Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former independent presidential candidate who subsequently endorsed Donald Trump, asked the Supreme Court on Friday to pull his name from the ballot in battleground Michigan in his latest longshot appeal to the high court.

Kennedy’s emergency request came days after he made the same appeal to the Supreme Court over Wisconsin’s ballot. Election officials in both pivotal presidential states will file a brief at the high court responding to Kennedy on Monday.

In both cases, Kennedy is arguing that election officials are violating his First Amendment rights by declining to withdraw his name.

Kennedy’s requests underscore the potential spoiler role third-party and independent candidates can play in tight elections. Early voting is already underway in both states.

In a separate appeal earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined Kennedy’s request to keep his name on the ballot in New York.

The chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus suggested that legislators in the battleground state of North Carolina could possibly allocate their state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump before votes are counted because of the possible disenfranchisement of voters in the west of the state, a plan that state election officials called illegal, and Republicans have criticized.

The activist, Ivan Raiklin, who has previously pushed baseless theories about the 2020 election, said during his presentation Thursday that because the hurricane had damaged many western counties, displaced some ballots and hindered the postal service, state legislators could decide the election.

Harris said in a statement to CNN on Friday that his “theoretical conversation has been taken out of context,” but did not go so far as to say he disagreed with the idea.

“As I’ve repeatedly said, every legal vote should be counted,” Harris’ statement continued.

Asked by CNN about proposals by far-right activists for legislators to award electors for Trump regardless of vote counts, the executive director of North Carolina’s election board called the plan a nonstarter. “What’s being proposed by these individuals is actually a violation of law,” saidKaren Brinson Bell.

Former President Donald Trump’s late-campaign television ads are littered with deceptively edited and misleadingly described quotations.

Multiple Trump ads omit critical words from quotes by and about Vice President Kamala Harris on the subject of tax policy. One Trump ad misleadingly depicts comments about fracking from Trump’s campaign and administration as if they were comments from independent news organizations.

Another Trump ad takes an immigration-related quote from a 6-year-old news article way out of context, wrongly depicting it as a comment about the Biden-Harris administration. Another ad changes a word from the headline of an economic news story. And another ad wrongly describes a quote from the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Asked for comment on CNN’s findings, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt chose not to defend any of the specifics. Instead, she said Friday: “President Trump has the hardest-hitting, most well produced ads in the business.” She credited them for damaging Harris’ campaign.

All of the ads discussed in this article are among the 20 most-aired ads from Trump and his outside allies in the last two weeks, according to data provided by AdImpact.

Read thisfact checkon some of the ads by Trump and his allies.

Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday she will discuss the “fundamental fight for the freedom of women to make decisions about their own body” during her rally in Houston, Texas.

CNN has previously reported that the Houston rally will spotlight Amanda and Josh Zurawski, the Texas couple who led a lawsuit against the state’s abortion bans after Amanda suffered life-threatening pregnancy complications but couldn’t have an abortion in the deep-red state. Shanette Williams — the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, who ProPublica reported died in 2022 from a treatable infection due to delays to her medical care stemming from Georgia’s restrictive abortion law — will also be in attendance.

Asked about reports, including from CNN, that Beyoncé will appear alongside the vice president at her rally Friday night, Harris said there will be “more to follow.”

Two Senate Democrats urged the Department of Justice on Friday to investigate and potentially prosecute tech billionaire Elon Musk over his $1 million sweepstakes to registered voters.

The letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland was sent by Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a former Connecticut attorney general. They sent the letter one day after Musk’s super PAC defied a private warning from the Justice Department that its lottery might violate federal laws against paying people to register.

Musk’s super PAC declined to comment about the letter. CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Some background: The Tesla CEO endorsed former President Donald Trump and has pumped more than $118 million into a political group, America PAC, supporting Trump’s candidacy, campaign finance reports show. Legal scholars immediately raised concerns about Musk’s sweepstakes after he launched it last weekend – because only registered voters in swing states can win the cash prize.

CNN reported Wednesday that the Justice Department sent a letter to America PAC warning that the sweepstakes might be illegal. Since then, the PAC has continued its giveaway, naming two $1 million winners on Thursday from Wisconsin and Michigan.

