Elections

Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.Second, there’s the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, compared with Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. But many of those donors don’t really like the culture war; they’ll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles and they’re usually pro-choice. So socially conservative moves that DeSantis can’t refuse, like signing Florida’s six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how his potential donors are thinking about closing up their checkbooks, with a palpable undercurrent of: “Why can’t we have Nikki Haley or even Glenn Youngkin instead?”This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. Remember how smoothly all of Joe Biden’s rivals suddenly exited the presidential race when it was time to stop Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, and if two of those rivals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, hail from the early primary state of South Carolina, it’s easy enough to see how they talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.But then again, a certain cast of mind has declared Trump to have unstoppable momentum already. This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from “he can’t win” to “he can’t be stopped” with barely a way station in between. A rough month for DeSantis has already surfaced the same spirit — as in a piece by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, which quoted one strategist saying resignedly, “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”Influencing this perspective, again as in 2016, is the assumption that Trump can’t win the general election, so if the G.O.P. just lets him lose it will finally be rid of him. Of course that assumption was completely wrong before, it could be wrong again; and even if it’s not, how do you know he won’t be back in 2028?Then, the final returning dynamic: The media still wants Trump. This is not offered as an excuse for G.O.P. primary voters choosing him; if the former president is renominated in spite of all his sins, it’s ultimately on them and them alone.But I still feel a certain vibe, in the eager coverage of DeSantis’s sag, suggesting that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders.And so Trump’s rivals will have to struggle, not only against the wattage of the man himself, but also against an impulse already apparent — to call the race for Trump before a single vote is cast.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 Florida governor, who has slipped in polls as his expected entrance to the presidential race nears, is moving beyond early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expanding his political travel as his poll numbers slip ahead of an expected presidential campaign, visiting rural north-central Wisconsin on Saturday in a sign of his intent to compete for voters beyond early nominating states like Iowa.Declared candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump, have largely focused on making appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three of the first states on the Republican nominating calendar next year.But Mr. DeSantis’s visit to a convention center outside the small city of Wausau, an area roughly 90 minutes west of Green Bay that voted heavily for Mr. Trump in the last two elections, suggests that the governor is preparing to challenge the former president more directly in a crucial battleground state.“It’s a smart move by DeSantis,” said Brandon Scholz, a lobbyist and former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “You don’t go to Wausau, Wisconsin, to get cheese curds. You go to get the grass roots talking. You go to get on local TV. It shows that DeSantis is thinking about his strategy beyond the early states, and that he’s picking his spots well.”For Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to announce his 2024 bid in the coming weeks, the trip to the Midwest offers a chance for a reset. A trade mission abroad late last month — meant to elevate his foreign policy credentials — received only a lukewarm response. And his poll numbers against Mr. Trump have consistently dipped.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis dismissed concerns by some fellow Republicans that he was taking too long to announce a campaign.“That’s chatter,” he said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The chatter is just not something that I worry about. I don’t bother.”At another point, he said of his political ambitions, “We’ll get on that relatively soon,” adding, “You either got to put up or shut up on that.”Mr. DeSantis can point to a busy two-month legislative session in Tallahassee that ended on Friday and allowed him to notch conservative victories on abortion, immigration and education, among other issues dear to his party’s base. With legislators returning home, he is expected to pick up his out-of-state travel schedule, which includes stops in Illinois and Iowa next week.After helping vault Mr. Trump to the presidency in 2016, Wisconsin swung to Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years later. Republicans there have continued to take losses, including the re-election of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, in November and a bruising loss last month in a consequential State Supreme Court race.The Saturday event for Mr. DeSantis, an evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Marathon County where he will speak about his memoir, is sold out with more than 560 attendees, according to organizers. “It’s not just Marathon County,” said Kevin Hermening, the county party’s chairman. “We have people traveling in from Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay,” he said. “There is a real interest in listening to somebody who represents the next generation of conservative thought.”Mr. DeSantis may use the Wisconsin dinner to highlight his family’s Midwestern roots: His mother is from Youngstown, Ohio, and his wife, Casey DeSantis, is also from Ohio. His father was raised in western Pennsylvania.Mr. DeSantis, who has spent most of his life in Florida, recently started to emphasize his ties outside the state.