Elections

It’s time to admit that I underestimated Nikki Haley.When she began her presidential campaign, she seemed caught betwixt and between: too much of a throwback to pre-Trump conservatism to challenge Ron DeSantis for the leadership of a Trumpified party, but also too entangled with Trump after her service in his administration to offer the fresh start that anti-Trump Republicans would be seeking.If you wanted someone to attack Trump head-on with relish, Chris Christie was probably your guy. If you wanted someone with pre-Trump Republican politics but without much Trump-era baggage, Tim Scott seemed like the fresher face.But now Scott is gone, Christie has a modest New Hampshire constituency and not much else, and Haley is having her moment. She’s in second place in New Hampshire, tied with DeSantis in the most recent Des Moines Register-led poll in Iowa, and leading Joe Biden by more than either DeSantis or Trump in national polls. Big donors are fluttering her way, and there’s an emerging media narrative about how she’s proving the DeSantis campaign theory wrong and showing that you can thrive as a Republican without surrendering to Trumpism.To be clear, I do not think Haley has proved the DeSantis theory wrong. She is not polling anywhere close to the highs DeSantis hit during his stint as the Trump-slayer, and if you use the Register-led poll to game out a future winnowing, you see that her own voters would mostly go to DeSantis if she were to drop out — but if DeSantis drops out, a lot of his voters would go to Trump.As long as that’s the case, Haley might be able to consolidate 30 or 35 percent of the party, but the path to actually winning would be closed. Which could make her ascent at DeSantis’s expense another study in the political futility of anti-Trump conservatism, its inability to wrestle successfully with the populism that might make Trump the nominee and the president again.But credit where it’s due: Haley has knocked out Scott, passed Christie and challenged DeSantis by succeeding at a core aspect of presidential politics — presenting yourself as an appealing and charismatic leader who can pick public fights and come out the winner (at least when Vivek Ramaswamy is your foil).So in the spirit of not underestimating her, let’s try to imagine a scenario where Haley actually wins the nomination.First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls alone cannot anticipate.For Haley, the stampede scenario requires winning outright in New Hampshire. The difficulty is that even on the upswing, she still trails Trump 46-19 in the current RealClearPolitics Average. But assume that Christie drops out and his support swings her way, assume that the current polling underestimates how many independents vote in the G.O.P. primary, assume a slight sag for Trump and a little last-moment Nikkimentum, and you can imagine your way to a screaming upset — Haley 42, Trump 40.Then assume that defeat forces Trump to actually debate in the long February lull (broken only by the Nevada caucus) between New Hampshire and the primary in Haley’s own South Carolina. Assume that the front-runner comes across as some combination of rusty and insane, Haley handles him coolly and then wins her home state primary. Assume that polls still show her beating Biden, Fox News has rallied to her fully, endorsements flood in — and finally, finally, enough voters who like Trump because he’s a winner swing her way to clear a path to the nomination.You’ll notice, though, that this story skips over Iowa. That’s because I’m not sure what Haley needs there. Victory seems implausible, but does she want to surge so impressively that it knocks DeSantis out of the race? Or, as the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio has suggested, does the fact that DeSantis’s voters mostly have Trump as a second choice mean that Haley actually needs DeSantis to stay in the race through the early states, so that Trump can’t consolidate his own potential support? In which case maybe Haley needs an Iowa result where both she and DeSantis overperform their current polling, setting her up for New Hampshire but also giving the Florida governor a reason to hang around.This dilemma connects to my earlier argument that beating Trump requires a joining of the Haley and DeSantis factions, an alliance of the kind contemplated by Trump’s opponents in 2016 but never operationalized. But I doubt Haley is interested in such an alliance at the moment; after all, people are talking about her path to victory — and here I am, doing it myself!Fundamentally, though, I still believe that Haley’s destiny is anticipated by the biting, “congrats, Nikki,” quote from a DeSantis ally in New York Magazine: “You won the Never Trump primary. Your prize is nothing.”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

