Republican presidential candidate and former president, Donald Trump, speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
By ZEKE MILLER, MICHELLE L. PRICE, WILL WEISSERT and JILL COLVIN Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
The victory validates his bare-knuckle approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.
As president, he’s vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies. Speaking to his supporters Wednesday morning, Trump claimed he had won “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. He is the first person convicted of a felony to be elected president and, at 78, is the oldest person elected to the office. His vice president, 40-year-old Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking member of the millennial generation in the U.S. government.
There will be far fewer checks on Trump when he returns to the White House. He has plans to swiftly enact a sweeping agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government. His GOP critics in Congress have largely been defeated or retired. Federal courts are now filled with judges he appointed. The U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, issued a ruling earlier this year affording presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
Trump’s language and behavior during the campaign sparked growing warnings from Democrats and some Republicans about shocks to democracy that his return to power would bring. He repeatedly praised strongman leaders, warned that he would deploy the military to target political opponents he labeled the “enemy from within,” threatened to take action against news organizations for unfavorable coverage and suggested suspending the Constitution.
Some who served in his first White House, including Vice President Mike Pence and John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, either declined to endorse him or issued dire public warnings about his return to the presidency.
While Harris focused much of her initial message around themes of joy, Trump channeled a powerful sense of anger and resentment among voters.
He seized on frustrations over high prices and fears about crime and migrants who illegally entered the country on Biden’s watch. He also highlighted wars in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to cast Democrats as presiding over – and encouraging – a world in chaos.
It was a formula Trump perfected in 2016, when he cast himself as the only person who could fix the country’s problems, often borrowing language from dictators.
“In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said in March 2023.
This campaign often veered into the absurd, with Trump amplifying bizarre and disproven rumors that migrants were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs in an Ohio town. At one point, he kicked off a rally with a detailed story about the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer in which he praised his genitalia.
But perhaps the defining moment came in July when a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed one of his supporters. His face streaked with blood, Trump stood and raised his fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Weeks later, a second assassination attempt was thwarted after a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun poking through the greenery while Trump was playing golf.
Trump’s return to the White House seemed unlikely when he left Washington in early 2021 as a diminished figure whose lies about his defeat sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He was so isolated at the time that few outside of his family bothered to attend the send-off he organized for himself at Andrews Air Force Base, complete with a 21-gun salute.
Democrats who controlled the U.S. House quickly impeached him for his role in the insurrection, making him the only president to be impeached twice. He was acquitted by the U.S. Senate, where many Republicans argued that he no longer posed a threat because he had left office.
But from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump – aided by some elected Republicans – worked to maintain his political relevance. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who at the time led his party in the U.S. House, visited Trump soon after he left office, essentially validating his continued role in the party.
As the 2022 midterm election approached, Trump used the power of his endorsement to assert himself as the unquestioned leader of the party. His preferred candidates almost always won their primaries, but some went on to defeat in elections that Republicans viewed as within their grasp. Those disappointing results were driven in part by a backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that revoked a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, a decision that was aided by Trump-appointed justices. The midterm election prompted questions within the GOP about whether Trump should remain the party’s leader.
But if Trump’s future was in doubt, that changed in 2023 when he faced a wave of state and federal indictments for his role in the insurrection, his handling of classified information and election interference. He used the charges to portray himself as the victim of an overreaching government, an argument that resonated with a GOP base that was increasingly skeptical – if not outright hostile – to institutions and established power structures.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who challenged Trump for the Republican nomination, lamented that the indictments “sucked out all the oxygen” from this year’s GOP primary. Trump easily captured his party’s nomination without ever participating in a debate against DeSantis or other GOP candidates.
With Trump dominating the Republican contest, a New York jury found him guilty in May of 34 felony charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. He faces sentencing later this month, though his victory poses serious questions about whether he will ever face punishment.
He has also been found liable in two other New York civil cases: one for inflating his assets and another for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.
Trump is subject to additional criminal charges in an election-interference case in Georgia that has become bogged down. On the federal level, he’s been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and improperly handling classified material. When he becomes president on Jan. 20, Trump could appoint an attorney general who would erase the federal charges.
As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to swiftly enact a radical agenda that would transform nearly every aspect of American government. That includes plans to launch the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, to use the Justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign policy that threatens to upend longstanding foreign alliances, including the NATO pact.
When he arrived in Washington 2017, Trump knew little about the levers of federal power. His agenda was stymied by Congress and the courts, as well as senior staff members who took it upon themselves to serve as guardrails.
This time, Trump has said he would surround himself with loyalists who will enact his agenda, no questions asked, and who will arrive with hundreds of draft executive orders, legislative proposals and in-depth policy papers in hand.
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Colvin reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Mail-in ballots sit in a secure area of the the Allegheny County Elections Division warehouse, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Matt Freed)
By JOSH KELETY The Associated Press
Pennsylvania election officials take a variety of measures to secure ballots when they are transported from polling places to county facilities. For instance, in Philadelphia, local police officers collect ballots from polling places after the polls close on Election Day. In Allegheny County, poll workers transport ballots to regional reporting centers. Poll workers and county election officials also utilize chain of custody forms to document the handoff of ballots.

