Miami-Dade County has Covid-19 restrictions in place, but the county “will be flexible” with the rules during the Trump rally scheduled tonight at an airport in Opa-Locka.
Wearing a mask in public is required in Miami-Dade County when social distancing is not possible, or when there is no physical barrier present. A midnight to 6 a.m. ET curfew is also in place.
According to Gimenez, the Republican National Committee confirmed that the event is scheduled to begin at 9:30 p.m. and is expected to end before midnight.
But according to an email sent to the Miami-Dade Aviation department by the RNC, and obtained by CNN, the permit requested a 10 p.m. start time, with remarks from President Trump expected to start at 11:00 p.m. According to an email obtained by CNN, the RNC requested a “first amendment permit” for the MAGA rally which could be attended by up to 10,000 people.
Gimenez said county personnel will hand out flyers listing local Covid-19 rule requirements, including the mask in public and physical distancing mandate. The RNC is expected to distribute masks and hand sanitizer to attendees, according to Miami-Dade County.
The FBI is investigating an incident in Texas on Friday involving the alleged harassment of a Biden-Harris campaign bus by motorists displaying Trump 2020 flags, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CNN.
As CNN previously reported, the campaign bus was traveling from San Antonio to Austin as part of a push to urge Biden supporters to cast their ballots on the state’s last day of early voting.
According to another source familiar with the incident, people in vehicles that were part of a “Trump Train” began yelling profanities and obscenities and then blockaded the entire Biden entourage.
At one point they slowed the tour bus to roughly 20 mph on Interstate 35, the campaign official said. The vehicles slowed down to try to stop the bus in the middle of the highway. The source said there were nearly 100 vehicles around the campaign bus. Biden staffers were rattled by the event, the source said, although no one was hurt. Staffers on the bus called 911, which eventually led to local law enforcement assisting the bus to its destination.
After tweeting a video of the bus incident with the words “I LOVE TEXAS!,” Trump claimed at a campaign rally on Sunday that his supporters were “protecting” the bus.
Rev. Dr. Cynthia Hale is used to diffusing tense situations from her time as a chaplain in a federal prison. This year, she’s hoping to bring the skills she learned working with prison inmates to the polls.
Hale and hundreds of other members of the clergy have been trained as part of a nonpartisan initiative called Lawyers and Collars to act as “poll chaplains” in nine battleground states. Hale will act as a poll chaplain in Georgia, a state that was at the center of a debate over voter suppression during the 2018 midterms.
In a tumultuous election year in which there are heightened fears about voter intimidation and suppression, these poll chaplains hope to ensure that every vote gets counted. They have been trained to provide information to voters about their rights, and deescalate any conflicts that may arise at polling locations.
“In Georgia in particular, we have some real concerns about voter intimidation and voter suppression,” Hale said. “Some of these can be handled easily, you know, people not having the right ID, or something of that nature.”
Hale added: “So to be a poll chaplain is to be there as a clergy person giving people, in most instances, comfort, because they trust clergy people, and letting them know that there is someone there to support and help them. We’re not there to get in the way of the process at all.”
Hale is the founder and senior pastor of the Ray of Hope Christian Church, which doubles as her polling location. Prior to joining this church, Hale said she was the first woman to serve in an all-male federal prison as a chaplain in North Carolina.
In addition to the poll chaplains, the group set up a hotline to make lawyers available to identify and address any voting irregularities and intimidation that may occur throughout the voting process.
Around the US: Lawyers and Collars is the product of a partnership between Sojourners, Skinner Leadership Institute, and the National African American Clergy Network. The lawyers and poll chaplains will be located throughout Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Bishop Claude Alexander, a poll chaplain and pastor in Charlotte, North Carolina, told CNN, “We are still having incidences of suppression, where people are being intimidated, and they are actually being told, ‘Go away, you cannot vote here.’ And therefore, there has to be some counter-presence that helps redirect and then give assurance to those individuals.”
The Texas Supreme Court denied a petition Sunday by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate more than 120,000 drive-thru votes in Harris County.
This is the second time in recent weeks the Supreme Court has blocked attempts to dismantle drive-thru voting in Harris County. The petition argued that drive-thru voting violated federal law.
Meanwhile, a similar court case is pending at a federal court in Houston with a hearing set for tomorrow.
Ten of Harris County’s 120 early voting sites are drive-thru locations. As of Friday, nearly 127,000 votes had been cast via drive-thru, marking nearly 9% of the total votes cast in the country’s third most populous county. While curbside voting in Harris County is limited to voters with a disability and located at all polling sites, the drive-thru voting locations are open to all voters.
Ohio’s top election official affirmed that every legally cast vote needs to be counted in his state, including those that arrive after election day in accordance with Ohio law.
