Biden vs Trump Live Updates: Virginia’s Voter Registration Portal Crashes

After a cut cable caused Virginia’s online voter registration portal to go down on Tuesday morning, cutting off access online and in local registrars’ offices on the final day to register before the Nov. 3 election, Gov. Ralph Northam said that he would support a court order extending the deadline.

The website crashed after a fiber optic cable was cut just south of Richmond, according to the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, which handles the state’s cybersecurity. The governor said that the cable had been “inadvertently cut during a roadside utilities project.” The cut affected several state government agencies on Tuesday, and workers were trying to repair the damage.

“We have been exploring all of our options to extend the voter registration deadline,” Governor Northam, a Democrat, said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon. “That deadline is set in our code, and it does not appear that I have the authority to change it. That is up to the courts, and I would support a court-ordered extension of the deadline.”

Virginia’s voter registration website advised people seeking to register to vote in the interim to print out and complete a paper application, which may count as long as it is delivered to a voter registration office or postmarked on Tuesday.

Andrea Gaines, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Elections, said Verizon technicians were working to repair the cut.

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Early Voting Begins In Texas

Long lines greeted many voters in Texas, where polls show the presidential and U.S. Senate races to be competitive this year.

“It’s 6:59 on opening day of early voting. This is the line.”

Early voting began in Texas on Tuesday with long lines in San Antonio and outside Houston, some the result of increased turnout and others linked to voting machine failures.

In Fort Bend County near Houston, home to over 400,000 registered voters, all voting machines at 30 early-voting sites did not work Tuesday morning due to a “programming glitch,” according to Judge K.P. George, the county’s top elected official.

Mr. George, a Democrat, said that more than 70 percent of the machines were back online by 10 a.m. local time. “We are going to launch a full investigation,” Mr. George said. “This is 100 percent unacceptable.”

Fort Bend County is at the heart of a rapidly diversifying suburban Texas electorate. The state’s 22nd Congressional District, being vacated by Representative Pete Olson, a Republican, is considered a tossup by the Cook Political Repor. The Democratic nominee, Sri Kulkarni, has raised nearly five times as much as his Republican opponent, Sheriff Troy Nehls.

The county, one of the nation’s fastest growing, is becoming a Democratic stronghold. Mitt Romney carried it by 6.8 points in 2012, but four years later Hillary Clinton won it by 6.6 points. In his 2018 Senate race, Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, won the county by 12.1 points in his narrow loss to Senator Ted Cruz.

The downed voting machines led to long lines. The Texas Democratic Party dispatched volunteers with food and water for voters.

But in San Antonio, long lines had nothing to do with voting machines, officials said. “They haven’t had one complaint on the machines,” said Judge Nelson W. Wolff, the executive of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio. “It’s just a huge turnout.”

Mr. Wolff, a Democrat, noted that this was the first presidential election since the Republican-controlled State Legislature eliminated “straight-ticket” or one-punch voting, an option particularly popular with Democrats in which voters could select a party’s entire slate with one ballot mark, instead of voting for each candidate separately.

In 2018, straight-ticket voting inspired by Mr. O’Rourke’s position at the top of the ticket helped sweep Democrats into power in many local Texas races.

This year, Mr. Wolff said, voters “have to go through and vote for everybody individually, so that’s holding it up some.”

The coronavirus also contributed to voting problems in Texas. A polling site in the Fort Worth suburb of Euless was closed after a poll worker tested positive. “We are in the process of finding a replacement crew for the site, and will open it as soon as possible,” county elections officials said.

Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Texas Democrats, said turnout was particularly heavy in Democratic counties and that some voters were energized by the Supreme Court confirmation hearing in Washington.

Texas has registered 3 million new voters since 2016 — and 1.3 million since 2018 alone. “The vast majority of these voters are expected to lean Democratic,” Mr. Rahman said.

The Texas early voting lines came a day after record turnout in Georgia, where officials said the number of people casting ballots on the first day of early voting was up 40 percent since 2016. Some Georgia voters stood in line for as long as eight hours.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett refused on Tuesday to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee whether she would recuse herself, if confirmed to the Supreme Court, from considering an upcoming case in which Republican states are trying to get the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act — or from any case arising from a legal dispute over next month’s presidential election.

When Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the committee, asked on the second day of her confirmation hearing whether she would participate in the pending health care case, Judge Barrett — who has criticized a past Supreme Court decision that declined to strike down a key part of the health care law — said that whether a justice should recuse herself was a “legal issue” and “not a question that I could answer in the abstract.”

She cited a statute that says, among other things, that judges should recuse themselves “whenever their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” However, Judge Barrett also acknowledged that whether that standard has been met is up to each individual justice to decide for herself.

Under questioning from Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont — who noted that President Trump has said he needs his nominee confirmed because he thinks Democrats will try to steal the election from him and it will end up in court — Judge Barrett also did not answer, instead saying she would faithfully work through the process of deciding what to do.

Mr. Leahy observed that Judge Barrett had merely offered a “sort of boilerplate response on recusal.”

Supreme Court justices do not like to recuse themselves, in part because, unlike at the district and appeals court levels, there is no one to replace them if they step aside. If a justice decides to stay on a case despite accusations of a conflict of interest, there is no appeal.

Asked about other issues — notably abortion rights — Judge Barrett spoke about the doctrine of “stare decisis,” which says the Supreme Court should be reluctant to revisit issues it has previously decided.

But she noted that the legal question at issue in the upcoming Affordable Care Act case — whether the entire law must be struck down because one part of it has been deemed flawed, or whether the flawed part is “severable” from the rest — was not addressed in the earlier case, meaning there was no precedent to respect. And she signaled that she did not think she had said or written anything that expressed a view on the current matter.

“Really, the issue in the case is this doctrine of severability and that’s not something that I have ever talked about with respect to the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “Honestly, I haven’t written anything about severability that I know of at all.”

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper declined to rule out sending active-duty military personnel to the polls on Election Day, amid an intensifying debate about the military’s role if a disputed election led to civil unrest.

Mr. Esper, asked by members of Congress to commit to refusing to send troops to the polls and to commit to facilitating a peaceful transition of power, responded to both queries with the same brief answer: “The U.S. military has acted, and will continue to act, in accordance with the Constitution and the law.

Mr. Esper’s comments, contained in written answers released Tuesday by two Democratic congresswomen, Representatives Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, come as President Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. Senior leaders at the Pentagon are privately discussing what to do if Mr. Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he has threatened to do during protests against police brutality.

Mr. Esper’s answers also diverge from the words of Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was explicit in stating his desire to keep the armed forces out of the election.

“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” General Milley wrote to Congress in August. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law, U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process.”

General Milley reiterated that stance on Monday, emphasizing in an interview with NPR that “we have established a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics.”

In its ongoing efforts to depict former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. as unfit for office, the Trump campaign enlisted Dr. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician who served three administrations, to lend some medical gravitas on Tuesday afternoon.

“He’s had trouble articulating words,” Dr. Jackson told reporters on a conference call. In case there was any confusion, he was not discussing President Trump, the candidate who has referred to Thailand as “Thighland” and pronounced “Yosemite’s” (as in the national park) “Yo, Semites.”

Dr. Jackson focused exclusively on Mr. Biden’s mental acuity. “When he gets in those binds, he has another behavior,” he said. “He seems to get very frustrated, he strikes out, he gets angry.”

He left unsaid that it was Mr. Trump who became irate when he was caught on camera referring to Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, as “Tim Apple.”

Dr. Jackson said that watching the race unfold, he had become convinced that Mr. Trump’s opponent did not have the “mental capacity” to serve as president of the United States.

Pointing out Mr. Biden verbal slips is a frequent Republican line of attack, for which the former vice president supplies frequent fodder. Dr. Jackson noted that on Monday alone, Mr. Biden appeared to have trouble coming up with Mitt Romney’s name, referring to him as “the senator, who was a Mormon — the governor” and told voters he was running “as a proud Democrat for the Senate,” rather than the presidency.

Dr. Jackson is himself running for Congress as a Republican in Texas, and his campaign is being advised by Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, and Justin Clark, his deputy campaign manager. He has frequently boasted on the campaign trail in his deep red district about his close friendship with Mr. Trump.

When pressed, however, Dr. Jackson noted that he was not, in fact speaking as a physician.

