Elections

It’s time to take them down from their pedestals.On Sunday, voters elected Guillermo Lasso, a former banker and a supporter of free-market policies, as president of Ecuador over Andrés Arauz, a left-wing populist. Some analysts are decrying the end of progressivism, but what we are really seeing is a welcome setback for a strange form of strongman politics: the phenomenon of former presidents seeking to extend their control and influence by choosing and backing their protégés in national elections.Mr. Arauz was handpicked by former President Rafael Correa, a semiauthoritarian economist who governed Ecuador from 2007 to 2017. The election was a referendum not just on the role of the state in the economy but also more fundamentally on the question, “What, if any, role should former presidents play in politics?”In Latin America, it has become normal for former presidents to promote surrogate candidates. This is a bizarre form of caudillismo, or strongman politics, combined with continuismo, or lineage continuity, intended to keep rivals at bay.Today, former presidents are the new caudillos, and they are hoping to extend their rule through their chosen heirs — in what is called delfinismo, from “dauphin,” the title given to the heir apparent to the French throne in the 14th through 19th centuries.In the last decade, at least seven democratically elected presidents in Latin America were handpicked by a predecessor. The most recent, Luis Arce, came to power in Bolivia in 2020, sponsored by former strongman Evo Morales. These surrogate candidates owe much of their victory to their patron’s blessing, which comes with a price. The new presidents are expected to stay loyal to their patron’s wishes.The practice binds those newly elected in golden handcuffs, undermining democracy in the process. More than passing the torch, former presidents issue a sort of noncompete contract. In Argentina, a former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, ran as vice president with her chosen candidate, Alberto Fernández.After serving as Argentina’s first lady and then president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, right, became vice president under her chosen candidate, Alberto Fernández, left.Pool photo by Natacha PisarenkoThis current style of strongman politics is an update of an update. In the classic version of the strongman politics, which dominated Latin American politics after the wars of independence during the 19th century until the 1970s, many caudillos sought to stay in office by banning or rigging elections, a tactic famously utilized by the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, or by staging coups if they couldn’t win office, a tradition employed by the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1952.This classic model of continuismo was intensely traumatic. In Mexico and Cuba, the model incited nothing less than two world-historic revolutions.Latin America updated this model of caudillismo. Coups and election bans became unfashionable by the 1980s, and so rather than abolish democracy, it became more common for leaders to rewrite constitutions and manipulate institutions to permit re-election. A re-election boom followed. From Joaquín Balaguer in the Dominican Republic in 1986 to Sebastián Piñera in Chile in 2017, Latin America saw 15 former presidents return to the presidency.But lately, the model of continuismo through re-election has run into trouble after a number of former presidents found themselves entangled in legal troubles.In Central America alone, 21 of 42 former presidents have had brushes with the law. In Peru, six ex-presidents from the past 30 years have faced corruption charges. In Ecuador, Mr. Correa was convicted of trading campaign finance contributions for state contracts. He claimed he was a victim of political persecution. His response was to use Mr. Arauz’s campaign as the ticket back to influence. At some point during the campaign, the candidate even promoted the idea that a vote for him was a vote for Mr. Correa.During Ecuador’s presidential campaign, the candidate Andrés Arauz promoted the idea that a vote for him was a vote for former President Rafael Correa.Dolores Ochoa/Associated PressThese legal complications encourage former presidents to promote surrogates who might, at the very least, pardon them if elected.Former presidents seem to think that this latest update of caudillismo liberates the country from trauma. President Alberto Fernández claimed that when her sponsor, former president Fernández de Kirchner, chose him as her candidate, she justified her decision by arguing that the country didn’t need someone like her, “who divides,” but someone like him, who can “draw people together.” Ms. Fernández de Kirchner was herself chosen as an heir by her late husband, former president Néstor Kirchner.But this political surrogacy hardly solves the trauma associated with its inherent continuismo. In fact, that makes it more toxic. Except for the former president’s followers, the country sees the gimmick for what it is: an obvious effort at restoration.The problems with delfinismo go beyond intensified polarization by exacerbating political fanaticism and can lead to even greater problems. In Mexico until the 1990s, where presidents essentially handpicked their successors, former presidents typically observed the norm of retiring from politics, granting the successor sufficient autonomy.But in the most recent version of delfinismo, successors are not that lucky. The sponsoring former presidents keep meddling. This interference produces governance travails. The sitting presidents either become premature lame ducks, with all eyes turned to the former presidents’ views, or eventually seek a break from their patrons. Splits can unleash nasty civil wars.Such breaks are often inevitable. Elected delfines face new realities that sponsors never confronted. Frequently they have to clean up messes their sponsors left behind.Lenín Moreno, the current president of Ecuador, who was selected by Mr. Correa, broke with him on a number of leftist-authoritarian policies, prompted by revelations of corruption. The result was a power struggle that splintered the ruling coalition and hindered the government’s ability to cope with the economic crisis and then the Covid-19 pandemic.A similar battle occurred in Colombia when President Juan Manuel Santos, chosen by the then president Álvaro Uribe, decided to make peace with guerrillas, defying Mr. Uribe’s preference. The result was a near civil war between those men that rivaled in intensity the war against guerrillas that the government was trying to settle.There is no easy solution to this type of continuismo. Parties need to stop placing their former presidents on a pedestal. They need to reform primaries to ensure leaders other than former presidents have the means to compete internally. Latin American countries have done a lot to ensure strong competition among parties, but less so within parties.Nothing screams oligarchy and corruption like a former president trying to stay alive through surrogate candidates. And Ecuador has demonstrated that this political maneuver may end up also empowering rather than weakening the very same political ideologies the former presidents were trying to contain.Javier Corrales is a professor and the chair of the political science department at Amherst College.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Despite being tipped that “Congress itself is the target” on Jan. 6, Capitol Police were ordered not to use their most powerful crowd-control weapons, according to a scathing new watchdog report.WASHINGTON — The Capitol Police had clearer advance warnings about the Jan. 6 attack than were previously known, including the potential for violence in which “Congress itself is the target.” But officers were instructed by their leaders not to use their most aggressive tactics to hold off the mob, according to a scathing new report by the agency’s internal investigator.In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence on Jan. 6. The report was reviewed by The New York Times and will be the subject of a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday.Mr. Bolton found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare despite explicit warnings that pro-Trump extremists posed a threat to law enforcement and civilians and that the police used defective protective equipment. He also found that the leaders ordered their Civil Disturbance Unit to refrain from using its most powerful crowd-control tools — like stun grenades — to put down the onslaught.The report offers the most devastating account to date of the lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries.Three days before the siege, a Capitol Police intelligence assessment warned of violence from supporters of President Donald J. Trump who believed his false claims that the election had been stolen. Some had even posted a map of the Capitol complex’s tunnel system on pro-Trump message boards.“Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th,” the threat assessment said, according to the inspector general’s report. “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.”How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol RampageWe analyzed the alternating perspectives of President Trump at the podium, the lawmakers inside the Capitol and a growing mob’s destruction and violence.But on Jan. 5, the agency wrote in a plan for the protest that there were “no specific known threats related to the joint session of Congress.” And the former chief of the Capitol Police has testified that the force had determined that the likelihood of violence was “improbable.”Mr. Bolton concluded such intelligence breakdowns stemmed from dysfunction within the agency and called for “guidance that clearly documents channels for efficiently and effectively disseminating intelligence information to all of its personnel.”That failure conspired with other lapses inside the Capitol Police force to create a dangerous situation on Jan. 6, according to his account. The agency’s Civil Disturbance Unit, which specializes in handling large groups of protesters, was not allowed to use some of its most powerful tools and techniques against the crowd, on the orders of supervisors.“Heavier, less-lethal weapons,” including stun grenades, “were not used that day because of orders from leadership,” Mr. Bolton wrote. Officials on duty on Jan. 6 told him that such equipment could have helped the police to “push back the rioters.”Mr. Bolton’s findings are scheduled to be discussed on Thursday afternoon, when he is set to testify before the House Administration Committee. He has issued two investigative reports — both classified as “law enforcement sensitive” and not publicly released — about the agency’s shortcomings on Jan. 6. He is also planning a third report.CNN first reported on a summary of the latest findings.The report — titled, “Review of the Events Surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Takeover of the U.S. Capitol” — reserves some of its harshest criticism for the management of the agency’s Civil Disturbance Unit, which exists to prevent tragedies like Jan. 6. Instead, nearly 140 officers were injured, and one, Officer Brian D. Sicknick, later collapsed and died after being assaulted by rioters.The Civil Disturbance Unit, Mr. Bolton wrote, was “operating at a decreased level of readiness as a result of a lack of standards for equipment.” In particular, Mr. Bolton focused in on an embarrassing lack of functional shields for Capitol Police officers during the riot.Some of the shields that officers were equipped with during the riot “shattered upon impact” because they had been improperly stored in a trailer that was not climate-controlled, Mr. Bolton found. Others could not be used by officers in desperate need of protection because the shields were locked on a bus.“When the crowd became unruly, the C.D.U. platoon attempted to access the bus to distribute the shields but were unable because the door was locked,” the report said, using an abbreviation for the Civil Disturbance Unit. The platoon “was consequently required to respond to the crowd without the protection of their riot shields.”Mr. Bolton also said that the agency had an out-of-date roster and staffing issues.“It is my hope that the recommendations will result in more effective, efficient, and/or economical operations,” he wrote.