Nov. 5, 2022 US election coverage

Over 1,000 absentee ballots in Cobb County, Georgia, are being mailed out Saturday morning, just days before Election Day, due to procedural errors in the elections office, the county election director told board members in a letter sent Friday night. 

“Critical” mistakes were made on at least two days in October, where absentee ballots were requested but not created, according to the letter. The investigation determined that 1,046 requested absentee ballots were never mailed, according to county officials.

On Oct. 22, the elections office accepted 194 ballots; however, none of these ballots were mailed to voters, the letter said, as the daily file was not uploaded to the mailing machine, thus not creating the ballots. 

In the letter, Cobb County spokesperson Ross Cavitt said the elections office printed these 194 ballots on Saturday morning and prepared them to be shipped out overnight by UPS. 

Earlier in the month on Oct. 13, the elections office accepted 1,227 ballots, but only 385 ballots were prepared manually and mailed out for elderly and disabled rollover voters, the letter said. 

The county said it was difficult to determine exactly what happened as some ballots were sent out and some were not. 

Almost 200 of the 1,227 voters whose ballots were accepted by the elections office on Oct. 13 cancelled their absentee ballots, and 92 others casted their vote on Friday, the letter said. 

The letter referenced a series of procedural and operational changes to the elections office, which a county official said likely contributed to the mistakes being made. 

The spokesperson said they didn’t know the extent to which the new elections office supervisor was overwhelmed. 

“We didn’t realize how overwhelmed she was and that such critical mistakes were being made,” the letter said. “Many of the absentee staff have been averaging 80 or more hours per week and they are exhausted. Still, that is no excuse for such a critical error.” 

It's the weekend before the high-stakes US midterm elections on Tuesday.

As candidates finish out their campaign sprint, election workers behind the scenes are hard at work counting the millions of early ballots already cast.

Here's a look at what the road to Election Day has looked like over the past few months:

For more images from the campaign trail and beyond, view CNN's complete midterms photo gallery here.

Summer-like temperatures graced western Pennsylvania just three days before Election Day, as hundreds of folks filed into Schenley Park on the eastern edge of Pittsburgh for a John Fetterman rally.

Former President Barack Obama is rallying here within the hour and in Philadelphia later today as he seeks to deliver a critical win for Senate Democrats in the Keystone State.

Fetterman's Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, has been pitching himself in the closing days of the campaign as a moderate voice, looking to go to Washington to end extremism. That doesn’t pass the smell test for Alvine, who was featured in one of Fetterman’s campaign ads earlier this year.

CNN also ran into Jackie Hill, the secretary of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, on her way in. In her mind, the difference between Fetterman and Oz couldn’t be more stark. 

“(Oz) is an elitist and I don’t think he even understands what moderate is,” Hill said. “He made choices about building a stardom versus serving people, and I have seen no signs of him doing public service kinds of things.”

Hill said the pressure surrounding the sole debate between Fetterman and Oz may have gotten to the lieutenant governor, but in more relaxed settings, she thinks Fetterman has shown himself to be more articulate than he’s portrayed in attack ads.

“I’m not concerned. His mind is working, maybe his tongue isn’t, OK?” she said with a smile. “But I ultimately think he will get where he needs to be. Oz needs to go back to New Jersey.”

Economic issues remain a top concern for most voters ahead of the 2022 election, a review of recent polling finds, with many also worried about America’s democratic process itself.

But voters’ highest priorities are divided along partisan lines, with abortion rights continuing to resonate strongly for Democrats, while Republicans remain sharply focused on inflation. Concerns about other issues, from gun policy to immigration, are often similarly polarized. And some topics that drew attention in previous elections – like the coronavirus pandemic – are relatively muted this year.

Recent polling provides a good general sense of which issues have become the focal points of this year’s elections, and for whom. But what voters truly consider important, and how those concerns influence their decisions, is too complicated to be fully captured in a single poll question.

Polling on the economy

CNN’s most recent polls have examined voters’ priorities from two different angles. A survey conducted in September and early October asked voters to rate a series of different issues on a scale from “extremely important” to “not that important,” while a second survey conducted in late October asked them to select a single top priority. On both measures, the economy emerged as a top concern.

In the first poll, nine in 10 registered voters said they considered the economy at least very important to their vote for Congress, with 59% calling it extremely important. And in the second poll, 51% of likely voters said the economy and inflation would be most important to them in their congressional vote, far outpacing any other issue.

The Republican Party also holds an advantage on economic issues. In a Fox News poll, voters said by a 13-point margin that the GOP would do a better job than the Democratic Party of handling inflation and higher prices. And in a mid-October CBS News/YouGov poll, voters were nine points likelier to say that GOP control of Congress would help the economy than to say it would hurt. Voters also said, by a 19-point margin, that Democratic economic policies during the last two years in Congress have hurt, rather than helped.

At the same time, voters express concerns beyond pocketbook issues. In that CBS News/YouGov survey, 85% of likely voters said that their “personal rights and freedoms” will be very important in their 2022 vote, while a smaller 68% said the same of their “own household’s finances.”

Go here to read more about polling around abortion, immigration, voting and elections, crime, and more.

Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney endorsed Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger on Saturday, weighing in on another highly competitive House race in the final days of the midterm election campaign.

Spanberger, a former CIA officer who was among the class of national security Democrats first elected in 2018, is locked in a tough contest with Republican challenger Yesli Vega.

In a statement to CNN, Cheney said Spanberger "is dedicated to serving this country."

Voters in Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's New York City district and Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's rural Georgia district see politics very differently. But this election season, voters in both areas are focused on similar issues.

Voters told CNN that they want to see gas prices and food prices go down, and they are concerned about crime as well.  

