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By SARA CLINE and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

It remained unclear Wednesday whether ballots cast during extended polling place hours in Texas’ primary will be counted in two counties that saw mass confusion over voting locations.

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Such votes have been set aside in Dallas County after the Texas Supreme Court stepped in Tuesday night, staying a lower court’s ruling. As of Wednesday afternoon, county election officials were still waiting for direction on whether the ballots should be included in vote totals.

The same issue affected Williamson County, north of Austin, which had hours extended at two polling places and has since had the last-minute ballots set aside.

But for Democrats in deeply blue Dallas County, the state’s second most populous, they say their hopes are dwindling. Terri Burke, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said the Supreme Court’s action was expected because it’s hard to get poll hours extended under Texas law.

“In a lot of ways, nobody was surprised by the writ from the Supreme Court last night,” Burke said. She added it’s likely the late ballots won’t be counted.

It is unclear exactly how many ballots were cast during the extended hours. According to data on the Dallas County Elections Department’s website, 2,316 in-person “provisional” ballots were rejected or pending, a number that includes any ballots flagged for a variety of issues as well as those the high court ordered to be segregated. A total of nearly 280,000 people voted in the county’s election, based on unofficial figures from the department.

Of greater concern, Burke said, was the chaos unleashed by the precinct-only voting system that Dallas County was forced to use because of a change by local Republicans, who refused to use a system that allowed voters to cast a ballot anywhere in the county, as they had done since 2019. Voters instead could cast ballots only at their assigned precinct. Under state law, Democrats had to use the same method.

Confused and frustrated, some voters were turned away from polling places on Tuesday and directed to other locations.

“There is a case to be made, and we can document it, there were people who were disenfranchised,” Burke said.

Primary voters line up to cast ballots at a voting center in Dallas, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

She said she will attempt to push the legislature to repeal the 2006 law that requires both parties to hold a joint primary to prevent this sort of chaos: “If one party wants to wreck their primary, they should be able to do that but they should not be able to wreck someone else’s.”

In Dallas County, a judge ordered polls to remain open for two hours past the scheduled 7 p.m. closing time, citing “voter confusion so severe” that it caused the website of the county election office to crash. The judge was acting on a petition filed by the local Democratic Party in a heavily left-leaning county. The extension applied only to Democratic voting precincts.

There was initial concern that it could affect the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because Dallas is the home base of Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, but she later conceded to James Talarico, a state lawmaker.

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who advanced to a runoff Tuesday against Sen. John Cornyn for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, challenged the lower court’s ruling. Shortly after, the state Supreme Court stayed both decisions in Dallas and Williamson counties. Its brief orders said ballots cast by voters in both counties who were not in line by the 7 p.m. scheduled close of polls should be separated.

Emily French, the policy director for Common Cause Texas, a voting advocacy group, said it is standard for ballots that are cast during extended poll hours to be set aside. In El Paso, for example, voting was extended for an hour on Tuesday after problems with voter check-in systems earlier in the day. French said she expects them to ultimately be tallied if no one is contesting the extension.

Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, said the organization is continuing “to monitor this situation and will be weighing all options to ensure every Texan is able to have their vote counted.”

By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — A protester and three U.S. Capitol Police officers were treated for injuries in a Senate office building on Wednesday after the protester resisted arrest for disruptive behavior and grabbed onto a doorway as the officers and a Republican senator tried to drag him out of the room.

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The protester, Brian C. McGinnis of North Carolina, was arrested and faces three counts of assaulting a police officer and three counts of resisting arrest and unlawful demonstration, the Capitol Police said in a statement.

“This afternoon, an unruly man who started to illegally protest during a hearing put everyone in a dangerous position by violently resisting and fighting our officer’s attempts to remove him from the room,” Capitol Police said in a statement.

Multiple videos show that McGinnis stood up and started shouting during the Senate Armed Services hearing and that police officers immediately grabbed him and tried to remove him from the room. McGinnis was protesting the U.S. military campaign in Iran, shouting, “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!”

The officers pulled McGinnis toward the exit as he violently resisted them and grabbed onto a doorway while they were trying to pull him out. Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Republican member of the Armed Services panel who is a former Navy SEAL, ran over to assist and pull the protester’s arm off the door as other protesters yelled that McGinnis’ hand was stuck.

Capitol Police said in the statement that McGinnis “got his own arm stuck in a door to resist our officers and force his way back into the hearing room,” and said he was treated for his injuries.

Sheehy said in a statement on social media that he was trying to de-escalate the situation.

“This gentleman came to the Capitol looking for a confrontation, and he got one,” Sheehy said, “I hope he gets the help he needs without causing further violence.”

A video posted on an X account under the name Brian McGinnis appears to show the same man standing outside the Capitol on Wednesday morning before the hearing. The account’s description says he is a “Green Party Candidate for US Senate.”