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, called the inspector general’s findings “disturbing” but said he had provided Congress with “important recommendations” for an overhaul.Since the Jan. 6 attack, Congress has undertaken a series of security reviews about what went wrong. The three top security officials in charge that day resigned in disgrace, and they have since deflected responsibility for the intelligence failures, blaming other agencies, each other and at one point even a subordinate for the breakdowns that allowed hundreds of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.“None of the intelligence we received predicted what actually occurred,” the former Capitol Police chief, Steven A. Sund, testified in February before the Senate. “These criminals came prepared for war.”But the inspector general report makes clear that the agency had received some warnings about how Mr. Trump’s extremist supporters were growing increasingly desperate as he promoted lies about election theft.“Supporters of the current president see Jan. 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election,” said the assessment three days before the riot. “This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.”The Department of Homeland Security warned the Capitol Police on Dec. 21 of comments on a pro-Trump website promoting attacks on members of Congress with a map of the tunnel system, according to the inspector general’s findings.“Several comments promote confronting members of Congress and carrying firearms during the protest,” a Capitol Police analyst wrote.Among the comments reported to the Capitol Police: “Bring guns. It’s now or never,” and, “We can’t give them a choice. Overwhelming armed numbers is our only chance.”On Jan. 5, the F.B.I.’s Norfolk field office, in Virginia, relayed another threat from an anonymous social media thread that warned of a looming war at the Capitol.“Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled,” the message read. “Get violent … stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”Last month, Mr. Sund testified that the F.B.I. report reached the Capitol Police the day before the attack, but not him directly. He said that an officer assigned to a law enforcement joint terrorism task force received the document and sent it to an unnamed intelligence division official on the force.Nevertheless, Mr. Bolton said, Capitol Police fell short in several other ways in preventing a mob attack.The agency did not train its recent recruits with the required 40 hours of civil disturbance training, citing concerns about the coronavirus, and failed to ensure its officers completed their 16 to 24 hours of annual training over “the past few years.”Munitions stocked in the police armory were beyond their expiration date, and the agency repeatedly failed to adequately complete required quarterly audits of the unit, the inspector general said.Moreover, within the agency, the Civil Disturbance Unit “has a reputation as an undesired assignment” and that fostered a “culture” that decreased “operational readiness,” the inspector general found.Nicholas Fandos More

The actions were driven by anger over the governor’s refusal to overturn the state’s 2020 primary results in favor of Trump.Republican Party officials in two deeply conservative counties voted to censure Gov. Brian Kemp and two other top party leaders in recent days, a sign that the Georgia governor continues to face grass-roots opposition from loyalists to former President Donald J. Trump, and the possibility of a primary challenge next year.In Whitfield county, in the northwest corner of the state, Republican officials unanimously voted to condemn Mr. Kemp, saying he “did nothing” to help Mr. Trump after the November election.“Because of Kemp’s betrayal of President Trump and his high unpopularity with the Trump GOP base, Kemp could end up costing the GOP the governor’s mansion because many Trump supporters have pledged not to vote for Kemp under any circumstances,” reads the resolution, which was adopted by acclimation.A similar resolution was adopted in Murray County, also in northern Georgia, by a nearly unanimous vote. It was opposed by only three of the dozens of members in attendance. Both counties also voted to censure Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.The resolutions hold no binding power over elected officials. Rather, party officials say their resolutions were intended to send a message to Mr. Kemp and other Republican lawmakers that their jobs may be in jeopardy.“I’d vote for Mickey Mouse before I would Kemp,” said Tony Abernathy, chairman of the Murray County Republican Party. “I know what I’ve got with Mickey Mouse. A RINO is useless.” RINO is the dismissive acronym for Republican in Name Only.After infuriating Mr. Trump by resisting his demands to overturn the state’s election results, Mr. Kemp has faced months of attacks, protests and opposition from his party’s base. Mr. Trump encouraged Republicans to retaliate by sending a hard-right loyalist to oppose Mr. Kemp in the primary next year.Mr. Kemp and his aides saw a path to redemption within the party in the controversial election bill that the legislature passed last month, which the governor has forcefully defended in dozens of public appearances even as the new law adds new limits to the right to vote in Georgia.Other resolutions adopted by the counties supported a bill passed in the Republican-controlled Statehouse stripping Delta of a $35 million jet fuel tax break and urged Georgians to boycott Major League Baseball and “woke companies” that criticized the election law.“The Republican grassroots are angry,” said Debbie Dooley, a conservative activist, who helped distribute drafts of the resolutions and encouraged Trump supporters to attend the local meetings. “These resolutions will let Gov. Kemp, Lt. Gov. Duncan and Secretary of State Raffensperger know we’re going to work against them in the Republican primary next year.” More