Groups seeking to protect US democracy from a renewed threat of subversion in the presidential race next year wield a new weapon against Donald Trump and his accomplices: the little-used law of defamation.Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the My Pillow CEO, Mike Lindell, and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza are among the individuals named in a spate of high-profile defamation cases targeting those who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Prominent rightwing media outlets such as Fox News and Gateway Pundit are also on the hook.Already the legal pain is mounting. Giuliani has been found liable for defaming two election workers in Georgia whom he falsely accused of criminally miscounting votes in 2020 in favour of Joe Biden.The case will go to trial in December with Giuliani facing possibly swingeing punitive damages.Lindell has notched up millions in legal fees in the $2bn defamation suits that have been brought against him by the voting machine firms Dominion and Smartmatic for falsely saying they rigged the count. His ongoing libel woes follow the April settlement in which Fox agreed to pay Dominion a shattering $788m for broadcasting similar lies.“This is lawfare,” Lindell protested in an interview with the Guardian. “Lawfare hasn’t been used in our country since the late 1700s, and that’s what they are doing.”The lawsuits are designed in part as a strategy of deterrence. Those pressing the libel suits hope that anyone contemplating a renewed assault on next year’s presidential election, in which Trump is once again likely to be the Republican candidate, will look at the potentially devastating costs and think twice.“We aim to demonstrate that there is no immunity for spreading intentional and reckless lies,” said Rachel Goodman, a lawyer with the non-partisan advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Ensuring accountability for intentional defamation is a crucial part of deterring election subversion from happening again in 2024.”Protect Democracy currently has five defamation suits on the go against individuals and outlets who propagated election denial. The defendants include Giuliani, the Gateway Pundit and the beleaguered undercover video outfit Project Veritas.D’Souza is being sued over his widely derided and debunked movie 2000 Mules. In it he depicted a Black voter in Georgia, Mark Andrews, as a “mule” who illegally deposited ballots in a drop box when in fact he legally delivered the votes of his own family.The fifth case concerns Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who refused to accept her defeat in that state’s gubernatorial contest last year. The plaintiff is the top election official in Maricopa county, Stephen Richer, whom she falsely accused of injecting 300,000 phoney ballots into the count to swing the race against her.Defamation law has traditionally been sparingly used in the US, given the very high bar that plaintiffs have to meet. Under the 1964 supreme court ruling New York Times Co v Sullivan, they have to be able to show “actual malice” on behalf of the accused.“When lawsuits are brought against public figures they can only prevail if they can show that the speaker knew that the statements were false, or very likely false, and made recklessly without further investigation or caring for the truth,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA.The first Protect Democracy suit to reach trial will be that against Giuliani. A jury will convene in a federal court in Washington DC on 11 December to decide the scale of damages he will have to pay.Giuliani waged a “sustained smear campaign” against two Georgia poll workers in the 2020 count of absentee ballots, Protect Democracy alleged. The mother and daughter duo, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, became the targets of a conspiracy theory in which they were said to have packed bogus ballots into “suitcases” which they then surreptitiously counted five times, transferring victory to Biden.Giuliani called their actions “the crime of the century”, and labeled them “crooks”.Georgia election officials and police investigators categorically disproved the falsehoods within 24 hours of Giuliani airing them. The suitcases turned out to be ballot storage boxes and the counting process was entirely normal, yet he continued to repeat the lies for months.Freeman and Moss faced a prolonged harassment campaign, including death threats from Trump supporters. At its peak, Freeman was compelled to flee her own home and to shutter her online business.In July, in an attempt to avoid disclosing evidence to the plaintiffs, Giuliani admitted that he had made defamatory statements and caused the pair emotional distress. The following month a federal judge ruled he was liable for defamation – leaving the jury to decide only the scale of damages.Goodman said the case summed up why Protect Democracy was bringing defamation suits against election denialists. “Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were Americans doing their civic duty, and they were put in the crosshairs of this election subversion machine – we should not stand for that.”Most defendants have tried to shield themselves behind the first amendment right to free speech. In Arizona, Kari Lake has attacked the lawsuit against her as an attempt to “punish or silence” her “core free speech about the integrity of the 2022 election”.In his Guardian interview, Lindell said: “I have a first amendment right. These defamation cases are damaging free speech – people are afraid to speak out, to come forward with anything.”Protect Democracy countered that the first amendment does not provide blanket protection for mendacity. “It does not protect those who knowingly spread lies that destroy reputations and lives,” Goodman said.Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation, also rejects the idea that the first amendment shields reckless falsehoods. She is suing Fox News for what she claims were the “vitriolic lies” the channel spread about her in 2022 in her role as head of a newly created federal unit combatting misinformation.Jankowicz resigned from the Disinformation Governance Board, which was also disbanded, barely three weeks into the job. Her defamation complaint quotes the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson calling her a “moron” on air and labelling her unit “the new Soviet America”.Jankowicz said she took the decision to sue because she could see no other route to correct the public record. If there was a free speech component, she said, it was that her rights had been violated, not those of Fox News.“Their intention was to silence me, just as the defamation of election workers in Georgia was designed to silence them. That’s pretty un-American.”Fox has moved to have Jankowicz’s case dismissed, arguing that she has failed to meet the actual malice standard. A ruling is expected soon.The billion-dollar question is: can it work? Can the strategy of deploying defamation as a deterrent force denialists to think twice before they embark on renewed election subversion in 2024?Jankowicz, despite pressing ahead with her own libel suit, remains skeptical. “I haven’t seen any change in how these rumors and outright lies are being spread yet, and I do worry for 2024,” she said.She added that change would only come “when we see more big settlements, or juries siding with plaintiffs”.Parties accused of peddling anti-democratic lies certainly remain vociferous. The Gateway Pundit, the far-right website which Protect Democracy is suing for having published the same falsehoods as Giuliani about the Georgia poll workers, has used the lawsuit as a fundraising tool.Lindell said that he would never be silenced, and continued to insist that his statements about Dominion’s rigging of the 2020 election were “truths”. “I will continue to tell the truth, nothing’s going to stop me from speaking out. I’m not scared,” he said.There are though tentative signs of a shift in behavior. The far-right channel One America News backtracked on its lies about the Georgia poll workers last year after having settled its defamation suit with Freeman and Moss. Since then the outlet has been dropped by several major cable providers.In the wake of the huge defamation settlement between Fox and Dominion, Dinesh D’Souza and Trump himself complained that Fox News refused to give air time to 2000 Mules.Goodman is optimistic that defamation suits can help shore up the US’s shaken democratic norms. “This is about accountability as a way of ensuring that our democracy can get back on track,” she said. More

Tricia Shimamura keeps busy by welcoming immigrants, helping women get into politics and chasing around her two young children on the Upper East Side.Tricia Shimamura spends her days crisscrossing the city as the director of community affairs for Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president. She helps with everything from street fairs to welcoming new immigrants.It’s a mission that resonates deeply with Ms. Shimamura, 34, who ran for City Council on the Upper East Side in 2021. She is of Japanese and Puerto Rican heritage and would have been the first person of color to represent her district.A licensed social worker, Ms. Shimamura, has served as the deputy chief of staff for Carolyn Maloney — a former Democratic congresswoman from New York — and as Columbia University’s director of government affairs. She sits on the boards of several organizations that work with women to develop leadership skills and run for political office.On Sundays, Ms. Shimamura combines family time with community work, an exhausting and edifying balance. She lives with her husband, Dov Gibor, 44, who is a lawyer, and their two sons, Teddy, 4, and Oliver, 1.“Teddy recently pointed to a picture of the 2017 Women’s March and said, ‘That’s where my mom works,’” Ms. Shimamura said. She added, “It’s very important to me for my kids to see me work.”RISE, SHINE, PLAY My boys are my alarm clock on Sundays. They wake me up around 6:30 a.m. I do a quick check of my email. If I know there’s no work emergency that needs my attention, I’m able to focus more on things at home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

The former governor of South Carolina, who has tried to thread the needle on abortion in the G.O.P. race, made a gesture of support for stricter limits on the procedure.Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has tried to carve a more moderate path on the contentious issue of abortion than many of her rivals for the Republican nomination for president.But on Friday, speaking to an audience of conservative Christians in Iowa, Ms. Haley was challenged on whether she would have signed a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy had it been passed by the Legislature when she served as governor of South Carolina.