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(WASHINGTON) — After making a surprise appearance at her husband’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, Melania Trump spoke out on “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday, fiercely defending him against reported comments that he had expressed admiration for Hitler.

“He is not Hitler and his supporters stand behind him because they want to see the country successful. We see what kind of support he has,” she said of the former president.

Donald Trump has falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris called him Hitler (she cited reports that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said he had praised Hitler for doing some “good things” and wanted generals like Hitler’s).

Melania Trump called the criticism “terrible.”

The former first lady also said her husband was well aware of her position supporting abortion rights before her views were published in her new book.

Earlier this month, Melania Trump broke from the Republican Party by declaring those views in what some suggested was an eleventh hour move to court women before the election. She said on Tuesday that her husband knew about her stance long before the book came out.

“My husband knew my position, my belief, since the day we met. It was not a big surprise for him. I guess other people, the world did not know where my stances are,” she said. “He was not surprised, he knew about it.”

Discussing her Election Day plans, she indicated that she would vote on Tuesday. Donald Trump had floated voting early in a sign of unity with his party’s newer message of support on that subject — but he has continued to criticize the idea.

“We will be in Palm Beach and in the morning, we will go to vote, me and my husband, and then it will be a waiting time, period of waiting and we’ll see and I hope it is a success and a party in the evening,” Melania said, indicating that she hopes to know the results that same evening.

“I hope the election will be fair and everything will be selected as we say on Tuesday night,” she said.

“I feel good. We are feeling good. We are working hard. My husband, he’s all over the country, traveling, and as we saw, Sunday evening,” she said.

“I’m not anxious, this time is different. I have more experience and knowledge,” she said, discussing a potential Trump victory next week. “I was in the White House before. When you go in, you know what to expect. You know what kind of people you need to get, people on your team that have the same vision as me.”

Melania Trump again spoke in tandem with her husband, pointing to the economy and immigration as issues she hopes can be improved if he wins.

“Well, I would like to see country to be safe and prosperous, better economy and peace in the world. That is very important,” she said.

Commenting on her husband’s indictments, she said “it is part of it, part of the politics.”

“When he came to the White House for the first time when he was elected, I knew it would not be easy and I knew they would go after him. They did,” she said.

In her new book, Melania discussed feeling betrayed. Referring to what she called “misinformation” and “mistruths,” Melania highlighted tapes recorded by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and senior adviser who wrote in “Melania and Me” that the former first lady showed frustration over criticism on the administration’s family separation policy.

“It is betrayal. They show the world who they are and they know what they did,” Melania Trump said. “To tape the first lady of the United States on phone calls and release to the public and edit phone calls, it is disgrace and should never happen to anybody.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Election officials in Vancouver, Washington, are encouraging voters to check the status of their absentee ballots after an arsonist lit a ballot drop box on fire on Monday morning, damaging hundreds of ballots one week before Election Day.

While incidents of bad actors targeting ballot drop boxes are rare, experts told ABC News that the infrastructure surrounding absentee voting over the last decade has allowed election officials to be prepared for such incidents, through the use of 24-hour surveillance, fire suppression systems, and advanced ballot tracking software.

“These are the types of scenarios that election officials are staying up at night thinking about and have been thinking about for years and as part of their contingency planning,” said Claire Woodall-Vogg, the former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. “While it’s very rare, it’s something that your election official has definitely thought about.”

Monday’s arson attack — which destroyed hundreds of ballots in Vancouver, Washington and three in Portland, Oregon — follows other incidents last week when ballots in Florida and Arizona were damaged in transit. Phoenix officials also arrested a man for arson last week after he allegedly lit a fire inside a USPS collection mailbox, destroying five ballots, and federal prosecutors in Florida charged another man last week for allegedly disposing of hundreds of pieces of election mail, including at least one ballot.

Here’s what to know about dealing with a ballot that’s been damaged.

How can voters find out if their ballot is impacted?

Voters who suspect their ballot might be impacted should contact their local election office to confirm if their ballot has been received, according to Brian Hinkle, senior voting policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project.

Forty-seven states offer free ballot tracking services, allowing voters to confirm if their ballots have been mailed, received and counted. In Clark County, Washington — where Vancouver is located — voters can track their ballots through the VoteWA online tool.

“If they don’t receive a message that their ballot has been accepted for counting or even received by the county office to be accepted, they’re going to know something’s wrong,” said Steve Olsen, the president of BallotTrax, a software company whose ballot tracking service covers 28% of American voters.

When possible, election officials will also attempt to contact any voter they believe may be impacted by an incident to ensure their ballots are received or to help with a replacement ballot. Because the USPS recommends that voters mail their ballot by Oct. 29 to ensure it is received in time, some voters who request replacement ballots may need to vote in person rather than attempt to vote by mail again.

“There are systems in place in every state, with every legal system, to make sure that someone’s vote wouldn’t be taken away from them by such a criminal act,” said Woodall-Vogg.

How are election officials able to track individual ballots?

According to Olsen, election officials are able to track individual ballots by using “intelligent mail barcodes” that are embedded in envelopes for absentee ballots.

“Voters can track their ballots similarly to how they would track package delivery,” said Hinkle.

The barcodes — which are printed on the envelopes sent to voters, as well as the return envelopes for the ballots themselves — allow voters to track when their absentee ballot is mailed out, sent back, and received by election officials.

The tracking technology cannot see how a ballot has been filled out.

“Basically, what we’re doing is tracking the envelopes,” said Olsen. “We have no access to the ballot.”

