Midterm Election Live Updates: Voters Head to Polls Across the Country
Allegations of voter suppression persist
Georgia has been a battleground over voting rights, made only more complicated because the Republican candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is also the secretary of state overseeing the election. And just two days before the election, Mr. Kemp threw a wrench into the proceedings when his office announced that it would investigate the Georgia Democratic Party for allegedly trying to hack the state’s voter registration system — an explosive claim for which officials provided no evidence.
Last month, it was revealed that Mr. Kemp’s office had frozen more than 50,000 voter applications, most of them from minority residents, because names on applications didn’t match those on government IDs. In some cases, these discrepancies were as small as a dropped hyphen. When early voting began last month, more problems emerged, including extremely long wait times. But a judge ruled Friday that the state must allow more than 3,000 naturalized citizens whose applications were improperly flagged to vote normally by presenting proof of citizenship.
[Here’s what voter intimidation looks like and how to report it.]
In North Dakota, opponents of a new residential address requirement lost a last-ditch attempt to stop it when a federal judge said it was too close to Election Day to issue an injunction. [Read more about the requirement and how it’s affecting Native Americans, many of whom don’t use residential addresses.] Advocacy groups are urging Native Americans to show up to the polls even if they don’t have the required identification, and to demand a provisional ballot if they are turned away. After Election Day, the groups might ask the courts to order those ballots counted.
Elsewhere, a court ruled late last month that voters in Shelby County, Tenn., must be allowed to correct errors or omissions on their voter registration forms and vote normally on Election Day. And among other controversies in Kansas — where Secretary of State Kris Kobach is, like Mr. Kemp in Georgia, the Republican candidate for governor — voters in Hispanic-majority Dodge City have to go outside the city limits to find their polling place, which is the only one for an electorate of 27,000.
— Maggie Astor
Fox News responds after hosts appear at Trump rally
CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — The show onstage might well have been called Fox & Friend. As President Trump wrapped up the midterm election cycle with a late-night rally in southeast Missouri on Monday, he was joined by a trio of conservative media rock stars: the radio host Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, who delivered speeches backing the president.
The participation of the Fox hosts in a political rally struck even executives at the network as inappropriate. “Fox News does not condone any talent participating in campaign events,” the network said in a statement on Tuesday. “We have an extraordinary team of journalists helming our coverage tonight, and we are extremely proud of their work. This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.”
How it was addressed the network did not say. Mr. Hannity followed up with his own statement saying that Mr. Trump’s invitation to come on stage was spontaneous, but the popular conservative host expressed no regret about accepting. Read more here.
— Peter Baker