Police escorts, sealed containers and chain of custody documentation: These are some of the measures that Pennsylvania counties take to secure ballots while they are transported from polling places to county facilities after polls close on Election Day.
The exact protocols vary by county. For instance, in Berks County, poll workers will transport ballots in sealed boxes back to the county elections office, where they will be locked in a secure room, according to Stephanie Nojiri, assistant director of elections for the county located east of Harrisburg.
In Philadelphia, local law enforcement plays a direct role in gathering ballots from polling places.
“Philadelphia police officers will travel to polling places across the city after the polls close and collect those ballots to be transported back to our headquarters at the end of the night,” said Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, who serves on the board that oversees elections in the city. “Each precinct is given a large canvas bag, and the containers that hold the ballots are placed into that bag and transported by the police.”
After polls close in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, poll workers will transport ballots in locked, sealed bags to regional reporting centers, where the election results are recorded, said David Voye, division manager of the county’s elections division.
From there, county police escort the ballots to a warehouse where they are stored in locked cages that are on 24-hour surveillance.
Poll workers and county election officials also utilize chain of custody paperwork to document the transfer of ballots as they are moved from polling places to secure county facilities.
For instance, in Allegheny County, chain of custody forms are used to verify how many used and unused ballots poll workers are returning to county officials, Voye said. Officials also check the seals on the bags used to transport the ballots to confirm that they are still intact.
There are similar security procedures for counties that use ballot drop boxes to collect mail and absentee ballots. In Berks County, sheriff’s deputies monitor the county’s three drop boxes during the day, according to Nojiri. When county elections officials come to empty the drop boxes, which are secured by four locks, they unlock two of the locks, while the sheriff’s deputies unlock the other two.
Officials remove the ballots, count them, record the number of ballots on a custody sheet, and put the ballots in a sealed box before they transported back to the county’s processing center.
“There’s all kinds of different custody sheets and all that, again, is reconciled in the days after the election,” Nojiri said.
Philadelphia has 34 ballot drop boxes, which are emptied daily and twice on Election Day by election workers, according to Bluestein. The bags used for transporting ballots from drop boxes are also sealed, and workers who are returning these ballots complete and sign a chain of custody form.
“The transportation of ballots is done in a secure, controlled manner, and the public should have confidence in the integrity of that ballot collection process,” Bluestein said.
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This story is part of an explanatory series focused on Pennsylvania elections produced collaboratively by WITF in Harrisburg and The Associated Press.
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The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here.

FILE – Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus appears on “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” with anchor Neil Cavuto, on the Fox Business Network, in New York, June 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Voters line up outside the Bucks County Administration Building during early voting in the general election, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, in Doylestown, Pa. (AP Photo/Michael Rubinkam)
By KATIE KNOL/WITF undefined

On Tuesday, millions of people in Pennsylvania will travel to their local polling place to cast a ballot.
Election officials want everything to go smoothly, but disruptions sometimes happen.
The most common disruptions at precincts are late openings, lack of staffing and voting machine issues, according to Jeff Greenburg, a 13-year election director veteran. He is now a senior advisor on election administration for The Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan organization focusing on engagement and public policy advocacy.
Anyone can report a problem with the election process. They can call their county elections office, contact the Department of State, or reach out to a voter hotline run by nonprofits.
What if my polling place doesn’t open on time or is not fully staffed?
Sometimes workers arrive late or facility owners forget to unlock the doors on time, Greenburg said.
Polling places open on Tuesday at 7 a.m. and will remain open until 8 p.m. Anyone in line to vote when polls close will be allowed to cast a ballot.
Voters can find their local polling place online.
“County election offices will have contact information for both poll workers and facilities in the event doors are locked or poll workers don’t show up,” Greenburg said.
If there is a shortage of workers at a polling place, workers can be shifted from other locations or recruited, Greenburg said. Pennsylvania law allows workers to fill a vacancy with someone who has come in to vote if that person is willing to help.
What if there are voting machine issues?
There are multiple backups in place so voters can cast a ballot if there are issues with the voting machines.
Greenburg said counties typically have roving technicians respond if issues arise. He said they are dispatched as quickly as possible once the issue is reported.
Typically, reports go from the precinct to the county election office. If the issue cannot be resolved or if legal action is required, the county solicitor and Board of Elections will determine if any further steps are required.
“If there is a significant enough impact on the voting location, the BOE could petition the county courts to extend hours,” Greenburg said.
Each county election office has a process in place to disseminate important information on Election Day. This can be through the county’s website, social media accounts or through local news outlets.
“People should only rely on trusted sources for this information,” Greenburg said. “Whether it’s through the county’s web site or social media accounts, or through local media outlets.”
Counties also have emergency paper ballots if machines cannot be repaired or replaced on Election Day.
Eva Weyrich, Juniata County’s director of elections, said the county only uses paper ballots and each polling place has one machine tabulator.
Even if something goes wrong with the tabulator, voters will still be able to fill out their ballots while a technician travels to the precinct to fix the issue.
Weyrich said the county has never had a machine go down for the whole day.
Juniata County prefers the hand-marked paper ballot system, according to Weyrich.
“We can always go back and hand-count the ballots to verify that the machine was accurate,” Weyrich said.
Forty-seven counties have voters fill in ballots by hand. The other 27 have voting machines that print paper ballots with the voter’s selections that can also be audited after an election.
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This story is part of an explanatory series focused on Pennsylvania elections produced collaboratively by WITF, led by democracy reporter Jordan Wilkie, and The Associated Press.
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The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here.

FILE – An election worker examines a ballot at the Clackamas County Elections office, May 19, 2022, in Oregon City, Ore. Problems with a ballot-sorting machine are delaying the vote count in a suburban Portland, Oregon county where issues with blurry bar codes on mail-in ballots delayed elections results in a key Congressional primary race for two weeks in 2022. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus, File)
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI Associated Press

