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Emi, my mom, was ready. She had printed out a sample ballot and filled in her selections. Her chuleta, she called it, a nod to cheat-sheets Venezuelan children use when they’re studying for tests. Three pages of candidates and propositions, going all the way from to community college trustees. My mother, 71, did have a child-like quality to her as she held her chuleta to her chest on top of a manila envelope, waiting in line for at Wheatsville, one of our local, Austin grocery stores turned into a polling place. Inside the envelope she had brought her voter registration card and naturalized citizen paperwork. I had told her that all she needed was her driving license, but she insisted—she wanted to have proof, in case something came up. She had only just become an American earlier this year, on a hot February day in Texas, after she swore the Oath of Allegiance at the Austin Courthouse. It was me, my wife, Brittani, my six-month-old daughter, Ona, and my father, Manuel, along with hundreds of other people’s family members serving as witnesses for the naturalization oath. Toward the end of the ceremony the judge called out the countries represented by the people eager to become Americans. I was afraid it would feel like erasure: you are no longer Nigerian, Pakistani, Ecuadorian, Laotian, Canadian, Venezuelan. But it felt like a welcoming, you are who you are, where you came from, and now you’re also part of this. At a time when it’s easy to be cynical about the great American experiment, the ceremony felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air. Our early voting location was crowded, the line at least 30 people deep. The mercury had hit the low 90s, a record for late October. But nobody seemed to mind. A mother and her teenage son stood in front of us. I wondered if he was 18, if maybe this was his first time voting, too. But the mustache was too wispy, the pimples too many. It was just a mom, bringing her son to vote with her. Over the past few months, I’ve been touring with my debut novel, , where I tell the story of a Venezuelan family torn apart by a country that seems bent on making the lives of its citizens as hard as possible. At book events, I most often read what I call “the election scene.” It’s 1998, Venezuela is about to elect the leftist , a candidate who has been able to tap into popular discontent over the inequality that has plagued Venezuela for years, decades, maybe even since its inception as a country. My character, Emiliana, a guerilla fighter in her youth, is in her 60s and dying of cancer. She knows this is the last time she will cast her vote. With the help of her daughter, they make it to the polling station, bringing her six-year-old grandson, Eloy, in tow. Emiliana carries Eloy with her into the voting booth and shows him how to vote. He places the ballot, marked for Chávez, in the box. We all now know what the promise of Chávez devolved into. Venezuela, after 25 years of Chavista Party rule, is considered by everyone, except the most extreme of actors, as a terrible dictatorship. Just this past July kept Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, in power and has spurred a wave of violence and that resulted in, at least, dozens dead, and thousands wrongly imprisoned. Still, that scene is perhaps my favorite in the whole book. It has something to do with the purity of it. Just a grandmother, bringing her grandson to experience democracy for the first time. Like the mom and son in front of us, heading to their voting machine. And in a flipped, strange way, like my mother and me. For months now, Trump has been using Venezuelans as the boogeyman. Watch out! Venezuelan gangs have taken over apartment complexes in Colorado. Beware! The Venezuelan government is rounding up criminals and depositing them at the U.S.-Mexico border to infiltrate us. These are finding a welcome audience. Even a good portion of my own community of Venezuelans living in the U.S., who are flocking to Trump. It’s hard to understand how they’re blind to how alike Trump is to Chávez and Maduro. They might occupy opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they are all authoritarian populists. My great fear is that, if Trump wins, there will be an accelerated, systematic chipping away of our democracy. That little by little; one Supreme Court justice at a time; a bit of erosion to the Voting Rights Act here, to the Civil Rights Act there; a few pieces of new legislation; a few policies later; we will find ourselves in a country where elections are not as fair as they used to be. Where naturalization oath ceremonies no longer have names like Restrepo or Adeyemi or Zhao or Farooq. Where women have for lifesaving procedures, if it has anything to do with their wombs. I hear Americans say, “That could never happen here. We have guardrails. We have institutions.” I’ve heard it before. I remember family and friends saying that Venezuela would never “turn into Cuba.” And now here we are, with . I can say this. It’s never a single flip switch. You don’t lose democracy in a day. It’s step by step. Whether in power or not, Trump has had eight years in the political spotlight, chisel in hand. He wants four more, and we all know he will want more after that. But hope remains. Going to vote with my mom still felt like democracy. In her accented English, she told the poll workers it was her first time voting in America. They cheered for her. It made my heart grow and I teared up, , as we say in Venezuela. My mom was nervous about operating the , so when the poll worker asked her if she wanted my assistance, she said yes. They made me recite the assistant’s oath and sign a form, promising to respect and protect her vote, without influence. I almost chuckled. She had raised me—was raising me still, perhaps, because when does that really end—as a good person, a good citizen. If there was any influence being levied it was hers and my father’s, who for years showed me by word and example what it was to fight for one’s country.

