Special counsel asks judge to pause his appeal in Trump’s classified documents case

(WASHINGTON) — Deep distrust in the American election system among Republican voters has inspired a wave of general election poll watchers purporting to protect against fraud in battleground states, where some officials fear a turn toward vigilantism before and on Nov. 5.

“Their presence alone is kind of a deterrent, because everybody knows somebody is watching,” said Jeff Fuller, a retired Army Special Forces officer, self-described 2020 election denier, and organizer of a GOP poll watching effort in Prince William County, Virginia.

Part of American elections for generations, poll watchers are volunteers appointed by both major parties to observe how ballots are cast, handled, and counted. They report alleged irregularities to party lawyers for possible further investigation.

“Poll watchers can provide transparency. They can raise issues that poll workers might not see as they deal with all sorts of other busy jobs on Election Day,” said Andrew Garber, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election watchdog. “The concern becomes when poll watchers go in either to fulfill partisan goals or to spread disinformation.”

Several veteran election administrators called the 2024 Republican effort “very significant,” if not unprecedented, for its size and scope.

“We’ve got over 175,000 volunteers who have signed up, registered, or are going through trainings,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley told ABC News Live last month of the party’s team of poll watchers, poll workers and lawyers.

Democrats have assembled a core legal team to counter the GOP operation and will also have volunteer poll watchers deployed in key states, though the party has not provided a total number.

Fuller described what he trains poll watchers to look out for.

“Is the voter, when he comes in, is he asked his name and address? Does he give his name and address? Can the poll watcher hear that and observe that dialogue? A lot of it is common sense,” he said. “If you see something that doesn’t make sense. You can ask a question about it.”

Fuller concedes he has seen “no” evidence of election fraud in Virginia so far.

In recent elections, a small but growing number of poll watchers have been accused of disruptive behavior and intimidation tactics leading some state election officials to fear this year could be worse.

In 2022, an armed poll watcher in Texas trailed election officials headed to count ballots. Others in Arizona, wearing masks, maintained an intimidating presence outside ballot drop boxes. Election staff in Wayne County, North Carolina, accused poll watchers of blocking access to voting machines and raising constant objections in an effort to disrupt the process.

“We all want our elections to be as secure as possible, but over the last couple of elections we’ve seen a growing trend of poll watchers spreading disinformation, of leaving the polling place and announcing that they witnessed fraud that didn’t really exist,” said Garber.

“There’s certainly concern about this election as well, that there are poll watchers who are going in and looking to make up claims about fraud, which can then be weaponized by losing candidates to say that there were problems in the election,” he said.

Poll watching recruitment efforts have tapped into lingering concern among conservative voters about alleged widespread fraud during the 2020 election — claims that have gone unsubstantiated but remain believed.

Thirty-three percent of registered voters — including 66 percent of Trump’s supporters — endorse Trump’s false claims that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win in 2020, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.

Just 6% of Vice President Kamala Harris supporters say they lack confidence that votes will be accurately counted in 2024, the poll found. Among Trump supporters it’s 54%.

“They’ve seen too many things that can’t be explained — data can’t be reconciled, other observations — and so they want to make a difference now,” said Mark Flaherty, co-founder of Citizens for New Jersey Election Integrity, a grassroots group that mobilizes conservative election volunteers. “They are no longer taking their elections for granted.

At a gathering of the New Jersey group over the summer, several participants explained why they felt compelled to volunteer to watch the polls or work as an official polling place staffer. “By and large, the elections are anything but transparent, reliable, or bulletproof,” said one man. Added another: “illegal immigrants — we need to prevent them from voting.”

Many veteran nonpartisan state election officials have said they fear an escalation of poll watcher tactics and have strategized on how to resolve confrontations which may arise.

“To come in with rhetoric — grand, immediate accusations — does not always go well because people are immediately saying you’re doing something illegal, you’re doing something fraudulent, and that just amplifies turns on from low temperature to boiling rapidly,” said Isaac Cramer, executive director of the Charleston County, South Carolina, Board of Voter Registration and Elections.

“The past couple of years, every election official has started to think about threats to them, their family, their election workers, and their staff,” said Kristie Burr, director of the Oconee County, South Carolina, Board of Elections. “It adds pressure to our job.”