When asked about what President Trump has said that he wanted the results of the election that night, LaRose added, “That’s not the way elections work. It’s just simply not, it’s not the way elections work in Ohio or most any other state election night is a snapshot in time.”
Ohio law allows for absentee ballots post marked by election date to be received up to 10 days after election day and still be counted.
“Every legally cast valid deserves to be counted and will be counted by our boards collections and reported as part of our final certified result at the end of the month,” LaRose added.
Some context: Last week, Ohio set two new daily records for new cases of Covid-19.
The state is under a statewide mask order, to try and slow the spread of the virus. The order has been contentious in some parts of the state. Voters who arrive to the polls who do not wear a facemask will be offered one, LaRose said. If they refuse to wear one other accommodations like curbside voting will be offered, he added.
“Of course, if somebody refuses all of those accommodations that we offer them, we can’t turn anyone away. No one will be disenfranchised here in Ohio,” he added.
First lady Melania Trump is set to make her fourth solo campaign stop of the election on Monday in Huntersville, North Carolina.
As of Sunday morning in North Carolina, 61.7% of the 7,345,481 registered voters in the state have already voted, by either Absentee Ballot or Early Voting. Early voting concluded Saturday at 3 p.m. local time.
There were more than 3.6 million one-stop early voting ballots cast, and over 929,000 absentee by-mail ballots in the state.
Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, has similar numbers with 62% of the county’s registered voters having already cast their ballot via absentee ballot or early voting.
President Trump’s election night party is expected to be moved to the East Room of the White House, a person familiar with the plans said.
While Trump had initially planned to hold a gathering on Tuesday night at the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC, the limits on the number of people who can gather indoors caused some problems for the planning. Discussions shifted to the idea of just holding it at the White House, where Trump will spend the evening of Election Day.
Trump on Saturday said he might be going to the hotel during some of the evening.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York Times first reported the plans.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris underwent PCR testing for Covid-19 Sunday and the virus was not detected, per a Harris aide.
Harris is in Georgia and North Carolina today and Pennsylvania on Monday for the last days of campaigning.
White House pandemic adviser Dr. Scott Atlas gave an extensive interview to RT, the Kremlin-controlled state media network in which he asserted coronavirus lockdowns “are killing people,” attacked public health experts and dismissed models predicting hundreds of thousands more pandemic deaths in the US.
Atlas gave the interview via satellite from the White House grounds, according to the footage. He said the pandemic is improving in the US, even as daily case counts and death counts hit new records for the pandemic as a whole.
Atlas, who is a radiologist and who has no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology, also dismissed forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine that forecasts 399,000 coronavirus deaths in the US by Feb. 1 under current conditions.
“The IHME model is really sort – it’s absurd to start looking at this model at this point,” Atlas said. “At this point in time anybody who’s even focusing on models has not learned from the past.”
Atlas tweeted an apology Sunday.
“I recently did an interview with RT and was unaware they are a registered foreign agent. I regret doing the interview and apologize for allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I especially apologize to the national security community who is working hard to defend us,” Atlas said in the tweet.
President Trump stepped into 37-degree Michigan underneath a black umbrella and descended the stairs into wind and hard rain.
Trump is now heading to Washington, Michigan, for his first rally of the day.
“It’s tough out here,” he said as he fought with the wind and the umbrella, climbing into the limo.
From Michigan, Trump heads to Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Citing his record on the economy, reductions in unemployment for Black Americans, and his America-first trade policies, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, announced it was endorsing President Trump for a second term.
Some context: The presidential endorsement, the first for a Republican since 1972, was announced on the newspaper’s website late Saturday night.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott, of Florida, admitted that the US has not beaten Covid-19, contrary to President Trump’s consistent messaging that America is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic.
When asked on the safety of Trump’s large campaign rallies, which have featured scarce masking of attendees and no social distancing, Scott emphasized the importance of public safety measures.
“There’s a way to do these things safely, and that’s what my expecting is, that every American does that. But it’s part of all of us, everybody has got to take this – I mean, take it seriously,” Scott said. “We haven’t beaten this yet.”
Half of all Wisconsin registered voters have cast early ballots, new data released by the state Elections Commission on Sunday showed, as the state’s largest cities hold their last day of in-person early voting.
As of Sunday morning, 1,873,403 voters had cast early ballots in Wisconsin. That’s 62.4% of the 2016 general election turnout, and 50.8% of the state’s total registered voters. In addition, the state released new data Sunday on registered voters, showing that an additional 100,922 Wisconsinites registered to vote in October – and those who haven’t can still do same-day registration at the polls on Election Day.
Slightly more than a third of the early votes, 636,697, were cast in person, while the rest were cast by mail. There are still 179,828 absentee ballots in the state that have yet to be returned, although some of those voters may have decided to cancel their mailed ballots and vote early in person instead.
Today is the last day that in-person early voting is allowed anywhere in the state, although many smaller municipalities ended it on Friday. The state’s two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, are still opening in-person voting sites today. All absentee ballots have to be delivered by 8 p.m. local time on Election Day.
Wisconsin doesn’t have partisan voter registration so no party breakdown is available.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah says President Trump still has faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci, despite the White House offering blistering criticism towards the country’s leading infections disease expert on Saturday.
Asked by CNN if Trump still has faith in Fauci, Farah said Sunday, “Yes we do.”
What is this about: The White House unloaded on Fauci Saturday, following his comments to the Washington Post that criticized the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, including Dr. Scott Atlas, who the President has relied on for advice on handling the coronavirus.
Trump campaign senior adviser Corey Lewandowski sought to minimize remarks from President Trump that front line medical workers are profiteering off of coronavirus during an interview on Fox News.
“We have seen on multiple occasions instances where people have claimed that they have been, died from Covid-19 and that wasn’t the case,” Lewandowski said.
When asked specifically about the President’s claim doctors are lining their pockets, Lewandowski said, “I haven’t spoken to the president about this directly so I couldn’t answer that,” and adding, “Look, we have enormous respect for doctors who are serving front-line patients and they do an amazing job by and large.”
Joe Biden senior advisor Anita Dunn cast an optimistic outlook on the race two days before the election, telling CNN that the campaign feels “confident” about their pathways to victory.
When asked about the Democratic nominee’s different campaigning style from that of President Trump, who has held big in-person rallies, Dunn said, “What Vice President Biden has done is basically why he’s gotten in this race. He showed people what a responsible president does and how a responsible president acts.”
She said that while normally at this point in a race the number of competitive and pathways to victories shrink, the campaign has actually expanded the number of states where it believes it has a chance and where it is investing resources and time campaigning, listing Texas and Georgia as two examples.
Dunn said, the thing that keeps her up at night is making sure they have done everything to get people to the polls.
More than 8.7 million people (8,700,645) have voted in Florida so far, state data shows.
Registered Democrats’ lead over registered Republicans has dwindled since early in-person voting began in the state almost two weeks ago.
Data from Oct. 20 showed how almost half a million more Democrats (481,892) than Republicans had voted at that point. Today, Democrats lead Republicans by less than 100,000 total votes (94,905).
Separately, nearly 1.9 million people (1,854,160) with no party affiliation have voted already.
With just three days until Election Day, pre-election voting has now surpassed two-thirds of all ballots cast during the 2016 presidential election.
More than 91.6 million Americans have voted so far, as a majority of states are reporting record early voting turnout in the 2020 election. While it’s too soon to know how that record turnout will translate to Election Day, the massive early voting numbers suggest a high level of enthusiasm for voting this year, despite the obstacles of a pandemic.
These votes represent about 43% of registered voters nationwide, according to a survey of election officials in all 50 states and Washington, DC, by CNN, Edison Research, and Catalist.
Sixteen states have already seen more than half of their registered voters cast ballots ahead of November 3.
Nationwide, the more than 91.6 million ballots already cast represent about 67% of the more than 136.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.
More context: Pre-Election Day voting is surging nationwide — with many states seeing record turnout in early voting in-person and an influx in mail-in ballots compared to last cycle — with voters wanting to avoid crowding at the polls because of the pandemic.
As of Friday, Texas and Hawaii surpassed their total turnouts from the 2016 general election.
In the final days before the presidential election, the Supreme Court has been pelted with requests from parties in battleground states seeking last minute approval to change election rules, especially regarding whether mail-in votes can arrive after Election Day and still be counted.
The court, issuing some of the orders after hours, has navigated a minefield with justices seeking consensus and coherence where possible, hindered without the benefit of a full briefing schedule. The situation was complicated by the fact that emergency requests came in before and just after Justice Amy Coney Barrett took the bench.
On the face of it sometimes the orders seemed contradictory. In North Carolina, ballots can arrive up to nine days after Election Day. In Pennsylvania, ballots can arrive up to three days late — for now. And in Wisconsin, the court said ballots must be in by election night.
Some themes have emerged. It is now clear that four conservative justices are ready to take a sharp right turn when it comes to the power of state legislatures to set the rules for elections.
In addition, Chief Justice John Roberts served as swing vote at times, but still worked to preserve the court’s institutional legitimacy, and the liberals on the bench again expressed their fear that the pandemic could disenfranchise voters in some states.
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