Judge Deals Massive Blow to Voting Rights in Key Swing State

Extreme wait times to vote in a Pennsylvania county couldn’t sway a judge to extend voting hours on Tuesday.

Despite reports that lines near Lehigh University in Bethlehem had estimated wait times longer than six hours, a judge in Northampton County refused to locally extend the state’s 8:00 p.m. poll closing time. Bethlehem stretches across the boundaries of Northampton and Lehigh Counties, both of which sided with President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Voters in line before the 8 p.m. deadline will still be permitted to vote, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State is expected to be a pivotal battleground race in the 2024 election. Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are projected to be neck and neck in Pennsylvania, with the Democratic presidential nominee just a smidge ahead of her Republican opponent at 47.9 percent to Trump’s 47.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated polling.

Donald Trump has claimed Indiana, winning 11 electoral votes over Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Associated Press. It’s the third time that Trump has won the historically conservative state.

While Harris was never projected to win the Hoosier State, one early bellwether of the national results did look up for the Democratic presidential nominee, however. Hamilton County, a suburb that Trump won by seven percentage points in 2020, sided with Harris on Tuesday, giving the Democrat a 1.2 percent lead with 65 percent of the vote tabulated, according to The New York Times.

Right-wing conspiracy theories began circulating Tuesday evening after election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, announced that they would need to recount approximately 31,000 ballots.

Several hours into counting votes, election officials realized that some of the doors on the tabulation machines “were not fully secured” by senior election officials, according to a statement from the Milwaukee Election Commission.

“In order to eliminate any doubt and be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count,” accounting for approximately 31,000 votes, the statement said.

The recount will significantly delay results out of Wisconsin, which was previously expected to give partial results Tuesday night. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Milwaukee County.

Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted about the issue on X Tuesday evening, claiming that her team had been “monitoring slow ballot counting in Milwaukee” and had learned that the “counting took place in unsecured conditions.”

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to DO THEIR JOBS and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence,” she wrote.

Her post was shared by RNC co-Chair Michael Whatley and Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz. Earlier Tuesday, Lara Trump had stoked concerns over voting in Pennsylvania, another key swing state.

It seems that undermining voter confidence has already taken root. CNN’s report on the issue in Milwaukee was shared by hatemongering X account LibsofTikTok, which regularly promotes misinformation and extremist conspiracy theories, sparking right-wing speculation that something more sinister was afoot.

Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was charged with drumming up Donald Trump’s ground game, seemed disturbed over low voter turnout on Election Day.

“Turnout is mixed and not where we want it to be. We need more people to vote. We can’t let turnout flatline,” Kirk wrote in a post on X Tuesday afternoon. “Text everyone you know. Make more noise. We need more.”

Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative youth organization, was tapped by Trump earlier this year to handle his get-out-the-vote efforts alongside Elon Musk’s America PAC. So if voters don’t show up for Trump, it will be at least 50 percent Kirk’s fault.

Kirk’s desperate message came as multiple states reported high voter turnout, including key swing states Trump needs to win if he wants a shot at the White House.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that his state is on course to surpass five million ballots cast, exceeding its record turnout from 2020. In North Carolina, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper reportedly said that suburban and female voter turnout in his state had been higher than expected.

Hours later, Kirk posted again, now claiming that the tides had changed.

“Huge after work surge happening right now in GA, NC, PA. Wow,” he wrote. “The men are arriving. Turnout is SURGING. STAY IN LINE!”

Donald Trump is already stoking the flames of conspiracy toward Philadelphia, where the Republican presidential nominee is suggesting a “massive” election fraud scandal is taking place.

“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Tuesday evening. “Law Enforcement coming!!!”

Within minutes, Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, rejected Trump’s claim, writing that there was “absolutely no truth to this allegation.”

“It is yet another example of disinformation. Voting in Philadelphia has been safe and secure,” Bluestein posted on X (formerly Twitter.)

In a separate statement, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner turned Trump’s bold claims back on him, arguing that the only claims of “massive cheating” had been coming from the MAGA leader and his allies.

“There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation,” Krasner continued. “We have invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day. If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath.”

Krasner had made headlines Monday by warning anyone planning to intimidate voters that they would “F around and find out.”

While it was unclear what specific wrongdoing Trump was alleging within the City of Brotherly Love, other high-profile Republicans had spent much of Election Day elevating sourceless allegations that the key battleground state was facing election integrity issues.

Republican National Committee co-Chair Michael Whatley claimed that Philadelphia County was one of several in Pennsylvania where Republican poll watchers were being “turned away.”

“Early this morning we learned that Republican poll watchers in Philadelphia, York, Westmoreland, Allegheny, Lehigh, Cambria, Wyoming, and Lackawanna Counties were being turned away,” Whatley posted. “We deployed our roving attorneys, engaged with local officials, and can now report that all Republican poll watchers have been let into the building. We will keep fighting, keep winning, and keep sharing updates.”

