Tag Archives: 2022 midterm elections

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Arizona Republican loses election lawsuit in secretary of state race

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An Arizona judge has dismissed a lawsuit from Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, that challenged the results in his race, confirming Democrat Adrian Fontes’ victory in the contest. 

Fontes, who previously served as Maricopa County recorder, won by about 120,000 votes, but Finchem filed his suit claiming that technical issues in Maricopa County cost him about 200,000 votes, which would be enough to change the race’s result. 

Printer issues occurred at 70 of Maricopa’s 223 voting centers on Election Day, causing the ink on certain ballots to be too light for tabulators to read, but election officials have maintained that everyone still had the ability to vote. They responded to the issue by allowing voters to wait in line until it was resolved, vote at a different voting center or drop their ballot in a box to be counted later. 

But Finchem and GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake each filed separate lawsuits stating that the issues disenfranchised largely Republican voters, who are more likely to vote on Election Day instead of in advance. 

Fontes and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs each filed motions to dismiss the challenges. 

Finchem also claimed that the voting machines in Arizona were not properly certified, which state election officials have denied and for which Finchem did not provide evidence. 

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Julian rejected Finchem’s arguments, noting that the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which supervises the accreditation process, provides for the process for testing and certification of voting system hardware and software, but states can choose whether to adopt it. 

Finchem argued that the EAC’s Voting System Test Laboratory manual requires a voting machine’s certificates to be signed by the EAC’s chair, so the fact that the certificates were signed by its executive director should take away the accreditation. 

But Julian said in her ruling that federal law requires the EAC to take a vote to remove accreditation from a laboratory, which it did not do. 

Julian also rejected arguments from Finchem that “tabulating machine failures” and a change in the estimated number of votes cast on the secretary of state’s website indicate that illegal voting happened. She said Finchem’s argument only mentions speculation that votes might not have been counted and not that any legal votes were not counted, which cannot sustain an election contest. 

Finchem argued that Hobbs committed misconduct in her oversight of the state’s elections, but none of his allegations reached the level of “misconduct” required to survive a motion to dismiss. 

Fontes praised the judge’s ruling on Twitter, writing that “Tonight’s ruling is about protecting the will of the voters, not about any single politician.” 

The Hill has reached out to Finchem’s attorney for comment.



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Warnock or Walker? Georgia runoff to settle last Senate seat

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ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia voters on Tuesday are set to decide the final Senate contest in the country, choosing between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican football legend Herschel Walker after a four-week runoff blitz that has drawn a flood of outside spending to an increasingly personal fight.

This year’s runoff has lower stakes than the two in 2021, when victories by Warnock and fellow Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff gave Democrats control of the Senate. The outcome of Tuesday’s contest will determine whether Democrats have an outright 51-49 Senate majority or control a 50-50 chamber based on Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote.

The runoff brings to a close a bitter fight between Warnock, the state’s first Black senator and the senior minister of the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, and Walker, a former University of Georgia football star and political novice who has waged his bid in the mold of former President Donald Trump.

A victory for Warnock would solidify Georgia’s status as a battleground heading into the 2024 presidential election. A win for Walker, however, could be an indication that the Democratic gains in the state might be somewhat limited, especially given that Georgia Republicans swept every other statewide contest last month.

In that election, Warnock led Walker by about 37,000 votes out of almost 4 million cast but fell shy of a majority, triggering the second round of voting. About 1.9 million votes already have been cast by mail and during early voting, an advantage for Democrats whose voters more commonly cast ballots this way. Republicans typically fare better on voting done on Election Day, with the margins determining the winner.

Last month, Walker, 60, ran more than 200,000 votes behind Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after a campaign dogged by intense scrutiny of his past, meandering campaign speeches and a bevy of damaging allegations, including claims that he paid for two former girlfriends’ abortions — accusations that Walker has denied.

Warnock, whose victory in 2021 was in a special election to serve out the remainder of GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term, sounded a confident note Monday during a packed day of campaigning. He predicted that he had convinced enough voters, including independents and moderate Republicans who supported Kemp, that he deserves a full term.

“They’ve seen that I will work with anybody that helps me to do good work for the people of Georgia,” said the 53-year-old senator. “I think they’re going to get this right. They know this race is about competence and character.”

