2024 election updates: Harris responds to Biden’s ‘garbage’ comments

(WASHINGTON) — Anyone who has watched Election Day coverage in the past, or is excited to do so in the hotly contested 2024 election, has probably heard anchors or analysts refer to exit polls. But what are they and how do they work?

Exit polls are surveys conducted as voters leave their polling places on Election Day. Reaching voters at that moment helps ensure that the people surveyed have actually voted. Critical questions of who won and why are answered from exit poll results. Exit polls tell what issues were important in the election and how important demographic groups voted.

How are exit polls conducted?

Interviewers stand outside polling places at randomly selected precincts across the country and approach voters at specific intervals as they exit, for example every fifth or ninth voter.

Voters who agree to participate fill out a short, confidential questionnaire and place it in a ballot box.

Interviewers phone in the results three times during the day. When a voter refuses to participate, interviewers note the gender and approximate age and race of that voter. This information is used to statistically adjust the exit poll to ensure that all voters are fairly represented in the final results.

What sort of questions are asked in an exit poll?

The exit poll questionnaire asks who people voted for, their demographics, opinions about the candidates and opinions on important issues. Here’s an example of a previous exit poll issue question, from 2022:

Do you think the condition of the nation’s economy is: 1. Excellent 2. Good 3. Not so good 4. Poor

Are exit polls accurate?

Exit polls, like any other survey, are subject to sampling and non-sampling error. Before news organizations report exit poll results or make projections, they compare results to pre-election polls and the voting history in that precinct and have statisticians and political experts carefully review the data.

After the polls close, exit poll results are weighted using the actual vote to make the data more accurate. Exit polls may be used to project the winners of races where the margin between the candidates is large. But most election projections are made after the polls close based on actual vote data.

How do exit polls account for the people who vote early or by mail?

In the 2020 presidential election, about 70 percent of voters voted before Election Day using some form of mail or early in-person voting. That number is expected to be about 60 percent in 2024.

Exit polls miss those who vote before Election Day. However, it is important to include them in the data in order to have accurate information about all voters.

Exit polls include those who vote absentee or early in two ways. The first is by conducting multi-mode polls (i.e. by phone, text and email) among those who have voted absentee or early. Second, in states with a high proportion of early in-person voters, exit polls are conducted in the weeks leading up to Election Day as these voters leave early-voting polling places. Data from the multi-mode polls and early-voter exit polls are combined with the Election Day exit poll to provide a complete picture of all voters, regardless of when they voted.

When will exit poll results be reported?

On Election Day, there is a strict embargo on any data coming from the early waves of exit poll data until 5 p.m. ET. By about 5:45 p.m. ET, some initial demographic information about voters and their views on key issues in the election will be available on ABCNews.com. After the polls close in a state, the complete exit poll crosstabs (which are data tables showing how a variety of subgroups have voted) will be posted on ABCNews.com.

ABC News will not project a winner until the last scheduled poll closing time in each state. If a race is not projected at poll closing time, the projection will incorporate actual vote data and will be made as soon as the data warrant. Information will be constantly updated throughout the evening on ABCNews.com and on all ABC News programs.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The Secret Service failed to make clear decisions and did not communicate properly with local law enforcement or provide necessary resources that caused “foreseeable, preventable” security failings on July 13, when a would-be assassin opened fire on former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a new Senate committee report.

The highly anticipated interim report was released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by both Republicans and Democrats and reflects the work of the committee since it opened its probe following the Butler attack.

This report focuses on the Butler shooting and does not extend to investigatory efforts launched after a separate second assassination attempt on the former president at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this month.

Since the Butler attack, acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe has acknowledged that the event was a “failure” by the agency, but the committee, which interviewed multiple Secret Service personnel, found that individuals “declined to acknowledge individual areas of responsibility for planning or security as having contributed to the failure to prevent the shooting that day, even when as an agency, the USSS has acknowledged ultimate responsibility for the failure to prevent the former president of the United States from being shot.”

On a call with reporters, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Gary Peters pointed to several failures by the Secret Service.

“Every single one of those failures was preventable and the consequences of those failures were dire,” Peters said. “This was the first assassination attempt of a former president and the presidential candidate in more than four decades.”

Peters was joined on the call by committee ranking member Rand Paul, R-Ky., Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., ranking member on the investigations subcommittee.

