Ukraine’s second-largest city and several strategic hubs were liberated in the operation.

A surprise counteroffensive over the weekend saw Ukrainian troops push into areas around Kharkiv in the country’s northeast, liberating villages and cities, and catching Russian troops flat-footed. The swift maneuvers threatened to encircle a portion of the Russian army and led them to rapidly abandon positions and military hardware as Ukrainian troops closed in.

The counteroffensive has recaptured around 1,160 square miles of territory since it began in earnest earlier this month, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyy told the Associated Press Sunday. The eastward push caught Russian forces off-guard and forced several units to abandon their posts as Ukrainian troops took control of the strategic cities of Izyum, Balakliya, and Kupiansk — critical areas for the Russian supply and logistics lines in the Donbas region.

It’s the most significant blow to the Russian military since Ukraine pushed troops out of Kyiv in March, and frees Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which Russian forces have devastated with near-constant shelling for months.

Ukraine’s second-largest city and several strategic hubs were liberated in the operation.

A surprise counteroffensive over the weekend saw Ukrainian troops push into areas around Kharkiv in the country’s northeast, liberating villages and cities, and catching Russian troops flat-footed. The swift maneuvers threatened to encircle a portion of the Russian army and led them to rapidly abandon positions and military hardware as Ukrainian troops closed in.

The counteroffensive has recaptured around 1,160 square miles of territory since it began in earnest earlier this month, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyy told the Associated Press Sunday. The eastward push caught Russian forces off-guard and forced several units to abandon their posts as Ukrainian troops took control of the strategic cities of Izyum, Balakliya, and Kupiansk — critical areas for the Russian supply and logistics lines in the Donbas region.

It’s the most significant blow to the Russian military since Ukraine pushed troops out of Kyiv in March, and frees Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which Russian forces have devastated with near-constant shelling for months.

New Hampshire, Delaware, and Rhode Island picked their candidates.

Winner: National Democrats
National Democrats pushed weak Republican candidates over the finish line both in a congressional race and in the New Hampshire GOP Senate primary. Don Bolduc — a retired Army brigadier general who believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election, said that the election was rigged in New Hampshire, and has made false claims about Covid vaccines — pulled off a victory over state senate president Chuck Morse in a split field. Morse conceded early Wednesday

Loser: Kevin McCarthy
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC aligned with the House minority leader, spent $1.8 million in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District to boost Matt Mowers, a veteran political operative who had been the GOP nominee in that swing district in 2020. Mowers lost. Instead, Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old who would be the youngest female member of Congress in history, won. Leavitt has recently refused to say whether she’d vote for McCarthy for speaker and made false claims about the 2020 election.

Winner: Elise Stefanik
Leavitt’s win wasn’t bad news for everyone in House leadership. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, had vigorously backed Leavitt, her former staffer.

Winner: Incumbent governors
Outside of New Hampshire, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee managed to narrowly win the Democratic primary against a split field that included Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea and former CVS CEO Helena Foulkes.

 

 

As political campaigning for the midterm elections is ramping up, millions of voters are considering how they should cast their ballots on Nov. 8, 2022. In addition to the traditional way of voting at their local precinct on Election Day, many have the option to vote earlier by mail.

With the exception of Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi and New Hampshire, early voting is allowed in 46 states and is offered in different forms such as drop boxes, mail or early voting in person.

It’s important to check with your state’s election office, because different states have different deadlines and options available.

In Montana, for instance, early voting is allowed for about four weeks between Oct. 11 and Nov. 7. But in Texas, the early-voting period is only the 10 weekdays between Oct. 24 and Nov. 4.

1. The long, long history of early voting

Early voting periods are as old as presidential elections in the U.S.

The first presidential election occurred in 1789 and started on Dec. 15, 1788. It ended almost a month later, on Jan. 10, 1789, with the election of George Washington.

It wasn’t until 1845 that Congress adopted the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the national Election Day.

Given the long history, Terri Bimes, an associate teaching professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, raises an interesting point on the impact of early voting on turnout.

“While some scholars contend that early in-person voting periods potentially can decrease voter turnout,” Bimes writes, “studies that focus on vote-by-mail, a form of early voting, generally show an increase in voter turnout.”

Regardless of overall turnout, more and more voters are choosing nontraditional ways of casting their ballots. In the 2020 election, for instance, 69% of voters nationwide voted by mail or through another means earlier than Election Day. That number was 40% in 2016.

---

Read more: There’s nothing unusual about early voting – it’s been done since the founding of the republic

---

2. Is early voting safe?

Election fraud is rare.

