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Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."

The bill would newly empower partisan poll watchers by allowing them more access inside polling places and threatening criminal penalties against elections officials who restrict their movement. Republicans originally proposed giving poll watchers the right to take photos, but that language was removed from the final bill that lawmakers were set to vote on this weekend.

Another new provision could also make it easier to overturn an election in Texas, allowing for a judge to void an outcome if the number of fraudulent votes cast could change the result, regardless of whether it was proved that fraud affected the outcome.

GOP legislators are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1 p.m., which critics called an attack on what is commonly known as "souls to the polls" — a get-out-the-vote campaign used by Black church congregations nationwide.

Major corporations, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell, have warned that the measures could harm democracy and the economic climate. But Republicans shrugged off their objections, and in some cases, ripped business leaders for speaking out.

Texas already has some of the country's tightest voting restrictions and is regularly cited by nonpartisan groups as a state where it is especially hard to vote. It was one of the few states that did not make it easier to vote by mail during the pandemic.

"Even as the national media minimizes the importance of election integrity, the Texas Legislature has not bent to headlines or corporate virtue signaling," they said in a joint statement.

Since Trump's defeat, at least 14 states have enacted more restrictive voting laws, according to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. It has also counted nearly 400 bills filed this year nationwide that would restrict voting.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired Trump's presidential campaign in Texas, offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could produce evidence of voter fraud. Nonpartisan investigations of previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State officials from both parties, including in Texas, as well as international observers have also said the 2020 election went well.

Republicans worked to downplay any concerns that health risks will keep some of their voters home, after Democrats heavily promoted mail-in and early in-person balloting to their voters.

Republicans are counting on a huge Election Day turnout among their supporters to offset the big leads in early voting among Democrats in states that are pivotal to the presidential race.

“If you were worried about voting at the polls on Election Day, you’ve probably already voted,” said John March, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Virginia.

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller said a woman who acknowledged she was positive for coronavirus voted curbside Thursday at a mall where early voting is taking place, the first known infected voter in the county.

Several other voters who were awaiting test results or wanted to avoid the line for health reasons also used it, and county auditors were preparing for a major increase in the rarely-used option Tuesday.

“Heck yes I’m concerned. I’m going to have 500 people working on Tuesday. I don’t want it on my conscience that somebody caught COVID at a polling place and got sick,” he said. “It could happen. It could happen to me.”

“Some of my poll workers are a little bit concerned because they are older individuals,” she said. “Still, I would rather do curbside than have them (voters) go to the polls.”

ut that’s a veritable rom-com next to the horror show of 2020, whose full terrors took shape after Biden committed to his presidential bid. He knew going in that Trump would fight dirty, exit messy and bequeath an even more toxic political environment than he inherited. He couldn’t foresee the breadth and depth of America’s hurt right now.

Knowing that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, Trump falsely claimed (again) that ballots received after Election Day, even if they’re in perfect accordance with a state’s requirement of a postmark by Election Day, are illegitimate. He applauded supporters of his who swarmed around and trapped a Biden-Harris campaign bus.

Biden would also confront a restive crew in his own party. If Democrats controlled the Senate, their fury during Trump’s presidency would transform into an insistence on any or all of the following: sweeping action to address climate change; sweeping action to expand health insurance; the sweeping aside of the filibuster; the expansion of the Supreme Court; an immigration overhaul; the placement of high-profile progressives in high-profile cabinet slots; the destruction of what stretches of the border wall Trump managed to construct; and the investigation and even prosecution of his henchmen.

But if Trump is ousted, the glue dissolves, laying bare the distance between Biden and many younger Democrats.

But it’s not just American politics that’s in disarray. It’s our whole information ecosystem. Trump’s presidency fortified the alternate realities that Americans live in, the contradictory sets of facts that they accept and the competing truths that they tell

Democrats effectively succeeded in running out the clock on this year's legislative session by depriving the Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the bill in a late-night session

Among other steps, the bill makes mail-in voting more difficult, bans after-hours and drive-through voting that helped Black and Latino voters in the Houston area cast their ballots in 2020. It prohibits early voting on Sundays -- a popular practice for Black churches -- before 1 pm and makes it easier to overturn an election.

"When you are pushed to extremes you respond to that with extreme(s)," Moody said on CNN's "New Day" on Monday.

Some Democrats may see hope in the fact that Manchin was angry and disappointed that Republicans used the filibuster to kill off the bipartisan January 6 commission. But he has so far given no indication that he will temper his desire for bipartisan action.