“Whoever was in charge of security on the day of Butler, whoever’s in charge of security during the recent assassination attempt, those people can’t be in charge. They there’s so many human errors,” Paul said. “No amount of money that you give to Secret Service is going to alleviate the human errors if you leave the same humans in charge who made these terrible, dramatic mistakes with regard to security.”

On Friday, the Secret Service released a four-page Mission Assurance Report, which affirms many of the findings in the committee’s report, but the committee report offers additional details from interviews with USSS and local officials. ‘

In a statement to ABC News, the Secret Service’s Chief of Communications said “many of the insights” gleaned from the Senate report “align with the findings from our mission assurance review and are essential to ensuring that what happened on July 13 never happens again.”

“We have reviewed the interim report on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump,” Chief of Communications for the U.S. Secret Service Anthony Guglielmi said. “The weight of our mission is not lost on us and in this hyperdynamic threat environment, the U.S. Secret Service cannot fail.”

He said in addition to the mission assurance report their efforts include cooperating with Congress, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security Independent Review, DHS Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office.

“We take the work of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee seriously and have begun to implement many of their proposed enhancements,” Guglielmi said.

As part of the investigation, the committee interviewed Secret Service agents, as well as the Secret Service counter-snipers that were at the rally.

A closer look at the roof of the building where shots were fired from

The Senate report pays special attention to the American Glass Research building from where Thomas Matthew Crooks fired, and unveils new details about the timeline of events on that day.

In the lead-up to the event, local law enforcement raised concerns about the building. The report finds that the line of sight from the AGR building plagued rally planning and that it was identified as a concern, but that no steps were taken to mitigate the threat. Trees obstructed the view of the sniper team that was positioned atop one of the nearby roofs.

The Secret Service initially began planning for the rally in early July with state and local law enforcement. The planning meetings lacked answers or a general plan, according to the report.

A Butler County Emergency Services Unit commander told the committee the July 11 site walkthrough was “incredibly disorganized” with “no coordination,” and said he felt like “there was really no plan.”

When the USSS counter-sniper team leader did a walkthrough of the area, he told the committee he “wasn’t independently looking at the threat areas,” but rather making sure the roofs were safe for law enforcement to stand on.

The leader assumed that if there were an issue with one of the lines of sight with a sniper position, that counter-sniper would have told the head of the unit.

Agents from the Secret Service were notified of a suspicious person with a rangefinder 27 minutes before shots were fired, but that information was not relayed to senior Secret Service leaders on the ground.

Three minutes before shots were fired, local law enforcement communicated over the radio that someone was on the roof of the AGR building. The information was passed to the Secret Service two minutes before Crooks fired. A local officer said there was someone armed on the roof 22 seconds before shots were fired, but that information wasn’t passed on to the Secret Service.

Secret Service counter-snipers did see local law enforcement running towards the AGR building with their guns drawn, but “the thought did not cross” the counter-sniper’s mind to alert the former president’s protective detail, because they were trying to figure out what was going on.

“[W]hen we looked, just plain eyes, no optics or anything, you could see police running towards the building with their hands on their pistols. I think one actually had a pistol facing towards the ground, out of a holster,” the counter-sniper told the committee. “That’s a pretty big deal for us, so immediately we turned and faced our guns towards the threat area. We didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed pretty serious, especially with the locals’ response.”

The counter-sniper told the Committee “police running, guns out, and there were a couple of people just running away from the AGR building, that looks like citizens, I guess you would say, just normal people.”

He said, “something was wrong” and the “police were the main identifier that something bad was happening.”

“At that time, we didn’t know what we were working with,” a USSS counter-sniper told the committee.

Though counter-sniper efforts ultimately failed to prevent Crooks from firing, the Senate report finds that Trump’s Butler rally was the first time that a USSS counter-sniper team was assigned to a protectee who was not the president, vice president, or formally nominated party nominee. Snipers were only at the rally in response to “credible intelligence” of a threat. Though the committee did not identify what that threat was, sources have told ABC News that Iran has targeted the former president since the killing of General Soliemani.

When the Secret Service sniper took his shot at Crooks, he did so “mere seconds” after identifying him, his partner told the committee.

Officers told the committee they didn’t get resources they needed

Rowe has repeatedly asserted publicly that no assets were denied for the Butler rally. But some of the committee’s findings suggest otherwise.

The operator of the USSS counter drone measures, known as C-UAS, told the committee he requested additional C-UAS equipment and personnel in the11 days before the rally. However, these requests were denied, at times without explanation, according to the report.

The USSS lead advance agent told the committee Trump’s Secret Service detail requested counter assault team liaisons to help coordinate tactical assets in advance of the July 13 rally, but USSS denied this request, the report found.

When the CUAS system went down, the agent who was responsible for it called the manufacturer hotline to start troubleshooting the problem, delaying the deployment of the system for hours.

Previous testimony from the acting director stated that Crooks flew a drone over the rally site during the few hours the CUAS system was down.

Secret Service communications and those of local law enforcement were “siloed” in real time, according to the committee’s report.

Those issues included inoperable radios — in one instance, the head of the Pittsburgh Field Office gave his radio to the lead advance agent on the ground because his radio wasn’t working. These types of problems were commonplace, according to the report.

At one point, some of the agent’s communications were getting crossed with those of the detail of first lady Jill Biden, who was nearby.

Blumenthal called the Secret Service’s lack of accountability an “Abbott and Costello” routine, making reference to the infamous “Who’s on First” skit.

“It was really truth being stranger than fiction,” Blumenthal said of the finger-pointing as to who was responsible and who was in charge of the Butler event.

Committee leaders stress that the report is an interim set of findings meant to be expanded upon by further lines of questioning.

Blumenthal also called for new leadership at the Secret Service.

Peters told reporters last week that there have been instances in which agencies were not as responsive to committee requests as he would’ve liked.

Though the committee staff examined “over 2,800 pages” of documents provided by USSS and transcribed 12 interviews with USSS personnel, the report does reflect instances in which agencies did not meet committee requests.

“The majority of documents provided by the USSS and DHS are heavily redacted. This has unnecessarily hindered the Committee’s ability to carry out its constitutional authority to investigate and acquire information necessary to identify needed reforms,” the report says.

Guglielmi said the Secret Service has “been and continue to work cooperatively, transparently, and in good faith with Congress.”

“The U.S. Secret Service has implemented changes to our protective operations including elevating the protective posture for our protectees and bolstering our protective details as appropriate in order to ensure the highest levels of safety and security for those we protect,” Guglielmi said.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Some ex-pats living abroad, including active-duty service members and their family members, are sounding the alarm after Republicans in three swing states have tried to delay accepting and counting overseas absentee ballots.

And there is already fear among Americans at home and abroad that no matter what the result, the damage has already been done, according to Sarah Streyder, the executive director of Secure Families Initiative, a nonpartisan non-profit that advocates for military families’ rights.

“We are already hearing military voters from all states who feel discouraged from participating, if they have concern that their ballot won’t even be counted,” Streyder, who is stationed in England with her husband a Space Force member, told reporters in a video news conference with other advocates Friday.

Election officials and other political science experts say the suits filed in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina in the last couple of weeks have no merit. The Republican plaintiffs, however, claim state election offices created loopholes that could allow ineligible people to vote through overseas absentee ballots.

GOP casts doubt on absentee ballots, election officials push back

On Sept. 30, five Pennsylvania GOP House members running for re-election — Guy Reschenthaler, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Lloyd Smucker and Mike Kelly — filed a suit against Al Schmidt, the secretary of the Commonwealth and Deputy Secretary for Elections Johnathan Ivlarks accusing them of providing guidance to local election offices to not allow ID requirements for their foreign absentee voters.

“The Commonwealth’s practice is an illegally structured election process which makes Pennsylvania’s elections vulnerable to ineligible votes by individuals or entities who could purport to be…eligible, register to vote without verification of identity or eligibility but receive a ballot by email and then vote a ballot without providing identification at any step of the process,” the plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania suit alleged.

Reschenthaler is the only member of the five plaintiffs with military experience as he previously served as a United States Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps attorney from 2009 to 2012, according to his bio. He was deployed to Iraq during his tenure with JAG.

The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office said in a statement that the lawsuit is “nothing more than an attempt to confuse and frighten people ahead of an important election,” and the state law ensures that all overseas ballots that are sent out are eligible.

