Politics

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A week after securing his reelection to the U.S. Senate, Republican Sen. John Kennedy said Monday that he is “giving serious consideration” to entering the 2023 Louisiana governor’s race.

In a statement, Kennedy said he will be announcing “soon” whether he will run for governor or not.

Current Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is unable to seek a third consecutive term due to term limits — opening a huge opportunity for Republicans to take control of the state’s highest ranking position. Even though the state legislature is dominated by Republicans, Louisiana is the only state in the Deep South with a Democrat for governor.

“I’ve spent my life and career serving the people of Louisiana,” Kennedy said in a news release. “But we can’t deny that our great state is facing serious challenges. To meet those challenges, Louisiana families deserve a governor who can lead our state and help solve our toughest problems.”

Kennedy’s statement comes less than a week after he easily clinched a second six-year Senate term, fending off 12 challengers and avoiding a runoff. The senator has proven to be popular in Louisiana and on Capitol Hill, raising $36 million in his reelection bid — 10 times as much as his Democratic challengers combined.

“Over the last year, Louisianians have asked me time and time again to come home to serve as governor during these difficult times,” Kennedy said Monday.

The highly anticipated 2023 gubernatorial race is expected to attract multiple strong GOP candidates, but so far only Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has officially announced his bid. Landry, a conservative Republican and staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, has already received an early endorsement from the Louisiana Republican Party last week — an announcement that sparked outrage from potential candidates who have yet to officially throw their hats into the ring.

A list of Republicans interested in the governor’s seat is slowly growing, with the election just 11 months away.

Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser confirmed to reporters in August that he plans to join the race and hit the campaign trail in 2023. Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder told supporters in January he also plans on running for governor.

Along with Kennedy, other Republicans who have indicated that they are considering running for the state’s highest position are U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves and state Sen. Hewitt.

It remains unclear who will emerge as a Democratic candidate.

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PHOENIX (AP) — When the Republican candidate for Arizona governor accused the state’s most populous county of “slow-rolling” the vote count to skew early election results, a local official fired back.

“Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this, when they’re working 14 to 18 hours” every day, said Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors.

Gates and other Maricopa County election officials have aggressively batted down rumors and slanted and false claims as vote counting has come under intense scrutiny in the battleground state. The accusations have come in all types and at all hours from former President Donald Trump and his supporters, Republican candidates and voters.

“Sadly, there continues to be a lot of misinformation from all different sources that are out on social media right now,” Gates said. “So that’s why we have to continue to do this.”

Election officials have had two years to hone their game.

In 2020, Maricopa County landed in the national spotlight while certifying results amid false claims that the election was stolen from Trump. The following year, it underwent an “audit” pushed by Republicans in the state Senate, which ended with a report validating Biden’s win.

“That was just a constant flow of misinformation that we became adept at responding to,” Gates said. “We began to understand the importance of responding to that misinformation.”

In May, county officials began talking publicly about what to expect in the upcoming midterm elections. They have held regular news conferences since early October, and since Election Day officials have briefings nearly every day. They also have a large public affairs team that can quickly respond to new or renewed claims of fraud or mismanagement.

One persistent claim started when Lake, who is trailing Democrat Katie Hobbs by a percentage point with less than 200,000 votes left to count, accused the county of “slow-rolling” the count.

Lake and other Republicans say the county has timed vote releases so Democratic areas of the metro Phoenix area are released first. Gates has spent days explaining how that’s not happening and is not possible. In truth, the county processes ballots using a first-in, first out system.

That means mail-in ballots that are dropped off at the polls on Election Day are processed in the order they are received at the county’s election headquarters.

“That’s how we do this,” Gates said Saturday. “We’re not picking them from certain parts of town. In fact, we can’t do that, because we have a vote center model.”

Vote centers mean any voter can walk into any polling place across the metro area to cast a ballot in-person or drop off their early ballots. And because ballots dropped off at vote centers are kept together for processing, the votes could be from anywhere. He called the allegations “irrelevant” and an “incredible distraction.”

“So let’s say we have someone who lives in Gilbert, but they work in Surprise,” Gates explained on Saturday. “They go to the vote center in Surprise on their lunch hour. Where’s that from?”

A record 290,000 of those ballots were dropped off at the county’s 223 vote centers on Election Day and are now being processed. As of Monday morning, the county had between 185,000 and 195,000 ballots to count, while nearly 1.4 million in-person and early ballots had been tabulated.

