Elections

Arizona’s top election official said the effort ordered by Republican state senators leaves ballots unattended and lacks basic safeguards to protect the process from manipulation.Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting.All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out this week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter. Ms. Hobbs, called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices.”“Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit,’” she wrote to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting it.The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds. But it has become so troubled that the Department of Justice also expressed concerns this week in a letter saying that it might violate federal laws.“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.The scene playing out in Arizona is perhaps the most off-the-rails episode in the Republican Party’s escalating effort to support former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that he won the election. Four months after Congress certified the results of the presidential election, local officials around the country are continuing to provide oxygen for Mr. Trump’s obsession that he beat Joseph R. Biden Jr. last fall.In Arizona, the review is proving to be every bit as problematic as skeptics had imagined.Last month, the Arizona Republic editorial board called for the state’s G.O.P. Senate majority to stop “abusing its authority.”“Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have set aside dollars, hired consultants, procured the hardware and software to conduct what they call ‘an audit’ of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County,” the editorial said. “What they don’t have is the moral authority to make it credible.”Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said the process had ignored long-established safeguards against mistakes or deliberate manipulation of the election results.Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinRepublican state senators ordered a review of the election in Maricopa County, whose 2.1 million ballots accounted for two-thirds of the entire vote statewide, in December, after some supporters of Mr. Trump refused to accept his 10,457-vote loss in Arizona. Democrats had flipped the county, giving Mr. Biden more than enough votes to ensure his victory statewide.The senators later assigned oversight of the effort to a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had publicly embraced conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines had been rigged to deliver the state to Mr. Biden. Since then, supporters of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election story line have been given broad access to the site of the review, while election experts, the press and independent observers have struggled to gain access, sometimes resorting to going to court.In one much-noted instance, Anthony Kern, a former state representative photographed on the Capitol steps on the day of the insurrection — and who was on the Maricopa ballot both as a legislative candidate and as a presidential elector — was hired to help recount ballots.Among other concerns, Ms. Hobbs’s letter contended that stacks of ballots were not properly protected and that there was no apparent procedure for preventing the commingling of tallied and untallied ballots.The security violations spotted by observers, the letter stated, included ballots left unattended on tables and ballots counted using scrap paper instead of official tally sheets. Counters receive “on the fly” training. Ballots from separate stacks are mixed together. Software problems cause ballot images to get lost. The letter also noted that some aspects of the process “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories than as a part of a professional audit.”For instance, some ballots are receiving microscope and ultraviolet-light examinations, apparently to address unfounded claims that fraudulent ballots contained watermarks that were visible under UV light — or that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Southeast Asia using paper with bamboo fibers.John Brakey, an official helping supervise the effort, said high-powered microscopes were being used to search for evidence of fake ballots, according to a video interview with the CBS News affiliate in Phoenix.“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in, to Arizona, and it was stuffed into the box,” he said in a taped interview. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”“I don’t believe any of that,” he added. “I’m just saying it’s part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”Republicans in the Senate signed a contract agreeing to pay $150,000 for the vote review, a figure that many said then would not cover its cost. A variety of outside groups later started fund-raisers to offset extra expenses, including the right-wing One America News cable channel and an Arizona state representative, Mark Finchem, who argues the election was stolen. How much in outside donations has been collected — and who the donors are — is unclear.The letter from the secretary of state also said that equipment and software being used to display images of ballots had not been tested by a federal laboratory or certified by the federal Election Assistance Commission, as state law requires. That left open the possibility, the letter said, that the systems could have been preloaded with false images of ballots or that the software had been designed to manipulate ballot images — concerns similar to those that believers in a stolen election had themselves raised.Ms. Hobbs also said the procedures for checking the accuracy of the effort included no “reliable process for ensuring consistency and resolving discrepancies” among the three separate counts of ballots. It also appeared that the task of entering recount results into an electronic spreadsheet was performed by a single person rather than a team of people from both political parties, the letter stated.Mr. Bennett, the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting the vote review, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But Ms. Hobbs concluded her letter to him by saying, “you know that our elections are governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency. You also must therefore know that the procedures governing this audit ensure none of those things.“I’m not sure what compelled you to oversee this audit, but I’d like to assume you took this role with the best of intentions. It is those intentions I appeal to now: either do it right, or don’t do it at all.” More

The case had examined whether Donald Trump violated election law with a $130,000 payment shortly before the 2016 election to a pornographic-film actress by his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.The Federal Election Commission said on Thursday that it had formally dropped a case looking into whether former President Donald J. Trump violated election law with a payment of $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to a pornographic-film actress by his personal lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen.The payment was never reported on Mr. Trump’s campaign filings. Mr. Cohen would go on to say that Mr. Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 race, and would apologize for his involvement in a hush-money scandal. Mr. Cohen was sentenced to prison for breaking campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress.“It was my own weakness and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light,” Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Trump in court in 2018.While Mr. Cohen has served time in prison, Mr. Trump has not faced legal consequences for the payment.“The hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding.”In December 2020, the F.E.C. issued an internal report from its Office of General Counsel on how to proceed in its review in December 2020. The office said it had found “reason to believe” violations of campaign finance law were made “knowingly and willfully” by the Trump campaign.But the election commission — split evenly between three Republicans and three Democratic-aligned commissioners — declined to proceed in a closed-door meeting in February. Two Republican commissioners voted to dismiss the case while two Democratic commissioners voted to move forward. There was one absence and one Republican recusal.That decision was announced on Thursday.Two of the Democratic commissioners on the F.E.C., Shana Broussard, the current chairwoman, and Ellen Weintraub, objected to not pursuing the case after the agency’s staff had recommended further investigation.“To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10-year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality,” they wrote in a letter.The Republican commissioners who voted not to proceed with an investigation, Trey Trainor and Sean Cooksey, said that pursuing the case was “not the best use of agency resources,” that “the public record is complete” already and that Mr. Cohen had already been punished.“We voted to dismiss these matters as an exercise of our prosecutorial discretion,” Mr. Cooksey and Mr. Trainor wrote.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Cohen case captured the public’s attention in 2018 after the F.B.I. raided his office, apartment and hotel room, hauling off boxes of documents, cellphones and computers. Months later, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to, among other charges, campaign finance violations.He said in court that he had arranged payments — including $130,000 to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”The payment was far in excess of the legal limit for individual contributions for president, which was then $2,700.Mr. Cohen further said he had arranged for a $150,000 payment by American Media Inc. to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate, earlier in 2016.Mr. Cohen would later turn on Mr. Trump and write his own book about serving as the former president’s enforcer while he was a businessman. The book was called “Disloyal: A Memoir.” More

Republicans say Liz Cheney, their No. 3, is being targeted because she won’t stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies. Her would-be replacement is campaigning on them.WASHINGTON — As House Republicans have made the case for ousting Representative Liz Cheney, their No. 3, from their leadership ranks, they have insisted that it is not her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies that they find untenable, but her determination to be vocal about it.But on Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have anointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, loudly resurrected his false narrative, citing “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to cast doubt on the results.“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, in the first of a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of the former president.The comments, Ms. Stefanik’s first in public since she announced she was taking on Ms. Cheney, reflected how central the former president’s election lies have become to the Republican Party message, even as its leaders insist they are determined to move beyond them and focus on attacking Democrats as radical, big-spending socialists before the 2022 midterm elections.Far from staying quiet about the false election claims on Thursday, Ms. Stefanik effectively campaigned on them, describing Mr. Trump on Mr. Bannon’s show as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” and asserting that Republicans would work with him as “one team.”“The job of the conference chair is to represent the majority of the House Republicans, and the vast majority of the House Republicans support President Trump, and they support his focus on election integrity and election security,” Ms. Stefanik later told Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump. The job, she said in an unmistakable jab at Ms. Cheney, “is not to attack members of the conference and attack President Trump.”While Ms. Stefanik avoided claiming outright that the election was stolen, she praised the Arizona audit, a Republican-led endeavor that critics in both parties have described as a blow to democratic norms and a political embarrassment, as “incredibly important.” She said recounting votes there and scrutinizing how Pennsylvania and other states administered the 2020 election were “valid, important questions and issues that the American people deserve policy proposals and answers on.”It was a stark contrast from Ms. Cheney, who has relentlessly upbraided the former president for falsely claiming the election was stolen and on Wednesday beseeched Republican lawmakers in a scathing opinion piece to excise him from the party. Ms. Cheney voted against her party’s efforts to invalidate the election results on Jan. 6, while Ms. Stefanik — like most House Republicans — voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Biden.Some Republicans, including the hard-right lawmakers who led a charge to try to remove Ms. Cheney in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, readily conceded that they were unwilling to tolerate dissent from their party leaders.“All the polling indicates that President Trump is still the titleholder,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Fox News. Ms. Cheney “can tell what her version of the truth is, but she can’t do it as the leader of the Republican Party in Congress.”For many Republicans, however, the calculation to boot Ms. Cheney, a strict conservative, in favor of Ms. Stefanik, who has a far more moderate voting record but has wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Trump, is more complicated.In interviews with lawmakers and party operatives, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the internal turmoil, several expressed concern about the optics of purging the only female member of leadership and a daughter of a conservative dynasty for her resolve to call out Mr. Trump’s lies. They worried that the move to oust Ms. Cheney could spook donors who might chafe at sending money to Republicans so closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, and ultimately voters who might be alienated by the party’s refusal to brook dissent.But they were also wrestling with the political downsides of keeping Ms. Cheney in her post, worried that they would continue to be forced to answer for her unyielding broadsides against the myth of a stolen election that many of their voters believe. Several lawmakers privately lamented her stubbornness and said they wished Ms. Cheney would focus solely on attacking Democrats.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have annointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, has loudly resurrected Mr. Trump’s false election narrative.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThat has been the approach taken by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who was initially vocal in his criticism of Mr. Trump and support of Ms. Cheney, but more recently has refused to broach either subject.On Thursday, for the second day in a row, he sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney, saying he was solely focused on challenging Mr. Biden and Democrats, and “looking forward — not backward.”“Members do not want to have to defend themselves against attacks from members of their own leadership team,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former House leadership aide. “The primary job of the House Republican Conference chair is to set up and facilitate the weekly press conferences conducted by the House Republican leadership. If you go out of your way to embarrass your leaders at those press conferences, you are not doing your job and you won’t last in that position very long.”Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a rising freshman star who voted against her party’s attempt to invalidate the election results, came out on Thursday in support of Ms. Stefanik, saying she respected Ms. Cheney’s “strong conservative record and service to our country” but wanted relief from the infighting that had plagued the conference.“If Republicans are divided, and not focusing all of our efforts against radical Democrat policies, Speaker Pelosi will remain in power,” Ms. Hinson said in a statement that called Ms. Stefanik “the right person to unify and lead our conference at this time.”Others appeared torn. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who had vocally condemned Mr. Trump for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and warned that the Republican Party could not define itself solely around the former president, said she was tired of “having these fights publicly.”“I want to move forward,” Ms. Mace told Fox Business’s Neil Cavuto. “I want to win back the House in a year and a half. We can get the majority back, and we’ve got to stop fighting with each other in public.”Ms. Mace warned that if the party continued “to make our party and our country about one person, and not about hard-working Americans in the this country, we’re going to continue to lose elections.” Asked whether she was referring to Mr. Trump or Ms. Cheney, Ms. Mace replied, “All of the above.”Some arch-conservative Republicans who are eager to oust Ms. Cheney — many of whom have despised her hawkish foreign policy views for years — have been quietly skeptical of Ms. Stefanik despite her endorsement from Mr. Trump, noting the low rankings conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Conservative Union have given her. On Wednesday night, the anti-tax Club for Growth opposed her campaign, branding her “a liberal.”“House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group wrote in a statement on Twitter.But despite the hand-wringing among the rank-and-file, by Thursday, Ms. Stefanik’s allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, publicly predicted that she would be conference chairwoman as soon as Wednesday, when Republicans plan to meet.“For sure the votes are there,” Mr. Jordan said on Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican Party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”Carl Hulse More

Every night at 8, the stern-faced newscaster on Myanmar military TV announces the day’s hunted. The mug shots of those charged with political crimes appear onscreen. Among them are doctors, students, beauty queens, actors, reporters, even a pair of makeup bloggers.Some of the faces look puffy and bruised, the likely result of interrogations. They are a warning not to oppose the military junta that seized power in a Feb. 1 coup and imprisoned the country’s civilian leaders.As the midnight insects trill, the hunt intensifies. Military censors sever the internet across most of Myanmar, matching the darkness outside with an information blackout. Soldiers sweep through the cities, arresting, abducting and assaulting with slingshots and rifles.The nightly banging on doors, as arbitrary as it is dreaded, galvanizes a frenzy of self-preservation. Residents delete their Facebook accounts, destroy incriminating mobile phone cards and erase traces of support for Myanmar’s elected government. As sleep proves elusive, it’s as if much of the nation is suffering a collective insomnia.Little more than a decade ago, the most innocuous of infractions — owning a photograph of pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or an unregistered cellphone or a single note of foreign currency — could mean a prison sentence. Some of the military’s Orwellian diktats rivaled those of North Korea.Security forces search for protesters as they crack down on a peaceful demonstration against the military coup in Yangon, in April.The New York TimesThree months after Myanmar’s experiment in democracy was strangled by the generals’ power grab, the sense of foreboding has returned. There is no indication that it will ease. For the better part of 60 years, the military’s rule over Myanmar was animated not by grand ideology but by fear. Today, with much of the population determined to resist the coup-makers, a new junta is consolidating its grip by resorting, yet again, to a reign of terror.“Myanmar is going back to the bad old days when people were so scared that their neighbors would inform on them and they could get arrested for no reason at all,” said Ko Moe Yan Naing, a former police officer who is now in hiding after opposing the coup.Prisons are once again filled with poets, Buddhist monks and politicians. Hundreds more, many young men, have disappeared, their families ignorant of their whereabouts, according to a group that tracks the military’s detentions. More than 770 civilians have been killed by security forces since the putsch, among them dozens of children.As they did years before, people walk the streets with the adrenaline-fueled sense of neck hairs prickling, a glance from a soldier or a lingering gaze from a passer-by chilling the air.Protesters fight with security forces in Yangon in March.The New York TimesYet if the junta is reflexively returning to rule by fear, it is also holding hostage a changed country. The groundswell of opposition to the coup, which has sustained protests in hundreds of cities and towns, was surely not in the military’s game plan, making its crackdown all the riskier. Neither the outcome of the putsch nor the fate of the resistance is preordained.Myanmar’s full emergence from isolation — economic, political and social — only came five years ago when the military began sharing power with an elected government headed by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. A population that barely had any connection to the internet quickly made up for lost time. Today, its citizenry is well versed in social media and the power of protests tethered to global movements. They know how to spot a good political meme on the internet.Their resistance to the coup has included a national strike and a civil disobedience movement, which have paralyzed the economy and roiled the government. Banks and hospitals are all but shut. Although the United Nations has warned that half the country could be living in poverty by next year because of the pandemic and the political crisis, the democratic opposition’s resolve shows no sign of weakening.More than 770 civilians have been killed by security forces since the putsch.The New York TimesIn late March, Ma Thuzar Nwe, a history teacher, branded her skin with defiance. The tattoo on the nape of her neck reads: “Spring Revolution Feb. 2021.”The police are now stopping people on the streets, looking for evidence on their phones or bodies of support for the National Unity Government, a civilian authority set up after the elected leadership was expelled by the military. A popular tactic is to affix an image of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader, on the sole of a shoe, smashing his face into the ground with each step. During spot checks, the police now demand that people show their soles.Ms. Thuzar Nwe says she wears her hair down to cover her tattoo, hoping the police won’t be too inquisitive.“In Myanmar culture, if a woman has a tattoo, she’s a bad girl,” she said. “I broke the rules of culture. This revolution is a rare chance to eradicate dictatorship from the country.”But the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has built an entire infrastructure dedicated to one purpose: perpetuating its power for power’s sake.Its bureaucracy of oppression is formidable. An army of informers, known as “dalan,” has reappeared, monitoring whispers and neighbors’ movements.The blandly named General Administration Department, a vast apparatus that remained under military control even after the army had started sharing authority with the civilian government, is once again pressuring administrators to keep tabs on everyone’s political views. And local officials have taken to banging on doors and peering in homes, as a dreaded system of household registration is reintroduced.Military vehicles during the national Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, in March.Associated PressEach morning, as residents count the dead and missing, the military’s media present its version of reality, all the more pervasive since the junta has revoked the publishing licenses of major private newspapers. Democracy will return soon, the military’s headlines insist. Banking services are running “as usual.” Health care with “modern machinery” is available. Government ministries are enjoying English-proficiency courses. Soft-shell crab cultivation is “thriving” and penetrating the foreign market.The Tatmadaw may have modernized its military arsenal, acquiring Chinese-made weapons and Russian fighter jets. But its propaganda is stuck in a time warp from back when few challenged its narrative. There is no mention in its media of the military’s killing spree, the broken economy or the growing armed resistance. On Wednesday, the State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, banned satellite TV.For all the fear percolating in Myanmar, the resistance has only hardened. On Wednesday, the National Unity Government said it was forming a “people’s defense force” to counter the Tatmadaw. Two days before, ethnic insurgents fighting in the borderlands shot down a Tatmadaw helicopter.Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in 2016.Hein Htet/European Pressphoto AgencyIgnoring such developments, the Tatmadaw’s media instead devote space to the supposed infractions of thousands of civilians who must be locked up for “undermining state peace and stability.” Among them are AIDS patients so weak they can barely walk.More than for the civilian population, such propaganda is meant to convince the military ranks that the coup was necessary, Tatmadaw insiders said. Sequestered in military compounds without good internet access, soldiers have little ability to tap into the outrage of fellow citizens. Their information diet is composed of military TV, military newspapers and the echo chambers of military-dominated Facebook on the rare occasions they can get online.Still, news does filter in, and some officers have broken rank. In recent weeks, about 80 Myanmar Air Force officers have deserted and are now in hiding, according to fellow military personnel.“Politics are not the business of soldiers,” said an air force captain who is now in hiding and does not want his name used because his family might be punished for his desertion. “Now the Tatmadaw have become the terrorists, and I don’t want to be part of it.”Myanmar’s citizens are now well versed in social media and the power of protests tethered to global movements, since the country opened up a few years ago.The New York TimesIn the cities, almost everyone seems to know someone who has been arrested or beaten or forced to pay a bribe to the security forces in exchange for freedom.Last month, Ma May Thaw Zin, a 19-year-old law student, joined a flash mob protest in Yangon, the country’s biggest city. The police, she said, detained several young women and crammed them into an interrogation center cell so small they barely had room to sit on the floor.For a whole day, there was no food. Ms. May Thaw Zin said she resorted to drinking from the toilet. The interrogations were just her and a clutch of men. They rubbed against her and kicked her breasts and face with their boots, she said. On the fourth day, after men shoved the barrel of a pistol against the black hood over her head, she was released. The bruises remain.Since she returned home, some family members have refused to have anything to do with her because she was caught protesting, Ms. May Thaw Zin said. Even if they hate the coup, even if they know their futures have been blunted, the instincts of survival have kicked in.“They are afraid,” she said, but “I can’t accept that my country will go back to the old dark age.”Riot police prepared to remove protesters who attempted to block a motorcade of security forces in February.The New York Times More

A recall candidate hired a bear to draw attention to his campaign to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, but the bear ended up drawing attention to the bear.SACRAMENTO — He was new to politics but a working actor who has shared the screen with Kevin Costner. He posed. He swaggered. He did not obviously beg for the rotisserie chicken. He publicly refrained from his two favorite offstage habits, flatulence and belching, although at one point he did wash himself with his tongue as the cameras rolled.Under a broiling Sacramento sun, Tag — a half-ton bear hired as a stunt by one of the Republicans hoping to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom of California in a likely fall recall election — hit all his marks in front of a campaign bus on Tuesday before heading home to Kern County in time for a dip and a nap.By Thursday, editorial boards were fretting, a state senator was fuming, animal rights groups were calling for formal investigations and the Republican candidate who hired the bear, John Cox, was fending off questions about whether his rented mascot had been exploited.“I kissed the bear, actually,” Mr. Cox said. “It’s a very tame bear.”As California’s nationally watched recall effort cleared yet another threshold this week, with a final count of some 200,000 signatures beyond the required 1.5 million or so, the bear’s appearance marked a new phase in the proceedings. Call it the circus phase.When Californians recalled their governor in 2003, 135 candidates were on the ballot, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom 48.6 percent of voters selected as the replacement for Gray Davis. Aspirants included the former child actor Gary Coleman, the online publisher Arianna Huffington and the Hustler magazine mogul Larry Flynt. The campaign became so antic and bizarre that one of the debates was hosted by the Game Show Network.Tag, a half-ton Kodiak bear, ate chicken and creme sandwich cookies.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesWill the list be long and bizarre again? Well, does a bear sleep in Kern County?Among those running again this time are Mary Ellen Cook, a former pornographic film actress who worked under the professional name Mary Carey, and Angelyne, a 70-year-old former Los Angeles billboard model. Many more have publicly flirted with the possibility, including the actor Randy Quaid, who tweeted last month that he was “seriously considering” a run despite pending criminal charges. Other announced candidates include Kevin Faulconer, the recent mayor of San Diego; Doug Ose, a former congressman from Sacramento; and Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist, reality show celebrity and transgender activist.The barriers to enter the race are low: State rules allow candidates to file any time up until 59 days before Election Day, as long as they can produce 7,000 signatures from supporters or pay a fee of about $4,000.Tag does not work as cheaply. Mr. Cox’s campaign paid about $6,000 to Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, animal wranglers in Frazier Park, Calif., for the bear to make appearances at news conferences and in a commercial, according to Mr. Martin and Keith Bauer, Tag’s trainer.Mr. Cox’s campaign sought to rebrand him with a tougher image after the San Diego businessman was trounced by Mr. Newsom in the 2018 election. It changed his Twitter handle to @BeastJohnCox, and labeled Mr. Newsom a “pretty boy” whose looks had carried him into office. Tag’s job, apparently, was to drive home the “beast” theme and represent California.In that respect, he was technically miscast. He is a Kodiak bear, and the official state animal is the brown California grizzly. The bear on the state flag is a grizzly. So is “Bacteria Bear,” the famed 800-pound bronze statue outside the governor’s office, so nicknamed for all the small, sticky hands that have petted it during elementary school field trips.But the grizzly has been extinct for a century in California. Born nine years ago in a private zoo in Ohio, Tag, at least, is alive and “is brown,” Mr. Bauer explained.Tag has worked for the past seven years. He has appeared in “Yellowstone,” the Western television series starring Mr. Costner, with Tracy Morgan in an ad for Rocket Mortgage and in the Apple TV+ series “See” with Jason Momoa. In an upcoming plumbing company ad with a Goldilocks theme, Mr. Bauer added proudly, “he plays all three bears.”At the Sacramento news conference on Tuesday, the trainer cued Tag to nod as Mr. Cox spoke, and rewarded the bear with creme sandwich cookies and chicken from Walmart. An electrified cord — unplugged because Mr. Bauer said the bear had long since learned not to go near it — separated Tag from the press.Tag is part of a rebranding effort for Mr. Cox, a San Diego businessman who lost to Mr. Newsom in 2018.Renée C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated PressMr. Bauer, who has trained Tag since he was a cub, said the bear had the personality of a golden retriever.“We wrestle and I tickle the inside of his thigh, which for a bear that’s like tickling the bottom of your foot,” the trainer said.Still, he expected trouble. Once, an Instagram influencer in Los Angeles hired Tag to pose with a crowd of bikini-clad women in a mansion, and animal rights groups complained, charging that the bear was insufficiently separated from the women. Mr. Bauer and Mr. Martin, the owner of the animal business, said state fish and wildlife inspectors interviewed them for several hours after the complaint.Records shared by animal rights groups show a handful of citations involving issues with the company’s care and housing of animals over the last decade, but none involving Tag. This week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals immediately criticized the Cox campaign for hiring the bear, saying that the use was exploitative and that the handlers appeared to have violated the federal Animal Welfare Act by letting Mr. Cox stand too close to his mascot.California opinion writers charged that the use of the bear was ethically and politically tone-deaf.“Pro tip: Nobody cares what you say when there’s a half-ton omnivore lurking behind you,” the Sacramento Bee’s editorial page editor suggested.And at the Capitol, a Democratic state senator from San Diego, Ben Hueso, charged that Tag’s handlers had violated the spirit of a law California passed in 2019 to prevent animal cruelty in circuses.“An innocent wild animal shouldn’t have to suffer harassment, confinement and humiliation because Mr. Cox has a problem generating interest in his campaign,” Mr. Hueso said.“Humiliation?” countered Mr. Bauer. “That bear will walk away from you and fart in your face and it doesn’t mean a thing to him. He burps in my face all the time. Doesn’t mean a thing to him.”Meanwhile, on Twitter, it appeared that the bear’s message had been hijacked. “Why’s everybody gotta make a big deal about my weight?” tweeted a new account, @SadJohnCoxBear.Mr. Bauer said he had done little this week but defend himself to reporters. “They make it seem like I’m up here with a cattle prod and it’s not like that,” he said.In fact, during the shoot for that plumbing commercial, he said, he and Tag had played off camera with soap suds. It did not fit the beastly brand, but “he enjoyed the hell out of that.” More

Arizona Republicans are examining whether there is bamboo fiber in ballots that were used in the 2020 election, an activist assisting with the ongoing audit of the ballots told reporters this week. The latest claim underscores how rightwing conspiracy theories continue to fuel doubt about the results of the results.“There’s accusation that 40,000 ballots were flown in to Arizona and it was stuffed into the box and it came from the south-east part of the world, Asia, and what they’re doing is to find out whether there’s bamboo in the paper,” John Brakey, a longtime election audit advocate, told reporters.John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021
Brakey told reporters he didn’t personally believe auditors would find bamboo fibers.“I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said on Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?”The search for bamboo fibers illustrates how the latest GOP audit of all 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, home to a majority of Arizona voters, is elevating absurd claims about the 2020 election. After election day, rightwing activists falsely claimed that China had imported ballots to tip the election for Biden and that those ballots could be identified because there was bamboo in the paper. Earlier, workers were using UV lights to examine ballots; while the purpose of doing so was never clear, there was a conspiracy theory after the election that Trump had watermarked ballots (the UV examinations have stopped).There are about a dozen tables on the audit floor at Veterans Memorial Coliseum where auditors are taking pictures of ballots and then running them under microscopic cameras that are supposed to provide high-quality images of the ballots. Those images are supposed to help auditors verify the authenticity of the ballots by allowing them to examine fibers, as well as folds in the paper and ink marks on ballots.Experts have expressed concern about whether this method is a reliable way of identifying fraud.Ken Bennett, the liaison between the auditors and the Arizona senate, said in an interview he wasn’t sure if auditors were looking for bamboo fibers specifically.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletter“I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying ‘we’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic,’” he told the Guardian. “They’re looking for folds in the paper. They’re looking for where the ovals are marked, is there a little bit of an indentation or was the mark made by a Xerox machine? It’s just kind of a general expression for ‘we’re checking the paper and the folds and everything to make sure that these are authentic ballots.’”The comment came amid increasing scrutiny of the audit, which many experts say is not credible and will only further undermine confidence in the 2020 race. The justice department sent a letter to the Arizona senate president, Karen Fann, on Wednesday expressing concern that the audit may be running afoul of federal laws regarding ballot custody and voter intimidation (during a separate part of the audit, workers will reportedly knock on voters’ door to confirm their 2020 vote).Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s top election official, sent a letter to Bennett on Wednesday expressing concern over how the audit is being run. She claimed that auditors did not have a clear process for tallying ballots, left laptops unattended, and clear procedures were not in place to hire unbiased counters. “Either do it right, or don’t do it at all,” she wrote.One of the people who spread the lie about China dumping ballots, according to Slate, was Javon Pulitzer, a treasure hunter and inventor, who is reportedly assisting with the Maricopa county audit. Though it’s not clear in what capacity Pulitzer is assisting, Brakey told reporters on Tuesday that the machines capturing the microscopic images of the ballots were linked to Pulitzer. “This guy is nuts,” he said. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.” More

While Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, has lost crucial supporters in his drive to become mayor, other backers have stood by him.From a distance, Scott M. Stringer’s campaign for mayor doesn’t appear to have changed much since last week, when he was accused of sexually assaulting a campaign volunteer 20 years ago.On Monday, a union representing 24,000 school safety agents and public housing employees endorsed him. Later that night, he answered questions about hate crimes and police funding at a forum sponsored by interfaith youth. Since the allegations first surfaced, he’s been to at least four candidates’ forums, three churches, two news conferences, three subway stations and one editorial board interview.The message at each stop is a forceful denial of the allegations from Jean Kim, a lobbyist, that he sexually assaulted her 20 years ago when he was running for public advocate. Each time, Mr. Stringer, 61, makes a statement similar to the one he gave during a television interview Tuesday: “I’m going to be the next mayor and win the Democratic primary.”But up close, Mr. Stringer’s hopes for becoming mayor have suffered a devastating blow. Members of the progressive coalition that assembled behind him began rescinding their endorsements on Friday.And much of the uptick in attention from the news media, like a 15-minute interview on NY1 on Tuesday morning, has focused as much on Ms. Kim’s allegations as it has on Mr. Stringer’s plans if elected mayor.On Wednesday morning Mr. Stringer appeared on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC to discuss the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic.Mr. Lehrer said the show was “trying to focus our candidate interviews on policy,” but immediately added that “we can’t ignore the elephant in the room of the sexual abuse and harassment allegation and your significant loss of endorsements.”Mr. Stringer’s campaign points out that the increased media coverage gives him a chance to dispute the allegations and talk about his plans for the city.During the interview on WNYC, Mr. Stringer, who declined to be interviewed for this article, talked about how his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, is a survivor of sexual assault. He mentioned that his mother had died of Covid-19, one of the reasons he said he wants to become mayor and help the city recover. And he said he wanted his two sons to be able to look back on this moment and understand that he strongly denies the allegations against him.None of that has been enough to stanch the flow of progressive groups and leaders abandoning the candidate.Sochie Nnaemeka, head of the New York State Working Families Party, said her group’s decision to drop Mr. Stringer was based in part in concern about “toxic male leadership.” The ideas of the progressive movement are now permeating city and state politics, and progressive groups have to guard their “governing values,” she said.“It cannot be that the candidate is the sole vehicle and the only option to make people’s lives better and to make our city different,” said Ms. Nnaemeka, whose group is now endorsing both Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio.While Mr. Stringer’s progressive coalition has dissolved, members of his labor coalition, including the influential United Federation of Teachers and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have stood by him.Jean Kim, left, and her attorney, Patricia Pastor, right, have accused Mr. Stringer of sexual assault.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe U.F.T.’s most active political volunteers met on Sunday and decided to reaffirm their support for Mr. Stringer. Heading into the final weeks of the campaign, the union expects to unleash its full capabilities to help him, including phone banking, canvassing and door knocking.The U.F.T. is also considering a donation to an independent expenditure committee that would boost Mr. Stringer’s campaign with advertisements.“It’s a wide-open race at this point,” said Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president.Mr. Stringer, one of the best-funded candidates in the race, continues to attract money, and he expects to have raised at least $10 million before the campaign is over. A fund-raising email said he was just over $41,000 away from receiving the maximum amount of matching public funds.A fund-raiser on Zoom this week went on as planned. And the campaign continued to purchase ads, a long-planned, multimillion-dollar effort seen as part of a final push to fulfill Mr. Stringer’s longtime goal of becoming mayor.Some voters received surveys from a polling firm to examine how concerned they are about the sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Stringer’s campaign declined to comment..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I actually think Scott still has a path,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change, a progressive grass-roots organizing group that rescinded its endorsement of Mr. Stringer last week. “One of the main things I’ve heard from my membership is, ‘They did this to Joe Biden, they went after him and he still prevailed’” — a reference to allegations by Tara Reade in 2020 that Mr. Biden had sexually assaulted her.Gregory Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, which announced its support for Mr. Stringer after the allegations were unveiled, said many members of his 24,000-person union may even feel a personal connection with the candidate. Among them are 5,000 school safety agents who say they have been unfairly accused of abusing students.“They, more than anybody, understand what it is to be accused of something they didn’t do, so this resonates with them,” Mr. Floyd said.Mr. Mulgrew said his members were also concerned about due process.“The basic work of why unions form is about workplace rules, and allegations are a major piece of workplace rules,” he said. “Their thing when they see something like this is, what’s the due process?”Ms. Kim has called for Mr. Stringer to resign from his current job as city comptroller and to withdraw from the mayor’s race. On Tuesday, her attorney, Patricia Pastor, filed a complaint with the New York attorney general’s office.“Jean will participate fully” with any investigation, Ms. Pastor said in a statement. The attorney general’s office is reviewing the complaint.Mr. Stringer has also faced criticism for the way in which he has responded to Ms. Kim’s allegations, including his characterization of their relationship as consensual — a point he repeated during the interview Wednesday on WNYC, citing an article from The Intercept that quoted anonymous sources saying that he and Ms. Kim had had a “casual” relationship. He described their relationship as “a friendship with a little more.”Mr. Stringer said that they had remained on good terms and that she had donated to his campaign multiple times, but he said that things soured after Ms. Kim was not offered a job on his 2013 run for comptroller. The campaign accused her of working for the front-runner in the race for mayor, Andrew Yang, which Ms. Kim denies.Ms. Wiley said last week that Mr. Stringer was “running a smear campaign.” She has called on Mr. Stringer to drop out of the mayor’s race.Despite his significant remaining support, it’s still unclear if Mr. Stringer will be able to fully recover, said Bruce Gyory, a Democratic strategist.“A week ago people presumed that Stringer was finished,” Mr. Gyory said. “A week later he’s back on his feet.”New York City voters, he noted, “like someone who can take a punch and get up.” More