Trump and Harris polls tighten with days to go as former president sues CBS News for $10bn: 2024 election live updates

White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says that the state has been targeted by a disinformation campaign attempting to “sow discord and chaos” ahead of the election.

He says the disinformation is likely “foreign interference” linked to Russia.

The statement reads in part:

Earlier today, our office became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia ID's claiming to have voted multiple times.

This is false, and is an example of targeted disinformation we've seen this election. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election.

We are working to combat this and identify the origin of it with our state and federal partners.

CISA is currently investigating. In the meantime, we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down. This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort.

Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.

As Americans we can't let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine our faith in our institutions - or each other.

Employees for Arizona’s most populous county have been reassigned to help election workers with an around-the-clock operation to process early ballots that are an unusually long two pages.

Election officials in Maricopa County must verify each voter’s signature on early ballot envelopes and then remove the ballot pages so they can be prepared for actual counting. The county was unsure how long it would need to keep up the 24-hour operation, which kicked off Thursday night.

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Tim Walz took a shot at Donald Trump’s age after his garbage truck campaign stunt.

Walz, speaking in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on Thursday, slammed the septuagenarian after he flew to Wisconsin, donned a bright orange safety vest, and got into a garbage truck in an attempt to troll Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Katie Hawkinson has the story.

Did the teleprompter loop around? Trump again claims he’s the father of IVF:

Perhaps more alarmingly, Trump says Robert F Kennedy Jr is going to work on women’s health in his administration: