Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter is hitting the campaign trail in Georgia on Friday as Democrats make their final pitch before the vote.

Carter is part of the “Georgia GOTV Road Trip” to boost the party’s turnout, with polls show a tight race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The Republican is favored to win Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, but Democrats hope a final push can flip the state – or at least come close enough to help lay the groundwork for 2018.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis, House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams and former Rep. John Barrow will headline a road trip kickoff on Friday before several party leaders pair off and fan out. Barrow joins the Rev. Raphael Warnock for a trip to Rome and Lewis and Abrams are setting their sites on Henry County. Other candidates will visit Cobb County and Macon.

Carter, who has stayed largely on the sidelines this campaign cycle, is spending the day in Albany, near her Plains home. The 89-year-old will host a luncheon, attend a millennial voter forum and speak at a phone banking at a local restaurant (which is aptly named Carter’s Grill).

A 56-year-old Allen Park man has been charged with seven felonies after he allegedly pointed a gun at six children he accused of destroying his Donald Trump lawn sign.

Michael Robert Kubek was arraigned Nov. 1 before 24th District Judge John Courtright. He was charged with six counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of felony firearm.

Shortly after 8 p.m. Oct. 29, Kubek called police to report a group of teens had hit his Trump for president lawn sign, then took off running on Sterling, toward Moore Avenue.

Upon arrival, an officer was unable to find Kubek at his Sterling Avenue house, but the officer heard what was described as a lot of yelling at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sterling.

Police found six children, ranging in age from 12 to 14, sitting on the grass with Kubek yelling and cursing at them. He told the officer he was highly upset because he believed the kids destroyed his Trump sign.

Note to viewers: “The Voter Suppression Trail” is the first-ever video game for Op-Docs, and also the final installment of our series of Op-Docs about the 2016 election. We hope you enjoy playing, and let us know what you think in the comments. —The Editors

In the 1800s, Americans made heroic journeys to settle in the West. These journeys inspired the classic computer game “The Oregon Trail,” beloved by grade school students across the country in the 1980s and ’90s.

On Nov. 8, a new generation of Americans will make their own heroic journeys — to the polls. Some paths will be more intrepid than others, particularly for blacks, Latinos and pretty much anyone who brings the kind of diversity to our polling places that they have historically lacked. Thanks to laws passed by Republicans to fight the nonexistent threat of voter fraud, the perils will be great. Long lines and voter ID laws, not to mention pro-Trump election observers, will try to keep these voters from the polls.

To celebrate these journeys, we’ve created a video game: “The Voter Suppression Trail.” Play as a white programmer from California, a Latina nurse from Texas, or a black salesman from Wisconsin. Experience the thrill of standing in line for hours at your understaffed polling place! Try to surmount voter ID laws! Avoid intimidation by Donald Trump’s election observers! Will you fend off the rhetoric of angry election “observers,” or heed calls from your boss and get out of line, or will you experience the fulfilling patriotic reward of casting a provisional ballot that will probably never be counted? Find out — play now!

First things first: There is no such thing as voting by text message. Period. If you want to cast a ballot, you can vote at your polling station or vote absentee. That’s it.

But a series of ads circulated on Twitter recently would have you believe otherwise.

Lifting imagery directly from Hillary Clinton’s campaign materials, the ads encourage supporters of the Democratic nominee to “vote early” and “vote from home” by texting their candidate’s name to a random five-digit number.

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At least four such ads began making rounds on social media this week, each containing the Clinton campaign’s “H” logo and a line saying they were “paid for by Hillary for President.” Some featured images of Clinton that appear to be pulled from actual campaign marketing materials, while others showed a black woman and a Hispanic woman, in what may be an attempt to dupe to minority voters. One was written entirely in Spanish.

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state's death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

"It's pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money," says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. "Pretty unprecedented."

Ricketts' personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it's largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts' administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It's possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts' critics think he's using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. "Certainly he sees himself with a future," says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. "A national future."