He says in the video that he was “here in D.C. trying to speak out against the Senate” to ask them about sending the country into war.

“Anyone who feels disillusioned and betrayed by our government, you are not alone,” he says in the video.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — U.S. Customs and Border Protection has opened an internal investigation into whether Gregory Bovino, the one-time architect of President Donald Trump’s large-scale immigration crackdown, made disparaging comments about the Jewish faith of the U.S. attorney for Minnesota.

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“Following a letter from a Congressman inquiring about reporting on anonymous allegations, CBP opened an internal inquiry to determine the full story,” a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “This is standard procedure and does NOT indicate any confirmation of wrongdoing.”

Customs and Border Protection is part of Homeland Security.

The investigation comes after The New York Times and then CBS News reported on remarks Bovino allegedly made during a Jan. 12 phone call held to coordinate a Saturday meeting to discuss the deployment of immigration agents in the Minneapolis area.

During the call, the reports said, Bovino allegedly complained that Attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel N. Rosen was unreachable for part of the weekend because of the Sabbath, which in Judaism is observed from sunset Friday to nightfall Saturday.

Bovino allegedly used the term “chosen people” in a disparaging way and asked, in a sarcastic tone, whether Rosen understood that some Orthodox Jewish people don’t take the Sabbath off work, the reports said.

“Do Orthodox criminals also take off on Saturday?” he asked, according to CBS.

The Times reported Rosen delegated the call to a deputy and that he himself was not part of the conversation.

The Times first reported on the investigation. It said an investigator with Customs and Border Protection’s office of professional responsibility wrote in an email that he had opened an “official inquiry into the allegation” that Bovino made “unprofessional comments.”

Bovino was the public face of the Trump administration’s city-by-city immigration sweeps until late January. The Border Patrol chief led agents in Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans before he headed to Minnesota in December for what Homeland Security called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.

The administration removed Bovino from his leading role after federal officers in Minneapolis fatally shot 37-year-old mother Renee Good and 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti on different days, leading to nationwide demonstrations and criticisms of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policies.

On Monday, a Minnesota prosecutor said her office would investigate Bovino and other federal officers for misconduct. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said she would look into an instance in which Bovino threw a smoke canister at protesters on Jan. 21. Homeland Security said in a statement that states cannot prosecute federal officers.

By MEAD GRUVER

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Wednesday approved its first construction permit for a commercial nuclear reactor in eight years, one that will allow a Bill Gates-backed company to build a sodium-cooled reactor in western Wyoming.

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TerraPower filed for the permit in 2024 and construction is now set to begin within weeks. Completion of the up to $4 billion plant is targeted for 2030, according to TerraPower. Microsoft co-founder Gates, who is eyeing nuclear generation as a power source for the electricity-hungry data centers behind artificial intelligence, is a founder of TerraPower and its primary investor.

“We have spent thousands of manpower hours working to achieve this momentous accomplishment,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a statement.

The TerraPower plant is set to be built near a coal-fired power plant that is being converted to burn natural gas outside Kemmerer, a town of about 2,500 people some 130 miles northeast of Salt Lake City.

Gates and his energy company are seeking to develop a next-generation nuclear plant that would “revolutionize” how power is generated. The 345-megawatt reactor is expected to produce up to 500 megawatts at its peak, enough energy for up to 400,000 homes.

Construction at the TerraPower plant site — though not on the reactor itself — began in 2024.

The reactor construction permit for a TerraPower subsidiary is the NRC’s first approval for a non-light-water commercial reactor in more than 40 years, the NRC said in a statement.

Virtually all of the world’s commercial nuclear reactors use water to control reactions and transfer heat to drive turbines and produce electricity.

The NRC last issued a construction permit for a conventional light-water reactor to Florida Power & Light Company for a power plant south of Miami in 2018. That project has yet to be built.

The TerraPower reactor would use molten sodium, not water, as a coolant.

The last commercial non-light-water reactor in operation in the U.S. was the Fort St. Vrain nuclear plant in northern Colorado. The problem-plagued, helium-cooled plant produced electricity from the mid-1970s until it was shut down in 1989.

In October, Gates told reporters he thinks nuclear power will be a “gigantic contributor” to powering data centers. He had recently met with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and various members of Congress and said the government was “very involved” in the TerraPower reactor.

“I wish I could deliver nuclear fission like three years earlier than I can, because then we’d have a perfect match to the current demand pattern of these data center guys,” he said.

The plant would use a highly enriched form of uranium that in recent years has been obtainable only from Russia. TerraPower has been lining up other sources to produce the fuel domestically and in South Africa, according to the company.

