Image source, REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Elon Musk's bid to move a lawsuit over his $1m (£770,000) election cash giveaways to a federal court has been denied, sending it back to the state court.

The Donald Trump supporter has, through his political group America PAC, been offering cash prizes to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition - something US officials suggest may break electoral law. Musk denies this.

Earlier this week, Philadelphia District Attorney Lawrence Krasner sued Musk over the giveaways, saying the billionaire "must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming presidential election".

Musk had requested the lawsuit move to a federal court, arguing it raised questions that involved federal law. Krasner says it was an attempt to "run the clock until election day".

It's not yet clear how this decision affects Musk's daily giveaways, or when the lawsuit will be heard.

Image source, Reuters

We can now bring you a some more details from Donald Trump's stopover in Dearborn, Michigan.

At a meeting with Arab Americans and other voters, the former president began to address the conflict in the Middle East, saying there were people in the region and the US who were "not doing their job", Reuters reports.

The former president also specifically addressed the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, saying first that he knew "many people form Lebanon" and then added that "we have to get this whole thing over with".

When reporters travelling with Trump later pressed him for specifics on his plan to solve the ongoing war in the Middle East, however, he did not offer details.

When he was asked by the New York Times whether he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a plan to end the regional conflicts, he replied, “I always talk about things like that".

Helena Humphrey
Reporting from Asheville, North Carolina

There’s a phrase you hear often in this country: all politics is local.

So when Hurricane Helene swept through the battleground state of North Carolina, with a little over a month to go until the US presidential election, the question remains: will it have an impact?

The devastation in Asheville is astounding. Entire areas by the river are all but flattened. Clean drinking water hasn’t yet been restored, and some voters tell us that those who have lost homes and livelihoods might not be focused on heading to the ballot box.

Then there’s the issue of how people feel about the disaster response. In the wake of the storm, former President Donald Trump spread misinformation that the Biden administration had redirected US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) relief funds to undocumented migrants.

Although this was untrue, in politics, perception can quickly become reality. On top of these political hurdles, there are practical ones, too.

Some voting infrastructure has been washed away, and Yancey County has erected a tent to allow people to cast their votes.

But up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, people are resilient.

“These people will crawl over trees and through mud to turn out and vote,” Ruth Smith, a Republican candidate running for election to the North Carolina House of Representatives for District 115, tells us.

Both Harris and Trump will be hoping that’s true — in a battleground state where every vote counts.

Ione Wells
Reporting from Dearborn, Michigan

I’ve been speaking to Dr Hassan Abdel Salam, who just gave a Friday sermon to “hundreds” of Muslim voters here in Dearborn, Michigan.

As we've been reporting, Donald Trump is visiting the city here today.

Dr Salam says his number one message to those in the hall was to “punish the vice-president” for the Democrats’ support for Israel.

(As we mentioned a bit earlier, there are some Arab American voters facing backlash over their decision to vote for Harris.)

He believes that there are enough Muslim voters who are angry at the ongoing conflict in the Middle East to deny Kamala Harris a win in the swing state of Michigan.

He argues that helping cause Harris to lose the election would gain his community leverage over both Democrat and Republican policy by showing they have “power”.

He tells me he's decided to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

• In addition to Stein, who else is running for president in 2024?

Madeline Halpert
Reporting from Dearborn, Michigan

Donald Trump’s motorcade has just arrived here in Dearborn, Michigan, for his meeting with businesses at the Great Commoner Cafe.

There are both pro-Trump and pro-Kamala protestors in a crowd of dozens across the street.

As Trump’s motorcade approaches, chants of “Free Palestine” break out in the crowd.

Some residents of the community here say they believe Trump would put an end to the war in the Middle Wast and condition aid to Israel.

The town has seen a shift toward Trump not just this year but in recent elections because of social issues, according to political experts.

• For context: In 2023, Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the US, external. The 110,000-person city is home to both the Arab American National Museum, external and the largest mosque in North America, external.

Image source, Reuters

Kamala Harris has responded to Donald Trump's comments yesterday on former House representative Liz Cheney, in which he said that she would not be a "radical war hawk" if she was in a war herself and had guns "trained on her face".

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac ahead of her rally in Wisconsin later, Harris says that Trump's comments are "disqualifying".

She hails Cheney as a "true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above parties", while saying that Trump's "rhetoric has grown more extreme".

"He [Trump] is even less focused than before on the needs and the concerns and the challenges facing the American people," Harris says.

Ione Wells
Reporting from Michigan

Is there a more quintessential “swing state” image than two contradictory placards side by side?

That’s what I’m seeing here in Dearborn, Michigan where a small crowd has gathered on the street where Trump is expected to visit in this Arab-majority city.

Some are donning MAGA caps in support of him. Others are protesting against his visit.

The mix is indicative of just how split this state as a whole is. But also how split this city is, in large part due to anger at the Democrats’ Middle East policy.

