Elections

Mark Rutte’s party convincingly won the Dutch elections. But wins by liberal-democrats can force him to compromise on his critical European stances.LEIDEN, the Netherlands — Mark Rutte, one of Europe’s longest-serving leaders, saw his Party for Freedom and Democracy win big in Dutch elections on Wednesday, setting him up for a fourth term as prime minister of the Netherlands.“We have to bring this country back to where it should be, as one of the best performing countries in the world,” Mr. Rutte said in a televised victory speech. “I have enough energy for even 10 more years.”Mr. Rutte, who describes his party as “center-right,” must now form a coalition with other parties to obtain a majority in Parliament. D66, a liberal-democratic party led by the former United Nations diplomat Sigrid Kaag, came in second. Mr. Rutte and Ms. Kaag are set to lead talks over forming a new government.Mr. Rutte’s party gained three seats as compared with similar elections in 2017, according to exit polls published by the public broadcaster NOS on WednesdayMr. Rutte and his cabinet had resigned in January over a scandal involving the tax authorities’ targeting of people, mostly poor, who had made administrative mistakes in their requests for child benefits. Many were ruined financially after being forced to pay back benefits to which they had been entitled.The scandal did not play a significant role during the campaign, however, nor did Mr. Rutte’s wavering polices for dealing with the coronavirus. He and his cabinet stayed on in a caretaker role until the election in order to manage the pandemic response.“This has been a corona election, and most of those in power have been rewarded,” said Tom-Jan Meeus, a political columnist for NRC Handelsblad. He said the dispersed wins by several right-wing parties combined did not go beyond their usual threshold of about 18 percent.“These elections are a victory for parties in the political middle, no change for the radical right and a loss for the left,” he added.Mr. Meeus said that he did not expect big shifts in policy, “but there will be more pressure on Mark Rutte to have more pro-European policies, from the parties he has to govern with.”Ms. Kaag, a career diplomat who speaks multiple languages including Arabic, is a staunch supporter of the European Union, as is her party. She served in the outgoing cabinet as minister of international trade and development.Last May, Mr. Rutte led a group of nations that refused blank-check payments for southern European countries to support their economies during the pandemic. He will now be forced to compromise on such stances if he enters into a coalition with D66.Voters in the Netherlands had cast their ballots in one of the first major European elections to take place during the coronavirus pandemic that has swept across the continent in successive waves.Neighboring Germany is also entering a packed election season, with national and state votes coming in a year that will bring to an end the 16-year chancellorship of Angela Merkel.Geert Wilders, a populist who has opposed immigration from Muslim countries and called for a ban of the Quran, saw his Party for Freedom lose two seats, though it remained the third largest.Another right-wing party, the Forum voor Democratie, led by Thierry Baudet, at the height of its popularity appeared ready to win 26 seats, according to opinion polls taken in 2019, but public infighting led some prominent politicians to leave and start their own party. Mr. Baudet’s party won six new seats for a total of eight, according to exit polls late Wednesday.The elections are among of the first to take place in Europe since the coronavirus broke out last spring, sparking repeated lockdowns across the continent as the death toll grew. Portugal voted in presidential elections in January, re-electing the center-right Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa for a second term in office.The pandemic has changed the usual dynamic of organizing elections in the Netherlands, but did not seem to affect turnout on Wednesday. Long lines of socially distanced voters stood waiting in the early afternoon in the historical center of Leiden, a university town near The Hague. At many polling stations voters were allowed to take home the red pencils they used to cast their ballots, a measure to help prevent the virus from spreading.“There is no way anyone can get corona with all these measures,” said Niels Romijn, a civil servant, as he entered a public library to cast his ballot. “Everybody was super chill,” he said, happily showing off his free red pencil. “Civil duty,” he said with a laugh.Polling stations had been open nationwide since Monday to allow vulnerable voters to avoid crowds. Voters over 70 were encouraged to vote by mail. And campaigning mainly took place on television, making it hard for voters to spontaneously confront politicians as is typical practice in the Netherlands.A temporary polling station in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.Jeroen Jumelet/EPA, via ShutterstockCoronavirus cases are once again surging in the Netherlands, prompting the authorities to warn of a third wave. Last year, it took Mr. Rutte’s government until November to ramp up testing, and now, the vaccination process has been advancing slowly.However, local issues, not the government’s handling of the coronavirus, dominated the election campaign.Broader policies put forward by Mr. Rutte, who has been in power since 2010, were also a focus on the campaign trail, with opponents questioning his government’s repeated cutbacks in health care, policing and other essential services.Mr. Rutte has ruled out any form of cooperation with Mr. Wilders’ Freedom Party, meaning that he will likely have to engage with other parties. Wednesday’s vote brings a record of 17 parties to the 150-seat Dutch parliament. More