The letter to Garland is the latest move in a partisan battle between Musk and elected Democrats. He recently triggered a war of words with Michigan’s top election official, a Democrat, after spreading false claims about the state’s voter rolls. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro condemned the $1 million lottery and said it should be investigated.

Musk has defended his lottery. In response to a recent X post accusing him of “paying to register Republicans,” Musk said winners “can be from any or no political party and you don’t even have to vote.” He also slammed Shapiro for criticizing the giveaway.

Former President Donald Trump on Friday baselessly claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was “behind” the ruling by a federal judge halting a Virginia program that purged the state’s voter rolls based on indications that a person might be a noncitizen.

Trump, who railed against the decision earlier on social media, claimed the judge’s decision was “election interference” and “unconstitutional.”

“The outrageous decision goes against the very bedrock of our democracy and thankfully Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is doing a terrific job,” Trump said at an event in Austin, Texas. “He’s working hard to fix this problem.”

“This is blatantly un-American and it’s election interference, and Kamala Harris is behind it very much,” Trump added, without providing evidence.

Key context: The judge on Friday ordered officials to restore the registrations of roughly 1,600 people who had been removed under the process.

US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles sided with the Biden administration and the private groups that brought the legal challenge, finding that Virginia’s program violated a federal law that forbids systematic removals from the voter rolls 90 days before a federal election.

The supposed threat of noncitizens voting in the 2024 election has been a fixation of Trump and Republicans. However, documented cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare; a recent Georgia audit of the 8.2 million people on its rolls found just 20 registered noncitizens — only nine of whom had voted.

Youngkin, a Republican, has touted his state’s efforts to purge the rolls and pledged to take even more aggressive steps to remove suspected noncitizens.

Chinese government-linked hackers have targeted the phone communications of former President Donald Trump and vice presidential nominee JD Vance as part of a much broader cyber-espionage effort aimed at high-level US targets, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The Chinese hackers have also targeted senior Biden administration officials, one of the sources said.

US officials informed the Trump campaign this week that Trump and Vance were among a group of people whose phones were targeted by the Chinese hackers, one of the sources said. In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung attacked the Harris campaign for allegedly emboldening China.

It was not immediately clear what data, if any, the hackers were able to access. Phone communications of senior current and former US officials are coveted by foreign spies.

The New York Times first reported on the hacking targeting Trump and Vance’s phones.

The activity is part of a much broader Chinese hacking campaign that has infiltrated multiple US telecommunications firms in the last several months. Investigators believe the hackers are likely searching for sensitive national security information, including, in some cases, information on wiretap warrant requests made by the Justice Department, CNN previously reported.

In this case, there is no indication that the hackers’ search for data on Trump and Vance related to US law enforcement activity, the sources said.

Major US broadband and internet providers AT&T, Verizon and Lumen are among the hackers’ targets, CNN has reported.

The Chinese government has denied the allegations.

Former President Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith, suggesting the prosecutor leading two federal criminal cases against him should be “thrown out of the country” in an interview on Thursday.

“We should throw Jack Smith out with them, the mentally deranged people. Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump said in an interview on “Cats & Cosby,” a conservative radio talk show, on Thursday.

The comment is the latest escalation in rhetoric against Smith, who he has frequently criticized for his role in leading the federal case into Trump’s role in the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Smith is also overseeing the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. The case was dismissed by a federal judge, but Smith is appealing.

In another interview on Thursday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said he would fire Smith “within two seconds” when asked if he would “pardon yourself” or “fire Jack Smith” if he’s reelected.

“Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy,” he told Hewitt. “I would fire him within two seconds.”

Vice President Kamala Harris called former President Donald Trump’s “garbage can” comment “just another example of how he really belittles our country.”

At a rally Thursday night in Arizona, Trump said that the United States is “like a garbage can for the world,” as he railed against illegal immigration.

“We’re a dumping ground. We’re like, we’re like a garbage can for the world. That’s what’s happened. That’s what’s happened to our— We’re like a garbage can,” Trump said in Tempe.

