It's the Friday before Election Day

The President opened his scheduled event in Rochester, Minnesota, by criticizing Democratic state leaders for attempting to limit capacity at his rally.

“I did not forget you, because we were given a very, very hard time by your so-called leaders. They’re not very good leaders as you found out during the riots,” Trump said in his opening remarks.

Trump added: “As you know, there are at least 25,000 people who wanted to be here tonight. We just saw a lot of ‘em. Pay our respects. They were here for a long time. They waited and waited, then the governor did bad things. Your far-left Democrat attorney general Keith Ellison and your Democrat governor tried to shut down our rally, silence the people of Minnesota and take away your freedom and your rights.”

In a Friday night advisory, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced that an Iranian cyber actor targeted a number of states’ websites – including election sites – and was successful in at least one case.

“The actor successfully obtained voter registration data in at least one state. The access of voter registration data appeared to involve the abuse of website misconfigurations and a scripted process using the cURL tool to iterate through voter records,” the advisory read.

This was the actor responsible for the threatening e-mails and video sent out earlier this month that the Director of National Intelligence and FBI director convened a press conference about last week. 

DNI Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray had previously said Iran had “obtained” voters’ data, this advisory explains the Iranian actor engaged in “scanning” and then exploiting the websites in late September into mid-October.

“A review of the records that were copied and obtained reveals the information was used in the propaganda video,” the advisory read.

However, it doesn’t sound like Iran was alone. The activity “cannot all be fully attributed to this Iranian APT actor,” the FBI and CISA write. 

Joe Biden has released a statement on the US hitting 9 million Covid-19 cases, using the opportunity to condemn President Trump for his handling of the pandemic, calling it "as severe an indictment of a president's record as one can possibly imagine."

"It is as severe an indictment of a president's record as one can possibly imagine, and it is utterly disqualifying," Biden said. "Anyone who is responsible for plunging and ensnaring America in this crisis -- anyone who could do so without an ounce of shame or a shred of empathy -- should not be president." 

Biden said that the situation could still get "markedly worse" as the president and Republicans "move within striking distance of destroying the Affordable Care Act once and for all."

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold held a news conference today to discuss the status of the state’s early voting.

Griswold reported that 2.2 million Coloradans have already cast a ballot, pointing out that is 80% of the total 2016 turnout.

“Colorado leads the nation in voter access. The Colorado election model is very straightforward, you register to vote, then every voter is mailed a ballot and you can, at that point, drop it off to one of the hundreds of drop boxes or voting centers across the state, or even go register and vote in person until 7 p.m. on Election Day. And we always look to increase accessibility, especially during a pandemic,” Griswold said.

At least 789,595 Democrats, 634,839 Republicans and 826,203 unaffiliated voters have cast a ballot, Griswold said.

Griswold said under Colorado law, county clerks may but are not required to open voting centers on the Sunday before Election Day. Adams County will open on Sunday and drop boxes are available to receive ballots until Nov. 3 at 7 p.m. local time.  

“Our office has been receiving quite a bit of inquiries about reporting a ballot results, how it will work is that after polls close on election night clerks will begin to upload results and we will report them out and continually update them through the night in the following days," Griswold said. "Counties are already processing ballots so the more early voting that happens, the more results will be ready on election night. Election night results are never final results with many activities happening after election day but we estimate that between 70% to 80% of results will be uploaded and reported by election night."

Florida elections and law enforcement officials detected a scheme that sought to register dozens of dead people to vote in Broward County, though the motive is not clear, according to the county elections office.

The county received about 50 voter registration applications sent in envelopes postmarked from Columbia, South Carolina, with no return address, documents show.

Broward County elections spokesperson Steven Vancore said the majority of the people named in the applications – who were listed as Democrats – were verified to be deceased and no votes were cast under their names.  

Vancore said that Florida allows people to register to vote by mail but he said the county receives state data about people who have died and marks those individuals in its files as ineligible to vote. He said the state requires a valid government ID to actually show up and vote, so he said this scheme “only got half the equation” necessary to vote. 

“Somebody went to great pains to exploit the system and it was caught,” said Vancore. “We don’t know if this person did this for pure chicanery or they were trying to alter the outcome of the election… but there appears to be no attempt that this person voted” 

The South Florida Sun Sentinel was first to report the applications. 

Timothy Donnelly, an assistant state attorney, wrote in an August letter to Broward’s supervisor of elections, Peter Antonacci, that he had launched an investigation into the applications and that there were “several potential criminal violations.” 

Another employee of the state attorney’s office wrote in an Oct. 22 email to Antonacci that the applications appeared to be filled out by one person but said, “Due to the fact that they were mailed from out of state with no return address I’m unable to identify the person who submitted these applications,” according to correspondence shared with CNN. 

Only five of the names in the applications were actively registered in the county at that time, according to that email.

Some of the applications were submitted under the names of people born more than a century ago – one person’s birthdate was listed as 1917, documents show. 

President Trump was wheels down in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at 3:46 p.m. ET, according to the pool. Trump is set to speak soon at a rally.  

The normal pre-rally playlist was interrupted several times by campaign messages playing on two large big screens. Most accused Biden of wanting to raise taxes, “destroy the suburbs” and defund the police.

While CNN is seeing many masks in the crowd, it still looks like the majority of people at the rally are maskless. It’s about 37 degrees and sunny out right now.

  

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden returned to Iowa Friday afternoon, a state he last left in February with a fourth-place caucus finish.

Introduced by Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield, Biden delivered his standard stump speech, but devoted a significant portion of his remarks to her race as he campaigns not only to beat President Trump, but also as he hopes to flip the Senate blue.  

Biden trolled Republican Sen. Joni Ernst after the moment in the Iowa Senate debate where she couldn’t name the break-even price of soybeans.  “And as we saw in a debate where a farmer's daughter knows a breakeven point for price of corn — crops. You’d think that’d be fairly basic,” he said. “That’s like my not knowing where the Delaware River was back home.”  

Biden shared a point of similarity between himself and Greenfield – they both lost their first spouse. “Theresa and I both lost our first spouses,” he said. “We’ve both been single parents to young kids. We both found a way back from broken places. We know that’s why you should elect this woman, Theresa, to the United States Senate. She sees, she understands, she believes. When she talks to you and you talk to her, you know, and I’m not just saying this, you know she understands, she gets it.”  

Biden slammed President Trump for trying to discourage people from voting and told the Iowans, “he will not be able to stop us at all.” 

He added that "despite Trump’s efforts," "We will not be silenced. 85 million people have already voted so far.” 

Biden concentrated much of his speech on the pandemic, and as he ticked through a list of grievances and statistics, he made its impact local. “The Iowa State fair was canceled for the first time since World War II,” he said. “And Donald Trump has given up.” 

After slamming the President for bragging that he didn’t pay his fair share of taxes, claiming it was "because I’m smarter, I know how to game the system,” Biden stated: "Well he ain't gonna be gaming the system anymore in a Biden administration. They’re gonna start paying." 

Biden ended his speech, “So in these final days, stay empowered, stay united, stay optimistic. Make a plan to vote, vote early. Vote on Election Day. Help get out the vote." 

The US Postal Service released a fact sheet on Friday detailing several “extraordinary measures” that the agency says it is undertaking to make sure mail-in ballots are delivered in time to get counted.

USPS says it will:

• Collect mail on Sunday for some routes (There is typically no Sunday collection). This is in addition to approving overtime hours, including some people doing maxed-out 12-hour shifts.
• Have early collections on Monday and Tuesday, and will deliver those ballots to election offices on the same day. Local carriers will also check for outgoing mail at “every residential mailbox.”
• Create special lines at post offices, including drive-thru options, for people who want their ballot postmarked and mailed. This means people with ballots will be prioritized.
• Facilitate after-hours “handoffs” of ballots to election offices. These handoffs will occur after the post office closes for the day but before the polls close, so ballots can still be counted.
• Try to intercept any ballots with misprinted barcodes that determine where the mail is funneled through the USPS system. If these issues are caught early, it would speed up processing times.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris gave her usual stump speech in Fort Worth, Texas, Friday. She addressed a crowd seated in white chairs that were set far apart and appear to have been provided by the campaign.

“Today is the last day of early voting in Texas, and you all have been doing your thing!” she told the crowd. “What did I hear, what is it, nine million people have voted so far, early voting in Texas! Nine million?!”

Harris reminded voters to continue their enthusiasm through Election Day. “Now we know this is no time to let up on the pedal though, right?”

Harris continued, saying, “people are committed, and so today is the last day of early voting in Texas, we want to make sure that we see it through, and then let’s make sure that on election day, everybody we know has made sure that their voice, their powerful voice, is represented in this election through their vote”

Toward the end of her remarks, the senator gave voters another reason to consider the Biden-Harris ticket.

“Everything is at stake. Like let’s think about where we are, we talked about it in terms of these crises, let's talk about it in terms of these 545 babies who right now have been orphaned because of a failure of the United States government to reunify them with their parents! Let's talk about a nation under this administration that had a policy of separating children from their parents at the border!”

Earlier today: Texas surpassed the state's total turnout from the 2016 general election with one more day of in-person early voting remaining Friday ahead of Election Day. Over 9 million people have voted early in the state.

Texans cast 8.96 million ballots in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Texas secretary of state's website.

The high turnout this election so far accounts for more than half — about 53% — of registered voters in the Lone Star State. The number of total registered voters has grown 12% since 2016 — almost 1.9 million people.