“Yes, whatever the people decide,” Ms. Haley replied, suggesting that she believed restrictions on abortion should be left to the states. “This was put in the states — that’s where it should be. Everyone can give their voice to it.”Ms. Haley — like the other two leading candidates, former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has tried to avoid being pinned down on supporting a national abortion ban with a specific gestational limit. Democrats scored victories in the midterms last year and in state elections this month with help from voters who were motivated by protecting abortion rights — and who could again be mobilized in a presidential election. Ms. Haley has characterized her position as “unapologetically pro-life” while she has also urged Republicans to accept that they do not have enough votes to pass an abortion ban in Congress and called on them to stop “demonizing this issue.”Her remarks in Iowa on Friday were not a drastic departure from her previous stance, but her gesture of support for a ban at six weeks after conception, when many women don’t yet know they are pregnant, could pose a political risk.Ms. Haley is performing well in New Hampshire, the second state to vote in the Republican primary, where voters tend to be more supportive of abortion rights. (The state currently bans abortions after 24 weeks.) And wealthy G.O.P. donors, who have paid more attention to Ms. Haley after her strong debate performances, are also more moderate on abortion.Democrats were quick to pounce on the comments, a sign that they see Ms. Haley, who is polling well against President Biden, as a threat. Even as Ms. Haley was still addressing the crowd at a hotel ballroom in Des Moines, where was joined onstage by Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the Biden campaign posted a video of Ms. Haley on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter. The video contained only one word of her answer.“Q: Would you sign a 6-week abortion ban if you were governor?” the post said. “Haley: Yes”In a statement, Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman, said, “Nikki Haley is no moderate — she’s an anti-abortion MAGA extremist who wants to rip away women’s freedoms just like she did when she was South Carolina governor.”While serving as governor in 2016, Ms. Haley signed a ban on the procedure at 20 weeks in the state.At the most recent Republican debate, in Miami this month, Ms. Haley said that as president, she would sign an abortion ban of any length passed by Congress. But she also echoed her belief that Republicans would not find enough votes to do so. Instead, she said Americans should “find consensus” where possible on issues such as banning abortions later in pregnancy, promoting adoption and access to contraception and not criminally charging patients who get abortions.“Stop the judgment,” she said. “We don’t need to divide America over this issue anymore.”Meanwhile, Mr. Trump — with an eye toward the general election — has criticized six-week bans, commonly called “heartbeat” bills in conservative circles, as “too harsh.” The former president, however, has enormous good will from the anti-abortion movement because he reshaped the Supreme Court, paving the way for it to overturn Roe v. Wade.And while Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week ban this year as governor of Florida, he managed for much of the year to avoid expressing support for a national abortion ban. That changed at the second Republican debate, in September, when Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who has since dropped out of the race, maneuvered Mr. DeSantis into saying unequivocally that he would sign a 15-week ban as president. More

A district court judge ruled that former President Donald J. Trump “engaged in insurrection” but said the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to him.A Colorado judge ruled on Friday that former President Donald J. Trump could remain on the primary ballot in the state, rejecting the argument that the 14th Amendment prevents him from holding office again — but doing so on relatively narrow grounds that lawyers for the voters seeking to disqualify him said they would appeal.With his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, an offense that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 to keep former Confederates out of the government — deems disqualifying for people who previously took an oath to support the Constitution.But Judge Wallace, a state district court judge in Denver, concluded that Section 3 did not include the presidential oath in that category.The clause does not explicitly name the presidency, so that question hinged on whether the president was included in the category “officer of the United States.”Because of “the absence of the president from the list of positions to which the amendment applies combined with the fact that Section 3 specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Judge Wallace wrote, “it appears to the court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath.”“Part of the court’s decision,” she continued, “is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent of Section 3.”She added in a footnote that it was “not for this court to decide” whether the omission of the presidency was intentional or an oversight.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: “We applaud today’s ruling in Colorado, which is another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges.” He added, “These cases represent the most cynical and blatant political attempts to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by desperate Democrats who know Crooked Joe Biden is a failed president on the fast track to defeat.”Mario Nicolais, one of the lawyers representing the six Colorado voters who filed the lawsuit in September, said he was encouraged by the narrow grounds on which they had lost — not on the substance of Mr. Trump’s actions, but on the scope of the amendment’s applicability. The voters will appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court within three days, but the United States Supreme Court will most likely have the final say.