The remark, coming less than two weeks from Election Day, marks the latest escalation in Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as he’s made border security central to his bid to return to the White House.

CNN’s Kate Sullivan and Kaanita Iyer contributed reporting.

Republicans plan on appealing to the US Supreme Court a decision from Pennsylvania’s highest state court that ordered the counting of provisional ballots cast by eligible voters whose mail ballots had been rejected for technical defects.

Lawyers for the Republican National Committee indicated their intention to seek the intervention of the US Supreme Court in a filing Friday that asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to pause the recent ruling until the US Supreme Court has the chance to step in.

More context: The case was brought by residents of Butler County, Pennsylvania, who sued the county for not counting provisional ballots they had cast in the 2024 primary after their mail ballots were tossed out. Both the Republic National Committee and the Democratic National Committee have intervened in the case, with Democrats arguing in favor of counting the provisional ballots. On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the voters.

It’s unclear how many ballots the dispute could affect, as not every county notifies voters ahead of the Election Day that their mail ballots have been disqualified, and some counties give voters the additional option of fixing mail ballots that have mistakes such as a missing signature or incorrect date.

However, with polls showing the presidential race to be in a dead heat and Pennsylvania a key state in the path the White House, both parties are preparing to grind it out in court over every last ballot.

The RNC said if the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was unwilling to put its ruling on pause, the court should at least order the disputed ballots to be segregated – setting up the potential for a post-election fight.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, election and law enforcement officials are probing an effort to potentially register up to 2,500 fraudulent voters.

“Through this staff’s normal review process, as many as 2,500 completed voter registration forms are being researched for potential fraud stemming from two separate dropped batches by individuals,” Ray D’Agostino, the vice chairman of the Lancaster County Board of Elections, said at a news conference.

The Board of Elections is led by two Republicans and one Democrat. D’Agostino said the fraudulent applications did not appear to be from one party or the other.

The Pennsylvania Department of State told CNN it would send a statement on the allegations later this afternoon.

What officials found: Election officials notified the Lancaster County district attorney’s office when staff found inconsistencies with multiple “stacks” of applications.

At Friday’s news conference, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said the detectives found fraud on applications, including inaccurate addresses and personal identifying information, duplicate handwriting, and signatures that did not match.

Some people who were listed on the applications with correct information told investigators they did not request or complete the form, Adams added.

“Thus far, of the investigations that we have completed, we have determined that 60% have been fraudulent,” Adams said. She added that investigators still have more applications to vet, and she expects that process to be completed later today.

County officials said the applications appear to be connected to a “large-scale canvassing operation” that dates back to the mid-summer, when canvassers solicited prospective voters at grocery stores, parks and other public spaces, but did not elaborate further on the organization suspected to be responsible.

“Our systems work”: D’Agostino said catching the problem was an example of their processes working.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will hold a joint rally in Michigan on Monday featuring singer Maggie Rogers, a Harris campaign official told CNN.

The joint rally will take place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the official said.

An election clerk was assaulted in an incident at a San Antonio polling location Thursday night, just as polls were closing for the evening, election officials said.

“It’s something that we never, ever, ever, thought we would have to say,” Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen told reporters at a news conference Friday.

The election clerk received medical attention on site and went home after the incident.

The election commission administrator said early voting turnout had exceeded the election board’s expectation.

The main purpose in telling the public about the incident was “to allay any fears that are out there,” she said.

“Our poll sites are safe,” Callanen said. As a safety precaution, and as mandated under Texas Election Code, Callanen said the election board is placing a peace officer at the location where the incident occurred.

She would not disclose the polling site location where the incident occurred, citing the ongoing investigation spearheaded by the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.

“Normally you don’t have any police presence or sheriff’s presence because they look at it as intimidation in some aspects, but we are going to place one at this site,” Callanen said.

There are no plans to close early voting polling locations early, she told reporters Friday.

Former President Donald Trump on Friday railed against a ruling by a federal judge halting a Virginia program that purged the state’s voter rolls based on indications that a person might be a noncitizen and ordered officials to restore the registrations of roughly 1,600 people who had been removed under the process.

