Evelyn Reynolds

A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.Chiusano, a former Newsday reporter, told the Guardian last week that the story of Santos, who was expelled from Congress last week after a damning ethics report that focused on his use of campaign funds and also faces criminal charges, was at its heart “a tragedy”.“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.A movie interpretation of Santos’s political career may have literary precedents to follow. Part of the New York district three that Santos served includes Great Neck, transposed as Little Egg in the story of Jay Gatsby, the (fictional) character who created his own fictional life in F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.The disgraced ex-congressman fired off a series of tweets late Friday night announcing he would file complaints about misdeeds involving former colleagues Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Bob Menendez.By Sunday, Santos’s controversial expulsion ahead of a criminal trial continued to attract political comment. Former Trump White House chief of staff and ABC political analyst Reince Priebus acknowledged splits within the Republican party on the vote to expel and the issue of the legislative body acting independently of voters in Santos’s district.“True, he lied. He has a big mouth, all of these things. You know, I do think there is a concern with taking that power away from the people in the district,” Priebus said.Santos, he added, was “a victim of himself. But he is also paying the price for having a big mouth, for being almost a comedian in front of his colleagues, who are now his judges. And he paid the price. And that’s a good lesson about, when you get in trouble, you keep your head down; you keep your mouth shut.”But the immediate aftermath of a year of Santos headlines has left an emotional vacuum – and the prospect of a hotly contested election in the New Year in which Democrats will hope to recover a seat they lost in 2022. New York Magazine, which exhaustively chronicled the Santos’s political epic, echoed the line from Dr Seuss: “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” More

Muslim community leaders gathered on Saturday in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US, to protest President Biden’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, reiterating that the president’s stance could affect his support in crucial swing states next year.Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Biden’s unwillingness to call for a ceasefire had damaged his relationship with the American-Muslim community beyond repair. (Cair-Minnesota is not involved in his work on the Abandon Biden effort, which the organization said Hussein is doing in his personal capacity.)“We are not powerless as American Muslims. We are powerful. We don’t only have the money, but we have the actual votes. And we will use that vote to save this nation from itself,” Hussein said. “Families and children are being wiped out with our tax dollars,” he added. “What we are witnessing today is the tragedy upon tragedy.”After Israel resumed its bombing offensive on the territory after a five-day pause, the health ministry said 15,200 Palestinians, roughly two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed thus far. Israel’s air and ground strikes began after Hamas militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took around 240 hostage in a cross-border attack on 7 October.From behind a lectern that read “Abandon Biden, ceasefire now”, leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania issued similar warnings that the president could not afford to lose the support of the Arab-American community in states critical to his chances for re-election.A recent poll showed Biden’s support among Arab Americans has plunged from a comfortable majority in 2020 to 17%.Dearborn is home to the highest concentration of Arab Americans in a state that has the highest number, 211,405 , and the highest percentage of Arab Americans, at 2.1%. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 2.8% of the vote. Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote, according to the Arab American Institute.In Wisconsin, where there are 25,000 Muslim voters, Biden won by about 20,000 votes, Tarek Amin, a doctor representing the state’s Muslim community, said.In Arizona, where Biden won by around 10,500 votes, there are over 25,000 Muslim voters according to the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California San Diego, said Phoenix pharmacist Hazim Nasaredden.About 3.45 million Americans identify as Muslim, or 1.1% of the country’s population, and the demographic tends to lean Democratic, according to Pew Research Center. Like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are also home to significant Arab-American populations and critical to Biden’s re-election mathematics.The #AbandonBiden campaign began in Minnesota in October and has since spread to at least five other states represented at the conference.“The anger in our community is beyond belief,” Hussein, who is Muslim, told the Associated Press. “One of the things that made us even more angry is the fact that most of us actually voted for President Biden. I even had one incident where a religious leader asked me: ‘How do I get my 2020 ballot so I can destroy it?’”While the Biden administration has resisted pressure to call for a permanent halt in fighting, and continues significant weapons transfers to Israel, senior officials are going further in expressing their discomfort with the high level of civilian casualties.The Wall Street Journal reported that the US has provided Israel with 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker busters included in a transfer package of around 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells since 7 October.On Saturday, US vice-president Kamala Harris said that while the US supports Israel’s “legitimate military objectives” in Gaza, the suffering of the civilian population inside the enclave has been too high.“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” Harris said at a press conference in Dubai. “It is truly heartbreaking.”At a meeting with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Harris also said that Washington will not allow for the forced relocation of Palestinians or any redrawing of the current border of the Gaza Strip.“Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza,” Harris said, according to a read-out of the meeting.Against a backdrop of pro-Palestinian protest in the US, Muslim leaders gathered in Dearborn said Biden or likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump were not their only choices next year, and they could choose to sit out the election.“We don’t have two options. We have many options. And we’re going to exercise that,” Cair’s Hussein said. More

A few months ago, the former president Donald Trump accused the Republican party of speaking “very inarticulately” on abortion. And yet, for the GOP presidential frontrunner, inarticulateness seems to be a feature, not a bug, of his own approach to abortion.Trump thinks he can run in 2024 as a “moderate” on abortion, Rolling Stone reported this week – even though he’s currently running ads in Iowa, a crucial state in the Republican primary, proclaiming himself “the most pro-life president ever”. It’s a title to which Trump has a legitimate claim: his three nominees to the supreme court not only handed the nation’s highest court a definitive conservative majority, but all three voted to overturn Roe v Wade in summer 2022.That move handed the anti-abortion movement the victory of a lifetime, but Republicans have been paying for it ever since. They underperformed in both the 2022 midterms and the 2023 Virginia state elections, losses that have been widely credited to the party’s inability to figure out a path forward on abortion. Abortion rights advocates, meanwhile, won every abortion-related ballot measure of the last 18 months, even in red states. After Ohio, seemingly a conservative stronghold, voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state constitution earlier this month, abortion rights activists rushed to remind Democrats that “abortion is a winning issue” in 2024.While Republicans have flailed over how to message on an apparently toxic issue, Trump has – in typical Trump fashion – flip-flopped on it with apparent ease. Shortly after the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed “the abortion issue” for Republicans’ poor performance. He has refused to say whether he supports a federal ban and called the decision by Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, to sign a six-week abortion ban a “terrible thing”.But all the while, Trump continues to take credit for overturning Roe.“I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” he bragged on social media in May.Howard Schweber, a professor of American politics and political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “Trump has what, in my experience of observing politics, seems like a nearly unique ability to maintain cognitive dissonance in ways that his supporters find untroubling.“His supporters will say, ‘Oh, well, he really means that when he says’ – and then finish that sentence with whichever position they approve of. That’s the gamble that he’s taking,” he said.Trump has not said what, if any, specific abortion policy he would support as president. DeSantis has said that he would support a 15-week national abortion ban, a position championed by the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has said that she would sign an abortion ban as president, but doubts that Republicans could muster the votes in Congress.Iowa has a reputation for conservative evangelicalism, but most Iowans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. By not letting himself get nailed down on a specific abortion policy, Trump might be approaching Iowa as though the presidential primary is already over, said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. (Which it very well be: Trump is polling far higher than any of his competitors, who have largely cratered.) In a general election, where voters are more likely to be less dogmatic, it can pay to be vague – particularly on a charged issue like abortion.“Things that you might say a little more forcefully during the nomination process during the primaries, you back off a little bit when it comes time to time for the general election,” Hagle said. “And that’s been a strategy of candidates for decades.”Republicans in Iowa have launched an effort to amend the state constitution and clarify that it does not protect abortion rights. In order for the amendment to show up on the ballot, the Republican-controlled state legislature would have to pass it before handing the measure to voters. That could backfire, increasing turnout among abortion rights supporters who oppose Trump.“But then we’re also talking about turnout in the presidential year, which is high anyway,” Hagle said. “So if you lose turnout in a midterm year, that’s going to make more of a difference than in a presidential year.”Most Americans oppose the overturning of Roe. But that doesn’t mean voters are all that motivated by it: numerous polls since Roe’s overturning have found that Democrats are highly energized by abortion, while Republicans are less so – a reversal of the status quo while Roe was the law of the land.As long as Trump wins the primary, he’s in little danger of losing the conservative evangelicals who oppose abortion rights. While they may want him to be more forceful on the issue, it’s improbable that they would turn to a Democrat in response to Trump’s reticence.“Sometimes the option is to not vote at all, but I can’t imagine that they would want to do that either,” Hagle said. “It does create a little heartburn on the part of the pro-life folks that supported him if all the sudden he’s taking a more moderating position, but he may see that that’s more appropriate given his electoral strategy.”Even people who say that they would like to keep abortion “mostly legal” are not always that invested in doing so. A recent poll from the New York Times – which did not look at Iowa – found that, among voters who want abortion to be “mostly legal”, Biden led by only one point. Those voters are also twice as likely to say they plan to vote based on economic issues, rather than social issues like abortion.Schweber, though, is convinced that there are would-be Trump voters who will defect solely based on their support of abortion.“Women voters – particularly middle-class and upper-class, suburban women voters – do take abortion rights seriously,” he said. In 2016, Schweber said Republican women told him, “It doesn’t matter, they’re never going to overrule Roe.”“That sense of security is obviously gone,” he added. More

On 14 September 1874, less than a decade after the end of the US civil war, the former Confederate general James Longstreet was back in arms. This time, he was seeking to prevent an insurrection: a white supremacist bid to take over New Orleans.Once seen by northerners as among the three most notorious Confederates – with his commander, Robert E Lee, and president, Jefferson Davis – Longstreet now led state militia and city police. His troops were Black and white, reflecting an unlikely commitment to post-war civil rights that would waver in later years. His complex life is the subject of a new biography, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, by Elizabeth R Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, currently the visiting Harmsworth professor of history at Oxford.“This turnabout is so fascinating,” Varon marvels. “I pitched the book as the story of the most remarkable political about-face in American history.”An enslaver, Longstreet directed Confederate forces to capture Black people and take them south to slavery or imprisonment. He fought until the surrender at Appomattox, then allied himself with those who had brought about his defeat: Ulysses S Grant and the Republican party.“He was not the only one,” Varon says of white southern Republicans who made such moves, “but [he was] the highest-ranking Confederate. He was a lightning rod for critics.”Prominent figures such as Lee were honored with monuments, some of which have recently been pulled down. Longstreet never had this problem, because you’d be hard-pressed to find such tributes to him.“It’s quite astounding,” Varon reflects. “Longstreet endorses Reconstruction at a time when the vast majority of white southern former Confederates pledged themselves to resist at all costs.”The author is interested in such dissenters. A previous book chronicled Elizabeth Van Lew, a resident of the Confederate capital, Richmond, who spied for the Union. Varon hopes a future scholar will write about another dissenter, Longstreet’s much younger second wife, Helen Longstreet, née Dortch, who outlived her husband by 58 years. By the 20th century, she was also an outspoken voice for civil rights in the south.Dissent characterized Longstreet’s war years as much as his later life did. The 1993 film Gettysburg dramatizes his dispute with Lee at that famous battle. Longstreet argued for a defensive approach. Lee took the offense and the result was a disaster, a turning point in the war. Transferred west, Longstreet led an assault credited for the victory at Chickamauga, then lambasted his new commander, Braxton Bragg, for his failure to capitalize. Longstreet would later suffer for daring to criticize Lee.Although Varon addresses Longstreet’s war years, she is more interested in his postwar career, which stretched for nearly four decades and included leadership positions in Louisiana and Georgia. He even became the US minister to the Ottoman empire, where he met Sultan Abdul Hamid II and defended American missionaries.He owed much of his success to an improbable allegiance to the abolitionist Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and a lasting friendship with Grant.Varon details an unconventional but unsuccessful peace initiative involving the Grant and Longstreet families near the end of the civil war. (The war years had been hard for Longstreet and his first wife, Louise Longstreet. They lost three children to scarlet fever in 1862, and two years later, the general was grievously wounded by his own men.) At Appomattox, Longstreet was impressed by Grant’s lenient terms, which helped convince him it was time to change. He explained his stance in a series of 1867 letters that were poorly received by many.As Varon explains: “Longstreet said, ‘Yes, let’s give the Republican party a chance, try to make this work, we appealed to arms and the sword to arbitrate the political conflict with the north, they won, now it … requires me to try to make the best of it.’”She adds: “He was absolutely thrown back on his heels by the backlash by ex-Confederates. For