US intelligence says Russia behind viral video of Haitian voters in Georgiapublished at 18:29 Greenwich Mean Time 1 November

18:29 GMT 1 November

By Shayan Sardarizadeh and Olga Robinson

US intelligence agencies have said a viral video of a Haitian man who claims to have voted “multiple times”, is the work of "Russian influence actors".

"This judgment is based on information available to the intelligence community and prior activities of other Russian influence actors," the agencies said in a joint statement today, external.

The 20-second video shows two men in a car claiming to be Haitian, with one saying they obtained US citizenship within six months of arriving and have voted for Kamala Harris in Gwinnett and Fulton counties, in Georgia.

One man shows multiple driving licences to the camera (presumably as proof of identity). BBC Verify took screenshots of these and enhanced them to try to verify the details on them.

A reverse search of the photo on one of the licences - in the name of Raoul Sylvan - returned a stock image entitled "happy smiling African man", external and credited to a production company in South Africa.

We spotted the name Jacques Benoit and the address 4029 Satellite Boulevard, Duluth, on the second licence.

Putting this address into Google Maps brings up an image and location in the middle of a boulevard near a petrol station, external, not a residential address.

Both the Democratic and Republican vice-presidential nominees are campaigning today in swing state Michigan.

Speaking in Detroit, Tim Walz addresses undecided voters, saying that Donald Trump "only knows how to take advantage of them" and that his presidency was an "endless string of broken promises".

Under the Biden-Harris administration, he says "we've seen over 400,000 jobs come back to Michigan".

JD Vance meanwhile spoke in Portage, with a Trump-Vance branded garbage truck in his backdrop.

“Remember from Hillary Clinton calling us deplorables… to now Kamala Harris's boss saying that Donald Trump supporters are garbage. These are people who hate their fellow citizens,” he says.

"We've got just four days to turn Michigan red."

Image source, Reuters

Natalie Sherman
New York business reporter

Image source, Getty Images

The director of the longest-running election betting market in modern US politics used to work in a relatively sleepy field, presiding over what he called a “connoisseurs' market”, where bets were capped at $500 (£388) and no-one made much money.

But the world Thomas Gruca, a marketing professor at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, now operates in has changed dramatically.

In the last few weeks, as the US barrels towards a presidential election that most pundits and polls say is too close to call, a new crop of companies has exploded on to the scene.

They are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in wagers on the outcome of the race - and attention from both campaigns and the media, as predictions on many of the biggest sites have tilted decisively in favour of Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The frenzy was in part unleashed in September, when a federal judge rejected arguments from US market regulators that offering election trading to Americans ran afoul of state gambling laws and was not in the public interest.

• Find out more about the surge in election betting here

Trump will see slow job growth as proof of US economy strugglingpublished at 17:39 Greenwich Mean Time 1 November

17:39 GMT 1 November

Anthony Zurcher
BBC North America correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

As we've reported, new figures show jobs growth in the US slowed sharply in October as hurricanes and strikes disrupted the economy.

The picture the figures paint – 12,000 new jobs for the month and an unemployment rate of 4.1% - isn’t great news for Democrats hoping voters have a rosier picture of the American economy as they head to the polls.

The lower-than-expected job growth – which included a downward revision of 112,000 jobs from the totals of the previous two months’ – is sure to be noted by Donald Trump and other Republicans in these final few days of the campaign as further evidence that the American economy is sputtering.

The White House was quick to issue a statement from President Joe Biden, explaining that recent hurricanes and labour strikes contributed to the lacklustre showing and pointing to wage growth that continues to outpace inflation.

The American public, however, still seems predisposed toward a gloomier view of the American economy – a not unreasonable outlook given the economic turmoil of the past few decades.

And in these final days of the campaign, voter perceptions of the economy are unlikely to shift by any significant margin based on one middling employment report.

The cake, as they say, has been baked.

Itoro Bassey
Reporting from Wisconsin

This Trump campaign office sits in a historically black neighbourhood in the key swing state of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, with a painted mural of the civil rights activist not too far from the building.

On that same street is America’s Black Holocaust Museum, an institution with the goal of raising awareness about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, which denied black people rights by enforcing segregation and discrimination in southern states.

Traditionally, some wouldn’t expect to see a Republican campaign office on a street like this, but the lead Trump campaign organiser in this district says that the Democratic Party, on both a local and national level, has not adequately addressed the needs of black voters.

Erik Ngutse, a full time canvasser, asked the local Republican Party in Milwaukee for literature that speaks directly to the lives of black voters.

Residents visited the office to buy Trump merchandise and learn more about the campaign’s efforts to reach the community.

One voter, named King, said he was voting for the first time in a presidential election and said that Trump was better for the economy and protecting gun rights. Another voter, named Sharon, said that parents needed more, say, in the schools and had a right to decide what’s taught to their children.

Vice President Kamala Harris holds a slight advantage over former president Donald Trump, but Ngutse says that more black voters, especially black men, are ready for something different.

Ione Wells
Reporting from Michigan

I’ve just met with Abbas Alawieh, one of the co-founders of the Uncommitted Movement in Dearborn, Michigan. The group protested during the Democratic primaries by not endorsing Joe Biden.