“I actually don’t even practice medicine at this point,” Dr. Jackson said, adding that when he was President Obama’s doctor, he had nothing to do with the medical care of Vice President Biden.

He said he was not trying to diagnose Mr. Biden, but only speaking out as a concerned citizen.

“I’ve not accused him of having Alzheimer’s, I have not made that statement,” he said. In fact, nobody had, but him.

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was discussed as a possible target by members of an anti-government group charged last week with plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, the F.B.I. said on Tuesday.

During a hearing in Grand Rapids, Mich., Special Agent Richard J. Trask II of the F.B.I. said that Mr. Northam and other officials were targeted because of their aggressive lockdown orders to restrict the spread of the coronavirus.

Last week, 13 men accused of involvement in the alleged plot were charged with a variety of state and federal crimes including terrorism, conspiracy and weapons possession. They also talked of planning to storm the Michigan State Capitol and start a civil war, the authorities said.

During Tuesday’s hearing, the authorities revealed that the suspects also spoke about “taking” the Virginia governor “based” on coronavirus lockdown orders that restricted businesses.

Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, issued a statewide stay-at-home order on March 24 that prohibited “in-person work that is not necessary to sustain or protect life,” as well as all gatherings of any number of people who did not live in the same household. Mr. Northam also a Democrat, issued a similar order on March 30, instructing residents to leave their homes only for work, medical appointments, family care, shopping for essentials and “outdoor activity with strict social distancing requirements.”

In April, President Trump had openly encouraged right-wing protests of social distancing restrictions in Virginia, Michigan and other states with stay-at-home orders, a day after his administration had announced guidelines for governors to set their own timetables for reopening. “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment,” the president wrote on Twitter at the time. “It is under siege!”

Mr. Northam started reopening much of Virginia on May 15, but as cases rose again over the summer, he implemented restrictions on bars, restaurants and public gatherings.

Michigan lifted its order on June 1, but prohibited bars from offering indoor service in July, citing an increase in cases. Earlier this month, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the law Ms. Whitmer had been using to issue her emergency orders was unconstitutional and invalidated the orders. Following the ruling, emergency orders were issued through the health department, which kept in place mask requirements as well as limits on gathering sizes and business capacities.

Mr. Trask of the F.B.I. said that some of the suspects held a meeting in Dublin, Ohio, several months ago where they “discussed possible targets” for “taking a sitting governor.”

Mr. Trask also provided additional details about the alleged plans to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. One of the suspects, Adam Fox, spoke about a plan to take Ms. Whitmer out on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, and leave her stranded with the engine disabled so that someone would have to “come rescue” her, Mr. Trask said.

Last week, the authorities said the men were affiliated with an extremist group called the Wolverine Watchmen, which court documents called “an anti-government, anti-law enforcement militia group.”

The group met many times for tactical and firearms training and practiced building explosives, the F.B.I. said, and spoke about attacking law enforcement officers.

Mr. Trask and the prosecutor mentioned several other men who they said were involved in the surveillance and the discussion of the plot, including one from Wisconsin, but who were not among those arrested.

The testimony also indicated that the participants were suspicious that government informants were monitoring or had infiltrated their group, changing encrypted messaging platforms and giving each other code names in hopes of escaping such surveillance.

At one point after a planning trip to case the governor’s vacation home and the surrounding area, Mr. Fox asked that all the participants be scanned with a device that is supposed to identify if anyone was wearing a transmission wire or a recording device.

The effort apparently failed, Mr. Trask said, with the group eventually infiltrated by four informants or undercover agents who continued to document what the group was planning.

Ad Watch

In his toughest re-election battle of his career, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, has turned to the 2016 well for his latest ad, resurfacing praise his Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, once offered to Hillary Clinton.

The Message

Even after she lost the 2016 presidential election, Mrs. Clinton has been an oddly galvanizing force for the Republican base, mostly through the continued obsession of President Trump and his campaign. The ad from the Graham campaign attempts to tap into that vein by simply showing a scene of Mr. Harrison and Mrs. Clinton from 2015. Mr. Harrison greets the former secretary of state saying, “We’re so excited to have you here.”

A faint, foggy static noise reminiscent of a horror movie plays behind the scene, as the ad switches to Mr. Harrison offering a testimonial for Mrs. Clinton: “I’m so proud to be with her.”

The ad quickly goes split screen, depicting the “Clinton-Harrison” agenda as one that would include “liberal activist judges,” “late-term abortion,” and “free health care for illegals” before cutting back to Mr. Harrison and replaying his earlier comment of “I’m so proud to be with her.”

Fact Check

The event featuring Mrs. Clinton took place in 2015, years before Mr. Harrison announced his candidacy for the Senate. Mr. Graham once penned a tribute to Mrs. Clinton for Time magazine, writing in 2006 that the two had found “common ground.”

Mr. Harrison is not in favor of Medicare for All or a single-payer system, stating in July that “I don’t view it as a practical solution.” Nor does he favor providing “free health care” to undocumented immigrants.

Where It’s Running

Multiple markets across South Carolina.

The Takeaway

In an election season defined by so many crises, it’s somewhat surprising to see the Graham campaign reach back to the 2016 election and attempt to tie Mr. Harrison to Mrs. Clinton. Yet it could be a clear sign that Mr. Graham is growing concerned about simply shoring up his base, and sees Mrs. Clinton as one of the best foils to help him do so.

The Cook Political Report changed its ratings of three closely watched Senate races on Tuesday, shifting their projections toward Democrats with three weeks to go before Election Day and asserting that “Democrats are now the clear favorite to flip control of the Senate.”

All three races feature Republican incumbents. The report shifted the assessment for Senator Kelly Loeffler’s Georgia race from “Lean R” (for Republican) to “Tossup,” and the races of Senators Dan Sullivan of Alaska and John Cornyn of Texas from “Likely-R” to “Lean-R.”

“A drop not only in President Trump’s re-election numbers following his disastrous first debate performance and coronavirus diagnosis but also in subsequent down-ballot G.O.P. surveys paint a dire picture for Republicans across the board at a very precarious time,” wrote Jessica Taylor, an editor for Cook, one of the most prominent election forecasters.

Democrats need to win four Republican-held Senate seats to take the majority, or three if their presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., wins the White House, which would allow his vice president, Kamala Harris, to break ties in the chamber.

The seat held by Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, is rated “Lean-R” by the Cook Political Report, and many Democratic strategists expect to lose it. But based on the report’s latest ratings, the party is competitive in races for a dozen Republican-held seats. The party is favored to flip at least two seats — in Arizona and Colorado — according to the analysis and is locked in tossups in seven others, including Ms. Loeffler’s.

Ms. Loeffler is in a multicandidate special election in November in which the top two candidates will proceed to a January runoff if none gets more than 50 percent of the vote. A University of Georgia poll released last week showed her in second place, with 22 percent support, behind the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, with 28 percent. But a plurality of Georgia’s voters said they supported a Republican for the seat — a second Republican candidate also polled over 20 percent.

In Texas, Mr. Cornyn faces a stiff challenge from M.J. Hegar, a former Air Force helicopter pilot who came close to defeating an incumbent Republican House member in a deeply conservative district two years ago.

And in Alaska, Mr. Sullivan must contend with Al Gross, a former orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisherman who is running as an independent candidate with the endorsement of state and national Democrats.

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah and his party’s 2012 nominee for president, took to Twitter Tuesday with a scathing condemnation of President Trump and Democrats for their roles in what he called the descent of American politics into a “hate-filled morass,” pleading for leaders to “lower the heat” on a discourse that he said had grown dangerously divisive.

In a statement, Mr. Romney said he had bitten his tongue in recent weeks because the November presidential election was nearing, but felt the need to weigh in after watching vitriol rise on all sides, and its amplification by the news media. He said the world was “watching in abject horror” at what was unfolding in the United States, and warned that the vitriol would lead to more violence and criminality.

“I’m troubled by our politics, as it has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass that is unbecoming of any free nation — let alone the birthplace of modern democracy,” said Mr. Romney. He has been one of the few Republicans in the Senate willing to challenge Mr. Trump, including when he was the only member of the party to vote to remove him from office at the impeachment trial.