his willingness to work with the Republicans, he was called anathema, a Judas, Lucifer, Benedict Arnold, they wished he’d died during the war.”A new battle began, a war of words with fellow former commanders such as Jubal Early, over who was responsible for the defeat. Yet Longstreet was committed to Reconstruction and the Republicans and to his postwar home, New Orleans, a racially diverse city where he held political positions following Grant’s election as president in 1868, beginning at the customs house. Through such positions, which extended to militia and police leadership, Longstreet advocated some degree of civil rights. Allies included PBS Pinchback, who in 1872 became the first sworn-in Black governor of a US state.In addition to Longstreet’s personal life and recognition of the flawed rebel war effort, Varon identifies “the last element” in his turnaround as “New Orleans itself – a unique political environment”. She cites the city’s Afro-Creole male leadership class, many of whom served as officers in the Union army.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They were politically savvy, assertive men,” Varon says, “really pushing for votes and full civil, economic and social rights for Blacks in Louisiana.” Regarding Longstreet, she notes: “I don’t think it would have turned out the same if [he] was somewhere else in the postwar south. This particular setting was uniquely positioned to change his views on race.”By 1874, that change was profound. On George Washington’s birthday, Longstreet participated in a review of interracial troops. Racist white discontent was simmering, in part over a disputed election two years earlier: after the Republicans were declared to have won, Democrats set up a rival government, followed by a takeover attempt and a massacre of Black people at Colfax. Another slaughter of Black people followed, in Coushatta in the summer of 1874. That fall, a group called the White League led a march on New Orleans.The insurrectionists targeted government property and overwhelmed authorities. Longstreet was wounded in the so-called Battle of Liberty Place, which ended with the rioters in control of the city. Their three-day takeover ceased with the approach of federal forces but the riot spelled doom for Reconstruction in Louisiana, presaging the demise of the policy throughout the southern states.Longstreet’s subsequent life brought something of a retrenchment on civil rights. Relocating to Georgia, he maintained ties to the Republican party but focused on cultivating white support. He also pursued two significant projects – restoring national bonds ruptured in the civil war, and defending his Confederate career, in part through a near 700-page autobiography.“He focuses on setting the record straight and answering charges as he gets older,” Varon says. “He claws back some of his lost popularity among white southerners. He reinvents himself as a herald of reconciliation. Both sides are going to have to make concessions.”As a US marshal, Longstreet did prosecute white supremacists and continue to back voting rights for all eligible citizens.“He remains kind of enigmatic,” Varon reflects. “In the last years of his life, he tries to reconcile his Confederate and Republican identities. It was not possible to ever fully do that.”
Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

The US House speaker Mike Johnson signaled on Saturday that Republicans are nearing holding a formal vote to launch an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.“I think it’s something we have to do at this juncture,” Johnson said during a Saturday appearance on Fox and Friends Weekend.Republicans have spent months investigating Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings, hoping to find improprieties they could use as the basis for impeachment. The full House has not yet voted to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry, as some Republicans have publicly expressed doubts about whether there is enough evidence to justify such action.The White House has rebuffed GOP efforts to force it to turn over information in part by citing a 2020 opinion from the justice department’s office of legal counsel citing the need for a full House vote before a House committee could force the production of documents or interviews.“We conclude that the House must expressly authorize a committee to conduct an impeachment investigation and to use compulsory process in that investigation before the committee may compel the production of documents or testimony in support of the House’s ‘sole Power of Impeachment’,” the memo says.Johnson, who appeared with the GOP conference chair, Elise Stefanik, expressed confidence that there were enough votes to authorize an inquiry and said it was a “necessary step” to obtain information from the White House.“Elise and I both served on the impeachment defense team of Donald Trump twice when the Democrats used it for brazen, partisan political purposes. We decried that use of it. This is very different. Remember, we are the rule-of-law team. We have to do it very methodically,” he said.The Republican investigation thus far has not resulted in several misleading claims, but nothing substantial. At a September hearing, several of the expert witnesses called by Republicans said they did not believe there was enough evidence to justify impeachment.Hunter Biden has also offered to publicly testify before the committees investigating his business dealings. More