And mail-in ballot fraud is even rarer.

The conservative Heritage Foundation conducted a survey in 2020 and found 1,200 “proven instances of voter fraud” since 2000, with 1,100 criminal convictions over those two decades.

Only 204 allegations, and 143 convictions, involved mail-in ballots – even with more than 250 million mail-in ballots cast since 2000.

Edie Goldenberg is a University of Michigan political scientist who belongs to a National Academy of Public Administration working group that offered recommendations to ensure voter participation and public confidence during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Goldenberg writes: “The evidence we reviewed finds that voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process, if done properly.”

---

Read more: What’s the best way to get out the vote in a pandemic?

---

3. Voting turnout is key to democracy

More people voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any election in the past 120 years, even as nearly one-third of eligible voters sat it out. That means nearly 80 million Americans did not vote.

Among the reasons nonvoters gave were not being registered, not being interested or not believing their vote made a difference. Despite such apathy, about 155 million voters – that’s 67% of Americans over 18 – did vote in 2020.

Part of the problem of reducing the percentage of nonvoters at the street level can be getting people to answer their doors to strangers or answering a telephone call placed by a campaign volunteer from an unrecognized number. Before the pandemic, an effective door-to-door campaign could increase turnout by almost 10%; a well-run phone campaign could add an additional 5%.

When University of California, Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Lisa García Bedolla began studying voter mobilization in 2005, it was common for door-to-door campaigns to reach half of the people they tried to contact. By 2018, that number had dropped to about 18%.

To close the gap, campaigns moved toward asking people to contact people they knew and help turn out those supporters and social networks. Text messages, especially reminder texts, became the virtual door knock.

“These friend-to-friend approaches are seen as a way to cut through the noise,” Bedolla writes.

These personal approaches can also create a sense of accountability.

Knowing that someone is paying attention to your vote, however it is cast, might make a difference in a local, state or federal election.

---

Google searches for “college rankings” spike each year in the months that follow the release of US News & World Report’s annual lists of Best Colleges. The company says that about 40 million people read those lists last year; that’s more than 10 times the number of graduating high school seniors in the United States.

The company released its 2022-23 lists on Monday.

Demand for information is evident, as higher education – once affordable and accessible – has continued to become more competitive and more expensive.

In the nearly four decades since the US News rankings launched in 1983, the cost of college has ballooned more than five times for those attending four-year private institutions. The average student graduates with about $30,000 in debt for the past decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which works out to more than half of their average starting salary.

 

Ukraine’s second-largest city and several strategic hubs were liberated in the operation.

A surprise counteroffensive over the weekend saw Ukrainian troops push into areas around Kharkiv in the country’s northeast, liberating villages and cities, and catching Russian troops flat-footed. The swift maneuvers threatened to encircle a portion of the Russian army and led them to rapidly abandon positions and military hardware as Ukrainian troops closed in.

The counteroffensive has recaptured around 1,160 square miles of territory since it began in earnest earlier this month, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyy told the Associated Press Sunday. The eastward push caught Russian forces off-guard and forced several units to abandon their posts as Ukrainian troops took control of the strategic cities of Izyum, Balakliya, and Kupiansk — critical areas for the Russian supply and logistics lines in the Donbas region.

It’s the most significant blow to the Russian military since Ukraine pushed troops out of Kyiv in March, and frees Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which Russian forces have devastated with near-constant shelling for months.

New Hampshire, Delaware, and Rhode Island picked their candidates.

Winner: National Democrats
National Democrats pushed weak Republican candidates over the finish line both in a congressional race and in the New Hampshire GOP Senate primary. Don Bolduc — a retired Army brigadier general who believes Donald Trump won the 2020 election, said that the election was rigged in New Hampshire, and has made false claims about Covid vaccines — pulled off a victory over state senate president Chuck Morse in a split field. Morse conceded early Wednesday

Loser: Kevin McCarthy
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC aligned with the House minority leader, spent $1.8 million in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District to boost Matt Mowers, a veteran political operative who had been the GOP nominee in that swing district in 2020. Mowers lost. Instead, Karoline Leavitt, a 25-year-old who would be the youngest female member of Congress in history, won. Leavitt has recently refused to say whether she’d vote for McCarthy for speaker and made false claims about the 2020 election.

Winner: Elise Stefanik
Leavitt’s win wasn’t bad news for everyone in House leadership. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, had vigorously backed Leavitt, her former staffer.

Winner: Incumbent governors
Outside of New Hampshire, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee managed to narrowly win the Democratic primary against a split field that included Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea and former CVS CEO Helena Foulkes.