In response, the other RNC co-Chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump said that “stopping this issue dead in its tracks is EXACTLY why we designed this EI operation.”

“Let this serve as a warning to anyone out there today who wants to interfere in a free, fair and transparent election process, WE ARE WATCHING & ready to take action,” she added.

But Bluestein was quick to shoot down Whatley and Lara Trump’s allegations, too. “We have been in regular contact with the RNC. We have been responsive to every report of irregularities at the polls to ensure Philadelphians can vote safely and securely,” he wrote in a separate post.

The Philadelphia Police Department did not know what Trump was referring to and had not been made aware of any election-related issues that required their response, according to CNN’s Holmes Lybrand.

Pennsylvania’s voting results will begin rolling in after polls close at 8:00 p.m. EST, and vote counting may continue through Friday as state officials contend with tens of thousands of provisional ballots amid issues with Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot procedures.

Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are projected to be neck and neck in Pennsylvania, with the Democratic presidential nominee just a smidge ahead of her Republican opponent at 47.9 percent to Trump’s 47.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated polling.

Last month, Trump jumped the gun on his own conspiracy, issuing a preemptive call to arms for what he described as “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery” by Democrats during the 2024 presidential race.

“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in a post that promised to punish his opponents “to the fullest extent of the law,” including “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.”

This story has been updated.

A federal judge in Georgia threw out a lawsuit Tuesday from the Republican National Committee, which claimed that several counties had illegally accepted absentee ballots in person over the weekend.

The Southern District of Georgia’s chief judge, Stan R. Baker, said that Republicans’ complaint that ballot drop boxes could not be open past the end of the early voting period lacked a “basic level of statutory review and reading comprehension.”

Baker, a Donald Trump appointee, said that Republicans were blatantly attempting to “tip the scales of this election by discriminating against [counties] less likely to vote for their candidate.”

Another Georgia judge had already rejected the lawsuit, which targets ballots delivered in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, on Saturday.

During an emergency hearing Saturday, Judge Kevin M. Farmer of the Superior Court of Fulton County dismissed Republicans’ allegations, citing a provision in Georgia law stating that absentee ballots can be returned until the end of voting on Election Day, according to The New York Times.

Republicans also claimed that collecting ballots over the weekend had prevented poll watchers from monitoring election offices while ballots were being turned in. During the hearing, Nadine Williams, director of Fulton County elections, explained that poll watchers were allowed at polling stations but had never been allowed in county offices, according to The Guardian. Williams later clarified that the process should be open to the public.

On Tuesday, Baker said that Republicans’ so-called concerns about poll watchers were a “red herring,” and that weekend hours have been part of the election process for years.

Trump’s campaign, alongside state and national Republicans, sent letters to Athens-Clarke, Chatham, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties demanding that officials keep ballots received after Friday separate from the rest, in anticipation of legal challenges.

A second lawsuit filed in Savannah targeted the other five counties.

Nearly 700,000 Georgians have already cast their ballots, according to an afternoon update from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said that at this rate, there are likely to be 1.1 million ballots cast in the state by the end of the day, for a total of more than 5 million votes from the state.

A total of 105 absentee ballots were returned in person to election offices in Fulton County on Saturday.

The fake bomb threats that shut down two Georgia polling sites on Election Day stemmed from a “foreign state actor,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger revealed on Tuesday.

“We pretty well dispelled that very quickly,” Raffensperger said at a press conference. “But we want to make sure everything stays safe.… That was this morning, and law enforcement jumped right on that, and we knew it was coming from a foreign state actor.”

Five bomb threats were called in to law enforcement officials in the state at two separate voting sites in Union City. Raffensperger added that the non-credible threats affected “five to seven different precincts” in the key swing state.

“Outside of these brief interruptions, Election Day has remained quiet,” a Fulton County official said at a press conference. “We remain ready and prepared to deal with any other potential disruptions.”

The FBI said in a statement that it was “aware” of several bomb threats to voting locations across the country that originated from Russian emails, noting that none of the threats have been credible “thus far.”

“Election integrity is among the FBI’s highest priorities,” the federal intelligence agency said. “We will continue to work closely with our state and local law enforcement partners to respond to any threats to our elections and to protect our communities as Americans exercise their right to vote.”

Donald Trump’s own staff now see that the campaign is rotting from within.

According to reporting from The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, who has followed the Trump campaign over the past year, many staffers are reflecting on the poor state of Trump’s 2024 run and are fed up.

“I just don’t know, you know, how much longer I can put up with this,” one person on the Trump campaign told Alberta last month, after John Kelly’s warning on Trump’s love of Hitler and fascism. “I’m just not even sure I can ride out this campaign,” the staffer added.