“The court found that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection after a careful and thorough review of the evidence,” Mr. Nicolais said. “We are very pleased with the opinion and look forward to addressing the sole legal issue on appeal, namely whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to insurrectionist presidents. We believe that it does.”Judge Wallace is the first judge to rule on the merits of whether Section 3 applies to Mr. Trump. Similar lawsuits in Minnesota and New Hampshire have been dismissed on procedural grounds, and a judge in Michigan recently ruled that the questions were political ones that courts did not have the authority to decide. The plaintiffs in Michigan have appealed that ruling.Judge Wallace’s assessment of Mr. Trump’s behavior before and on Jan. 6 was damning, and, notably, she rejected his lawyers’ argument that the First Amendment protected him. His words and actions, she wrote, met the criteria set by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio for distinguishing incitement from protected speech.“Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”Referring to his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, in which he told his supporters that they needed to “fight like hell” and that they were justified in behaving by “very different rules,” Judge Wallace said, “Such incendiary rhetoric, issued by a speaker who routinely embraced political violence and had inflamed the anger of his supporters leading up to the certification, was likely to incite imminent lawlessness and disorder.”Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said she would obey whatever ruling was in place on Jan. 5, 2024, the state’s deadline for certifying candidates to the primary ballot. Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, is responsible for that certification, and the effect of Judge Wallace’s ruling was to order her to include Mr. Trump.But, while emphasizing that she was not saying whether the judge was right or wrong about the scope of Section 3, she said she found the notion that the presidency was excluded “deeply problematic.”“The idea that the presidency itself is a get-out-of-jail-free card for insurrection and rebellion, I think, is striking,” she said in an interview Friday night. Referring to Judge Wallace’s conclusion that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection, she added: “I think that court determination in itself is incredibly powerful for the country.”The decision followed a weeklong trial in which lawyers for the plaintiffs called eight witnesses to build their case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification, relying in particular on the testimony of two professors.Peter Simi, an expert on political extremism, testified that far-right groups routinely relied on implicit, plausibly deniable calls for violence, and that Mr. Trump had communicated with them in that way — an argument presented to rebut the defense that he never explicitly told anyone to storm the Capitol. And Gerard Magliocca, an expert on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, testified that at the time it was ratified, “engaging in insurrection” had been understood to include verbal incitement of force to prevent the execution of the law.Mr. Trump’s lawyers called one expert, Robert Delahunty, a law professor who testified that Section 3 was vague and that it should be up to Congress to define it. Their other witnesses included a former Defense Department official who said Mr. Trump had pre-emptively authorized the use of National Guard troops to prevent violence on Jan. 6 — followed by people who were at Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse that day, who testified that they had not heard his words as a call to violence and that the crowd had been peaceful before part of it turned violent. More

President George Weah, a former soccer star whose administration had weathered accusations of corruption, announced that he had lost his bid for re-election to Joseph Boakai, a 78-year-old former vice president.Liberia’s president, George Weah, conceded defeat on Friday night in his bid for a second term, after a tight runoff against Joseph Boakai, a 78-year-old political veteran, in an election that was considered a test of democracy in the West African nation.Mr. Boakai, who had served as vice president for 12 years under the former president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, defeated Mr. Weah, a 57-year-old former soccer star, by a razor-thin margin. The country’s national election commission stopped short of declaring a winner on Friday afternoon, but announced that with more than 99 percent of the ballots counted, Mr. Boakai held 50.89 percent of the votes, and Mr. Weah 49.11 percent. It was the nation’s tightest election in two decades, and a rematch of the election in 2017, when Mr. Weah handily beat Mr. Boakai. Mr. Weah said in a radio address broadcast late on Friday evening that while his party had lost the election, “Liberia has won.”“This is a time for graciousness in defeat, a time to place our country above party, and patriotism above personal interest,” he said. His words marked a notably peaceful transition of power at a time when many other West African countries have endured a spate of coups, aging leaders clinging to power and elections plagued by allegations of vote rigging.In Nigeria and in Sierra Leone, independent observers have cast doubt on the results of presidential contests this year. In Niger and Guinea, juntas rule despite international efforts to restore civilian governments.This is the first time since the early 1900s that an incumbent president of Liberia has not been re-elected after serving one term. The swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for January.The election, first held on Oct. 10 with the runoff on Tuesday, was the first one managed solely by Liberian authorities without international funding or assistance since the country emerged in 2003 from a ruinous civil war.Mr. Boakai plans to speak publicly on Saturday, his spokesman said. The candidate told Reuters on Friday night, “First and foremost, we want to have a message of peace and reconciliation.”The presidential campaign hinged on accusations that Mr. Weah tolerated corruption in government circles and failed to deliver jobs and development, despite the country’s economic rebound after the pandemic.One voter in the capital, Monrovia, said that he had cast a ballot for Mr. Boakai because of his promise to crack down on drug abuse and corruption.“It’s unthinkable that you would see young people getting addicted to drugs, and the president doesn’t have any idea how to tackle it,” said the voter, MacPherson Darweh, who is 45.Mr. Weah “doesn’t have a sense of belonging and does not even know how the country has been governed and run,” Mr. Darweh said. “He still thinks he is a football player running around town.”President George Weah casting his vote in Monrovia in the first round of voting last month.Guy Peterson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLiberia, a country of 5.5 million people, declared independence in the 19th century — a century ahead of most African countries — with a democratic political system that was modeled on that of the United States.But the country was racked by civil wars from 1989 to 2003 that left about 250,000 people dead.The Ebola epidemic between 2013 and 2016 also killed thousands, leaving the country in a precarious state and prompting the United Nations to take over organization of the country’s elections — until this year.Liberia’s economy grew by 4.8 percent in 2022, according to the World Bank, mainly driven by mining and a relatively good agricultural harvest. But more than 80 percent of the population is food insecure, the World Bank said in July, and prices of basic food products and fuel have skyrocketed over the past year, with over half of Liberians living below the poverty line, on $1.90 a day.A team of observers from the Economic Community of West African States on Wednesday congratulated Liberians for “the generally peaceful conduct of the elections so far.” The European Union said in a statement that Tuesday’s runoff was “calm” and “well organized,” and there were “organizational improvements” compared to the first round.Police officers in riot gear patrolled the streets of Monrovia, the Liberian capital, as the vote proceeded, while polling workers counted ballots late into the night by lamps and flashlights because of power cuts, which have become common in the country.Mr. Weah and Mr. Boakai had finished almost neck and neck in the first round of the election, with neither passing the 50 percent threshold required to be declared the outright winner. Mr. Weah had a narrow lead, by just over 7,000 votes.Supporters of Mr. Boakai and his Unity Party in Monrovia last month. In Liberia, 60 percent of the population is under 25. Guy Peterson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Boakai, a political veteran in Liberia, served as agriculture minister in the 1980s, and director of the state-owned Liberian Petroleum Refinery in 1992, when the civil war raged. Although he was not implicated in any corruption scandals, as vice president he was accused by his critics of turning a blind eye to corruption in the government.In this year’s election, he seemed to gain traction by portraying himself as a safe pair of hands to steer the country in a new direction. He focused on grievances with Mr. Weah’s rule, criticizing his opponent for his lavish lifestyle and for being out of touch with Liberian society.But Mr. Boakai’s opponents focused on his being nearly 80 years old, and nicknamed him “Sleepy Joe,” accusing him of napping during a public event.The election was a rerun of the vote in 2017, when Mr. Weah defeated Mr. Boakai by a relatively large margin, capitalizing on his status as a sports superstar and political outsider who claimed he could better the lives of ordinary Liberians.Last time around, Mr. Weah’s story of ascent to the pinnacle of world soccer after growing up in a Liberian slum had resonated with young people in a nation where 60 percent of the population is under 25.But his image as an advocate for the poor cracked under the weight of graft scandals, a failure to deal with the drug crisis and soaring living costs. Under his government, Liberia has fallen 20 places on a corruption index compiled by Transparency International, ranking 142nd last year out of 180 countries.Last year, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on three Liberian officials, including Mr. Weah’s chief of staff, Nathaniel McGill. An investigation promised by Mr. Weah has yet to materialize.Officials with the National Elections Commission counting runoff ballots in Monrovia, on Tuesday. They worked into the night by flashlights and lamps because of power cuts, which are common in Liberia.Carielle Doe/Reuters More

