Why the winner of the 2024 presidential race might not be called on election night

(SPRINGFIELD, Ohio) — Springfield, Ohio, city officials declined to take a call with former President Donald Trump’s running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance earlier this month, as the Trump campaign continued to spread unsubstantiated claims that Haitian immigrants were terrorizing the community by eating pets, according to emails obtained by ABC News.

The emails, obtained through a public records request, shed light on the contentious relationship between the city and the Ohio senator as officials have had to repeatedly debunk unfounded claims promoted in viral social media posts and by the Trump campaign about Haitian migrants in the city. Springfield city leaders have said the baseless claims have led to dozens of bomb threats and other threats of violence targeting the Haitian community that have forced Springfield law enforcement officials to evacuate schools, hospitals and other city facilities.

In one email obtained by ABC News dated Sep. 17, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue told Vance’s acting state director James Coyne that he and other city leaders were declining to join a call after the senator’s office invited “third parties” to join who Vance’s team said had “first-hand experiences” with how the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield was affecting their lives.

“It is disheartening to see our vibrant community drawn into the national immigration debate, leading to disruptions in daily life and increased security concerns. Over the past week, schools and public offices have been closed due to threats,” Rue wrote.

A Springfield city spokesperson said officials initially believed they were scheduling a private call between Vance, Rue and Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck.

“We later learned that they wanted to bring some constituents (without providing their names or how they selected them) into what was initially portrayed as a private call. We decided that it was in our best interest to decline,” Springfield’s Strategic Engagement Manager Karen Graves told ABC News in a statement. “While we appreciated them reaching out to us, we felt the scope of the initial invitation changed and this went from an opportunity to have an honest discussion to us potentially being drawn into more politicalization.”

Graves said another call has not taken place.

Coyne later replied to Rue’s email that the senator had been “inundated with constituent complaints” since the Ohio senator spoke before the Senate Banking Committee raising some of the housing concerns the city had expressed to him in recent months.

“Our intention in inviting some of these constituents to join the call was to help facilitate a dialogue between residents we have heard from with first-hand experiences and city officials to help him contextualize their perspective with yours,” Coyne responded.

Vance first spread unsubstantiated rumors of Haitian migrants on Sept. 9, despite one of his staffers being informed that same day by Heck — who is carbon copied on the emails obtained by ABC News — that such comments were “baseless,” a city spokesperson said. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report about the Sep. 9 call, and ABC News later confirmed the details.

Still, the Trump campaign has doubled down on the unfounded claims about Haitian. Trump repeated the rumors on the national stage during the presidential debate hosted by ABC News.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said during the debate.

Vance himself has repeated the baseless claims, including in a post on X saying, “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”‘

Despite the Trump campaign’s efforts to substantiate the unfounded claims, city and state officials have repeatedly rebuked them. In one case, a resident who initially blamed their Haitian neighbors for the disappearance of her cat admitted she was mistaken and reportedly apologized.

Vance has also repeatedly portrayed the Haitian migrants not only in Springfield but the thousands across the nation as being brought into the U.S. illegally by Vice President Kamala Harris. However, most of the Haitian migrants in Springfield are there legally.

Many of the migrants have been granted Temporary Protected Status, and once that is granted they are insulated from deportation and are allowed to temporarily work in the U.S.

“What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said on ABC’s This Week.

Rue has publicly urged those amplifying rumors about the city to stop, adding, “we need help, not hate.” But the email obtained by ABC News shows his most forceful rebuttal of Vance’s comments.

“On a personal note, it is disappointing that, as an Ohio native and elected official, you would speak about our community without first reaching out to me or my team to better understand the situation,” Rue told Coyne. “We are always open to working with you to ensure that any claims made about our community are accurate and based on a full understanding of the facts.”

Spokespeople for Vance and the city of Springfield dispute which party initiated the call request.

“Senator Vance’s office was confused by the last-minute cancellation of a meeting requested by Springfield officials. However, the door is always open for future discussion,” a spokesperson for Vance told ABC News in a statement.

