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Voters are generally asked to leave political attire at home before they vote wearing a Joe Biden shirt or a MAGA hat could cause minor issues at polling places. But poll workers cannot turn voters away for any other political messaging, from Black Lives Matter banners to Second Amendment pins. If its not on the ballot, youre free to wear what you want.

State election law states that electioneering is not allowed inside polling places, or within a 100-foot radius. That means that no political banner, button, poster or placard shall be allowed in or upon the polling place. While the law is really meant to prevent campaigns from harassing voters trying to cast their ballots, it also applies to individual voters who wear merchandise from the candidate or political party of their choice.

In theory, electioneering can lead to a misdemeanor charge if someone does not comply with poll workers directives. But in a 2016 Gannett Albany story, a spokesperson for the state Board of Elections said that poll workers dont make a big deal out of someone showing up in candidate attire and that they just ask that person to turn a shirt inside out or remove any buttons before going inside to vote.

The BOE did not return a request for comment about this story.

However, the law also seems overly broad as to what exactly counts as a political banner, button, poster or placard. Does this apply to someone desiring to wear pro-choice pins, or perhaps even a shirt with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on it? There are plenty who would argue that by wearing such attire, youre making a political statement.

In reality, any long-established political message is not considered electioneering, and so poll workers cannot ask anyone to change or remove something like a Black Lives Matter shirt before being allowed to vote. In fact, the 2018 Supreme Court case Minnesota Voters Alliance v Mansky found that a law preventing political apparel of any kind at or around polling places violated voters First Amendment rights.

In response to the ruling, the state Board of Elections issued bipartisan guidance obtained by City & State. The board said the ruling did not impact the state law on electioneering at polling places. The guidance narrowly defined electioneering as statements for, or against, a candidate or referendum on the ballot, and applied that narrow interpretation to acceptable apparel as well.

Persons wearing clothing or donning buttons that include political viewpoints i.e. support of the Second Amendment, Marriage Equality, Environmental Sustainability, Immigration Reform, Support for Voter ID Laws do not violate New Yorks electioneering prohibition unless the issue itself is unambiguously on the ballot in the form of a ballot proposal, the guidance reads.

Since Black Lives Matter protests, gun rights, Supreme Court nominees and abortion rights, among other subjects, are not being voted on directly on the ballot as referendums in New York, wearing political apparel related to these issues is a constitutionally protected right. And a poll worker who asks anyone to remove such attire before voting is violating both state law, and the constitution.

With all that being said, however, voting rights advocates still generally recommend leaving any political messaging at home, regardless of its legality, to avoid any potential complications or disruptions at the polls.

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What not to wear while voting | CSNY - City & State

"As Black folks we have learned that we are running out of resources when it comes to being protected," the organization wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.

"Police are killing us. White nationalists are threatening us. The president is supporting the nationalists. We need to learn how to protect ourselves in a way that keeps us safe."

"It's a really volatile time right now," she said. "We need to be armed. We need to be safe. We are citizens here, we have equal rights here," she said. "The Second Amendment is our right too."

The goal of the fundraiser is to raise $2,000. As of Wednesday, the organization had raised $780.

In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, thousands have made calls for police reform, justice reform and voter action.

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A California Black Lives Matter chapter is fundraising to get some of its members trained in gun safety - CNN

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump still has a path to the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win reelection. But it requires everything to break in his direction a second time.

Persuadable voters in battleground states will need to overwhelmingly swing in his favor. Hell have to win back crucial voting blocs. And his turnout operation will need to dramatically outperform Democrat Joe Bidens in an extraordinarily turbulent year.

In 2016, his chances of winning the election were those of drawing an inside straight in poker. The question this year is whether he can draw an inside straight two hands in a row, said Whit Ayres a veteran Republican pollster. It is theoretically possible but practically difficult.

While Trump has multiple roads to victory, his most likely route hinges on winning two crucial battleground states: Florida and Pennsylvania. If he can claim both and hold onto other Sun Belt states he narrowly carried in 2016 North Carolina and Arizona while playing defense in Georgia and Ohio, which he won handily in 2016 but where Biden is now competitive, he will win.

Trumps campaign is also continuing to pour time and money into Wisconsin and Michigan, longtime Democratic strongholds he flipped his way by the slimmest of margins four years ago, while trying to defend Iowa and Maines second congressional district and grab Nevada and Minnesota, two states his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton narrowly won.

Trumps campaign points to other factors pointing in their favor: The campaign and the Republican Party have spent years investing in a powerful voter outreach operation and have 2.5 million volunteers knocking on millions of doors each week. They have seen spikes in GOP voter registration in several keys states. And Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their candidate than Democrats are about Biden. The Democrats are driven more by their hate for Trump.

