Erum Salam

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and former California governor, has announced he is endorsing Kamala Harris.

He joins a running list of republicans crossing party lines to vote against Trump.

“I want to tune out. But I can’t. Because rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets,” Schwarzenegger wrote on X. “To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America a trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.

“And I will always be an American before I am a Republican. That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

He added that electing Trump as president would be “four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful”.

Sam Levine

The legal dispute centers on a 7 August executive order by the Republican Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, ordering the state to run its voter registration rolls against DMV data on a daily basis to check for non-citizens.

The justice department and civil rights groups sued, saying that the state was violating a federal law that prohibits systematic removals of voters within 90 days of a federal election.

The US district judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction request last week to restore the voters.

Voting experts have long warned that comparing voting rolls to DMV data is not a reliable way to find non-citizens on the rolls because there may be paperwork errors and people can become naturalized after getting their driver’s license. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit said they had identified several people who were in fact citizens but had their registrations wrongly canceled.

Donald Trump and allies had distorted the removals, saying that the lower court decision meant that non-citizens were going to be placed back on the voter rolls. But the state had not provided conclusive evidence that many of those removed were non-citizens.

Sam Levine

The supreme court made the ruling to pause the lower court ruling on its emergency docket and did not give a rationale for its decision, which is customary for rulings on an expedited basis.

All three liberal justices on the court – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said they would not have halted a lower court ruling earlier in October ordering the state to restore the voter registrations.

Virginia’s Republican attorney general Jason Miyares has also lauded the supreme court’s decision to strip away voting rights from approximately 1,600 people, saying:

“I am pleased to announce that the US Supreme Court granted Virginia’s emergency stay to keep noncitizens off our voter rolls.”

Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has hailed the supreme court’s ruling that allowed the state to proceed with its removal of approximately 1,600 voter registrations, calling it a “victory for common sense and election fairness”.

Youngkin, who ordered state officials to identify and cancel the voter registration of alleged non-citizens unless they could prove their citizenship in two weeks, said:

“Clean voter rolls are one important part of a comprehensive approach we are taking to ensure the fairness of our elections. Virginians also know that we have paper ballots, counting machines not connected to the internet, a strong chain of custody process, signature verification, monitored and secured drop boxes, and a ‘triple check’ vote counting process to tabulate results. Virginians can cast their ballots on Election Day knowing that Virginia’s elections are fair, secure, and free from politically-motivated interference.”

The supreme court has paused the ruling by a lower court that would have restored voting rights to approximately 1,600 voters in Virginia.

In its brief order, the supreme court wrote:

“The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is granted. The October 25, 2024 order of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia … is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of the Court.”

Last week, Virginia was asked to permit more than 1,600 people to the vote after a federal judge ruled that the state had illegally revoked those rights.

The Guardian’s voting rights reporter Sam Levine reported then that the plaintiffs who brought forth the lawsuit said that many people were being incorrectly identified as non-citizen by the Department of Motor Vehicles by checking the wrong box on a form.

Tim Walz appeared on Good Morning America, saying, “We know it’s going to be close but we’re going to win this thing.”

Speaking to host George Stephanopoulos, Walz said, “We’ve got the better ground game, we’ve got the excitement, we’ve got the momentum on our side.”

He added that his biggest concern was that “that Donald Trump has brought up a pessimism to folks, that folks don’t believe that their vote matters. Those votes do matter … Make sure you participate in this democracy. I think you’re going to see Donald Trump continue to spiral downward in this really difficult and hateful rhetoric.”

In response to Joe Biden’s “garbage” remark, Walz said, “The president’s clarified his remarks, but let’s be very clear: the vice-president and I have made it absolutely clear that we want everyone as a part of this. Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric is what needs to end … and what I say is, there’s a place for all of us here.”

In a new interview on Fox News, Nikki Haley, a Donald Trump critic-turned ally, said now was “not a time to have anyone criticize Puerto Rico or Latinos”.