 

 

As political campaigning for the midterm elections is ramping up, millions of voters are considering how they should cast their ballots on Nov. 8, 2022. In addition to the traditional way of voting at their local precinct on Election Day, many have the option to vote earlier by mail.

With the exception of Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi and New Hampshire, early voting is allowed in 46 states and is offered in different forms such as drop boxes, mail or early voting in person.

It’s important to check with your state’s election office, because different states have different deadlines and options available.

In Montana, for instance, early voting is allowed for about four weeks between Oct. 11 and Nov. 7. But in Texas, the early-voting period is only the 10 weekdays between Oct. 24 and Nov. 4.

1. The long, long history of early voting

Early voting periods are as old as presidential elections in the U.S.

The first presidential election occurred in 1789 and started on Dec. 15, 1788. It ended almost a month later, on Jan. 10, 1789, with the election of George Washington.

It wasn’t until 1845 that Congress adopted the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the national Election Day.

Given the long history, Terri Bimes, an associate teaching professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, raises an interesting point on the impact of early voting on turnout.

“While some scholars contend that early in-person voting periods potentially can decrease voter turnout,” Bimes writes, “studies that focus on vote-by-mail, a form of early voting, generally show an increase in voter turnout.”

Regardless of overall turnout, more and more voters are choosing nontraditional ways of casting their ballots. In the 2020 election, for instance, 69% of voters nationwide voted by mail or through another means earlier than Election Day. That number was 40% in 2016.

---

Read more: There’s nothing unusual about early voting – it’s been done since the founding of the republic

---

2. Is early voting safe?

Election fraud is rare.

And mail-in ballot fraud is even rarer.

The conservative Heritage Foundation conducted a survey in 2020 and found 1,200 “proven instances of voter fraud” since 2000, with 1,100 criminal convictions over those two decades.

Only 204 allegations, and 143 convictions, involved mail-in ballots – even with more than 250 million mail-in ballots cast since 2000.

Edie Goldenberg is a University of Michigan political scientist who belongs to a National Academy of Public Administration working group that offered recommendations to ensure voter participation and public confidence during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Goldenberg writes: “The evidence we reviewed finds that voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process, if done properly.”

---

Read more: What’s the best way to get out the vote in a pandemic?

---

3. Voting turnout is key to democracy

More people voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any election in the past 120 years, even as nearly one-third of eligible voters sat it out. That means nearly 80 million Americans did not vote.

Among the reasons nonvoters gave were not being registered, not being interested or not believing their vote made a difference. Despite such apathy, about 155 million voters – that’s 67% of Americans over 18 – did vote in 2020.

Part of the problem of reducing the percentage of nonvoters at the street level can be getting people to answer their doors to strangers or answering a telephone call placed by a campaign volunteer from an unrecognized number. Before the pandemic, an effective door-to-door campaign could increase turnout by almost 10%; a well-run phone campaign could add an additional 5%.

When University of California, Berkeley’s Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Lisa García Bedolla began studying voter mobilization in 2005, it was common for door-to-door campaigns to reach half of the people they tried to contact. By 2018, that number had dropped to about 18%.

To close the gap, campaigns moved toward asking people to contact people they knew and help turn out those supporters and social networks. Text messages, especially reminder texts, became the virtual door knock.

“These friend-to-friend approaches are seen as a way to cut through the noise,” Bedolla writes.

These personal approaches can also create a sense of accountability.

Knowing that someone is paying attention to your vote, however it is cast, might make a difference in a local, state or federal election.

---

Over the past two years, Republicans have used their dominant hold on most state legislatures to advance a polarizing agenda moving social policy sharply to the right on issues from abortion and voting to book bans and classroom teaching of race and gender.

Now, a new analysis has found that over the next decade, Democrats will face an uphill challenge to dislodge the GOP state house advantage that has allowed conservatives to advance this agenda so broadly and so quickly. In the battle for control of state legislatures, “Democrats face a defensive outlook over the decade ahead,” the Democratic group Forward Majority concludes in a report released Monday. “Good years for Democrats are ones in which power will come down to razor-thin margins; in contrast, good years for Republicans will be total routs.”

The study is based on an exhaustive effort by the group to model how the electoral competition between the two parties will evolve through 2030.

The final piece of the 2022 Senate puzzle is about to be set.

Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan’s reelection campaign could be one of November’s most competitive races — but that depends on who wins Tuesday’s Republican primary in New Hampshire, the last nominating contest left in the battle to swing the 50-50 Senate.

