By Andrew Goudsward and Jarrett Renshaw
WASHINGTON, Oct 30 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday intensified his effort to save Republicans’ congressional majorities ahead of Tuesday’s US midterm election, restoring planned 11th-hour rallies he had canceled a day earlier while stepping up legal interventions that could pave the way for court challenges to the results.
The November 3 contest has already drawn 48 million early ballots, more than any other midterm election in US history, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, with even the American-born Pope Leo casting a ballot by mail.
Trump’s fellow Republicans are likely to lose their slim majority in the US House of Representatives, according to nonpartisan analysts, with control of the Senate expected to be hard fought.
The Trump administration pushed forward in legal cases in Alaska, home to a Senate contest that may play a pivotal role in determining the majority, and California, which historically takes more time than most other states in counting ballots.
The Justice Department filed an amended lawsuit in Alaska on Thursday seeking to block the certification of results in the event of a narrow Republican loss, citing a New York Times report that Democratic operatives recruited a spoiler candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent.
The FBI was expected to hold a press conference on Friday at the US Attorney’s office in Anchorage, an agency spokesperson confirmed.
In California, meanwhile, the Justice Department is escalating its pressure campaign against state election officials, issuing subpoenas as part of a criminal probe into alleged voting by non-citizens, according to copies of documents seen by Reuters.
Taken together, the moves are an extraordinary federal intervention in state-run elections, which are administered locally under the US Constitution. Election officials around the country have told Reuters they are bracing for further legal challenges from Washington.
Trump has long sought to sow distrust of election results, falsely claiming for years that his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. Voter fraud in the US is extremely rare, studies and investigations have found.
WORRIES ABOUT MISINFORMATION
Amid concerns about disinformation and misinformation surrounding the election, the city of Detroit is taking steps to forestall conspiracy theories that plagued the vote count in 2020.
Social media clips showing vans arriving at the rear of a vote-counting center on election night in 2020 were falsely portrayed as evidence that unidentified vehicles were delivering ballots to help Democrats win. Then-President Trump amplified those claims, and protesters carrying “stop the steal” signs gathered outside, banging on windows and attempting to halt the vote count.
Matt Friedman, who is helping the Detroit clerk’s office disseminate information about the voting process, said he was arranging for media to witness the vans and trucks that will arrive late at night as a routine part of the process. The vehicles will transport ballots from 38 drop boxes spread across 140 square miles (362.6 square kilometers) first to the Department of Elections for signature verification and then on to Huntington Place for tabulation.
“The process of counting votes in Detroit has become a political issue over the last six years, and it’s a priority to increase confidence in the truth about what voting and counting votes is like in Detroit,” Friedman told Reuters.
TRUMP’S CANCELED RALLIES BACK ON
The dispute in Alaska, home to one of about 10 highly competitive Senate races, could leave control of the chamber unclear for weeks. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win back the majority from Republicans.
If Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress, they intend to launch investigations into Trump’s administration and increase pressure on the president to end the war against Iran.
On Friday, Trump will campaign in Florida, the latest in a series of rallies he has headlined in states he won handily in 2024 but where Democrats are unexpectedly competitive.
Earlier this week, Trump campaigned in deep-red Mississippi and South Carolina, and the White House said on Friday that the president would hold weekend rallies in Kansas and Iowa, less than 24 hours after they had been called off. Trump won all four states by anywhere from 13 to 22 percentage points two years ago.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Trump defeated in the 2024 election, will rally for Democrats in Atlanta on Friday.
ALASKA SENATE DISPUTE
In its revised lawsuit in Alaska on Thursday, the Justice Department wrote that operatives for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola orchestrated a “sham campaign for the purpose of misleading Alaskan voters.”
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the operatives convinced a retired teacher living in a remote fishing village named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to appear on the ballot alongside the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan.
Peltola’s campaign asked a judge to dismiss the Justice Department’s updated lawsuit, arguing it has no legal basis. The campaign has previously said it had “no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.”
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has denied involvement and accused Republicans of propping up third-party candidates of their own in other races. Daniel J. Sullivan, listed on the ballot as unaffiliated with any party, has previously denied that his aim was to cause confusion or divert votes from Dan S. Sullivan.
In California, meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office received grand jury subpoenas last week in the Justice Department’s investigation into alleged non-citizen voting.
“At every step, the US Department of Justice has taken a confrontational, adversarial approach,” Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said in a statement on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Nathan Layne, Jana Winter, Max Schwarz, Kia Johnson, Maria Tsvetkova, Doina Chiacu and Jan Wolfe; Writing by Costas Pitas, Jonathan Allen and Joseph Ax; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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