A newly declassified intelligence report made clear that government agencies long knew of Russia’s work to aid Donald Trump, but he and allies muddied the waters.WASHINGTON — Representative Jason Crow listened during a classified briefing last summer while a top intelligence official said that Russia was hurting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign to help President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Crow, Democrat of Colorado, held up an intelligence agency news release from days earlier and demanded to know why it said nothing about Russia’s plans.“‘When are you going to come out publicly and correct this record?’” Mr. Crow recalled asking the official, William R. Evanina. “‘Because there’s a massive disconnect between what is in your news releases and what you’re saying publicly — because of the pressure of the president.’”A report released Tuesday made clear that the intelligence community believed that Russia had long attacked Mr. Biden for the benefit of Mr. Trump. But throughout 2020, senior officials bowed to Mr. Trump’s hostility toward any public emphasis of the threat from Russia, and they offered Congress and the public incomplete or misleading portraits of the intelligence on foreign influence in the election.The picture is complicated. While Mr. Trump’s enmity toward the intelligence community loomed, and his political appointees emphasized the threat from China and Iran, not Russia, career officers did also get key findings about Russian intelligence declassified and disclosed last year.Soon after that briefing to Congress, Mr. Evanina released details about Kremlin-backed operatives denigrating Mr. Biden, fulfilling the demands of Mr. Crow and other lawmakers. In an interview, Mr. Evanina credited Congress for pushing for more information, but said it took time and effort to get other intelligence officials to declassify the information.Once made public, the information broke new ground in describing Russian activity, but it also angered the White House.“We were out there on our island,” Mr. Evanina said. “The White House was unhappy with us, and so were the Democrats.” After Mr. Evanina’s disclosure, Mr. Trump and senior administration officials worked to play down the intelligence about Russian interference or to redirect focus to China’s work.Their efforts allowed Americans to dismiss a widely accepted intelligence assessment as politics, deepening distrust and division among the electorate, current and former officials said, adding that a divided country was vulnerable to foreign interference.“We’re so polarized,” Mr. Evanina said, “we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward.”Former Trump administration officials defended their public assessments of the intelligence. Some administration officials saw intelligence analysts, particularly the C.I.A.’s Russia experts, as presenting an overly dramatic analysis of the Kremlin’s intentions.The newly released report, former Trump administration officials argued, blurs the definitions of influence and interference. Russia’s effort was always more about spreading misinformation and propaganda, the former officials said, and there was no evidence that the Kremlin changed votes, the report’s definition of interference.“There is zero evidence,” said Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence. “Key judgment No. 1 is that no one interfered. This is influence vs. interference.”Throughout 2020, current and former intelligence officials privately expressed concern about how the White House characterized intelligence. Inside the intelligence agencies, officers continued to develop classified information on Russian interference and worked to present it honestly. For example, the designated election security czar, Shelby Pierson, was consistent in how she portrayed Russian actions in briefings to Congress, according to people familiar with her testimony.“We’re so polarized, we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward,” said William R. Evanina, a former top intelligence official.Joshua Roberts/ReutersBut one of her briefings, in which Ms. Pierson told lawmakers Russia favored Mr. Trump and was working for his re-election, prompted outrage among Republicans and contributed to the ousting of Joseph R. Maguire as the acting director of national intelligence. Mr. Evanina was then put in charge of briefing Congress, a role he was abruptly thrust into with little preparation, officials said.For Mr. Evanina’s first meeting with lawmakers on election security last March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, then run by Mr. Grenell, prepared a document that tried to temper Ms. Pierson’s February warning by cautioning that officials had not concluded that Russia was backing Mr. Trump.“The I.C. has not concluded that the Kremlin is directly aiding any candidate’s re-election or any other candidates’ election,” an unclassified summary given to lawmakers said, using shorthand for the intelligence community. “Nor have we concluded that the Russians will definitely choose to try to do so in 2020.”Mr. Grenell privately pushed intelligence officials to provide evidence to back up their conclusion that Russian disinformation activity was about influencing the elections, rather than simply an effort to stoke divisive debates in the United States. He has in the past defended the March briefing as an accurate summary of the intelligence.But the intelligence community ombudsman said in January that there were substantive differences between talking points for briefing Congress and what the intelligence community really thought.The newly declassified report showed that the March briefing was at best misleading to Congress and backed Ms. Pierson’s February testimony.The report laid out how the Russian strategy of attacking Mr. Biden goes back to 2014, before Mr. Trump was a serious candidate for office. While some senior intelligence officials have suggested that intelligence on Russia was in flux at various points in 2020, the new report made clear that the intelligence community’s view on President Vladimir V. Putin’s support for Mr. Trump was little changed from 2016 to 2020.Senior Trump administration officials’ comments about China were also at odds with the report.John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s final director of national intelligence, said publicly before and after the election that China was the greatest national