The ruling was a step toward allowing prosecutors to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol believed they were acting at Donald Trump’s instruction.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election rejected on Friday a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to remove language from his indictment describing the role he played in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The ruling by the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, was an initial step toward allowing prosecutors in the case to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day believed they were acting at Mr. Trump’s instruction.Last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to strike any mention of the riot at the Capitol from the 45-page indictment filed against him this summer in Federal District Court in Washington. The lawyers argued that since none of the four charges in the case explicitly accused Mr. Trump of inciting the violence that day, any reference to the mob attack would be prejudicial and irrelevant.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, shot back that even if they had not filed formal incitement charges, the riot would be instrumental in their efforts to prove one of their central allegations: that Mr. Trump had plotted to obstruct the certification of the election that was taking place at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6.In court papers to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors called the Jan. 6 attack “the culmination” of Mr. Trump’s “criminal conspiracies” to overturn the election. They also suggested that they were poised to introduce video evidence of the riot and call witnesses at trial who could testify that they attacked police and stormed the Capitol after hearing Mr. Trump exhort them to “fight” in a speech he gave before the violence broke out.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested that they will try in a future motion to keep Mr. Smith’s team from introducing evidence like that at the trial. If the lawyers end up taking that route, Judge Chutkan will have to make another ruling about whether the evidence is relevant and not prejudicial.Her decision to keep the references to the riot in the indictment came on the same day that a group of news organizations reiterated a request to televise the trial.Lawyers for the news organizations said Mr. Trump had sought to challenge the “very legitimacy” of the case, and they argued that a live broadcast was needed so people could view the trial firsthand.“Of all trials conducted throughout American history, this one needs the public trust that only a televised proceeding can foster,” lawyers for the organizations wrote.The nine-page brief by the media outlets — The New York Times, among them — was the last round of court papers expected to be filed to Judge Chutkan before she rules on whether to allow cameras at the trial, which is scheduled to begin in March.Lawyers for Mr. Trump, in a combative and misleading filing last week, compared the election interference case to “a trial in an authoritarian regime.” They told Judge Chutkan that it should be televised so that the public did not have to “rely on biased, secondhand accounts coming from the Biden administration and its media allies.”Within days, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel fired back that broadcasting the proceeding would not only violate longstanding federal rules of criminal procedure, but would also allow Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, to turn the trial into “a media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Lawyers for the media coalition said in their filing on Friday that it was “naïve to think that Trump’s trial will be anything other than a ‘media event.’”But the lawyers said that if the proceeding were broadcast live — in a “dignified, carefully managed” manner — it would permit the public to “see this trial firsthand” after Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked the government’s case as an act of pure political persecution.“The media coalition believes that the more people who see the trial in real time, the stronger the case for public acceptance of the result,” the lawyers wrote.The judge who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s trial in Fulton County, Ga., on local charges of tampering with that state’s election has already televised several key hearings and has vowed to broadcast the trial itself, which could take place as early as next summer. (Prosecutors in Georgia filed a motion seeking an Aug. 5 start date on Friday, though the presiding judge will ultimately set the trial date.)But the federal courts have stricter rules about cameras in the courtroom, and Judge Chutkan would have to set them aside to allow her trial to be broadcast live. More

Source: Election results are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Cam Baker, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More