Gates said the audit taught the board and other county leaders the importance of battling misinformation quickly and accurately.

He and county Recorder Stephen Richer have taken the lead, with Democratic Sheriff Paul Penzone also taking the podium at times. Gates is a lawyer who for years represented the GOP during county elections. Penzone said the constant unfounded claims have forced Gates and Richer to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining why they are wrong.

“You know, what’s the saying, a lie travels around the world … 10,000 times before the truth even gets started?” Penzone said Saturday. “That’s what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing people empowered by saying things that make them feel good and they’re not accountable for it and they lie.”

David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, praised county election officials and Gates in particular for their rapid and consistent responses.

“They’re not doing a good job, they’re doing an outstanding job,” Becker said. “I’ll tell you, I think Bill Gates and his colleagues have been the best of American governance, not just in the last week, but over the course of the past several years while they’ve been running elections in Maricopa County.”

The Republican Party of Arizona has complained about Election Day issues and the prolonged vote count, which is normal in Arizona. Party Chair Kelli Ward complained about ballot-counting machines that could not always read the ballots. The 17,000 affected ballots were instead taken to the county’s central facility. Black bags of those ballots were stacked for processing Monday.

Not every claim is a lie, but the accusations have answers that make sense. On Friday night, losing Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters accused the county of mixing up counted ballots with those that could not be tabulated by the vote center machines at least twice. He demanded that the more than 1.4 million ballots that had already been tabulated be recounted, calling it “a giant disaster.”

Megan Gilbertson, the spokeswoman for the county elections department, told The Associated Press that election workers at two vote centers did combine voted ballots with a batch that could not be read by the on-site tabulators, but that the mix-up did not lead to double-counted or uncounted ballots because the department has systems in place to deal with such occurrences.

“Because ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and reconcile the total ballots against check-ins to ensure it matches,” she wrote less than two hours after Masters made the statement. “This is done with political party observers present and is a practice that has been in place for decades.”

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections

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The movement for “parents’ rights” saw many of its candidates come up short in this year’s midterm elections. But if history is any guide, the cause is sure to live on — in one form or another.

Activists through the generations have stood up for a range of things in the name of parents’ rights in education.

Over the last century, the term has been invoked in disputes related to homeschooling, sex education and even the teaching of foreign languages in schools.

In politics today, many U.S. parents have joined a conservative movement pushing for state legislation giving parents more oversight of schools. At issue are library books and course material, transgender students’ use of school bathrooms and the instruction of topics related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won election last year with his slogan “Parents matter.” The GOP embraced the message, with conservative PACs funneling millions of dollars to school board races on the coattails of frustration over remote learning and school mask mandates.

Here is a look at how movements for “parents’ rights” have evolved over the decades.

HOW HAS THIS COME UP IN THE PAST?

For nearly as long as there have been public schools in the U.S., there has been concern among some parents, and conservatives in particular, about influences on children.

In the 1950s, groups of parents monitored schools closely for any signs of communist infiltration. In the same decade, amid the start of desegregation, large numbers of families in the South began enrolling children in private schools rather than have them in integrated public schools.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court cited parental rights when it allowed Amish families to exempt their children from high school, in Wisconsin v. Yoder. The court acknowledged it was an exceptional case since the Amish live separately and self-sufficiently, said Joshua Weishart, a lawyer and professor at West Virginia University.

In lawsuits stretching back to the 1920s, courts have affirmed the rights of parents to direct their children’s education. But they also have emphasized there’s a balance to be struck with the state’s obligation to protect children’s welfare, Weishart said.

Part of being a democracy is educating all American kids, Weishart said.

“The state really does have a constitutional duty to democratize school children, and that’s never been disputed that the state has that obligation,” he said.

WHAT DO EARLIER MOVEMENTS HAVE TO DO WITH TODAY’S DEBATES?

One commonality has been questions about what schools should teach related to sex and gender identity.

In the 1990s, a movement backed by evangelical conservatives sought to limit sex education in schools. Conservative leaders also encouraged like-minded candidates to run for school board, expressing concerns about the morals taught in schools and growing acceptance of LGBTQ rights.

Some of those candidates won election, but the communities pushed back against attempts at extreme changes, said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, who has studied those school board battles. By the early 2000s, many conservative Christian families had begun leaving public schools for homeschooling or other options, she said.

“Parents’ rights always existed in that you can pull your kid out of something,” said Michael Barth Berkman, a political science professor at Penn State.