George Santos, the disgraced New York Republican who was expelled from the US House on Friday, spent his first hours as a former congressman railing against his former colleagues and saying he would file ethics complaints against four of them on Monday.Santos told reporters after his expulsion he was done with Congress.“Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place,” he told reporters outside the US Capitol after the vote.By Friday evening, he was tweeting about his colleagues. He wrote on X that he would file an ethics complaint against three fellow Republicans from New York – Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis and Nick LaLota – who had long pushed to oust him from Congress. He offered no proof of wrongdoing against any of the three.He also wrote that he would file a complaint against Representative Rob Menendez, whose father, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, has been criminally charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of Egypt. Santos, again, didn’t offer specific accusations of wrongdoing.Any person can file a complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics, but that does not mean it will result in an investigation.He also urged a Republican in Congress to have the “testicular fortitude” to move to expel Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a fine for setting off a fire alarm in a congressional office building.Santos spent the week leading up to his impeachment vote railing against colleagues, accusing them of having affairs and missing votes because they were hungover.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSantos became just the sixth person to ever be expelled from Congress after a bipartisan 311-114 vote on Friday. His expulsion came shortly after a report from the House ethics committee detailed how he spent campaign funds on luxury goods, cosmetics and an OnlyFans subscription. He also has pleaded not guilty to a 23-count federal indictment related to his use of campaign funds.After being elected to Congress to represent Long Island and Queens last year, Santos quickly earned a reputation as a prolific liar. Among other things, he lied about working on Wall Street, that his mother died during 9/11, and that he was a volleyball star in college. More

It was the perfect story and Donald Trump pounced.In the final weeks of the 2020 election, officials in Luzerne county in north-east Pennsylvania had discovered nine mail-in ballots in the trash. Several of them were cast in favor of Trump, who had been railing for months that the election was rigged against him. William Barr, then the attorney general, briefed Trump on the matter before it was public and Trump immediately began spinning it.“They were Trump ballots – eight ballots in an office yesterday in – but in a certain state and they were – they had Trump written on it, and they were thrown in a garbage can. This is what’s going to happen,” Trump said at the time. In an unusual move, the justice department quickly announced it was investigating the matter. Months later, it would announce the incident was caused by human error.Several months later there was a new election director in place. But there was also a new problem. When Republicans went to the voting machine in the primaries, a header popped up on their ballot telling them they were voting an “official Democratic ballot”.When the midterm elections came around in 2022, there was another new election director . Again, there was a problem. Just after the polls opened, many precincts quickly reported they did not have enough paper to feed the voting machines, prompting delays and forcing some voters to be turned away.All three incidents were caused by unintentional human error, exacerbated by a high level of turnover in the election office of a politically competitive county in a battleground state. (Trump won the county by 14 points in 2020, a five-point drop from his 2016 margin.) Between 2016 and 2019, the median experience for staffers in the office was between 17 and 22 years, according to an analysis by the news outlet Votebeat, which has reported extensively on the election office’s turnover. In 2022, the median level of experience was just 1.5 years.“It’s a good example of an office that hasn’t been invested in and it shows,” said Jennifer Morrell, the CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, an election administration consultancy that worked with Luzerne county to improve processes in 2021. “I think there are a lot of other offices like that maybe haven’t had the public problems, but it’s probably because they’re kind of holding things together by a thread. Or more likely by duct tape.”While the turnover in Luzerne county has been exceptionally high, it is emblematic of a larger crisis facing American elections. Experienced election officials, long underresourced and underpaid, are leaving the profession as they face a wave of threats and harassment, seeded by Trump and allies who have spread the myth that US election results can’t be trusted. About 20% of local election officials are projected to be working their first presidential election in 2024, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. Nearly 70 election directors or assistant directors in 40 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have left since 2020, according to Al Schmidt, the secretary of state.With this exodus comes a massive loss of institutional knowledge. The people who know exactly how to proof a ballot, test election machines, or troubleshoot problems on election day won’t be there. The result is a toxic cycle, where a lack of experience produces human error, fueling distrust in elections and anger, then pushing election officials to leave.