security threat. In a letter to Congress, he said the intelligence community was not applying the same definition to Chinese influence operations as it was to Russia’s.Some intelligence officials defended Mr. Ratcliffe’s comments on China, noting that Beijing was the most serious long-term threat to the United States and that it clearly tried to influence how it was viewed in America and elsewhere. The January ombudsman report did find merit in Mr. Ratcliffe’s critique of how intelligence on Chinese influence operations was handled.Mr. Grenell said his successor was right to focus on China, and that it was wrong to dismiss his critique of the intelligence agencies because analysts used different standards when looking at China’s influence operations compared with Russia’s. “China is a crisis,” Mr. Grenell said. “Russia is a problem.”Still, in appearances on Fox News, Mr. Ratcliffe’s relentless focus on China, rather than Russia, had the effect of leaving the impression, particularly with the president’s most enthusiastic supporters, that China was the most urgent threat to the 2020 election.The new report rejected that assertion.“Trying to equate, or at times suggest that, China was actually more actively interfering than Russia, it just wasn’t true,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I certainly tried to call them out on it at the time but wasn’t able to hold up the classified intelligence document to show how misleading they had been. But I think this report makes it very clear.”Even if China is a long-term national security threat, Russia will continue to be the larger threat in the next few elections, Mr. Evanina said.“There’s some political speak about China being a bigger, more existential threat,” Mr. Evanina said. “Sure they are, but not when it comes to elections.” More

A new survey by one of the country’s top pollsters hinted at discomfort among voters in the state about new balloting restrictions.Republican state lawmakers across the country have responded to President Biden’s victory in November by proposing a raft of new restrictions on voting, aiming to tamp down early voting and absentee balloting in moves that would make it harder to participate on Election Day.But in Iowa — a state that’s been trending red for years, and where Donald Trump won by over eight percentage points in November — a new survey by one of the country’s top pollsters suggests that voters are irked by the latest push to curtail voting access.Last week, the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a bill passed by the G.O.P.-led state legislature that includes a number of restrictions on voting, including shortening the early-voting period by nine days and closing the polls an hour earlier on Election Day.The new poll, conducted by Selzer & Co. for The Des Moines Register and released today, found that 52 percent of Iowans were opposed to condensing the early-voting period, and 42 percent were in favor.There was a deep partisan divide, with 71 percent of Republicans favoring the move and 81 percent of Democrats opposed. Among independents, 51 percent were against the change, while 43 percent were in favor.The poll found that Iowans were evenly split on Reynolds’s job performance, with 46 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving. But 52 percent said they hoped she wouldn’t run for re-election next year, and just 41 percent said they wanted her to.Asked about Biden’s work so far as president, 47 percent gave him positive marks and 44 percent gave him a thumbs-down.The voting bill Reynolds just signed is one of hundreds that have been making their way through Republican-led state legislatures across the country. Proponents of these bills often cite the risk of voter fraud as a motivating factor, even though in reality fraud is vanishingly rare — and restrictions on access to the ballot tend to do more to disenfranchise legitimate voters than to cut down on illegitimate voting.The rash of state-level restrictions has drawn fire from advocates of voting rights, and Democratic lawmakers in Washington have recommitted themselves to passing two major voting-rights bills that would invalidate many of the state laws.But on a national level, it’s not yet clear that Democrats have won the battle over messaging. A poll published this month by CNN found that 53 percent of Americans said they were more worried that voting rules might not be “strict enough to prevent illegal votes from being cast,” while just 39 percent were more concerned that voting laws might “make it too difficult for eligible citizens” to cast a ballot.Fears of anti-Asian violence rise after a deadly rampage in Georgia.The killings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, during a shooting spree in the Atlanta area yesterday have prompted a national outcry, and at a news conference today Biden noted a “very, very troubling” pattern of violence against Asian-Americans in recent months.“Whatever the motivation here,” Biden said, “I know Asian-Americans are very concerned.” But the president stopped short of saying that the killings had been racially motivated, citing an ongoing investigation.Investigators said they had not ruled out bias as a motivating factor in the shootings, which were carried out at three massage parlors, although the suspect denied racial animus once in custody.The suspect in the killings was charged today with murder. He told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and the first Asian-American person to hold the office, expressed condolences for the families of the victims today.“I do want to say to our Asian-American community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people,” she said.Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were targeted in nearly 3,800 hate incidents reported over the past year, according to Stop AAPI Hate. The incidents compiled by the group included mostly verbal harassment and name-calling, which accounted for about 68 percent of those reported. Shunning, or the deliberate avoidance of Asian-Americans, composed about 20 percent. About 11 percent of the reports involved physical assault, the report said.Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said of the shootings, “Whatever the motivation was for this guy, we know that the majority of the victims were Asian.”She added: “We also know that this is an issue that is happening across the country. It is unacceptable, it is hateful and it has to stop.”— More

