to Joe Biden in 2020 by fewer than 34,000 votes, a 2.4 percent margin, and news agencies didn’t call the race until three days later. Last time, Republicans also tried to use a fake elector scheme and legal challenges to overturn the race. This time, at least one of their election-meddling plans has been stopped.

Donald Trump’s former aide has been cooking up an executive order for Trump to turn the military on the American people.

Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025 who is reportedly in line to be chief of staff for Donald Trump, has bragged about laying out the legal rationale to allow Trump to deploy the military against protesters, according to recordings of private speeches obtained by Documented and ProPublica.

In a speech earlier this year, Vought, who worked as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, explained that he would use the Insurrection Act to allow the president to use the military to quell political protest. Vought, who also leads the pro-Trump think tank the Center for Renewing America, proudly announced that the organization is working tirelessly to find legal avenues to allow Trump to invoke the act and deploy the military on day one.

“We have detailed agency plans,” said Vought at an event for the think tank. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought also stated that he believes that this brute force is the Republicans’ only hope against their “adversaries,” using rhetoric similar to Trump’s recent threats about “the enemy within.”

“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us,” said Vought. “We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could]—and I believe it will—rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us.”

In another 2023 speech, Vought also vowed to make government workers miserable by defunding their organizations, making them political enemies, and putting them “in trauma.”

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Vought in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Vought was also caught by undercover reporters in August declaring his love of “Christian nation-ism.” Despite Trump’s lies that he knows nothing about Project 2025, Vought told reporters that the Republican candidate is “very supportive of what we do.”

Ballot drop boxes in two states were set on fire Monday, potentially damaging dozens of ballots.

In Vancouver, Washington, first responders pulled flaming ballots out of a ballot box at Fisher’s Landing Transit Center in the early morning, according to KATU News.

Clark County auditor Greg Kimsey said that “hundreds” of ballots were potentially damaged and added that anyone who placed their ballot in the receptacle after 11 a.m. on Saturday should contact his office to confirm whether their ballot had been received.

Vancouver is located in Washington’s 3rd congressional district, where Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking to keep hold of the seat she won two years ago, a major upset in a district that was long held by a Republican.

While losing her House seat could weaken Democratic hopes of regaining control, for her part, Gluesenkamp Perez has set herself apart from her Democratic colleagues by regularly voting against her own party. She voted against Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan and in favor of Republicans’ SAVE Act, and refused to endorse Kamala Harris.

Biden won Clark County, where Vancouver is located, in 2020, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly beat Donald Trump there by only 107 votes.

In Portland, Oregon, a ballot box was lit on fire Monday by what Portland police described as an “incendiary device.” The Multnomah County election office said that “fire suppressant inside the ballot box protected virtually all the ballots” and only three were damaged, according to NBC News.

It’s unclear whether the two incidents were related, but the FBI is investigating them both.

In Phoenix, a United States Postal Service mailbox also was lit on fire Monday, damaging a small number of mail-in ballots, according to The Guardian.

This series of burning ballots follows a nearly two-week-old warning from the Department of Homeland Security to law agencies across the country. Online chatter suggested that election deniers were plotting to bomb ballot boxes ahead of the general election, according to the department.

One of Donald Trump’s campaign employees has been fired after complaining about money being wasted and sent to firms overcharging the campaign.

The Daily Beast reports that a campaign worker wrote an email calling out Trump’s campaign co-chairs, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, alleging that they are funneling millions of dollars to companies she accuses of overcharging the former president, including one run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was fired October 18. “I’m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

In her email, the worker, who has requested anonymity, also alleged that she and other campaign employees believed that their bosses put “a listening device in a cut out hole” in a conference room at the campaign’s south Florida headquarters. She wrote that the campaign’s chief financial officer, Sean Dollman, was worried enough to search the conference room to try and find such a device.

The worker wrote that Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation. There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

Dollman has denied the worker’s allegations.

“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” a senior campaign official told The Daily Beast.

The worker was responsible for making sure Trump’s campaign ads were posted on platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and was employed by Launchpad Strategies, an ad firm owned by Dollman, and not the campaign directly. In her email, she said Dollman fired her at the behest of LaCivita.

While the worker did not go into detail about the “grift and greed,” The Daily Beast reported that other sources said she had raised concerns for months about how ad money was being spent by LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast revealed that LaCivita’s firm has raked in more than $19.2 million in just two years while he served as Trump’s adviser.* The campaign worker was fired three days after that.

Trump’s campaign, much like its candidate, has had multiple issues with transparency regarding money. It has failed to identify who received millions of dollars in ad spending, and millions of campaign dollars have been funneled into the former president’s businesses. One of the latest super PACs to support him is skirting campaign disclosure laws. It seems that a businessman notorious for grift can’t help bringing it into politics as well.

* This article has been updated to reflect corrections made by The Daily Beast.

When Hurricane Milton hit Florida nearly three weeks ago, the Category 3 storm ravaged the coastline and created a record number of tornadoes—at least 41—inside the Sunshine State. At least 24 people died from the storm, and more than three million people were left without power.

But the hurricane also devastated things even far outside of its reach: namely, Donald Trump’s legal defense in his January 6 case.

On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkan granted a motion to extend deadlines in his January 6 trial by several weeks after Trump attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, John Lauro, and Gregory Singer claimed that Milton had “severely” affected their ability to stick to the previous schedule. The legal team did not specify exactly how they were affected by the southern storm but wrote in a footnote that they would elaborate under seal if required by the judge, claiming that the “personal details” of the reasoning were irrelevant to the public.

“Specifically, the impacts of the hurricane, which remain ongoing for certain counsel, have substantially slowed progress on the Response,” the filing said. “This, in turn, has limited counsel’s ability to thoroughly consider the Court’s extensive classified and unclassified discovery order and prepare an appropriate Motion to Compel.”

Chutkan noted that special counsel Jack Smith’s office did not oppose the request.

The decision moves the Trump team’s November 7 deadline to submit several legal filings, including a motion to strip “immunity-related discovery” from Smith as well as an argument that Smith was unlawfully appointed, to November 21. It also moves briefings on the immunity issue from December 5 to December 19, apparently also based on Hurricane Milton’s disruption.

Earlier this month, Smith’s team released an eye-opening report that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6, outlining what Smith described in the redacted document as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The motion was broken into four separate sections: The first section outlined Smith’s case against Trump, while the second offered a road map to aid Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” in light of a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion tied in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section featured a conclusion requesting Chutkan rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law.” She warned that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

Trump has been charged with four crimes in the election interference case: two related to the disruption of Congress’s certification of votes, one for Trump’s alleged scheme to defraud the U.S. via disrupting the collection and certification of votes, and a fourth for the conspiracy to deprive citizens of their right to vote.