Alawieh says the Arab American community in Dearborn, where Donald Trump is campaigning today, is “hurting” and “grieving” as many have lost family members in the war.

He has decided to vote for Kamala Harris because he believes his movement and others would have more ability to influence her policy on the Middle East than a Trump administration.

He has received some backlash for expressing this publicly. An image was shared on social media groups with his face and others in the Muslim community who have said they will vote for Harris, captioned “This genocide is endorsed by…”

But he says he understands this anger, and is frustrated that the Harris campaign has not done more to stress that they would back peace in the Middle East to his community.

At an event in Arizona yesterday, Donald Trump suggested one of his most vocal Republican critics Liz Cheney would not be a "radical war hawk" if she was in a war herself and had guns "trained on her face".

Trump made the remarks during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, prompting criticism of his "violent rhetoric" from Kamala Harris's campaign.

Cheney responded today: "This is how dictators destroy free nations.

"They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant," she wrote in a post on X.

Watch how this happened in the clip above.

Carl Nasman
Reporting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin

I’m reporting in the swing state of Wisconsin, where there is a buzz ahead of campaign visits by both candidates today.

There has also been a surge of activity at polling stations across the state. Here in Milwaukee, we saw a steady stream of voters arriving at a polling station near the local university to cast early ballots.

The precinct head told me they’ve seen “way more” early voters than expected and had to open a second room to process voter registrations.

So far, more than 1.2 million people have voted ahead of Election Day - though it’s unclear which candidate that favours.

A Milwaukee election official told local reporters today that the large pile of early ballots will likely mean the city could be counting until 2 or 3am on election night - adding to the drama in a state already full of it.

As we've mentioned, over 66 million people had already voted by yesterday. But what if someone tries to vote twice?

The Washington Post reported a rare case, external involving Richardson Carter Bell, 67, who voted early at the Nelson County registrar's office on 4 November 2023. Then, on election day, he queued at his local polling station and confirmed his details to the staff.

They quickly realised he had already voted and turned him away.

"I was messing [with them] to see if they were gonna let me vote again," Bell later told police.

In a trial on Monday he was found not guilty, as the jury believed his claim that he was only testing the election system.

Illegal voting is, in fact, quite rare in the US, as there are measures to verify voters. BBC Verify has also looked into how challenging it is for illegal immigrants to vote, which you can explore here.

Ione Wells
Reporting from Michigan

I’m in Dearborn, the largest Arab-majority city in the US where Donald Trump is expected to campaign later today. There is a lot of anger here about the Democrats’ handling of the war in the Middle East.

I spoke to Prof Ron Stockton, professor of political science from the University of Michigan, who lives in Dearborn.

“The environment is extremely inflamed, people are angry,” he says.

“People feel betrayed by the Democratic Party. Harris will get very few votes in this town. There’s a lot of hate literature being sent to us to try stir things up.”

He showed me a flyer he’d received, painting Harris and her Jewish husband as a “pro-Israel power couple”, which he believes has been deliberately sent to households in Arab-majority areas to “inflame people against each other”.

“This is obviously coming from somebody on the Republican side and it’s designed to turn us against each other," he adds.

“The Jewish communities are getting things saying the exact opposite.”

Speaking about Trump’s visit, he argues Harris had made a mistake by not hosting more Palestinian speakers at the Democratic convention or making a statement about what she would do differently to bring peace and security to the Middle East, compared to Joe Biden.

Donald Trump has never accepted that he lost the 2020 election and has made unsubstantiated claims about vote-rigging.

With polls neck and neck this time around, will the US find history repeating itself?

Ros Atkins looks at what could follow a Trump defeat.

Image source, Getty Images

US politics is full of sometimes confusing jargon - one term you might hear a lot in the next few days is "blue wall".

The "blue wall" was the name given to the 18 states - especially in the Midwest - that had voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since Bill Clinton's first victory in 1992 - that is, until Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016.

He managed to flip three of those "blue wall" states to red: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Since then, critics have often pointed to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's choice to not visit Wisconsin during that campaign, saying she lost the state because she took voters' support there for granted.

The Democrats won those three states back in 2020 - and they are now the most hotly contested battlegrounds of the 2024 campaign, with the Trump campaign working hard to snag wins there again.

Kamala Harris is headed to campaign in Wisconsin on Friday, while Trump will hold rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The contest in the state is judged to be incredibly tight, as both candidates have visited multiple times in recent weeks and targeted airwaves there with intense rounds of advertising.

Image source, Reuters

Donald Trump's focus is also back on the "blue wall" as he'll be campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin today.

The "blue wall" refers to states that the Democrats have won in presidential elections from 1992 to 2012. Trump won three such states - Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan - in the 2016 election.

The former president will first speak in the city of Warren in Michigan, where he is likely to talk about inflation and criticise the Biden-Harris administration’s electric car initiatives. Warren is in Macomb County, an area that Trump won by eight points in 2020.

He then plans to hold a rally in Milwaukee at the Fiserv Forum.

Trump has won and lost both states in presidential races. A double victory this year would significantly narrow Harris’s potential path to victory.