“Any dialogue about our community should be grounded in facts and a comprehensive understanding of the situation,” Rue told Coyne in one of the emails. “Unfortunately, recent communications have not consistently reflected this approach. The safety of our residents is a responsibility we take seriously, and it should not be politicized.”

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(WASHINGTON) — There were many mistakes made on the day of the July assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump by the Secret Service, but an independent review by the Department of Homeland Security revealed systemic issues within the organization and found that without reforms to the agency, “another Butler can and will happen again.”

In the aftermath of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assigned a panel of four former law enforcement and national security officials to examine what went wrong, and how they recommend the Secret Service moves forward after the attempt on former president’s life.

“The Secret Service does not perform at the elite levels needed to discharge its critical mission,” the letter addressed to Secretary Mayorkas said, which was included in the report. “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved.”

On the independent panel are former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, former Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, former Maryland State Police Superintendent David Mitchell and former Deputy National Security Adviser Fran Townsend.

The scathing 35-page report from the independent panel said the findings illustrated “deeper concerns” within the U.S. Secret Service.

“The Panel has observed that many of the Secret Service personnel involved in the events of July 13 appear to have done little in the way of self-reflection in terms of identifying areas of missteps, omissions, or opportunities for improvement,” the report said. “July 13 represents a historic security failure by the Secret Service which almost led to the death of a former president and current nominee and did lead to the death of a rally attendee.”

The panel said that even a “superficial” level of reflection would have been meaningful.

Plaguing the Secret Service are “corrosive cultural attitudes” regarding resourcing events – a “do more with less” attitude, according to the report.

The report also found there was a troubling “lack of critical thinking” by Secret Service personnel “before, during and after” the assassination attempt.

“A prominent instance of this is the fact that personnel had been read into significant intelligence regarding a long range threat by a foreign state actor against former President Trump, but failed to ensure that the AGR building was secured despite its proximity to the rally stage and the obvious high angle line of sight issues it presented,” the report found.

Other instances “revealed a surprising lack of rigor in considering the specific risks posed to particular individual protectees.”

The report said, for example, Trump, though not formally the Republican nominee at the time, had essentially clinched it months before and thus the Secret Service’s approach was formulaic “rather than an individualized assessment of risk.”

The failure to take ownership of planning the Butler rally and the lack of cohesion with state and local law enforcement during the planning of events, a lack of experienced agents to perform “certain critical security tasks,” a lack of auditing mechanisms to learn from mistakes in the field, a lack of training facilities, and a lack of agents feeling comfortable to speak up.

In particular, the operational tempo for younger agents who came up during the COVID-19 pandemic was slower than most election years, and thus those agents did not get as much experience in the field as agents would normally get.

The panel is calling for new leadership at the Secret Service – saying the agency needs a change with people from outside the agency.

“Many of the issues that the Panel has identified throughout this report, particularly regarding the Panel’s “deeper concerns,” are ultimately attributable, directly or indirectly, to the Service’s culture,” the report said. “A refreshment of leadership, with new perspectives, will contribute to the Service’s resolution of those issues.”

Among the other recommendations the panel made are a restructuring of the agency’s protective office, new training initiatives, new communication technologies that are more reliable and an evaluation “of the Secret Service’s method for how it resources protectees to ensure that it is risk-based, and not overly formulaic or reliant on a protectee’s title for making resource determinations.”

“The Panel also recognizes the bravery and selflessness exhibited by Secret Service agents and officers who put themselves in harm’s way to protect their protectees, including in Butler after Crooks fired at former President Trump and others. However, bravery and selflessness alone, no matter how honorable, are insufficient to discharge the Secret Service’s no-fail protective mission.”

Specific to July 13, the panel’s findings are in line with the Secret Service’s mission assurance review that came out last month.

Some of the findings are an absence of law enforcement to secure the AGR building where Thomas Matthew Crooks eventually fired from, the failure to mitigate the line of site from that building, having two communications rooms, the failure of anyone to encounter Crooks despite spotting him 90 minutes before Trump took the stage, the failure to inform the former president’s detail and the drone detection system not working.

