u. s. house

HENRICO, Va. — In-person voting for this year’s midterm elections began Friday, ushering in the final six weeks for Americans to decide which party they trust to lead Congress through a cost-of-living crisis, a prolonged war in Iran and other pressing issues.

Election administrators say they are prepared and confident the vote will be accurate and secure. Nevertheless, President Trump has continued with efforts to denigrate certain voting methods and reshape how elections are run, through court challenges, an expansive federal hunt for noncitizen voters and a pressure campaign to force election officials to share sensitive voter data.

Friday marked the start of early voting in Virginia. Voters in a handful of other states, including Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota, can cast absentee ballots in person, typically at a local election office or voting center. More expansive early voting is scheduled to begin in those and other states in the coming weeks.

At a voting location in Fairfax, Virginia, 18-year-old college student Sanya Singhal was among the first to vote early in person Friday morning, arriving well before the site opened to get in line.

“Why not just have a little fun in life, you know, try to be the first early voter?” she said. “I really want to participate in my democracy.”

At a voting location in suburban Richmond, a poll worker rang a bell as the building opened and about a dozen voters in line began to file in. Stephen Gura was excited to be the first.

“This election is critical. We need to stop the Trump agenda. We need to start electing people who will stand up for people in this district,” said Gura, who added that he voted for U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Shannon Taylor, the Democratic nominee against Republican incumbent Rob Wittman in the 1st Congressional District.

The Nov. 3 election includes votes for governor and state legislature in most states and will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House and Senate. If Democrats retake Congress, it will alter the trajectory of the final two years of Trump’s term, most likely leading to investigations and other oversight efforts.

Voting underway after unusual redistricting and Trump’s bid to control how elections are run

At the suburban Richmond voting center, a steady stream of voters flowed in and out for the first hour of early voting. William Curry, a 74-year-old retiree who described himself as a libertarian-leaning independent conservative, voted for Warner’s Republican challenger, Bert Mizusawa, and Wittman. Curry said he generally approves of the job Trump has done, apart from the war with Iran.

“He’s in a mess he can’t get rid of,” Curry said of the conflict.

On a rainy day in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Bill Goehring, 67, said he voted early at the county office because he will be traveling later. He voted for a mix of Democrats and independents, and said Trump’s “dictatorial tendencies are bad for America.”

The start of early voting comes at a time of deep angst among many Americans about issues including rising gas and grocery prices, the war in Iran, the looming risks of artificial intelligence and Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.

It also follows an unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House that began when Trump urged the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas to redraw its congressional map to help the party. California and other states followed.

The changes affect millions of people: Research shows 1 in 10 Americans this fall is a resident of a different congressional district than in 2024.

Those partisan efforts are expected to continue before the 2028 elections after a landmark ruling this year from the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the federal Voting Rights Act’s protections against racially discriminatory redistricting.

As the start of early voting approached, Trump was focused on efforts to assert federal control over election administration, even as the Constitution bestows the power to run elections on the states and, in some cases, Congress. The nation’s highest court rejected Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots this week, but several of his administration’s other efforts to influence the voting process and mine state voter lists for illegitimate voters continue.

Virginia’s attorney general said Thursday that Trump’s administration may have violated several of the state’s laws after a whistleblower accused federal employees of misrepresenting themselves on voter lookup tools to hunt for noncitizen voters. In a letter, Attorney General Jay Jones demanded that the Department of Homeland Security confirm in writing whether it had directed anyone to access Virginia voters’ information without first obtaining permission from those voters.

Trump for years has raised the specter of widespread noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, and this year is no exception. But despite his administration’s insistence that hundreds of thousands of people are illegally on voting rolls across the country, research continues to show noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare.

David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Republican president continues “his disinformation campaign and his attack on election officials.” But he said he thinks despite that and other challenges, “ultimately the process will hold as it has in past years.”

Advocates suggest voters cast their ballots early

Voting rights advocates have encouraged voters this year to cast mail ballots early, in part because of concerns about recent changes in U.S. Postal Service operations that could delay the application of postmarks to ballots.

“Voting early, whether in person or by mail, is good for all of our communities because it gives voters options, eases lines on Election Day and can even mean faster results,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local.

The top official at the U.S. Postal Service also encouraged voters who cast ballots by mail to get them in early.

“We say seven days,” postmaster general David Steiner said in an interview. “Everything is solved if people vote early.”

In a news briefing Thursday, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon urged people not to be swayed by stories they might have seen or read that cast doubt on election operations. They would be able to vote “just like they always have,” he said.

“I just want to reaffirm that Minnesota’s elections are fundamentally free, fair, accurate, honest and secure,” he said.

Swenson, Rankin and Raza write for the Associated Press. Swenson reported from New York and Raza from Sioux Falls, S.D. AP writer Mike Catalini in Philadelphia and AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Fairfax, Va., contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — For a third time, the U.S. House has voted to end the war in Iran, approving a war powers resolution that would halt President Trump’s ability to continue military action without congressional approval.

The roll call late Tuesday, 220-204, was similar to earlier efforts this summer, with a few more Republicans joining all Democrats voting to bring an end to the conflict. None of the resolutions have made it to the president’s desk, where Trump would almost certainly veto the measure.

“Remember when Donald Trump said that this war would last just a few weeks?” said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who served as a Marine during the Iraq War and pushed the resolution forward.

He said it’s time for Congress to “actually ask tough questions, as the Constitution directs us to do, rather than be subservient to another warmongering administration.”

Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned which military resources Democrats would want to remove from the region where he said Iran remains a threat.

Mast said Trump is against “forever wars, and that is what he is ending” — the decades of hostilities from Iran.

“They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” Mast said. “Enough is enough.”

Last war powers vote before the midterms

The action is likely the last House vote on the Iran war ahead of the midterm elections, where the conflict overseas is playing a substantial role in the political campaigns. The war that Trump launched Feb. 28 has dragged, with on-again, off-again deadly missile strikes being exchanged and causing havoc in the region for nearly seven months.

Lawmakers are heading home at the end of the week to campaign nearly full-time, with less than 50 days to go before the elections that will determine control of Congress as Democrats try to wrest power from Republicans.

Voters are confronting high prices, particularly for gas at the pumps, as the conflict disrupts the flow of oil resources through the vital Strait of Hormuz.

The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the war has cost more than $38 billion, as of Aug. 1, and is projected to be costing between $2 billion and $3 billion monthly, depending on the intensity of the fighting. The budget office projected inflation will be 0.5 percentage points higher than expected heading into 2027 due to the war.

Trump himself had promised not to involve the U.S. in foreign wars when he won a second term in the White House, and his actions against Iran are weighing on the Republican Party that controls the House and Senate. Most Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth fighting, according to an AP-NORC poll in July.

In the previous House actions, four Republicans voted to halt the war in Iran, but that number rose to seven in Tuesday’s war powers vote, including GOP lawmakers from battleground Iowa, Rep. Zachary Nunn and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and retiring Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.

They joined GOP Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky voting in favor of the war powers resolution, with all Democrats.

War powers being put to the test

Congress has tried repeatedly to alter the trajectory of the war against Iran, but efforts to limit the Trump administration’s military action remain a longshot so long as the president is able to fend off or veto the measures.

The House first approved a war powers resolution in June, and followed up with another one in July, all seeking to halt U.S. action in Iran. The Senate on its 10th try also approved a war powers resolution to end the conflict, but GOP senators quickly reversed course the next day after Trump berated them during a closed-door lunch.

While the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war, it also gives the president authority as the commander in chief to engage in some military actions. The War Powers Act, created in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, sought to put a more specific time limit on the president’s power, requiring congressional approval for sustained military actions after 60 or 90 days.

House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged at a press conference Tuesday the need to bring gas prices down.

But the Republican speaker said he believes the Iran conflict is entering a “new phase” as allies step up to help stabilize the region. When that happens, he said, “you’re going to see, as the president said, anytime gas prices will go down again, the cost of groceries will as well.”

Johnson said Trump expects the shift after the election, and the speaker added, “I’d love it to happen today.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic overhaul of the once-a-decade U.S. Census head count that could leave out millions of immigrants based on status and key racial and ethnic data, jeopardizing the allocation of resources and the country’s voting map.

The potential changes, announced Wednesday, would exclude undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and anyone without permanent status. Certain demographic questions from the traditional questionnaire would also be eliminated.

It echoes Trump’s previous idea to add a citizenship question to the 2030 census.

The U.S. Census Bureau, in a post on the Federal Register website, argued “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”

The census also “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the agency said. It also is considering nixing questions related to people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.

These changes would harm the quality of the data, said Beth Jarosz, a data researcher and vice president of the Association of Public Data Users. She called the proposals “unprecedented.”

“Not counting all of the people who reside here is actually where the real threat is,” Jarosz said. “If you think about all of the ways that census data are used.”

Census figures are traditionally used for an “apportionment count” to determine how many seats each state will have in the U.S. House of Representatives. That count also determines the number of votes in the Electoral College.

“You can imagine if we have undercounts or if we have people counted in the wrong place,” Jarosz said. “Then their political power or their political representation gets diluted.”

Immigrants of every status have historically been counted

Historically, the decennial census has not sought to conduct a full count of people by citizenship status, she added. It may come up in the Census’ periodic American Community Survey.

Getting an accurate count of immigrants of various statuses is useful when assigning resources for public health emergencies or natural or human-made disasters.

“If you don’t have a count of everyone who’s there, you’re not going to have the resources you need,” Jarosz said. “And that puts everybody at risk.”

Why race and ethnicity census data matters

Race-related questions have been on the once-a-decade census since 1790. Starting in 2000, the U.S. census began allowing people to identify by more than one race. A 2015 Pew Research Center study found that multiracial people in the U.S. were growing at a rate three times faster than the general population. By 2020, 33.8 million people in the U.S. identified as being more than one race, according to the census.

Race and ethnicity data is essential for researchers who gauge discrimination, crime rates and wealth gaps in communities of color.

Manjusha Kulkarni is co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, two advocacy groups that rely on census counts of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The proposed changes would have tremendous impact on the populations they serve, she said.

“It also seeks to exclude important demographic data from millions that enables lawmakers, health care providers, public safety officials and community advocates — really anyone who cares about the health, safety and well-being of all Americans — from having the necessary data to keep us safe and healthy,” Kulkarni said via text message.

Dropping race and ethnicity data as well as some immigrants sends a message that these communities don’t matter, she added.

Collecting data for the 2030 Census with all these missing elements would be detrimental, Jarosz said.

“These changes are like trying to land an airplane when you are in thick fog and someone has thrown paint across the front window and your instruments are also not working,” she said.

Tang writes for the Associated Press.