Walker campaigned Monday with his wife, Julie, greeting supporters and offering thanks rather than his usual campaign speech and full-throated attacks on Warnock.

“I love y’all, and we’re gonna win this election,” he said at a winery in Ellijay, comparing it to championships he won as an athlete. “I love winning championships.

Warnock’s campaign has spent about $170 million on the campaign, far outpacing Walker’s nearly $60 million, according to their latest federal disclosures. But Democratic and Republican party committees, along with other political action committees, have spent even more.

The senator has paired his push for bipartisanship with an emphasis on his personal values, buoyed by his status as senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. And, beginning with the closing stretch before the Nov. 8 general election, Warnock added withering takedowns of Walker, using the football star’s rocky past to argue that the political newcomer was “not ready” and “not fit” for high office.

Walker, who used his athletics fame to coast to the GOP nomination, has sought to portray Warnock as a yes-man for President Joe Biden. Walker has sometimes made the attack in especially personal terms, complete with accusing Warnock of having his “back bent” and “being on his knees, begging” at the White House — a searing charge for a Black challenger to level against a Black senator about his relationship with a white president.

A multimillionaire businessman, Walker has inflated his philanthropic activities and business achievements, including claiming that his company employed hundreds of people and grossed tens of millions of dollars in sales annually, even though later records indicate he had eight employees and averaged about $1.5 million a year. He has suggested that he’s worked as a law enforcement officer and said he graduated college, though he has done neither.

Walker was also forced to acknowledge during the campaign that he had fathered three children out of wedlock whom he had never before spoken about publicly — in direct conflict with Walker’s yearslong criticism of absentee fathers and his calls for Black men, in particular, to play an active role in their kids’ lives.

His ex-wife has detailed violent acts, saying Walker once held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. Walker has never denied those specifics and wrote of his violent tendencies in a 2008 memoir that attributed the behavior to mental illness.

Warnock has countered with his individual Senate accomplishments, touting a provision he sponsored to cap insulin costs for Medicare patients while reminding voters that Republicans blocked his larger idea to cap those costs for all insulin-dependent patients. He hailed deals on infrastructure and maternal health care forged with Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, mentioning those GOP colleagues more than he did Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer or other Democrats in Washington.

After the general election, Biden, who has struggled with low approval ratings, promised to help Warnock in any way he could, even if it meant staying away from Georgia. Bypassing the president, Warnock decided instead to campaign with former President Barack Obama in the days before the runoff election.

For his part, Walker was endorsed by Trump but avoided campaigning with him until the campaign’s final day: The pair conducted a conference call Monday with supporters, according to a Republican National Committee spokesperson.

Walker’s candidacy is the GOP’s last chance to flip a Senate seat this year. Dr. Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania, Blake Masters of Arizona, Adam Laxalt of Nevada and Don Bolduc of New Hampshire, all Trump loyalists, already lost competitive Senate races that Republicans once considered part of their path to a majority.

Walker has differentiated himself from Trump in a notable way. Trump has spent two years falsely claiming that his loss in Georgia and nationally was fraudulent, despite the fact that numerous federal and local officials, a long list of courts, top former campaign staffers and even his own attorney general have all said there is no evidence of the fraud he alleges.

At his lone debate against Warnock in October, Walker was asked whether he’d accept the results even if he lost. He replied with one word: “Yes.”

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Arizona certifies 2022 election despite GOP complaints

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PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona’s top officials certified the midterm election results Monday, formalizing victories for Democrats over Republicans who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged.

The certification opens a five-day window for formal election challenges. Republican Kari Lake, who lost the race for governor, is expected to file a lawsuit in the coming days after she’s spent weeks of criticizing the administration of the election.

Election results have largely been certified without issue around the country, but Arizona was an exception. Several Republican-controlled counties delayed their certification despite no evidence of problems with the vote count. Cochise County in southeastern Arizona blew past the deadline last week, forcing a judge to intervene on Thursday and order the county supervisors to certify the election by the end of the day.

“Arizona had a successful election,” Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who beat Lake in the race for governor, said before signing the certification. “But too often throughout the process, powerful voices proliferated misinformation that threatened to disenfranchise voters.”