The GOP’s establishment wing has lined up behind state Senate President Chuck Morse, who is mounting a late charge for the nomination against longtime polling leader Don Bolduc. But a leading Democratic super PAC has been attacking Morse on the airwaves, the latest example of the party’s involvement in GOP primaries.

New Hampshire Republicans are also picking two candidates to challenge each of the state’s vulnerable Democratic House incumbents. And just down I-95, Democrats in Rhode Island will decide whether to keep their appointed governor, Dan McKee, who took over in Providence after Gina Raimondo resigned to become President Joe Biden’s commerce secretary.

Not counting Louisiana, which runs its “jungle primaries” on November’s Election Day, Tuesday marks the final primaries of 2022. Here’s what to watch for:

Google searches for “college rankings” spike each year in the months that follow the release of US News & World Report’s annual lists of Best Colleges. The company says that about 40 million people read those lists last year; that’s more than 10 times the number of graduating high school seniors in the United States.

The company released its 2022-23 lists on Monday.

Demand for information is evident, as higher education – once affordable and accessible – has continued to become more competitive and more expensive.

In the nearly four decades since the US News rankings launched in 1983, the cost of college has ballooned more than five times for those attending four-year private institutions. The average student graduates with about $30,000 in debt for the past decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which works out to more than half of their average starting salary.

 

God save the Queen, long live the King. The second Elizabethan age has come to an end and the royal family will now regroup around a new monarch for the next era in British history.

What will change for each of the royals?

The moment Elizabeth II died, her eldest child, Charles, automatically became monarch. As sovereign, he has chosen to take the name King Charles III.

All rights and responsibilities of the Crown now rest with King Charles III.

He becomes head of state not just in the UK but in 14 other Commonwealth realms including Australia and Canada. He will become head of the 56-member Commonwealth, although that is not a hereditary position, after his succession to the role was agreed by Commonwealth leaders at a meeting in London in 2018.

The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s lawyers face a Friday midnight deadline for submitting proposals for how the special master review of the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago — including classified documents — should work.

They’ll be filing the briefs even as the Justice Department appeals the order requiring the review, in which a third-party attorney will sift through the materials from Trump’s Florida home and segregate out the privileged documents that should be withheld from federal investigators.

While the appeal plays out, prosecutors are also asking that its review of classified documents be allowed to continue separate from the special master review. The parties have been instructed by US District Judge Aileen Cannon to weigh in on the department’s arguments about the documents in the filing due Friday.

Queen Elizabeth II, who has died age 96 after the longest reign in British history, will be mourned around the globe as one of the last monarchs born to a classic age of European royalty, when kings and queens wielded genuine political power.

Elizabeth’s death comes seven months after she marked the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne, yet another milestone achievement in the remarkable life of a queen who, though reluctantly thrust into the spotlight at a young age, won almost universal praise for her steadfast dedication to duty.

Her long reign saw Britain transformed from a war-weary declining imperial power into a modern multi-cultural state that rarely looked to its monarch for leadership, but still held her in high esteem.
And while it witnessed its fair share of joy — not least the 2011 marriage of the Queen’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton, and the birth of their three children — Elizabeth’s rule also weathered many storms, both public and personal, as the monarchy tried to keep pace with changing times.

 

In recent days, President Joe Biden has sharpened his attacks against Donald Trump and the so-called MAGA Republicans for posing a threat to democracy. He’s likened the philosophy undergirding the dominant strain of the modern-day GOP to “semi-fascism.”

And Democrats are taking notice.

The gloves-off, no-holds-barred approach from Biden as of late has emboldened Democrats across the country, rallying the party faithful ahead of the November elections even as his harshest rhetoric makes some vulnerable incumbents visibly uncomfortable.

Biden’s increasingly stark warnings about Trump-fueled elements of the Republican Party are making up the core part of his midterm message, combined with repeated reminders to voters about recent Democratic accomplishments and a promise that democracy can still produce results for the American people. But it’s the blistering statements from Biden about his predecessor and adherents of the “Make America Great Again” philosophy that have given many Democrats a bolt of fresh energy as they campaign to keep control of Congress.

God save the Queen, long live the King. The second Elizabethan age has come to an end and the royal family will now regroup around a new monarch for the next era in British history.

What will change for each of the royals?

The moment Elizabeth II died, her eldest child, Charles, automatically became monarch. As sovereign, he has chosen to take the name King Charles III.

All rights and responsibilities of the Crown now rest with King Charles III.

He becomes head of state not just in the UK but in 14 other Commonwealth realms including Australia and Canada. He will become head of the 56-member Commonwealth, although that is not a hereditary position, after his succession to the role was agreed by Commonwealth leaders at a meeting in London in 2018.