The panel recommends the Service has integrated communications, a mandatory situation report when a protectee arrives, better counter-drone technologies and an advanced line of site mitigations.

A footnote in the report says the second assassination attempt against Trump didn’t impact the panel’s work but might’ve reinforced the report.

The panel recommends the Service implement the Butler reforms no later than March 31, 2025, and the broader reforms by the end of 2025.

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(GERMANTOWN, PA) — In the final sprint of the election campaign, local officials in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania have mounted an unprecedented push to engage some of the state’s newest and untested voters: 18-year-old high school seniors.

“They’re the largest registered bloc of voters in the city. It’s just a matter of getting them energized to come out and turn out to vote,” said Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein.

Fewer than half of 18- and 19-year-old voters nationwide cast ballots in the 2020 election, according to the Center for Information and Research on Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

But Pennsylvania teens have historically participated at a higher rate than the national average and may be helping to close the gap with other voting groups, experts say. More than 70,000 young Pennsylvanians reach voting age every year.

“There’s really been a much greater and much more visible investment in registering new voters and doing get-out-the-vote efforts in Philadelphia this year,” said political scientist Matt Levendusky at the University of Pennsylvania.

President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania by just 80,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election. Both political parties say they are fighting for every last vote in 2024.

“Really it’s sort of a battle of inches between Trump and Harris. So the campaigns will really be trying to get all of these teenage voters out,” Levendusky said.

With razor thin polling margins in races up and down the ballot, state school district officials, city council members and nonprofit civic groups have joined forces to organize nonpartisan bus tours and student field days to target voting-eligible teens and educate them on how and why to cast ballots.

“We make sure they understand that elected leaders are being hired. When we vote, we’re hiring them to do a job. And when they don’t do that job, we have the power to fire them through our votes,” said Angelique Hinton, who helped create PA Youth Vote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group leading the effort.

At Martin Luther King High School in Germantown, ABC News joined hundreds of high school seniors assembled for an outdoor field day of election-themed activities.

Students participated in a relay race to the ballot box, a mock election with sample 2024 ballots, and a tug of war meant to illustrate how the number of people on each side can sway the outcome of a contest.

“We want them to have that mindset — run to the polls on Election Day! We have the mock election so they can actually practice voting for the first time,” said Kamryn Davis, the PA Youth Vote program director.

Many of the students said they appreciated the outreach and felt increasingly empowered.

“I am following the political election a lot. I am into the debates, and I am watching the debates. So I do feel pretty positive about who I’m taking on voting for this year,” said Jymirah Wood.

She and fellow senior Janeeiah Simmons said they also volunteered to be poll workers on Election Day.

“I’m not, like, someone who’s super duper political myself,” Simmons said, “but I feel like in this year with the election, it’s really important because so many changes can happen depending on who wins.”

Still, voter apathy remains a big challenge in underfunded communities, organizers said. Many students told ABC News they worried about uncontrolled gun violence, rampant substance abuse, the rising costs of food, and the stress of a better future that often seems out of reach.

Several students said they were unfamiliar with the candidates or unhappy with the choices.

“We’ve just got to find the right language to connect with our young people,” Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. said. “It is not lost on us that the students who are here today registering to vote may very well determine how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania votes in the presidential election on November 5th.”

Senior and JROTC cadet Gio Arzu, the oldest of seven who works at a fast food restaurant after school to support his family financially, said he is imploring his classmates to participate.

“Don’t be scared to speak, to speak out. To get your voice out there and you’re good,” he said. “Just get your voice out there and just get your votes in.”

As the presidential candidates make their final pitch in Pennsylvania, many of the state’s youngest voters said they are listening.

“Especially coming from, like, an immigrant family, it’s a really important time to educate others on how one can make change and actually stepping up and doing something,” Rochelle Meneses said.

Added Gianna Tran: “I’m voting because I think there’s a lot of change that I want to see in, not just the city, but Pennsylvania state as a whole. And the only way to change it is through voting.”

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