We feel better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year, Trumps campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told staff on a conference call this week. And this optimism is based on numbers and data, not feel, not sense.

But polling shows Trump trailing or closely matched in nearly every state he needs to win to reach 270 Electoral College votes. Barring some kind of major upset, Trump needs to hold onto at least one of the three rustbelt states he won in 2016: Pennsylvania Wisconsin or Michigan, said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Wisconsin.

I dont see any other way for Trump to do this, he said.

Fox News polls released Wednesday show Biden with a clear advantage in Michigan and a slight one in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, recent polls show Biden ahead but vary on the size of his lead.

For all of that, though, Trumps team can draw comfort from this historical footnote: In all three states, Clinton led in the polls in the final weeks of 2016.

But Trumps fundamental problem, said Ayres is that a large number of states that he won comfortably last time are currently close.

While Trumps upset win in 2016 still haunts Democrats and has left many voters deeply distrustful of public polls, close watchers of the race stress that 2020 is not 2016.

Biden is better liked than Clinton and polls suggest there are now fewer undecided voters, who broke for Trump in the races final weeks four years ago. And Clinton was hobbled in the final weeks by a series of setbacks including the late reopening of an FBI investigation into her emails. The impact of any additional October surprise this time would be limited by the record number of voters who have already cast their ballots.

Trumps team, for its part, has been working to repair his standing with suburban women and older voters soured by his handling of the pandemic, while trying to boost enthusiasm among targeted groups like Catholic and Second Amendment voters as well as aiming to build support among Black and Latino voters.

Hes again at the thread-the-needle stage, said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. He noted that because Trump won key states by so few votes last time around, he has very little margin for error.

Still, Miringoff stressed that while many polls may favor Biden, they do not account for cataclysmic events, such as potential voter suppression, election interference, or court challenges that could halt votes from being counted. Democrats are expected to cast far more ballots by mail, which are rejected at higher rates than in-person ballots, even in normal years.

The polls could both be right and wrong at the same time, he said, because they could poll those who think they voted but whose votes end up not counted.

With 29 electoral votes, Florida is arguably the most crucial state for Trump. A loss there would make it nearly impossible for him to retain the White House. But the state, which has sided with the winner of nearly every presidential race for decades, is also known for razor-tight elections most notably in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes after a recount.

Both sides point to signs of promise in the state, with Republicans saying they see growing support among Hispanics while Democrats focus on seniors. While polling in early October showed Biden with a slight advantage, two recent polls have the two candidates neck and neck.

From everything I can see, its a statistical tie, said Jennifer Krantz, a Tampa native and Republican strategist who has worked on multiple state races. If thats the case, she said, ground game could make the difference.

In 2016, Clinton won more votes in the state than Barack Obama in both his races, with commanding leads in Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade. But Trump ran up the the score with stunning turnout in smaller counties, including across the Florida Panhandle.

Trumps campaign expects do even better this time thanks to a robust turnout operation. Indeed, Republicans say they have registered 146,000 more voters than Democrats since the pandemic hit in March, leaving Democrats with their smallest lead since the state began tracking.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope to run the table when it comes to early voting and vote by mail though some remain cautious after 2016.

I think were all in this collective PTSD panic, said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who runs the pro-Biden super PAC Unite The Country.

Its a similar story in Pennsylvania, where two recent polls show Biden maintaining a clear lead and another suggests a narrow one. Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes last time, powered by an overwhelming showing in rural areas and small towns and cities.

Trumps team is counting on those trends to hold this time around.

Its dj vu all over again, said Robert Gleason, the former chair of Pennsylvanias Republican Party who lives in the city and has been helping Trumps campaign Theres a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Just as in Florida, while Democrats hold a substantial voter registration edge, Republicans have narrowed their gap by about 200,000 from four years ago, thanks in part to Democratic party-switchers. Trump campaign aides stress that number is five times Trumps 2016 vote margin.

But Trumps campaign is also facing grimmer prospects in areas like the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs. And Biden is not Clinton, an historically unpopular candidate who particularly turned off white, working class men. Biden not only comes from the working class bastion of Scranton, but has built his political persona as a champion of those voters and their ideals.

AP writers Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington, Jonathan Lemire in New York and Marc Levy in Harrisburg contributed to this report.

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Road to 270: Trump's best path to victory hinges on FL, PA - The Republic

AP Photo/Evan VucciPresident Donald Trump waves to the crowd as he walks off stage after speaking at a campaign rally at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Wednesday, Oct. 21, in Gastonia, N.C.

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump still has a path to the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win reelection. But it requires everything to break in his direction a second time.

Persuadable voters in battleground states will need to overwhelmingly swing in his favor. Hell have to win back crucial voting blocs. And his turnout operation will need to dramatically outperform Democrat Joe Bidens in an extraordinarily turbulent year.

In 2016, his chances of winning the election were those of drawing an inside straight in poker. The question this year is whether he can draw an inside straight two hands in a row, said Whit Ayres a veteran Republican pollster. It is theoretically possible but practically difficult.

While Trump has multiple roads to victory, his most likely route hinges on winning two crucial battleground states: Florida and Pennsylvania. If he can claim both and hold onto other Sun Belt states he narrowly carried in 2016 North Carolina and Arizona while playing defense in Georgia and Ohio, which he won handily in 2016 but where Biden is now competitive, he will win.

Trumps campaign is also continuing to pour time and money into Wisconsin and Michigan, longtime Democratic strongholds he flipped his way by the slimmest of margins four years ago, while trying to defend Iowa and Maines second congressional district and grab Nevada and Minnesota, two states his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton narrowly won.

Trumps campaign points to other factors pointing in their favor: The campaign and the Republican Party have spent years investing in a powerful voter outreach operation and have 2.5 million volunteers knocking on millions of doors each week. They have seen spikes in GOP voter registration in several keys states. And Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their candidate than Democrats are about Biden. The Democrats are driven more by their hate for Trump.

We feel better about our pathway to victory right now than we have at any point in the campaign this year, Trumps campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told staff on a conference call this week. And this optimism is based on numbers and data, not feel, not sense.

But polling shows Trump trailing or closely matched in nearly every state he needs to win to reach 270 Electoral College votes. Barring some kind of major upset, Trump needs to hold onto at least one of the three rustbelt states he won in 2016: Pennsylvania Wisconsin or Michigan, said Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster based in Wisconsin.

I dont see any other way for Trump to do this, he said.

Fox News polls released Wednesday show Biden with a clear advantage in Michigan and a slight one in Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, recent polls show Biden ahead but vary on the size of his lead.

For all of that, though, Trumps team can draw comfort from this historical footnote: In all three states, Clinton led in the polls in the final weeks of 2016.

But Trumps fundamental problem, said Ayres is that a large number of states that he won comfortably last time are currently close.

While Trumps upset win in 2016 still haunts Democrats and has left many voters deeply distrustful of public polls, close watchers of the race stress that 2020 is not 2016.

Biden is better liked than Clinton and polls suggest there are now fewer undecided voters, who broke for Trump in the races final weeks four years ago. And Clinton was hobbled in the final weeks by a series of setbacks including the late reopening of an FBI investigation into her emails. The impact of any additional October surprise this time would be limited by the record number of voters who have already cast their ballots.

Trumps team, for its part, has been working to repair his standing with suburban women and older voters soured by his handling of the pandemic, while trying to boost enthusiasm among targeted groups like Catholic and Second Amendment voters as well as aiming to build support among Black and Latino voters.

Hes again at the thread-the-needle stage, said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. He noted that because Trump won key states by so few votes last time around, he has very little margin for error.

Still, Miringoff stressed that while many polls may favor Biden, they do not account for cataclysmic events, such as potential voter suppression, election interference, or court challenges that could halt votes from being counted. Democrats are expected to cast far more ballots by mail, which are rejected at higher rates than in-person ballots, even in normal years.

The polls could both be right and wrong at the same time, he said, because they could poll those who think they voted but whose votes end up not counted.

With 29 electoral votes, Florida is arguably the most crucial state for Trump. A loss there would make it nearly impossible for him to retain the White House. But the state, which has sided with the winner of nearly every presidential race for decades, is also known for razor-tight elections most notably in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes after a recount.

Both sides point to signs of promise in the state, with Republicans saying they see growing support among Hispanics while Democrats focus on seniors. While polling in early October showed Biden with a slight advantage, two recent polls have the two candidates neck and neck.

From everything I can see, its a statistical tie, said Jennifer Krantz, a Tampa native and Republican strategist who has worked on multiple state races. If thats the case, she said, ground game could make the difference.

In 2016, Clinton won more votes in the state than Barack Obama in both his races, with commanding leads in Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade. But Trump ran up the the score with stunning turnout in smaller counties, including across the Florida Panhandle.

Trumps campaign expects do even better this time thanks to a robust turnout operation. Indeed, Republicans say they have registered 146,000 more voters than Democrats since the pandemic hit in March, leaving Democrats with their smallest lead since the state began tracking.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope to run the table when it comes to early voting and vote by mail though some remain cautious after 2016.