Trump said in a social media post that it was a “totally unacceptable travesty,” adding he hoped the US Supreme Court would “fix it.”

Trump also said he would be calling in to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s rally on Saturday.

Some context: US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles sided with the Biden administration and the private groups that brought the legal challenge, finding that Virginia’s program violated a federal law that forbids systematic removals from the voter rolls 90 days before a federal election.

Time is ticking until Election Day, and Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are working to get voters to the polls.

Many Americans are taking to social media to talk politics, and there are some campaign-related moments that can rack up millions of views on platforms like TikTok.

The former president dished out french fries at a McDonald’ franchise location in Pennsylvania over the weekend. At the staged event, Trump put on an apron to work as a fry attendant and handed people food out of the drive thru, which had been closed for the campaign stop.

The event got people talking online. A video of the visit posted by Trump’s TikTok account has received more than 41 million views and more than 4.6 million likes.

The caption of the video said, “I’ve officially worked longer at McDonalds than Kamala.” Harris says she briefly worked at the chain during the summer of 1983 when she was still a student at Howard University in Washington, DC. “I’m having a lot of fun here everybody,” Trump told people in a car while hanging out food from the drive thru window.

The stop was also fuel for the late night shows. “The Daily Show” posted a clip on TikTok that got 3.5 million views, with host John Stewart poking fun at the former president.

The Harris campaign has been using social media to highlight aspects of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s biography.

“Coach Walz here. Their game plan is titled Project 2025,” Walz says in the TikTok video posted to his account that racked up to 1 million views and hundreds of thousands of likes.

Walz, standing at a white board wearing a baseball hat, draws up plays and uses football terms to argue that voters need to get to the polls to “play defense” and stop the 920-page document and its proposals, which Democrats warn will be implemented if Trump is elected, despite the former president’s efforts to distance himself from the document.

But Walz didn’t stop there. The vice presidential candidate has mentioned on the campaign trail that he is a runner, so he took questions on the go with popular social media influencer, Kate Mackz. Walz joined Mackz, who conducts interviews with runners, on a four a mile-long run in New York City’s Central Park on Monday. Walz told the young audience viewing the TikTok video — which got 3.8 million views — that they should “get out and vote,” regardless of who they vote for.

While scrolling through their feed, some TikTok users might see an ad from the social media platform itself promoting its Election Center. The ad, with more than 23,000 likes, tells users how they can find the Election Center in the app, which it says includes things like voting dates and how to check your registration.

Lawmakers have doubled down their focus on TikTok this election year. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law in April that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States or force its sale, citing national security concerns due to the social media platform’s parent company, ByteDance, being based in Beijing.

There is already some evidence of election influence on the platform. In September, TikTok said it removed accounts associated with two Russian media groups for trying to exercise what it called “covert influence” on the upcoming election.

Former President Donald Trump appears in a new TV ad for Ohio Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno that began airing Friday, saying Moreno’s opponent, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, “pretends he’s my friend.”

The ad, which comes from a super PAC supporting Moreno, features Trump on-camera, slamming Brown’s record in Congress and working to undercut Brown’s bipartisan messaging.

“Sherrod Brown is a radical left politician who has played politics for 50 years making a career of selling you out,” Trump says in the ad. “He pretends he’s my friend, he pretends he goes with my policies — but it’s only for about a month before the election.”

Trump proceeds to criticize Brown over immigration and border security — key issues for conservative voters — and closes saying, “He’s a disaster. He’s not for me. He’s not for my policies. He’s not for Make America Great Again, he has nothing to do with it.”

The ad comes in the closing days of the most expensive 2024 Senate race, and the most expensive congressional election on record.

The incumbent Democrat’s past work with the Trump administration, and instances where he’s broken with his own party, have featured heavily in Brown’s advertising as he’s courted crossover voters in a state that twice voted for the former president.

One of the Brown campaign’s top TV ads by spending over the last 30 days features the senator talking about that record, saying, “I’ve shown I’ll stand up to presidents of my party if they’re doing damage to my state.”

For the first time in decades, The Washington Post will not endorse a presidential candidate, the newspaper’s publisher announced Friday.