Now, he said, parents are going further — keeping their kids in the public school, but pushing to determine the curriculum.

WHAT DO OPPONENTS SAY?

Critics say the policies emerging from the parents’ rights movement threaten to make schools less welcoming places for students of color and others who’ve benefited from inclusion efforts.

The proposals promote a false narrative that parents don’t have rights, said Sharon Ward, a senior policy adviser at Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center. A legislative proposal in Pennsylvania, she said, could allow objections by parents to impose limits on what is taught.

“Rather than empower parents, the bill will impose some parents’ views on other parents,” Ward said.

Across Virginia, student activists held school walkouts in September to protest Youngkin’s proposed changes to the state’s guidance on transgender student policies. New rules there would parental sign-off on the use of any name or pronoun other than what’s in a student’s official record.

Some opponents see an agenda to hollow out public education through vouchers and other measures.

“I would say that part of the game plan here is to just sort of discredit schools and to discredit the public school system,” Berkman said. “It’s painting them as horrible, evil places where all of these really bad, ugly things are going on and have to be stopped.”

HAS THIS GOTTEN TRACTION IN STATE LEGISLATURES?

In the last two years, legislation focusing on parents’ rights has appeared across the country, with mixed success.

The bills largely seek to codify that parents are responsible for the care, custody and direction of their child’s education. Discussions around them have focused on parents’ access to curriculum, bans on critical race theory and transgender students’ use of bathrooms, among other issues.

At the federal level, legislation introduced last year as the Parental Rights Protection Act by a Republican congressman would have barred COVID-19 vaccination requirements for children.

Several states have enacted the legislation like Georgia, Arizona, and Florida — but it has stalled or been struck down in other states like North Carolina and Missouri.

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Brooke Schultz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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U.S. Catholic bishops begin their fall meeting Monday and will be electing new leaders — a vote that may signal whether they want to be more closely aligned with Pope Francis ‘ agenda or not.

Several of the 10 candidates to be the next president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are part of its powerful conservative wing, and have not fully embraced some of the pope’s priorities, such as focusing more on the marginalized than on culture-war battles.

The USCCB also will be marking the 20th anniversary of its adoption of policies designed to root out sexual abuse and abusers in the priesthood — measures adopted amid the white-hot scandals of 2002 when The Boston Globe exposed widespread abuse and cover-up.

Outside groups are calling on the bishops to use the anniversary to renew efforts to help survivors heal from abuse, increase lay involvement and consider making another apology to victims.

But the official highlight of this week’s meeting in Baltimore is the election of the next USCCB president, who will succeed Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles.

Usually this is a formality, with the bishops elevating the conference’s vice president to the post. But this year’s election is wide open because the current VP — Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron — will turn 75 soon, making him ineligible to serve.

The 10 candidates range from the relatively moderate Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle to San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, a staunch conservative. Cordileone made headlines this year by barring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Franciscan, from receiving Communion in the archdiocese because of her support for abortion rights.

There is no clear-cut front runner, though some Catholic media outlets on both sides of the ideological spectrum have identified Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Services as a strong contender.

The candidates were nominated by their fellow bishops, who bypassed several of their colleagues who have been elevated to cardinal by Pope Francis.

It remains to be seen if the bishops will make another apology for the sex abuse crisis during the meeting, but they have a time of prayer and reflection in observance of the charter’s 20th anniversary scheduled. Bishops have voiced remorse for the scandal at various points over the past two decades.

A coalition of lay advocacy groups organized an online petition pushing for a new apology that has gained more than 1,100 signatures.

The petition acknowledges the bishops’ June 2002 public contrition in the preamble to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the document of reforms they passed in response to the scandal. The petition also calls for an audit of a new reporting system for complaints against bishops — enacted in 2019 to close a prior loophole in the charter — and for laypeople to play a greater role in such investigations.

While 20 years ago the bishops apologized for “too often failing victims and the Catholic people in the past,” petition organizer Kevin Hayes said many don’t know or remember that. He cited Pope Francis’ trip this summer to Canada, where Francis said he was “deeply sorry” to Indigenous survivors of abusive and culturally destructive residential schools.

“This is a good opportunity to not only remind people the bishops had apologized but reaffirm that apology,” said Hayes, of Catholics for Change in Our Church. The Pennsylvania group was created after a 2018 grand jury report into abuse in the church.

Gomez reflected on the milestone year in June, the month the charter passed in 2002.