Five competing Democratic polling firms put their heads (and their data) together about 2020.Everybody agrees the polls missed the mark in 2020, as they had four years earlier. But nobody’s certain why.In search of answers, five competing Democratic polling firms have decided to put their heads (and their data) together, forming a group that will undertake a major effort to figure out what went wrong in 2020 — and how the polling industry can adjust.The team released a memo today announcing the project and offering some preliminary findings that seek to address why polls again underestimated support for Donald Trump. But over all, the message was one of openness and uncertainty. The big takeaway: Things need to change, including the very nature of how polls are conducted.Innovation aheadThe authors wrote that their analysis thus far had pushed them toward thinking that pollsters must take a boldly innovative approach when mapping out the road ahead.“We know we have to explore all possibilities,” Fred Yang of Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, one of the five firms involved in the study, said in an interview today.That will probably mean embracing some tools that had been considered too untested for mainstream public polling: Officially, the survey-research community still considers live-interview phone calls to be the gold standard, but there is growing evidence that innovative methods, like sending respondents text messages that prompt them to respond to a survey online, could become essential.And it could also mean going back to some methods that have become less common in recent decades, including conducting polls via door-to-door interviews, or paying respondents to participate.“We are going to put every solution, no matter how difficult, on the table,” the memo read.The consortium of Democratic firms plans to release a fuller report this year; so will a number of traditional survey-research institutions. The American Association for Public Opinion Research, which undertook a widely discussed post-mortem analysis in 2016, is already at work on another. AAPOR is a bastion of polling traditionalism, but if the Democratic groups’ preliminary report is any indication, even the association’s coming analysis might acknowledge that the industry should embrace more experimental approaches to data collection.In a separate analysis released late last month, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight found that traditional, live-interview phone polls weren’t meaningfully more accurate than others. In fact, out of dozens of polling firms analyzed, none of those with the lowest average error had exclusively used live-interview phone calls (and some hadn’t used them at all). Two of the three most accurate firms were Republican-aligned companies that are held in suspicion by most leaders in the social-science world, partly because they use methods that have long been considered suspect — including robo-calling, as well as newer techniques like contacting respondents via text message.What drove polling errorThe Democratic firms’ memo said polls had slightly missed the mark when determining the makeup of the electorate last year. This means they misunderstood, to some degree, who was likely to vote and who wasn’t: a crucial “X” factor in pre-election polling.Among so-called low-propensity voters — that is, the ones pollsters consider the least likely to turn out — Republicans proved four times as likely as Democrats to actually end up casting a ballot in November. This can be taken as another indication of how effective Donald Trump was at expanding the Republican electorate, and pollsters’ difficulties accounting for that, particularly among white voters without college degrees and those in rural areas.Tellingly, the researchers found that voters who considered Trump “presidential” were underrepresented in polls.But a greater source of concern was so-called measurement error. That’s a fancy way of saying polls have had trouble figuring out what percentage of people in certain demographic groups plan to vote for one candidate over the other.The report proposed some explanations for why there was significant measurement error in 2020 pre-election polling, and it landed on two big potential culprits. One was the higher prevalence of anti-institutional views (sometimes referred to as “social distrust”) among Trump supporters, meaning those voters would be less willing to respond to official surveys. The second explanation was the lower incidence of pandemic-related fears among Trump voters, meaning they were more likely than Biden voters to be willing to turn out to vote.“What we have settled on is the idea there is something systematically different about the people we reached, and the people we did not,” the report’s authors wrote. “This problem appears to have been amplified when Trump was on the ballot, and it is these particular voters who Trump activated that did not participate in polls.”New York Times PodcastsThe Improvement Association: A true story about election fraudWhy do election fraud allegations live on, even after they’ve been debunked? In our new audio series with Serial Productions, we went to one rural county to try to find out. Listen to the first episode now.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

State Republicans are pushing a voting law that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said she will veto. But a rarely used option for a voter-driven petition could allow the G.O.P. to circumvent her veto.At first glance, the partisan battle over voting rights in Michigan appears similar to that of many other states: The Republican-led Legislature, spurred by former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about election fraud, has introduced a rash of proposals to restrict voting access, angering Democrats, who are fighting back.But plenty of twists and turns are looming as Michigan’s State Senate prepares to hold hearings on a package of voting bills beginning Wednesday. Unlike Georgia, Florida and Texas, which have also moved to limit voting access, Michigan has a Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who said last month she would veto any bill imposing new restrictions. But unlike in other states with divided governments, Michigan’s Constitution offers Republicans a rarely used option for circumventing Ms. Whitmer’s veto.Last month, the state’s Republican chairman told activists that he aimed to do just that — usher new voting restrictions into law using a voter-driven petition process that would bypass the governor’s veto pen.In response, Michigan Democrats and voting rights activists are contemplating a competing petition drive, while also scrambling to round