The statewide certification, known as a canvass, was signed by Hobbs, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, a Ducey appointee.

When the same group certified the 2020 election, Ducey silenced a call from then-President Donald Trump, who was at the time in a frenetic push to persuade Republican allies to go along with his attempts to overturn the election he lost.

“This is a responsibility I do not take lightly,” Ducey said. “It’s one that recognizes the votes cast by the citizens of our great state.”

Republicans have complained for weeks about Hobbs’ role in certifying her own victory, though it is typical for election officials to maintain their position while running for higher office. Lake and her allies have focused on problems with ballot printers that produced about 17,000 ballots that could not be tabulated on site and had to be counted at the elections department headquarters.

Lines backed up in some polling places, fueling Republican suspicions that some supporters were unable to cast a ballot, though there’s no evidence it affected the outcome. County officials say everyone was able to vote and all legal ballots were counted.

Hobbs immediately petitioned the Maricopa County Superior Court to begin an automatic statewide recount required by law in three races decided by less than half a percentage point. The race for attorney general was one of the closest contests in state history, with Democrat Kris Mayes leading Republican Abe Hamadeh by just 510 votes out of 2.5 million cast.

The races for superintendent of public instruction and a state legislative seat in the Phoenix suburbs will also be recounted, but the margins are much larger.

Once a Republican stronghold, Arizona’s top races went resoundingly for Democrats after Republicans nominated a slate of candidates backed by Trump who focused on supporting his false claims about the 2020 election. In addition to Hobbs and Mayes, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly was reelected and Democrat Adrian Fontes won the race for secretary of state.

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This story has been corrected to show that Fontes ran for secretary of state, not attorney general, and that Arizona was once a Republican stronghold, not Democratic.

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Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

Discussion on prioritizing diversity drew such impassioned reaction at the committee gathering in Washington that DNC chair Jaime Harrison wiped away tears as committee member Donna Brazile suggested that Democrats had spent years failing to fight for Black voters: “Do you know what it’s like to live on a dirt road? Do you know what it’s like to try to find running water that is clean?”

“Do you know what it’s like to wait and see if the storm is going to pass you by and your roof is still intact?” Brazile asked. “That’s what this is about.”

The committee approved moving South Carolina’s primary to Feb. 3 and having Nevada and New Hampshire vote three days later. Georgia would go the following week and Michigan two weeks after that.

The move marks a dramatic shift from the current calendar, which has had Iowa holding the first-in-the-nation caucuses since 1972, followed by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major overhaul of their primary calendar.

The changes will still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely early next year, but it will almost certainly follow the rule-making committee’s lead.

The revamped schedule could largely be moot for 2024 if Biden opts to seek a second term, but may remake Democratic presidential cycles after that. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides have begun making staffing discussions for his likely reelection campaign, even though no final decision has been made.

The DNC also plans to revisit the primary calendar again before 2028 — meaning more changes could be coming before then.

Biden wrote in a letter to rules committee members on Thursday that the party should scrap “restrictive” caucuses altogether because their rules on in-person participation can sometimes exclude working-class and other voters. He told also told party leaders privately that he’d like to see South Carolina go first to better ensure that voters of color aren’t marginalized as Democrats choose a presidential nominee.

Four of the five states now poised to start the party’s primary are presidential battlegrounds, meaning the eventual Democratic winner would be able to lay groundwork in important general election locales. That’s especially true for Michigan and Georgia, which both voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020. The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1976.

The first five voting states would be positioned to cast ballots before Super Tuesday, the day when much of the rest of the country holds primaries. That gives the early states outsize influence since White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting much of the rest of the country.

Scott Brennan, a rules committee member from Iowa, said “small, rural states” like his “must have a voice in the presidential nominating process.”

“Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party in newer generations,” Brennan said.

The Republican National Committee has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential primary, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — have continued to frequently campaign there.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat and one of Biden’s top supporters in Congress, said the president called him Thursday to inform him of his push to move his state up.

“I didn’t ask to be first,” Clyburn said. “It was his idea to be first.”

Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 boosted the candidate’s flagging presidential campaign just ahead of South Carolina’s primary, which he won big. That helped Biden shake off early losses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and eventually take the White House.

“He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn said.

Still, the vote by the rules committee has faced serious pushback, with some states vowing to ignore the changes altogether. That’s despite the panel approving language saying states could lose all of their delegates to the party’s national convention if they attempt to violate new rules.

Iowa and New Hampshire have said laws in their states mandate them going before others, and they intend to abide by those, not DNC decrees. Only committee members from Iowa and New Hampshire objected to the proposal that passed Friday, with everyone else supporting it.

Nevada, with its heavily Hispanic population, initially balked at sharing the second-place slot with New Hampshire, a state 2,500 miles away. Nevada committee member Artie Blanco’s voice cracked as she argued against the change.

“If we want to build a strong relationship with Latinos,” Blanco said, “then Nevada must stand alone on a date and not have to share that date.”

After more discussion, Blanco said later that she would support the new calendar. It was “not ideal” for her state to go the same day as another, she said, but “we accept what the will of the president is.”

Harrison said the new slate of five early voting states will need to show they are working toward moving their primaries to those dates by early next year or risk losing their place. Some state legislatures set primary dates; others have their secretaries of state or the directors of their state parties do it.

The DNC chair choked up after the vote as he talked about South Carolina once having been the site of the first attack of the Civil War and now being in line to lead off his party’s primary.

“This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger,” Harrison said.

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Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard contributed from Columbia, S.C.

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Arizona county certifies election after judge’s order

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PHOENIX (AP) — A rural Arizona county certified its midterm election results on Thursday, following the orders of a judge who ruled that Republican supervisors broke the law when they refused to sign off on the vote count by this week’s deadline.

Two Republicans on Cochise County’s three-member board of supervisors balked for weeks about certifying the election, even as the deadline passed on Monday. They did not cite any problems with the election results. Rather, they say they weren’t satisfied that the machines used to tabulate ballots were properly certified for use in elections, though state and federal election officials have said they were.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbsfiled suit Monday, as did a local voter and a group of retirees, asking a judge to force the supervisors to certify the election, a process formally known as a canvass. Hobbs said she is required to hold the statewide certification on Dec. 5 and by law can delay it only until Dec. 8.

At the end of a hearing Thursday, Judge Casey McGinley ordered the supervisors to convene within 90 minutes and to approve the election canvass by the end of the day.

“I am not ashamed of anything I did,” said Supervisor Peggy Judd, one of the two Republicans who twice blocked certification. “And today I feel I must, because of a court ruling and because of my own health and situations that are going on in our life, I feel like I must follow what the judge did today.”

The board’s other Republican, Tom Crosby, skipped the meeting.

Two hours earlier, Supervisor Ann English, the board’s lone Democrat, urged the judge to order the board to immediately certify the election and not wait another day. She said Crosby is trying to stage a “smackdown between the secretary of state and the election deniers” at a meeting scheduled for Friday.

“I think it’s a circus that doesn’t need to have to happen,” English said. “So I’ve had enough. I think the public’s had enough. So I’m asking for a swift resolution of this if that’s possible.”

The vote allows the statewide certification to go forward as scheduled on Monday.

Hobbs, a Democrat who was elected governor in November’s election, had warned that she may have to certify statewide results without numbers from Cochise County if they aren’t received in time, an outcome that could have tipped the balance of several close races. The county’s 47,000 votes went overwhelmingly to Republicans.

The board members represented themselves in court after struggling to find someone willing to take the cases. The elected county attorney, who normally represents the board in legal disputes, refused to handle the cases, saying the supervisors acted illegally. The board voted hours before the hearing to hire a Phoenix-area attorney, but he was not able to get up to speed before the hearing and did not inform the court he was representing the supervisors.

Days before the Nov. 8 election, the Republican supervisors abandoned plans to hand count all ballots, which the court said would be illegal, but demanded last week that the secretary of state prove vote-counting machines were legally certified before they would approve the election results. On Monday, they said they wanted to hear again about those concerns before taking a vote on certification. A meeting is scheduled for that purpose on Friday.

There are two companies that are accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct testing and certification of voting equipment, such as the electronic tabulators used in Arizona to read and count ballots.

Conspiracy theories surrounding this process surfaced in early 2021, focused on what appeared to be an outdated accreditation certificate for one of the companies that was posted online. Federal officials investigated and reported that an administrative error had resulted in the agency failing to reissue an updated certificate as the company remained in good standing and underwent audits in 2018 and in early 2021.