“This is not a time of celebration, but a time of continued vigilance and determination,” said Gomez, in a statement. “We remain firm with Pope Francis’ commitment, ‘that everything possible must be done to rid the Church of the scourge of the sexual abuse of minors and to open pathways of reconciliation and healing for those who were abused.’”

But David Clohessy, a longtime leader in the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, isn’t among those calling for a new apology: “All the apologies on Earth don’t keep a single kid safe. Promptly suspending molesters and harshly disciplining enablers, those steps both protect kids now and help survivors heal.”

He was present at the 2002 Dallas meeting, heard then-USCCB President Wilton Gregory, now a cardinal and theb archbishop of Washington, share a litany-like confession of bishops’ failures and coverups, and was given time to speak.

Clohessy said that for all the charter’s reforms – which banned any abusers from ministry for even a single offense – its fatal flaw is that it doesn’t punish those who covered up abuse. In a few cases, bishops have resigned amid revelations of cover-up but have rarely been punished.

“This may sound dreadfully cynical, but I hope there’s never another bishop who apologizes,” said Clohessy. “I think apologies in this crisis lull Catholics into complacency. Worse, they imply that everything’s fixed.”

Steven Millies, an expert on the Catholic Church in the U.S., called Gregory’s 2002 apology a historic moment and a powerful gesture, but said in an email that another highly visible one would not be amiss, especially since abuse revelations have continued.

“It’s a terrible mistake to treat the way the church failed its people as a solved problem because it is not a solved problem, even as the Charter turns 20,” said Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

He considers the charter a good faith effort by the conference, which he said has no authority, but only “modestly successful” because each bishop gets to decide to what extent they follow it.

“This is a church controlled more by individual bishops, and the Charter could not overcome that obstacle. That good faith is not really enough,” he said.

Once the new president is elected, one outside Catholic group plans to send the conference a slate of restorative justice proposals developed with clergy sex abuse survivors who still love and participate in the church, said the Rev. Thomas Berg, group member and moral theology professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, in an email.

The proposals include developing a national center to equip the church in restorative justice practices, creating a permanent healing garden, instituting an annual day of prayer and penance for healing and reconciliation and initiating trauma-informed training for clergy, lay leaders and others.

They hope embracing restorative justice could begin a “sea change in the institutional Church’s response to the crisis–toward new approaches that can promise deeper healing,” Berg said.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer has won the open U.S. House seat in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, flipping the district for the GOP in a hard-fought contest that drew millions in outside money to the state.

Chavez-DeRemer’s victory makes her the first Latina congresswoman from Oregon, a distinction also sought by 6th District Democratic candidate Andrea Salinas. That race remained too early to call.

The district was previously held for seven terms by moderate Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader and was targeted by the GOP, which saw the 5th as vulnerable after the long-time incumbent’s primary defeat by progressive candidate Jamie McLeod-Skinner.

McLeod-Skinner conceded the race Sunday, saying in a statement that she had called to congratulate Chavez-DeRemer.

“While there are still votes to count, it appears that the ultimate result will not be the outcome we worked so hard to achieve,” she wrote.

The 5th was significantly redrawn following the 2020 U.S. Census to include parts of more conservative central Oregon, and trended slightly less blue this election. Democrats still hold a slight advantage in voter registration, but both campaigns focused on the roughly one-third of unaffiliated voters in the district.

Chavez-DeRemer, a small business owner and former mayor of the Portland suburb of Happy Valley, built her campaign around concerns over homelessness and rising crime in Portland, which neighbors some of the district’s suburban communities.

McLeod-Skinner, an attorney and regional emergency coordinator, previously ran unsuccessfully for Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District in 2018. She sought to highlight Chavez-DeRemer’s shifting stance on abortion and painted her as a far-right candidate who was too conservative for the district.

The super PAC linked to House Republicans, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent more than $2.7 million on several ads in the district, which stretches from Portland’s affluent southern suburbs to the central high desert city of Bend.

Elsewhere in Oregon’s U.S. House races, Democrats maintained control of the 1st, 3rd and 4th Districts, and the GOP kept the sprawling 2nd, which encompasses nearly two-thirds of the state.

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This story has been updated to correct that McLeod-Skinner previously ran unsuccessfully in the 2nd Congressional District in 2018, not the 3rd District.

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PHOENIX (AP) — The nation’s last undecided race for governor got even closer Sunday as Democrat Katie Hobbs’ lead shrank against Republican Kari Lake in the race to lead Arizona, but it was too early to call.

