Reuters
Republican battleground-state legal blitz falters ahead of election
By Jack Queen
October 27, 202411:32 PM GMT+6Updated an hour ago
Item 1 of 2 Rally for Donald Trump, State College, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2024. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
[1/2]Rally for Donald Trump, State College, Pennsylvania, October 26, 2024. REUTERS/Hannah McKay Purchase Licensing Rights
Oct 27 (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s Republican allies have suffered a string of courtroom setbacks in battleground U.S. presidential election states as Election Day draws closer, losses that could boost voter turnout and speed certification of the eventual winner.
In the past three weeks, Trump’s allies have been dealt at least 10 court losses in battleground states that could decide the outcome of the Nov. 5 contest between Republican former President Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
On Friday, they were dealt another loss in Virginia, when a federal judge blocked the state’s removal of people it said had not proved their citizenship from its voter rolls.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said the removal ran afoul of a federal prohibition on purging large numbers of voters in the 90 days before an election. The state, which is not a swing state this election, said it would appeal.
The other decisions include four rulings against Republicans in Georgia, where judges have blocked last-minute changes to election rules championed by Trump’s allies, including one that would have required poll workers to hand count ballots, as well as cases seeking to purge voter rolls and block some Americans who are living overseas from voting.
The party’s recent losses suggest its legal strategy is coming up short in court, which some legal experts said will likely be a net positive for voter turnout. The losses in Georgia, meanwhile, will likely make it easier for officials there to quickly count and certify vote totals, the experts said.
“If courts had accepted some of these arguments, it could have had a huge impact on voter disenfranchisement,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In one of a handful of wins for Republicans, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that mail-in ballots can only be counted if they are received by Election Day, invalidating Mississippi’s five-day grace period. Mississippi is not a swing state, and the ruling does not directly apply to any battleground states.
The Republican court losses undermine what party members say are efforts to tighten election security measures to prevent fraud, which Trump falsely claims cost him the 2020 election.
Democrats and voting rights groups have accused Republicans of trying to make it harder for people to cast ballots and for officials to count them.
Some of the cases could be reversed on appeal and other election cases brought by Republicans are pending.
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Claire Zunk defended the party’s legal record in a statement and said it will continue to “fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”
“Our unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote. We have engaged, and won, in record numbers of legal battles to secure our election,” Zunk said.
A Harris campaign spokesman said in a statement that Republicans are using lawsuits to stoke baseless fears about election security.
“For months, MAGA Republicans have tried to exploit our legal system for free PR to broadcast lies about our free, fair and secure elections, but they failed to provide a single shred of evidence for their bogus claims,” spokesman Charles Lutvak said.
There have been 265 election-related lawsuits filed this election cycle, including 71 filed by Republicans and their allies, according to election litigation tracking website Democracy Docket, founded by Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias.
In addition to the Mississippi win, Republicans have touted at least a half-dozen legal victories since August. Those include blocking a voter registration deadline extension in Georgia, forcing Michigan to tighten signature verification measures and preventing the use of digital university IDs to vote in North Carolina.
SETBACKS IN GEORGIA
But the past several weeks have seen a series of major setbacks for Republicans, particularly in Georgia.
A state court judge ruled on Oct. 15 that local election officials must certify results, rejecting a Republican election board member’s claim that she had discretion not to. The official, Julie Adams, is appealing.
The judge, Robert McBurney, issued an order in a separate case the following day that blocked the Georgia hand count rule from taking effect, saying the change had been made too close to the election.
In a third case, Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox invalidated the hand count rule and six other changes pushed through by Trump’s allies on the state election board, saying they violated state law.
Georgia’s highest court on Tuesday rejected a Republican request to fast-track its appeal of Cox’s ruling, meaning the case will not be resolved until next year.
Zunk said the rule changes were “commonsense measures to safeguard our elections” and that Republicans are confident they will prevail on appeal.
In his ruling, Cox said the board overstepped its authority with the 11th-hour rule changes, declaring them “illegal, unconstitutional, and void.”
Judges applied similar reasoning in rejecting lawsuits seeking to purge voter rolls of allegedly ineligible or non-citizen voters in recent weeks in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan, finding that the cases were filed too close to the election.
In addition to the federal law prohibiting systematic purges of voter rolls 90 days or less before an election, longstanding court precedent holds that judges should avoid making last-minute changes to election rules to prevent voter confusion.
Republicans are appealing those decisions.
Other judges in battleground states have ruled against Republicans in cases seeking to restrict overseas voting.
On Oct. 21, a Michigan judge tossed a lawsuit seeking to tighten residency requirements for overseas absentee ballots, saying the case lacked merit and was filed too late.
That same day, a North Carolina judge denied a Republican bid for an initial order preventing North Carolina from using similar eligibility rules for overseas voters.
“We are appealing both decisions in Michigan and North Carolina because the law in both states is clear: If you’ve never lived there, you can’t influence their elections,” Zunk said.
BUTTRESSING CLAIMS OF FRAUD?
Hasen and other legal experts said many of the Republican lawsuits were likely to fail from the beginning and could be aimed primarily at sowing doubt about the election’s legitimacy and amplifying Trump’s claims of fraud.
Paul Smith, a Georgetown Law professor and senior vice president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said the early court losses may actually further Republicans’ strategy of spreading fears about voter fraud that could be leveraged to challenge the results if Trump loses.
