With the race in Virginia flipping red to blue and back before the eyes of CNN viewers, reports are trickling out that the state’s late close for Hillary Clinton in one of her key “firewall” states was helped by her old friend, the state’s governor Terry McAuliffe.
According to a report in the World Tribune, Gov. McAuliffe “used an autopen to sign thousands of letters granting voting rights to felons, enough to put the swing state in Hillary Clinton’s column.” Governor McAuliffe is a longtime Clinton ally, having served as chairman of both President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. The report, which first appeared in the Daily Caller, says that “those who received McAuliffe’s letter also got voter registration forms with pre-paid return postage. No others in Virginia received such a service.”
If the race ends as close as it looks at this moment — about 10:30 pm — this controversial move by the governor will surely wind up in court.
And that’s not the only race likely headed to court.
In Nevada, an election official kept the polling place open an extra two hours in a Vegas-area county packed with Latino voters. According to CNN, “a Nevada court judge forcefully denied a request Tuesday from Donald Trump’s campaign to direct a county registrar of voters to preserve and segregate ballots from voting machines in four early voting sites in the Las Vegas area where Latino voters showed up in record numbers.”
The Observer spoke by phone to Heather Flick, a lawyer for the Trump campaign who is running the Nevada war room from Las Vegas.
“We tried to get a TRO to preserve the evidence of the early voting machines to segegate them more when the polls were kept open more than two hours past the published deadline. I spent two hours with the registrar, Joe Gloria, yesterday at his office and he told me, ‘I could have kept the temporary poll places open from 4 am to midnight because it was up to me.’ I disagree — it was published that they’d be open til 8 (some were 9) and the most egregious one was supposed to close at 8 but didn’t close til 10.”
This story will be updated with comment from Virginia officials as they are reached by email and phone.
