The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.Mr. Trump was not shy about it. He told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network last Thursday that he was pushing back against Democrats’ demand for further U.S.P.S. funding in the latest Covid-19 relief bill: “Now they need that money in order to have the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots …. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”While targeting the U.S. Postal Service may be new, the threat to election integrity coming from Mr. Trump is not. But there are steps we can take right now to assure a fair election in November.Mr. Trump has made at least 91 attacks on the integrity of voting so far this year (and more than 700 since 2012) and backed up his complaints about mail-in ballots with lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Iowa. He has repeatedly tweeted the unsupported claim that increased use of mail-in ballots in November, necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, will lead to voter fraud and a rigged election.Back in May he wrote that “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed….” He said that with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California sending ballots to all active registered voters, which he terms “universal mail-in” voting, “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”The end game here is a bit curious because Republicans traditionally have relied on mail-in balloting to get out the vote, and there are already signs that Republican turnout might be hurt by his rantings. How else to explain the president seeking to distinguish between good “absentee” voting and bad “mail-in” balloting and urging Floridians to vote by mail? And how else to explain the president not only repeatedly voting by mail but using a third person — what Mr. Trump refers to as “ballot harvesting” — to deliver his own ballot to election officials in the Florida primary on Tuesday?The most benign explanation for Mr. Trump’s obsessive focus on mail-in balloting is that he is looking for an excuse for a possible loss to his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, in November. The less benign explanation is that he is seeking to sow chaos to drive down turnout and undermine the legitimacy of the election, laying the groundwork for contesting a close election if he loses. I fear that the latter explanation is correct, and that makes it all the more urgent that election administrators, the media and others take steps to avoid a crisis of confidence in the 2020 election results.The benign explanation for Mr. Trump’s conduct — that it will assuage his ego in the event of a loss to Mr. Biden — is consistent with how Mr. Trump explained his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Although the president won in the Electoral College, he lost the popular vote nationally by about 3 million votes. It seems not a coincidence that Mr. Trump claimed to David Muir of ABC News, without any evidence whatsoever, that 3 million to 5 million noncitizens voted in the 2016 elections, all for Clinton: “None of ’em come to me. None of ’em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of ’em come to me.”He has now turned from unsubstantiated claims of massive noncitizen voting to claims that mail-in ballots will lead to “rigged” and “substantially fraudulent” elections. No doubt he has made this shift because mail-in balloting is set to explode thanks to the pandemic making polling place voting a potential health risk. In Georgia, for example, the state had approximately 37,000 voters vote by mail in the 2016 primaries and more than 1 million voted by mail in the June 9 primary.Here, too, Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud are unsupported by the evidence. Absentee ballot fraud is rare; one study found fewer than 500 prosecutions nationwide during a 12 year period in which voters cast over a billion ballots; most of those cases were not aimed at changing election outcomes, and the ones that were tended to involve small elections when there wasn’t an active press looking for chicanery. The relative rarity of cases is no surprise because states have all kinds of security measures in place, such as signature matching, ballot tracking and statements signed under penalty of perjury.The idea that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have raised of foreign governments sending in ballots is particularly ludicrous because it would require quickly copying the paper stock, color and ballot information specific to each voter’s ballot, getting ahold of and forging voter signatures, matching the ballot tracking information that election officials include on ballot envelopes, and doing so on a large enough scale to swing a state’s presidential election contest — all without the voters in the state whose ballots have been tampered with noticing when they go to vote and election officials tell them they have already turned in a ballot.Indeed, coordinated mail-in ballot tampering tends to get caught quickly. An operative helping a Republican candidate in the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district has been charged with stealing and altering absentee ballots; the scheme led the bipartisan state election board to call a new election. The current scandal in Paterson, N.J., which the president has specifically called out, followed a similar pattern; a postal worker noticed an attempt to mail a stack of absentee ballots, and the ongoing investigation into the ham-handed conspiracy may well lead to criminal charges and an election do-over.If Mr. Trump is not really concerned about fraud, what’s the real end game? His unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud may be aimed at sowing chaos during the election and depressing turnout to help his side win election. Worse, it could be calculated to delegitimize the election results, which could allow Mr. Trump to contest a close election or weaken a Biden presidency.It is all too possible that in Michigan and Pennsylvania — two states that recently changed their laws to allow anyone who wishes to vote by mail to do so — Mr. Trump will be ahead in the counting on election night, only to see his lead evaporate days later as Philadelphia, Detroit, and other Democratic-leaning cities process a flood of absentee ballots.A “blue shift” toward Democrats as later votes are counted is now a well-established phenomenon; as Democrats vote later, their ballots are counted later, leading to a good number of elections where Republican leads on election night turn into Democratic victories when the full and fair count ends.Trump could claim, as he did in a 2018 U.S. Senate race in Florida, that later-counted ballots are fraudulent (a claim he abandoned when Rick Scott, a Republican, won the race). It could lead millions of his supporters to believe that Democrats stole the election, when in fact all that happened was that battleground states engaged in a close and careful count of ballots to ensure the election’s integrity.What can be done about this? A committee I led recently issued a report, Fair Elections During a Crisis, addressing how to avoid an election meltdown in November.To begin with, Congress needs to adequately fund the additional costs related to running an election during a pandemic. Democrats have pushed for more election funding in the latest House Covid-19 bill, but Senate Republicans, following Mr. Trump’s lead, have resisted. The White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow called adequate money for voting rights during the pandemic a “really liberal left” wish list item in the bill.This should not be a partisan issue: Republicans, Democrats and everyone else need safe voting options in November. It’s not just the cost of mail-in balloting; safe in-person voting will be costly too and also crucial for many people. Those additional costs are going to be there whether Congress funds them or not, and lack of funding means that the election administration will be sloppier, creating fodder to feed conspiracy theories and the real risk of not being able to determine a clear winner in a close election.Under pressure from Congress and the public, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy promised on Tuesday to defer any cuts to service in mail delivery until the election season is over. Congressional oversight can help him keep his promise.States need to streamline procedures for the mailing out and processing of absentee ballot applications and the ballots themselves. Voters casting their ballots by mail need to request and return them as early as possible, flattening the absentee ballot curve. States should assure their deadlines for requesting mail-in ballots comport with what the Postal Service can realistically do.All states should authorize the processing of absentee ballots before Election Day — that is, everything but the counting — to make sure they are valid. The count needs to be done quickly but carefully, and the number of outstanding ballots and all other relevant information must be made available in a transparent way, especially if the election goes into overtime.The media needs to educate the public that the election may be “too early to call” for days after Nov. 3, and that a slow count does not equal evidence of fraud. No one should be able to claim victory until there is a clear indication of a winner given the number of outstanding ballots. Networks and cable stations need to get over the idea of being the first to call election results, and should avoid saying things like “100 percent of precincts” have reported when thousands of absentee ballots remain to be counted. Fortunately, this message is beginning to break through.We cannot count on Mr. Trump to speak responsibly about the fairness of the 2020 vote count. Indeed, he is one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the election. He’s already tweeted that we “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” He declared in a speech in Oshkosh, Wis., on Monday that “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”But Americans can take steps to neutralize the irresponsible claims. That starts with holding a free, fair and safe election, both in person and by mail, in the midst of a pandemic. And it ends with everyone from across the political aisle rejecting any attempts to call the results of the election into question based upon nothing but a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions about voter fraud.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The city’s chronic homelessness has taken on greater urgency over the course of the campaign this spring, as New York has seen an apparent rash of random assaults, often carried out by people who appeared to be homeless, mentally ill, or both.The candidates clashed Wednesday night over whether this was more of a problem for those who are afflicted with mental illness and homelessness, or for everyone else.Andrew Yang said the solution was simple. “We need to get them off of our streets and our subways into a better environment,” he said of mentally ill people on the streets and subways. “There will be no recovery until we resolve this.” He promised to double the inventory of inpatient psychiatric beds in the city, a nod to the fact that many hospitals have gotten rid of psychiatric beds to build Covid-19 units.Scott Stringer, who had spoken of the need to build tens of thousands of units of “truly affordable housing,” went on the attack. “That is the greatest non-answer I’ve ever heard in all of our debates,” he barked at Mr. Yang. “Not one specific idea.” He defied Mr. Yang to tell him how much his plan would cost. The exchange came hours after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to move 8,000 homeless people from the hotel rooms they were moved into during the pandemic back to barrackslike congregate shelters by the end of July, to make way for tourists. Many of the hotels are in Manhattan neighborhoods where long-term residents have complained that the hotel guests use drugs and create other nuisances.Other candidates shied away from Mr. Yang’s harsh rhetoric. Maya Wiley mentioned the struggles of a formerly homeless man who goes by the name Shams DaBaron and emerged as a spokesman for the residents of one of the hotels, The Lucerne. “When the response was to send more police into the subways where he was riding because the congregate shelters were so dangerous, he asked for help, and what he got was handcuffed and taken to jail,” Ms. Wiley said, adding that outreach to try to get people to accept placement in shelters needed to be done by “the right people,” rather than the police. More

