News briefs

Tribune News Service on Nov 2, 2026

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Judge warns ‘hell to pay’ if DOJ misstated role of poll monitors

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said he is “struggling” with whether to grant an eleventh-hour bid by the NAACP to block the Justice Department from deploying personnel from federal law enforcement agencies to serve as poll monitors during the midterm election on Tuesday.

Walton, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said during a hearing Monday in Washington that he was not sure that the civil rights group had sufficiently demonstrated that the presence of such employees among the nearly 1,000 poll monitors the department is dispatching nationwide would amount to voter intimidation in violation of federal law.

DOJ attorney Kathryn Barragan said during the hearing that those employees will not be present at polls in a law enforcement capacity and they will not wear uniforms or other identifying insignia. She said the department is working to ensure that none of the law enforcement employees participating as monitors are “sworn officers,” or have the authority to make arrests.

Walton stressed the importance of that distinction and said he hoped that Barragan “would not misrepresent the reality of who these monitors are going to be.” If she did, Walton said, “there’s going to be hell to pay for that.”

—Bloomberg News

Democrat Haley Stevens: Backing Abdul El-Sayed would be 'living a lie'

HUNTINGTON WOODS, Mich. — On the eve of the Nov. 3 election, Democrat Haley Stevens said she felt she was living a lie having endorsed her former primary rival Abdul El-Sayed, leading to her shocking decision to flip her endorsement from El-Sayed to Republican Mike Rogers two days before the Michigan contest that could decide control of the U.S. Senate.

"By the time I got to the place where I was ready to do it, I would have been living a lie to a lot of people and in community. ... There was no way to circle the square. Why? Because he said you aren't welcome," Stevens told The Detroit News on Monday, referring to El-Sayed's message that she wasn't welcome on the campaign trail with him.

"I think that behavior and that level of anger and uncompromising — it's not acceptable or fitting for a senator. And that's that." The four-term congresswoman from Birmingham spoke exclusively to The News from the dining room table of her fiancé's home in Huntington Woods.

With her decision to back Rogers, Stevens said she was speaking out for folks furious about El-Sayed's refusal to meet her demand last week to disavow an outside group's ad that blamed high grocery prices on U.S. foreign aid to Israel. She said the spot is antisemitic. El-Sayed said Saturday that he doesn't agree with its contents.

—The Detroit News

LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman ousts campaign staffer over 'reprehensible' remarks

LOS ANGELES — Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman fired part-time campaign staffer Eric Cheng on the weekend before Tuesday’s election, saying he made “reprehensible” remarks on a video where he was discussing a U.S. Senate race.

On Instagram, Cheng said that Rep. Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat who made a surprise endorsement of a Republican in a U.S. Senate race, had been trying to “brainwash a lot of the Black vote” in her state.

Political strategist Michael Trujillo, who is supporting Mayor Karen Bass in Tuesday’s election, said Sunday on X that those remarks were a reflection of the Raman campaign’s “ignorance of the African American community.”

Trujillo called on Raman’s campaign to apologize. Within an hour, Raman’s team did just that, saying in a reply to Trujillo that Cheng was no longer with the campaign.

—Los Angeles Times

Spanish Socialists weaken in election polls after train crash

MADRID — Support for Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez dropped following one of the deadliest train crashes in Spanish history.

Sánchez’s Socialist party has about 24.6% backing among voters, compared with about 26% a week earlier, according to a poll by SigmaDos published Monday by newspaper El Mundo. This would grant the Socialists between 97 and 103 seats in parliament in a Nov. 29 national election, down from the current 121.

The center-right People’s Party, already the biggest group in the country, is set to win 31.1%. That’s up from 30.6% and would result in 133 to 139 seats.

The poll was conducted in the two days after an Oct. 28 high-speed train crash killed 69 people, while another survey, published Sunday night by El Español, showed similar trends. The collision was Spain’s second mass train disaster this year.

—Bloomberg News