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Funerals held in Georgia for 2 U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan drone attack
Two young citizen-soldiers who became close friends after enlisting in the Army Reserve were remembered at funerals in southeast Georgia on Saturday, nearly three weeks after they died in a drone attack in January while deployed to the Middle East.
The soldiers — 24-year-old Sgt. Kennedy Sanders and 23-year-old Sgt. Breonna Moffett — were among three members of their Army Reserve unit who died Jan. 28 in the attack on a U.S. base in Jordan, near the Syrian border. Staff Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, was buried Tuesday following a church service in Carrollton, Georgia.
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The service for Sanders was held in the packed 1,200-seat auditorium of Ware County Middle School in Waycross.
Fellow soldiers recalled Sanders’ courage, her loving personality and her willingness to volunteer for tasks few wanted to do, including learning to operate earth-moving equipment to help build roads and shelters, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“Behind her smile was a fierce determination,” Col. Jeffrey Dulgarian said during the service, adding that she “tackled her responsibility with vigor and skill.”
Sanders’ former basketball coach, Mandy Lingenfelter, remembered Sanders as a point guard for Ware County High’s Lady Gators.
“It was hard for me to yell at her,” Lingenfelter said, “because she was always smiling. … She had pure joy. She put Jesus first, others second and herself last.”
A similar welcome marked the final homecoming for Moffett in Savannah. Moffett’s funeral at a Baptist church was scheduled for the same time Saturday as Sanders’ service 100 miles away. Moffett’s family requested that media not be present.
The deaths of the three Georgia reservists were the first U.S. fatalities blamed on Iran-backed militia groups after months of intensified attacks on American forces in the region since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7.
More than 40 troops were also injured in the drone attack at Tower 22, a secretive U.S. military desert outpost that enables U.S. forces to infiltrate and quietly leave Syria. Roughly 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel are deployed at Tower 22, according to the Department of Defense.
The Jan. 28 attack was different from prior attacks because of where and when it took place — in living quarters and “pretty early morning,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters in a Jan. 30 briefing.
“People were actually in their beds when the drone impacted,” she said at the time.
The attack was believed to be the deadliest attack on U.S. service members since 13 Americans were killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul as the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021.
The three soldiers killed in Jordan were awarded promotions in rank after their deaths. They were assigned to the 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, based at Fort Moore in west Georgia.
According to the Army Reserve, Moffett and Sanders both enlisted in 2019 as construction engineers who use bulldozers and other heavy equipment to clear roads and construction sites.
By the time they deployed to the Middle East last year, the two had become close friends. Moffett’s mother, Francine Moffett, said that whenever the family would call her daughter, they typically would hear from Sanders too.
When she wasn’t serving in uniform, Moffett worked in Savannah for United Cerebral Palsy of Georgia, helping teach cooking and other skills to people with disabilities. She joined the Army Reserve after graduating from Windsor Forest High School, where she had been a drum major and JROTC cadet. She was killed just days after her 23rd birthday.
Sanders came from Waycross on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp and worked at a local pharmacy. The former high school athlete helped coach children’s basketball and soccer teams in her spare time. Her mother, Oneida Oliver-Sanders, said the last time they spoke, her daughter talked of wanting to buy a motorcycle when she came home.
On Feb. 3, in response to the drone attack in Jordan, the U.S. began retaliatory airstrikes on dozens of targets associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its affiliated militias in Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Iranian-backed Houthi militants based in Yemen have been conducting attacks on commercial and naval vessels in the Red Sea in the wake of Oct. 7.
Last month, the U.S. and its allies began launching retaliatory strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
Throughout Election Day and night, CBS News’ Confirmed team will be fact checking reports of threats around voting today, voter fraud, election hacking, and more as the nation votes and waits to see whether Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States., CBS News’ full coverage of the election is here.
False: Elon Musk claimed Google intentionally manipulating search results in favor of Harris
X owner Elon Musk posted, then deleted, a screen recording comparing the Google searches. The post reached over 2.5 million views before its removal, with other posts garnering thousands of views.