The iconic columns of the White House glowed behind her. In front of her, thousands of supporters held “USA” signs and wore bracelets that lit up red and blue across the grassy acres of the Ellipse. A week before Election Day, decided to make her prime-time closing argument to Americans, not from one of the seven closely contested but from the same spot in Washington, D.C., where had rallied his supporters on , to try to overturn his 2020 election loss. The place was . Harris wanted voters to remember Trump’s recalcitrance that day—when he didn’t act to protect Vice President Mike Pence from rioters chanting for his hanging or listen to pleas from fellow Republicans to call off supporters who were attacking law enforcement at the Capitol—and what he’s done in the years since, when he’s continued to deny the election results and promised to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters convicted of assault. In a forceful, 30-minute speech, Harris asked voters to elect her and “turn the page” on Trump.   “We know what Donald Trump has in mind: more chaos, more division, and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path,” she said. Harris compared Trump to a “petty tyrant” who is “unstable,” “obsessed with revenge,” and wants “unchecked power.” She said he wants back in the Oval Office, “not to focus on your problems but to focus on his.” Trump has signaled support for military tribunals for political enemies, promised to purge the federal bureaucracy of workers who don’t agree with him, and said he’d use the military against opponents he calls “the enemy within.” Trump would come into the Oval Office with an “enemies list,” Harris said. She’ll show up with a “to do list.” Early voting is underway in nearly every state, and polls show the race in a dead heat. Trump’s campaign spent the previous days trying to contain the fallout from and sexist comments made by speakers at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. Harris, meanwhile, has worked to stave off defections from the left over her support for arming Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza. During the speech, several protestors in different sections of the crowd began shouting “Stop the genocide!” and were escorted away by police. One person unfurled a pink banner that read “Kamala: No weapons to Israel” before being removed.  Harris has also been trying to convince Republicans alarmed by Trump’s autocratic comments to vote for her, campaigning with former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and running ads showing Republicans explaining why they’re voting for her. Harris has laid out a raft of forward-looking ideas for the country in recent weeks, trying to describe a positive vision for what she could accomplish if voters agree to promote her. During her Tuesday night speech, Harris promised to protect women’s access to abortion and reproductive health care, and she said she would work to reduce costs for Americans. She outlined a plan to cut red tape for home builders to alleviate the housing shortage that is driving prices higher. She said she’d penalize companies that gouge consumers on groceries. She proposed expanding Medicare to include home care. Trump’s campaign has pounced on those proposals, urging voters to wonder why she didn’t do more to enact her policy wishlist over the past four years as the No. 2 in the White House. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said voters should blame Harris for inflation, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and crime caused by recent immigrants. “Kamala’s first day in office was over 1,300 days ago, and she has spent the past four years working hand-in-hand with Joe Biden to destroy our country—but now, she is lying about her record because she has zero policy solutions to offer,” Leavitt said in a statement following Harris’s Tuesday night speech. “As for President Trump, his closing argument to the American people is simple: Kamala broke it; he will fix it.”  But many Harris supporters at the rally were less focused on what Harris would do if she got to the Oval Office than on blocking Trump from getting back there. Gretchen McMullen, 64, came into Washington from Accokeek, Md., to see Harris speak. She wants to be able to tell her newborn granddaughter about it when she’s older and “show her the side of history I stood on.” McMullen is retired from the Army and is now a case manager helping severely injured veterans, and she said Trump’s public comments that he would use the military go after the “enemy within” have alarmed her. “The thought that my fellow comrades would be turned on their own, it scared me,” she said.  Mitzi Maxwell, 69, decided to fly from outside Orlando, Fla., to attend Harris’s speech after her 88-year-old mother told her, “I think we have to go.” Maxwell has been writing postcards for the Harris campaign and waving signs in support of Harris around her hometown of Howey-in-the-Hills. But Maxwell wanted to come to Harris’ speech on the Ellipse to be a part of restoring the place itself. She wanted to be here in person, she said, to “help rid this beautiful place of the negativity and grief from the awful tragedy that Jan. 6 was.”

