First Thing: Trump election subversion efforts better organized than in 2020, experts warn

From seeding doubt about voter fraud to using legal means, the efforts stand in contrast to last election’s more haphazard efforts. Plus, authorities seize massive amounts of fentanyl in California

Good morning.

Experts are preparing for Donald Trump to stage an aggressive attempt to challenge the election results if he appears to be losing Tuesday’s vote, warning that such efforts will be far more organized than his attempt at overturning the result following the 2020 race.

The former president has made it clear that he will contest the results if he loses – and election lawyers and voting rights experts say that this time, the effort to get Trump into the White House, regardless of the result, ranges from using the courts to local groups organizing election deniers to work the polls.

From spreading the false idea that voter fraud is undercutting the election, to planning to sow chaos in states with slow vote counts, here are the ways that Trump and his allies are organizing.

Just how close could the vote be? Analysts are predicting the closest election since 2000, when George W Bush won by 537 votes, and warning of the threat of civil unrest and political violence.

Trump leans into anti-migrant rhetoric in Georgia while Harris promises Michigan she will do her best to end Gaza war

Donald Trump stuck to familiar territories in his final Georgia rally on Sunday, attacking migrants and describing the US as “an occupied country” while Kamala Harris used her last event in Michigan to vow to “do everything in [her] power” to end the Gaza war.

More than 4 million Georgians – a record – voted early this year, and the swing state appears to be balanced on a knife edge. At his rally in the city of Macon, Trump appeared on stage an hour and a half late and promised to pursue the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who kill a US citizen. He also vowed to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1790, the law under which Japanese, Italian and German-Americans were interned during the second world war.

Meanwhile, anger over the Biden administration’s position on the Israel-Gaza war means that many of Michigan’s 240,000 registered Muslim voters are leaning towards the Green party candidate, Jill Stein, polling suggests.

Where will Trump and Harris be on the final day of campaigning? Harris will be in three cities in Pennsylvania; Trump will make appearances in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Judge rules Iowa can challenge validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens

A federal judge has ruled that Iowa can carry on challenging the validity of potential noncitizens’ ballots, despite warnings from civil liberties groups that this may jeopardize the voting rights of recently naturalized US citizens.

The US district judge Stephen Locher sided with the state in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of an Iowa Latino group and four recent citizens who had been added to a list of questionable registrations. The ruling is a boon for Republicans – Donald Trump has made voting by noncitizens a campaign issue, despite it being rare.

How many people could be affected? While the judge said their names won’t be taken off electoral rolls, potentially 2,000 could be required to use provisional ballots.

What are the latest polls saying? The margins are razor-thin. The Guardian’s national polling average has Kamala Harris at 48% and Trump at 47%, but the popular vote does not matter: the race will likely be determined by the results in just seven so-called swing states, where polling is equally tight.

In other news …

Quincy Jones, the American entertainment giant who produced albums by Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and many others, has died aged 91.

The IDF claims it has killed a Hezbollah commander inside Lebanon, who it named as Abu Ali Rida, saying that he commanded the southern Lebanon’s Baraachit area.

Hundreds heckled and threw mud at Spain’s royals, its prime minister, and Valencia’s regional leader during an official visit following last week’s deadly floods.

Four people have been injured, two of them seriously, in a fight involving an axe on a suburban train outside Paris, a police source said.

Stat of the day: Authorities seize enough fentanyl to ‘kill a quarter of California’

A major fentanyl bust in California’s central valley saw officers seize enough lethal doses of the synthetic opioid to kill a quarter of the state’s population, according to California highway patrol (CHP).

Don’t miss this: School-leaver at 11, domestic slave at 12, gang member at 15 – how a missing birth certificate derailed a life

Esther (not her real name) loved going to school as a pre-teen: it was an escape from her cramped home in the south side of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. But when her school demanded her birth certificate, which she did not have access to, to allow her to sit her exams, her life went into a downward spiral. Here is the story of how a lack of documentation locked her out of a better life, after she dropped out of school and ran away to seek domestic work, with abuse and lack of payment later leading her to join a gang.

Climate check: Governments stress links between climate and nature collapse

Governments have underlined that the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse are interconnected, after years of treating the two as separate challenges. But while the texts agreed at the end of the Cop16 biodiversity negotiations in Cali linked the two, it failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

Last Thing: World’s largest GPS penis traced across Welsh mountains for charity

A man has traced a record-breaking 75-mile GPS image of a penis on the running app Strava by trekking across south Wales. Terry Rosoman, 38, completed the route in less than 24 hours to fundraise for men’s mental health issues, running through the pitch black at times.

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