Campaign books written by politicians are often dismissed as focus-grouped fluff. I disagree. You can learn a lot about people by paying close attention to how they want to be seen. And so it is with Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to be Free.” It’s not a good book, exactly. But it is a revealing one.As I read through it, I started marking down every time he told a story about using the power of his office to punish or sideline a perceived enemy or obstacle. There is his bill to make it easier to sue tech companies if you feel they’re discriminating against your politics. Here are his laws limiting what teachers can say about gender identity and imposing criminal penalties on medical providers who offer certain types of gender-affirming care. There’s his effort to punish Disney for opposing his anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws by removing its self-governing status. Here’s his suspension of Andrew Warren, the state attorney for Hillsborough County, because Warren declined to enforce laws criminalizing abortion. There’s the bill to increase criminal penalties against rioters during Black Lives Matter protests.Then there’s what DeSantis wants to do, but hasn’t yet done. He thinks the federal government has become too “woke” and too liberal, and Congress should “withhold funding to the offending executive branch departments until the abuses are corrected.” He is frustrated that President Donald Trump didn’t do more with an authority known as Schedule F that can reclassify around 50,000 federal employees to make them more like political appointees, enabling the president “to terminate federal employees who frustrate his policies.” He tried to make it easier to sue media outlets for defamation, though that plan got bogged down in the Florida Legislature. Outside the book, he has called for a national “reckoning” on Covid and promised to hold people like Dr. Anthony Fauci “accountable” for the damage he believes they’ve caused.“For years, the default conservative position has been to limit government and then get out of the way,” DeSantis writes. Such reticence about using the power of government to fight back against the arrayed forces of the left — including Facebook, Disney, the government, the schools, the media and much else — means “essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society.”My colleague Carlos Lozada traced many of the critiques of Trump that are threaded through DeSantis’s book, but to his list I’d add one more: DeSantis is saying that Trump, for all his complaints about the “deep state,” shied away from fully using the power of his office to destroy the threatening forces of the left. And DeSantis is trying to show, in vignette after vignette, that he has both the will and the discipline to do what Trump did not. (That Trump is now under federal indictment for, among other things, keeping boxes with classified documents piled in an ornate bathroom and scattered across a storage room floor at Mar-a-Lago, helps DeSantis’s case.)Trump often appears in DeSantis’s book as a faintly comic figure. When DeSantis requests federal aid after Hurricane Michael devastated the Panhandle, Trump says, according to DeSantis’s recounting, “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” It is left to Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to beg DeSantis to delay announcing the aid because Trump “doesn’t even know what he agreed to.”The Trump that emerges in DeSantis’s anecdotes is overmatched by the details and minutiae of government. That is clearest in DeSantis’s extensive account of his Covid governance, in which he marinates in the details of his response and his decisions while battering away at Dr. Fauci as the personification of biomedical Leviathan. As Lozada observes, this is DeSantis criticizing Trump by proxy — Dr. Fauci served under Trump, and DeSantis is making clear he would have never let that stand. The critique of Trump is not so much that he agreed with Dr. Fauci as that he didn’t care enough to figure out where he disagreed with him and how to bend the state to his will.And so DeSantis delights in describing the methodical, relentless effort he put in to bending the state of Florida to his will. He describes winning Florida’s governorship and ordering his transition team to “amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor.” Much of the rest of the book is an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, account of how he used them.DeSantis is portraying himself as the figure liberals have long feared: a Donald Trump who plans, a Donald Trump who follows through. One question is whether that’s what Republicans really want. In an interview with Ben Shapiro, DeSantis tried out a counterattack on Trump. “He’s been attacking me by moving left,” DeSantis said. “So this is a different guy than 2015, 2016.”Is it? Part of Trump’s appeal in 2015 and 2016 was his willingness to defy conservative orthodoxy. He promised to raise taxes on rich guys like himself, leave Medicare and Social Security alone, and make sure everyone had great health care. Polls showed he was viewed as a more centrist candidate than Hillary Clinton.DeSantis is leaving himself no such room. His voting record from his time in Congress includes plenty of efforts to slash Medicare and Social Security. As governor, he signed a six-week abortion ban into law. If you see Trump’s ideological deviations as a problem for Republican voters, DeSantis’s attacks make sense. If you see them as part of what endeared Trump to Republican voters, then it’s a vulnerability for DeSantis.DeSantis’s other problem, both in writing and on the stump, is that he can’t bring himself to extend even a modicum of compassion to his opponents. When he describes the George Floyd protests he doesn’t spare even a word condemning or grieving Floyd’s murder. His anti-L.G.B.T.Q. agenda is unleavened by even the barest sympathy for L.G.B.T.Q. kids.He opened a recent speech in New Hampshire with a riff on Joe Biden tripping and falling over a sandbag. “I don’t know if he sustained injuries,” DeSantis