While the Trump administration pushes toward nuclear power, the federal government has yet to address the thousands of tons of spent fuel that have been piling up for decades at nuclear plants nationwide. New Mexico and Texas have dug in their heels to keep from becoming dumping grounds in the absence of a permanent solution.

In January, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was taking what it called a first step toward possible partnerships with states to modernize the fuel cycle, including reprocessing spent fuel and disposing of waste. The agency gave states until April 1 to step forward if they’re interested in participating.

The TerraPower reactor would produce relatively less nuclear waste than conventional reactors, according to the company.

Jennifer McDermott in Providence, Rhode Island, and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

By COLLEEN SLEVIN and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

DENVER (AP) — Colorado’s Democratic governor, facing a pressure campaign from President Donald Trump, is signaling his openness to granting clemency to a former county clerk who was convicted in a scheme that attempted to find proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

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A social post by Gov. Jared Polis brought swift rebuke Wednesday from the state’s attorney general, secretary of state and the association representing local election officials, who said such an action by the governor would send the wrong message to anyone seeking to interfere with elections ahead of this year’s midterms.

In his post on Tuesday, the governor compared the case of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving a nine-year prison sentence, to that of a former state lawmaker who was recently sentenced to probation and community service after being convicted of one of the same crimes. Polis was echoing a concern he raised in January that the sentence for Peters, who didn’t have a criminal history, was “harsh.”

“Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly, you never know when you might need to depend on the rule of law. This is the context I am using as I consider cases like this that have sentencing disparities,” Polis wrote on the social platform X.

Peters’ lawyers welcomed the governor’s comments and hoped they would lead to her sentence being reduced to the nearly 17 months she has already served. They want her to be released from prison while they continue to try to get her convictions overturned in the state appeals court.

“Action takes real courage,” said one of her lawyers, John Case.

He said he could not discuss whether he had any conversations with the governor or his office about clemency because he said the process is confidential.

Governor’s post creates backlash from other Colorado officials

Peters has become a hero to many who support Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, especially those who have been pushing unfounded conspiracy theories.

Trump threatened “harsh measures” against Colorado unless the state releases Peters, and his administration has cut off funding to the state.

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat who is running for state attorney general, said Polis’ comments were “shocking and worrisome” and that he was wrong to make a comparison between the case of Peters and former state Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis. Lewis and Peters were each convicted of attempting to influence a public servant, but also convicted of additional, different crimes.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office helped prosecute Peters, said Peters has not demonstrated any remorse for her actions.

“Clemency should be based on remorse, rehabilitation, and extenuating circumstances — not on political influence, favor, or retribution,” Weiser, a Democrat who is running to succeed the term-limited Polis, said in an emailed statement.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who is hoping to replace Polis as governor, also said Peters shouldn’t be pardoned or have her sentence commuted.

“Donald Trump may be seeking revenge on Colorado, but surrendering to his political pressure will not make our state stronger or safer,” the Democrat said.

Clemency could signal that it’s OK to ‘undermine our elections’

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said there are few similarities between Peters’ and Lewis’ cases.

“It seems he’s tying himself in knots trying to find a way to commute her sentence,” he said of the governor.

He also said he worried that an early release would send the wrong message before this year’s midterm elections.

“The signal is it’s OK to work to undermine our elections because, whether it’s President Trump or Jared Polis, you’ll get a get-out-of-jail free card,” Crane said.

In response, a Polis spokesperson, Shelby Wieman, said the governor has been skeptical of Peters’ sentence and was comparing it with the one given to the former state lawmaker who was sentenced Friday.

In contrast to some other Democratic governors, Polis, who prides himself on being a political iconoclast, has taken a sometimes accommodating stance toward Trump. As Trump entered office, Polis praised the idea of the Department of Government Efficiency, then run by billionaire Elon Musk, and the nomination of vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

He also has criticized Trump’s stance on tariffs and immigration, among other issues.

Two cases with significant differences

Peters and Lewis were both convicted of attempting to influence a public servant, a crime that involves using deception or a threat to try to get a public official to act in a certain way.

Lewis was convicted of one count of that and three counts of forgery. Prosecutors said she forged letters of support in the middle of a legislative ethics investigation over whether she had mistreated her staff. Her attorney, Craig Truman, declined to comment on her case.

Peters was convicted of state crimes for sneaking in an outside computer expert to copy images of her county’s election computer system before and after state officials updated it in 2021. A photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were later posted on social media and a conservative website. She said she had a duty to preserve the information as clerk.

Peters was found guilty of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.

Peters’ lawyers said the judge violated her First Amendment rights by punishing her with a stiff sentence for making allegations about election fraud. The judge called her a “charlatan” and said she posed a danger to the community for spreading lies about voting and undermining the democratic process.

Appeals court judges seemed sympathetic to the free speech argument during oral arguments in January.