ABC News: Biden stands by Newsom, warns the country’s future is on the ballot in California’s recall election

Californians may be the only ones that can vote in Tuesday’s recall election, but in his closing arguments for Gov. Gavin Newsom, President Joe Biden warned that the country’s political future is on the ballot. …

Although Californians will make their voices heard at the ballot box, candidates on both sides are warning of potential legal challenges that could follow.

Elder, who would not say if he would accept the results of Tuesday’s election in an interview with ABC News’ Zohreen Shah, has already started making claims of fraud. …

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a nonpartisan, liberal-leaning political advocacy organization, told ABC News that such claims should be expected.

“There will inevitably be claims that the election is rigged because the purveyors of the ‘big lie’ need these local and state elections in between the major national elections to keep up their momentum; but all of their allegations in the November 2020 election fell flat,” Stein said. “There’s nothing new under the sun here. And we assume that there will be lawsuits filed after the recall and they will be treated the same way as the lawsuits in the 2020 election.”

Stein said misinformation in the recall could also undermine and limit turnout among the voters that those who are sowing the misinformation are trying to reach.

But such misinformation, he said, has “no basis in the realities of California’s election administration, which has been stress-tested repeatedly and proven to be some of the most secure, most reliable elections in the nation.”