“Ballots cast by ineligible voters occur at extremely low rates and are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities when they occur. Individuals registering to vote must affirm that the information they submit is accurate, with any false statement subjecting them to a potential felony conviction, prison sentence and substantial fine,” the office said in a statement.

Pennsylvania election officials could not immediately provide ABC News data on how many absentee ballots have currently been sent overseas and how many of those ballots have been returned.

The Republican National Committee filed a pair of lawsuits in North Carolina and Michigan last week arguing their state rules are violating federal law and allowing ex-pats to vote despite never residing in their state.

In both suits, the RNC officials allege that the states’ election officials have not created a secure system to verify that an overseas voter is an American and have specifically called out provisions in their election laws that permit spouses or dependents of military or overseas voters to vote in elections based on the residency of the military or overseas voter.

“As a result, certain people who have never resided in Michigan (or perhaps anywhere else in this country) are registering to vote and voting in Michigan elections,” the plaintiffs in the Michigan case claim in their filing.

Similar language was used in the North Carolina lawsuit.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed amicus briefs this week seeking to dismiss her state’s case, contending that the plaintiffs have no standing in their claims.

“Challenging a decades-old statute in this frivolous manner is both irresponsible and abusive. Their actions are a clear attempt to sow doubt about the integrity of the election and suppress the legitimate votes of American citizens,” she said in a statement.

Nessel noted that absentee ballots have already been sent out to Michigan voters living overseas, and the RNC failed to file a timely notice of intent to sue under the Michigan Court of Claims Act.

Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, echoed that sentiment and maintained the state law allowing military family members to vote in the state is valid.

“North Carolina lawmakers adopted this law more than 13 years ago, as a way to implement a federal law that required states to make voting more accessible for military families and other citizens living abroad. It has been part of our state’s law for every election since then,” he said in a statement.

As of Friday afternoon, over 22,000 Michigan military and overseas voters have requested ballots for the general election, according to data from the Michigan Secretary of State’s office. Of that number, almost 8,000 voters have already completed and submitted their ballots to be counted, the data showed.

As of Friday afternoon, 8,451 North Carolina absentee ballots have been requested by military members and 20,571 ballots have been requested by civilians living overseas, according to data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Of those requests, 8,331 ballots were sent to the military members and 2,434 of those have been returned and accepted, the board said. There have been 20,449 absentee ballots sent to other ex-pats, and 10,481 of those ballots have been returned and accepted, according to the data.

Veterans, ex-pats furious over the move

Ray Kimball, a veteran who serves as an Arizona volunteer for the nonpartisan advocacy group Veterans for All Voters, told reporters on Friday he was furious about allegations made by officials who questioned the validity of absentee ballots back in 2020.

Kimball, a former Pennsylvania voter who said he mostly voted by mail when he was deployed overseas, said he was appalled that “partisan actors are doubling down,” despite the lack of evidence to their claims.

“I took that as a personal insult to what I and tens of thousands of Americans including service members and civilians abroad have been doing for years prior to this narrative,” he said.

One of the biggest concerns from legal experts and overseas voters is the request in all three lawsuits to segregate the foreign absentee ballots and stop counting them until the person can be verified.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, the president and CEO, of U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonprofit group that provides ex-pats with resources to help cast their vote, told reporters that this move was done to “just reduce the number of ballots counted overall.”

“It is a complete disenfranchisement of U.S. citizens,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat, who lives in Munich, said. “We are U.S. citizens. We do have a secure voting process.”

Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley told reporters that she has concerns that if the request is granted, it would put extra unnecessary work on the already overtaxed election workers.

“All that time, energy and effort doing that, that further chips away at people’s confidence in the election,” she said.

Lawsuits are just the beginning: Expert

Michael Traugott, research professor emeritus in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, told ABC News that the three suits are part of a strategy by Republican leaders aimed at sowing doubt in the election results in the months to come.

He predicted the three suits will be dismissed, especially in Michigan where he said the secretary of state’s office has been efficient for determining voter eligibility.

“They do this in a very careful and systematic way and it’s worked,” he said.

Traugott said that election offices will be prepared for these attacks but they may not be able to control the public relations damage that the suits cause.

Kimball, however, said he believed that the majority of voters want more access to their right to cast a ballot.

“Bottom line this should not be a partisan issue. We should get behind the idea of Americans voting wherever they are all over the world,” he said.

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