“What they’re likely going to do is bring up these claims of fraud not so much as legal issues but to feed whatever disruptive plan they have to mess with vote counting and mess with certification,” Smith said.
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Reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Jonathan Oatis and Bill Berkrot
November 5, 20249:16 AM GMT+6Updated 4 hours ago
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WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who recently interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for nearly three hours, said on Monday he has endorsed the former president in the race to the White House.
Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 U.S. election in what polls show to be a tight race. Harris has got multiple celebrity endorsements.
“For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump,” Rogan said on X while posting a clip of his interview with billionaire Elon Musk, who has also endorsed Trump. Rogan said in his post that Musk made the “most compelling case for Trump.”
Trump’s recent interview with Rogan lasted about 3 hours and was released on YouTube and Spotify in late October. The two discussed a range of topics and the interview got over 45 million views on YouTube.
The former president criticized Rogan in August on Truth Social, his social media platform, after the podcaster praised then-independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has since pulled out of the race and endorsed Trump. Trump later called Rogan a “good guy.”
Trump and Harris have courted voters with appearances on podcasts, in addition to more traditional rallies and media interviews.
Spotify (SPOT.N), opens new tab said in March “The Joe Rogan Experience” had 14.5 million followers, almost triple the platform’s second most popular program. Rogan also has more than 19 million followers on Instagram and 18 million followers on YouTube.
A poll by YouGov last year found that 81% of his listeners are male and 56% are under 35 years old, a demographic that tends to support Trump over Harris.
Harris’ team had been in touch with Rogan’s program about a possible appearance but her campaign said in late October she will not appear on his podcast.
Rogan joins a list of celebrities like Musk and wrestler Hulk Hogan to have endorsed Trump.
Harris has a much bigger list of celebrity endorsements – ranging from basketball superstar Lebron James and actress Meryl Streep to comedian Chris Rock and former talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Superstar singers Beyonce and Taylor Swift have also endorsed her.
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Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Raju Gopalakrishnan
By Kanishka Singh and Sheila Dang
November 5, 20249:52 AM GMT+6Updated 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – False or misleading claims by billionaire Elon Musk about the U.S. election have amassed 2 billion views on social media platform X this year, according to a report, opens new tab by non-profit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The platform is also playing a central role in enabling the spread of false information about the critical battleground states that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential race, election and misinformation experts said on Monday.
A spokesperson for X said the company’s Community Notes feature, which lets users add additional context to posts, is more effective at helping people identify misleading content than traditional warning flags on posts.
Since taking over the company formerly known as Twitter, Musk has curtailed content moderation and laid off thousands of employees. He has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump, who is locked in an exceptionally close race against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Musk’s massive reach with nearly 203 million followers helps enable “network effects” in which content on X can jump to other social media and messaging platforms such as Reddit and Telegram, said Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and expert on disinformation. “X is a conduit from one platform to another,” she said.
At least 87 of Musk’s posts this year have promoted claims about the U.S. election that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading, amassing 2 billion views, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report.
In Pennsylvania, one of the seven key swing states, some X users have seized on instances of local election administrators flagging incomplete voter registration forms that would not be processed, falsely casting the events as examples of election interference, said Philip Hensley-Robin, Pennsylvania executive director at Common Cause, during a press briefing on Monday.
Common Cause is a nonpartisan organization that promotes accountable government and voting rights.
Some X accounts implied “that there was voter fraud, when in fact, we know very clearly that election officials and election administrators in all of our counties were following the rules and … therefore only eligible voters are voting,” Hensley-Robin said.
Cyabra, a firm that uses AI to detect online disinformation, said on Monday that an X account with 117,000 followers played a key role in helping spread a fake video purporting to show Pennsylvania mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed.
X’s spokesperson said the platform took action against many accounts that shared the video.
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Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington and Sheila Dang in Austin; Additional reporting by Stephanie Burnett; Editing by Lincoln Feast
By Reuters
November 5, 20244:36 AM GMT+6Updated 9 hours ago
- A person picks up a sticker while voters head to a polling station as Georgians turned out a day after the battleground state opened early voting, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Megan Varner/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – The top court in the battleground state of Georgia ruled on Monday that Cobb County cannot extend the deadline for counting about 3,000 absentee ballots that were sent out shortly before Election Day, handing a victory to the Republican National Committee and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Siding with the RNC, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned a judge’s ruling extending the deadline until Friday in Cobb County, located in suburban Atlanta. The court decided that only absentee ballots that arrive by 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday (0000 GMT Wednesday) can be counted.
Civil rights groups had sued last week seeking to extend the deadline, arguing that the county violated state law by failing to promptly send out about 3,000 absentee ballots. County officials said they were overwhelmed by a surge in requests.
The Republican National Committee had argued that extending the deadline would violate state law.
“Election Day is Election Day – not the week after,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley wrote in a post on social media.
Cobb County is a large and racially diverse area in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. The county voted for Democrat Joe Biden over Trump by 14 percentage points in the 2020 election. Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020.
A spokesperson for Cobb County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The state high court ordered that ballots received after Election Day be separated from other ballots and set aside. Voters who did not receive an absentee ballot or did not have enough time to mail it can vote in person on Tuesday.
Georgia is one of seven closely contested states expected to decide the outcome of the race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
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Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Will Dunham
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