While Mr. Romney rebuked both sides, he was particularly pointed in his criticisms of Mr. Trump. “The president calls the Democratic vice-presidential candidate ‘a monster,’ ” Mr. Romney said. “He calls for the Justice Department to put the prior president in jail; he attacks the governor of Michigan on the very day a plot is discovered to kidnap her.”

The Democrats he singled out for blame included Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for ripping up Mr. Trump’s State of the Union speech earlier this year, and Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC anchor he faulted for describing the president as a “terrorist.” He appeared to at least partially exclude former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Democrats launch blistering attacks of their own — though their presidential nominee refuses to stoop as low as others,” Mr. Romney said.

“It is time to lower the heat,” Mr. Romney concluded. He warned: “The consequences of the crescendo of anger leads to a very bad place.”

A Monmouth University poll of North Carolina brought more good news for Democrats Tuesday, with Joseph R. Biden Jr. retaining a narrow advantage over President Trump and Cal Cunningham continuing to outpoll Senator Thom Tillis.

The survey of 500 registered voters shows Mr. Biden ahead of Mr. Trump ahead by three points, 49 percent to 46 percent — within the margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points. Only two percent of registered voters said they were undecided.

Mr. Tillis, the Republican incumbent, is trailing Mr. Cunningham by four percentage points, 48 percent to 44 percent, with only three percent of voters claiming to be undecided, the poll found.

The poll was conducted from Oct. 8 to 11, after the first presidential debate and Mr. Trump’s positive coronavirus test and almost immediately after reports surfaced that Mr. Cunningham had exchanged romantic text messages with a married woman who is not his wife.

Mr. Cunningham, a former state senator and Iraq war veteran, quickly acknowledged the messages and apologized. This poll suggested that the controversy had not damaged him: In a Monmouth survey conducted in September, Mr. Cunningham led Mr. Tillis by just one percentage point, 46 percent to 45 percent.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of North Carolina voters conducted last month found Mr. Biden ahead of Mr. Trump by one point and Mr. Cunningham leading Mr. Tillis by five points.

North Carolina, which Mr. Trump carried by nearly four points in 2016, is a critical battleground. Democrats’ effort to unseat Mr. Tillis are crucial to their hopes of retaking the Senate, which will require gaining either three or four seats, depending on the presidential winner.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci insisted Tuesday that there was no “rift” between him and President Trump, even as he stepped up his criticism of the Trump campaign for quoting him “out of context” in a television ad praising the administration’s coronavirus response.

“I have been a public servant, for five decades now and I have never either directly or indirectly endorsed any political candidate,” Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist, said in an interview, reiterating comments he made on CNN over the weekend. “That ad clearly implies strongly that I’m endorsing a political candidate, and I have not given them my permission to do that. And in addition to that, the quote that they took is completely out of context.”

The Trump campaign released the new ad last week after the President was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center following treatment for Covid-19.

“President Trump tackled the virus head on, as leaders should,” the ad declares, before switching to an interview in which Dr. Fauci said, “I can’t imagine that… anybody could be doing more.”

Dr. Fauci said that comment was made “months and months ago” (in March, early on in the pandemic) in reference to the hard work of the White House coronavirus task force, when the group was “meeting literally seven days a week” and “knocking ourselves out.”

He said he blamed the campaign, not “the president as a person,” but conceded he has little power to get the ad off the air. He said he has not contacted either the president or the campaign — “and I don’t want to contact them.” But he also warned that the ad could backfire.

“I think if they keep doing that, and I make it clear that this is something that I’m not happy with, because I didn’t give permission, and that I would like them to stop, and they continue to do it,” he said, “they may turn off a lot of people.”

The Biden campaign released an ad on Monday mocking the Trump campaign for the way it repurposed Dr. Fauci’s quote. The ad featured an obviously pasted-together montage of the president’s speeches, a few words at a time, in which he is made to say, “I am failing at managing the coronavirus outbreak.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Dr. Fauci said the campaign was “in effect, harassing me” — a comment he told The New York Times he made “because I had heard that they were going to continue to do it with other ads, given that I have explicitly said I do not like that, and I don’t give them permission.”

On Monday, Dr. Fauci had warned that President Trump’s plan to resume a full schedule of rallies when the virus is surging in much of the country was “asking for trouble.”

He told CNN, “We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves. It happens. And now is even more so a worse time to do that, because when you look at what’s going on in the United States, it’s really very troublesome.”

He noted that many states were now seeing increases in positive tests and suggested that Americans should be “doubling down” on precautions rather than casting them aside.

Most of the audience at Mr. Trumps packed rally near Orlando, Fla., Monday night was unmasked.

A federal appeals court reinstated restrictions late Monday night that would allow just a single ballot drop-off site per county in Texas, allowing Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to proceed over criticism that it would make voting more difficult and dangerous.

The three-judge panel in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, all of whom were appointed by President Trump, reversed a lower court decision from Friday that had blocked the restrictions. The judges wrote that the order “does nothing to prevent Texans from mailing in their absentee ballots, as they have done in the past in election after election.”

It’s unclear if the decision will be the final word in the back-and-forth legal battle.

Gov. Abbott created the rule on Oct. 1, citing election security and saying it would “help stop attempts at illegal voting.” There is no evidence tying mail-in ballots to widespread fraud; Democrats see the move as voter suppression, arguing the restriction targets densely populated areas with more Democratic voters.

Several Texas counties had created multiple drop-off locations, intending to make voting easier for people wary of long Election Day lines or delays in mailing their ballots in. The Texas League of United Latin American Citizens and other civil rights organizations sued over the governor’s restrictions, saying they would harm vulnerable voters.

Polls have indicated Texas, long a Republican stronghold, is competitive this year in both the presdiential and U.S. Senate races. Early voting began in Texas on Tuesday.

A lot of voters are asking these questions right now: How quickly will ballots be counted in the presidential election? Which states will have results — and possibly a winner — on election night?

In a year when absentee ballots are surging, a lot depends on when officials first start what’s called pre-processing of ballots. This ranges from verifying signatures, opening envelopes and flattening ballots to get them ready for tabulation.

Some states begin this work weeks in advance and others are only allowed to begin on Election Day. States that begin early may have a lot more results counted by election night.

Because of the surge in mail ballots that need to be counted, if the presidential race is close, the winner may not be known on election night. More than 80.5 million absentee ballots have already been requested or sent to voters nationwide.

Facing a steep surge in coronavirus cases, health officials in Minnesota have connected two dozen virus cases to people who attended presidential campaign events in the past month, most of them attendees at airport rallies hosted by President Trump.

State officials said 16 of the cases were tied to a Sept. 18 outdoor rally at the airport in Bemidji, where Mr. Trump addressed a packed and mostly-maskless crowd.

Four of those cases were reported by people who had gone to the rally to protest Mr. Trump’s visit, Kris Ehresmann, the state’s infectious disease director, said on Monday. The officials were careful not to conclude that the infected people caught the virus at the events they attended.

Three people who attended a Sept. 30 Trump rally in Duluth and three people who attended a Sept. 24 rally featuring Vice President Mike Pence at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport also tested positive for the virus, Ms. Ehresmann said. One person was present at both events.

But the infections were not limited to Republican events: Health officials also reported that one person who attended a Sept. 16 event for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Duluth later contracted the virus, as did one person who went to a Sept. 22 Biden event in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park.

Minnesota reported 1,537 new infections on Saturday, its highest one-day figure since the pandemic began.

WinRed, the donation-processing digital platform created last year to help Republicans catch up with Democrats’ online fund-raising, announced this week that it had passed the $1 billion mark in only 15 months.

The for-profit site, founded by Republican strategists, processed $623.5 million in the third quarter of 2020. Its Democratic counterpart, the nonprofit platform ActBlue, which was launched in 2004, processed about $1.5 billion in that time frame.

Gerrit Lansing, the president of WinRed, wrote in a memo that Republicans were closing the gap on the Democrats’ online fund-raising advantage: “A critical problem grew continuously for 15 years, reshaping how politics was financed — and a solution had previously proven elusive.”

On its single biggest day, Sept. 30, WinRed raised $24.8 million. ActBlue did not hit that mark until this June, 15 years into its existence. (On Sept. 30, ActBlue processed more than $65 million.)