Officials also noted federal law dictates the only way a testing company can lose certification is for the commission to revoke it, which did not occur.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Phoenix sanctioned lawyers who represented Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the defeated Republican candidates for governor and secretary of state, respectively, in a lawsuit seeking to require hand counting of all ballots.

Judge John Tuchi, a Barack Obama appointee, agreed with lawyers for Maricopa County, who argued the lawsuit was based on frivolous information, and ordered the lawyers to pay the county’s legal fees.

The lawyers “made false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” in their lawsuit, Tuchi wrote. He said the court will not condone lawyers “furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust” in the democratic process.

The lawyers for Lake and Finchem, including well-known Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. They told the court that their claims were “legally sound and supported by strong evidence.”

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This story corrects a previous version that said Mark Finchem was the Republican candidate for attorney general. He was the candidate for secretary of state.

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AP sources: Biden tells Dems he wants SC as 1st voting state

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Thursday that Democrats should give up “restrictive” caucuses and prioritize diversity at the start of their presidential primary calendar — dealing a major blow to Iowa’s decadeslong status as the state that leads off the process.

In a letter to the rule-making arm of the Democratic National Committee, Biden did not mention specific states he’d like to see go first. But he has told Democrats he wants South Carolina moved to the first position, according to three people familiar with his recommendation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The president’s direction comes as the DNC rules committee gathers in Washington on Friday to vote on shaking up the presidential primary calendar starting in 2024. Members now expect to approve new rules putting South Carolina first, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day a week later.

Georgia and Michigan would move into the top five as new early states, and each would hold primaries in subsequent weeks, committee members say. The two battlegrounds were critical to Biden’s 2020 victory over then-President Donald Trump, who had won both states in his 2016 White House campaign.

Much of the rest of the country would vote as part of Super Tuesday soon afterward.

Such changes are set to come after years of calls from many top Democrats for the voting calendar to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse base than mostly white Iowa, which holds the country’s first caucus, and New Hampshire, which holds the first primary. The new calendar would still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely to come early next year, but the DNC will almost certainly heed the rule-making panel’s recommendations.

The proposed order of the early states was first reported by The Washington Post.

“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote in a letter on personal stationery that did not carry the White House seal. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

He said caucuses were “restrictive and anti-worker” because they require voters “to spend significant amounts of time” on one night gathering to choose candidates in person, “disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time.”

The changes could be implemented as soon as 2024 but would be rendered largely meaningless until 2028 if Biden opts to seek a second term. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides and Biden allies have begun staffing and structural discussions for his likely 2024 bid while refraining from overt steps while the president weighs a final decision.

Such a shakeup would nonetheless be seismic given that Iowa’s caucus has led off the Democratic voting calendar since 1976. Still, it would come two years after a series of technical glitches so marred party results that they prevented The Associated Press from declaring a 2020 Iowa Democratic caucus winner.

On the current Democratic calendar, Iowa has been followed by New Hampshire, which has held the nation’s first primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major primary calendar overhaul.

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential calendar, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — will continue campaigning there frequently.

South Carolina holds special relevance to Biden. His victory in the state’s first-in-the-South primary in 2020 kickstarted his presidential campaign after poor finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire on his way to winning the Democratic nomination.

Dick Harpootlian, a longtime Biden ally, fundraiser and former South Carolina Democratic Party chair, said Thursday that he and Biden discussed South Carolina’s possible advancement the night of Biden’s 2020 primary victory there. Harpootlian said he’d impressed upon Biden that the state was a better place than Iowa to hold an even earlier presidential voting contest — to which Harpootlian said Biden was receptive.

“I think he agreed that this was a much more dynamic process,” Harpootlian said. “Iowa was just a nightmare.”

The DNC rules committee has been discussing reordering the early calendar for months, touching off a fierce battle among many states to go first. In a joint statement Thursday night, Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell said, “We have always said that any road to the White House goes through the heartland and President Biden understands that.”