Talking with CNN and MSNBC Monday night, Alberta said that some of those working on the campaign are “disillusioned” or even feel “resentment” and “disgust” toward the Republican nominee.

“There is a fatigue and exhaustion, and at times, I think, it would be accurate to say, a disgust, for some of these people that has set in,” Alberta told MSNBC. “Even among the people who have poured their blood, sweat and tears” into reelecting Trump, there is a feeling that “something is off here.”

As Alberta reported in his Atlantic feature on Saturday, many Trump staffers appeared burnt out and even considered resignation in the home stretch of the campaign. Following Joe Biden’s resignation, as Trump cozied up to Laura Loomer and Elon Musk and “Lewandowski was going rogue,” wrote Alberta, “morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff.”

“The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers,” he continued. “Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.”

The same people who had been excited to reelect Trump just months before, after week after week of scandal, told Alberta “they’d had a change of heart.”

“As of a few weeks ago, people close to him were still pretty bullish on his prospects,” Alberta told CNN. “I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. I think that there is a real fear that the bottom has started to fall out here at the worst possible moment, and that they are closing in about as weak a fashion as you possibly could.”

Fake FBI videos are circulating containing misinformation about Election Day.

The bureau on Tuesday warned about two videos that make false claims about terror threats and voter fraud. One fake video claiming to be from the FBI said that there is a high terror threat and urged people to “vote remotely,” while a different video included a fake FBI press release claiming a rigged voting process in five prisons in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

In a statement, the FBI said that both videos are “not authentic.”

“Attempts to deceive the public with false content about FBI threat assessments and activities aim to undermine our democratic process and erode trust in the electoral system,” the FBI’s statement read. 

Tuesday’s FBI warning follows a statement from the FBI and two other intelligence agencies Monday that they expect foreign actors to “intensify” influence operations “through election day and in the coming weeks,” particularly in the contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The agencies warned about threats from Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran.

Misinformation and conspiracies have been rife during this election, often helped along by influential personalities who should know better. Just a few days ago, Elon Musk spread a fake election video that purportedly showed a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times in Georgia and encouraging others to do the same—drawing a rebuke from Georgia’s Republican secretary of state.

Last week, Trump spread a false claim about fake voter registrations in York County, Pennsylvania, and has already tried to sow doubt in the electoral process with a lawsuit over alleged voter intimidation in the state. Earlier this month, Musk recycled debunked claims about fake voting machines at a rally in the Keystone State.

Even after polls close on Tuesday, final vote counts and certifications are likely to continue for days and possibly weeks afterward, creating opportunities for bad actors to spread rumors and conspiracies. The question is whether this misinformation will persuade people to act rashly and commit crimes, or if the results are accepted by the majority of the public to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

A mysterious text banker has been targeting progressive voters in swing states with messages about Kamala Harris’s policies on Israel.

According to reporting by the Forward, Pennsylvania voters have been receiving anonymous text messages promising that Vice President Harris “will always stand with Israel.” The texts, which came from a number with a Virginia area code, appear to be targeting pro-Palestinian voters in the state.

“The Kamala Harris campaign has been running conflicting ads about where she stands on Israel,” one of the messages sent on Sunday read. “It is just what she has to do to be able to win.”

The text included a screenshot of a CNN article about how the Democrat would “amplify different parts of her message on Gaza and Israel in Michigan and Pennsylvania.” Another included a link to a Times of Israel article describing how Harris plans to keep arming Israel.

Voters in Michigan received similar texts last week. Former Axios reporter Sam Robinson obtained messages sent to Detroit voters encouraging them to “stand up against Hamas and all radical terrorists in Gaza.”

Though it is not entirely clear if the efforts are connected, as all the messages are anonymous and not tied to any particular organization, the Michigan and Pennsylvania texts included strikingly similar language.

Moreover, voters in both states reported receiving texts from someone named “Max,” and many messages shared a link to the same story: an NBC news article from August on Harris telling pro-Palestinian protesters “I am speaking now.”

As the Forward noted, the messages overall bear a resemblance to ads targeting Michigan and Pennsylvania voters put forth by the Future Coalition PAC funded by Elon Musk and Mitch McConnell. That super PAC is running digital ads portraying Harris as a hawk for Israel in areas in Michigan with large Arab and Muslim voters, while attacking Harris on her anti-Israel policies in ads to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.

The Verge reported Tuesday that the texts most likely came from a company called Wonder Cave based in North Carolina, which works with digital advocacy and fundraising group Twenty Manor. Over the past year, Twenty Manor has received $33,000 from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) for text messaging and more than $12,000 from former Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s leadership PAC, Defend Freedom, for “digital consulting.”

This story has been updated.