Super PACs for two candidates raised millions of dollars to help their chances in the New York City mayor’s race. One, for Shaun Donovan, was bankrolled by his father.With New York City’s mayoral primary a little more than three months away and a deadline to qualify for the city’s generous matching-funds program having just passed, pleas for donations have been in overdrive in recent days.But in the background, another spigot of money has quietly opened for two Democratic mayoral candidates who are trailing in early polls: Raymond J. McGuire and Shaun Donovan.An independent expenditure committee for Mr. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, has garnered more than $3 million since Feb. 1, with more than 70 donations from business magnates, including Kenneth Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot; the art world philanthropist Agnes Gund; and the real estate developer Aby J. Rosen.A new super PAC for Mr. Donovan, a former cabinet member in the Obama administration, in contrast, has drawn $1.02 million from just two donors — the primary benefactor being his father, Michael Donovan, an executive in the ad tech industry who donated $1 million.In an interview, Mr. Donovan, the candidate’s father, said he was trying to “level the playing field,” particularly since some candidates began raising money before they even declared they were running for mayor.“I can’t give very much to Shaun directly, and seeing the amount of money McGuire had raised and all these other people, I felt he needed enough to go out and compete and get the message across,” Mr. Donovan said.The two super PACs are among several seeking to influence the race for mayor, the most important election in recent city history.Business-friendly organizations, motivated by the leftward tilt of some candidates in the Democratic field, have already raised millions of dollars. The billionaire developer Stephen M. Ross is rallying fellow business leaders to commit tens of millions of dollars in an effort to push moderate Democrats to vote in the June 22 mayoral primary and “change the future course of the city.”Progressive groups are also involved, creating their own super PACs to supplement their on-the-ground efforts and social media campaigns.The super PACs supporting Mr. McGuire and Mr. Donovan hauled in more than their respective campaigns raised during the most recent city filing period, which began in January. Mr. Donovan, who ran Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s housing agency before joining President Barack Obama’s cabinet as budget director and housing secretary, is participating in the city’s public funding program. Mr. McGuire, a former vice chairman at Citi and one of the highest-ranking African-Americans on Wall Street, is not.The super PAC supporting Mr. McGuire, New York for Ray, plans to spend its bounty on advertising — television, digital and print — “in an effort to cut through the clutter and introduce a larger number of voters to Ray McGuire, his story and inclusive plans to revitalize and rebuild New York City,’’ said Quentin Fulks, the group’s executive director.Kenneth I. Chenault, the former chairman and C.E.O. of American Express, who, with his wife, Kathryn, donated $250,000 to the super PAC for Mr. McGuire, said he had known Mr. McGuire since they attended Harvard University together and that he wanted to help him get his name out.“We’re convinced that he can be a strong leader,” Mr. Chenault said, adding that it was “important for people to understand Ray’s story and to hear Ray’s story. We think it’s compelling and that’s why we’re doing it.”Brittany Wise, the treasurer for the super PAC supporting Mr. Donovan, New Start N.Y.C., did not specify how the funds would be spent, saying only that the group would promote Mr. Donovan as having “the experience to tackle Covid, racial equity, and affordable housing and move New York City forward.”Perhaps inevitably in the small world of political professionals, both super PACs are staffed and funded by people whose circles overlap with the campaigns.Ms. Wise worked on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2013 campaign with Bill Hyers, who served as Mr. de Blasio’s campaign manager and is now advising Mr. Donovan’s campaign.Kimberly Peeler-Allen, who is helping to run Mr. McGuire’s super PAC, co-founded Higher Heights for America, an organization that aims to elevate Black women in politics. L. Joy Williams, who is working on Mr. McGuire’s campaign, is the chairwoman of Higher Heights’s PAC.Campaigns are not allowed to coordinate with super PACs, or independent expenditure committees, as they are known in New York State.But Seth Agata, a former counsel in the governor’s office who helped write New York’s independent expenditure regulations, said there was often a “wink and a nod” that characterized interactions between campaigns and super PACs.“You know what’s going to help the candidate,” Mr. Agata said. “You’re out there because you know what the candidate needs and you say the right things.”Both campaigns said they had not coordinated with their respective super PACs.“I know nothing about it,” said Lupe Todd-Medina, a spokeswoman for Mr. McGuire’s campaign, referring to New York for Ray.Yuridia Peña, a spokeswoman for Mr. Donovan’s campaign, said that Mr. Donovan had likewise not coordinated with his father on his super PAC.“We take the prohibition of coordination with any outside entities as a hard line, and any efforts to support Shaun are completely independent of our campaign,” Ms. Peña said.New York City’s strict donor limits make it difficult for big spenders to make their presence felt through direct contributions to candidates. But the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, paved the way for barely regulated money to pour into super PACs, giving donors another way of exerting influence.“The Supreme Court that decided Citizens United and related cases got it wrong,” said Chisun Lee, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Election Reform Program. “Any reasonable voter knows that huge donors with unlimited influence have a detrimental effect on representative democracy.” More