“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep,” Mr. DeSantis says in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” which he is promoting nationwide. “This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”Saturday’s fund-raiser is not a high-dollar affair, allowing Mr. DeSantis to talk directly to his party’s base. Individual tickets cost $75. A table of eight went for $1,000. Representative Tom Tiffany, a Republican who represents the area in Congress and has not made a presidential endorsement, will introduce Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis’s visit to Wisconsin could also invite further comparisons between him and Scott Walker, the state’s former governor and onetime front-runner in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, who ended his campaign after only two months. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Walker was a young, popular governor. But he stumbled early on the campaign trail and saw his star quickly dim as Mr. Trump outshone his establishment rivals.In Wisconsin — which will also host the Republican Party’s 2024 convention, in Milwaukee — Mr. DeSantis will be walking straight into the heart of Trump country.The former president held several rallies in the state’s rural north during previous campaigns, and handily beat both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden there. Mr. DeSantis has so far largely avoided mentioning Mr. Trump by name, although a super PAC backing the governor’s campaign is stepping up its attacks.“The die-hard people up here still love Trump,” said Linda Prehn, a Republican who helped organize the Saturday event. “But I know a lot of people who voted for him two times and do not want to vote for him a third time” in a primary.Ms. Prehn said she did not know much about Mr. DeSantis, although her friends in Florida had praised how he handled the coronavirus pandemic and a recent devastating hurricane.“People want to get a look at him,” she said.In a recent survey of Wisconsin voters, Mr. DeSantis performed better in a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump did, according to the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.Still, pro-Trump forces are mobilizing to challenge Mr. DeSantis in Wisconsin. On its Facebook page, the Republican Party in nearby Waupaca County posted an invitation calling for a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the dinner where Mr. DeSantis will speak.“Please gather with us,” the post said, “for a patriotic rally showing that Wisconsin is Trump Country!” The post was earlier reported by NBC News.On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis is likely to make his case to party activists by extolling the results of Florida’s legislative session.“I think we got probably 99 percent” of his agenda, he told reporters on Friday. He acknowledged, however, the failure of high-profile defamation bills that would have made it easier for private citizens to sue news outlets for libel, measures that some right-wing outlets had opposed.“Look, the defamation, it’s a thorny issue,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Clearly I don’t want to incentivize frivolous lawsuits. That is totally unacceptable.”As Mr. DeSantis makes the positive case for his candidacy, the main super PAC supporting his candidacy, Never Back Down, is attacking Mr. Trump.The group released an ad this past week that features an actor putting a fresh bumper sticker on his truck.The new sticker reads “DeSantis for President.”The man places it directly over a tattered decal for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. More

The president also said that he was not yet prepared to lean on the 14th Amendment to compel the government to pay its debt amid a showdown with House Republicans.In his first interview since announcing that he would seek a second term, President Biden sought to downplay concerns about his age by saying he was the most experienced person to have ever run for the presidency.“I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom and know more than the vast majority of people,” Mr. Biden told the MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle in an interview that aired on Friday night. “And I’m more experienced than anybody that’s ever run for the office. And I think I’ve proven myself to be honorable as well as also effective.”Mr. Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term should he win, has in recent days tried to reassure voters about his age, presenting it as an asset rather than a hindrance to running. In the interview, he also said that Vice President Kamala Harris “hasn’t gotten the credit she deserves,” and he promoted her past work as attorney general of California and as a senator.The wide-ranging interview showed a president seeking to make his case for re-election amid looming potential crises, including a deployment of American troops to the country’s southern border and a federal government that is potentially weeks away from defaulting on its debt.Compared with his predecessors, Mr. Biden has given far fewer news conferences and rarely sits for interviews with journalists, instead opting for friendly celebrity interviews or softball social-media videos. His interview with Ms. Ruhle, who hosts a show on a network that leans sympathetic to Mr. Biden and Democratic causes, was broadcast at 10 p.m. on a Friday.In the interview, Mr. Biden said he was not yet prepared to invoke a clause in the 14th Amendment that would compel the federal government to continue issuing new debt should the government run out of cash, an event that Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned this week could come as soon as June 1. “I’ve not gotten there yet,” he told Ms. Ruhle.Republicans are demanding major spending cuts before raising the debt limit. But Mr. Biden has repeatedly said that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, pointing out that it was raised several times under former President Donald J. Trump without issue. In his interview, he reiterated that he was willing to negotiate on federal spending — as long as it was separate from debt-ceiling negotiations.“This is not your father’s Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said, repeating claims he has made before about extremists within the G.O.P. “This is a different, a different group. And I think that we have to make it clear to the American people that I am prepared to negotiate in detail with their budget. How much are you going to spend? How much are you going to tax? Where can we cut?”Mr. Biden is supposed to meet with Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House next week to discuss a path forward. He will need a negotiating partner in Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who last week marshaled a bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting spending and unraveling major elements of Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda. The legislation is considered dead on arrival, but it has given Mr. McCarthy the opportunity to say he has done his part.The president said in the interview that Mr. McCarthy was an “honest man” but that he had “sold away everything” to the far-right wing of his party to become House speaker.“He’s agreed to things that maybe he believes, but are just extreme,” Mr. Biden said.Mr. Biden defended his decision to send 1,500 troops to the border with Mexico as the ending of pandemic-era immigration restrictions threatens a surge of migrants, saying that the troops would not be there to “enforce the law” but to “free up the border agents that need to be on the border.”He also said that his son Hunter, who is the subject of a federal investigation into his business dealings, was innocent and that he did not think his son’s legal problems would harm his presidency.“My son has done nothing wrong,” Mr. Biden said. “I trust him. I have faith in him. And it impacts my presidency by making me feel proud of him.” More

A Kentucky man with a long criminal record has been sentenced to a record-setting 14 years in prison for attacking police officers with pepper spray and a chair as he stormed the US Capitol with his wife.Peter Schwartz’s prison sentence is the longest so far among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The judge who sentenced Schwartz on Friday also handed down the previous longest sentence – 10 years – to a retired New York police department officer who assaulted a police officer outside the Capitol on 6 January.Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 24 years and 6 months for Schwartz, a welder.US district Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Schwartz to 14 years and two months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.Mehta said Schwartz was a “soldier against democracy” who participated in “the kind of mayhem, chaos that had never been seen in the country’s history.”“You are not a political prisoner,” the judge told hm. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice or fighting against an autocratic regime.”Schwartz briefly addressed the judge before learning his sentence, saying, “I do sincerely regret the damage that January 6 has caused to so many people and their lives.”The judge said he didn’t believe Schwartz’s statement, noting his lack of remorse. “You took it upon yourself to try and injure multiple police officers that day,” Mehta said.Schwartz was armed with a wooden tire knocker when he and his then-wife, Shelly Stallings, joined other rioters in overwhelming a line of police officers on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where he threw a folding chair at officers.“By throwing that chair, Schwartz directly contributed to the fall of the police line that enabled rioters to flood forward and take over the entire terrace,” prosecutor Jocelyn Bond wrote in a court filing.Schwartz, 49, also armed himself with a police-issued “super soaker” canister of pepper spray and sprayed it at retreating officers. Advancing to a tunnel entrance, Schwartz coordinated with two other rioters, Markus Maly and Jeffrey Brown, to spray an orange liquid toward officers clashing with the mob.