For four consecutive quarters, WinRed has doubled or nearly doubled the amount raised in its previous quarter — an enormous rate of growth that has been driven mostly by President Trump and the Republican Party using the platform. It has raised $1.2 billion in total.

Mr. Trump cheered the site’s success on Tuesday in a tweet.

The site did not break down how much various candidates and campaigns raised last quarter but will be required to do so in filings later this week with the Federal Election Commission.

The California Republican Party has admitted responsibility for placing more than 50 deceptively labeled “official” drop boxes for mail-in ballots in Los Angeles, Fresno and Orange Counties — an action that state officials said was illegal and could lead to voter fraud.

The dark gray metal boxes have been popping up over the past two weeks near churches, gun shops and Republican Party offices, mostly in conservative areas of a deep-blue state, affixed with a white paper label identifying them as either an “Official Ballot Drop off Box” or a “Ballot Drop Box.”

To the average voter, they are virtually indistinguishable from drop-off sites sanctioned by the state, which are governed by strict regulations intended to prevent the partisan manipulation of ballots.

The actions of the largely marginalized state party come at a moment when Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a bitter national struggle over voting rights, with President Trump’s allies accusing Democrats in Minnesota and elsewhere of undermining the integrity of the electoral process by expanding absentee voting and other measures to increase ballot access.

On Monday, California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, and Attorney General Xavier Becerra sent a cease-and-desist order to the state- and county-level Republican parties, ordering them to remove the boxes. They also urged voters who might have unknowingly dropped off their ballots in the receptacles to sign up with the state’s voter tracking website to ensure their vote is counted.

“Misleading voters is wrong regardless of who is doing it,” Mr. Padilla said in a conference call with reporters, adding that the boxes “are not permitted by state law.”

Mr. Becerra called the boxes “fake,” adding that it was “illegal to tamper with a citizen’s vote.” He warned that anyone “engaging in this activity” could be subject to criminal prosecution or civil action.

Hector Barajas, a spokesman for the California Republican Party, said the party would continue to distribute the boxes, without adding any label identifying them explicitly as Republican ballot drops.

Here are the daily schedules of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates for Tuesday, Oct. 13. All times are Eastern time.

President Donald J. Trump

7 p.m.: Holds a rally in Johnstown, Pa.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Afternoon: Speaks in Pembroke Pines, Fla. on his vision for older Americans.

Late afternoon: Attends an event to encourage voters to make a voting plan in Miramar, Fla.

Vice President Pence

Noon: Holds a rally in Waukesha, Wis.

Senator Kamala Harris

Beginning at 9 a.m.: Takes part in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. turned his attention on Tuesday to older Americans, making a case in South Florida that President Trump had failed to protect the country during the coronavirus pandemic.

Older people are a crucial voting bloc in the retiree haven of Florida, and they were an important part of Mr. Trump’s winning electoral coalition in 2016 across the nation’s battleground states. But seniors now appear poised to contribute to the president’s political undoing, and Mr. Biden’s pitch to them on Tuesday was his latest attempt to maximize his standing with those voters.

“All this president knows how to do is play games with people’s lives and families’ futures,” Mr. Biden, wearing a mask, said in a speech at a community center in Pembroke Pines, a city in the vote-rich Democratic stronghold of Broward County.

Nationwide, Mr. Trump won voters age 65 and older by seven percentage points in 2016, according to exit polls, and no Democratic nominee has won among those voters since Al Gore in 2000. But Mr. Biden appears to be in a considerably stronger position with seniors than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, both nationally and in Florida, where a victory is critical to Mr. Trump’s re-election chances.

In Florida, Mr. Trump won by 17 points among voters 65 and older in the 2016 election, exit polls found. But a recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in Florida found a tight contest this time around within that age group, with 47 percent supporting Mr. Biden and 45 percent backing Mr. Trump.

Later Tuesday, Mr. Biden was scheduled to campaign in Miramar, another city in Broward County, before returning to Delaware.

Mr. Biden’s trip was his third visit to Florida as the Democratic nominee. He campaigned in Tampa and Kissimmee in mid-September, and he traveled last week to Miami, where he appealed to Haitian-Americans, gave a speech in Little Havana and participated in a televised town hall event.