BallotTrax works with election offices in 546 counties across the United States, covering 72 million voters and tracking over 240 million ballots. Created in 2009 to assist the city of Denver its elections, the company expanded tenfold in 2020 when large swaths of the country moved to mail-in voting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Individual counties foot the bill for the BallotTrax service, which allows voters to opt-in to receive free updates about their ballot status, according to Olsen. Even if a voter does not opt in to tracking, election offices can still track ballots to identify issues.

Once a ballot makes it to a local election office and is removed from its return envelope, the ballot is no longer identifiable to a particular voter, preserving the anonymity of the vote.

“Once the ballot is pulled out of the envelope, where all of the identification marks are on it, it becomes anonymous at that point,” Olsen said.

What happens to damaged ballots?

If a ballot is damaged in transit but still recognizable, election officials can attempt to remake the ballot so that it can be fed into a voting machine. Bipartisan teams are involved in the process known as “ballot duplication.”

“The election workers will reconstruct the ballot to preserve the voters’ intent and translate it onto a clean new ballot,” Hinke said.

If a voter suspects their ballot might be damaged, they should contact their local election office to confirm if their ballot has been received or if they need to request a replacement ballot.

Are ballot drop boxes safe?

Despite the recent high-profile incidents, ballot drop boxes are still one of the most secure ways to cast a ballot, according to experts.

Most ballot drop boxes are tamper proof, bolted to the ground, under 24-hour surveillance, and include fire suppression systems. In most areas, the ballots themselves are picked up by two-person teams.

“We have a chain-of-custody system in place so that we know when we picked up the ballots and when we dropped them off, and all the ballots have barcodes on them, so that they’re secure,” said George Dreckmann, a longtime poll worker in Milwaukee. “So the drop box system is as safe as putting it in the mail, and in some cases, might even be safer.”

Drop boxes in many states have fire suppression systems that extinguish fires using powder rather than water, preventing further damage to the ballots. While the fire suppression system failed to work effectively during Monday’s arson attack in Clark County, election officials credited the fire suppression system with saving over 400 ballots in neighboring Multnomah County, Oregon.

“These boxes are very secure, and voters should be able to trust using them,” said Hinkle.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(TALLAHASSEE, F.L.) — In just one week, voters in Florida will head to the polls to decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida constitution, through a ballot measure that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration have spent months fighting in the courts.

If passed, Amendment 4 — officially titled “The Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion” — would block any law from restricting an abortion before fetal viability, which is typically around 24 weeks, according to experts. The amendment would repeal the state’s current six-week abortion ban that was signed into law after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

Florida is one of 10 states that will have reproductive rights-related questions on the ballot, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade left the issue up to the states.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that 46% of those Floridians polled support the measure, while 38% are against it, with 16% refusing to answer or saying they don’t know. To pass on Nov. 5, the ballot measure will require the approval of 60% of those casting votes.

The governor and his allies have been waging an intense campaign against the ballot initiative.

“When you’re dealing with constitutional amendments, your default should always be no,” DeSantis said at a press conference last week, where he was joined by a dozen doctors. “You can always alter normal policies and legislation. Once it’s in the constitution, that’s forever. You really have zero chance of ever changing it.”

Earlier this month, the Florida Department of Health sent letters to television stations across the state — including ABC-affiliated stations — asking them not to air an ad supporting the ballot initiative and threatening criminal charges against broadcasters that did not comply. The ad featured a Florida mother describing how she was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago, when she was 20 weeks pregnant.

“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” Florida resident Caroline Williams said in the ad, saying that she believes she would be dead if she had been diagnosed under the sate’s current six-week abortion ban, which went into effect earlier this year.

After Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group behind the ballot initiative, sued the state for threatening “criminal proceedings” against the broadcast stations, a federal judge issued a restraining order against Florida’s surgeon general, prohibiting the Department of Health from threatening the stations.

“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in the ruling.

John Wilson, the Department of Health attorney who signed the letters to the television stations, resigned two weeks ago, stating in a signed affidavit that attorneys for DeSantis wrote the letters and directed him to send them under his name.

“I resigned from my position as General Counsel in lieu of complying with directives … to send out further correspondence to the media outlets,” Wilson said in the affidavit. “The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment. Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”

Critics of DeSantis say the letter threatening broadcasters may not have been his administration’s only attempt at intimidation.

Last month, two Florida residents reported that law enforcement from the Office of Election Crimes & Security, a unit created by DeSantis in 2022, knocked on their doors and asked them about petitions they had signed to get the amendment on the November ballot, the Miami Herald reported.

“I had indeed signed a petition seeking to have the right to an abortion placed on the ballot in Florida,” Isaac Menasche, one of the residents, said in a Facebook post. “The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was [the officer] had a folder on me containing my personal information.”

DeSantis defended the actions by the Election Crimes unit, saying at a press conference last month that there were “a lot of complaints” about one group that was supporting Amendment 4.

“They’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” DeSantis said of the Elections Crimes unit. “They’re following the law.”

The Election Crimes unit also released a report last month alleging that Floridians Protecting Freedom committed petition fraud to reach the 891,523 signatures needed to place the amendment on the ballot. The group has denied any wrongdoing.

“These lawsuits, coming on the heels of the State of Florida’s latest attempt to undermine Floridians’ right to vote on Amendment 4, are desperate,” said Lauren Brenzel, director of the “Yes on 4” campaign supporting the amendment. “Ask yourself, why is this happening now — over half a year after over 997,000 petitions were verified by the state of Florida and with less than a month until the election — that these anti-abortion extremists want to relitigate the petition-collection process?”

“It’s because our campaign is winning and the government and its extremist allies are trying to do everything they can to stop Floridians from having the rights they deserve,” Brenzel said.

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