Haley, who ran against Trump earlier this year before dropping out the presidential race, added:

“You’ve got Americans who are absolutely not going to vote for Trump. And then you’ve got a percentage in the middle who like Trump’s policies but don’t like his style. That is what they need to focus on. So when you look at these things, it has got to be a story of addition. This is not a time to have anyone criticize Puerto Rico or Latinos. This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going. 53% of the electorate are women with will vote. They care about how they’re being talked to, and they care about the issues …”

When Yadira Caraveo, a Democratic party member, won the race to represent Colorado’s eighth district in the House of Representatives in 2022, she eked out a victory, winning by the narrowest margin of any Democrat in the country. This November, Caraveo is facing yet another close race – one that could determine the balance of Congress.

In a district where nearly 40% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, the community will be decisive in crowning a winner. The battle for their votes is mostly playing out not on TV or in town halls, but on social media and local radio.

“[Latino voters] are listening to social media and the radio,” said Sonny Subia, Colorado’s volunteer state director for Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic organization in the country …

Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on top Democrats as “the enemy from within” and talk of deploying the military against political foes if he wins the election are stark signs Trump will endanger the rule of law in America, say former US justice department officials and scholars.

Trump’s threats – singling out ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and others as “the enemy from within” and “more dangerous than China [and] Russia” – jibe with his earlier incendiary talk of using a return to the White House to seek “revenge” against political foes led by Joe Biden. He also suggested the military could be used to quell violence at the polls from “radical left lunatics”.

Those comments, along with Trump’s adamant refusal to say clearly he will accept the election results if he is defeated, prompt critics to say Trump poses unprecedented dangers to the US constitution …

The latest polls show Kamala Harris enjoys a small lead over her rival Donald Trump. However, the election is still too close to call and a small margin of error could see either candidate in the White House.

The key battleground states, so named because there is no entrenched support for Democrats or Republicans and could swing either way, are Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina.

If Donald Trump wins next week’s election, it would be the first time in US history that a candidate wins based on such a huge lie – his falsehood that we have “the worst economy ever”. The former president’s Big Lie has distorted the views of millions of Americans, wrongly convincing many that the US economy is in bad shape.

There’s no denying that many Americans are struggling economically and that inflation was painfully high back in 2022, but inflation is far lower now, and most economists agree that our economy is strong. The unemployment rate is low, inflation is way down, economic growth is solid, and job growth has been remarkably strong. Indeed, the country has added nearly 18m jobs – a record – under the Biden-Harris administration. Not only that, median household income has climbed to $80,610, higher than it was in Trump’s last year in office…

Welcome to our ongoing coverage of the US election campaign as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump continue to make their pitches to voters with less than a week to go to election day.

Current president Joe Biden was forced to clarify comments he made on Tuesday after he was seen in an edited video clip saying “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”.

He said that a pro-Trump comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” about Puerto Rico was “garbage”.

Republican politicians and rightwing media outlets quickly picked up the clip to argue that Biden had called Trump’s supporters garbage, comparing his remarks with Hillary Clinton’s labeling of half of Trump supporters as belonging in “a basket of deplorables” in 2016.

Elsewhere:

• Urged by some allies to apologise for racist comments made by speakers at his weekend rally, Donald Trump took the opposite approach on Tuesday, saying it was an “honour to be involved” in such an event and calling the scene a “lovefest” – the same term he has used to describe the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol.

• Harris will spend election night at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss her campaign’s plans. If elected, Harris would be the first graduate of a historically Black university to occupy the Oval Office.

• Michelle Obama took the stump in Georgia. The former first lady’s organisation When We All Vote hosted a rally for more than 2,000 people at an arena in College Park, near Atlanta’s airport – a slickly produced event that was dominated by earnest pleas to vote from a star-studded roster.

• JD Vance hit back at those who say Trump is a fascist, accusing Harris and her allies of disrespecting second world war veterans as he campaigned on Tuesday in one of the most hotly contested regions of battleground Michigan.