But Biden’s wishes sparked anger in New Hampshire, where state law calls for holding the nation’s first primary and where officials had for months threatened to simply move up their election regardless of what new rules the DNC approves. Other states have previously tried to violate party rules and jump closer to the front, only to be threatened with having their delegates not count toward their chosen candidate clinching the party’s nomination.

New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen issued a statement blasting “the White House’s short-sighted decision,” while fellow New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan said, “I strongly oppose the President’s deeply misguided proposal.

“But make no mistake,” Hassan said in a statement. “New Hampshire’s law is clear and our primary will continue to be first in the nation.”

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Kinnard reported from Columbia, S.C. Associated Press writer Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this report.

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Obama urges Georgia Democrats to push turnout for Warnock

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ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Barack Obama and Sen. Raphael Warnock on Thursday urged Democratic voters to keep pushing an apparent head start in early voting in the Georgia Senate runoff against Republican Herschel Walker, ahead of Friday’s last day of early in-person voting and Tuesday’s election day.

“If they didn’t get tired, you can’t get tired,” Obama told a crowd gathered in a cavernous former railroad repair shop east of downtown Atlanta.

Voters have already cast more than 1.4 million ballots amid an all-hands-on-deck push by Democrats to bank as many votes as possible while Republicans, especially Walker, have taken a less aggressive approach that could leave the GOP nominee heavily dependent on runoff Election Day turnout.

“We’ve got to keep on showing up,” Warnock told the crowd at his largest event of the four-week runoff blitz. “We’ve got to keep on voting. We cannot let up for even a moment. We’ve got to keep our foot on the gas all the way to victory.”

Both Obama and Warnock criticized Walker, part of Democratic attacks that Walker is unqualified and untruthful.

“I believe in my soul that Georgia knows that Georgia is better than Herschel Walker,” Warnock said.

Obama told a story about how Walker once claimed he let Obama beat him in basketball, but later admitted he had never met the Democrat.

“When again and again you serve up bald-faced lies, that says something about the kind of person you are and the kind of leader you would be if elected to the United States Senate,” Obama said.

Georgia voters have cast more than 1.4 million ballots.

Warnock voted Sunday after a religiously infused rally that called on the civil rights traditions of the Southern Black church, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock occupies the pulpit once held by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Walker, meanwhile, is expected to vote on the runoff’s Election Day, as he did in November for the midterms.

Warnock led Walker by about 37,000 votes out of almost 4 million cast in the general election but fell short of the majority required under Georgia law.

Statewide early voting data, including some weekend and Thanksgiving weekdays in certain counties, shows higher overall turnout in the most heavily Democratic counties and congressional districts. Still, both parties are finding data to tout as they jockey for any advantage in the final contest of the 2022 midterm election cycle, and both campaigns agree generally that Warnock will lead among early voters, as he did in the first round, while Walker will have the advantage in Election Day ballots, as he did in November. The respective margins will determine the eventual winner.

TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, analyzed the identities of the 830,000-plus voters who’d cast ballots by the end of Tuesday and concluded that Democrats have increased their advantage by 14 percentage points over what it was with six days to go before the Nov. 8 election. That analysis did not include the 240,000-plus additional ballots cast Wednesday.

Walker’s campaign manager, Scott Paradise, pushed back on notions of Democrats’ domination. He argued that their advantage comes only because it was heavily Democratic metro-area counties that held weekend early voting, while more Republican areas waited until the statewide mandatory early voting window that began Monday. Republicans had sued, unsuccessfully, in state court trying to block Saturday early voting for the runoff.

Paradise said a Walker campaign analysis found that nine of the 10 counties with the highest turnout Monday were counties Walker won in November with a combined 70% of the vote. He added that of the state’s most populous counties — those with more than 100,000 registered voters — it was two Republican strongholds, Hall and Forsyth, that posted the highest turnout percentages Monday. Paradise said those trends reflect high enthusiasm among Republicans.

Still, Republicans have catching up to do.

According to state voting data compiled by Ryan Anderson, an independent analyst in Atlanta, four of the state’s five Democratic-held congressional districts had already seen advance turnout through Tuesday of at least 43% of the total early vote for the November election, when every Georgia county had at least 17 days of early in-person voting. Just one of Georgia’s nine Republican-held congressional districts had eclipsed that 43% mark.

