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  • After months of buildup, news outlets finally have the chance to report on election results

    After months of buildup, news outlets finally have the chance to report on election results

    The final answer may or may not come on Tuesday, but news organizations that have spent months reporting on the presidential campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally have the opportunity to report on actual results.

    Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news outlets’ sites and one streaming service — Amazon — all set aside Tuesday night to deliver the news from their own operations.

    Actual results will be a relief to news organizations that had weeks — and an excruciatingly long day of voting — to talk about an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be remarkably tight. The first hint of what voters were thinking came shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern, when networks reported that exit polls showed voters were unhappy with the way the country was going.

    It’s still not clear whether that dissatisfaction will be blamed on Harris, the current vice president, or former President Trump, who was voted out of office in 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash said.

    Trying to draw meaning from anecdotal evidence

    Otherwise, networks were left showing pictures of polling places on Tuesday and trying to extract wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

    “Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin said, making efforts to draw meaning from the tiny New Hampshire community that reported its 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early morning hours on Tuesday.

    MSNBC assigned reporter Jacob Soboroff to talk to voters waiting in line outside a polling place near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. Soboroff was called on by one young voter to take a picture with herself and Rudd.

    On Fox News Channel, Harris surrogate Pete Buttigieg appeared for a contentious interview with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.

    “Is this an interview or a debate?” Buttigieg said at one point. “Can I at least finish the sentence?”

    Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams began a one-night appearance on Amazon to deliver results, and he already had one unexpected guest in the California studio where he was operating. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was supposed to report from Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach, but was denied credentials to attend by the former president’s team.

    Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, in revealing the banishment, described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site X. Palmeri told Williams that she had accurately reported some anxiety within the Trump camp about who was voting early.

    Amazon said Palmeri was replaced at Trump’s Florida headquarters by New York Post reporter Lydia Moynihan.

    Neither Axios or Politico would immediately confirm reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately return a call for comment.

    New York Times strike affects an election night fixture

    One notable election night media fixture — the Needle on The New York Times’ website — was endangered by a strike by technical workers at the newspaper.

    The newspaper said early Tuesday that it was unclear whether it would be able to include the feature on its website during election night coverage since it relies on computer systems maintained by engineers at the company, including some who went on strike early Monday.

    The Needle, as its name suggests, is a graphic that uses voting results and other calculations to point toward the likelihood of either presidential candidate winning.

    The 2024 election is here. This is what to know:

    News outlets globally count on the AP for accurate U.S. election results. Since 1848, the AP has been calling races up and down the ballot. Support us. Donate to the AP.

    First introduced in 2016, it became nightmare-inducing for supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who the Times determined had an 85% percent chance of winning the election. Readers watched as the Needle moved from forecasting a “likely” Clinton victory at the beginning of election night, to “toss-up” by 10 p.m. Eastern to “leaning Trump” at midnight. Trump won the election.

    The Times said that “we will only publish a live version of the Needle if we are confident” that the computer systems it relies upon for data are stable.

    Some 650 members of the Times’ Tech Guild went on strike early Monday.

    ___

    David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

  • Arizona voters to decide on expanding abortion access months after facing a potential near-total ban

    Arizona voters to decide on expanding abortion access months after facing a potential near-total ban

    PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona voters are set to decide whether to guarantee the right to abortion in the state constitution — a vote that could cement access after the presidential battleground came close to a near-total ban earlier this year.

    Arizona is one of nine states with abortion on the ballot.

    Abortion-rights advocates are hoping for a win that could expand access beyond the state’s current 15-week limit to the point of fetal viability, a term used by health care providers to describe whether a pregnancy is expected to continue developing normally or whether a fetus might survive outside the uterus. Doctors say it’s sometime after 21 weeks, though there’s no defined time frame.

    Advocates also are counting on the measure to drive interest among Democrats to vote the party line up and down the ballot. When Republicans running in tough races address the ballot measure, they generally don’t dissuade voters from supporting it, though some like Senate candidate Kari Lake say they’re personally voting against it. GOP U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani, whose battleground congressional district encompasses Tucson, ran an ad saying he rejects “the extremes on abortion.”

    Arizona has been whipsawed by recent legal and legislative battles centered on abortion. In April, the state Supreme Court cleared the way for enforcement of a long-dormant 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions. The Legislature swiftly repealed it.

    In addition to the abortion ballot measure itself, the issue could sway state legislative races and lead to elimination of the voice voters have over retention of state Superior Court judges and Supreme Court justices.

    Arizona for Abortion Access, the coalition leading the ballot measure campaign, has far outpaced the opposition campaign, It Goes Too Far, in fundraising. Opponents argue that the measure is too far-reaching because its physical and mental health exemption post-viability is so broad that it effectively legalizes abortion beyond viability. The measure allows post-viability abortions if they are necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of the mother.

    Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion-rights supporters prevailed in all seven abortion ballot questions, including in conservative-leaning states.

    Voters in Arizona are divided on abortion. Maddy Pennell, a junior at Arizona State University, said the possibility of a near-total abortion ban made her “depressed” and strengthened her desire to vote for the abortion ballot measure.

    “I feel very strongly about having access to abortion,” she said.

    Kyle Lee, an independent Arizona voter, does not support the abortion ballot measure.

    “All abortion is pretty much, in my opinion, murder from beginning to end,” Lee said.