“While the stream of liquid did not directly hit any officer, its effect was to heighten the danger to the officers in that tunnel,” Bond wrote.Before leaving, Schwartz joined a “heave ho” push against police in the tunnel.Stallings pleaded guilty last year to riot-related charges and was sentenced last month to two years of incarceration.Schwartz was tried with co-defendants Maly and Brown. In December, a jury convicted all three of assault charges and other felony offenses.Schwartz’s attorneys requested a prison sentence of four years and six months, saying his actions were motivated by a “misunderstanding” about the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump and his allies spread baseless conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the election from the Republican incumbent.“There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being among the most prominent. Mr Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong,” his defense lawyers wrote.Prosecutors said Schwartz has bragged about his participation in the riot, shown no remorse and claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated. He referred to the Capitol attack as the “opening of a war” in a Facebook post a day after the riot.Schwartz has raised more than $71,000 from an online campaign titled Patriot Pete Political Prisoner in DC. Prosecutors asked Mehta to order Schwartz to pay a fine equaling the amount raised by his campaign, arguing that he shouldn’t profit from participating in the riot.Schwartz was on probation when he joined the riot and his criminal record includes a “jaw-dropping” 38 prior convictions since 1991, “several of which involved assaulting or threatening officers or other authority figures”, Bond wrote.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to January 6. Nearly 500 of them have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment. More

Half of the 16 so-called fake electors in Georgia who sought to falsely declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election have accepted immunity deals in the local criminal investigation into the matter, their lawyer said in a court filing on Friday.The immunity deals to the eight came in April, according to the filing, after the Fulton county district attorney’s office called their lawyer and said prosecutors were willing to make the arrangement – about four months after the lawyer asked about the prospect of such deals.With half of the fake electors now apparently immune from prosecution, the scope of a potential conspiracy indictment ensnaring Trump and the electors – identified as targets in the case – may have narrowed, not least because the immunity deals did not compel any incriminating information in return.The filing also raised new questions about how prosecutors might handle the fake electors more broadly, after the lawyer for the eight, Kimberley Debrow, effectively accused the district attorney’s office of misrepresenting key facts in an earlier motion seeking to have her disqualified.The latest twist in the Georgia election criminal investigation comes as the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, is expected to ask a grand jury starting in mid-July to return charges against Trump and dozens of people involved in efforts to reverse his defeat in the state of Georgia.Last month, the district attorney’s office sought to disqualify Debrow from the case entirely, citing her clients’ testimony that they were not told of immunity offers, and citing a conflict of interest after some of her clients implicated another one of her clients in a separate crime.In the 68-page brief filed on Friday, Debrow vehemently disputed the claims, saying that transcripts and recordings of interviews – submitted to the court for a confidential review – showed that none of her clients told prosecutors that immunity offers were not brought to them in 2022.The filing also revealed that although eight fake electors received immunity deals, two of the fake electors – whose identities were not disclosed and were until recently her clients – had not. One of them is understood to be Cathy Latham, a local Republican party leader.A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Debrow claimed in the filing that the transcripts of interviews with her clients showed one of the prosecutors, Nathan Wade, sought to intentionally confuse them by suggesting they were offered immunity last year, though no actual offers had been made before April 2023.In one instance, Debrow claimed, the prosecutor threatened to “tear up” the immunity deal that was already in force and binding if Debrow did not stop clarifying that the discussions about immunity prior to April were only potential offers.“Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. Either [Elector E] is going to get this immunity, and he’s going to answer the questions – and wants to talk – or we’re going to leave. And if we leave, we’re ripping up his immunity agreement,” Wade is said to have told Debrow and her client.Debrow also claimed she could find no testimony in her clients’ interview transcripts showing them implicating another fake electors in a further crime, noting that the district attorney’s office had refused to say what the alleged crime was, or who had made the allegations.“All of the electors remain united in their collective innocence and defenses, and none testified or believe that they or any other elector committed any wrongdoing, much less ‘criminal acts’,” the filing said.Debrow added that even if it were true that some of clients incriminated another of her clients, it would not matter since they could not be prosecuted as a result of the immunity deals. More

A North Carolina court, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that courts don’t have the ability to determine if a political map is legal, giving legislators a free pass.WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be.And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina.The North Carolina Supreme Court said that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. In addition, the justices said, any court-ordered standard “would embroil the judiciary in every local election in every county, city and district across the state.”The effect was to give the Republican-led legislature carte blanche to draw new maps for 2024 elections that lock in G.O.P. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.Under its current court-ordered map, North Carolina now elects seven Democrats and seven Republicans to the U.S. House. Maps drawn by the Republican legislature could mean 10 Republicans to four Democrats, or possibly 11 to three. Without judicial review, the only remedy is to vote the dominant party out using maps drawn to keep them in power.The 5-to-2 decision, which fell along party lines in a court led by Republicans, pointedly threw out a ruling by a Democrat-led court only a few months earlier that said such lines could — and should — be drawn. In that respect, the North Carolina ruling reinforced what seems to be a hardening partisan divide between jurists who believe unfair political maps should be policed and ones who do not.The U.S. Supreme Court also split along partisan lines in 2019 when it ruled 5 to 4, after decades of dithering, that it could not devise a legal standard to regulate partisan gerrymandering, though it suggested that state courts could.It is hard to separate party allegiance from jurists’ positions, said Paul M. Smith, the senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group that litigates voting rights issues.“One explanation would be that the courts decide cases about elections based on who will be helped,” he said. “On some days, I’m cynical enough to believe that.” Whether that consciously figures in court decisions, though, is less easy to say, he added.Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach.“The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of clear mathematical test, I respect the argument that judges’ political preferences might creep into the process.” Passing judgment on a legislature’s constitutional authority to set political boundaries can be a fraught exercise. In 1962, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, who had heard the historic redistricting case Baker v. Carr, suffered a nervous breakdown during the court’s deliberations and skipped the final vote.But some say that just because it is hard to create fair district lines does not mean it cannot be done.“I think that’s intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy,” Rebecca Szetela, a political independent and a member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, said in an interview. “We had a commission made up of 13 randomly selected voters of varying educational backgrounds, and somehow we were able to come up with fair standards.”The Michigan commissioners drew their first set of maps after the 2020 election, following orders not to give any party a “disproportionate advantage.” They relied on several statistical metrics to meet that standard. But overall, they decided that an acceptable range for the statewide ratio of votes to seats won would fall within five percentage points of their calculation of the state’s political preferences: 52 percent Democratic, 48 percent Republican.In practice, Ms Szetela said, the maps hewed closely to the calculated partisan divide. Still, some experts say that it is impossible to construct a standard that will be reliably fair. Daniel H. Lowenstein, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law, said that would-be regulators of partisan gerrymanders by and large know little of how politics really works. He said that he picked up such an education during the 1970s while working in the California Secretary of State office, and later while running the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says elections have to be fair,” he said, “and that’s a good thing, because different people all have different concepts of what it means to be fair.”Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale wrote a detailed analysis on the topic, “The Thickest Thicket,” in 1987. “I just don’t see any objective criteria that would be authoritative in assessing whether a gerrymander ought to be upheld or not,” he said. A few other state courts have set standards for partisan gerrymandering and applied them. Pennsylvania was the first state to strike down partisan gerrymanders in 2018, and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision last month stating that gerrymandered State Senate seats violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.Many voting rights advocates say the same computer-driven advances that enable today’s extreme gerrymanders also make it possible to easily spot them.In particular, software programs can now generate thousands and even millions of maps of hypothetical political districts, each with small variations in their borders. Using statistical measures, those maps can be compared to a map being contested to gauge their partisan slant.In actual court cases, the technique has shown that some gerrymandered maps produce more lopsided partisan outcomes than 99 percent and more of the hypothetical ones.Measures of partisanship have improved, as social scientists employed data analytics to tease out the partisan impact of map changes. One yardstick, called the efficiency gap, gauges how much the votes of one party are wasted when its voters are disproportionately packed into one district or carved up among several. Another, partisan bias, measures the effectiveness of a gerrymandered map by calculating how many seats the same map would give each party in a hypothetical election where voters were split 50-50. There are many others, and each has its shortcomings. For example, voters sort themselves geographically, with a lopsided share of Democrats packed in cities and Republicans in rural areas, for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan skulduggery. And some metrics are useful only in particular situations, such as in states where party support is closely divided.In a 2017 hearing in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called such metrics “sociological gobbledygook.” But if so, much of American jurisprudence carries the same label, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard University law professor who has been a leading advocate of standards to judge partisan gerrymanders.“In any voting rights case, people have to calculate racial polarization, which is a far more complex calculation than the efficiency gap,” he said. “You have to calculate the compactness of districts. You have to estimate voting patterns for minority voters and white voters.”“Tests involving some matter of degree are just ubiquitous in constitutional law,” he added, and nothing makes a partisan gerrymander case any different.Mr. Stephanopoulos and others also say that drawing a line between permissible and illegal political maps is not all that difficult. Courts make similar judgments in lawsuits claiming racial bias in redistricting, he noted. After the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964, judges quickly set a limit — 10 percent — on how much political districts could deviate from the new requirement to have substantially equal populations.Some gerrymandering yardsticks have already been suggested. For example, a political map might be assumed constitutional unless measures of partisanship uniformly argued against it. At that point, the body that drew the map would have to demonstrate another compelling reason for the way boundaries were drawn.Critics like Professor Lowenstein argue that any dividing line between unfair and fair maps will have an unwanted consequence: Every subsequent map may be drawn to extract as much partisan gain as possible, yet fall just short of the legal standard for rejection.“The ultimate question,” Professor Schuck said, “is how crude a fit should a court be willing to accept?”Then again, he pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court have answered that question: Future political maps, they have ruled, can be as crude as their makers want them to be.“Declining to apply a rule is still going to validate or invalidate what politicians have done,” he said. “There’s no total innocence, no virginity, as it were.” More

He foresaw the problems with punch-card ballots that benumbed the nation after Florida’s chaotic vote in the 2000 presidential election. His warnings went largely unheeded.Roy G. Saltman, the federal government’s leading expert on computerized voting whose overlooked warning about the vulnerability of punch-card ballots presaged the hanging chad fiasco in Florida that came to symbolize the disputed recount in the 2000 presidential election, died on April 21 in Rockville, Md. He was 90.His death, in a nursing home, was caused by complications of recent strokes, his grandson Max Saltman said.In a 132-page federal report published in 1988 and distributed to thousands of local voting officials across the country, Mr. Saltman, an analyst working for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cautioned that the bits of cardboard that voters were supposed to punch out from their ballots, known as chads, might remain partly attached (hence, hanging), or pressed back into the card when the votes were counted.Either event would render the voter’s choice uncertain or, if the ballot appeared to be picking more than one candidate, invalid.“It is recommended,” Mr. Saltman said flatly, “that the use of pre-scored punch card ballots be ended.”His recommendation was largely ignored, certainly in Florida, where the initial count in the 2000 election gave the Republican candidate, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, a 1,784-vote lead over the Democrat, Vice President Al Gore, a margin so close that state law required a recount.Armies of lawyers and political operatives descended on Florida, suits and countersuits were filed, and recounts were started and stopped in various counties. The spectacle of election workers examining punch-card ballots through magnifying glasses, to try to determine a voter’s intent, popularized the term hanging chad as it raised doubts about the accuracy of the count.After five weeks of recounts, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in on Dec. 12, 2000, and, in a 5-to-4 decision, stopped a state court-ordered recount, with Mr. Bush holding a 537-vote lead over Mr. Gore. Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, and the presidency, were awarded to Mr. Bush.“It has always puzzled me why my report never got a wider acceptance,” Mr. Saltman told USA Today in 2001. “It takes a crisis to move people, and it shouldn’t have.”The counting crisis that crippled the presidential transition in 2000 prompted congressional hearings that led in 2002 to the Help America Vote Act, which outlawed the use of punch cards in federal elections.A member of the canvassing board in Broward County, Fla., examining a disputed election ballot in the 2000 presidential election.Alan Diaz/Associated PressAs recently as last month, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems after Fox TV personalities falsely claimed that Dominion’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking and had switched votes in the 2020 election from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. The company’s patents cite Mr. Saltman’s early reports on punch-card vulnerabilities as proof that Dominion’s voting technology had overcome those flaws.As early as 1976, Mr. Saltman warned that “we have a serious problem of public confidence in computers and a serious problem of public confidence in public officials, and around election time they tend to coalesce.”When his bosses at the federal agency discounted his early concerns, Mr. Saltman got a $150,000 grant to study voting mishaps around the country.He found a report that reviewed Detroit’s first punch-card voting experience in a 1970 primary election. It turned up “design inadequacies of the voting device” that had invalidated ballots because voters had unintentionally voted for more than the prescribed number of candidates. Similar concerns about punch-card voting were raised after a 1984 election for property appraiser in Palm Beach County, Fla.In 1988, Mr. Saltman’s prescient report, “Accuracy, Integrity and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,” recommended banning the pre-scored punch-card voting machines that would create the counting crisis in Florida in 2000.He also recommended against the use of computer systems that would prevent voters from examining their ballots for accuracy before leaving the polls, and that would not produce an immediate printed paper trail for election officials to examine in a recount.“The defects in the pre-scored punch card voting system are fundamental and cannot be fixed by engineering or management alterations,” Mr. Saltman wrote. He added that “manual examination of pre-scored punch card ballots to determine the voter’s intent is highly subjective.”“For example,” he continued, “manual counters are forced to determine whether a pinprick point on a chad demonstrated an intent to register a vote.”Max Saltman said his grandfather had expressed concern that nearly all electronic voting systems in the United States still relied on complex operating systems, despite his warnings about their vulnerabilities.Charles Stewart III, an M.I.T. professor of political science who consulted with Mr. Saltman, said by email: “Roy appreciated how computers could help to make election administration better, by automating vote counting, which is a very tedious and error-prone exercise when done by hand. But, he demonstrated that these machines sometimes broke down, and it was foolish not to design systems that took this fact into account.”Roy Gilbert Saltman was born on July 15, 1932, in Manhattan to Ralph Henry Saltman, a son of immigrants from Russia, and Josephine (Stern) Saltman, who had immigrated from Budapest as an infant. His father was a production manager in the garment industry and later at an electrical appliance factory. His mother was a homemaker.Raised in the Bronx and in Sunnyside, Queens, Roy graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School.He earned a degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in 1953. In 1955, he received a master’s in engineering from M.I.T., where he worked on the guidance systems for the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine. He also studied engineering at Columbia University and was granted a master’s degree in public administration from the American University in Washington in 1976.In 1969, after jobs at Sperry Gyroscope Co. and IBM, he joined the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he worked on software policy and served on the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the agency charged with maintaining the uniform usage of geographic names within the federal government.His first marriage, to Lenore Sack, ended in divorce. In 1992, he married Joan Ettinger Ephross. She died in 2008.In addition to his grandson Max, he is survived by his sons, David and Steven, and a daughter, Eve, from his marriage to Dr. Sack; his stepchildren, David, Peter and Sara; two other grandchildren; and six step-grandchildren.After he retired in 1996, Mr. Saltman became an election consultant.The belated attention his reports received after the 2000 election, in part as a result of his testimony to the House Committee on Science in May 2001, prompted him to write what became a definitive book, “The History and Politics of Voting Technology” (2006).He also continued to speak out on election issues. In