Georgia judge invalidates more controversial election rules
(GEORGIA) — One day after a Georgia judge invalidated the state’s controversial “hand count” rule, a separate judge Wednesday evening invalidated even more rules that were passed by the Republican-led state election board, declaring them “unlawful and void.”
Fulton County Judge Thomas Cox ruled after an hours-long hearing to invalidate seven rules total, including the hand count rule, finding in part that the board did not have the authority to enact them.
Cox made clear that the State of Georgia and the State Election Board “are hereby DIRECTED TO IMMEDIATELY REMOVE THESE RULES FROM THEIR ROLES AND OFFICIAL REPORTING” and to “IMMEDIATELY INFORM ALL STATE AND LOCAL ELECTION OFFICIALS THAT THESE RULES ARE VOID AND ARE NOT TO BE FOLLOWED,” in his decision.
The rules now invalidated include a rule calling county officials to certify election results after “reasonable inquiry.”
Cox wrote in his order that rule “adds an additional and undefined step into the certification process” and that it is “inconsistent with and unsupported” by state law.
He also invalidated a rule that “requires that a person delivering an absentee ballot provide a signature and photo ID at the time the absentee ballot is delivered.”
The judge said in his ruling that state provisions don’t require that.
“The SEB thus has no authority to require such presentment as a condition of accepting and counting an otherwise properly delivered ballot,” Cox wrote.
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and painted a picture of an “absolutely obliterated” Ukraine as the foreign leader is in the U.S. to present what he calls his “victory plan” to 2024 candidates and President Joe Biden.
At a campaign event in North Carolina, Trump went after Zelenskyy for “making little nasty aspersions” toward him.
While Trump didn’t elaborate on what the comments were, Zelenskyy was recently critical of Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, in an interview with The New Yorker.
Zelenskyy expressed doubt Trump knew how to end the Russia-Ukraine war despite Trump’s assertions, without detail or specifics, that the war never would have happened if he were president and he could end it on the first day of his new administration.
“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Zelenskyy told the magazine. “With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand. I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.”
Zelenskyy also called Vance “too radical” over his position that Ukraine will likely have to cede territory taken by Russia. Zelenskyy said the senator’s “message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice.”
Trump, in his freewheeling stump speech on Wednesday, claimed Ukraine is “obliterated” with towns and cities gone that can “never be duplicated.” He said “millions and millions” were dead and accused Ukraine of “using young children and old men” as its military experiences a shortage of soldiers.
Trump continued to call Zelenskyy the “greatest salesman on Earth” amid his apparent criticism of the amount of aid the U.S. has given to Ukraine to help the nation fight President Vladimir Putin’s forces, and how Zelenskyy has used the aid.
“Those buildings are down. Those cities are gone. They’re gone. And we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal,” Trump said.
A day prior, at a campaign event in Georgia, Trump expressed little confidence Ukraine could win while praising Russia’s military capabilities.
“But we’re stuck in that war unless I’m president. I’ll get it done. I’ll get it negotiated. I’ll get out. We got to get out. Biden says we will not leave until we win. What happens if they win? That’s what they do, is they fight wars. As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler. They beat Napoleon. That’s what they do.”
Zelenskyy will hold meetings with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday to present what his “victory plan.” The proposal includes specific figures and amounts of military assistance that he says Ukraine needs to force Russia to stop the war, as well as a list of certain diplomatic and political steps, a source close to Zelenskyy told ABC News.
Trump said last week that he would “probably” be meeting with Zelenskyy but now is not expected to meet with him while he is here in the U.S. this week, sources said, saying Trump’s plans were never firm.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, the top Republican on Capitol Hill, also won’t meet with Zelenskyy, a source familiar with the matter said Wednesday after a meeting had been previously announced. Johnson, who has a mixed record on Ukraine aid, has recently taken issue with Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova organizing a tour for Zelenskyy of an American munitions manufacturing plant in election battleground Pennsylvania.
