Just days after Election Day, right-wing activists and two Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania withdrew the majority of last-minute challenges filed against voters’ mail ballot applications.

Around 77% of more than 4,400 challenges were withdrawn on Wednesday or Thursday, including in Allegheny, Bucks, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Lancaster and Lehigh counties, NPR has confirmed. The removals come after more than 100 challenges were withdrawn on or before Election Day in Centre and Chester counties.

To voting rights groups and many of the affected voters, the withdrawal of more than 3,400 challenges coming right after a successful election for the GOP underscores that these formal objections to voter eligibility were baseless.

And all of the county election boards who have held emergency hearings to review the remaining challenges agreed that the challenges carried no weight. Since Nov. 1, officials have rejected more than 900 challenges in Beaver, Chester, Delaware, Lawrence, Lycoming, Washington and York counties.

Most of the challenges were filed days before Election Day and focused on the eligibility of U.S. citizens living abroad who are eligible to vote in federal elections in Pennsylvania under the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, while a smaller group questioned the residency of registered voters in the U.S. based on change-of-address forms they filed with the U.S. Postal Service.

All of them, according to Matt Heckel, a Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson, were part of “bad-faith mass challenges” that have added extra pressure on election officials in 15 counties across the state who have been facing intense public scrutiny this year for another high-stakes election.

The withdrawal of the bulk of these challenges this week led election officials to cancel multiple public hearings they scrambled to add to calendars amid running polling sites, counting ballots and reporting results.

It’s not clear why Pennsylvania state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, a Republican who filed a total of 1,713 challenges to overseas voters’ ballot applications in Bucks and Lehigh counties — the largest batch of challenges — stood down on Wednesday, the day after Election Day. In a statement to NPR, Coleman said he remained concerned that county election officials “were not registering the voters who applied for a federal ballot as required by law.”

“I will continue to pursue the matter through legislative oversight and potential changes to Pennsylvania law that will clarify the current requirement for the registration of federal voters in our statewide voter registration system,” Coleman said.

Republican state Sen. Cris Dush voiced similar concerns during a hearing Tuesday before withdrawing challenges in Centre and Clinton counties.

County election officials, however, have maintained that they are properly entering these overseas voters into Pennsylvania’s system for managing voter rolls. Under federal law, these voters, who indicate on registration forms that their intent to return to the U.S. is uncertain, are eligible to cast ballots for federal elections in the district where they last lived in the United States.

Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, says under state law, election officials cannot register these overseas voters as Pennsylvania voters so they are, instead, entered into a separate part of the registration database as federal voters.

These challenges, Walczak adds, were an “inappropriate” use of Pennsylvania’s legal process for contesting the eligibility of mail-in ballot voters.

“Whether this really was an effort to try to disenfranchise these individuals or whether it was intended to create chaos in elections systems and processing, which to some extent it did, or whether it’s designed to promote some kind of conspiracy theories about how the elections don’t work and how much chaos there is, it’s impossible to tell,” Walczak says. “Bottom line is these are meritless challenges that never should have been made, that inconvenienced thousands of voters and made it much more difficult for countless elections officials and workers to be able to do their jobs at a very difficult and stressful time.”

For Christine Dax, a challenged overseas voter who was born and raised in Lehigh County, Pa., it’s been a nerve-wracking week watching the controversy unfold from Melbourne, where she has lived for about seven years with her husband, who is Australian.

Dax learned about Sen. Coleman’s challenge to her mail-in ballot application through an email a county official sent on Election Day, more than a month after she received confirmation that her ballot was received in October.

“It was very confusing, and I was like, ‘Have I done something wrong? Have I filled something out wrong?’ ” explains Dax, who says she has voted in every election for which she’s been eligible.

After finding news articles reporting that other mail-in voters’ ballot applications had been challenged across Pennsylvania, Dax says it became clear to her that this was a “bogus attempt to suppress people’s votes.”

“It’s very clear that our votes are legal. It’s very clear that we’ve done nothing wrong,” Dax adds. “And it’s clear that they’re just using this as an insurance policy should their candidate not win. And it’s especially enraging because now that their preferred candidate has won, now it’s all gone away. It’s all, ‘No big deal. Business as usual. Hope everyone forgets.’ But I haven’t forgotten — definitely won’t be forgetting that.”

One challenger in Lawrence County, Pa., however, has indicated she is not prepared to move on.

During a hearing Friday before local election officials, Carrie Hahn, a county resident who submitted 52 challenges, explained that she was not questioning whether these voters have the right to vote, but whether or not they should be entered into Pennsylvania’s voter registration system.

“This was not a partisan issue when I filed it at all,” said Hahn, who noted she is “very involved” in the Lawrence County Republican Committee and learned after filing the challenges that the ballot applications she contested are “heavily weighted in the Democrats’ favor.”

