Elections

More from our inbox:‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?Missing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic ChurchTaxing the UltrarichAn appearance in 2019 on Mark Levin’s Fox News show brought John Eastman, right, to President Donald J. Trump’s attention.via Fox News ChannelTo the Editor:Re “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House” (front page, Oct. 3) and “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked” (editorial, Oct. 3):Regarding my advice to Vice President Mike Pence in the days before the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6: Although I take issue with some statements in the front-page news article, its most important point, one backed up by very thorough reporting, is that I did not recommend “that Mr. Pence could simply disregard the law and summarily reject electors of certain key battleground states,” as your editorial contends.Rather, as your own reporters noted, I told Mr. Pence that even if he did have such power, “it would be foolish for him to exercise it until state legislatures certified a new set of electors for Mr. Trump.”That honest bit of reporting contradicts not only your editorial but also myriad other news accounts to the same effect.John C. EastmanUpland, Calif.The writer is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.To the Editor:Reading the excellent but frightening editorial “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked,” I was not surprised that the former president wanted to stay in power despite losing a fair election. What was staggering was the number of people who wanted to help him.Jana GoldmanHonor, Mich.To the Editor:Your editorial hit on a serious issue that worries us all, including your many friends in Australia. An independent electoral commission manages, scrutinizes, counts the votes and announces the results of all state and federal elections in Australia.No one ever doubts its word, and challenges are resolved by it quickly and based on evidence that is made publicly available, and only very rarely end up in the courts. The commission also draws electoral boundaries, according to statutory formulas, so there’s no possibility of gerrymandering.We find the heavy politicization of your system puzzling.Nuncio D’AngeloSydney, AustraliaTo the Editor:In “He Drafted Plan to Keep Trump in White House,” John Eastman’s influence is attributed to giving President Trump “what he wanted to hear.”The former F.B.I. director William Webster gave me the most important advice on leadership when I was a White House fellow serving as one of his special assistants. As the only nonlawyer on his executive staff, I was unsure about my job description until he explained, “Your job is to make sure I hear things people think I don’t want to hear or that they don’t want me to hear.” Within a day, it was clear what that entailed.I have shared that advice, and it has proved valuable for countless leaders. Mr. Eastman demonstrates the risks of disregarding it.Merrie SpaethPlano, Texas‘I Won’t Mount a Coup.’ Now Is That Too Much to Ask?  Jason Andrew for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Is there a chance that in the 2024 election all the presidential candidates would sign a pledge that if they lose the election they will not try to overthrow the government?William Dodd BrownChicagoMissing Yazidis, Captives of ISIS: ‘The World Must Act’The Sharya camp near Duhok in August.Hawre Khalid for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Yazidis Know Some of Their Missing Are Alive, as Captives” (news article, Oct. 4):As a Yazidi, I read this piece with a heavy heart, and I ache to do more for these women, children and families. I have been to the camps in Duhok, in northern Iraq, and met with many families hoping for their loved ones to return, but they can barely afford daily necessities, let alone ransoms.I believe that what we need is a task force, comprising Iraqi authorities, U.N. agencies and civil society organizations, formed with the sole goal of searching for and rescuing Yazidi captives of the Islamic State.Opportunities for asylum must be expanded and support given for their recovery. Every necessary resource should be committed to ensuring that survivors can live in freedom and safety for the first time in years.Seven years is an unthinkable amount of time to be held in sexual slavery. We must act. The world must act to rescue women and children from captivity.Abid ShamdeenWashingtonThe writer is executive director of Nadia’s Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence.Clerical Celibacy in the Catholic Church Benoit Tessier/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Report Describes Abuse of Minors Permeating Catholic Church in France” (news article, Oct. 6):Clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church wasn’t imposed until the 12th century. How many more of these stories do we have to read until the church acknowledges that it made a dire, if well-intentioned, mistake by instituting that policy?Kate RoseHoustonTaxing the Ultrarich  Erik CarterTo the Editor:Re “This Is How America’s Richest Families Stay That Way,” by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Sept. 24):Mr. Kaiser-Schatzlein states that the ultrarich could pass on stock bought for $1 but worth $100 at death, and that the inheritors would pay tax only on gains above the $100. While that is accurate, it neglects to mention that instead of paying the federal capital gains rate of 20 percent on the $99 gain, the estate would pay the estate tax of 40 percent on the full $100 value (since we are discussing the ultrarich, the $11.7 million exclusion for the estate tax would be a rounding error).This omission gives the misleading impression that the inheritance would be untaxed, when in fact it would be taxed at a higher rate.Peter KnellPasadena, Calif.The writer is managing director of an investment management company. More