Israelis will vote again on Tuesday, seeking to end a political deadlock that has gripped the country for two years. This is what you need to know.JERUSALEM — Israelis head to the polls on Tuesday for the fourth time in two years, hoping to break a seemingly endless cycle of elections and a political deadlock that has left the country without a national budget during a pandemic.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes Israel’s world-leading vaccination program, which has helped the country emerge in recent days into something approaching normality, will give him and his right-wing allies an edge and the stable majority that proved elusive in three earlier rounds of elections.But Mr. Netanyahu, prime minister since 2009, is running for re-election while standing trial on corruption charges — a dynamic that opposition parties hope will prompt voters to finally push him out of office.In reality, though, polls show that neither bloc has a clear route to a majority, leaving many Israelis bracing for another inconclusive result, and a possible fifth election later in the year.Here’s what else you need to know.Why is Israel holding so many elections?The simplest explanation is that since 2019, neither Mr. Netanyahu nor his opponents have been able to win enough seats in Parliament to form a coalition government with a stable majority. That has left Mr. Netanyahu in office, either as a caretaker prime minister or at the helm of a fragile coalition with some of his fiercest rivals, though not wholly in power. And that has forced the country to vote again and again in an attempt to break the deadlock.Underlying this drama, analysts say, is one of Mr. Netanyahu’s motivations for seeking re-election — his hunch that he can best fight his prosecution from the prime minister’s office. They say he is ready to take the country to election after election — until he wins a stronger parliamentary majority that could grant him immunity from prosecution.“I don’t know any serious thinker who says Israel is going to another round of elections for reasons other than Netanyahu’s personal interests,” said Gayil Talshir, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Supporters of Mr. Netanyahu, however, reject the notion that his personal interests have pushed Israel from election to election. They contend that his critics simply resent that Mr. Netanyahu is a fierce and savvy competitor, and they blame Mr. Gantz for making the coalition untenable..Mr. Netanyahu leaving the Israeli Parliament in December.Pool photo by Alex KolomoiskyWhat prompted this fourth election?A series of disagreements between Mr. Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, his rival and centrist coalition partner, culminated in December in their failure to agree on a state budget. That led the Parliament to dissolve, forcing a new election, though for now the government remains in place.The rivals joined forces last April, after the third election, saying that it was to ensure Israel had a government to lead the country through the pandemic. Under their power-sharing agreement, Mr. Gantz would take over as prime minister in November of this year. But the coalition partners never got along, and each side accuses the other of failing to cooperate in good faith.Mr. Netanyahu’s critics contend that he acted out of personal interest when he fought Mr. Gantz over the budget, favoring a one-year plan, rather than the two years called for by the coalition agreement. The budget deadlock, by forcing a new election, gave Mr. Netanyahu another shot at forming a government, rather than staying in the current coalition and ceding power to Mr. Gantz later this year.But Mr. Netanyahu blamed Mr. Gantz for the break, saying that Mr. Gantz had refused to compromise with Mr. Netanyahu on several state appointments.How has the political gridlock affected Israelis?The gridlock has forced Israel to go without a state budget during one of the most profound health and economic crises in its history, undermining long-term economic planning, including the development of major infrastructure projects.The stasis has delayed the appointment of key state officials, including the state attorney and senior executive officers at the Justice and Finance ministries. And members of the coalition, including Mr. Netanyahu, have been accused of politicizing government decision-making even more than usual, seeking any possible edge in the electoral advantage.The continual turmoil, abetted by Mr. Netanyahu’s long-running legal troubles, has reshaped Israeli politics. Voters are now divided less by ideology than by whether they are for or against Mr. Netanyahu.And with the race so tight, Jewish politicians are now increasingly looking to members of Israel’s Arab minority to help break the deadlock. Arab citizens of Israel form about 20 percent of the population. Once marginalized, they have become a key constituency in this election campaign.Gideon Saar, a former interior minister for Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, is one of his primary challengers.Amir Cohen/ReutersWho are Mr. Netanyahu’s main rivals this time?In a sign of how the political map has changed, two of Mr. Netanyahu’s principal challengers in this election cycle are also right-wingers. Gideon Saar is a former interior minister for Mr. Netanyahu’s party and Naftali Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff. The third leading challenger is Yair Lapid, a centrist former broadcast journalist whose party is mounting the strongest challenge to Mr. Netanyahu.Mr. Gantz is no longer considered a viable threat to the prime minister. Polls suggest his party may even fail to win a seat, largely because of anger among his former supporters over his decision to form a unity government with Mr. Netanyahu in the first place, an arrangement he