“Any wrinkle in an election process is immediately the subject of conspiracy theories,” said Robert Morgan, who served as Luzerne county’s election director for most of 2021 and was in the role when the ballot header issue occurred. “If you experience that level of turnover, there is a concern that you may not be as experienced, and you may not have handled this, or handled something this large, and yes, that doesn’t help. That doesn’t build confidence.”As the county heads into another election year, it’s under the magnifying glass. Officials know that any error can lead to more distrust and skepticism of elections. The county is now seeking to improve its internal election processes to regain trust of its residents.“There’s certain things that we can’t control. But what we need to do is make sure that we prepare for everything that we can control,” Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, said. “We still hear from people who don’t trust the election. And you’re not going to get people’s trust overnight. We’re going to have to have a series of clean elections.”As the justice department investigation found, for example, the ballots Trump seized on in 2020 weren’t discarded because of a nefarious plot to steal the election, but rather because a temporary worker who had been on the job for a few days made a mistake. The worker appeared not to realize they were military ballots, which can arrive in different envelopes than regular mail-in votes and discarded them. The discarded ballots were quickly discovered by Shelby Watchilla, the county’s director of elections. Federal prosecutors and the FBI would later say there was no evidence of criminal intent.Still, the damage was done. After the ballots were disclosed, Walter Griffith, a county councilman, had organized a protest outside the county office and criticized Watchilla as incompetent. She resigned in December, shortly after she filed a defamation lawsuit against Griffith.Public meetings of the election board became more heated in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “There were no filters for some people. They would immediately assume everybody was incompetent in the process and that sort of stuff because of what had happened in 2020,” said Morgan, who took over in 2021. “And you know it’s tough to operate in an environment like that.”Recent election directors in Luzerne county have also been paid $64,500 per year, according to Votebeat, among the lowest salaries in similarly sized counties across the country. “You’re making $65,000 and you’re going to work and people are publicly abusing you? And you’re receiving threats. That’s not an incentive to get out of bed and get to the office,” Crocamo said.And as distrust built after the discarded ballots in 2020, another error from the election office only further escalated mistrust.When Morgan started his job as the election director in 2021, the elections office was already in the process of proofing the ballot for the upcoming primary. There wasn’t a manual or protocol to follow.“It was basically an oral history tradition. It was a little frustrating. Because sometimes the stories weren’t told in the order they might have been otherwise,” he said. “I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t know anywhere near all the things that needed to go into it. It’s a huge logistical process.”When election day for the primary came around, Morgan made a mistake. When a representative of Dominion programmed the county’s election machines, Morgan didn’t catch that the representative had programmed the first page of all ballots to say it was a Democratic ballot. Polls opened at 7am and by 7.15am the office was swamped with phone calls. “That was not fun,” Morgan said.“We should have caught it. But we didn’t. You never proofread your own work and a lot of times when you proofread you’re looking for the highlights,” he added. “The problem is in a heightened situation where people don’t feel you’re credible and you make a simple error like that and it just lights the fire for everything everyone thought they were getting cheated by last time.”Morgan resigned that fall to take another job, a decision that he said was unrelated to any harassment he faced.By November of last year, Beth Gilbert McBride, a city councilperson in Wilkes-Barre, was running the elections office. She started as a deputy in July 2022 and took over three months before election day when the elections director stepped down, according to Votebeat. Weeks before election day, the deputy director texted McBride that the county was low on paper but probably would be OK for the election. McBride said she would order more paper.That order never materialized and shortly after polls opened, several precincts reported they were running low on paper. County officials initially delivered extra paper from a warehouse to precincts with a shortage, but then had to take it back when a Dominion representative expressed concern it might not work with the machine. The county ultimately had to make a same-day order for the correct paper.There were immediate accusations that the paper issue was an attempt to suppress the vote in Republican areas of the county. Republicans on the elections board refused to certify the election, causing the county to miss the state’s certification deadline (it ultimately certified after a lawsuit). The accusations went national – the US House administration committee held a hearing in March of this year focused on the paper shortage that was titled: “Government Voter Suppression in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.” Representative Bryan Steil, a Republican from Wisconsin, said that one-third of precincts had been turned away.But an extensive investigation by the district attorney’s office found that wasn’t true: 16 of the county’s 143 polling locations had a paper shortage, and just four election judges reported a stoppage in voting.