Tina Barton, a Republican former election official from Michigan, received death threats after the state’s 2020 vote count did not favor Trump. She now travels the country to coach other officials on how to prepare.

“It impacts you forever,” Barton told ABC News in an interview. “You change the way you do things, how you talk about things, what you share on social media, how you arm your house, and arm yourself.”

A Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News warns that “threat actors” are “likely” to push unsubstantiated claims of election fraud “to drive 2024 general election-related violence” and notes that at least 12 individuals were sentenced “in relation to violent threats” directed at election officials or volunteers in 2020 and 2022.

Jeff Fuller says he doesn’t condone violence, but he insists an army of poll watchers looking over their shoulder is the only way to build back trust.

“I’m a partisan Republican, but I don’t buy threatening anybody or doing anything that is going to cause anybody to fear for their life,” Fuller said.

As for fears of vigilantism by some of the GOP’s army of 175,000 poll-watching volunteers, Fuller says he can understand the sentiment, but “It’s not true. It’s not true.”

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Democrats for years have struggled with working-class, populist voters, ceding precious political territory to Republicans. This year, a slate of congressional races could help reverse the tide — or intensify it, even beyond Election Day.

Democratic lawmakers like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana, and Reps. Jared Golden of Maine, Mary Peltola of Alaska and Marie Gluesenkamp of Washington, represent working-class areas who are running tough reelection campaigns this year. With Republicans’ tissue-thin House majority and Democrats’ one-seat Senate majority, their races are among those at the heart of both parties’ paths to congressional control.

But with Republicans cleaning up with working-class voters and Democrats featuring fewer and fewer national leaders with brands that appeal to them, keeping those remaining lawmakers in office is also crucial to the party’s hopes of maintaining a bench of national spokespeople in the long-term fight over blue-collar populism.

Populist fervor among working-class voters is “definitely a major driving force,” said John LaBombard, a former Senate aide to red-state Democrats. “I tend to think that my party has at times been slow on the uptake in terms of what a winning message and a winning candidate means to working-class voters, and as a result of factors both in our control and out of our control, to a degree, we’ve been losing that fight big time.”

LaBombard emphasized “the importance of having go-to figures in the national party where those folks can stay to their constituents, ‘we’re not just another national Democrat. We understand working people. We understand and can speak to these issues.’ And it helps the Democratic Party to be a bigger tent and be more appealing and less toxic to winnable voters.”

Democrats have been on their back foot with white voters without college degrees since former President Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, using his brash brand of politics to appeal to voters frustrated with a government they felt had left them behind. That slippage, Democrats fear and polls suggest, is expanding with Black and Latino voters without a college degree.

(WASHINGTON) — Voters without college degrees are far from the only sought-after demographic — Vice President Kamala Harris is also working to gin up support among women and seniors with appeals to issues like abortion and entitlements, and Trump is working to expand backing from younger men, leaning on male-oriented podcasts to underscore a bravado his campaign believes is appealing.

But voters without college degrees are particularly coveted as one of the anchors of today’s politics. And they lean toward Republicans — backing Trump by a 50-48 margin in 2020 but a 53-42 margin in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll — risking Democrats’ path to the White House and congressional majorities this year.

“It’s the biggest engine that there is in Republican politics, and it is the biggest area of recovery that the Democrats are focused on in this election cycle in particular,” said former Wisconsin GOP strategist Brian Reisinger, the author of “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” which explores the economic struggles of farmers. “Republicans are doing everything they can to maximize it as their primary path to victory, and you’ve got Democrats who have recognized it.”

Democrats insist that their policies are more suited for working-class voters, pointing to their support for unions and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, among other things. But, lawmakers and operatives said, there’s a more emotional hurdle Democrats have failed to pass before engaging in a policy discussion — recognizing voters’ frustrations.

“People communicate on an emotional level first and you do not talk people out of their feelings with a spreadsheet. You have to understand what they’re saying to you,” said Gluesenkamp Perez. “Rural communities like mine, we don’t like we don’t like it when a politician says, ‘hey, sorry, your economy’s collapsed, fill out this 200-page grant application, and maybe I’ll help you.'”

It’s a strategy that a shrinking handful of lawmakers have deployed effectively to remain in office, representing what on paper would appear to be hostile territory.

