Residents of Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota have hit the polls for early voting today, as the 2024 election gets underway.

While the bulk of voters will cast ballots on 5 November, the three states are the first to open their polls, and more will follow throughout October, the Associated Press reports.

In the weeks to come, millions more Americans will cast absentee ballots by mail. Here’s more on that:

George Chidi

Kevin Moncla, a prominent election denier, is holding court on the marble steps just outside the Georgia state board of elections hearing room at the state capitol.

Moncla described how state election officials had given him the cold shoulder after the 2020 election. Moncla and fellow activist Joe Rossi filed a complaint alleging that Fulton county had covered up mass election fraud with multiple duplicate ballots, missing ballot images and missing documents.

Applause from their supporters occasionally bleeds into the hearing room. Their backers from Georgians for Truth are wearing white T-shirts printed with the words “Paper Please.”

Here’s more on Moncla:

The House just unanimously approved allowing a bipartisan taskforce investigating the July assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump in Pennsylvania to also scrutinize the apparent second attempt on his life on Sunday in Florida.

“There’s no leader in American history who has been attacked as aggressively as Donald Trump, and yet remained so strong and resilient,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said in a statement after the vote.

“Today, the House is rising to meet this historic moment by voting to formally expand the purview of the taskforce to include the second assassination attempt on his life. The American people deserve answers and accountability for the many security failures that have led to these events – and this Congress will deliver.”

Earlier, the House unanimously approved the bipartisan Enhanced Presidential Security Act, which would establish universal standards for Secret Service protectees such as the president, former presidents and candidates for the White House, and require a comprehensive review of the agency’s current protection strategy.

A Secret Service report looking into the events leading up to the July assassination attempt on the former president was released on Friday, and, according to the Associated Press, found fault with both local and federal law enforcement in the run-up to the Pennsylvania rally where a gunman fired at Donald Trump, injuring him and others, and killing a rally attendee.

The report details a series of “communications deficiencies” before the shooting occurred, and states that the Secret Service knew even before the shooting that the site of the rally posed a security challenge.

“It’s important that we hold ourselves to account for the failures of July 13 and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another mission failure like this again,” the Secret Service’s acting director, Ronald Rowe Jr, said in a statement.

Georgia’s election board has voted to require that ballots be counted by hand, a move that could complicate and slow down determining whether the swing state has voted for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the November election. The decision, made after Trump-aligned members gained a majority on the board, comes despite a warning from the state attorney general that such a rule would be illegal. The meeting is ongoing, with the election board voting down a proposal to require the hand counting of early voting ballots. We will let you know what else they decide.

Here’s what else is happening today:

• In an interview with Oprah, Harris, a gun owner, said: “If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot.”

• Democratic state lawmakers denounced the Georgia election board’s rule change with a press conference held in sight of Trump supporters.

• CNN reported that Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has a history of lewd and offensive statements online. Will he appear with Trump during his rally tomorrow? The former president’s campaign won’t say.

Oliver Laughland

Opponents of the Georgia election board’s rule change rallied in the state capitol in Atlanta as the body met.

But supporters of Donald Trump were not far away:

Georgia election board rejects hand-counting ballots from early voting

Sam Levine

The Georgia state election board just voted 4-1 to table a proposal that would have required hand-counting ballots during early voting.

The decision to delay came after member Janelle King raised concerns that people hand-counting the ballots could potentially leak information about who was ahead in certain precincts. Anticipating that this election was going to be contentious, King said she did not want to get the rule wrong.

The only member to vote in favor of the rule was Janice Johnston.

The state attorney general had advised the board that this rule was likely illegal.

Sam Levine

The Georgia state election board was advised by the attorney general’s office that the decision to hand-count ballots was likely illegal.

“The statutes upon which these rules rely do not reflect any provision enacted by the general assembly for the hand-counting of ballots prior to tabulation,” it said.

“There are thus no provisions in the statutes cited in support of these proposed rules that permit counting the number of ballots by hand at the precinct level prior to delivery to the election superintendent for tabulation. Accordingly, these proposed rules are not tethered to any statute – and are, therefore, likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do,” the attorney general’s office wrote in a memo.

Georgia election board approves rule change that could delay determining presidential winner

Sam Levine

The Georgia state election board approved a rule requiring election workers to hand-count ballots on election night. The vote was three in favor, and two opposed.

The three Republicans who voted in favor of the proposal were all praised by name by Donald Trump during an August rally as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.

The board’s lone Democrat, Sara Tindall Ghazal, and John Fervier, a Republican who serves as the board’s chair, voted against the proposal.

The concern among voting advocates and local election officials is that the rule will delay the reporting of election results and open the door for chaos after the presidential vote. It could also make it harder to determine whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the state’s electoral votes in the November election.

Hand counts, long favored by those who question the results of the 2020 election, have been shown to be slower and less reliable than machine counts.