“The Democrats have given us another option,” she wrote in response to a tweet from her son that advised Peach State residents to register to vote.
Maye Musk concluded, “You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal. Maybe we should work the system too.”
Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into getting GOP voters to cast ballots before Election Day.
They’re frustrated because Donald Trump keeps getting in the way.
In just the last few weeks, the former president has dismissed early voting as “stupid,” falsely claimed that 20 percent of mail ballots in Pennsylvania are “fraudulent,” suggested mail carriers could “lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully,” and baselessly accused Democrats of exploiting a program that sends ballots to overseas and military voters to evade citizenship checks.
Trump’s vilification of mail and early voting methods, a key component of his web of stolen-election conspiracy theories, stoked a deep partisan divide that Republicans have spent the better part of the last four years trying to undo. They have also tried on and off since 2020 to persuade Trump himself to embrace early voting.
But with just weeks to go, they have plainly failed to win him over. While Trump has sometimes come around — urging his supporters at rallies, in tele-rallies and through social media posts to take advantage of expanded voting options — Republicans warn his rhetoric is threatening to undermine it all.
“It’s counterproductive,” said David Urban, a former Trump campaign senior adviser who led his successful Pennsylvania effort in 2016. While the former president has occasionally warmed to the issue, Urban said, when “we’re kind of pushing a message, and then the president comes and says, ‘I’m not so big on that,’ it’s much more difficult to convince people.”
Trump’s resurrection of his baseless claims of early and mail voting fraud — one way in which he is laying the groundwork to potentially challenge the results of a second election if he loses — comes as Republicans and GOP-aligned groups wage multimillion-dollar campaigns to get voters in key states to embrace those methods. It’s a massive effort aimed at getting reliable Republican voters to cast ballots early so that the party can redirect resources in the final stretch of the campaign toward winning over lower-propensity voters who could decide a close election.
“The whole idea behind absentee voting is you’re banking that vote, you’ve got that person, you know they’re going to vote for you, you get them off the list,” said Mark Graul, a GOP strategist based in Wisconsin. “This is how you get the extra 5,000, 10,000 votes that may decide the election.”
The second in a series of Common Ground Democracy essays on the philosophy of democracy and its implications for electoral systems.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Sunday refused to say former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
During a heated interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Johnson also declined to criticize comments from Donald Trump and Eric Trump implying Democrats helped fuel the assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July….
The ABC host asked Johnson multiple times whether he was willing to say definitively Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance declined to do the same during Tuesday’s debate on CBS.
Biden won the 2020 election. Donald Trump and his allies launched dozens of lawsuits following the election, and the former president has long said without evidence the race was impacted by voter fraud. Courts across the country have rejected the allegations.
“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020.”
The US Supreme Court opens its new term under the shadow of a presidential election that threatens to create fresh strains at a court already deeply enmeshed in the nation’s political divisions.
Three months after releasing a barrage of far-reaching rulings, the justices return to the bench Monday with a docket that looks relatively tamer, notwithstanding clashes over so-called ghost guns and medical care for transgender youths.
The wild card is the election and the too-close-to-call race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. With litigation already raging around the country – and Trump making unsupported claims that Democrats are preparing to cheat – the justices face the prospect of being drawn into a polarizing showdown they might prefer to avoid.
“I think the court would rather not be in the position of determining the outcome of the election,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law. “They’d rather stay out of it.”
That doesn’t mean they won’t be asked. Already the court has turned away calls to put Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in Nevada and to restore independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the ballot in New York even though he has suspended his candidacy. Potentially bigger fights loom over the rules for mail-in ballots and state certification of election results.
A major election case would test a conservative-majority court whose public standing has taken a hit in the face of ethics controversies and divisive rulings, including the 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. A Marquette Law School poll released in August found 43% of adults approve of the court and 57% disapprove.
The court managed to sidestep major election controversies four years ago. Although the justices addressed issues involving pandemic-inspired rule changes, they firmly rejected a Trump-backed bid by Texas to nullify Joe Biden’s victory in four pivotal states.
Whether they can do so again may depend on just how close the election is. When the Supreme Court got involved in 2000, sealing George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore, it intervened in a race so tight it came down to fewer than 600 votes in Florida.
“If it’s so close that it turns on just a single state that is very close, then I think we’d see a repeat of Bush v. Gore,” Hasen said. “But that is not a likely occurrence, just based on the odds.”…