up corporate opposition to the bills; they are hoping to avoid a replay of what happened in Georgia, where the state’s leading businesses didn’t weigh in against new voting rules until after they were signed into law.The maneuvering by both parties has turned Michigan into a test case of how states with divided government will deal with voting laws, and how Republicans in state legislatures are willing to use any administrative tool at their disposal to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud and pursue measures that could disenfranchise many voters. The proposal puts new restrictions on how election officials can distribute absentee ballots and how voters can cast them, limiting the use of drop boxes, for example. “These bills contain some of the most outlandish voter suppression ideas that Michigan has ever seen,” said State Senator Paul Wojno, the lone Democrat on the Michigan Senate’s elections committee. “We’ll find out if what was adopted in Georgia may have backfired, causing legislation like this to be put under a bigger microscope.”Michigan’s two largest companies, the iconic automakers Ford and General Motors, have not weighed in on the proposals specific to the state. But both have indicated they opposed changes to Michigan’s election laws that would make voting harder — an apparent effort to get ahead of the issue, rather that come under pressure after laws are passed, as happened to two big Georgia-based companies, Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines.On Tuesday, GM posted a statement calling on the state legislature to ensure that any new voting law protect “the right for all eligible voters to have their voices included in a fair, free and equitable manner.’’“Anything less falls short of our inclusion and social justice goals,’’ it added, an apparent shot across the bow of G.O.P. lawmakers.The Republican push to tighten Michigan’s election laws comes as the state faces a major spike in coronavirus cases, with the number nearing the peak in late December. Ms. Whitmer, who declined to be interviewed, on Friday called for a two-week pause in youth sports, in-person school and indoor dining and asked President Biden for more vaccine. Republican opposition to Ms. Whitmer in Michigan has intensified during the pandemic.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said last month she would veto any bill imposing new restrictions on voting.Matthew Hatcher/Getty ImagesMichigan is one of just nine states that allow voters to petition lawmakers to take up a piece of legislation; if passed, the law is not subject to a governor’s veto. If the Legislature does not pass the bill within 40 days of receiving it, the measure goes before voters on the next statewide ballot. It is a rarely used procedure: Lawmakers have passed only nine voter-initiated bills since 1963, according to the state Bureau of Elections.But last month, Ron Weiser, the state’s Republican Party chairman, told supporters in a video reported on by The Detroit News that the state party planned to subsidize a petition drive to cut Ms. Whitmer out of the lawmaking process.To do so would require 340,047 voter signatures, or 10 percent of the vote in the last governor’s election. Mr. Weiser said that the signatures would be gathered through county committees with party funding. So far, the signature gathering has not begun, nor has the secretary of state’s office received a proposed bill needed to start a petition drive, as required by law.A spokesman for the state G.O.P., Ted Goodman, said the party could easily gather the needed signatures for the initiative if Ms. Whitmer vetoes a bill that emerges from the Legislature. “We’re confident we can ensure election integrity reforms ahead of the 2022 elections,’’ Mr. Goodman said.A preview of what might be in a voter-initiated bill was suggested by a package of 39 bills to change the state’s voting laws that Republicans in the State Senate introduced on March 24. Democrats denounced most of the proposals.The package would prohibit the secretary of state from mailing unsolicited applications for absentee ballots to voters, require voters to mail in a photocopied or scanned ID to receive an absentee ballot, and restrict the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, among other rule changes. These measures would roll back some of the expanded access to absentee ballots that Michigan voters approved, by a two-to-one margin, in a 2018 vote to amend the Constitution.The bills also include some provisions to make voting easier, such as adding an extra day of early voting on a Saturday and allowing 16-year-olds to preregister to vote.But the bulk of proposed changes would impose new hurdles to absentee voting, after Mr. Trump and Michigan Republicans last year spread misinformation about wide fraud and “irregularities” in the use of mail ballots. They particularly targeted Detroit, the state’s largest city, which has a majority-Black population.Ron Weiser, left, Michigan’s Republican Party chairman, with Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman. Mr. Weiser said the state party planned to subsidize a petition drive to collect the signatures necessary to circumvent a veto by the governor.David Guralnick/Detroit News, via Associated PressIn November’s election, 3.3 million absentee ballots were cast in the midst of a pandemic, out of 5.5 million total votes. Citing scores of audits, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, called the election one of the most secure in Michigan history. Ms. Benson said only 15,300 absentee ballots were rejected, less than 0.5 percent, for reasons such as arriving too late. Mr. Biden carried Michigan by 154,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points.Ms. Benson refused to appear last week before a legislative hearing on the 2020 election, saying it could “further the lies” that undermine faith in voting. The secretary of state has proposed her own election changes, including making Election Day a holiday and allowing clerks two weeks before that date to open absentee ballots and begin processing them; the goal is to shorten the wait for results — one factor that fed misinformation about the 2020 outcome.Despite the courts’ near-universal rejection of claims of fraud, including the Michigan Supreme Court, Ruth Johnson, a Republican state senator and former secretary of state, said there was a “lot of gaming of the system.”“There was more cheating last year in an election than I’ve ever seen in Michigan,” said Ms. Johnson, who is chairwoman of the State Senate’s elections committee.Ms. Johnson, who represents a district in the Detroit suburb of Oakland County, said the suite of Republican voting bills would receive a fair hearing before her committee and said there was “no predetermined outcome” about which ones would be advanced to the full Senate.Michigan Democrats are working under the presumption that they will have to fight off both the legislative proposals and a major petition drive.Lavora Barnes, the party chairwoman, said she was weighing plans that include a competing petition drive and tailing Republican signature gatherers to speak directly to voters and counter G.O.P. claims. She said Democrats might also argue in court that the new voting legislation violates the state Constitution.“We will have our grass-roots folks on the ground making sure folks are educated about what they are signing,” Ms. Barnes said. “I’m imagining a world where they are standing out in front of folks’ grocery stories and we are actively communicating on the ground during that entire process.”Republicans’ proposed measures would roll back some of the expanded access to absentee ballots that Michigan voters approved by a two-to-one margin in 2018.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York TimesNancy Wang, the executive director of a group called Voters Not Politicians, which drove support for the 2018 constitutional amendment, said she was preparing a campaign to pressure Michigan corporations to oppose any new restrictions on voting before a law is passed.“We’re making it known what is happening and what the impact would be if these bills were to pass,” Ms. Wang said. “We’re trying to get the same result they had in Georgia, but earlier.”Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, said last Friday that the company supports “initiatives that promote equitable access and do not disproportionately affect any segment of the population.’’ Michigan Democrats said the prospect of a citizen initiative to bypass the normal lawmaking process would serve to allow a fraction of the state’s white population to disenfranchise Black voters.“It feels almost criminal to me,’’ said Sarah Anthony, a state representative from Lansing. “As an African-American woman who has worked for years now to expand the right to vote, to mobilize and educate people about why it’s so important to vote, and to lower barriers to people, and now be in the Legislature and see these crafty ways that folks are trying to strip us of the right to vote, words can’t describe it.’’ More

The proposal, initiated by the Chinese central government, is intended to make it difficult for democracy advocates to hold office and would criminalize organized protest votes.HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government on Tuesday introduced the final details of a push to drastically overhaul the city’s election system, including a proposal that would make it illegal to encourage voters to cast blank ballots or boycott elections.The electoral changes are the latest effort by the central Chinese government to stamp out political opposition in Hong Kong, after months of fierce antigovernment demonstrations in 2019. Last month, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, an arm of China’s Communist Party-run legislature, unanimously approved a plan that would give national security bodies the authority to select candidates for political office.That proposal, which followed the enactment last year of a harsh national security law, dictated that less than a quarter of Hong Kong’s legislature would be directly elected, compared to half before. It also created a candidate vetting committee with the power to unilaterally bar anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to the government. And it reshuffled the membership of another election committee that selects Hong Kong’s top leader, stacking it with more Beijing loyalists.But some details of the new system, including exactly who would sit on the reconstituted election committee, remained unclear until Tuesday, when the Hong Kong government published a bill of more than 500 pages. The bill made clear that the election committee — already tilted in favor of the central government — would be filled with even more pro-establishment business and interest group leaders, as well as members of pro-Beijing political bodies.Also included was a proposal that would criminalize encouraging voters to cast blank or modified ballots, or to forgo voting altogether. Boycotting elections is an idea that has been discussed among some in the pro-democracy camp.The bill is expected to be passed easily by the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s local lawmaking body which is composed entirely of pro-establishment figures after the mass resignation of the opposition last year.“We all want elections to be very fair, so any manipulation to jeopardize or sabotage an election should not be permitted,” Carrie Lam, the city’s chief executive, said at a news conference.The bill also laid out dates for upcoming electoral contests. The 1,500 members of the election committee are scheduled to be elected on Sept. 19.Legislative elections are set for Dec. 19. They had originally been slated for last September, but the government postponed the vote, citing coronavirus concerns, though opposition figures accused it of trying to forestall an election defeat.A demonstration in September protesting the government’s decision to postpone legislative council elections.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesThe chief executive election is scheduled to be held in March.While the majority of the proposal focused on the composition of the election committee — which in addition to choosing the chief executive will also be empowered to fill 40 legislative seats — it also included several changes to the few remaining directly elected seats. Some geographic districts for those seats will be redrawn, combining areas that had leaned pro-democracy with those more staunchly pro-establishment.Still, some experts said that the changes were unlikely to have much effect on the already-battered political opposition. After all, the changes to the directly elected seats could disadvantage pro-democracy candidates only if any stood for office in the first place — a scenario that seemed increasingly unlikely given the new vetting procedures, said Ma Ngok, an associate professor of government at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.