Iraqis vote Sunday in parliamentary elections called a year early, after huge anti-government protests. Most parties are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.BAGHDAD — Outside the headquarters of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, one of the main Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, fighters have posted a giant banner showing the U.S. Capitol building swallowed up by red tents, symbols of a defining event in Shiite history.It’s election time in Iraq, and Asaib Ahl al-Haq — blamed for attacks on American forces and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization — is just one of the paramilitary factions whose political wings are likely to win Parliament seats in Sunday’s voting. The banner’s imagery of the 7th century Battle of Karbala and a contemporaneous quote pledging revenge sends a message to all who pass: militant defense of Shiite Islam.Seventeen years after the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator, the run-up to the country’s fifth general election highlights a political system dominated by guns and money, and still largely divided along sectarian and ethnic lines.The contest is likely to return the same main players to power, including a movement loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a coalition connected to militias backed by Iran, and the dominant Kurdish party in the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Other leading figures include a Sunni businessman under U.S. sanctions for corruption.A poster for the Sadrist Movement on display at the entrance to Sadr City, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. Posters for a candidate from another party hang nearby. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesIn between are glimmers of hope that a reformed election law and a protest movement that prompted these elections a year early could bring some candidates who are not tied to traditional political parties into Iraq’s dysfunctional Parliament.But persuading disillusioned voters that it is worth casting their ballots will be a challenge in a country where corruption is so rampant that many government ministries are more focused on bribes than providing public services. Militias and their political wings are often seen as serving Iran’s interests more than Iraq’s.Almost no parties have put forth any political platforms. Instead they are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.“I voted in the first elections and it did not meet our goals and then I voted in the second election and the same faces remained,” said Wissam Ali, walking along a downtown street carrying the bumper of a car he had just bought at a market. “The third time I decided not to vote.”Mr. Ali, from Babil province south of Baghdad, said he taught for the last 14 years in public schools as a temporary lecturer and has been unable to get a government teaching position because he does not belong to a political party.Anti-government protestors at a demonstration in Bagdad’s Tahrir Square this month commemorating activists killed by security forces and militia gunmen.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesStarting in October 2019, protests intensified, sweeping through Baghdad and the southern provinces demanding jobs and basic public services such as electricity and clean water. The mostly young and mostly Shiite protesters demanded change in a political system where government ministries are awarded as prizes to the biggest political blocs.The protesters called for an end to Iranian influence in Iraq through proxy militias that now are officially part of Iraq’s security forces, but only nominally under government control.In response, security forces killed almost 600 unarmed protesters, according to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights. Other estimates place the toll at 800. Militia fighters are blamed for many of the deaths and are accused of killing dozens more activists in targeted assassinations.The current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, came to power last year after the previous government was forced by the protests to step down.While early elections were a key campaign promise, Mr. Kadhimi has been unable to fulfill most of the rest of his pledges — bringing to justice those behind the killings of activists, making a serious dent in corruption and reining in Iranian-backed militias.While the parties already in power are expected to dominate the new Parliament, changes in Iraq’s electoral law will make it easier for small parties and independent candidates to be elected. That could make this vote the most representative in the country’s postwar history. Despite faults in the election process including, in previous years, widespread fraud, Iraq is still far ahead of most Arab countries in holding national and provincial polls.A poster for an independent candidate hung on the fence of a soccer field in Sadr City. Changes in election rules have made it easier for independent candidates to win seats. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“It’s not a perfect system but it’s much better than the old one,” said Mohanad Adnan, an Iraqi political analyst.He said he believed the protests — and the bloody suppression of them — had resulted in some established parties losing part of their support. Some candidates are hoping to capitalize on a backlash against traditional political blocs.Fatin Muhi, a history professor at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said she was encouraged by her students to run for office. Ms. Muhi, who is running with a party affiliated with the anti-government protests, said many people in her middle-class constituency had planned to boycott the elections but changed their minds.“When they found out we were candidates for the protest movement they said ‘we will give you our votes,’” Ms. Muhi said. “We will be an opposition bloc to any decision issued by corrupt political parties.”In addition to anger and apathy, serious fraud in the last parliamentary election has fueled the boycott campaign.To counter voter distrust that led to a record low turnout in the 2018 polls, election workers have been going to people’s doors in some neighborhoods with voter registration cards. Election authorities “wanted to make it as easy as possible for voters who don’t have trust in the system,” said Mr. Adnan, the political analyst. “They are not motivated to register or pick up their cards.”Customers at a cafe in Sadr City with the lights switched off. State electricity provides the cafe with only two hours of power at a time before it must rely on a generator.  Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesThe country’s 21 million registered voters include an estimated one million old enough to vote for the first time. Despite TikTok campaign spots and other tactics aimed at reaching young voters, many of them are boycotting the election.“Our country is for us and not for them,” said Helen Alaa, 19, referring to the political parties and the militias. Ms. Alaa, a first-year college student who said she would not vote, was at a demonstration commemorating slain protesters. “We tried so hard to explain to them but they always try to kill us. Now they try to calm down the situation so they can win in the election and bring back the same faces.”Ahmed Adnan, 19, said, “Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets.” The candidate keeps being elected, he said, but none of those things have been done.To help support his family, Mr. Adnan, who is unrelated to Mohanad Adnan, works at a shop selling ice, making about $8 a day. He is trying to finish high school by studying at home and going in only to take exams.His friend, Sajad Fahil, 18, said a candidate came to his door and offered to buy his vote for $300.“Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets,” said Ahmed Adnan, center. He wants to finish high school but needs to work to help support his family.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“He refused to say which party he was running for,” said Mr. Fadhil, who studies at a technical institute and is also boycotting the vote.In some areas where there is more money and races are more hotly contested, the going price for buying a vote is up to $1,000, according to several tribal officials.Sheikh Hameed al-Shoka, head of the Anbar Tribal Leaders Council, said groups commissioned by some political blocs were buying up people’s biometric voting cards by the thousands. Under that scheme, voters agree to relinquish their cards and later retrieve them outside polling sites — ensuring that they actually do turn out — where they then vote as directed.In a race between the powerful Sunni speaker of Parliament, Mohammad al-Halbousi, and Iraqi businessman Khamis al-Khanjar, Sheikh Hammeed said he had told his followers to support Mr. Khanjar. The tribal leader said both political figures were suspected of corruption, including Mr. Khanjar whom he acknowledged having “corrupt friends.”“But his friends have worked in the government and offered something for people,” said the tribal leader. “The others did not offer anything. They only provided for themselves.”Fishing on the banks of the Tigris river in Baghdad.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesFalah Hassan and Sura Ali contributed reporting from Baghdad. Nermeen al-Mufti contributed reporting from Kirkuk, Iraq. More

A city investigation criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio’s use of his security detail during his presidential campaign and to transport his children.Mayor Bill de Blasio misused public resources for political and personal purposes, including deploying his security detail for personal trips like moving his daughter to Gracie Mansion, and has not reimbursed the city for security costs from his presidential campaign, according to a city investigation released on Thursday.The city spent nearly $320,000 for members of Mr. de Blasio’s security detail to travel on his presidential campaign trips in 2019 — funds that have not been paid back personally or through his campaign, according to the 47-page report by the city’s Department of Investigation.The report said that the use of a police van and personnel to help move Mr. de Blasio’s daughter was “a misuse of N.Y.P.D. resources for a personal benefit,” and that Howard Redmond, the police inspector in charge of the family’s security detail, had “actively obstructed and sought to thwart this investigation.”At a news conference, Margaret Garnett, the commissioner of the investigation department, said that investigators found that Mr. Redmond had tried to destroy his cellphone after he was told to surrender it and that he had deleted communications. She said she was referring the matter to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.The report did not say that any laws were broken. But the findings still come at an inopportune time for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat with three months left in office who is actively considering a run for governor. He has faced several investigations into his fund-raising practices over his eight years as mayor, and prosecutors in 2017 raised concerns about them but ultimately decided not to bring criminal charges.Mr. de Blasio’s office criticized the report on Thursday, arguing that “civilian investigators” should not decide how to keep the mayor and his family safe.“This unprofessional report purports to do the N.Y.P.D.’s job for them, but with none of the relevant expertise — and without even interviewing the official who heads intelligence for the City,” his office said in a statement. “As a result, we are left with an inaccurate report, based on illegitimate assumptions and a naïve view of the complex security challenges facing elected officials today.”The report also examined Mr. de Blasio’s use of his security detail during his failed presidential campaign in 2019. The city paid for flights, hotels, meals and rental cars for members of his detail as Mr. de Blasio visited states including Iowa and South Carolina at a cost of almost $320,000. That figure does not include salary or overtime for the officers.Mr. de Blasio failed to make an impact in the presidential race and dropped out after a few months.The report also cited several occasions where the mayor’s detail was used to pick up his brother from the airport, and to drive him to pick up a Zipcar in Palmyra, N.J. The detail also drove Mr. de Blasio’s brother “to an Alamo rental car location without the mayor present.”Asked if Mr. de Blasio was using his security detail as “glorified Uber drivers,” Ms. Garnett said there was a culture that treated the officers like they were City Hall staffers and a “concierge service.”The report made recommendations to prevent misuse of the mayor’s security detail in the future, including having the Conflicts of Interest Board publicly release advice issued to elected officials about the use of city resources in connection with political activities.City officials acknowledged in 2019 that the New York Police Department executive protection unit assigned to guard Mr. de Blasio and his family had helped his daughter, Chiara, move her belongings from an apartment in Brooklyn to Gracie Mansion. They used a city police van to move some of her personal items, including a rolled-up futon mattress.Mr. de Blasio has also received criticism over using his security detail to drive his son, Dante, between New York City and Yale University in Connecticut. The report said that one detective recalled driving Dante de Blasio to or from Yale “approximately seven or eight times without the mayor or first lady present.”The mayor’s son continued to use of the security detail when he moved back to New York City. The report found that starting around January 2020, he began receiving rides from the police every weekday morning from Gracie Mansion to his job in Brooklyn. The mayor “denied knowledge of this arrangement,” the report said.The mayor’s office defended the trips at the time, saying that Mr. de Blasio and his family had followed ethical rules, and that his children were guaranteed police protection like the children of previous mayors.On Thursday, Mr. de Blasio’s office said that his immediate family was “always entitled to detail therefore all uses are proper” and argued that Mr. de Blasio and his family regularly received threats, pointing to a post on Twitter last year by Ed Mullins, the former police union leader who is under investigation, regarding Chiara de Blasio’s personal information.As for the security costs of his presidential campaign, the mayor’s office said that the city had appealed a decision by the Conflicts of Interest Board that he should pay for them and that “no final decision has been made.”The report faulted the Police Department for its failure to follow “any formal processes or procedures” or create formal records regarding the eligibility of the mayor’s two children for security detail protection. The report noted that Dante de Blasio “has not had an assigned detail since approximately August 2015,” yet often was given protection.The report also found that for about a year, the mayor’s detail has been making security checks at homes owned by Mr. de Blasio in Brooklyn — a practice that investigators focused on because the mayor does not currently live in them and because one home is used as an investment property with paying tenants. A sergeant told investigators that the practice began during protests last year after the homes of elected officials were vandalized.The city’s Department of Investigation previously found in a confidential and heavily redacted report that Mr. de Blasio had solicited contributions from people who had business pending with the city, an apparent violation of the City Charter’s ethics law.The department investigates city government, including the executive branch. Mr. de Blasio nominated its commissioner, Ms. Garnett, a former federal prosecutor, in 2018, and the City Council confirmed her. Mr. de Blasio had fired her predecessor, Mark G. Peters, after he produced a series of investigative reports that were embarrassing to Mr. de Blasio.Katie Glueck contributed reporting. More

A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.The interim report, released publicly on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

No one is fooled when authoritarian leaders carry out fake elections. So why do they bother?This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs, and is published in conjunction with the annual Athens Democracy Forum.The Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, who has most recently been in power since 2007, is running for a fourth consecutive term this year. Virtually all of his potential challengers have disappeared, been detained, or pushed into exile, while the independent media has been silenced and the main opposition party has been formally disqualified from running.Yet Mr. Ortega continues to keep up the illusion of holding free elections, imitating the tactics of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Last year, Mr. Maduro’s administration cracked down on dissident leaders, journalists and activists in Venezuela ahead of December’s parliamentary elections, which were eventually boycotted by the opposition. Mr. Maduro’s governing majority and allies won 91 percent of the seats in the National Assembly.Nicaragua is not alone in constructing a democratic facade, but Mr. Ortega’s methods have been exceptionally striking. “This is a dramatic escalation of systemic repression which we haven’t seen in Latin America since the 1980s,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.“There is still a desire on the part of regimes to have a fig leaf of democracy, however not credible that is,” Mr. Shifter said. He noted that the pretense might have been the excuse Mexico and Argentina needed to avoid joining in a recent Organization of American States vote denouncing the crackdown against Mr. Ortega’s political rivals in Nicaragua.These days, governments like those in Nicaragua, Venezuela and elsewhere that reject political pluralism are ready to go to great lengths to pretend to embrace democracy — primarily by imitating the crucial rituals of periodic elections.When election time comes around, authoritarians allow a certain amount of political campaigning, vet candidates (barring or even arresting those deemed too critical of the government), then make a show of counting ballots, all the while intending to hold on to power.A polling agent with ballot boxes in Lusaka, Zambia, in August. A challenger managed to win the presidency in Zambia by more than a million votes despite the incumbent’s attempts at voter intimidation.Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated PressBut faking elections can be a tricky business. Too big a victory can draw suspicion and encourage an angry populace to gather on the streets, as happened after the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Too big a loss can be difficult to falsify, as was the case in Zambia in August when, despite the incumbent’s overt attempts at voter intimidation, the challenger, Hakainde Hichilema, managed to win the presidency by more than a million votes.Authoritarians have learned that they must carefully weigh how and when to interfere. Too much pre-election excitement can encourage too big a turnout, drawing more votes for the opposition. A low turnout is safer, because authoritarians have ways of making sure their voters get to the polls.Such intrigues require preparation, skill and money, all for an exercise that most citizens know is a sham.So why bother to pretend?Elections, even flawed ones, serve a purpose. The goal for autocrat and democrat alike is legitimacy — a right to rule that, in the views of most citizens in the 21st century, can be bestowed only by a popular vote, or at least the semblance of one.In other eras, and even now in some parts of the world, the right to rule could be inherited by a monarch, blessed by religious faith or sustained by an iron-fisted ideology like Communism. But where those options have been exhausted, democracy — or something resembling it — seems to be the best, and maybe the only, option for maintaining a monopoly on power short of outright dictatorship.“In the contemporary world, there are, practically speaking, no alternative ideologies,” Dmitri Furman, a Russian political scientist, wrote in New Left Review in 2008. He used the term “imitation democracy” to describe the combination of democratic forms and authoritarian reality then in place across most of the former Soviet Union.This formula was recently perfected in Russia, 20 years into Vladimir V. Putin’s rule, ahead of parliamentary elections last month.A woman voting in Moscow during elections last month. President Vladimir V. Putin and his allies deployed heavy-handed measures to keep critics off the ballot and to sway apathetic voters.Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via ShutterstockThere never was any doubt that United Russia, the party backed by Mr. Putin, would come out on top. And indeed, the final vote gave the party 324 of the Duma’s 450 seats, more than enough to guarantee a constitutional, or two-thirds, majority (but fewer than the 343 seats United Russia took in 2016).Still, Mr. Putin and his allies took no chances, deploying heavy-handed measures to keep his critics off the ballot, while giving generous handouts to sway apathetic voters. Pensioners and military personnel, two crucial constituencies, received one-off pre-election bonuses, at an estimated cost of $6.7 billion to the federal government.Followers of the jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, now legally labeled “extremists,” were barred from running, and some were put in jail or forced to flee the country. Popular candidates from Russia’s legal parliamentary parties — including the liberal centrist party Yabloko and the Communist Party — were pushed off the ballot under thinly veiled pretenses, ranging from faulty paperwork to allegations of criminal offenses. In St. Petersburg, a well-known Yabloko candidate found himself running against two people who had recently adopted not only his name but also his appearance.The Kremlin also took on independent media outlets, declaring that many journalists were foreign agents. And yet news still leaked about local officials who went to great lengths to gin up the vote for United Russia. Election officials were reportedly caught on tape discussing vote targets of 42 percent to 45 percent, presumably for United Russia, and government officials complained of being pressured by their employers to vote. In today’s Russia, these advantages are called “administrative resources,” all of which tipped the scales in United Russia’s favor.Similar tactics have worked in the past. In Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections, officials in the city of Saratov did not take any risks. In about 100 of the city’s 373 electoral districts, the results were exactly the same: 62.2 percent for United Russia, 11.8 percent for the Communist Party, and on down the list. A local electoral commission official dismissed the suspicious results as a mere coincidence.Much has changed in the last five years. Unpopular pension reforms in 2018 have hurt both Mr. Putin and United Russia in opinion polls. Ahead of the September elections, the party’s popularity hit a record low, falling below 30 percent nationally, and even lower in the big cities.“United Russia’s polling is bad, but it doesn’t really matter,” Aleksei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow think tank, told The Moscow Times in an interview in early September. A recycled Soviet-era joke made the rounds after the elections: “You pretend to hold elections, and we pretend to vote,” a retooled version of the old quip “You pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”But elections benefit the Putin government, according to an analysis by the political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in their book “The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy,” published last year. Elections have been turned into national rituals, spectacles that create the illusion that Russian voters can play a role in politics. They can also test the national mood, district by district, and allow the Kremlin to measure the loyalty and competence of their local officials.“You had a hard time in post-Communist Russia finding out how local officials were behaving, figuring out who was reliable, who could turn out the vote,” Mr. Holmes said in an interview. “It is not just about loyalty, but also about who is effective. Elections give you new tools to measure performance.”Paradoxically, “a managed democracy,” a term often used to describe the Putin system of government, is not so much about pretending to be democratic, but rather about pretending to manage, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Krastev said in their book. “Rigging an election also allowed the government to mimic the authoritarian power that it did not actually possess,” they wrote. “In Putin’s first decade in power, organizing a pseudo-election was like wearing sheep’s clothing to prove that you are a wolf.”But most pseudo-democrats these days are reluctant to assume their inner autocratic selves: They are not sure how to be wolves. In Nicaragua, where Mr. Ortega lost an election in 1990 after five years in power, today’s government seems to have gone further than others toward becoming a police state, but most other authoritarian rulers are careful not to cross the line, at times at the risk of seeming ineffective.Typically, they promote their hold on power as a guarantee of stability, and a protection of the nation in a hostile, unstable world. And in some cases, such leaders do in fact enjoy broad support: Mr. Putin’s popularity rating in Russia is down from a high point of 88 percent after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but it still hovers above 60 percent, well above the ratings of leaders in Western democracies.These days, elections may be a necessary tool for authoritarian systems to hold power, but they remain risky, as was the case in Zambia, where the opposition managed against all odds to score a victory that was too big to deny, and in Belarus where the falsification of the results was so obvious that protesters came out to the streets.“Politics is about promising and disappointing and managing the disappointment,” Mr. Holmes said. “The special magic of democracy is that, although a lot of people may be disappointed, they have a hope that at the next election, they can bring in another group. By giving up the idea that another group can come to power, a lot of pressure builds up.”Celestine Bohlen is a former New York Times Moscow correspondent who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. More

When the actor Matthew McConaughey dropped his rom-com act to pursue hard-hitting dramas, Hollywood called it a “McConaissance.” Now we may be on the cusp of the next one, as he mulls over a run for governor of Texas. McConaughey is the first to admit he’s not a conventional pick for Texans. “I’m not a man who comes at politics from a political background,” he says. “I’m a statesman-philosopher, folk-singing poet.” Even so, he has some thoughts about the current political climate, observing, “It’s necessary to be aggressively centric, at least, to possibly salvage democracy in America right now.”[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, Kara Swisher asks McConaughey to unpack his thoughts on key issues like mask mandates, abortion and voting rights, and what he actually means when he says he’s “measuring” a run for governor. They also discuss his recent memoir, “Greenlights,” as he doles out some of his life philosophies and cackles in good humor at the critical reviews that Kara insists on reading him.This episode contains strong language.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Vida Alves McConaugheyThoughts? Email us at [email protected].“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Matt Kwong, Daphne Chen and Caitlin O’Keefe, and edited by Nayeema Raza; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Kristin Lin; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Mahima Chablani. More

Just who believes the claim that Trump won in 2020 and that the election was stolen from him? Who are these tens of millions of Americans and what draws them into this web of delusion?Three sources provided The Times with survey data: The University of Massachusetts-Amherst Poll; P.R.R.I. (the Public Religion Research Institute); and Reuters-Ipsos. With minor exceptions, the data from all three polls is similar.Alexander Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, summed it up:About 35 percent of Americans believed in April that Biden’s victory was illegitimate, with another 6 percent saying they are not sure. What can we say about the Americans who do not think Biden’s victory was legitimate? Compared to the overall voting-age population, they are disproportionately white, Republican, older, less educated, more conservative, and more religious (particularly more Protestant and more likely to describe themselves as born again).P.R.R.I. also tested agreement or disagreement with a view that drives “replacement theory” — “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” — and found that 60 percent of Republicans agreed, as do 55 percent of conservatives.The Reuters/Ipsos data showed that among white Republicans, those without college degrees were far more likely to agree “that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,” at 69 percent, than white Republicans with college degrees, at a still astonishing 51 percent. The same survey data showed that the level of this belief remained consistently strong (60 percent plus) among Republicans of all ages living in rural, suburban or urban areas.With that data in mind, let’s explore some of the forces guiding these developments.In their September 2021 paper, “Exposure to authoritarian values leads to lower positive affect, higher negative affect, and higher meaning in life,” seven scholars — Jake Womick, John Eckelkamp, Sam Luzzo, Sarah J. Ward, S. Glenn Baker, Alison Salamun and Laura A. King — write:Right-wing authoritarianism played a significant role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In subsequent years, there have been numerous ‘alt-right’ demonstrations in the U.S., including the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that culminated in a fatal car attack, and the 2021 Capitol Insurrection. In the U.S., between 2016 and 2017 the number of attacks by right-wing organizations quadrupled, outnumbering attacks by Islamic extremist groups, constituting 66 percent of all attacks and plots in the U.S. in 2019, and over 90 percent in 2020.How does authoritarianism relate to immigration? Womick provided some insight in an email:Social dominance orientation is a variable that refers to the preference for society to be structured by group-based hierarchies. It’s comprised of two components: group-based dominance, and anti-egalitarianism. Group-based dominance refers to the preference for these hierarchies and the use of force/aggression to maintain them. Anti-egalitarianism refers to maintaining these sorts of hierarchies through other means, such as through systems, legislation, etc.Womick notes that his own study of the 2016 primaries showed that Trump voters were unique compared with supporters of other Republicans in the strength of theirgroup-based dominance. I think group-based dominance as the distinguishing factor of this group is highly consistent with what happened at the Capitol. These individuals likely felt that the Trump administration was serving to maintain group-based hierarchies in society from which they felt they benefited. They may have perceived the 2020 election outcome as a threat to that structure. As a result, they turned to aggression in an attempt to affect our political structures in service of the maintenance of those group-based hierarchies.In their paper, Womick and his co-authors askWhat explains the appeal of authoritarian values? What problem do these values solve for the people who embrace them? The presentation of authoritarian values must have a positive influence on something that is valuable to people.Their answer is twofold:Authoritarian messages influence people on two separable levels, the affective level, lowering positive and enhancing negative affect. and the existential level, enhancing meaning in life.They describe negative affect as “feeling sad, worried, or enraged.” Definitions of “meaning in life,” they write,include at least three components, significance, the feeling that one’s life and contributions matter to society; purpose, having one’s life driven by the pursuit of valued goals; and coherence or comprehensibility, the perception that one’s life makes sense.In a separate paper, “The existential function of right‐wing authoritarianism,” Womick, Ward and King, joined by Samantha J. Heintzelman and Brendon Woody, provide more detail:It may seem ironic that authoritarianism, a belief system that entails sacrifice of personal freedom to a strong leader, would influence the experience of meaning in life through its promotion of feelings of personal significance. Yet, right wing authoritarianism does provide a person with a place in the world, as a loyal follower of a strong leader. In addition, compared to purpose and coherence, knowing with great certainty that one’s life has mattered in a lasting way may be challenging. Handing this challenge over to a strong leader and investment in societal conventions might allow a person to gain a sense of symbolic or vicarious significance.From another vantage point, Womick and his co-authors continue,perceptions of insignificance may lead individuals to endorse relatively extreme beliefs, such as authoritarianism, and to follow authoritarian leaders as a way to gain a sense that their lives and their contributions matter.In the authors’ view, right-wing authoritarianism,despite its negative social implications, serves an existential meaning function. This existential function is primarily about facilitating the sense that one’s life matters. This existential buffering function is primarily about allowing individuals to maintain a sense that they matter during difficult experiences.Terray Sylvester/ReutersIn his email, Womick expanded on his work: “The idea is that perceptions of insignificance can drive a process of seeking out groups, endorsing their ideologies and engaging in behaviors consistent with these.”These ideologies, Womick continued,should eventually promote a sense of significance (as insignificance is what drove the person to endorse the ideology in the first place). Endorsing right wing authoritarianism relates to higher meaning in life, and exposing people to authoritarian values causally enhances meaning.In “Race and Authoritarianism in American Politics,” Christopher Sebastian Parker and Christopher C. Towler, political scientists at the University of Washington and Sacramento State, make a parallel argument:Confining the definition of authoritarianism to regime rule, however, leaves little room for a discussion of more contemporary authoritarianism, at the micro level. This review shifts focus to an assessment of political psychology’s concept of authoritarianism and how it ultimately drives racism. Ultimately, we believe a tangible connection exists between racism and authoritarianism.Taking a distinct but complementary approach, David C Barker, Morgan Marietta and Ryan DeTamble, all political scientists, argue in “Intellectualism, Anti-Intellectualism, and Epistemic Hubris in Red and Blue America” thatEpistemic hubris — the expression of unwarranted factual certitude” is “prevalent, bipartisan and associated with both intellectualism (an identity marked by ruminative habits and learning for its own sake) and anti-intellectualism (negative affect toward intellectuals and the intellectual establishment).The division between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, they write, isdistinctly partisan: intellectuals are disproportionately Democratic, whereas anti-intellectuals are disproportionately Republican. By implication, we suggest that both the intellectualism of Blue America and the anti-intellectualism of Red America contribute to the intemperance and intransigence that characterize civil society in the United States.In addition, according to the Barker, Marietta and DeTamble, “The growing intellectualism of Blue America and anti-intellectualism of Red America, respectively, may partially explain the tendency by both to view the other as some blend of dense, duped, and dishonest.”In an email, Marietta wrote:The evidence is clear that the hubris driven by intellectual identity and the hubris driven by anti-intellectual affect lower our willingness to compromise with those who seem to lack character and honesty. I suspect the divide in perceptions, but unanimity in hubris, feeds the growing belief that democracy is failing and hence anti-democratic or illiberal policies are justified.Marietta reports that he and his colleaguesconducted a series of experiments to see what happens when ordinary citizens are faced with others who hold contrary perceptions of reality about things like climate change, or racism, or the effects of immigration. The results are not pretty.Once they realize that the perceptions of other people are “different from their own,” Marietta continued,Americans are far less likely to want to be around them in the workplace, and are far more likely to conclude that they are stupid or dishonest. These inclinations are symmetrical, with liberals rejecting conservatives as much (or sometimes more) than conservatives reject liberals. The disdain born of intellectual identity seems to mirror the disdain arising from anti-intellectual affect.I asked Barker about the role of hubris in contemporary polarization and he wrote back:The populist Right hates the intellectual Left because they hate being condescended to, they hate what they perceive as their hypersensitivity, and they hate what they view as an anti-American level of femininity (which is for whatever reason associated with intellectualism).At the same time, Barker continued,the intellectual Left really does see the G.O.P. as a bunch of deplorable rubes. They absolutely feel superior to them, and they reveal it constantly on Twitter and elsewhere — further riling up the “deplorables.”Put another way. Barker wrote,The populist/anti-intellectual Right absolutely believe that the intellectuals are not only out of touch but are also ungodly and sneaky, and therefore think they must be stopped before they ruin America. Meanwhile, the intellectual Left really do believe the Trumpers are racist, sexist, homophobic (and so on) authoritarians who can’t spell and are going to destroy the country if they are not stopped.What is a critical factor in the development of hubris? Moral conviction, the authors reply: “The most morally committed citizens are also the most epistemically hubristic citizens,” that is, they are most inclined “to express absolute certainty regarding the truth or falsehood” of claims “for which the hard evidence is unclear or contradictory.”Moral conviction plays a key role in the work of Clifford Workman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics at the University of Pennsylvania. Workman, Keith J. Yoder and Jean Decety, write in “The Dark Side of Morality — Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence” that “People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence.”Using M.R.I. brain scans, the authors “examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence” to determine “the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions.”Their conclusion: “Moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.”In a striking passage, Workman, Yoder and Decety argue thatWhile violence is often described as antithetical to sociality, it can be motivated by moral values with the ultimate goal of regulating social relationships. In fact, most violence in the world appears to be rooted in conflict between moral values. Across cultures and history, violence has been used with the intention to sustain order and can be expressed in war, torture, genocide, and homicide.What, then, Workman and his co-authors ask, “separates accepting ‘deserved’ vigilantism from others and justifying any behavior — rioting, warfare — as means to morally desirable ends?”Their answer is disconcerting:People who bomb family planning clinics and those who violently oppose war (e.g., the Weathermen’s protests of the Vietnam War) may have different sociopolitical ideologies, but both are motivated by deep moral convictions.The authors propose two theories to account for this:Moral conviction may function by altering the decision-making calculus through the subordination of social prohibitions against violence, thereby requiring less top-down inhibition. This hypothesis holds that moral conviction facilitates support for ideological violence by increasing commitments to a ‘greater good’ even at the expense of others. An alternative hypothesis is that moral conviction increases the subjective value of certain actions, where violence in service of those convictions is underpinned by judgments about one’s moral responsibilities to sociopolitical causes.In a 2018 paper, A Multilevel Social Neuroscience Perspective on Radicalization and Terrorism, Decety, Workman and Robert Pape ask, “Why are some people capable of sympathizing with and/or committing acts of political violence, such as attacks aimed at innocent targets?” More