The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s lawyers face a Friday midnight deadline for submitting proposals for how the special master review of the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago — including classified documents — should work.

They’ll be filing the briefs even as the Justice Department appeals the order requiring the review, in which a third-party attorney will sift through the materials from Trump’s Florida home and segregate out the privileged documents that should be withheld from federal investigators.

While the appeal plays out, prosecutors are also asking that its review of classified documents be allowed to continue separate from the special master review. The parties have been instructed by US District Judge Aileen Cannon to weigh in on the department’s arguments about the documents in the filing due Friday.

Queen Elizabeth II, who has died age 96 after the longest reign in British history, will be mourned around the globe as one of the last monarchs born to a classic age of European royalty, when kings and queens wielded genuine political power.

Elizabeth’s death comes seven months after she marked the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne, yet another milestone achievement in the remarkable life of a queen who, though reluctantly thrust into the spotlight at a young age, won almost universal praise for her steadfast dedication to duty.

Her long reign saw Britain transformed from a war-weary declining imperial power into a modern multi-cultural state that rarely looked to its monarch for leadership, but still held her in high esteem.
And while it witnessed its fair share of joy — not least the 2011 marriage of the Queen’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton, and the birth of their three children — Elizabeth’s rule also weathered many storms, both public and personal, as the monarchy tried to keep pace with changing times.

 

In recent days, President Joe Biden has sharpened his attacks against Donald Trump and the so-called MAGA Republicans for posing a threat to democracy. He’s likened the philosophy undergirding the dominant strain of the modern-day GOP to “semi-fascism.”

And Democrats are taking notice.

The gloves-off, no-holds-barred approach from Biden as of late has emboldened Democrats across the country, rallying the party faithful ahead of the November elections even as his harshest rhetoric makes some vulnerable incumbents visibly uncomfortable.

Biden’s increasingly stark warnings about Trump-fueled elements of the Republican Party are making up the core part of his midterm message, combined with repeated reminders to voters about recent Democratic accomplishments and a promise that democracy can still produce results for the American people. But it’s the blistering statements from Biden about his predecessor and adherents of the “Make America Great Again” philosophy that have given many Democrats a bolt of fresh energy as they campaign to keep control of Congress.

The number of online donors to the Republican Party unexpectedly dropped in the first half of 2022, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data — one in a series of setbacks that have tempered expectations of a red wave in November.

Online fundraising usually ramps up dramatically and predictably over the course of an election cycle. But campaign finance data show that in the first half of this year, the number of people giving federal contributions to Republican candidates and committees through WinRed — the GOP’s widely used donation processing platform — fell to around 913,000 down from roughly 956,000 contributors during the six months prior.

The surprising dip illustrates broader fundraising difficulties that have plagued GOP candidates in key races across the country this summer, even amid hopes that the party could retake control of Congress. It reflects the party’s long-standing challenges in building donor lists to power its campaigns.

The inquiry that led to the August search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club is only one of more than a dozen investigations and lawsuits against the former President and his orbit.

There is a complicated web of ongoing investigations, civil suits and countersuits. While he has not been accused of any crime by a government, state or city attorney, Trump is under scrutiny from all three. He denies wrongdoing in all these matters.

His efforts to overturn the 2020 election are on the radar of federal and Georgia prosecutors. His finances, which he long tried to hide from investigators, are under the microscope in New York. He’s been sued for defamation, wrongful termination and for cutting a relative out of a will. The lawsuits and investigations included here do not encompass the multiple investigations of Trump underway by the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats, but would end if Republicans take control after elections in November.

Ex-Attorney General William Barr’s scathing critique of a major court victory for Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents drama is escalating the scrutiny of the judge who put the brakes on the investigation.

Barr was once seen as a facilitator of the then-President’s penchant for tearing at the limits of presidential power. But since Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat to President Joe Biden in 2020, Barr has emerged as one of his most acerbic and significant critics. He, for instance, infuriated Trump by publicly declaring there was no significant electoral fraud. And his video testimony has emerged as one of the key weapons in the televised hearings run by the House select committee investigating the US Capitol insurrection.

On Tuesday, Barr took aim at a decision by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon to grant Trump’s request for a “special master” to vet for executive and legal privilege issues the material taken from his home in last month’s FBI search.

A lot can change in a couple of months. Democrats now face a midterm environment that looks decidedly brighter than it was in the middle of the summer.
There were glimmers of optimism back in July for the party trying to hold on to its narrow Senate majority, in the immediate aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The ruling appeared to energize the Democratic base — something the party had been struggling with given President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.