Former President Donald Trump is stepping up his demands that the winner of the presidential race be declared shortly after polls close Tuesday, well before all the votes are counted.
Trump set the pattern in 2020, when he declared that he had won during the early morning hours after Election Day. That led his allies to demand that officials “stop the count!” He and many other conservatives have spent the past four years falsely claiming that fraud cost him that election and bemoaning how long it takes to count ballots in the U.S.
But one of many reasons we are unlikely to know the winner quickly on election night is that Republican lawmakers in two key swing states have refused to change laws that delay the count. Another is that most indications are this will be a very close election, and it takes longer to determine who won close elections than blowouts.
In the end, election experts note, the priority in vote-counting is to make sure it’s an accurate and secure tally, not to end the suspense moments after polls close.
“There’s nothing nefarious about it,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The time delay is to protect the integrity of the process.”
Trump’s demand also doesn’t seem to account for the six time zones from the East Coast to Hawaii.
David Becker, an elections expert and co-author of “The Big Truth,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies, said it’s not realistic for election officials in thousands of jurisdictions to “instantly snap their fingers and count 160 million multi-page ballots with dozens of races on them.”
Trump wants the race decided Tuesday night
During a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump demanded that the race be decided soon after some polls begin closing.
“They have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump said. “Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people.”
It was not clear who he was targeting with the “crooked people” remark.
Timing is one example of why Trump’s demands don’t match the reality of conducting elections in the U.S. By 11 p.m. Eastern time, polls will just be closing in the two Western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Trump has led conservatives to bemoan that the U.S. doesn’t count elections as swiftly as France or Argentina, where results for recent races have been announced within hours of polls closing. But that’s because those countries tabulate only a single election at a time. The decentralized U.S. system prevents the federal government from controlling elections.
Instead, votes are counted in nearly 10,000 separate jurisdictions, each of which has its own races for the state legislature, city council, school boards and ballot measures to tabulate at the same time. That’s why it takes longer for the U.S. to count votes.
Declaring a winner can take time
The Associated Press calls races when there is no possibility that the trailing candidate can make up the gap. Sometimes, if one candidate is significantly behind, a winner can be called quickly. But if the margin is narrow, then every last vote could matter. It takes a while before every vote is counted even in the most efficient jurisdictions in the country.
In 2018, for example, Republican Rick Scott won the U.S. Senate race in Florida, a state conservatives regularly praise for its quick tally. But the AP didn’t call Scott’s victory until after the conclusion of a recount on Nov. 20 because Scott’s margin was so slim.
It also takes time to count every one of the millions of votes because election officials have to process disputed, or “provisional,” ballots, and to see if they were legitimately cast. Overseas ballots from military members or other U.S. citizens abroad can trickle in at the last minute. Mail ballots usually land early, but there’s a lengthy process to make sure they’re not cast fraudulently. If that process doesn’t start before Election Day, it can back up the count.
Some states, such as Arizona, also give voters whose mail ballots were rejected because the signatures didn’t match up to five days to prove they actually cast the ballot. That means final numbers simply cannot be available Tuesday night.
Election rules are to blame in some states
Some of the sluggishness is due to state-specific election rules. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two of the most important swing states, election officials for years have pleaded with Republican lawmakers to change the law that prevents them from processing their mail ballots before Election Day. That means mail ballots get tallied late, and frequently the results don’t start to get reported until after Election Day.
Democrats have traditionally dominated mail voting, which has made it seem like Republicans are in the lead until the early hours of the next morning, when Democratic mail votes finally get added to the tally. Experts even have names for this from past elections — the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” Trump exploited that dynamic in 2020 when he had his supporters demand an abrupt end to vote counts — the ballots that remained untallied were largely mail ones that were for Joe Biden. It’s not clear how that will play out this year, since Republicans have shifted and voted in big numbers during early voting.
Michigan used to have similar restrictions, but after Democrats won control of the state Legislature in 2022 they removed the prohibition on early processing of mail ballots. That state’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she hopes to have most results available by Wednesday.
“At the end of the day, chief election officials are the folks who have the ability to provide those accurate results. Americans should focus on what they say and not what any specific candidate or folks who are part of the campaign say,” said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Trump allies urge him to declare victory swiftly
Some of Trump’s allies say he should be even more aggressive about declaring victory this time around.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who in 2020 predicted the then-president would declare victory before the race was called, advocated for a similar strategy during a recent press conference after he was released from federal prison, where he was serving time for a contempt of Congress conviction related to the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in 2020.
“President Trump came up at 2:30 in the morning and talked,” Bannon said. “He should have done it at 11 o’clock in 2020.”
Other Trump supporters have taken a darker tone. His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, suggested during a recent interview on the right-wing American Truth Project podcast that violence could erupt in states still counting ballots the day after Election Day because people “are just not going to put up with it.”
Trying to project a sense of inevitability about a Trump win, the former president and his supporters have been touting early vote data and favorable polls to contend the election is all but over. Republicans have returned to voting early after largely staying away at Trump’s direction in 2020 and 2022. In some swing states that track party registration, registered Republicans are outvoting Democrats in early voting.
But that doesn’t mean Republicans are ahead in any meaningful sense. Early voting data does not tell you who will win an election because it only records who voted, not how they voted.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been explicitly targeting Republicans disillusioned by Trump. In each of those states where more Republicans have voted, there also are huge numbers of voters casting early ballots who are not registered with either of the two major political parties. If Harris won just a tiny fraction more of those votes than Trump, it would erase the small leads Republicans have.
There’s only one way to find out who won the presidential election: Wait until enough votes are tallied, whenever that is.

FILE – Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., speaks during the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

By MARC LEVY Associated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race between three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican challenger David McCormick will help determine control of the chamber Tuesday in a battleground state contest that is one of the nation’s most expensive this year.
Casey, perhaps Pennsylvania’s best-known politician and the son of a former two-term governor, is seeking a fourth term after facing what he has called his toughest reelection challenge yet. Casey, 64, is a stalwart of the state’s Democratic Party, having won six statewide elections going back to 1996, including serving as the state’s auditor general and treasurer.
McCormick, 59, is making his second run for the Senate after losing narrowly to Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022’s Republican primary. He left his job as CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund to run after serving at the highest levels of former President George W. Bush’s administration and sitting on Trump’s Defense Advisory Board.
The race ran on national themes, from abortion rights to inflation. But it also turned on local ones, too, such as Casey’s accusation that McCormick is a rich carpetbagger from Connecticut’s ritzy ” Gold Coast ” — a caricature McCormick helped bring to life by mispronouncing the name of one of Pennsylvania’s local beers — trying to buy Pennsylvania’s Senate seat.
Casey also attacked McCormick’s hedge fund days, accusing him of getting rich at America’s expense by investing in Chinese companies that make fentanyl and built Beijing’s military.
McCormick, in turn, stressed his seventh-generation roots in Pennsylvania, talked up his high school days wrestling in towns across northern Pennsylvania — a sport that took him to the U.S. military academy at West Point — and his time running online auction house FreeMarkets Inc., which had its name on a skyscraper in Pittsburgh during the tech boom.
Casey, a staunch ally of labor unions and President Joe Biden, has campaigned on preserving the middle class, abortion rights, labor rights and voting rights, calling McCormick and former President Donald Trump a threat to all those.
McCormick, in turn, accused Casey of rubber-stamping Biden administration policies on the border, the economy, energy and national security that he blames for inflation, domestic turmoil and war. He has attacked Casey as a weak, out-of-touch career politician and a sure bet to fall in line with Vice President Kamala Harris if she becomes president.
Democrats currently hold a Senate majority by the narrowest of margins.
Both Casey and McCormick were uncontested for their party’s nominations in the primary election.
Also on the Nov. 5 Senate ballot are John Thomas of the Libertarian Party, Leila Hazou of the Green Party and Marty Selker of the Constitution Party.
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Follow Marc Levy at https://x.com/timelywriter.