had promised not to join.How do Israeli elections work?The Parliament, known in Hebrew as the Knesset, has 120 seats that are allocated on a proportional basis to parties that win more than 3.25 percent of the vote.The system almost guarantees that no single party will win an outright majority, often giving tiny parties big influence in the deal-making that forms coalitions. The system allows for a broad range of voices in Parliament but forming stable coalitions under it is difficult.It could take weeks or possibly months for a new government to be formed — if one can be formed — and at any point in the process, a majority of the Knesset could vote to dissolve again, forcing yet another election.In the days after the election, Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s president, will give one lawmaker four weeks to try to form a coalition. He usually gives that mandate to the leader of the party that won the highest number of seats, which is likely to be Mr. Netanyahu. But he could grant it to another lawmaker, like Mr. Lapid, who he believes has a better chance at pulling together a viable coalition.If that lawmaker’s efforts break down, the president can give a second candidate another four weeks to form a government. If that process also stutters, Parliament itself can nominate a third candidate to give it a go. And if he or she fails, Parliament dissolves and another election is called.In the meantime, Mr. Netanyahu will remain caretaker prime minister. If somehow the deadlock continues until November, Mr. Gantz might still succeed him. The power-sharing deal the pair agreed to last April was enshrined into Israeli law, and stipulated that Mr. Gantz would become prime minister in November 2021.How has the coronavirus affected the election?In recent weeks, Israel has sent children back to school, reopened restaurants for in-house dining and allowed vaccinated people to attend concerts and theater performances.Mr. Netanyahu hopes the success of Israel’s vaccine rollout, which has given a majority of Israelis at least one dose, will help propel him to victory.But his pandemic record may also cost him. Some voters believe he politicized certain key decisions — for instance, capping some fines for flouting antivirus regulations at levels much lower than public health experts recommended.Critics perceived this as a sop to ultra-Orthodox Israelis, some of whom flouted coronavirus restrictions on mass gatherings. Mr. Netanyahu will need the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties to remain in office after the election.Voting by mail is not available in Israel. To prevent the spread of the virus, special polling stations are being set up for quarantined people and for Covid-19 patients.Could there be a fifth election later in the year?No one is ruling it out. Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, is predicted to emerge as the largest party, with around 30 seats. But his allies may not win enough seats to give him a majority of 61.And though current polling suggests the opposition parties will collectively win more than 61 seats, it’s unclear whether their profound ideological differences will allow them to come together.The key player could be Mr. Bennett. Though he wants to replace Mr. Netanyahu, he has also not ruled out joining his government.Patrick Kingsley and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting. More

But that may not be a good sign after all.On March 23, Israel will go to the polls for its fourth national election in two years. The worst part is that this depressing Election Day may just be a prelude to yet another: Opinion polling suggests that Israel’s political blocs will struggle to elect and form a stable parliamentary majority. Our politics, it seems, are stuck on a repetitive doom loop.At least one thing is different: This time, the American president is a nonentity.Consider two election cycles of the last decade. In 2015, just days before Israelis voted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington and spoke before Congress about the threat of Iran. Mr. Netanyahu made his fierce opposition to President Barack Obama and his Iran deal central to his campaign. Four years later, when Israel entered its current long cycle of repeated elections, Mr. Netanyahu posted his image alongside that of President Donald Trump on a high-rise overlooking Tel Aviv’s main highway. This time his goal was making America a central feature of his campaign, by highlighting his closeness to the president. In both cases, the political messaging was spot-on.Mr. Netanyahu was hardly the first Israeli politician to make America’s president an electoral issue. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was helped by President George W. Bush. Prime Minister Ehud Barak was elected with the backing of President Bill Clinton’s administration.Why are American presidents so central to elections in a country so far away from Washington? First, because Israelis see the United States as a cornerstone of their country’s security. And while Israelis’ confidence in the alliance has somewhat eroded in recent years, the ability of their leaders to understand, debate and confront the leaders in Washington is still important. Second, what happens in Israel also matters to America; Israeli politics are also part of Washington’s strategy for the Middle East.But in the lead-up to this month’s election, there has been neither an embrace of President Biden nor a repudiation of him. And that’s not for a lack of opportunity. Nearly four weeks passed between Mr. Biden’s inauguration and his first call to Israel’s prime minister. That was viewed by many as a snub. But when Mr. Netanyahu was asked this month why Mr. Biden was so late to call him, the prime minister didn’t try to convince the voters that in fact, Mr. Biden was his best friend; nor did he try to claim that Mr. Biden was a great foe who threatened Israel’s security. He dismissed the question with a few generalities and moved on.Mr. Netanyahu’s main rivals, Yair Lapid, Naftali Bannett and Gideon Saar, have also been hesitant to seize on the issue, or on early signs of disagreement