Golden, a tattooed combat veteran whose district is anticipated to once again back Trump this year, described populism in a speech in July as “the public’s disdain of an elite consensus that seems stacked in favor of the powerful and wealthy — regardless of party or ideology — at the expense of everyone else — regardless of party or ideology.”

Voters “trust that when necessary, I’ll stand up for them against elites who don’t care about them, or where they’re from, or how they’ve lived, even when that means standing up to my own party,” he said.

To persuade voters of that, though, Democratic lawmakers and candidates have to have a shared lived experience with the voters whose backing they want.

“You have to have candidates who are driving a s—box, who have struggled to get a home loan, who are working multiple jobs. You have to have different candidates,” said Gluesenkamp Perez, who ran an auto-repair shop before winning her seat in 2022. “The model that you need to be somebody with a J.D. and a trust fund and no kids does not deliver the nuance.”

Democrats are trying to create an opening.

Harris elevated Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a military veteran, hunter and former public schoolteacher, to be her running mate. Gluesenkamp Perez name checked Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, and Whitney Fox, the daughter of a nurse and single mother, as examples of congressional challengers who can expand the party’s appeal.

And the party still counts a coterie of lawmakers already in Congress — for now.

“There’s a lot of voters in rural areas who might be very conservative, they might be really leaning Republican, but they’re not all that ideological. What I mean by that is, if they think that you’re fighting for them, and they hear the right issues, they’re willing to vote for you,” Reisinger said.

Democrats’ ability, or lack thereof, to pull that off is crucial this year.

Brown and Tester’s races will likely decide the Senate majority, and there are enough Democratic populists who can make a difference in which party controls the House of Representatives.

And beyond fighting for congressional majorities, Democrats who are desperate to make up ground, particularly in rural America, said they need those lawmakers in office to make a strong case and show that rhetoric of a big tent party isn’t just talk.

But standing in their way is a Republican Party that under Trump has swallowed up support in rural America, clinching a longtime GOP goal.

“Twenty years ago, I said the Republican party should become the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club. Ironically, Donald Trump did more to advance that goal than any Republican candidate in a long time,” said former Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

And, some Democrats warned, prolonging existing perceptions of Democrats could morph into a political reality that could make it hard for candidates to defy.

“There’s still a lot of ground to make up in terms of credibility,” LaBombard said.

“Depending on how this election goes, we have the opportunity for some perhaps limited but significant steps in the right direction in terms of the Democratic Party appealing to working-class, populist-type voters. Or we also have the opportunity to lose a ton of ground in terms of the voices we have and have elevated up to this point.”

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(WASHINGTON) — Murders in the United States were down 11.6% in 2023, according to statistics released by the FBI Monday morning.

The murder rate went down from 6.2 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2023. The steep decline last year comes after a 6.1% drop in 2022 over 2021.

Violent crime, which is one of the top issues for voters in the presidential election, as a whole was down 3% from 2022 to 2023, according to the FBI.

An FBI official said the drop in murders represents the “largest drop” since the agency has been collecting data, the agency said in a call with reporters on Monday.

“An estimated 1,218,467 violent crime offenses were committed in 2023, indicating a rate of 363.8 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, down from the 2022 offense rate of 377.1 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants,” the Uniform Crime Reporting Program report released on Monday said.

Other crimes, like rape, decreased by 9.4%, aggravated assault decreased by 2.8%, and robbery decreased by 0.3%, according to the report.

Robberies also behaved differently during the pandemic and, unlike murders, went down during the shutdown and popped back up post-pandemic.

The number of law enforcement agencies who reported their data also increased from last year with 85.% of agencies actively enrolled in the FBI’s UCR Program and cover a combined population of 315,761,680 (94.3%) inhabitants.

All 12 cities that have 1,000,000 or more people reported data, the FBI said.

A crime that increased in 2023 was motor vehicle theft, which increased 12.6%, the FBI said.

Overall, property crime decreased by 2.4%, burglary decreased by 7.6% and larceny theft decreased by 4.4%.

Hate crimes are up in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023, according to the FBI statistics – including the number of incidents, offenses and victims of hate crimes.

The FBI doesn’t specify which group is the most targeted.

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