Details: Google said searches for “where to vote for Harris” yielded a polling location map because Harris is also the name of a county in Texas, not because of bias for the Democratic candidate.
Searching for “where to vote for Trump” returned news articles and standard search results, while “where to vote for Vance” produced a similar polling locations map because Vance is the name of a county in North Carolina.
Google adjusted its algorithm Tuesday to prevent candidate-related queries from returning polling maps. Google trends data show that searching “where to vote” is a much more common query than searching where to vote for either Trump or Harris.
By Julia Ingram and Layla Ferris
False: Social media posts claim Milwaukee mayor, a Democrat, said the city’s votes would not be counted on election night
On X, users claimed that the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee said at a news conference that Milwaukee would not be counting ballots tonight.
Details: Votes in Milwaukee will be tabulated tonight despite posts on the social media platform X that have pushed a false claim that Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said votes in the city won’t be counted on election night.
In reality, vote counting started Tuesday morning and will continue late into Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning at the city’s so-called “central count” location, according to Johnson’s communications director, Jeff Fleming.
“They’ve already started tabulating, and had tabulated thousands of ballots by this afternoon,” Fleming said. “The vote totals exceeded our original projections, so the workload at central count is higher than expected.”
Milwaukee’s votes can take longer to count for several reasons, Barry Burden, Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, said.
“It’s the biggest city, and it has the most ballots, and it also counts absentee ballots at a central location,” Burden said. “That’ll be after midnight, 1 (a.m.) or 2 a.m.”
The city’s more than 200 election workers started counting votes at 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, Fleming said. They’ll continue the tabulation overnight, and ballots will be delivered to county clerks either the next day or the day after, depending on local rules.
By Chris Hacker
Spreadsheet error corrected: GOP U.S. House candidate says Harris County, Texas, early vote results showed big drops and spikes in early voting
U.S. House candidate Caroline Kane, a Republican running in Texas’ 7th District, posted on X Monday that Harris County’s early vote results showed significant drops and spikes in the number of early voters for several voting locations between Sunday and Monday, which should not be possible.
Details: Election officials said a misaligned spreadsheet caused the publicly reported early vote totals in Harris County to appear incorrectly. Local officials have corrected the document posted online by Kane. They noted the spreadsheet was labeled “unofficial” and said the error would not impact the official vote tally.
In a statement, the Office of the Harris County Clerk said, “In the process of updating the daily record of early vote totals for two vote centers (Baytown Community Center and Mission Bend Center), the formatting of the spreadsheet inadvertently misaligned, causing cells to shift and reflect incorrect numbers for other locations. Our office is aware and is actively working to correct the report.”
“I assure you that every vote that was cast will be accurately tallied,” the statement from the clerk’s office concluded.
By Jui Sarwate
Software malfunction prevented some voters from scanning ballots in Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Voting hours extended to 10 p.m. in the county.
Details: Local courts have extended voting hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. in Cambria County, Pennsylvania after local officials said a “software malfunction” prevented voters from scanning their ballots early Tuesday morning.
Voters are using paper ballots as technicians review the issue.
“All votes will be counted and we continue to encourage everyone to vote,” the county commissioner’s office said in a press release.
According to the county’s petition to extend voting hours, the malfunction “caused voter confusion, long lines of voters, and many individuals left the polling locations without casting a ballot.
“The Pennsylvania Department of State said it is in contact with Cambria County and is “committed to ensuring a free, fair, safe, and secure election.”
Cambria County, located in southwestern Pennsylvania, has a population of approximately 131,000. Trump won the county 68% to 31% in 2020, and he won by a similar margin in 2016.
By Steve Reilly, Julia Ingram, Layla Ferris
False: Non-citizens encouraged to vote in Philadelphia
Conservative commentator James O’Keefe claimed non-citizens are being encouraged to vote in Philadelphia.
Details: Philadelphia officials said allegations by commentator James O’Keefe that non-citizens are being encouraged to vote are incorrect. O’Keefe posted a new video on Monday claiming Election Clerk Milton Jamerson and Ceiba, a local non-profit, advised voting with an ITIN number, regardless of citizenship.