a letter to The Washington Post in 2005, he warned that Georgia’s requirement that voters have a photo ID card, at a cost of $20 every five years, might violate the Constitution’s prohibition of a poll tax.As Sue Halpern wrote in The New Yorker in 2020, plenty of potential problems with electronic voting machines that Mr. Saltman identified remain: “tallies that can’t be audited because the voting machines do not provide a paper trail, software and hardware glitches, security vulnerabilities, poor connections between voting machines and central tabulating computers, conflicts of interest among vendors of computerized systems, and election officials who lack computer expertise.”Mr. Saltman often said that there was no margin of error in voting, that civic engagement and confidence in the electoral system was too vital to a democracy to leave any grounds for misgivings.“An election is like the launch of a space rocket,” he often said. “It must work the first time.” More

Prosecutors are nearing charging decisions after investigating whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 election.More than half of the bogus Georgia electors who were convened in December 2020 to try to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power have taken immunity deals in the investigation into election interference there, according to a court filing on Friday and people with knowledge of the inquiry.In addition, Craig A. Gillen, the former deputy independent counsel in the 1980s-era Iran Contra scandal, has been hired to represent a fake elector who could still face criminal charges, David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party. Mr. Gillen specializes in cases involving racketeering, which is among the charges being weighed by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga.Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Ultimately, it will be up to Ms. Willis to decide which charges to seek before a regular grand jury, which she has said she will do after a new jury is seated in mid-July. Her case is focused in part on a plan to create the slate of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in the weeks after the 2020 election despite Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia.Lawyers for the electors have argued they were simply trying to keep Mr. Trump’s legal options open, though when they met on Dec. 14, 2020, three vote counts had all affirmed Mr. Biden’s win there.Even before any indictments are announced, the legal jockeying in the case has become intense. In March, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to quash the special grand jury’s final report, most of which remains sealed.In April, Ms. Willis sought to have Kimberly B. Debrow, then a lawyer for 10 of the 16 Trump electors, thrown off the proceedings. According to a motion filed at the time by Ms. Willis’s office, some of the electors recently told prosecutors that Ms. Debrow and another lawyer, Holly Pierson, had not informed them of offers of immunity in exchange for cooperation that prosecutors made last year.Fani T. Willis, center, the Fulton County district attorney, in Atlanta in 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Debrow responded with her own filing on Friday, in which she called the accusation “completely without merit” and said she had made her clients fully aware, in writing, of what she called “generalized potential offers of immunity.”Ms. Pierson, who along with Mr. Gillen represents Mr. Shafer, has called the district attorney’s assertions “entirely false.” Both Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pierson have been paid by the state Republican Party.Ms. Debrow’s new filing also revealed that eight of her clients had been offered immunity deals and that all of them had accepted. At least one additional elector who is not represented by Ms. Debrow also has a deal in place, according to people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the investigation is ongoing.Ms. Debrow said in her filing that two clients had not been offered immunity deals and now had new lawyers, though she did not name the clients. A recent filing from Cathy Latham, a fake elector for Mr. Trump who was the Republican Party leader in rural Coffee County, Ga., revealed that she now has her own representation.Ms. Latham played a key role in an effort by Trump allies to access voter data in her county after the 2020 election — another point of scrutiny in the investigation.While all of the fake electors had long been identified by prosecutors as targets who could face criminal charges, three have been considered particularly vulnerable by those with knowledge of the investigation: Mr. Shafer, Ms. Latham and Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator who filed and later withdrew a lawsuit related to the vote count in Coffee County.Mr. Still did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment. Her office alleged in a filing last month that some of the Trump electors have accused another of illegal conduct.But in her motion, Ms. Debrow called the allegation “categorically false.” She added that the court “need not take defense counsel’s word for the fact that none of the electors incriminated themselves or each other — these interviews were recorded.”It will be left to Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who has been presiding over the inquiry, to sort through the competing motions.Sean Keenan More