“The evidence shows that the failure to provide paper to the polling places was not a deliberate act, but rather a catastrophic oversight,” the district attorney’s report said, noting it was overlooked “amid the flurry of activities involved in the newly hired parties managing the election”.The review offered a thorough, public audit of what went wrong in 2022 and how to fix it. That kind of transparency will be required to rebuild trust, said Morrell, the elections consultant. “You address the mistake, you don’t brush it under the rug. You be transparent about why it happened and then ‘What can we do to ensure it doesn’t happen again?’” she said.Crocamo, the county manager, said there was little doubt the issues the county has faced have had to do with turnover.“We had individuals who worked in the bureau who were very good, very competent, but who were being abused. They were being verbally abused by board members. Some government representatives. People in the public coming to meetings. Some of them were receiving threats,” she said. “If there were individuals who worked in the bureau and had institutional memory and they were gone, that was gone as well. All that was gone.”This year, she’s determined not to have the same issues happen again. The county brought in a lawyer with expertise in elections to officially record its election procedures. Crocamo published a calendar of what needs to be done each week and expects an explanation if a deadline isn’t met. And the county is doing extensive outreach for poll workers at high schools and senior centers.The new election director, Eryn Harvey, 28, has experience in the office – she left in 2022 to run for elected office, but returned.During an interview in mid-November, Crocamo was especially optimistic. Luzerne county had just pulled off largely successful municipal elections – a hugely complicated endeavor because of the wide variations in local races that can appear on a ballot.“I mean, I’m not gonna convince everybody. That’s impossible. There are people out there who want us to fail. But I think we can convince most of the people, most of the voting public, that they can have trust in our elections in Luzerne county,” she said.She took a long pause. “Absolutely believe it.” More

As Las Vegas prepares to host Super Bowl LVIII sports betting is preparing to celebrate its remarkable shift from the illegal fringes of American sports to the heart of its establishment. In Congress, one man is not cheering.Congressman Paul Tonko fears the industry has already gone too far. “There’s no limit to this,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t have this wild west environment.” So far Tonko is a rare voice of dissent in Washington, another arena where the new gambling establishment is gaining ground.The gambling capital of the world is playing host to one of its largest sporting events for the first time in February – less than six years after the supreme court set the stage for sports betting’s surge across much of the United States.The transformation of official attitudes to online gambling has been head-spinning. Barely a dozen years ago, US authorities were still arresting and jailing online gambling executives. Now, in most of America, placing a wager has never been so easy.This now-legal sector’s sprint must be stopped, according to Tonko, who has become its fiercest critic on Capitol Hill. The congressman is calling for a federal crackdown to halt a “public health crisis” from engulfing the country – starting with a nationwide ban on advertising.The crusade has so far been a solitary one. No other member of Congress has yet publicly endorsed his campaign against betting ads, launched nine months ago. But Tonko is not prepared to throw in the towel.Over the course of an hour-long interview, the Democrat of New York let rip at a sector he believes must be reined in, accusing it of “preying on” the vulnerable, targeting ads at recovering addicts and putting “profits over people”.Back in May 2018, when the US supreme court struck down a decades-old law which had prohibited legal sports betting across much of the country, it knew the ruling would be divisive. Supporters of the ruling believed it would prompt a financial boon for states and “critically weaken” illegal platforms, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s opinion. Opponents feared it would “hook the young on gambling” and corrupt professional and college sports.The sports betting industry loudly highlights potential signs that its supporters were right. The American Gaming Association (AGA), which represents legal gambling companies, estimates they paid $13.5bn in taxes to state and local governments last year.So far the opponents of legalization have tended to speak more quietly. Signs of climbing youth addiction rates are more likely found in treatment clinics and helpline call centers than in political press releases.Tonko is trying to turn up the volume. “I’m very academic about this job,” he said. “And if I see something as a looming crisis… then I should respond.”The congressman was drawn to scrutinize the burgeoning gambling market after hearing “routinely” from younger constituents about a “constant bombardment” of ads. This is a “known addictive product” which, as far as he’s concerned, should be regulated like any other.At 74, Tonko noted that his generation was not “much of a target” for the sector’s marketing blitz. “But high