Seconds after the three commissioners of the county’s election board unanimously denied all of the challenges, Hahn said she plans to appeal.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey

In past years, voters under 30 have proved essential on the margins, especially for Democrats, where even minimal shifts in support can decide an election.

It was a group that Vice President Harris had hoped would be part of her winning coalition this year. Instead, she underperformed, and President-elect Trump made gains.

Since 2008, winning Democratic candidates have received at least 60% support from young voters, but Harris did not meet that threshold, getting 54%, according to early exit polls.

It was a loss especially pronounced in the blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – where the vice president’s margins dropped significantly from President Biden’s commanding leads four years ago.

Michigan had the most sizable change. Harris and Trump received equal shares – 49% to 49% – of youth support in the state, a sobering 24-point drop from 2020.

Young voters prioritized pocketbook issues

After years of Trump hammering home his agenda, Harris had just over 100 days to present an alternative option, and it’s unclear how much broke through to young Americans during that time.

A month before Election Day, the final youth-focused poll from the University of Chicago pointed to a potential information gap. While nearly 80% of those under 40 said they “pretty much already know” what they need to about Trump, just 57% felt that way about Harris.

John Della Volpe has been studying youth politics for more than two decades and previously worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign. He argued the election results point to disconnects in how Harris appealed to young people on issues – notably around the economy.

“From the earliest focus groups I conducted this year, there was this innate sense that younger people’s personal finances were better and would be better under a Trump administration,” said Della Volpe, who serves as the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

“Nothing the Democrats seemed to do, over the course of the last year, really changed that perspective,” he added.

Harris made protecting access to abortion a central part of her campaign. It’s an issue that has galvanized young voters to turn out for Democrats in recent elections.

However, in this election, voters under 30 were most likely to say the economy and jobs were top of mind, with the issue of abortion as a far second, according to early data from the Associated Press.

Trump won a majority of those who chose the economy as their top concern.

The gender gap was more pronounced among young voters

Trump made significant gains among young men, according to the AP’s exit polling, winning 56% of the vote, compared to 2020, when he won just 41%.

To Della Volpe, it’s part of a trend he has been watching for years, where a significant number of young men, especially those who have grown up with Trump, feel disconnected from the modern Democratic Party.

“They’re telling us in our surveys and our focus groups that the Democratic Party doesn’t speak to them. They’re choosing not to be affiliated with it. This is something that you can’t turn around in 30 days or 100 days,” he said. “To do this takes years of investment. Donald Trump made that investment. And I think much of that playing field was seeded by Democrats.”

Young women, on the other hand, did break for Harris. She won the group by 18 points – though still by a margin that was lower than four years ago.

Comparing the Harris and Trump vibes

Before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, he had largely lost his footing with young voters and was suffering in the polls. When Harris took over the ticket, she saw a boost in support. It’s something the campaign tried to channel moving forward, both online and in person, which included embracing the viral meme culture around her candidacy.

That said, though Harris had both a student-organizing program and a large social media presence to connect with young Americans, as Election Day got closer, her polling numbers were still falling short of Biden’s 2020 standing with this group.

For Trump, his youth outreach stayed mainly online.

Over the summer, he was the only major Republican who joined TikTok – where he grew a follower count that now stands at 14 million, higher than Harris, who has 5 million followers. Trump also did a number of extended interviews on some of the top podcasts in the country, many popular among young men.

It was all part of a youth strategy that Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk told NPR was handily achieved.

“The goal was, of course, to lose by less,” said Kirk, whose organization focuses on getting young people engaged in conservative politics. “But in the last couple of weeks, we were whispering to each other that there might be something bigger.”

Turning Point’s advocacy organization, which doesn’t have a youth-only focus, was one of several outside groups that were tapped by the Trump campaign to run its on-the-ground organizing work.

Kirk added that Trump’s connection with young voters goes past traditional appeals on political topics.

“They just want to live in the same country as their parents. I don’t know if that’s a social issue or an economic issue,” he said. “They want a nice life, and they feel it slipping away.”

“It’s more, dare I say, a vibe than anything else,” he added, alluding to the Harris campaign. “For an entire campaign that was built on vibes, they certainly didn’t read the room.”

WASHINGTON — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case canceled any remaining court deadlines Friday while prosecutors assess the “the appropriate course going forward” in light of the Republican’s presidential victory.

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But Smith’s team has been evaluating how to wind down the two federal cases before the president-elect takes office because of longstanding Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris means that the Justice Department believes he can no longer face prosecution in accordance with department legal opinions meant to shield presidents from criminal charges while in office.

Trump has criticized both cases as politically motivated, and has said he would fire Smith “within two seconds” of taking office.