Hobbs led by 26,000 votes, a 1 point margin, down about 10,000 votes from a day earlier.

Lake has never led in the race but insists that she’ll take the lead as early ballots dropped off at polling places are added to the tally. She won a majority of the 99,000 votes reported in Maricopa County on Sunday, but it’s not clear if she’ll be able to narrow the gap with the roughly 160,000 remaining to be counted statewide.

The Associated Press has not yet called the race because there are still too many votes left to count to conclude Hobbs’ lead is insurmountable.

Democrats won the races for U.S. Senate and secretary of state in Arizona, but Lake is doing better than the Republicans in those races. A former television anchor, Lake is well known in much of the state and drew a fervent following among supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Lake is one of the most prominent election deniers running for office this year. Her supporters have been highly critical of the protracted vote count in Arizona, but it is nothing new in a state where the overwhelming majority of people vote on ballots they receive in the mail. Maricopa County officials reported that a record number of early ballots were dropped off at the polling place on Election Day, delaying the count while officials verify they’re legitimate.

Republican Rep. David Schweikert took the lead for the first time but was less than 900 votes ahead of Democrat Jevin Hodge in a suburban Phoenix House district that Democrats have hoped could help them defy expectations and win a majority in the House.

In southern Arizona, Republican Juan Ciscomani maintained his narrow lead over Democrat Kirsten Engel for an open House seat.

Both races were too early to call.

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The Associated Press called the Nevada Senate race for Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on Saturday after a batch of votes from the Las Vegas area gave her a 5,000-vote lead that the AP determined she would not relinquish.

The win for Cortez Masto also meant Democrats would keep control of the Senate.

The AP concluded Cortez Masto’s lead would carry even if Republican Adam Laxalt made gains in rural Nevada counties that are still counting votes.

Her victory allows the Democrats to retain control the Senate with at least 50 seats because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote even without a victory in the Georgia runoff in December.

Cortez Masto benefited in mail ballot counting since Election Day, winning in Clark County, which accounts for three-quarters of Nevada’s population. Laxalt saw his lead of some 19,000 votes after election night dwindle to nearly 900 on Saturday before the latest counted votes were added to the tally.

The AP determined Cortez Masto’s lead would carry through additional updates in Reno’s Washoe County as well as among provisional and “cured” ballots, or those with signature or date issues. Later on Saturday, Cortez Masto carried a batch of more than 10,000 ballots from Washoe by 56% to 40% and her lead grew to more than 6,500 votes.

TALLYING TIMELINE

Nevadans tend to vote early.

In elections from 2014 to 2018, more than half the total vote came from people who voted early in person or delivered absentee ballots.

Those categories accounted for nearly 90% of the vote in 2020’s presidential election.

The counties to watch are Clark (anchored by Las Vegas) and Washoe (which includes Reno). If the margin is large in Clark, and the winning candidate is also winning Washoe, it becomes tough for the trailing candidate to pick up enough votes to catch the leader, even if they do well in the remaining rural counties.

In a tweet Saturday, Laxalt acknowledged that Cortez Masto was performing better than Republicans expected in Clark County ballots counted over the past few days.

Here’s how the vote unfolded, starting with the most recent information:

SATURDAY, NOV. 12

—CLARK: Officials late Saturday released tallies from a batch of some 23,000 votes, which Cortez Masto won 61% to 36% for Laxalt. The batch put her in the lead by about 5,000 votes.

—WASHOE: In a batch of more than 10,000 votes late Saturday, the senator won 56% while Laxalt captured 40%.

FRIDAY, NOV. 11

—CLARK: The county tallies about 27,000 votes, over 63% of which go to Cortez Masto to Laxalt’s 33%. By Friday, Laxalt’s lead shrinks to more than 800 votes, down from a gap of over 8,000 votes statewide.

—WASHOE: Officials report nearly 11,000 votes counted, with the senator carrying about 54% of them to 43% for Laxalt.

THURSDAY, NOV. 10

—CLARK: About 12,000 votes are tallied Thursday, breaking roughly 62%-35% for Cortez Masto. Laxalt’s overall statewide lead at this point is about 8,000 votes.

—WASHOE: Nearly 40,000 votes get counted on Thursday in Washoe. They go overwhelmingly for Cortez Masto, 61% to 36%.

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 9

—CLARK: Officials count some 600,000 ballots, which tilt narrowly for Cortez Masto. She wins about 52% of them to Laxalt’s 46%. By the end of the day, his lead is more than 19,000 votes.

—WASHOE: Of the 130,000 ballots counted, Laxalt is the choice of over half the voters, while Cortez Masto carries 47%.

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Mike Catalini can be reached at http://twitter.com/MikeCatalini

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Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections. Follow AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Lexie Overstreet logged plenty of miles on foot, knocking on doors to try to persuade Kentuckians not to take away one of the last legal paths to restoring abortion rights in the state.

Now she’s hoping her side’s win at the ballot box Tuesday will convince the state’s highest court to throw out a sweeping abortion ban passed by the Republican-led legislature.

“It was great to wake up this morning and know that Kentuckians are on the same side as me,” the 21-year-old University of Louisville student and volunteer said after the election. “And know that the thousands of doors that I knocked aren’t going to be forgotten and that all those people I talked to, they cast their vote and their vote was heard.”

Whether those voices will resonate with the Kentucky Supreme Court, which is set to hear arguments for and against the ban Tuesday, hinges on legal arguments about whether state constitutional protections extend to a right to an abortion. With a hearing set for Tuesday, the case looms as the first legal test for abortion rights after midterm elections in which voters across the country came down firmly on the side of keeping abortion legal. No timeline has been given for a ruling.

In Kentucky, abortion rights supporters think the amendment’s rejection should be a consideration as the justices hear the case.

“My hope is that the Supreme Court will listen to the will of the people and know that the people have rejected extremism and rule accordingly,” Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, said in the days leading up to the pivotal court hearing.

Beshear, who is running for reelection next year, can take comfort in knowing that his position on abortion rights puts him squarely on the side of a majority of Kentuckians. But one of the GOP candidates hoping to take his job next year said the vote shouldn’t be a factor.

Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron said the result, though disappointing, didn’t change his belief that there is “no right to abortion hidden in the Kentucky Constitution.” Abortion policy, Cameron said, “belongs to our elected representatives in the General Assembly” to decide.

Right now it belongs to the courts, with attention shifting to the courtroom at the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, where the Supreme Court justices will hear arguments in the case.

Those arguments will center on a Louisville judge’s ruling from July, when he wrote that the state’s new, post-Roe abortion bans likely violate “the rights to privacy and self-determination” protected by Kentucky’s constitution. Judge Mitch Perry said it was not the court’s role to determine whether the state constitution contains the right to abortion, but whether the state’s restrictive laws violate freedoms guaranteed by its constitution.

It’s unclear how much impact, if any, the anti-abortion measure’s defeat will have on the court’s views on the case.

“It may well differ from justice to justice,” said University of Louisville law professor Samuel Marcosson. “Some of them may view the defeat of the initiative as a strong signal that Kentuckians believe there is and should be a right in the constitution, and this could empower those justices to rule that way. Others may say that it is at best an uncertain signal, and that it remains a task for them to determine the meaning of the constitution.”

Abortion opponents had hoped to shut off such a path through the courts. The amendment would have added “clarity and an extra level of protection against judicial activism,” said David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation, a faith-based organization opposed to abortion.

Currently, abortions are mostly on hold in Kentucky, based on a trigger law at the center of the case before the state Supreme Court. Approved by lawmakers in 2019, the ban took effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June by the U.S. Supreme Court. That law ended all abortions with narrow exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent disabling injury. There are no exceptions for rape or incest victims. The state’s high court in August kept the ban in place while it reviews the case. A separate six-week ban that Kentucky lawmakers approved also is being challenged.

Now abortion rights supporters hope the amendment’s defeat is a springboard to victory in court.

“It is an important step in continuing the legal fight for abortion access in this state,” said Rachel Sweet of Protect Kentucky Access, an abortion-rights coalition. “Moreover, it is a repudiation of the extreme anti-choice agenda that is out of step with most voters’ values and beliefs.”

Attorneys for the two abortion clinics left in Kentucky — both of them in Louisville, the state’s largest city — will ask the state’s high court for an injunction to allow abortions to resume while the case is litigated.

Meanwhile, abortion rights supporters secured wins elsewhere across the country. Michigan, California and Vermont voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. Voters in Montana rejected a ballot measure that would have forced medical workers to attempt lifesaving measures in the rare event of a baby born after an attempted abortion.

In Michigan, Democrats who took control of the Legislature for the first time in decades have signaled that affirming reproductive rights will be one of their top priorities in 2023.