LOS ANGELES — Teri Garr, the comedic actress known for her quirky roles in films like Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has passed away. She was 79. Garr died on Tuesday due to complications from multiple sclerosis, surrounded by family and friends, according to her publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr had faced several health challenges in recent years, including an aneurysm repair surgery in January 2007. Tributes poured in on social media, with [REDACTED] calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and [REDACTED] saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.” The actress, sometimes credited as Terri, Terry, or Terry Ann throughout her career, seemed destined for the entertainment world from a young age. Her father, Eddie Garr, was a renowned vaudeville comedian, and her mother, Phyllis Lind, was one of the original Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Their daughter began dance lessons at the age of six and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies. She was 16 when she joined the touring company of West Side Story in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963, she started appearing in small roles in films. In a 1988 interview, she recalled how she secured the role in West Side Story. After being rejected in her initial audition, she returned the next day in different clothes and was accepted. From there, Garr found consistent work as a dancer in movies, appearing in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, and Clambake. She also made appearances on numerous television shows, including Star Trek, Dr. Kildare, and Batman, and was a featured dancer on the rock ’n’ roll music show Shindig, the rock concert performance T.A.M.I., and a cast member of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Her big break in film came in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller The Conversation, where she played Gene Hackman’s girlfriend. This led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who offered her the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s Young Frankenstein, on one condition: she had to be able to speak with a German accent. “Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once shared. The film cemented her as a talented comedic performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael declaring her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.” Her bright smile and offbeat charm helped her land roles in films like Oh, God! opposite George Burns and John Denver, Mr. Mom (playing Michael Keaton’s wife), and Tootsie, where she portrayed the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns he has disguised himself as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.) While best known for her comedy, Garr demonstrated in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Black Stallion, and The Escape Artist that she could handle drama equally well. “I would like to play Norma Rae and Sophie’s Choice, but I never got the chance,” she once remarked, adding that she had become typecast as a comedic actress. She possessed a talent for spontaneous humor, often playing David Letterman’s foil during guest appearances on NBC’s Late Night With David Letterman early in its run. Her appearances became so frequent, and their good-natured bickering so convincing, that rumors of a romantic relationship between them began to circulate. Years later, Letterman credited those early appearances with helping make the show a hit. It was during this time that Garr began to experience a “little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It started in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm, but she initially believed she could manage it. By 1999, the symptoms had become so severe that she sought medical advice. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. Garr kept her illness private for three years. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.’” After going public with her diagnosis, she became a spokesperson for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, delivering humorous speeches at events across the US and Canada. “You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.” She also continued acting, appearing on shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Greetings From Tucson, Life With Bonnie, and others. She had a brief recurring role on Friends in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother. Garr married contractor John O’Neil in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996. In her 2005 autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, Garr explained her decision to avoid disclosing her age. “My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote. She mentioned being born in Los Angeles, although most reference books list Lakewood, Ohio as her birthplace. As her father’s career declined, the family, including Teri’s two older brothers, lived with relatives in the Midwest and East. The Garrs eventually returned to California, settling in the San Fernando Valley, where Teri graduated from North Hollywood High School and studied speech and drama for two years at California State University, Northridge. Garr recalled in 1988 what her father had advised his children about pursuing a career in Hollywood. “Don’t be in this business,” he told them. “It’s the lowest. It’s humiliating to people.” Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson, Tyryn. —Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary. AP entertainment writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court rejected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s late requests to remove his name from the presidential election ballots in Michigan and Wisconsin. Kennedy, who now supports former President Donald Trump in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris, argued that the two states were violating his constitutional rights by keeping him on the ballot against his wishes. Officials in Wisconsin and Michigan stated that Kennedy’s requests, submitted on August 23, were too late under their state laws, as voting had already begun. In Wisconsin, Kennedy requested stickers to cover his name on millions of ballots not yet distributed to voters. The court declined to grant Kennedy’s requests without providing an explanation, as is common practice for emergency matters. Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated that he would have sided with Kennedy in the Michigan case. Lower courts had supported the states’ positions.  Kennedy, who withdrew from the race on August 23, has sought to have his name remain on the ballot in some states while being removed from others. Justice Sonia Sotomayor last month refused to include Kennedy’s name on the New York ballot. The Wisconsin case is Kennedy v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, . The Michigan case is Kennedy v. Benson, .