I think were all in this collective PTSD panic, said Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who runs the pro-Biden super PAC Unite The Country.

Its a similar story in Pennsylvania, where two recent polls show Biden maintaining a clear lead and another suggests a narrow one. Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes last time, powered by an overwhelming showing in rural areas and small towns and cities.

Trumps team is counting on those trends to hold this time around.

Its deja vu all over again, said Robert Gleason, the former chair of Pennsylvanias Republican Party who lives in the city and has been helping Trumps campaign Theres a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Just as in Florida, while Democrats hold a substantial voter registration edge, Republicans have narrowed their gap by about 200,000 from four years ago, thanks in part to Democratic party-switchers. Trump campaign aides stress that number is five times Trumps 2016 vote margin.

But Trumps campaign is also facing grimmer prospects in areas like the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs. And Biden is not Clinton, an historically unpopular candidate who particularly turned off white, working class men. Biden not only comes from the working class bastion of Scranton, but has built his political persona as a champion of those voters and their ideals.

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Trump's best path to victory hinges on Pennsylvania - Lock Haven Express

As the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings Monday on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, much of the attention focused on whether the committee should even be considering her at this late date, with so many Americans already casting ballots in elections that could shift control of the White House and Congress. There was widespread interest, too, in how Barrett would handle issues already before the court or potentially soon to be there, including challenges to the Affordable Care Act and the results of the November elections.

One issue flying under the radar is gun control. Its been more than a decade since the Supreme Court has taken up a significant Second Amendment case largely, court observers agree, because the four conservative associate justices worried that they wouldnt be able to persuade Chief Justice John Roberts to vote with them to expand the rights of gun ownership.

If Barrett wins Senate approval to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the conservatives might just gain that fifth vote. And that could be exceedingly dangerous for a country already awash in guns, potentially undermining efforts of California, New York and other states to overlay some measure of sanity on access to and use of firearms.

The Supreme Court previously embraced the notion that the Second Amendment referred to the rights of states to maintain militias, which consisted of individuals who brought their guns with them in the event the state called the militia into service. That changed with the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, written by a conservative icon, Justice Antonin Scalia (invoking a misreading of the historical role of militias). In that case, the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment conferred a constitutional right to keep a firearm in the home for purposes of self-defense.

But it wasnt an absolute right, the court held. Government has a compelling interest in regulating who has access to firearms, Scalia wrote, pointedly adding that nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

A couple of years later, the court ruled in McDonald v. Chicago that the Heller decision applied to state laws as well as federal, but since then it has declined to accept cases that might clarify other issues, such as whether the court believes the right to have a firearm exists outside the home. (It took one case last year, then abandoned it as moot after the New York law at issue was changed.)

The Heller decision was wrongly decided, in our view, but the likelihood that this court will undo it is astronomically small. More likely, with Barrett aboard, is that the court will change the way it assesses gun regulations, opening the door for more successful challenges by gun rights advocates, many of whom take a hard-line approach that the Second Amendment guarantees just about anyone in the country the right to own and carry a gun any time they want.

Barrett didnt mention the Second Amendment in her opening statement Monday before the Judiciary Committee. And while sitting on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett considered only one Second Amendment case, writing an arcane but important dissent in Kanter v. Barr, a 2-1 case last year.

Since the Heller decision, lower federal courts have measured the constitutionality of gun restrictions by looking at whether the restriction in dispute achieved an important government objective. If the evidence showed that it did, the courts have held, restrictions were lawful even if they impinged on someones ability to buy or carry a weapon.

Barretts dissent embraces a broader view of Second Amendment rights that suggests she subscribes to the text, history and tradition test to determine whether there is a historical precedent for a challenged gun law. If theres no precedent, then the restriction is unconstitutional a theory that could imperil such modern gun controls as mandatory background checks, permits to carry a firearm in public and bans on large-capacity magazines.

But when do history and tradition start? Gun laws have always been part of American jurisprudence. So while Barretts ascension to the court will likely shift the balance toward loosening gun restrictions, its unclear how far she and the court might go.

Ultimately, though, loosening restrictions or barring innovative new controls on access to firearms would move the country in the wrong direction. We know that the presence of firearms in the home increases the likelihood they will be used against someone in the household. We have seen the incendiary effect they have when protesters arrive at demonstrations with military-style rifles slung over their shoulders. Accidental deaths and suicides run higher in jurisdictions with the fewest restrictions on gun ownership. Thats all part of the history we would hope even a conservative court would contemplate as it holds the fate of so many people in its hands.

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Another View: What a Justice Barrett might mean for the Second Amendment - Press Herald