FILE – Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, attends the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022. The intrigue surrounding Musk’s Twitter investment took a new twist Tuesday, April 12, 2022, with the filing of a lawsuit alleging the colorful billionaire illegally delayed disclosing his big stake in the social media company so he could buy more shares at lower prices. (Patrick Pleul/Pool Photo via AP, File)
By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes that Elon Musk ‘s political action committee is hosting in swing states can continue through Tuesday’s presidential election, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Monday.
Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta — ruling after Musk’s lawyers said the winners are paid spokespeople and not chosen by chance — did not immediately explain his reasoning.
District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat, had called the process a scam “designed to actually influence a national election” and asked that it be shut down.
Musk lawyer Chris Gober said the final two recipients before Tuesday’s presidential election will be in Arizona on Monday and Michigan on Tuesday.
“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” Gober said Monday. “We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
Chris Young, the director and treasurer of America PAC, testified that the recipients are vetted ahead of time, to “feel out their personality, (and) make sure they were someone whose values aligned” with the group.
Musk’s lawyers, defending the effort, called it “core political speech” given that participants sign a petition endorsing the U.S. Constitution. They also said Krasner’s bid to shut it down under Pennsylvania law was moot because there would be no more Pennsylvania winners before the program ends Tuesday.
Krasner believes the giveaways violates state election law and contradict what Musk promised when he announced them during an appearance with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump ‘s campaign in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19: “We’re going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election,” Musk vowed.
Young also acknowledged that the PAC made the recipients sign nondisclosure agreements.
“They couldn’t really reveal the truth about how they got the money, right?” Krasner lawyer John Summers asked.
“Sounds right,” Young said.
In an Oct. 20 social media post shown in court, Musk said anyone signing the petition had “a daily chance of winning $1M!”
Summers grilled him on Musk’s use of both the words “chance” and “randomly,” prompting Young to concede the latter was not “the word I would have selected.”
Young said the winners knew they would be called on stage but not specifically that they would win the money.
Musk did not attend the hearing. He has committed more than $70 million to the super PAC to help Trump and other Republicans win in November.
“This was all a political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” Krasner testified Monday. “That’s what it is. A grift.”
Lawyers for Musk and the PAC said they do not plan to extend the lottery beyond Tuesday. Krasner said the first three winners, starting on Oct. 19, came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to the state’s Oct. 21 voter registration deadline.
Other winners came from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. It’s not clear if anyone has yet received the money. The PAC pledged they would get it by Nov. 30, according to an exhibit shown in court.
More than 1 million people from the seven states have registered for the sweepstakes by signing a petition saying they support the right to free speech and to bear arms, the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Krasner questioned how the PAC might use their data, which it will have on hand well past the election.
“They were scammed for their information,” Krasner said. “It has almost unlimited use.”
Krasner’s team called Musk “the heartbeat of America PAC,” and the person announcing the winners and presenting the checks.
“He was the one who presented the checks, albeit large cardboard checks. We don’t really know if there are any real checks,” Summers said.
Foglietta presided over the case at Philadelphia City Hall after Musk and the PAC lost an effort to move it to federal court.
Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, as he’s tasked with protecting both lotteries and the integrity of elections.
Pennsylvania remains a key battleground state with 19 electoral votes and both Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris have repeatedly visited the state, including stops planned Monday in the final hours of the campaign.
Krasner — who noted that he has long driven a Tesla — said he could also seek civil damages for the Pennsylvania registrants. Musk is the CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla. He also owns the social media platform X, where America PAC has published posts on the sweepstakes, and the rocket ship maker SpaceX.

FILE – Allegheny County Election Division Deputy Manager Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