between Washington and Israel over Iran as proof that the prime minister is not fit to keep Israel secure.There’s a simple explanation, and a more complicated one, for this unusual absence. First, the simple: Israelis do not yet know whether Mr. Biden will prove to be a friend, like his predecessor, or a thorn in their side, like the president he previously served under. Mr. Netanyahu cannot yet oppose him because so far he has done nothing objectionable, and alienating the White House for no good reason is beyond the pale even for a cynic like Mr. Netanyahu. The opposite is also true: Mr. Biden has not yet proved himself to be Israel’s friend as president, and so the prime minister’s rivals must be careful not to portray themselves as his admirers.The more complicated explanation concerns America’s interest in the Middle East and the country’s relative irrelevance to much that is happening in the region. The United States was unsuccessful in its halfhearted quest to contain Iranian expansion; it was missing in action in the Syrian civil war; it bet on wrong horses during the so-called Arab Spring; it has alienated the Saudis, let Russia take over Libya and did nothing of value to resolve the Palestinian issue. The list goes on.In fact, the only true achievement of the United States in the region in recent years is the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreement between Israel and the Gulf Arab countries, which was orchestrated by the Trump administration. But this significant move was achieved not as a triumph of the traditional American policy but because American diplomacy was on leave — temporarily occupied by the revolutionary troops of the Trump administration.If America’s leaders are just tired of being involved in Israel’s never-ending political process, I can’t fully blame them. We Israelis are all tired of it, too. We would all wish for a little break. And yet, an Israeli election with no America as a background noise is disturbingly strange. Is this another proof that America is less interested in the country that much depends on its support? Are we being demoted?In more than one way, the policy of the Biden administration seems to be moving along a trajectory that assumes a less central role for Middle East affairs in America’s foreign policy. So it’s quite possible that Israel’s needs are becoming less urgent and that who leads Israel matters less in the eyes of the United States. In such case, the proper election question for Israelis is no longer “Which leader could better deal with America?” but “Which leader can better manage without America?”Shmuel Rosner (@rosnersdomain) is the editor of the Israeli data-journalism site TheMadad.com, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The assessment was the intelligence community’s most comprehensive look at foreign efforts to interfere in the election.WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.The report also found that neither Russia nor other countries tried to change ballots themselves. Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.Foreign efforts to influence United States elections are likely to continue in coming years, American officials said. The public has become more aware of disinformation efforts, and social media companies act faster to take down fake accounts that spread falsehoods. But a large number of Americans remain open to conspiracy theories pushed by Russia and other adversaries, a circumstance that they will exploit, officials warned.“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency’s assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”Some of the report’s details were released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to disclose more information about foreign operations during the campaign after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.During the 2020 campaign, intelligence officials outlined how Russia was spreading damaging information about Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in an attempt to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances. It also outlined efforts by Iran in the final days before the election to aid Mr. Biden by spreading letters falsely purporting to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group.Accusations of election interference have been some of the most politically divisive in recent years. The intelligence report is akin to a declassified assessment in early 2017 that laid out the conclusions about Russia’s efforts in Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, further entrenched the partisan debate over his relationship with Moscow and cemented his enmity toward intelligence and law enforcement officials.With Mr. Trump out of office and the new report’s conclusions largely made public in releases during the campaign, the findings were not expected to prompt as much partisan fury. But elements of the report are likely to be the subject of political fights.Its assessment that China sat on the sidelines is at odds with what some Republican officials have said. In private briefings on Capitol Hill, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s last director of national intelligence, said Chinese interference was a greater threat in 2020 than Russian operations.The declassified documents released on Tuesday included a dissenting minority view from the national intelligence officer for cyber that suggested that the consensus of the intelligence community was underplaying the threat from China.In a letter in January, Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in support of that minority view and said that the report’s main conclusions about China “fell well short of the mark.” He said the minority conclusion was more than one analyst’s view and argued that some intelligence officials were hesitant to label Chinese actions as influence or interference. Privately, some officials defended the consensus view, saying their reading of the intelligence supported the conclusions that China sought some level of influence but avoided any direct efforts to interfere in the vote.The most detailed material in the assessment was about Russia, which