“I love her personality, I love her vibe, but I need to keep hearing the same passion about keeping my children safe that I hear about social responsibility and well-being,” Michael Brown, a voter in Queens, said of Ocasio-Cortez.

Carlos Quiroga said he doesn’t think the government represents the people right now. “They gaslight us all day,” he said. 

Meanwhile, in Rome, Georgia, while voters admit Taylor Greene’s rhetoric doesn’t appeal to everyone, most feel she is speaking about issues they care about. 

Three presidents – one sitting and two former – descend on Pennsylvania Saturday for a final-stretch midterm push that underscores the stakes of one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.

For President Joe Biden, who will hold a rare joint appearance with former President Barack Obama in Philadelphia meant to boost the Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania will amount to a political stress test in his home state, where he’s traveled 20 times since taking office.

For former President Donald Trump, who rallies outside of Pittsburgh in the city of Latrobe, a win by his hand-selected candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz could prove his own enduring viability in a commonwealth he lost by a narrow margin in 2020.

The consequences extend well beyond next week’s election. As sources say Trump is preparing to announce a third presidential bid, potentially in the coming weeks, Biden’s aides are taking their own initial steps toward mounting a reelection campaign. For a several-hour stretch on Saturday afternoon, the dynamics of a potential 2020 rematch will be laid bare.

The convergence of presidents in Pennsylvania, each warning of dire consequences should the opposing party prevail, reflects the altered norms Trump precipitated when he took office nearly six years ago, quickly issuing false accusations against Obama of spying and general malfeasance.

Former presidents have typically only waded sparingly into daily politics, mostly avoiding direct criticism of the men occupying the office they once held.

Read more here.

When Democrats won the House in 2018, they did it with help from a great uptick in turnout that achieved the highest voter turnout for a midterm election in more than 100 years.

Still, half the voting eligible population didn’t take part.

This year, early voting has surged in some of the key states, but when I talked to Michael McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist known for tracking early voting data, he predicted turnout would fall below that 2018 level.

McDonald has a new book that dissects the massive achievement of the 2020 presidential election, when nearly 67% of the voting eligible population cast ballots. There’s more about the book and his early voting tracker at his US Elections Project website.

We talked about what people should take away from the last election and what he’s seeing as he tracks early voting data for the current election.

Below is a condensed version of our longer phone conversation:

Takeaways from 2020

WOLF: You’ve written a book about this kind of amazing democratic achievement of voting during a pandemic. What do you want people to take away from that research?

MCDONALD: We have to give a lot of credit to the election officials, volunteers who staffed polling locations and the voters themselves for participating in an election at the highest turnout for presidential elections since 1900.

There was nobody alive that voted in the 2020 election that voted in the last election where we’d had higher turnout. That really is quite an achievement. We managed to do something that was historical under extraordinary circumstances. That’s the very positive news.

Unfortunately, the other takeaway from the book is the relentless attacks on voting that happened during the election, coming from the rhetoric with (former President Donald) Trump, and then just filtering on down through this party. That’s damaged democracy, and we can see that happening in real time with the 2022 election.

High turnout may be a symptom of extreme polarization

WOLF: You referred to the highest turnout in 100 years in 2020. I saw in the book that the turnout for the 2018 midterm was the highest since 1914. We’re seeing that more people are questioning the integrity of elections, but also that they’re taking part in elections more. What do you make of that?

MCDONALD: The last time that we had exceptionally high turnout was in the late 1800s, and that period was also marked by intense polarization. We don’t have any survey data so we can’t go back and ask the voters if they were polarized, but we can guess that what was happening among our elected officials at the federal government was also reflective of what was happening among the voters.

And so we’ve entered a period of higher polarization, and you can point to culprits for that. But whatever the cause, we’ve certainly reached a point where people really believe that it matters who is running the government and it really matters that their side is the one that is running the government.

When people perceive that difference between the parties and the importance the policy differences make on their lives, they’re more likely to vote.

It’s that old curse: "May you live in interesting times." We live in interesting times. People are very interested in politics, and they are thus highly engaged in elections.

What early voting data tells us

WOLF: You are very well known for tracking early voting data. What can it actually tell us before Election Day?

MCDONALD: What you want to do is you want to take all the bits of information you can weave together and try to get a picture of where we are. So I don’t think early voting alone tells the picture just like I don’t think that polling alone tells you a definitive picture about where the election is going.

Polls have errors. Early voting has its nuances and measurement issues.

Read more from the conversation here:

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What early voting data can and cannot tell us | CNN Politics

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Independent voter Sarah Barrett says she is backing Republican Mehmet Oz for Senate because she believes he truly cares about people.

"The most important thing is people, you know, not what we fight over," the Moscow, Pennsylvania, resident said. 

Barrett attended her first Oz rally Thursday night in Lackawanna County and shared how she became a fan of Oz's television show. 

"My mom and my grandmother got me into watching his show years ago. They loved him. I fell in love with him, and when I saw that he was running, I was just like, 'Yes,' because I feel like he cares about people. I felt that watching the show. I feel that now," she told CNN.

Another reason she's throwing her support behind Oz is because of his stance on abortion. 

"I am very pro-life, and just the fact that he is, that kind of really sells it for me," Barrett said.

Oz's campaign website says he is "100% Pro-Life." At a press conference on Sept. 6, Oz said he has three exceptions: Life of the mother, rape and incest.

Barrett did not have a comment about Oz's support toward exceptions to abortion, adding, "I don't know all of his stances."

As an independent voter, Barrett said she makes her choices at the polls based on the candidate. 

Barrett said she is enthusiastic about the upcoming midterm election and "can't wait to see what happens next."

Oz is facing Democrat John Fetterman. Both President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama will be stumping for Fetterman at a rally Saturday night in Pennsylvania, while former President Donald Trump is attending an Oz rally.