“The key issue is who in the pro-democracy camp will still run and who will be allowed to run,” Professor Ma said. “If you have already built in a very stringent screening system, then I don’t think it is actually necessary for the government to change” the system.In the weeks since Beijing approved the electoral plans, the authorities have repeatedly said that Hong Kong’s residents had broadly embraced the changes.But in moving to criminalize protest voting, Professor Ma said, the government seemed to be acknowledging that the changes were in fact unpopular, at least among some segment of the population.“It seems that the government thinks that actually a lot of people will try to boycott or cast a protest vote,” he said. More

Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher From the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.A few years ago, Bladen County was at the center of a major news story — the only time in recent history a congressional election was thrown out for fraud. In a hearing that followed, a Black political advocacy group was mentioned and dragged into the scandal. The group was the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, and after the hearing, Horace Munn, one of the group’s leaders, reached out to Zoe with an invitation to come to the county.In chapter one, Zoe goes to North Carolina to hear what’s behind all these cheating allegations.A tree in the water at Jones Lake State Park in Bladen County, N.C.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More

Tali Farhadian Weinstein built up a $2.2 million war chest with help from hedge fund managers, far more than her rivals in the Manhattan district attorney race. Even had she not raised more money than her rivals, Tali Farhadian Weinstein would be a formidable candidate in the nine-way race to become the Manhattan district attorney, perhaps the most high-profile local prosecutor’s office in the country.She was a Rhodes scholar, has an elite legal résumé and is the only candidate who has worked for both the Justice Department and a city prosecutor’s office. And while most of the candidates are campaigning as reformers intent on reducing incarceration, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, 45, has staked out a slightly more conservative position, expressing concerns about guns and gangs.But what most sets Ms. Farhadian Weinstein apart from the field is her fund-raising. As of January, she had raised $2.2 million, far more than her competitors, hundreds of thousands of it from Wall Street, where her husband is a major hedge fund manager.Her opponents, legal ethicists and good government advocates have raised questions about that support, pointing out that the Manhattan district attorney, by virtue of geography, has jurisdiction over a large number of financial crimes.“It’s very difficult to see how a Manhattan D.A. candidate can accept really large and numerous donations from people who are involved in industries who could easily be the subject of that office’s attention,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who is married to the wealthy hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, says the donations will not influence her judgment on prosecuting cases. She notes she has not received large sums from criminal defense attorneys.“Judge me on my record,” she said. “I’ve gotten every job I’ve ever had on my own and I’ve never done a favor for anyone.”Much of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s campaign war chest came from a small group of donors in the hedge fund industry. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, William A. Ackman, and his wife have contributed $70,000 to her. Kenneth Griffin, who founded Citadel, gave Ms. Farhadian Weinstein $10,000, and his colleague Pablo Salame, the head of global credit at Citadel, donated $35,000.She also received $70,800 from the founder of PointState Capital, Zach Schreiber, and his wife, as well as $55,000 from Michael Novogratz, formerly of the Fortress Investment Group, and his wife.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, left, speaking to voters Friday on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Opponents and good government advocates have raised questions about her donors.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe flood of money from financiers into Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s coffers has been reported by other news outlets, most recently Gothamist. It gives her a significant advantage in the race, which is likely to be decided by a narrow margin during the Democratic primary in June.She has plastered Upper Manhattan with expensive mailers and has hosted high-profile guests on a podcast to promote her candidacy, including the author Malcolm Gladwell and two U.S. senators — Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.The heavy support from New York’s ultrawealthy in finance has surprised longtime campaign consultants watching the race, including some working on behalf of her opponents.George Arzt, a onetime adviser and campaign spokesman for Robert M. Morgenthau, who was Manhattan district attorney for decades, said he had “never seen such eye-popping numbers for individual donations in a D.A.’s race.” Mr. Arzt is currently working with another candidate, Liz Crotty. “Whatever happened to the sheriff of Wall Street?” he added.‘She was not a shrinking violet’Ms. Farhadian Weinstein came to the United States in 1979 as a 4-year-old, the daughter of Jewish parents from Iran who fled the revolution and applied for asylum.The uncertainty she felt as a young person, knowing the government could change her life at any moment, affected her career path, she said. “I think now there was always an impulse to be on the other side and to be a decision maker,” she said.After graduating from Yale Law, she was offered clerkships with Merrick B. Garland, who was then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. At the U.S. Department of Justice, she worked as a counsel under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who remembers her as a fierce debater.