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Will Lewis said in a statement Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

The Post has endorsed a presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s. In his statement, Lewis referred to the Editorial Board’s past decisions to not endorse, noting that it is a right “we are going back to.”

The decision comes just days after The Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Newspaper owners typically play a role in their publication’s endorsements and sign off on the editorials which are seen as a reflection of their views.

Ahead of Friday’s announcement, the Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, told staffers that Lewis would be publishing a public note with the decision.

“The news is significant - and I know there will be strong reactions across the department,” Shipley wrote in a memo.

A person with knowledge of the matter told CNN an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris had been drafted and was ready to be approved by the editorial board but was never presented.

Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor who led the newspaper through its coverage of the January 6, 2021, attack, sharply criticized the decision Friday.

This post has been updated with more reporting on the decision.

The race for the White House rests on a razor’s edge in the final nationwide CNN poll before votes are counted. The poll, conducted by SSRS, finds 47% of likely voters support Vice President Kamala Harris and an equal 47% support former President Donald Trump.

CNN polling has found a tight race throughout the short campaign between Harris and Trump. In September, likely voters split 48% for Harris and 47% for Trump, nearly identical to the new poll, and a poll just after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race over the summer and threw his support behind Harris found 49% of registered voters behind Trump, with 46% backing Harris.

Trump has never trailed outside the margin of error in CNN’s polling on this year’s presidential contest against either Harris or Biden, a stark departure from his previous two runs for the presidency.

The race has been remarkably stable throughout this tumultuous political year. The poll finds that 85% of likely voters who’ve made a choice say they knew which party they would support in the presidential election all along, and just 15% say they changed their minds along the way. As of now, even more than that are fully locked in: A scant 2% of all likely voters say they haven’t yet chosen a candidate, and another 9% say that they could change their minds before casting a ballot.

Those voters who say their choices are locked in now split 50% Harris to 49% Trump, with just 1% supporting other candidates. Those who could change tilt toward Trump and are much more likely than decided voters to be backers of minor-party and independent candidates (38% support Trump, 31% Harris, 30% someone else). They are also much less motivated to vote than those who’ve made a decision. While 70% of likely voters who say their minds are made up say they are “extremely motivated” to vote, that drops to just 27% among those who could change their minds.

Harris has likely banked more votes than Trump so far, given Democrats’ higher propensity to vote early or by mail, according to the poll. The poll was fielded October 20-23, after early and absentee voting was well underway across the country, and found the 20% of likely voters who say they have already cast their ballots break 61% Harris to 36% Trump, while those who say they haven’t yet voted break in Trump’s favor, 50% to 44%.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson called Vice President Kamala Harris’ rhetoric about the dangers of a Trump presidency “reckless” in a new statement, pointing to the previous assassination attempts against the former president.

“Vice President Harris acknowledged that ‘we all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence.’ These words have proven hollow,” they said.

Johnson and McConnell said that they have been briefed on “ongoing and persistent threats” against Trump and warned that Harris must “stop escalating the threat environment.”

Kamala Harris’ campaign rally in Houston tonight is aimed at accomplishing two things the vice president’s team is focused on in the final stretch of the campaign: persuasion and getting out the vote.

Campaign officials say that with 11 days to go until Election Day, they expect there are plenty of voters who are now tuning into the presidential race for the first time. With early voting underway in many states across the country — including in the seven most competitive battlegrounds — reaching voters who are in the middle of their decision-making process and convincing them that Harris’ vision for America is a better one than Donald Trump’s is a top priority for the campaign.

And that is precisely why the campaign has chosen the decidedly non-battleground state of Texas for Friday’s event. While not a state that Democrats compete for in a presidential election, Texas — which has one of the country’s most strict abortion bans — is a powerful backdrop for Harris to discuss the issue of reproductive rights and deliver a warning about another four years of a Trump presidency.

As for the second urgent task at hand for the Harris campaign — getting people to actually vote — the team is getting a helping hand tonight from one of the biggest celebrities in the world: Beyoncé.

The promise of a musical performance by the megastar tonight is just one of many ways in which the Harris campaign is leaning on celebrities in the final days to grab people’s attention.