By MARC LEVY and MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — More than 4,000 mail ballot applications have been challenged across 14 Pennsylvania counties, leaving election officials to decide voter eligibility during hearings that will extend well past Election Day.
State elections officials say the “mass challenges” focused on two separate groups — people who may have forwarded their mail without also changing their voter registration and nonmilitary U.S. voters living overseas. The overseas voters are only entitled to cast ballots under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act for president and congressional seats.
The state had a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to for anyone to challenge mail-in ballot applications; any ballots from those voters whose applications were challenged must be sequestered until the county elections board officials hold a hearing to adjudicate the claims. Those hearings must be no later than Friday, three days after Election Day.
Pennsylvania is a critical swing state that could be a deciding factor in the contest between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump, a very close race on the eve of Election Day. If the margin is tight, the 4,300 mail ballots at issue could be enough to determine who wins the state and its 19 electoral votes.
The effort follows a federal judge’s ruling last week to throw out a lawsuit by six Republican members of Congress seeking to make Pennsylvania election officials institute new checks confirming military and overseas voters’ eligibility and identity.
The first county elections board hearing, conducted Friday in suburban Philadelphia’s Chester County, resulted in rejection of all of the challenges made to mail ballot applications, claims that people have moved and should have changed where they vote.
“The scary part was that they had sent this letter with a voter registration cancelation form and claimed they got 2,300 voters to cancel voter registration” in Pennsylvania, Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell, a Democrat, said Monday.
The challenges cost $10 a voter and it’s not entirely clear who filed each of them. In Chester County, they were filed by Diane Houser, a Trump supporter who said they were nonpartisan and from a grassroots network.
Lycoming County will conduct a hearing Friday on the 72 challenges it received from Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer with PA Fair Elections, a conservative group that has fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures. DiSalvo said she made the challenges in her capacity as an individual and not as a member of any organization.
“The challenges submitted simply point out that the county election officials must properly process the voter registration applications that they already have for these applicants. The voters do not need to do anything –- all have received their ballot. To resolve the eligibility issues noted in the challenges, county officials should properly register the applicants,” DiSalvo wrote in an email.
In York County, all the challenges — 354 — were denied Monday by the elections board, but chief clerk Greg Monskie said the board agreed to keep those ballots segregated during a period in which an appeal can be made.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, said that by Saturday there were some 3,700 challenges to mail ballot applications by overseas voters pending in 10 counties. There were also challenges pending in four counties to 363 voters based on supposed changes of address — plus the 212 that were rejected or withdrawn in Chester County in that category.
Maxwell said people who had been challenged included active-duty military members, college students and people who left Pennsylvania seeking medical care.
“That is alarming to me that someone take up such an approach to disenfranchise legitimate Pennsylvania voters,” Maxwell said. “And I can’t think of anything less American than that.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania says filling out a change-of-address form does not necessarily mean a voter has moved out of the state permanently — those forms can also be used to get mail forwarded.
There are also 52 challenges being reviewed in Lawrence County, said Tim Germani, director of voter and elections services in Lawrence, and it appears most if not all relate to overseas mail ballot requests. The elections board may need to conduct a hearing by Friday, he said.
In suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County, where about 1,300 challenges were filed — most of them by Republican state Sen. Jarrett Coleman — officials were trying to notify voters Monday about a hearing scheduled for early Thursday. Until then, those votes will be segregated during the vote counting, said Bucks governmental spokesman Jim O’Malley.
“We are doing our best to provide notice today to those voters and that notice will include information about how to contact the Board of Elections,” O’Malley said in a phone interview Monday.
A message seeking comment was left for Coleman.
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This story has been corrected to show that the comments in the 13th and 14th paragraphs should have been attributed to Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell, not Commissioner Eric Roe.

PITTSBURGH – (Nov. 4, 2024) – McDonald’s restaurants in Pittsburgh are honored to serve veterans, active-duty military members and their families each and every day. This year, McDonald’s restaurants across the region will be recognizing Veterans Day in a special way, by offering current and former military members free food.

Participating McDonald’s restaurants will offer a meal to all veterans, with a valid military ID, all day on Monday, November 11. For breakfast, veterans can enjoy a free Sausage Egg McMuffin meal, including a hash brown and any size soft drink, tea or coffee. For lunch or dinner, veterans can enjoy a free 10 pc McNugget Meal, with medium fry and any size soft drink, tea or coffee.

Throughout the Pittsburgh region, McDonald’s restaurants are proud to show up for the community in ways both big and small. From providing meals in honor of veterans, teachers and first responders to supporting youth sports leagues and neighborhood jobs, local McDonald’s owner/operators are committed to feeding and fostering communities.

The deals are only available via dine-in or drive-thru. The deals are not available in the McDonald’s app. Breakfast meals are only available until 10:30am.