schoolers, young children, college students and, believe it or not, people that were on the list as people in recovery were a targeted list of populations that sportsbooks went after.”With online sportsbooks now live and legal in more than two dozen states, Tonko is alarmed that this liberalization has triggered a sharp increase in compulsive gambling rates. “It’s an issue that needs to be addressed before we are overwhelmed by pain and suffering.”Back in February, on the eve of the last Super Bowl, Tonko proposed the Betting on our Future Act, based on legislation that banned tobacco advertisements in the 1960s. It is designed to “protect the innocent” from the betting commercials that have flooded television, radio and the internet in recent years. “We didn’t outlaw smoking,” he said, “and we’re not outlawing gambling here.”Days later, with 115 million people tuned into the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory over the Philadelphia Eagles, and companies reportedly shelling out up to $7m per ad to reach them, gambling giants dug deep. DraftKings, one of the biggest players in sports betting, recruited a cadre of celebrities to promote its special offer: a “FREE BET” for all customers. “Man, that’s big,” the comedian Kevin Hart said during its advert. Only the small print (displayed in the last seven seconds) explained it was impossible to withdraw winnings from such a “non-cashable” wager.The wider industry continues to spend heavily. The top four operators – FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Caesars – spent $825.3m on advertising last year alone, according to data from the advertising intelligence groups Vivvix and Pathmatics, and an estimated $417.2m on adverts in the first eight months of this year; more than the same period of 2022.These digital gladiators are still battling to dominate this nascent arena. Their extensive marketing campaigns have made gambling more visible than ever before; their innovations have made it more accessible, too. Regular prompts and opportunities to gamble have made the practice “far more destructive”, argued Tonko, who believes legal operators want “free rein” to do as they please. This is a market with “no parameters”, he claimed, laying out his case for swift action.So far, however, support for his proposal has been muted. Privately, some in Washington question whether advertising restrictions would make more sense than outright ban. The pushback has been blunt.The congressman’s comments “ignore the hard work and commitment of thousands of state and tribal gaming regulators who work every day to safeguard consumers, uphold marketplace integrity, and enforce the law”, Cait DeBaun, the AGA’s vice-president for strategic communications and responsibility, said. “The only ‘Wild West’ out there is the unchecked illegal market enabled by failed federal legislation, which handed bad actors a monopoly for almost three decades.“Offshore sportsbooks pad their pockets by targeting kids, college students and those with gambling problems. Anyone interested in protecting vulnerable Americans should focus their efforts on strengthening and enforcing existing laws to stop illegal gambling.”The industry has made some changes. The AGA’s marketing code, for example, was updated in March to prohibit use of the term “risk free”, and clarify that ads should be “designed to appeal primarily” to people aged 21 and over. Insiders deny this move was prompted by anything in particular. (Asked if it still uses the term “free bet” in ads following the change, DraftKings did not respond.)“As legalized gaming expands, our commitment to responsibility continues to grow and evolve in tandem,” said DeBaun. “The changes to the Code enacted by AGA members demonstrate this commitment by raising standards and introducing increased protections for college-aged audiences who are more vulnerable.”Such action is not enough for Tonko. “Intervening here, I think, is the just and right thing to do,” he said. The congressman is focused “for now” on advertising, but in time believes his colleagues should consider the best ways to both prevent and treat compulsive gambling.Congressional hearings could explore what should be “off limits” for this industry, he suggested. “There will be ripple effects of all sorts that, I hope, will be reviewed, and given intense examination. And if it warrants public policy, let’s do the bills. Let’s do that legislation.”Tonko is not sure the current safety net for problem gamblers is sufficient. “We do a lot to fund efforts to address people with alcohol, tobacco and heroin” issues, he said. When it comes to gambling, “you’ll tell me there’s an 800 number. How strong is it? How functional is it? You don’t treat any mental health disorder, any addiction, [with] a simple telephone number.”Media companies selling ads, gambling operators pursuing customers and states collecting tax revenue “all stand to gain” from sports betting’s rise, Tonko observed. “But at what price?”Toward the end of his interview, the congressman trailed off. “Look, I have a horse track in my district,” he said. “I’m not against gambling.”Tonko visits the Saratoga course, in upstate New York, from time to time. His staffers reckon the congressman most recently placed a bet last summer.But attending a track to wager on which horse finishes first seems quaint in an era when smartphones have enabled myriad bets – from the length of the longest touchdown to the number of passes two players might complete – during a single football game. The congressman believes tougher regulations are needed to reduce the odds of addiction trapping a new generation. More