Today's D Brief: Voting surge; Trump vows ballot challenge; Helicopters broke regs during protest; 19 killed in Kabul; And a bit more.

We’re less than 24 hours away from Election day in the U.S. Have you voted? Or do you have a plan to vote on Tuesday? So far, more than 95 million Americans have cast their ballot, according to Reuters, which is “almost twice as many pre-election votes as were cast in the 2016 election,” NPR reported Sunday. 

Abnormal metrics in several places. Already, more Hawaiians and Texans have voted this year than they did in 2016; Montana was close to that point on Sunday, too. “The swing states of North Carolina, Florida and Georgia have also reached 91% or more of their 2016 vote totals,” according to NPR. 

Also not normal: Trump supporters reportedly blocked a major New York highway for a brief time on Sunday, The Hill and CNN reported. “Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond,” the New York Times reported Sunday. Further south, a Democratic rally in Georgia “was canceled shortly before it was scheduled to begin on Sunday” because organizers were concerned about a quote “large militia presence” from a nearby Trump event.

And in Texas, a “Trump Train” convoy of supporters surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus as it drove up I-35 on Friday. President Trump shared the video on social media shortly afterward; and now the FBI is investigating what exactly happened on the highway, the Texas Tribune reported Saturday. More election news out of Texas below.

Today: Trump has five rallies planned, beginning in Fayetteville, N.C., just before noon. He’s then off to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Michigan again — where he’s scheduled to leave Grand Rapids just 20 minutes before midnight. His VP Mike Pence holds two rallies today in the Keystone state, first in Latrobe just before noon, and just a few hours later in Erie. 

Joe Biden is in Cleveland this afternoon before moving on to Pittsburgh in the evening. His VP pick, Kamala Harris, is also in Pennsylvania today, where she’ll wrap up the evening at a drive-in rally in Philadelphia. 

BTW: Trump is already vowing to challenge Pennsylvania’s vote count, telling reporters in Charlotte on Sunday evening, “We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” 

Trump was reacting to a Supreme Court decision last week permitting Pennsylvania and North Carolina officials to count ballots cast before Election Day but received days later. And hours before Trump’s remarks on Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court denied a Republican effort to throw out at least 127,000 votes from drive-through locations near Houston. That effort to purge votes “now hinges on a nearly identical effort at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday,” the NYTs reported.  

Why Trump says he’s upset about these court decisions: “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computer,” he told reporters on the tarmac in Charlotte.

Make no mistake: 

• “[T]he Election has never ‘ended’ on Election Day in any state,” tweeted CNN correspondent Dianne Gallagher — along with an authoritative explainer on the process from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 
• “We stop *voting* on November 3; the election doesn't ‘end’ then,” tweeted University of Texas Law Professor Steve Vladeck.

Bigger picture: “Republicans said they are just trying to make sure the process runs smoothly and the rules are applied fairly, arguing that Democrats have loosened election rules in ways that could confuse voters and invite fraud,” the Washington Post reported Friday from the GOP’s recent and growing efforts in the courts. “But Democrats said there is no evidence that expanded mail balloting and other pandemic-related changes lead to fraud. They accused Republicans of targeting valid votes in Democratic strongholds in a blatant bid to gain an electoral advantage.”

Will Trump try to declare victory prematurely? Yes, Axios’s Jonathan Swann reported Sunday. Swann writes that “Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won. For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.” 

Related: Twitter announced today that “Tweets which include premature claims will be labeled and direct people to our official US election page.” More from that updated policy, here.

Another alarming prediction from Swann: “Trump's team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.” Read on, here.

Judge to U.S. Postal Service: Take “extraordinary measures” to postmark and deliver ballots. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the service to use its Express Mail Network and other special procedures to ensure that mailed ballots reach state officials in time to be counted. The order follows directives earlier this year by the Trump-appointed postmaster general that slowed mail service across the country. Reuters, here.

From Defense One

Helicopters Over DC Protesters Broke Regulations While Commander was Driving Home, DC Guard Concludes // Katie Bo Williams: The D.C. National Guard and Pentagon IG are fighting over who to blame for the dangerous incident that symbolized Trump’s militarized response.

Right and Left-Wing Extremists Are Anticipating Election-Related Violence—From the Other Side, Report Finds // Patrick Tucker: Experts say that high tensions could lead to a combustible situation this week.

The Pandemic Is in Uncharted Territory // The COVID Tracking Project, The Atlantic: The fall surge is rewriting the coronavirus record books across America. And the numbers are still climbing.

Esper’s Curious Partners-and-Allies Initiative // Bilal Y. Saab: Why now? And are the combatant commanders on board?

The Election Without a Debate over War // James E. Wright: We go to the polls without the candidates having exchanged meaningful thoughts about the American way of war — and what we might do differently.

Donald Trump is No Jack Kennedy. Or Khrushchev.   // Peter Zwack, Charlie Martinez, and Nancy Soderberg: The president lacks the experience, character, credibility, and confidence to navigate our country through a Cuban Missile Crisis. We need Joe Biden.

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Send us tips from your community right here. And if you’re not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1920, Pittsburgh’s KDKA became America’s first commercial radio station when it broadcast the results of the U.S. presidential election that evening. By the next general election, more than 600 commercial stations would be up and running across the country, according to PBS. As recently as late September, more than 15,000 American radio stations were still broadcasting.

Nineteen people were killed when three gunmen stormed Kabul University in the Afghan capital today, the Associated Press and Reuters report. The Taliban denied involvement in the attack, which hit as the university “hosted a book fair attended by the Iranian ambassador,” AP writes. More, including a recent history of ISIS-linked attacks in Kabul and across the country, here.

Because China: The U.S. military is continuing its drawdown from Africa, first reported more than two years ago, and which now finds the department “downgrading or pulling senior officers out of embassies” across the continent “as it saves billets and realigns to counter China,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.
By the way, an American citizen kidnapped recently in Niger was rescued on Saturday in neighboring Nigeria when U.S. special forces swept in and killed five of the seven captors.
His name is Philip Walton, and he’s a 27-year-old who was “kidnapped from his backyard last Monday after assailants asked him for money,” ABC News reported. He’s the son of missionaries, and he lived on a farm in northern Niger with his wife and daughter. “The criminal gang that captured Walton was based in the small village of Niamey in southwestern Niger,” CBS News adds. And he was located “after tracking the phones of his attackers to a hide-out in neighboring northern Nigeria,” the New York Times reported.
For what it’s worth, “Nigerien and American officials told ABC News that they believed the captors were from an armed group from Nigeria and that it was not considered terror-related.” However, “hostages are often sold to terrorist groups,” so U.S. officials were motivated to act quickly.
For the U.S. side, “[A]bout 30 Navy commandos parachuted into the remote area where the kidnappers had taken Mr. Walton,” the Times reports. Immediately afterward, “Members of the rescue team hiked about three miles until they came upon the captors’ small encampment in a copse of scrubland bushes and trees.”
One more thing: “[O]ne other American is believed to still be held in the Sahel, Jeffrey Woodke, who was also taken from Niger in 2016,” Caleb Weiss of the think tank, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote after learning of Walton’s rescue, highlighting what he called “the danger and differences between criminal and jihadist kidnappings as Woodke was taken by the Islamic State in the area and has likely been shuffled between bases in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso making it harder to find him.” More from NYTs, here.