Abortion rights supporters in Vermont are planning to ask the legislature to enact shield laws to protect Vermont providers that perform abortion services for out-of-state travelers.

In Kentucky, Cameron downplayed the anti-abortion amendment’s defeat in a post-election filing with the Supreme Court, saying the outcome “has no bearing on whether the court should create a Kentucky Roe v. Wade.”

“In short, because Kentucky voters chose to leave their Constitution as is, the constitutional text that the court must interpret to resolve this appeal is the same today as it was before” the vote, the Republican attorney general wrote.

But Overstreet, the University of Louisville student and abortion rights volunteer, said the voters’ rejection of the Kentucky amendment spoke volumes about where the people stand.

“I have family from Appalachia, and I grew up in the city,” she said. “People really underestimate Kentucky. People think that Kentucky is regressive. They think that Kentuckians don’t believe in one another. But that’s just absolutely not true. Kentuckians want abortion access. And that’s what this amendment has shown us.”

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Associated Press writers Wilson Ring in Stowe, Vermont; and Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report.

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Democratic control of the U.S. Senate was settled Saturday when Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada won reelection, but the U.S. House majority is still in question. Let’s see where things stand.

WHY HASN’T THE AP CALLED CONTROL OF THE HOUSE YET?

It’s simple: Neither party has yet reached the 218 seats needed to control the House.

The Associated Press has declared winners in most contests, but a handful are outstanding. Heading into Sunday, Republicans had 211 seats compared with 204 for the Democrats, leaving 20 undecided.

The AP does not make projections and will only declare a winner when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. In some contested races where a party or candidate has a history of consistent and convincing wins, The AP can use results from AP VoteCast — a survey of American voters aimed at determining why they voted how they did — to confirm a candidate’s victory, even as soon as polls close. But some races, as it is again this year, can take days or even weeks to call.

WHAT STATES ARE STILL COUNTING VOTES?

California, the country’s most populous state, has more undetermined contests than any other. A dozen races remain to be called there, with millions of votes left to count.

There are also close races in Colorado and Oregon, among others, including some tight enough that they could be headed to a recount.

In Alaska, where incumbent Democrat Mary Peltola won a special election this summer to fill an open House seat held for decades by Republicans, a second round of vote tabulating could take place.

That’s because Alaska has ranked choice voting in which voters rank candidates. If no one gets more than half of the votes cast on or before Nov. 8, the person with the fewest votes gets eliminated and voters’ choices count toward their second pick. The rounds continue until two candidates are left and the one with the most votes wins.

Peltola was leading Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich in a race too early to call.

WHAT OTHER CHALLENGES ARE THERE?

In 2020, former President Donald Trump challenged outcomes of the vote for president in states across the country. Those challenges failed in courts, though Trump continued to insist falsely that the race was stolen.

So far, nothing like those kinds of objections has materialized.

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Mike Catalini can be reached at https://twitter.com/mikecatalini

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Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

Follow AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Heading into this year’s midterms, voting rights groups were concerned that restrictions in Republican-leaning states triggered by false claims surrounding the 2020 election might jeopardize access to the ballot box for many voters.

Those worries did not appear to come true. There have been no widespread reports of voters being turned away at the polls, and turnout, while down from the last midterm cycle four years ago, appeared robust in Georgia, a state with hotly competitive contests for governor and U.S. Senate.

The lack of broad disenfranchisement isn’t necessarily a sign that everyone who wanted to vote could; there’s no good way to tell why certain voters didn’t cast a ballot.

Voter advocacy groups promoted voter education campaigns and modified voting strategies as a way to reduce confusion and get as many voters to cast a ballot as possible.

“We in the voting rights community in Texas were fearing the worst,” said Anthony Gutierrez, director of Common Cause Texas, on Wednesday. “For the most part, it didn’t happen.”

False claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump undermined public confidence in elections and prompted Republican officials to pass new voting laws. The restrictions included tougher ID requirements for mail voting, shortening the period for applying for and returning a mailed ballot, and limiting early voting days and access to ballot drop boxes.

There is no evidence there was widespread fraud or other wrongdoing in the 2020 election.

An estimated 33 restrictive voting laws in 20 states were in effect for this year’s midterms, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The most high-profile and sweeping laws were passed in Georgia, Florida, Iowa and Texas. Arizona also passed new voting rules, but those were largely put on hold this year or will take effect later.

