Four Days Out: Trump Escalates His Legal Challenges As 46 Million Vote Early — And The Pope Casts A Ballot

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump stepped up legal efforts that could help his fellow Republicans challenge results in next week’s midterm elections, and scrambled his schedule for the campaign’s final days on Friday, restoring planned rallies he had scrapped a day earlier, Reuters reported. With four days left before the November 3 election, early voting has already outpaced the whole of the 2022 midterms — and among the more than 46 million Americans who had voted by Friday morning was Pope Leo, the first pontiff ever to cast a ballot in a US election.

The Alaska Lawsuit, Amended

The Justice Department filed an amended lawsuit in Alaska on Thursday seeking to block the certification of the state’s Senate result in the event of a narrow Republican loss, citing a New York Times report that Democratic operatives recruited a spoiler candidate with a nearly identical name to the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan. In its revised filing, the department wrote that operatives for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola orchestrated a “sham campaign for the purpose of misleading Alaskan voters.” Alaska’s Senate contest may play a pivotal role in determining which party holds the majority: Republicans currently lead the Senate 53–47, and Democrats need to gain four seats to take control of Congress’s upper chamber.

California: The Subpoena Campaign Escalates

In California, meanwhile, the Justice Department is escalating its pressure campaign against state election officials, issuing subpoenas as part of a criminal probe into alleged voting by noncitizens, according to copies of documents seen by Reuters. The California fight is the sharp end of a broader federal effort the Daily has been following all week: more than 100 subpoenas for records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states, at least 44 of them grand jury subpoenas, and a ruling on Wednesday in which US District Judge David Carter refused to stop California counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters the department had flagged as likely noncitizens — a list state officials call unreliable. California, which historically takes longer than most states to count its ballots, holds 52 House seats, more than any other state. Legal experts told Reuters the records demands could be used to contest results in close races after Election Day.

46 Million Votes, And One From The Pope

Early voting outpaced 2022 totals well before the weekend. More than 46 million Americans had already voted early as of Friday morning, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, surpassing the total from the 2022 midterms with days of early voting and Election Day itself still to come. Among them was Chicago-born Pope Leo, who cast a ballot by mail, the Vatican press office announced on Friday — the first pontiff to vote in a US election. The announcement follows Leo’s critiques of Trump’s war on Iran and his treatment of immigrants, which the Pope has said deviate from the teachings of Christ. Texas, where early voting ends on Friday, had already recorded 5.8 million early votes by Thursday, 1.75 million more than in the whole of 2022.

Rallies Off, Then On Again

The president’s own schedule whipsawed. On Friday Trump restored planned rallies he had scrapped only a day earlier, and headed to campaign in Florida, hoping to galvanise supporters in a state he won handily in 2024 but where early voting has tilted toward Democrats. Nonpartisan analysts believe Trump’s Republicans are likely to lose their current majority in the House of Representatives, where Democrats need a net gain of five seats, with control of the Senate expected to be hard fought. It is against that arithmetic that the legal campaign is being read: challenges filed before a single result is known, in the two states — Alaska and California — where a pivotal Senate race and the slowest big count in the country leave the most room for a disputed finish.

Sources: Reuters — reporting of October 30, 2026, and of October 28–29, 2026 (subpoena campaign and California ruling); University of Florida Election Lab early-vote figures.