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up to get stories like this sent to your inbox. As Kamala Harris prepares to deliver a major speech outlining her campaign's final arguments, she has chosen a location as potent as it is symbolic: the Ellipse, the site of the January 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. This location serves as a stark reminder of the dangers posed by a potential return of former President Donald Trump to the White House. On Tuesday evening, just one week before the election, Harris will address a crowd gathered on the 52-acre lawn between the White House and the Washington Monument. While her speech is not expected to focus solely on democracy or the threat Trump poses, the message will be impossible to ignore. Harris will speak from the very spot where Trump incited his supporters to overturn his electoral defeat, leading to a violent assault on the Capitol that resulted in nine deaths, injuries to 150 law enforcement officers, and widespread trauma. The visual of Harris speaking from the Ellipse, a site steeped in historical significance, should remind voters that Trump's actions on January 6th were not a normal conclusion to a presidency. It should also serve as a warning that similar events could become commonplace if he is re-elected. This provocative setting is likely to trigger a defensive response from Trump and his surrogates, who will once again defend his actions and those of his supporters. The Department of Justice has charged over 1,500 individuals for their involvement in the January 6th attack, including 571 felony cases. This response is exactly what Democrats hope to see in the final week of the campaign. Beyond January 6th, the choice of the White House as a backdrop for Harris's speech could also inspire voters to consider what a President from a younger generation might accomplish. This message is resonating with audiences, particularly in states where voters may not be enthusiastic about Harris but are receptive to the idea of moving past the chaos of the Trump era. Sources within the Harris campaign, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive planning, indicate that the event's focus will be on the stark choice facing voters: Harris's vision for the future versus Trump's return to power. Trump's ongoing efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, combined with his attempts to evade responsibility for his actions on January 6th and other criminal probes, serve as a driving force behind his bid for a second term. This stark contrast, highlighting the difference between a prosecutor and a felon, is a compelling argument for voters who expect their Presidents to uphold the law. However, it's important to note that a significant portion of the Republican base continues to support Trump. At the third anniversary of the January 6th attack, polls revealed that roughly three-quarters of Republicans believe it's time to move on, including 80% of Trump supporters. There are even instances where those convicted for their actions on January 6th, including individuals who assaulted law enforcement officers with weapons, are celebrated by some within the GOP as victims of a political system. Trump has even contributed money to their legal defense funds and plays recordings of inmates singing the National Anthem at rallies, presenting their imprisonment as a sign of persecution. While this embrace of lawlessness would be disqualifying for most political parties, it has become a defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party. As voters observe Harris speaking at the Ellipse, they will be reminded of the legal scrutiny that Trump will continue to face if he fails to regain the presidency. After a year spent portraying the investigations against him as politically motivated, Harris will directly argue that the American voters hold the power to judge Trump. This message is sure to be effective in the final weeks of the campaign, particularly as Harris has a knack for using symbolic settings to convey broader themes. However, it remains to be seen how Trump's supporters will react to this move, given his success in convincing many that he is a victim of a corrupt justice system. Trump's allies have repeatedly fallen into traps set by Harris and her team, as seen during the presidential debate and at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden. At the latter event, speakers invited by the Trump campaign made offensive and racist remarks, and Trump has failed to denounce these statements. As history has shown, Trump prioritizes his own ego over broader goals. This is evident in his refusal to call off the January 6th mob, his absence at Joe Biden's inauguration, and his ongoing attempts to undermine public faith in democracy. It is therefore certain that Harris's choice of location for her major speech will provoke a strong reaction from Trump. Harris's advisors believe this strategy will effectively highlight Trump's worst impulses in the final week of the campaign, and history suggests that he will be unable to resist the bait. Make sense of what matters in Washington. .