    The Civil War-era ban also shaped the contours of tight legislative races. State Sen. Shawnna Bolick and state Rep. Matt Gress are among the handful of vulnerable Republican incumbents in competitive districts who crossed party lines to give the repeal vote the final push — a vote that will be tested as both parties vie for control of the narrowly GOP-held state Legislature.

    Both of the Phoenix-area lawmakers were rebuked by some of their Republican colleagues for siding with Democrats. Gress made a motion on the House floor to initiate the repeal of the 1864 law. Bolick, explaining her repeal vote to her Senate colleagues, gave a 20-minute floor speech describing her three difficult pregnancies.

    The 2024 election is here. This is what to know:

    News outlets around the world count on the AP for accurate U.S. election results. Since 1848, the AP has been calling races up and down the ballot. Support us. Donate to the AP.

    While Gress was first elected to his seat in 2022, Bolick is facing voters for the first time. She was appointed by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to fill a seat vacancy in 2023. She has not emphasized her role in the repeal vote as she has campaigned, instead playing up traditional conservative issues — one of her signs reads “Bolick Backs the Blue.”

    Another question before voters is whether to move away from retention elections for state Superior Court judges and Supreme Court justices, a measure put on the ballot by Republican legislators hoping to protect two justices who favored allowing the Civil War-era ban to be enforced.

    Under the existing system, voters decide every four to six years whether judges and justices should remain on the bench. The proposed measure would allow the judges and justices to stay on the bench without a popular vote unless one is triggered by felony convictions, crimes involving fraud and dishonesty, personal bankruptcy or mortgage foreclosure.

    Shawnna Bolick’s husband, Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, is one of two conservative justices up for a retention vote. Justice Bolick and Justice Kathryn Hackett King, who were both appointed by former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, sided with the high court’s majority to allow the enforcement of the 1864 near-total ban. Abortion-rights activists have campaigned for their ouster, but if the ballot measure passes they will keep their posts even if they don’t win the retention election.

  • America Pac was warned about Trump ground game fraud months ago | US elections 2024

    America Pac, the political action committee founded by Elon Musk that has led the ground game operation for Donald Trump’s campaign, was warned in September about increasing numbers of door knocks being flagged as potentially fraudulent, according to three people familiar with the matter.

    The confrontation marked the first time that America Pac’s leadership became aware of the problem – canvassers falsely claiming to have knocked on doors – that has raised the possibility that thousands of Trump voters might not be reached by the field operation.

    The question of whether Trump voters are being reached by the America Pac ground game effort has taken on significance in recent months given the race between the former president and Kamala Harris has remained extremely close, suggesting the result may hinge on voter turnout.

    As America Pac rapidly sought to scale up its field operation on behalf of the Trump campaign in late fall, executives at some of the canvassing vendors contracted to knock on doors in battleground states observed that internal audit systems were increasingly flagging doors as suspicious.

    map of number of electoral college votes by US state

    The executives were seeing the uptick both through the “unusual activity logs” on the Campaign Sidekick software used by America Pac and their managers in the field spotting fraud by canvassers on door knocks teams across several states, including Pennsylvania.

    By 24 September, the situation had so alarmed Drew Ryun, the chief executive of Sidekick, that he raised the issue via email with Musk’s newly hired political adviser Chris Young, a former national field director for the Republican National Committee, the people said.

    Whether any changes were implemented as a result is unclear. A review of the unusual activity logs in Arizona and Nevada for instance showed that the percentage of potentially fraudulent doors remained constant in the period before and after Ryun’s missive, hovering around 20-25% with occasional spikes.

    America Pac has previously disputed that their doors were falling victim to its canvassers cheating their way through walkbooks, a problem that has dogged the paid canvassing industry for years, saying their audit program essentially prevented door knocks being faked.

    But the Guardian has reported that tens of thousands of door knocks in Arizona and Nevada, for instance, remain dubious based on the unusual activity logs. In one instance, GPS data showed a canvasser sitting at a restaurant half a mile away from doors he was supposedly hitting in Arizona.

    As a result of that reporting, America Pac moved to restrict access to the unusual activity logs and toggled off the feature for dozens of users, who promptly complained and ultimately had their user privileges restored, two of the people said.

    A Trump spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

    The problem of suspicious door knocks in the America Pac field operation underscores the risk of outsourcing a ground-game program, where paid canvassers are typically not as invested in their candidate’s victory compared with traditional volunteers or campaign staff​.

    With the Trump campaign targeting their low-propensity voters – Trump supporters who have not voted in several previous elections – the walkbooks have had what canvassers refer to as “bad turf”, where target doors are separated by particularly large distances that are tedious to complete.

    Musk donated $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures. Roughly $37m has been spent on the ground game operation to drive the Trump vote, with the rest put towards digital and mail advertising for him, as well as for down-ballot Republican candidates.

    map of presidential results in 2024 battleground states in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020

    The billionaire owner of SpaceX has also been trying to return Trump to the White House in other ways, notably through a petition that asks registered voters in battleground states to submit their address, phone number and emails in exchange for $47 and to enter a daily-$1m prize draw.

    Some campaign finance lawyers and the US justice department have warned Musk that the America Pac petition offer is illegal as it amounts to paying people to register to vote in violation of federal law. America Pac has also been used by Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner.

    Musk’s defenders say it is simply a contest open to registered voters; in theory, Democrats registered to vote in battleground states can complete the petition and have a chance to win the $1m lottery.