Of the four states with major voting law changes in effect, a preliminary analysis shows a decline in turnout among registered voters in Florida, Iowa and Texas, while Georgia turnout declined slightly. Several factors can affect turnout, including voter enthusiasm and bad weather.

In Texas, the bumbling rollout of new voting restrictions in the state’s March primary resulted in officials throwing out nearly 23,000 mailed ballots as confused voters struggled to navigate new ID requirements.

But preliminary reports after Tuesday’s election showed rejection rates reverting to closer to more normal levels, which election officials attributed to outreach and mail voters figuring out the new rules. In San Antonio, county officials put the preliminary rejection rate at less than 2% — a sharp reversal from the 23% of mailed ballots they threw out in March.

Groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project, working through churches and other organizations, focused on ensuring voters knew how to properly complete their mail ballots under the law known as Senate Bill 1.

“As a Texas community we’ve worked very hard to prepare for SB1,” said Emily Eby, the group’s senior election protection attorney.

Florida last year added a host of new rules around mail and early voting. They included new ID requirements, changes to how many ballots a person can turn in on behalf of someone else and limiting after-hours access to drop boxes. This year, lawmakers created a controversial new office dedicated to investigating fraud and other election crimes.

Still, voting appeared to be relatively smooth this year, before and on Election Day. Election officials reported no major problems.

Mark Earley, president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, said the new laws did not greatly affect voter turnout or access this year, but said the rules, taken together, posed a challenge.

“When you put all of these together — the cumulative effect — it becomes confusing, difficult to communicate and educate the public about, difficult for the public to understand,” said Earley, who oversees elections in Tallahassee’s Leon County. “It becomes a big logistical and educational burden, and more hurdles for people to be able to jump over before they can get their ballots together.”

Iowa’s new law shortened the period for voters to return their mailed ballots, reduced polling place hours and early voting days, and prohibited anyone but close relatives, a household member or caregiver from dropping off someone else’s ballot.

More than 1.2 million voters cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election. State officials said it was the second highest in state history for a midterm, but voting groups expressed concern that Latino participation may have declined due to the changes.

“We historically have had a fair amount of Latino voters who did the absentee ballot, which allowed LULAC volunteers to pick up those early ballots and return them to the county election offices,” said Joe Henry, a board member of the Iowa chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

In Georgia, more votes were cast in this general election than in any prior midterm election — although with more voters on the rolls than four years ago, the actual turnout rate was lower.

Gabriel Sterling, interim deputy secretary of state, noted that most of the changes in the election law, known as Senate Bill 202, affected pre-Election Day voting — “and they blew away every record in that.”

He said more votes were cast early — both in person and by mail — than in any previous midterm election in the state. It was Election Day turnout that was lower than expected.

After Democrats won the 2020 presidential contest and two U.S. Senate runoff elections, the Republican-controlled Georgia Legislature passed a sweeping overhaul of the state’s election laws in 2021.

The law shortened the time period to request an absentee ballot and required voters to sign absentee ballot applications by hand, meaning they needed access to a printer. It also reduced the number of ballot drop boxes in the state’s most populous counties and limited the hours they were accessible.

Critics said the changes made it more difficult to cast mail ballots. Democrats urged people to vote early and in-person this year instead. Kendra Cotton, CEO of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, said she believes the election law did have a negative effect in a state where key races have been decided by narrow margins in recent elections.

“The narrative that’s out there is that SB202 was trying to depress the vote writ large, and we submit that that was not, in fact, the case,” she said. “It was trying to stop just enough people from voting that the electoral outcome here in Georgia would shift.”

This year, Republicans swept the statewide constitutional offices, and a Dec. 6 runoff will be held to decide the winner in the U.S. Senate race.

While she acknowledged there weren’t many problems on Election Day, Cotton said the law created a lot of “noise” that drained energy and resources from organizations such as hers.

“We’re having to go out and help voters fight to remain on the rolls,” Cotton said.

Voter advocacy groups already are mobilizing to support Georgia voters heading into the Dec. 6 Senate runoff. Previously, runoffs were held nine weeks after an election. The new law shortened that to just four weeks, a period that also leaves too little time for new voter registrations.

“These types of tactics aim to suppress votes,” Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org, said in a statement. “But Georgians have shown that they are ready and willing to navigate tough voting environments in order to make their voices heard.”

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Associated Press data journalist Aaron Kessler in Washington, D.C., and writers Kate Brumback in Atlanta; Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida; Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa; and Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

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