Warnock first won the seat as part of concurrent Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, 2021, when he and Jon Ossoff prevailed over Republican incumbents to give Democrats narrow control of the Senate for the start of President Joe Biden’s tenure.

“That happened because of you, Georgia, and now we need you to do it again,” Obama said.

Warnock now is seeking a full six-year term. This time, Senate control is not in play: Democrats have already secured 50 seats and have Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. That puts pressure on both Warnock’s and Walker’s campaigns to convince Georgia voters that it’s worth their time to cast a second ballot, even if the national stakes aren’t as high.

Obama argued on behalf of Warnock himself, though, saying “51 is better than 50 because it means Sen. Warnock will keep representing you in Washington.”

Warnock got about 70% of his overall first-round votes from advance voting; for Walker, it was about 58%. That translated to an advantage of more than 256,000 votes for Warnock. Walker answered with an Election Day advantage of more than 200,000.

The senator’s campaign, Democratic Party committees and aligned political action committees have tailored their voter turnout efforts toward early voting. Republicans have countered with their own wide-ranging push, including a direct-mail push from one super political action committee featuring Gov. Brian Kemp, who got 200,000 more votes than Walker to win a second term comfortably.

Yet Republicans are battling some internal party narratives, including from former President Donald Trump, that question some advance voting, especially mail-in ballots, pushing some Republicans toward an Election Day ballot. As recently as Tuesday, Trump declared on social media that “YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS – NEVER, NEVER NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”

Walker himself does not mention early in-person voting or mail-in ballots at all as he urges his supporters to vote.

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Trump faulted for dinner with white nationalist, rapper Ye

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is renewing attention to his long history of turning a blind eye to bigotry after dining with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West just days into his third campaign for the White House.

Trump had dinner Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago club with West, who is now known as Ye, as well as Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist who has used his online platform to spew antisemitic and white nationalist rhetoric.

Ye, who says he, too, is running for president in 2024, has made his own series of antisemitic comments in recent weeks, leading to his suspension from social media platforms, his talent agency dropping him and companies like Adidas cutting ties with him. The sportswear manufacturer has also launched an investigation into his conduct.

In a statement from the White House, spokesman Andrew Bates said: “Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America — including at Mar-A-Lago. Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned.”

Trump, in a series of statements Friday, said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived with Ye at his club. But Trump also did not acknowledge Fuentes’ long history of racist and antisemitic remarks, nor did he denounce either man’s defamatory statements.

Trump wrote of Ye on his social media platform that “we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’” He added, “Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”

The former president has a long history of failing to unequivocally condemn hate speech. During his 2016 campaign, Trump waffled when asked to denounce the KKK after he was endorsed by the group’s former leader, saying in a televised interview that he didn’t “know anything about David Duke.” In 2017, in the aftermath of the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump was widely criticized for saying there was “blame on both sides” for the violence. And his rallies frequently feature inflammatory rhetoric from figures like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spoke earlier this year at a far-right conference organized by Fuentes.

The latest episode, coming just one week after Trump launched his third run for the Republican nomination, also underscored how loosely controlled access to the former president remained, particularly without a traditional campaign operation in place.

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club came under intense scrutiny amid revelations that Trump was storing hundreds of documents with classified markings there — sparking a federal investigation. But the club — and the people it gave access to Trump — had long been a source of consternation among former White House aides.

Mar-a-Lago is not only Trump’s home, but also a private club and event space. Paid members and their guests dine alongside him and often mingle with him; members of the public can book weddings, fundraisers and other events, and Trump often drops by.

Ye first shared details of the dinner in a video he posted to his Twitter account Thursday. Ye said he had traveled to Florida to ask Trump to be his 2024 running mate, and that the meeting had grown heated, with Trump “perturbed” by his request and Ye angered by Trump’s criticism of his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian.

“When Trump started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was gonna lose. I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history, telling Ye that I’m going to lose?” Ye asked in the video. “You’re talking to Ye!”

Ye also said Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes,” whom he described as “actually a loyalist” and said he’d asked Trump, “Why when you had the chance did you not free the January 6th-ers?” referring to the defendants who were alleged to have participated in the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump released a series of statements Friday trying to explain the circumstances of the meeting.

“Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about,” Trump said in his first statement released by his campaign.