said, “but I just want to say that we hope and wish Joe Biden a swift recovery from any injuries he may have sustained, but we also wish the United States of America a swift recovery from the injuries it has sustained because of Joe Biden.” It’s a classless riff, leaden with insinuation, delivered humorlessly.Still, DeSantis has a real case to make to Republicans. I thought DeSantis was overvalued in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 election, where his victory was no more impressive than those of Mike DeWine in Ohio or Jared Polis in Colorado. But I think he’s being underestimated now.I’ve been listening to DeSantis’s speeches and interviews, and while he’s not a generational talent, and he does have that tic of gratuitous cruelty, he’s not as stilted on the stump as many liberals seem to think. The technical glitches of his launch on Twitter Spaces don’t mean anything for his campaign. He has a proven ability to win tough races. And polling in the mid-20s against a popular former president in that president’s own party isn’t that weak of a starting point.A lot can happen from here, and DeSantis has proved himself nothing if not a capable opportunist.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Investors were optimistic after American officials touted progress in trade negotiations over the weekend, though details had yet to be released.Stocks in Asia gained on Monday after weekend talks signaled that progress had been made in easing trade tensions between the United States and China.Benchmark indexes in Japan and South Korea edged higher in early trading on Monday morning. Stocks in Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China climbed about 1 percent, while futures pointed to similar gains for the S&P 500 when trading begins in New York.Meetings in Geneva between U.S. and Chinese officials concluded on Sunday with Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, saying that “substantial progress” had been made. China’s vice premier, He Lifeng, called the talks “candid, in-depth and constructive.” Details are expected to be released on Monday, both sides said.The meetings were the first between Washington and Beijing since President Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and China retaliated with its own taxes of 125 percent on U.S. goods. The tariffs are so high as to effectively block much of the trade between the two countries.The escalating trade war has left financial markets uneasy, and the meeting raised investors’ hopes that tariffs could eventually be lowered.Analysts at the financial services firm Wedbush Securities said the talks were a “positive step in the right direction.” They anticipated that an initial agreement, once unveiled during the U.S. day on Monday, would “at a minimum” involve a “much lower level” for tariffs.Economists have warned that the tit-for-tat trade barriers have significantly increased the possibility of an economic downturn. That includes in Asia, where some of the biggest economies, including Japan and South Korea, are heavily reliant on both China and the United States as trade partners.The World Trade Organization has forecast that the continuing division of the global economy into “rival blocs” could cut global gross domestic product by nearly 7 percent over the long run. Earlier this month, Japanese officials slashed their growth forecast for this year by more than half.Last week, China reported that its exports to the United States in April dropped 21 percent from a year earlier. Recession warnings are beginning to emerge in the United States.Heading into the weekend, investors had relatively low expectations for a breakthrough at the talks that would result in a meaningful reduction in tariffs. Many analysts expected the discussions to revolve around determining what each side wanted and how negotiations could move forward.Recently, Mr. Trump has opened the door to lower tariffs. Last week, he suggested that tariffs could come down to 80 percent. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox News that so-called reciprocal tariffs on trade with China may settle near 34 percent. More

On Friday evening, US federal judge Robert Pitman blocked Texas governor Greg Abbott’s order to shut down mail-in ballot drop-off sites across the state as the election is currently under way.Last week, Abbott issued a proclamation limiting each county to only one ballot drop-off site, regardless of size or population. This decision would have led to the closure of drop-off sites across the state, including 11 in Harris county and three in Travis county. A lawsuit was immediately filed by civil right organizations.Critics argued Abbott’s order to close drop-off sites would disproportionately affect larger, more diverse counties and hit communities of color, making it more difficult for them to vote. Harris county has more than 4.7 million residents and is the most populous county in the nation and home to the city of Houston. Travis county is home to Texas’s capital city, Austin. By comparison, smaller counties like Brewster county in west Texas, which has a population of just under 10,000, would remain unaffected by the ruling as it has always only had one drop-off site.Requests for absentee ballots in Texas are higher than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, but concerns of mail slowdowns presented a need for drop-off locations. The ruling by Pitman blocking Abbott’s move is a victory for those deemed eligible to vote by mail in the state, including the elderly and disabled who would have had to travel farther distances to drop off their ballot and risk exposure to Covid-19.Statement from Harris County Clerk @CGHollins:Tonight’s injunction reinstating Harris County voters’ ability to hand-deliver their ballots at 12 county offices is a victory for voting rights. (1/3) https://t.co/t5v4Zb9g6h— Harris County Clerk (@HarrisVotes) October 10, 2020
In a statement, the Harris county clerk, Chris Hollins, said: “Tonight’s injunction reinstating Harris county voters’ ability to hand-deliver their ballots at 12 county offices is a victory for voting rights. The governor’s suppressive tactics should not be tolerated, and tonight’s ruling shows that the law is on the side of Texas voters.” More