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The whereabouts of an untold number of ballots in Pennsylvania's Butler County that were slated for delivery to would-be voters in next week's election remain unaccounted for, the county's director of elections said Thursday.

the county has received in excess of 10,000 phone calls seeking information about ballots that were requested but not received, and that some callers have called multiple times.

County officials said in a press release Thursday that they sent out about 40,000 ballots and have had 21,300 returned so far, but it's unclear how many voters have received ballots but simply haven't returned them yet.

With recent electoral history and current polls suggesting that Democrats are likely to make gains in the vote-rich suburbs nearly everywhere, Mr. Trump’s path to re-election has always required expanding his support in rural and exurban counties in Pennsylvania, as well as in other industrial states where he squeezed out victories in 2016.

Around 24 percent of the 424,000 registered Republicans who have cast early mail-in votes in the state did not vote four years ago, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic elections data firm.

About one in four of the 1.3 million registered Democrats who have voted did not vote in 2016.

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

Republicans overcame unanimous opposition by Democrats to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman ever to sit on its bench.

 Trump rushed back from the campaign trail in Pennsylvania for aceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in the midst of a global pandemic.

a month earlier the federal appeals court judge from Indiana was introduced in a crowded settingthat contributed to the spread of COVID-19, both at the White House and in the Senate.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called Barrett "a woman of unparalleled ability and temperament."

In the Pennsylvania case, the court refused a plea from Republicans in the state that it decide before Election Day whether election officials can continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Nov. 3.

In the North Carolina case, the court let stand lower court rulings that allowed the state’s board of elections to extend the deadline to nine days after Election Day, up from the three days called for by the state legislature.

“It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before the election,” he wrote. “That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”

At a rally in Arizona yesterday, he said the country was “rounding the turn” on the virus, and promised that a vaccine would be available “momentarily.” (A widely available one is still months away, experts say.)

Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” he said yesterday before heading to a state office building to vote alongside his wife, Jill Biden. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.” He added, “We’ll let science drive our decisions.”

He also tweaked Trump over a rally he had held the night before in Omaha, where an organizing snafu stranded hundreds of attendees in the near-freezing cold for hours.

Despite a legacy of low turnout, college students — and young people in general — could be a decisive voting bloc in this election. Already, nearly 5 million Americans, ages 18 to 29, have cast early votes, a far higher number than at this point in 2016.

College students more than doubled their rate of voting between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to research from Tufts University.

In the 2016 presidential election, 48% of college students voted. Experts predict that percentage will grow this year. A poll on Monday from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they would "definitely" vote in the election. In 2016, that number was 47%.

A public option, but for banking. That’s what Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are proposing in a new bill unveiled on Friday.

would foster the creation of public banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated.

at some point it’s just hitting a wall where it doesn’t carry them along and they’re looking for options,” said Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, the third-poorest congressional district in the country. “So I’m putting this on the table as an option.”

There is no reason to expect we will know the result of the Presidential election on Tuesday night.

Part of the reason: a few key states will have millions of mail-in ballots to count after in-person voting has concluded. The Supreme Court ruled this week to allow that counting to proceed in two key states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Election lawyer Ben Ginsberg has been following those cases.

In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.

Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.

“To some extent, conspiracy theories rule the day,” Prof. Offit told us.

Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than since the Civil War, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.

The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots

But when extremists go all the way, and moderates just go away, the system can break. And it will break. I saw it happen.

President Donald Trump’s hopes of reversing the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts are running into the reality that the numbers just aren’t there in terms of votes he can dispute -- at least not yet.

At a Saturday press conference held just as the major networks were calling the election for Biden, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hinted that hundreds of thousands of votes might be overturned by a federal civil rights lawsuit he planned to file in Pennsylvania alleging that Republican observers were excluded from areas where mail-in ballots were tabulated or kept too far away to watch in a meaningful way.

“A court would not set aside the results of an election, or particular votes, based on violations of laws concerning observation of the counting process,” said Michael Morley, an assistant law professor at Florida State University who’s worked on election emergencies and post-election litigation. “Courts will not disturb election results based on unproven generalized claims about the theoretical possibility of fraud.”

Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.

They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states -- Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

They're asking for the court to block the electors from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, pushing Biden back under the magic 270-vote total to win.

The justices did the right thing by declining to hear the case brought by red states to overturn the election results. But let’s see what happens down the road.

t’s as if someone filed a case asking the court to exercise its original jurisdiction and declare the moon to be made of green cheese. We would hardly pat the justices on the back for tossing out such a case. More likely, we would shrug and say, “There goes another nut case.”

The justices, I added, would never permit themselves to be drawn into such a sorry charade.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

(in 2016, the six largest Hollywood studios alone accounted for more than half of global box office sales)

Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Jerry Seinfeld’s less-than-classic Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop).

Compared to 66 percent of Canadians and 76 percent of U.K. citizens, only about four in 10 Americans have a passport and can therefore travel abroad.

When more than six million African Americans left the South for better opportunities in the North and West, between 1916 and 1970, their relocation changed the demographic landscape of the United States and much of the agricultural labor force in the South. This decades-long, multi-generational movement of Black Americans, known as the Great Migration, impacted southern labor to such a degree that white landowners resorted to coercive tactics to keep African Americans from leaving.

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow segregation became the law across the South, restricting political, economic and social mobility of African Americans. According to The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a comprehensive history of the migration by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms. Despite a concerted effort by white southern landowners to make them stay, by 1970, nearly half of all African Americans, about 47 percent, would be living outside of the South.

Post-slavery, white southerners still depended on Black people as their main labor force

A bitterly divided U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Wednesday to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.

The vote was 223 to 207, with just two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining Democrats in favor. One other Republican, Representative David Joyce of Ohio, voted “present.”

They said the rapid move to pass a censure resolution exposed the Democrats’ true agenda: silencing conservatives by branding them as instigators of violence.

In May of 1607, a hearty group of Englishmen arrived on the muddy shores of modern-day Virginia under orders from King James I to establish an English colony. But despite their efforts,

In December of 1606, the Virginia Company, under charter from King James I, sent an expedition to establish an English settlement in North America. When their ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, arrived near the banks of the James River on May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys set foot on what would soon become Jamestown. The initial group contained well-to-do adventurers, a handful of artisans and craftsmen, and laborers eager to forge a new home. Notably absent were members of the opposite sex. It would be another nine long months before any women arrived at the fledgling colony. 

While the terrain might have appeared ideal from the deck of a ship—unoccupied and ripe with natural resources—the Virginia Company established its settlement on a swath of swampy land with no source of fresh water. Soon after, the men began to perish. Only 38 of the 104 original settlers were still alive by January 1608. 

mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.

During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.