Not long after, Trump took to his social media network to say that Ye and “three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about” had “unexpectedly showed up” at his club.

“We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport,” he wrote.

Hours later he again posted, saying he had told Ye that he “should definitely not run for President,” and that “any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.”

“Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’” he added. “Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”

Fuentes, meanwhile, said after the trip that, while he couldn’t rule out that Trump had heard of him, “I don’t think he knew that I was me at the dinner.”

“I didn’t mean for my statements and my whole background to sort of become a public relations problem for the president,” he added on his show.

The meeting drew immediate criticism from Trump critics as well as some supporters, including David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel.

“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this. Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable,” Friedman wrote in a tweet. “I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”

On Saturday, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a potential 2024 rival, also denounced antisemitism, without directly referencing the dinner or the president under whom he served.

“Anti-Semitism is a cancer,” Pompeo wrote, adding: “We stand with the Jewish people in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry.”

Biden, asked about the Trump dinner meeting while vacationing in Nantucket, Massachusetts, replied, “You don’t want to hear what I think.”

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Lake seeks election records in suit against Arizona county

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PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, has filed a public records lawsuit demanding Maricopa County hand over a variety of documents related to the election.

Lake has refused to acknowledge that she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs and has for weeks drawn attention to voters who said they experienced long lines and other difficulties while voting on Election Day in Arizona’s largest county.

Her lawyer, Tim LaSota, says in the suit filed Wednesday that the county has not fulfilled public records requests filed on Nov. 15 and 16. The requests seek to identify voters who may have had trouble casting a ballot, such as people who checked in at more than one vote center or those who returned a mail ballot and also checked in at a polling place.

Lake is also asking for information about counted and uncounted ballots that were accidentally mixed. County officials have acknowledged the problem occurred at a handful of vote centers but say it happens in most elections and can be reconciled.

Lake and her allies have bombarded Maricopa County with complaints about Election Day problems, which stem largely from a problem with printers at some vote centers that led them to print ballots with markings that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators. All ballots were counted, but Lake says some of her supporters may have been unable to cast a ballot amid the chaos.

Lake wants the county to produce the records before certifying the election. The Board of Supervisors, controlled 4-1 by Republicans, votes to certify the election on Monday, the deadline under state law. Certification votes are also scheduled for Monday in five other counties, including two where Republican supervisors voted earlier to delay certifying the election.

The statewide canvass is scheduled for Dec. 5.

County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, has said the county takes responsibility for the printer issue but blamed prominent Republicans including state GOP Chair Kelli Ward for exacerbating the problem by telling voters not to allow their ballots to be counted at the elections headquarters in downtown Phoenix.

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Georgia court declines to halt Saturday early runoff voting

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ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia appeals court ruling on Monday means that counties can offer early voting this coming Saturday in the U.S. Senate runoff election between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.

The Court of Appeals declined a request by the state to stay a lower court’s ruling that said state law allows early voting that day.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had told county election officials that early voting could not be held that day because state law says it is illegal on a Saturday if there is a holiday on the Thursday or Friday preceding it.

Warnock’s campaign, along with the Democratic Party of Georgia and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, sued last week to challenge that guidance.

Thursday is Thanksgiving, and Friday is a state holiday. The Saturday following those two holidays is the only possibility for Saturday voting before next month’s Senate runoff election between Warnock and Walker.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox on Friday issued an order siding with the Warnock campaign and the Democratic groups. He found that the law cited by the state regarding Saturday voting after a holiday does not apply to a runoff election.

Lawyers for the state filed an appeal on Monday with the Georgia Court of Appeals. They asked the court to immediately stay the lower court ruling.

They argued in a court filing that the ruling was erroneous for procedural reasons but also that Cox was wrong to consider the runoff a separate type of election rather than a continuation of the general election.

In a one-sentence order Monday, the Georgia Court of Appeals declined to stay the lower court ruling.

It’s not clear how many counties will open polling places for voting on Saturday.

Warnock and Walker, a former football player, were forced into a Dec. 6 runoff because neither won a majority in the midterm election this month.

Georgia’s 2021 election law compressed the time period between the general election and the runoff to four weeks, and Thanksgiving falls in the middle. Many Georgians will be offered only five weekdays of early in-person voting beginning Nov. 28.

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