More evidence of Republican efforts to build on Trump's election fraud lies are causing some Democrats to wonder how much longer it will be politically feasible for Biden to pursue deals with a Republican Party that appears bent on locking them out of power.

"Let's be clear. If 10 Republican Senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican Senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster & act now," Sanders wrote.

If the infrastructure deal fails, that event may come to be seen as the moment when a more partisan White House approach became inevitable.

The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory.

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure.

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory.

In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”

“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”

In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.

Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.

he Omaha police said that roughly 30 people had sought medical attention during the episode, and half a dozen had been hospitalized.

Biden was essentially tied with Trump among white voters in the poll, driven by nearly two-to-one support from white people with college degrees.

Pennsylvania is poised to accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day, and North Carolina can keep counting for nine days, after the Supreme Court yesterday issued two rulings widely seen as favorable to Democrats.

“Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling,” he wrote.

“But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.”

“We’re going to try to avoid predictions,” said NBC News President Noah Oppenheim. “We’re going to try to avoid clinging to any kind of narrative story line.”

The Associated Press, whose election calls are used by a range of news organizations, is gathering data on voting with NORC at the University of Chicago using a methodology developed with Fox News.

He said the network is preparing for an election that could go well beyond Election Day. CNN has anchors, producers and digital journalists scheduled in shifts to cover the election round-the-clock for several days, if necessary.

Did journalists and local election officials sufficiently prepare the public for red shifts, blue shifts and potential delays?

Were the major networks and The Associated Press able to practice what they preached, a/k/a patience?

Did the pollsters and forecasters get it right? If not, is the polling industry dead for good?

Did "shy Trump" voters materialize?

Can this election help the American media restore a little bit of the trust that's been eroded in recent years?

Will the Trump presidency go down in history as a one-term, one-off fluke or a fundamental realignment of American politics? (Or maybe both?)

Will QAnon adherents realize they were fooled when Trump does not win all 50 states, as a recent Q world narrative has claimed?

Will Fox News viewers feel misled if Biden wins?

Will Trump make a premature claim of victory, and if so how will the major networks handle it?

What will the election results mean for the future of the right-wing media economy?

If Biden wins, for how long after the election will the media uncover more wrongdoing from the Trump admin?

Did the press overcorrect from 2016, and if so in what ways?

My impression, as a reporter who covers the media industry every day, is that some journalists feel like they are limping to the finish line.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss, leading to a rampage that left five people dead. The rally was planned on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. On Parler, people posted advice on which streets to take to avoid the police; some posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol.

Parler grew slowly until early 2020, when Twitter began labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets as inaccurate and some of his supporters joined Parler in protest. After November’s election, Parler grew even more quickly as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on false claims that the vote had been rigged. So many users signed up that, at times, they overloaded the company’s systems and forced it to pause new registrations.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others.

“I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet,” he said.

But Parler had a significant advantage: money.

In total, people downloaded Parler’s app more than 10 million times last year, with 80 percent in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, the app data firm.

“I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”

There is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement. Google said, “We do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.”

“It’s devastating,” Mr. Matze told Fox News on Sunday. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.” He said he was struggling to find another company to host Parler’s website.

And that is why the only choice in this election is Joe Biden. The Democrats are not blameless when it comes to playing politics, but there is no equivalence to the Republicans. The Democratic Party sorted through all the choices, and, led by older Black men and women in South Carolina, rejected the Democratic socialist candidate and said they wanted a moderate unifier named Joe Biden.

They have fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, meanspirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.

To get back a semblance of unity and sanity, Biden has to win. And that is why I have only one answer to every question now: Vote for Biden

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said the country should wait to decide on the election winner for Trump to pursue his challenges, comparing them to the 2000 election dispute decided by the Supreme Court giving George W. Bush the victory over Al Gore.

“This assumes that the problem is evidentiary,” Levitt said. “If the problem is that there really hasn’t been widespread voter fraud, there’s no evidence to present.”

But even if the court were to take up an election-related case, it probably wouldn’t hear arguments until the fall.

As cable news networks carried images of fires and destructive protests in Minneapolis, the president tweeted at 12:53 a.m. ET: "these THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!"

Less than two-and-a-half hours later, Twitter took action. "This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today," the company said.

Facebook came under scrutiny last year for saying it would not fact-check politicians' posts.