Strong performances by Democrats in special House elections and a defeated anti-abortion ballot initiative in deep-red Kansas have given them more confidence that running on abortion, especially when framed in terms of rights and liberties, can be effective.

On top of that, Democrats have enacted a sweeping health care, tax and climate law, gas prices have come down and former President Donald Trump has thrust himself back in the headlines by revealing the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home, offering a foil for Biden and the party in power.

Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as British prime minister, inheriting a country in crisis

Liz Truss will be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom after winning most votes in the Conservative Party leadership contest, succeeding Boris Johnson who resigned in July after a series of scandals.

Truss defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 among party members and will take over as leader on Tuesday, as Britons face mounting economic and social crisis.

She pledged action to tackle the crisis in a short victory speech at a conference center in London on Monday. Without offering details, Truss promised a “bold plan” to cut taxes and build economic growth, and “deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply.”

Local election officials are trying to share voting information with the public on social media but may be missing some key platforms – and the voters who use them.

In early July 2022, for instance, young voters in Boone County, Missouri, complained that they had missed the registration deadline to vote in the county’s Aug. 2 primary election. They claimed no one “spread the word on social media.” The local election office in that county actually has a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. But its accounts don’t have many followers and aren’t as active as, say, celebrity or teenage accounts are. As a result, election officials’ messages may never reach their audience.

The Boone County example raises important questions about how prospective voters can get informed about elections, starting with whether or not local election officials are active on social media and whether they use these platforms effectively to “spread the word.”

In our research as scholars of voter participation and electoral processes, we find that when local election officials not only have social media accounts but use them to distribute information about voting, voters of all ages – but particularly young voters – are more likely to register to vote, to cast ballots and to have their ballots counted.

For example, during the 2020 election, Florida voters who lived in counties where the county supervisor of elections shared information about how to register to vote on Facebook, and included a link to Florida’s online voter registration system, were more likely to complete the voter registration process and use online voter registration.

In North Carolina, we found that voters whose county board of elections used Facebook to share clear information about voting by mail were more likely to have their mailed ballots accepted than mail voters whose county boards did not share instructions on social media.

Young people face distinct voting challenges

Voter participation among young voters, those between the ages of 18 and 24, has increased in recent elections, but still lags behind that of older voters. One reason is that younger voters have not yet established a habit of voting.

Even when they do try to vote, young voters face more barriers to participation than more experienced voters. They are more likely than older people to make errors or omissions on their voter registration applications and therefore not be successfully registered.

When they do successfully complete the registration process, they have more trouble casting a vote that will count, especially when it comes to following all the steps required for voting by mail. When they try to vote in person, evidence from recent elections shows high provisional voting rates in college towns, suggesting college students may also experience trouble in casting a regular ballot owing to confusion about finding their polling place, or because they are not registered to vote because their voter registration application was not successfully processed.

Some of these problems exist because voters, especially young ones, don’t know what they need to do to meet the voter eligibility requirements set by state election laws. Those laws often require registering weeks or months in advance of Election Day, or changing their registration information even if they move within a community.

Social media as a tool to ‘spread the word’

Social media can be a way to get this important information out to a wider audience, including to the young voters who are more likely to need it.

Younger people use social media more than older voters, with a strong preference for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

News outlets and political campaigns use social media heavily. But our analysis finds that the vast majority of local election officials don’t even have social media accounts beyond Facebook. And, when they do, it is likely that they are not effectively reaching their audience.

Gaps in how local election officials use social media

We have found that during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, 33% of county election offices had Facebook accounts. Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform among Americans of all ages. But two-thirds of county election offices didn’t even have a Facebook account.

Just 9% of county election offices had Twitter accounts, and fewer than 2% had accounts on Instagram or TikTok, which are more popular with young voters than Twitter or Faceboook.

Using social media for voter education

Local election officials are charged with sharing information about the voting process – including the mechanics of registering and voting, as well as official lists of candidates and ballot questions.

Their default method of making this information available is often to share it on their own government websites. But young voters’ regular use of social media presents an opportunity for officials to be more active and engaged on those sites.

While many election officials around the country face budget and staffing pressures, as well as threats to their safety, our research confirms that when officials do get involved on social media, young voters benefit – as does democracy itself.

God save the Queen, long live the King. The second Elizabethan age has come to an end and the royal family will now regroup around a new monarch for the next era in British history.

What will change for each of the royals?

The moment Elizabeth II died, her eldest child, Charles, automatically became monarch. As sovereign, he has chosen to take the name King Charles III.

All rights and responsibilities of the Crown now rest with King Charles III.

He becomes head of state not just in the UK but in 14 other Commonwealth realms including Australia and Canada. He will become head of the 56-member Commonwealth, although that is not a hereditary position, after his succession to the role was agreed by Commonwealth leaders at a meeting in London in 2018.

The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump’s lawyers face a Friday midnight deadline for submitting proposals for how the special master review of the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago — including classified documents — should work.

They’ll be filing the briefs even as the Justice Department appeals the order requiring the review, in which a third-party attorney will sift through the materials from Trump’s Florida home and segregate out the privileged documents that should be withheld from federal investigators.

While the appeal plays out, prosecutors are also asking that its review of classified documents be allowed to continue separate from the special master review. The parties have been instructed by US District Judge Aileen Cannon to weigh in on the department’s arguments about the documents in the filing due Friday.

Queen Elizabeth II, who has died age 96 after the longest reign in British history, will be mourned around the globe as one of the last monarchs born to a classic age of European royalty, when kings and queens wielded genuine political power.

Elizabeth’s death comes seven months after she marked the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne, yet another milestone achievement in the remarkable life of a queen who, though reluctantly thrust into the spotlight at a young age, won almost universal praise for her steadfast dedication to duty.

Her long reign saw Britain transformed from a war-weary declining imperial power into a modern multi-cultural state that rarely looked to its monarch for leadership, but still held her in high esteem.
And while it witnessed its fair share of joy — not least the 2011 marriage of the Queen’s grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton, and the birth of their three children — Elizabeth’s rule also weathered many storms, both public and personal, as the monarchy tried to keep pace with changing times.

 

In recent days, President Joe Biden has sharpened his attacks against Donald Trump and the so-called MAGA Republicans for posing a threat to democracy. He’s likened the philosophy undergirding the dominant strain of the modern-day GOP to “semi-fascism.”

And Democrats are taking notice.

The gloves-off, no-holds-barred approach from Biden as of late has emboldened Democrats across the country, rallying the party faithful ahead of the November elections even as his harshest rhetoric makes some vulnerable incumbents visibly uncomfortable.

Biden’s increasingly stark warnings about Trump-fueled elements of the Republican Party are making up the core part of his midterm message, combined with repeated reminders to voters about recent Democratic accomplishments and a promise that democracy can still produce results for the American people. But it’s the blistering statements from Biden about his predecessor and adherents of the “Make America Great Again” philosophy that have given many Democrats a bolt of fresh energy as they campaign to keep control of Congress.

The number of online donors to the Republican Party unexpectedly dropped in the first half of 2022, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data — one in a series of setbacks that have tempered expectations of a red wave in November.

Online fundraising usually ramps up dramatically and predictably over the course of an election cycle. But campaign finance data show that in the first half of this year, the number of people giving federal contributions to Republican candidates and committees through WinRed — the GOP’s widely used donation processing platform — fell to around 913,000 down from roughly 956,000 contributors during the six months prior.

The surprising dip illustrates broader fundraising difficulties that have plagued GOP candidates in key races across the country this summer, even amid hopes that the party could retake control of Congress. It reflects the party’s long-standing challenges in building donor lists to power its campaigns.

The inquiry that led to the August search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home and private club is only one of more than a dozen investigations and lawsuits against the former President and his orbit.

There is a complicated web of ongoing investigations, civil suits and countersuits. While he has not been accused of any crime by a government, state or city attorney, Trump is under scrutiny from all three. He denies wrongdoing in all these matters.

His efforts to overturn the 2020 election are on the radar of federal and Georgia prosecutors. His finances, which he long tried to hide from investigators, are under the microscope in New York. He’s been sued for defamation, wrongful termination and for cutting a relative out of a will. The lawsuits and investigations included here do not encompass the multiple investigations of Trump underway by the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats, but would end if Republicans take control after elections in November.

Ex-Attorney General William Barr’s scathing critique of a major court victory for Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents drama is escalating the scrutiny of the judge who put the brakes on the investigation.

Barr was once seen as a facilitator of the then-President’s penchant for tearing at the limits of presidential power. But since Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat to President Joe Biden in 2020, Barr has emerged as one of his most acerbic and significant critics. He, for instance, infuriated Trump by publicly declaring there was no significant electoral fraud. And his video testimony has emerged as one of the key weapons in the televised hearings run by the House select committee investigating the US Capitol insurrection.

On Tuesday, Barr took aim at a decision by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon to grant Trump’s request for a “special master” to vet for executive and legal privilege issues the material taken from his home in last month’s FBI search.

