By Andrew Goudsward and Jarrett Renshaw
WASHINGTON, Oct 30 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump stepped up legal efforts that could help his fellow Republicans challenge results in next week's midterm congressional election, and scrambled his schedule for the campaign's final days on Friday, restoring planned rallies he had scrapped a day earlier.
Early voting outpaced 2022 totals, with even the American-born Pope Leo casting a ballot by mail for the November 3 contest in which nonpartisan analysts
believe Trump's Republicans are likely to lose their current majority in the US House of Representatives, with control of the Senate expected to be hard fought.
The Trump administration pushed forward in legal cases in Alaska, home to a Senate contest that may play a pivotal role in determining the majority, and California, which historically takes more time than most other states in counting ballots.
The Justice Department filed an amended lawsuit in Alaska on Thursday seeking to block the certification of results in the event of a narrow Republican loss, citing a New York Times report that Democratic operatives recruited a spoiler candidate with a nearly identical name to the Republican incumbent.
In California, meanwhile, the Justice Department is escalating its pressure campaign against state election officials, issuing subpoenas as part of a criminal probe into alleged voting by non-citizens, according to copies of documents seen by Reuters.
Taken together, the moves are an extraordinary federal intervention in state-run elections, which are administered locally under the US Constitution. Election officials around the country have told Reuters they are bracing for further legal challenges from Washington.
The dispute in Alaska, home to one of about 10 highly competitive Senate races, could leave control of the chamber unclear for weeks. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win back the majority from Republicans.
If Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress, they could launch investigations into Trump's administration and increase pressure on the president to end the war against Iran.
TRUMP'S CANCELED RALLIES ARE BACK ON
On Friday, Trump will campaign in Florida, hoping to galvanize his supporters in a state he won handily in 2024 but where early voting has tilted toward Democrats.
It will be his latest stop in a state Republicans usually expect to win, following campaign events earlier this week in Mississippi and South Carolina.
Less than 24 hours after canceling, the president plans to hold weekend rallies in Kansas and Iowa after all, alongside "nearly 20" virtual campaign appearances before Tuesday, according to a White House official.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Trump defeated in the 2024 election, will rally for Democrats in Atlanta on Friday.
"The last year and a half, it's been difficult," she told the crowd on Thursday at an event in Macon, Georgia. "Now we're in the phase where we can do a whole lot."
More than 46 million Americans had already voted early as of Friday morning, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab, surpassing the total from the 2022 midterms. Among them was Chicago native Pope Leo, who became the first pontiff to vote in a US election, the Vatican press office announced on Friday, which follows Leo's critiques of Trump's war on Iran and treatment of immigrants as deviating from the teachings of Christ.
ALASKA SENATE DISPUTE
In its revised lawsuit in Alaska on Thursday, the Justice Department wrote that operatives for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola orchestrated a "sham campaign for the purpose of misleading Alaskan voters."
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the operatives convinced a retired teacher living in a remote fishing village named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to appear on the ballot alongside the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan.
Peltola's campaign asked a judge to dismiss the Justice Department's updated lawsuit.
"Nothing in these new allegations changes DOJ's utter lack of any legal claim, any legal authority to bring this case, or any entitlement to the relief it seeks," Peltola's lawyers wrote in their motion. Her campaign has previously said it had "no involvement with either Sullivan campaign."
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has denied involvement and accused Republicans of propping up candidates of their own in other races. Daniel J. Sullivan, listed on the ballot as unaffiliated with any party, has previously denied that his aim was to cause confusion or divert votes from Dan S. Sullivan.
Julie Wyatt, a 62-year-old logistics manager who lives in the capital Juneau, said such trickery was nothing new in Alaskan politics, and she still planned to vote for Peltola.
"If the Republicans are this desperate, Mary has them on the ropes," she wrote in an email.
CALIFORNIA SUBPOENAS
In California, meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's office received grand jury subpoenas last week in the Justice Department's investigation into alleged non-citizen voting.
"At every step, the US Department of Justice has taken a confrontational, adversarial approach," Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said in a statement on Thursday. "Election officials are acting in accordance with state and federal law."
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the subpoenas but said that California and the federal government "agree that non-citizen voting is properly addressed through criminal law."
(Additional reporting by Max Schwarz, Kia Johnson, Maria Tsvetkova, Doina Chiacu and Jan Wolfe; Writing by Costas Pitas and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Alistair Bell)