Vance on Wednesday, during a call with reporters hosted by the Republican National Committee, was asked if he sees an opportunity to discuss with Zelenskyy how a Trump-Vance administration would approach the conflict and if he believed Ukraine should cede land in exchange for the war to end.
Vance said “everything’s going to be on the table” in negotiating an end to the war and that “the biggest problem here is that this war has distracted and consumed a lot of resources at a time when Americans are suffering.”
“I think that the president has said very clearly that, first of all, Russia would have never invaded Ukraine if he had been president, and he’s gonna negotiate an end to the conflict,” he said.
While Trump and Vance voiced skepticism of how much further assistance should be given to Ukraine, President Biden, in his final address at the United Nations General Assembly, urged world leaders not to relent on the issue.
“The world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away, let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed? I know my answer,” Biden said. “We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away and we will not let up on our support for not Ukraine.”
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders, Hannah Demissie and Lauren Peller contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — In the first and only vice-presidential debate of the 2024 election, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance are going head-to-head on the nation’s most pressing issues.
With just over 30 days till Election Day, the debate stage offers both candidates an opportunity to appeal to undecided voters and help solidify the Democratic and Republican platforms.
The high-stakes, 90-minute debate is being held at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City on Tuesday.
As Walz and Vance make their case for a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump-led White House respectively, ABC News is live fact-checking their statements for answers that are exaggerated, need more context or are false.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
WALZ CLAIM: Gov. Walz said, “The persons closest to them, to Donald Trump, said he is unfit for the highest office. That is Senator Vance.”
FACT-CHECK: True
Vance has shifted his view toward former President Trump since he first rose to prominence. Early in his career, Vance made a number of comments that were disparaging toward Trump. The specific comment that Walz seems to be referencing here is from a 2016 New York Times op-ed written by Vance ahead of the release of his book “Hillbilly Elegy.” In the op-ed, Vance wrote, “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
In years since the op-ed was published, Vance has said his views on Trump changed.
-ABC News’ Allison Pecorin
VANCE CLAIM: Sen. Vance said, “We’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country”
FACT-CHECK: False
During Biden’s administration, immigration officials have encountered immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border around 10 million times. When accounting for “got aways” — people who aren’t stopped by border officials — the number rises to about 11.6 million.
But encounters don’t mean admissions. Encounters represent events, so one person who tries to cross the border twice counts for two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let into the country.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates about 4.2 million encounters have led to expulsions or removals. About 3.9 million people have been released into the U.S. to await immigration court hearings under Biden’s administration, Department of Homeland Security data shows.
(WASHINGTON) — Republican calls are mounting for sharper focus by former President Donald Trump on inflation and immigration, worried that his penchant for personal attacks and scattered stances on social issues could serve as distractions in his quest to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
In key down-ballot races, however, Republicans are still fighting on the culture-war battlefields.
Red- and purple-state Republican Senate challengers are leaning on issues such as transgender rights and “wokeism” to define battle-hardened Democratic incumbents as too liberal and chip away at longstanding brands among their electorates.
The dynamic serves as a recognition that while Trump needs to win over swing voters in purple states, a Republican Senate majority hinges on GOP strongholds like Montana and Ohio, where boiling the race down to a conservative-versus-liberal matchup allows those states’ partisan bents to take over.
“If you’re running against a Democrat who’s running underneath Trump [on the ballot] in a state where Trump’s going to win overwhelmingly, then you have every reason to try to drive a shirts-and-skins election,” said GOP strategist Scott Jennings. “Get everybody into their corners, don’t let them think that ticket splitting is a good idea or something they should even consider.”
Republicans are bullish on their opportunities to unseat Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. They’re also hoping to expand a future majority by winning seats in purple states such as Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and they’re not just relying on kitchen-table issues to do it.
Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP Senate super PAC, released ads in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania Tuesday knocking Democratic incumbents there for what they said was support for allowing “biological men” to compete in “women’s sports.”
Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee to take on Tester, also knocked Democrats in his opening ad over “drag queen story time on our military bases” and said he was running “to get this woke crap out of our military.” At his speech at this summer’s Republican convention, Sheehy started his speech by saying, “My name is Tim Sheehy. Those are also my pronouns.”
And Bernie Moreno, the GOP nominee in Ohio, wrote on his website that he’s running in part to “end wokeness and cancel culture,” and a supportive super PAC had hammered one primary opponent as being untrustworthy for being a “champion for trans equality.”
The tactics are all part of a strategy to tear down in-state images of Democratic candidates — Tester and Brown in particular — as bipartisan dealmakers and instead remake them as nothing more than run-of-the-mill liberals in states where the overall partisan makeup makes such labels untenable. And if they’re successful Republican candidates, can just ride on Trump’s lengthy red-state coattails.
“It’s code for liberal,” one GOP strategist working on Senate races said of the recent ads. “It’s less about the actual trans issue itself and more about what their support for that issue actually says about their overall worldview.”
“Ohio and Montana are the inverse of almost every swing state Senate race of the last three cycles. And what I mean by that is, it’s not a question of, can Republicans reach beyond the Trump base to win over voters who didn’t support Trump? Neither Tim Sheehy nor Bernie Moreno needs a single voter to vote for them who isn’t already voting for Trump,” the person added.
Multiple Republican strategists boasted of poll numbers they’d seen of the popularity of GOP stances on transgender issues. A second operative working on Senate races said it was the “better testing and often the best testing message in surveys” they’d seen, and Brad Todd, another GOP strategist, said two campaign’s he’s working on are planning on releasing ads of their own on the topic.
And for Republican candidates like Sheehy, Moreno and Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, all of whom can’t compete with the name recognition of their multi-term Democratic opponents, social issues offer an avenue to signaling alignment with voters looking to learn more about them.
“You do have to check some boxes with some voters so that they cross that threshold of, ‘Well, is this even someone that is culturally aligned with me enough to consider?’ And that issue right there for a lot of more culturally conservative voters is one that definitely pops,” Jennings said.
The moves mark a stark contrast with the conventional wisdom in the presidential race, where Republicans are pushing Trump to focus on the economy and border security and leave aside issues such as transgender athletes, gender-affirming care for minors and his scattershot stances on some women’s reproductive rights matters. Still, some references to culture-war issues could prove advantageous, according to Republican strategists.
“I do think [in the presidential race], voters look to it more as a wrong track/right track on the economy. They see the president as the person steering the ship of economic state and in charge of sovereignty,” Todd said. “I think because those issues are so closely tied to the president and Republicans have an advantage on both of them, that’s why you don’t see as much discussed there. But they would be fair game.”
To be certain, Republicans are not hinging their Senate prospects solely on red meat, telling ABC News that it’s just one piece of the puzzle and that burnishing their own credentials on kitchen table issues is also critical.
“The type of people could vote for Donald Trump and Jon Tester, Donald Trump and Sherrod Brown, we know those people exist. They’re going to start to say, ‘OK, I get it. Tester is Biden, Brown is Biden. So, what do you got for me? What’s my alternative? Give me something,'” said a third GOP strategist working on Senate races. “You just can’t be generic Republican versus a liberal, because that’s been tried, and that clearly doesn’t work against Tester and Brown.”
Still, the person added, “you got to have more than one arrow in your quiver, and that’s the cultural stuff. There’s a place for it in these races.”
Some Democrats swatted away concerns that Republicans’ messaging was as potent as they claimed.
“Does anyone base their vote on this issue? How many people has this actually happened to?” Democratic strategist and former Senate aide Jon Reinish asked of transgender rights issues. “I’m expecting it is slim to probably none.”
But other Democrats told ABC News that transgender rights and other culture war topics could be potent in red states and made sense as a strategy where simply keeping GOP voters in line could deliver Republican victories — and with them, likely the Senate majority.
“Those are just redder states where I think the culture war stuff just gets more traction and playing to your base can get you over 50%,” one Democratic pollster said. “So, it does not surprise me at all to take that tact in these redder states.”