“She had really good judgment and the guts to challenge people at the Justice Department,” said Mr. Holder, who has endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein. “She was not a shrinking violet.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s courage was tested when, as a federal prosecutor pregnant with her third child, a defendant charged with murder threatened to hire someone to kidnap her and cause her to lose the pregnancy.For weeks, federal marshals had to escort her. She was told she could come off the case, if it would make her more comfortable, but she stayed on until the baby was born.Later, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein served for several years as the general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, one of the most progressive local prosecutors in the country.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein with the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, in 2019. She is the only candidate who has worked for both the Justice Department and a city prosecutor’s office.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesStill, she has tacked to the right of her competitors in the race for Manhattan district attorney. She has been less prone than several of her rivals, for instance, to pledge that she would not prosecute certain categories of low-level crime.“It’s very easy and simplistic to insist on bright-line rules,” she said. “The hard work of prosecutorial discretion is having policies but also allowing for discretion to do justice in individual cases.”The possibility of conflictsThe Manhattan district attorney’s office has long overseen many investigations into wrongdoing in the worlds of finance, real estate and other lucrative industries based in the borough. Mr. Morgenthau, the predecessor of the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was known for taking a particularly tough line against white-collar crime.Under Mr. Vance, the office’s reputation for taking on the powerful lessened, in part because of criticism he drew over donations from lawyers for Harvey Weinstein and former President Donald J. Trump, who were under investigation. Mr. Vance eventually decided to stop accepting donations from lawyers with pending cases.For her part, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has declined to accept donations of more than $1 from defense lawyers, firms with a defense law practice or lawyers who work at firms with a defense law practice, saying that donations from lawyers who appeared before the district attorney’s office created the most potential for conflicts of interest. She brushed off the suggestion the donations from people in finance might create such conflicts if she were to win.“Anybody is a would-be witness or target or a subject of an investigation,” she said. “That’s diffuse.”Some of her opponents disagree. “By running a campaign that’s so tied to Wall Street, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has put herself at a real political and frankly ethical disadvantage,” said Jamarah Hayner, the campaign manager for Tahanie Aboushi, who is running on a platform to shrink the size and power of the district attorney’s office.Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an expert in legal ethics, said in an interview that while Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had violated no ethics rule, she should not have accepted the donations.“The fact that this is the Manhattan D.A. and Manhattan is the financial capital of the country if not the world says to me that this candidate should not be raising large sums from hedge fund interests,” he said.All told, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has received at least 21 donations of $30,000 or more. (The maximum allowable is about $38,000.) Her opponent Alvin Bragg, who was the runner-up in the money race in January, when candidates last filed disclosures, had received only two donations of that size. Ms. Aboushi had received only one similarly hefty donation, from the professional basketball player Kyrie Irving.Leaders at her husband’s fund, Saba Capital, have collectively given Ms. Farhadian Weinstein more than $105,000.In 2020, Mr. Weinstein gave the maximum allowable donations to Ritchie Torres and Adriano Espaillat, two congressmen who have endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has also donated thousands of dollars in past years to Senators Booker and Gillibrand, who appeared on Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s podcast, “Hearing.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein bristles at questions about her husband’s influence on her, calling them “deeply disappointing and sexist.” To answer critics, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein asked Judge Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge of New York State, to advise her on what conflicts might arise because of her husband’s business. (Broadly speaking, Mr. Weinstein trades highly complex financial instruments.)Judge Lippman said in an interview he did not anticipate Mr. Weinstein’s business would create conflicts of interest, but he laid out steps she could take to ensure any potential investigation would remain independent. He did not look closely at Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s fund-raising, but said he did not find it unusual or concerning. “It goes with the terrain of running for public office,” he said.Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer and former candidate for governor who has worked extensively on public corruption matters, said the Wall Street money Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had amassed “raises all kinds of red flags.”“It’s really problematic and distorting to have so much Wall Street cash in this race because the D.A. is responsible for enforcing white-collar criminal law in Manhattan,” she said. “We are talking about an enormous amount of money that common sense tells you has the power to shape judgment.” More