sought to influence how the American public saw the two major candidates “as well as advance Moscow’s longstanding goals of undermining confidence in U.S. election processes.”Moscow used Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s Parliament, to undermine Mr. Biden, the report confirmed. Mr. Derkach released leaked phone calls four times to undermine Mr. Biden and link him to Ukrainian corruption. The report said Mr. Putin “had purview” over the actions of Mr. Derkach, who had ties to Russian intelligence.Citing in one instance a meeting between Mr. Derkach and Mr. Giuliani, intelligence officials warned Mr. Trump in 2019 that Russian intelligence officers were using his personal lawyer as a conduit for misinformation.Mr. Giuliani also provided materials from Ukraine to American investigators to push for federal inquiries into Mr. Biden’s family, a type of operation that the report mentioned as an example of Russia’s covert efforts without providing names or other identifying details.The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.Collecting intelligence to feed to Mr. Trump’s allies and use against Mr. Biden was a priority for Russian intelligence. Moscow’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., conducted a hacking campaign against a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, in what was most likely an attempt to gather information about Mr. Biden’s family and their work for the company, the report confirmed.In the closing weeks of the campaign, intelligence officials also said that Russian hackers had broken into state and local computer networks. But the new report said those efforts were not aimed at changing votes.Unmentioned in this report was the wide-ranging hacking of federal computer systems using a vulnerability in software made by SolarWinds. The absence of a concerted effort by Russia to change votes suggests that Moscow had refocused its intelligence service on a broader effort to attack the U.S. government.Earlier in 2020, American officials thought Iran was likely to stay on the sidelines of the presidential contest. But Iranian hackers did try a last-minute effort to change the vote in Florida and other states. Iranian hackers sent “threatening, spoofed emails” to Democratic voters that purported to be from the Proud Boys, the report said. The group demanded that the recipients change their party affiliation and vote for Mr. Trump. They also pushed a video that supposedly demonstrated voter fraud.The Iranian effort essentially employed reverse psychology. Officials said Iranian operatives hoped the emails would have the opposite effect of the message’s warning, rallying people to vote for Mr. Biden by thinking Mr. Trump’s supporters were playing dirty campaign tricks. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, authorized the campaign, the report said. More

A student and her mother were arrested after the authorities found more than 100 votes suspiciously cast from a single school login.MIAMI — The report about vote tampering reached the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in early November: Someone had gained access to electronic accounts without authorization. At least 117 votes had been suspiciously cast — in J.M. Tate High School’s election for homecoming court.It was a case reminiscent of the 1999 dark comedy film “Election.”Department agents arrested Laura Carroll, 50, and her daughter, Emily Grover, 17, on Monday and charged them with conspiracy to use Ms. Carroll’s school district login to help Ms. Grover get elected homecoming queen.Laura Rose Carroll was arrested on Monday in Escambia County, Fla.The Escambia County Department of CorrectionsA five-month investigation found that the login for Ms. Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School near Pensacola, was used to gain access to the internal accounts of 372 Tate High students since August. The accounts include personal information such as students’ grades, medical history and disciplinary records.Students use the same accounts with an application to cast votes for homecoming.Ms. Grover often spoke about obtaining students’ information using her mother’s login, eight students and one teacher said in witness statements.“She looks up all of our group of friends’ grades and makes comments about how she can find our test scores all of the time,” one of the witnesses said, according to the arrest affidavits.Escambia County School District employees are supposed to change their password to log in to the internal system every 45 days.One witness told the agents that Ms. Grover had said she knew using her mother’s login would result in a “ping” that showed that Ms. Carroll had logged on at Tate High. Agents interviewed Ms. Carroll in November and knocked on her door last month to talk further, but she referred them to her lawyer, according to her arrest affidavit.Ms. Grover was expelled, according to police records, a decision that the family contested, but the expulsion was upheld. Ms. Carroll was suspended from her job, Tim Smith, the superintendent of the Escambia public schools, said in an email. He declined to comment further.Ms. Carroll was taken into custody on Monday and released on $8,500 bail. Ms. Grover was sent to juvenile detention for an evaluation, according to the Department of Law Enforcement.Through her lawyer, Ms. Carroll declined to comment. “She’d love to give out her side of the story, but it would probably be after we resolve the case,” the lawyer, Randall J. Etheridge, said.The school district’s elections contractor contacted school administrators in October after flagging more than 100 votes that were cast in a short period of time, all from the same unique IP address. The student council coordinator also heard reports that Ms. Grover had boasted about using her mother’s login to get into students’ accounts during the election, according to witness statements.Investigators later determined through IP addresses that 124 votes had been cast from Ms. Carroll’s phone, and 122 from Ms. Carroll’s and Ms. Grover’s residence.On Oct. 30, Ms. Grover was elected homecoming queen.Jack Begg contributed research. More