A lot can change in a couple of months. Democrats now face a midterm environment that looks decidedly brighter than it was in the middle of the summer.
There were glimmers of optimism back in July for the party trying to hold on to its narrow Senate majority, in the immediate aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The ruling appeared to energize the Democratic base — something the party had been struggling with given President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.

Strong performances by Democrats in special House elections and a defeated anti-abortion ballot initiative in deep-red Kansas have given them more confidence that running on abortion, especially when framed in terms of rights and liberties, can be effective.

On top of that, Democrats have enacted a sweeping health care, tax and climate law, gas prices have come down and former President Donald Trump has thrust himself back in the headlines by revealing the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home, offering a foil for Biden and the party in power.

Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as British prime minister, inheriting a country in crisis

Liz Truss will be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom after winning most votes in the Conservative Party leadership contest, succeeding Boris Johnson who resigned in July after a series of scandals.

Truss defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 among party members and will take over as leader on Tuesday, as Britons face mounting economic and social crisis.

She pledged action to tackle the crisis in a short victory speech at a conference center in London on Monday. Without offering details, Truss promised a “bold plan” to cut taxes and build economic growth, and “deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply.”

Local election officials are trying to share voting information with the public on social media but may be missing some key platforms – and the voters who use them.

In early July 2022, for instance, young voters in Boone County, Missouri, complained that they had missed the registration deadline to vote in the county’s Aug. 2 primary election. They claimed no one “spread the word on social media.” The local election office in that county actually has a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. But its accounts don’t have many followers and aren’t as active as, say, celebrity or teenage accounts are. As a result, election officials’ messages may never reach their audience.

The Boone County example raises important questions about how prospective voters can get informed about elections, starting with whether or not local election officials are active on social media and whether they use these platforms effectively to “spread the word.”

In our research as scholars of voter participation and electoral processes, we find that when local election officials not only have social media accounts but use them to distribute information about voting, voters of all ages – but particularly young voters – are more likely to register to vote, to cast ballots and to have their ballots counted.

For example, during the 2020 election, Florida voters who lived in counties where the county supervisor of elections shared information about how to register to vote on Facebook, and included a link to Florida’s online voter registration system, were more likely to complete the voter registration process and use online voter registration.

In North Carolina, we found that voters whose county board of elections used Facebook to share clear information about voting by mail were more likely to have their mailed ballots accepted than mail voters whose county boards did not share instructions on social media.

Young people face distinct voting challenges

Voter participation among young voters, those between the ages of 18 and 24, has increased in recent elections, but still lags behind that of older voters. One reason is that younger voters have not yet established a habit of voting.

Even when they do try to vote, young voters face more barriers to participation than more experienced voters. They are more likely than older people to make errors or omissions on their voter registration applications and therefore not be successfully registered.

When they do successfully complete the registration process, they have more trouble casting a vote that will count, especially when it comes to following all the steps required for voting by mail. When they try to vote in person, evidence from recent elections shows high provisional voting rates in college towns, suggesting college students may also experience trouble in casting a regular ballot owing to confusion about finding their polling place, or because they are not registered to vote because their voter registration application was not successfully processed.

Some of these problems exist because voters, especially young ones, don’t know what they need to do to meet the voter eligibility requirements set by state election laws. Those laws often require registering weeks or months in advance of Election Day, or changing their registration information even if they move within a community.

Social media as a tool to ‘spread the word’

Social media can be a way to get this important information out to a wider audience, including to the young voters who are more likely to need it.

Younger people use social media more than older voters, with a strong preference for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

News outlets and political campaigns use social media heavily. But our analysis finds that the vast majority of local election officials don’t even have social media accounts beyond Facebook. And, when they do, it is likely that they are not effectively reaching their audience.

Gaps in how local election officials use social media

We have found that during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, 33% of county election offices had Facebook accounts. Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform among Americans of all ages. But two-thirds of county election offices didn’t even have a Facebook account.

Just 9% of county election offices had Twitter accounts, and fewer than 2% had accounts on Instagram or TikTok, which are more popular with young voters than Twitter or Faceboook.

Using social media for voter education

Local election officials are charged with sharing information about the voting process – including the mechanics of registering and voting, as well as official lists of candidates and ballot questions.

Their default method of making this information available is often to share it on their own government websites. But young voters’ regular use of social media presents an opportunity for officials to be more active and engaged on those sites.

While many election officials around the country face budget and staffing pressures, as well as threats to their safety, our research confirms that when officials do get involved on social media, young voters benefit – as does democracy itself.