In a court filing Friday in the 2020 election case, Smith’s team asked to cancel any upcoming court deadlines, saying it needs “time to assess this unprecedented circumstance and determine the appropriate course going forward consistent with Department of Justice policy.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan quickly granted the request, and ordered prosecutors to file court papers with their “proposed course for this case” by Dec. 2.

Trump had been scheduled to stand trial in March in Washington, where more than 1,000 of his supporters have been convicted of charges for their roles in the Capitol riot. But his case was halted as Trump pursued his sweeping claims of immunity from prosecution that ultimately landed before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in July ruled that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution, and sent the case back to Chutkan to determine which of the the allegations in the indictment can move forward.

The classified documents case has been stalled since July when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed it on grounds that Smith was illegally appointed. Smith has appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the request to revive the case is pending. Even as Smith looks to withdraw the documents case against Trump, he would seem likely to continue to challenge Cannon’s ruling on the legality of his appointment given the precedent such a ruling would create.

Statewide efforts to adopt open and nonpartisan primaries, as well as ranked choice voting, failed in this year’s election, delivering a stinging setback to the election reform movement.

The measures sought to reduce political polarization in U.S. politics. And while an overwhelming share of Americans say they are unhappy with the country’s democratic systems, these initiatives were voted down in states across the country this week.

“The status quo won this year,” said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms. “The pro-democracy ballot measures, including anti-gerrymandering reform and open primary-only initiatives, tended to do worse than expected at the ballot.”

Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota had ballot measures that would have replaced party primaries with nonpartisan contests and/or created a ranked choice voting system in their elections. A majority of those measures sought to implement both.

An effort to move to an independent redistricting commission in Ohio lost. And a measure to repeal nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska remains too close to call.

In nonpartisan primaries, all candidates, regardless of party, appear on the same ballot and some number of candidates, like the “top four” vote-getters, move on to the general election. Proponents of primary reform say partisan elections often exclude independent and unaffiliated voters — and simultaneously bolster more extreme candidates who mainly appeal to a party’s base, likely exacerbating polarization.

Both nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting, advocates say, force candidates to appeal to voters who are outside of their base — which could potentially foster more bipartisanship.

Opponents of these kinds of measures — which are chiefly the two main political parties — say nonpartisan primaries strip power away from parties to control who can vote in their elections. They also argue that big changes to the way elections are run, including ranked choice voting, can confuse voters.

Nick Troiano — founding executive director of Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan electoral reform — said pushback from the Democratic and Republican parties really hurt the 2024 measures.

“I think these initiatives were largely swept up in a highly polarized climate in which any suggestions of changing voter rules were met with suspicion among voters,” he said. “And then that’s amplified by the fact that you have both political parties and their aligned special interests fighting tooth and nail against these initiatives and planting doubt among voters.”

The election reform efforts generally were well funded, but voters seemed skeptical.

Dorothy Wesley, a Democratic voter in Nevada, voted against Amendment 3. She said the measure “was doing too much.” Wesley said voters currently have the freedom to vote however they want and she wasn’t sure why anyone “came up with this.”

“It just seemed to [pop up] all of a sudden,” she said. “And it wasn’t clear. So, if I’m not clear and I don’t understand it, I’m going to say no.”

Troiano said his group is “disappointed, of course,” but he said there’s a lot to learn from the failure of these measures.

“We’ve learned that we have to simplify our message in terms of explaining exactly what these reforms are and the benefit to voters,” he said. “And I think we’ve also learned that we have to communicate more about why these reforms will lead to a positive impact on the issues that people do care about.”

Ranked choice voting did have some wins at the local level

Otis said a bright spot for the electoral reform movement, though, was in cities across the country, like Oak Park, Ill., and Bloomington, Minn.

“We are really excited about the city wins this November, including Washington, D.C., where we won in all eight wards of the city,” she said.

Voters in Washington, D.C., approved a measure that will open up primaries to unaffiliated voters and implement ranked choice voting, allowing voters to rank five candidates in order of preference for most offices on the ballot.

Otis said there are a couple of reasons these reforms did better on a city level. For one, campaigning for the city-level measures was more effective.

“Seeing a television ad might not be quite enough,” she said. “In smaller locations, there were great ground games where campaign volunteers got to talk to voters and share their enthusiasm about this reform.”

And secondly, Otis said “city elections don’t always have the same level of partisanship as these statewide” elections.

“I think that makes folks more willing to try out this reform without the worry that possibly it could harm one side or the other,” she said.

Troiano said that despite the fact that these measures failed on a state level, this election was “a big step forward for the election reform movement.”

“We always knew it would be an uphill battle,” he said, “but the fact that it got on the ballot in as many states as it did and then won over six and a half million votes from voters in those states, means we’ve really started a national conversation about what it means to fix our political system at a systemic level.”