The video received 1.6 million views on X as of Tuesday, and was reposted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said it was “the smoking gun of attempted election theft.”
Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein said the report was incorrect and non-citizens are not eligible to vote in Philadelphia. ITINs are for tax purposes and not linked to voting eligibility. Ceiba called O’Keefe’s claims “unfounded and based on harmful stereotypes.”
By Joanne Stocker and Emmet Lyons
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If the election in Pennsylvania is close, new challenges made to over 3,500 voters, many of whom live overseas and cast ballots by mail, could prove to be a pivotal part of the effort to undermine confidence in the 2024 election.
“Throughout the day Friday, several bad-faith mass challenges were filed in a coordinated effort in counties across the Commonwealth to question the qualifications of thousands of registered Pennsylvania voters who applied to vote by mail ballot,” the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement.
Most of the voters are individuals who live overseas and vote absentee under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law that has allowed certain citizens living overseas to vote since 1986. This group of voters includes active military members, people who work abroad, and expats.
Additional challenges were filed questioning voters’ residency because they had a permanent mail forwarding address with the U.S. Postal Service.
“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Department of State said.
Josh Maxwell, chair of the Board of Commissioners in Chester County, said the elections office received hundreds of challenges from activists in his community based off USPS mail forwarding data. He believes the effort was made in an effort to deprive legitimate voters their right to vote.
“It’s about disenfranchising voters in a swing state and overturning the outcome of an election,” he said.
Many of these challenges arise from activists associated with organizations that say they focus on election integrity. In Chester County, the activist challenging votes claimed to be affiliated with the group PA Fair Elections in a video hearing last week. PA Fair Elections is part of a broader national initiative to scrutinize voter registrations and ballots, according to the progressive watchdog group Documented.
According to a report released to CBS News by Documented, PA Fair Elections is run by Heather Honey, an activist whose organization is known for her work to change elections procedures around the country.
Honey is the head of the Election Research Institute, and was involved in the controversial petition to the Georgia State Elections Board that would have made it easier for county boards to block the certification of elections, according to ProPublica. The rule has since been blocked by a Fulton County judge. Honey denies involvement in pushing the Georgia rule.
“Heather Honey is working as part of a well funded, nationally organized effort to manufacture election conspiracy theories, drum up thinly-sourced voter challenges and call the results into requisition when MAGA Republicans lose,” said Brendan Fisher, Documented’s deputy executive director.
PA Fair Elections denied any involvement in voter challenges in an email to CBS News. Heather Honey did not respond to a request for comment as of publication.
Aside from activist groups, several of the challenges to individual voters came from Republican State Senator Jarrett Coleman, who submitted challenges in Bucks and Lehigh Counties. The letter also says he submitted a $10 fee per voter challenge as required. Coleman’s office did not respond to CBS News for comment.
Now, counties with challenged voters must hold a hearing before the certification deadline on Nov. 12 about the status of these voters, which legal groups say is cause for concern. The ACLU sent an email to 67 county solicitors in Pennsylvania asking the officials to throw out the challenges to both groups of voters.
“Counties should formally dismiss or deny the challenges as quickly as possible to minimize any delay or disruption to the canvassing process,” the ACLU letter stated.
Both York and Chester counties have already rejected all the challenges.
Concern over overseas absentee voting has been amplified by former President Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social in September that Democrats “are getting ready to CHEAT! They are going to use UOCAVA [Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act]
to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever.”
Overseas absentee voting has become a rallying cry for self-described “election integrity” activists who claim individuals living overseas could be submitting fraudulent voter information. In the last few weeks, two lawsuits about overseas absentee voting have been thrown out in North Carolina and Michigan.
With the Pennsylvania challenges, election boards are the arbitrators, not judges.
Fact checking Election Day 2024 claims about voter fraud, ballot counting and more
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Fact checking Election Day 2024 claims about voter fraud, ballot counting and more
South Dakota is deciding whether to protect abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana