Elections

Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: The moves have come from trusted insiders.American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.It’s less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic voters’ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicans’ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters — and especially Black Democratic voters — from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Biden’s margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans — who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud — will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats — seeing what Republicans are doing — will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasn’t a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well known Republicans support him.Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but they’re unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) is a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Bruce Schneier (@schneierblog) is a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society.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 work of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers is not glamorous and rarely draws much attention. Its members handle matters like reviewing petition signatures and helping local clerks find voting machines.But on Monday, the national spotlight will fall on one of the board’s normally mundane tasks: reviewing results from the presidential election that have been certified by Michigan’s 83 counties and giving a stamp of approval.The winner is clear. Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat President Trump in the state by over 150,000 votes, according to the Michigan Bureau of Elections. But Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are trying to upend that reality by urging the board to refuse to certify the election results. They have made baseless claims about discrepancies in the vote tallies, especially in Wayne County, which includes Detroit and is predominantly Black, and have argued that an investigation should be carried out before the state’s 16 electoral votes are awarded to Mr. Biden.Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said on Sunday that state law dictated that no audit or investigation could be done until the election was certified, because state elections officials cannot legally gain access to poll books or ballot boxes before then.The Board of State Canvassers, which will meet at 1 p.m. Eastern on Monday, includes two Republicans and two Democrats. While election law experts say the certification vote is a strictly ministerial duty that the board members are obligated to fulfill, political operatives in Michigan are preparing for a chain of events in which the two Republicans on the board follow the Trump campaign’s wishes.A 2-to-2 deadlock, which would prolong Republicans’ unprecedented attempts to overturn this year’s presidential race, would most likely prompt Democrats to ask the state Court of Appeals to order the board to do its constitutional duty and certify the election results.So who are the members of the canvassing board? Three of them have served on the panel for several election cycles; the fourth was appointed in 2018 by former Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican.The DemocratsJeannette Bradshaw, 44, the chairwoman of the board, is from Ortonville, about 40 miles north of downtown Detroit. She is an electrician by trade, but serves as the recording secretary and registrar for her International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local in Detroit.Appointed to the board in 2013, Ms. Bradshaw said she was hoping for a smooth and efficient meeting on Monday despite the possibility that it could turn into the same type of live-streamed virtual brawl that occurred last week in Wayne County. There, two Republicans on Wayne’s canvassing board initially refused to certify the county’s results before backtracking after several hours of outraged comments from voters who said they were being disenfranchised.“I’m trying to block out all the noise and focus on my job,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “That’s where I’m at.”She said she would look at the report on the results by the state Bureau of Elections and make a decision based on its recommendation.That report found that out of more than 250,000 votes cast in Detroit, there were problems with about 350 ballots. Mr. Biden won the city over Mr. Trump by 94 percent to 5 percent, and he carried Wayne County by 68 percent to 30 percent. The number of discrepancies, 72 percent of which could be easily explained, according to the state Bureau of Elections, was significantly lower than during the 2016 presidential election.“I’m getting lots of emails, asking me to certify, not to certify,” Ms. Bradshaw said. “We get the report, and that’s what we go off of. I appreciate that people are participating.”In the meantime, she added, “I’m going to turn off my phone and go outside and rake some leaves.”Julie Matuzak, 66, of Clinton Township in Detroit’s northern suburbs, said she expected the board to certify the election results.“I have confidence that we will do what we’re supposed to do,” said Ms. Matuzak, a retired political director for the American Federation of Teachers in Michigan who was appointed to the board in 2010. “We are the third step in a process that checks and crosschecks and balances the results. It’s all done in public. The statute says the board shall certify the election. If you follow the rules, you certify the election.”Ms. Matuzak views her job as safeguarding elections. She recalled, with a touch of irony, how Mr. Trump sued in 2016 to stop a recount in Michigan requested by Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate.“I would have loved to finish that recount because what it showed before it was stopped was there were very few problems,” Ms. Matuzak said. “My biggest fear now is that no matter what we do, there are going to be people out there who are never going to believe that it was a fair election.”The RepublicansNorm Shinkle, 70, of Williamston, near Lansing, is an open supporter of Mr. Trump’s, volunteering for the campaign and even singing the national anthem at a rally for the president in Michigan last month.A longtime politician in Michigan, he has served as a poll challenger in the past. His wife, Mary Shinkle, was a poll challenger this year at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee ballots were counted, and she filed an affidavit complaining about the tense environment there.Mr. Shinkle, who was appointed to the board in 2008, said that he had some concerns about the vote tally in Wayne County, especially in Detroit, and that an investigation there would be acceptable. He, too, said he had been receiving hundreds of phone calls and emails from people pressuring him either to certify or not to certify the results. He said he had not heard from Mr. Trump or his campaign.Mr. Shinkle said his time as a judge on the Michigan Tax Tribunal had taught him that you can’t make up your mind until you see both sides of a case. He said that was what he planned to do.“I’m just focused on Monday and reviewing all the information for the meeting,” he said. “No one knows how the vote is going to go. But I just have to do the best that I can based on what’s ethical and legal.”Aaron Van Langevelde, 30, of Charlotte in mid-Michigan, is the unknown quantity on the board. Appointed in 2018, he has declined interview requests from The New York Times and other news outlets.He is a lawyer who works for the Republican caucus in the Michigan House of Representatives.After the state’s primary elections in August, he said he was seriously worried about the number of precincts that had voting disparities in Detroit, despite the fact that the problems were relatively minor, and expressed reluctance to certify the results without a pledge that the secretary of state would take control over the city’s elections.“I want to make sure we’re doing whatever we can to prevent the same thing from happening in November,” he said at the time. “That would be a disaster.”The state was involved in helping the city prepare for the Nov. 3 general election, providing workers and training. More

YANGON, Myanmar — The National League for Democracy, the incumbent party led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, secured another landslide victory in the general elections of Nov. 8. It did better even than in 2015, a landmark election, winning this year 396 of the 476 elected seats to be filled in both the lower and the upper houses. (Another 166 seats were reserved for military appointees.)And the N.L.D. obtained this result despite the government’s weak performance on its key pledges during its first term in office — constitutional reform, national reconciliation and peace, socioeconomic improvement — and the rise of both ethnic minority parties and new challengers. In addition to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (U.S.D.P.), some 90 parties fielded candidates this year.So what does the outcome say about what Myanmar’s voters really care about?In 2015, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi embodied hope and change, but while her popularity endures today, its nature has changed. Her party’s success at the polls this month has less to do with what she stands for than what she stands against: the military’s enduring power, including in civilian affairs.That, at least, is for the more predictable part of this argument. Now comes the paradox: The N.L.D., which was the incumbent party in this election for the first time, also benefited from various structural features created by the military regime that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party has fought for decades.The N.L.D.’s resounding victory speaks to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability, still, to rally voters in opposition to the military and its political proxies, and in the name of democratic development. In a country ravaged by a half century of military misrule — and in which the military today still controls major ministries and has veto power both in Parliament and over any proposed amendment to the Constitution — the civil-military divide remains the most important political issue for many people in Myanmar, whatever misgivings they might have about the N.L.D.’s governance.Less than a week before the vote, the country’s commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, urged the national election commission to be “careful” — a suggestion that he might challenge the election’s results.A few days later, the nationalist monk Ashin Wirathu, who is known for both his links to the military and inflammatory language against Muslims, resurfaced in public after more than a year on the run: In May 2019, he was charged with sedition for insulting Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and her government. As he handed himself over to the police, he called on his followers “to vote for the parties that work to protect the country’s race and religion.”Then on Nov. 6 a bomb exploded at the office of the election commission in Bago, a small city about 40 miles from Yangon. Speculation was rife on social media that the explosion was somehow connected to the ominous statements of General Min Aung Hlaing and Ashin Wirathu.But neither that act of violence nor the fear-mongering nor the veiled threats seem to have served the old establishment: If anything, all that appears to have only reminded voters of the country’s terrifying past, playing into the N.L.D.’s own campaign rhetoric. The U.S.D.P. will now hold just 71 seats out of a total of 1,117 in the national Parliament and all states and local assemblies; that’s 46 fewer than in 2015. No party that ran on an ultranationalist platform won any seat.Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi also seems to have garnered admiration in Myanmar for defending her government — and so, as was widely perceived, the country itself — against accusations of genocide against the Rohingya at a hearing before the International Court of Justice last year. Many people here see her defense as an ultimate sacrifice for Myanmar, perhaps in particular because she stood up for the country in the face of accusations against her lifelong foes: the military.In other words, voting for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was partly an expression of gratitude to a mother figure who is seen as having sacrificed her personal well-being, her life and now, too, her iconic reputation worldwide for Myanmar’s democracy and development.Yet this alone doesn’t explain her party’s success: The N.L.D., after five years in power, also benefited from various incumbent’s advantages — including prerogatives and policies that were put in place by the previous military regime.Myanmar’s elections are determined according to the first-past-the-post (or winner-take-all) principle, which can produce a ratio of seats-to-votes that doesn’t strictly represent an electorate’s preferences overall. What’s more, the system encourages tactical voting, including in ethnic regions. Some ethnic voters seem to have voted for the N.L.D., a strong and established party, rather than their real first choice — a small ethnic party — because defeating the military’s proxies remained an absolute priority.The ethnic minority parties did not perform well at the national level, even though they had merged or forged alliances to avoid splitting the vote. (Some did, however, make modest gains that will give them some influence in state legislatures, including in Shan, Rakhine and Kayah States.)Likewise for some new parties that had splintered from the N.L.D. or were created in opposition to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s centralized leadership or her government’s weak economic performance, such as the People’s Party, the People’s Pioneer Party and the Union Betterment Party. None of those won any seat.And this is to say nothing of the fact that more than 1.5 million voters in ethnic regions weren’t allowed to vote, ostensibly because of security reasons; or that measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus hampered the in-person campaigns of small parties; or that the state media censored dissenting voices — all factors that created an uneven playing field for the opposition, especially resource-strapped ethnic parties.Then there is demography. Decades of a “Burmanization” policy, a systematic effort to culturally assimilate the country’s very many ethnic groups, have further institutionalized benefits and privileged access to public services for the majority Bamar ethnic group. Another effect has been to change the composition and balance of the population in some ethnic regions, typically to the disadvantage of local ethnic groups — a result that has sometimes been compounded by internal migrations caused by poverty.Demographic changes also disserved ethnic parties in this month’s elections in Kachin, Karen and Mon States, and all the more so because in early 2020 the N.L.D. government lowered the residency requirement for voters (from 180 days to 90 days), allowing many migrants or very new residents — in most cases, from the majority Bamar group — to vote in ethnic minority regions.So now what? Is the election’s outcome, and the people’s powerful re-endorsement of the government, a validation of the N.L.D.’s version of democracy: super-majoritarian and, some might say, illiberal?On Nov. 12, the N.L.D. sent a letter to 48 ethnic political parties inviting them to join it in building a federal democratic union and “ending civil war.” “The ethnic parties’ objectives are the same as the N.L.D.’s, and the N.L.D. will prioritize the ethnic peoples’ desires in the future,” the letter said. A party spokesman also said that new government “must be a national unity government.”This is a welcome step, and it suggests that the N.L.D. is aware that even its apparently commanding mandate and ringing popularity have political limits in such a divided society. The risk, though, is that the party might only be gesturing at a government of national unity and will then try to co-opt the ethnic parties with various political rewards.But sticking with the political status quo would not help solve the country’s deepest problems; more likely, it would create even more deadlock — and breed anti-system resentment; more radical ethnic nationalism, as already exists in Rakhine State; or adventurism on the part of the military.Civil-military relations have been deteriorating. Ethnic conflicts are intensifying. International pressure over the Rohingya crisis continues. Socio-economic hardships have worsened with the coronavirus pandemic. The N.L.D.’s victory was a vote of confidence that it can do better, not an endorsement for more of the same.Min Zin is the executive director of the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a think tank in Yangon.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

Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy Giuliani this time.
The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.
Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
There was no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
“Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
The status of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Since then, a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn case were privileged.
She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan. More

President Trump’s campaign on Sunday disavowed Sidney Powell, one of his lawyers who has pushed false claims of voter fraud, after she made wild accusations that Republican officials had been involved in a payoff scheme to manipulate voting machines.The repudiation of Ms. Powell, which came at the hands of former allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani, added unwanted drama for the president’s legal team at a moment when it is losing case after case, offering a public window into the chaotic nature and amateurish tactics of most of its attempts so far to fight the election outcome.Even as many campaign aides, White House advisers and professional lawyers want nothing to do with the claims, a small group of lawyers for Mr. Trump’s campaign has presided over a widely mocked, circuslike legal effort to try to invalidate votes and prevent states from certifying their results.People like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have been frequent guests on conservative news programs, where they have made spurious claims that have been rejected by judges or that the Trump campaign has refrained from echoing in court because they lack evidence.Ms. Powell, who was not directly involved in cases the Trump campaign filed in court, appeared with its legal team at a news conference just last week, and had been embraced by the president and many of his allies because of her emphatic and unconditional defense of an array of baseless claims.On Sunday, though, the Trump campaign reversed course.“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” it said in a statement. “She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”In a statement issued to CBS News, Ms. Powell said that she understood the statement from Mr. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another Trump lawyer, and that she would still be filing a lawsuit related to her unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.The disavowal came a day after a Pennsylvania judge eviscerated arguments that other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team had made in court that millions of votes in the state should be invalidated.Ms. Powell was described as a member of the legal team’s “elite strike force” at the news conference on Thursday as she laid out an elaborate conspiracy theory about efforts by the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, to essentially rig elections in the United States by using voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. While Mr. Trump has become obsessed with the idea of a global conspiracy, cybersecurity officials from his own government have said there is no evidence that machines were compromised.Appearing on the conservative network Newsmax on Saturday night, Ms. Powell further pushed the conspiracy theory, saying that two top Republicans in Georgia — Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — were taking payoffs as part of the scheme, and that Representative Doug Collins of Georgia had in fact won his race for Senate against Senator Kelly Loeffler. (He did not; Ms. Loeffler’s race is heading to a runoff without Mr. Collins.) Ms. Powell said she planned to file a “biblical” suit in the state.Two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5 are set to determine which party controls the Senate, and Republicans have grown anxious that the Trump campaign’s legal efforts there could affect those races, which are likely to have lower turnout than this month’s general election.Ms. Powell’s claims were widely derided, including by some Trump allies. Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, said on ABC’s “This Week” that the legal team had become a “national embarrassment.” Most of the president’s other lawyers have declined to become involved in his efforts to delay certifying the vote in states.Mr. Trump has been agitated about Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for a few days, advisers said, complaining about how black rivulets of liquid had dripped down Mr. Giuliani’s face at the Thursday news conference and complaining that it had stretched on for too long.On Saturday and Sunday, several of the president’s advisers urged Mr. Trump to part ways with Ms. Powell, people briefed on the discussions said. One of those people said that even Mr. Giuliani had recognized that she had gone too far.But Ms. Powell also made an easy target for deflection by Mr. Giuliani and others, as Mr. Trump vented his frustrations about the Pennsylvania judge’s scathing ruling.Other lawyers for Mr. Trump who have largely stayed out of the fray believe Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell have merely been telling the president what he wants to hear. The president latched onto Ms. Powell’s claims about votes being switched on Dominion machines in the last two weeks.The thrust of Ms. Powell’s conspiracy theory — that a powerful and vast network of Mr. Trump’s enemies cheated him out of victory — has been largely constant, though the cast of perpetrators and accomplices has varied from setting to setting.In an interview last week on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, where she spoke with few interruptions for nearly 20 minutes, Ms. Powell claimed that the voting machines in question had been designed to rig elections.The day before, on Fox Business, Ms. Powell said the conspiracy involved “dead people” who had voted “in massive numbers” — again offering no evidence — and claimed that fraudulent paper ballots were also part of the scheme.In September, Ms. Powell acknowledged during a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington that she had taken the highly unusual step of briefing Mr. Trump on the case of one of her most prominent clients, Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.While representing Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell often amplified social media posts promoting QAnon, the conspiracy theory whose proponents believe Mr. Trump is battling a cabal of satanic pedophiles.The cold shoulder extended to Ms. Powell was only the latest embarrassment for Mr. Trump’s legal team, for which more than 30 lawsuits challenging the integrity of the election have either been dismissed or voluntarily withdrawn in a half-dozen battleground states. A major loss came in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, when the federal judge, Matthew W. Brann, threw out a lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the state’s election results and criticized it in blistering language, likening its argument to “Frankenstein’s monster” and saying it was “unsupported by the evidence.”Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting. More

On Bill Clinton’s Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1993, he found on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway desk in the Oval Office a gracious, handwritten letter left for him by the Republican president whom he had defeated.In it, the departing president reminded the arriving one:“You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good Luck — George.”In reflecting on how meaningful that letter had been to him, Clinton wrote of George H.W. Bush that “though he could be tough in a political fight, he was in it for the right reasons: People always came before politics, patriotism before partisanship.”That is why it was somewhat embarrassing that some members of the Clinton administration committed silly, immature acts of vandalism when handing the reins of power over to Bush’s son, George W. Bush, in 2001.The General Accounting Office investigated the vandalism for a year and concluded that “damage, theft, vandalism and pranks did occur in the White House complex” during the transition, and as The New York Times reported: “The agency put the cost at $13,000 to $14,000, including $4,850 to replace computer keyboards, many with damaged or missing W keys.”It was embarrassing, but not truly disruptive to the transfer of power. Still, Republicans pointed to it as an extreme breach of protocol. Representative Bob Barr of Georgia, who had asked the G.A.O. to look into the allegations of vandalism, said of the findings: “The Clinton administration treated the White House worse than college freshmen checking out of their dorm rooms.” He continued, “They disgraced not just themselves but the institution and the office of the presidency as well.”I have thought about the grace of the elder Bush’s transition letter and the smallness of the Clinton White House’s shenanigans often in recent weeks as we have watched Donald Trump stubbornly refuse to concede, brazenly try to disenfranchise millions of voters and recklessly sow distrust in our electoral system, and by extension our democracy. Everything that happened before has been rendered quaint.The way Trump has absolutely trashed our democratic norms has made a mockery of things that used to raise our, or at least Republicans’, hackles about decorum and propriety — like Obama not wearing a flag pin, putting his feet on a desk, or wearing a tan suit. Republicans have either cheered or shrunk in silence as Trump has set his blazes and fanned the flames.The damage Trump is now doing trying to claw back an election that he has lost is almost incalculable in its scope and yet-to-unfold possibilities. There is no guarantee that Trump will ever concede, and there is every suggestion that he won’t. There is no way to know what a Biden Inauguration Day would look like. Would Trump attend? Would he gracefully exit the White House premises?Furthermore, the damage Trump has attempted to do to faith in the American election system has been wildly, depressingly, successful. A Politico/Morning Consult poll earlier this month found that “70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair, a stark rise from the 35 percent of G.O.P. voters who held similar beliefs before the election.”That would represent tens of millions of Americans who, largely because of Trump and the far-right press that abets him, will see a duly elected Joe Biden presidency as illegitimate, and the election system as flawed.Furthermore, we have a president who appears to care about nothing else but turning his loss into a win, and, if he fails, handicapping the Biden administration.He has essentially given up fighting the Covid crisis — other than touting vaccines — even though the virus is raging in this country and around the world. On Saturday, Trump skipped the “Pandemic Preparedness” meeting of G-20 leaders to play golf. As The Times reported, “at least 1,428 new coronavirus deaths and 171,980 new cases were reported in the United States” on Saturday.Not only that, but as food insecurity triples for families with children during the Covid-19 pandemic, food bank lines stretch ahead of the holiday, and with 12 million Americans scheduled to lose unemployment benefits the day after Christmas, Trump is not pressuring congressional leaders to pass another aid package.Remember that it was Trump who used a tweet to halt stimulus talks in early October, writing: “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business.”He didn’t win, and now he could care less. There is golf to be played. Trump is hurt but not humble. He is angry and lashing out.I wish that all he and his team were doing was removing some B’s and H’s from some keyboards. Instead, they’re taking a sledgehammer to a young and fragile democratic experiment and allowing Americans to suffer and die as they do it.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

WASHINGTON — As President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to name his first slate of cabinet appointees, more Republicans are starting to push for the transition to officially begin and calling on their conservative colleagues to openly acknowledge his victory.Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, called the conduct of President Trump’s legal team, which has indulged in a web of conspiracy theories about voter fraud, “a national embarrassment,” given the blistering dismissals of their lawsuits in court and their failure to produce evidence of widespread improprieties.“They allege fraud outside the courtroom, but when they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud,” Mr. Christie, a longtime Trump ally, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen.”The Trump campaign on Sunday disavowed Sidney Powell, one of the lawyers who had floated many of those baseless claims, even though she had appeared at a news conference alongside Trump lawyers and campaign officials and been embraced by allies.Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, on Saturday congratulated Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory, saying that the president had “exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge” the state’s result after a federal judge dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit challenging the election outcome there.Many of the strongest denunciations of the president’s refusal to concede have come from Republicans like Mr. Christie and Mr. Toomey, who are no longer in office or have announced their retirement. But as Mr. Trump has continued to deny the results of the election in an unflinching assault on the democratic process, a few more sitting lawmakers have tiptoed up to join them in subtly urging the president to at least begin the transition process.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican in the House, on Friday became the most senior Republican to urge Mr. Trump in a statement to begin “respecting the sanctity of our electoral process” should the nation’s courts continue to reject his legal team’s challenges to the outcome.Still, most Republican lawmakers have not challenged Mr. Trump, in part because they fear that a public acknowledgment of Mr. Biden’s victory could undercut support from their conservative base before two critical Senate runoff elections in Georgia in January.In a nod to those concerns, Mr. Christie suggested that Mr. Trump would better spend his time supporting the Republican candidates in Georgia “rather than looking in the rearview mirror.” (The president spent much of his weekend at his golf course in Virginia and deriding Republicans, including Ms. Cheney, Mr. Toomey and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who publicly undercut his barrage of false claims.)The few Republicans who made their own ascertainment in the 15 days since Mr. Biden won the election were increasingly blunt in their assessment of Mr. Trump’s prospects for overturning the results. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, released a statement condemning the president’s pressure campaign on state legislatures as “not only unprecedented but inconsistent with our democratic process.” Mr. Hogan responded to Mr. Trump’s criticisms by suggesting that the president “stop golfing and concede.”“Here again in Michigan, it’s not a razor-thin margin — it’s 154,000 votes,” Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, one of the first congressional Republicans to congratulate Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, said in an appearance on CNN. Mr. Trump has made false charges of widespread fraud in Michigan and pressured state legislators to undo the results, but “154,000 votes is plenty to overcome,” Mr. Upton said. “I mean, it’s over.”Other Republicans were more tentative on Sunday, but they edged toward recognizing Mr. Biden’s victory by amplifying calls for the Trump administration to allow the transition to begin, pushing for Mr. Biden to begin receiving intelligence briefings as part of that process. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Twitter that “I agree briefings should occur” as he shared a clip of Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff, warning of the consequences of withholding classified information and access to agency officials.“It’s past time to start a transition, to at least cooperate with a transition,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said on Sunday, even as he insisted that Mr. Trump should have additional time to pursue legal challenges to the outcome of the election. “I’d rather have a president who has more than one day to prepare.”Members of Mr. Biden’s transition team, even as they announced plans to unveil cabinet appointments on Tuesday, continued to warn that the new administration would be severely handicapped without advance intelligence briefings and updates on plans to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine.Jennifer Psaki, a senior adviser to the transition team, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that F.B.I. background checks, a key part of the confirmation of cabinet secretaries, could not be done until the General Services Administration “ascertained” Mr. Biden’s victory. The process would give Mr. Biden and his staff members access to federal resources, data and personnel.The transition team wants to “talk to the people doing the job right now so that we can be ready,” Representative Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat who is set to leave his seat for a role in the Biden administration, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, urged his party to speak out against the president’s behavior, calling on “senior Republican leaders to join those who have begun to come out and say, ‘Trump’s behavior is inexcusable.’”“Look,” Mr. Bolton continued on “State of the Union,” “the Republican Party is not going to be saved by hiding in a spider hole. We need all of our leaders to come out and say, ‘The election is over.’”Hailey Fuchs, Lucy Tompkins and Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting. More

WASHINGTON — Officials at the Group of 20 summit meeting released a closing statement on Sunday that served as perhaps the Trump administration’s final reminder of the wide gulf between the United States and its allies on handling global threats like the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.In its statement, or communiqué, the group emphasized what it called the “important mandates of the United Nations’ systems and agencies, primarily the W.H.O.,” referring to the World Health Organization, an agency Mr. Trump announced a withdrawal from in July, threatening to cut off one its largest sources of funding. The communiqué, released after a two-day virtual meeting hosted by Saudi Arabia, said the group supported strengthening the W.H.O.’s “overall effectiveness in coordinating and supporting the global response to the pandemic and the central efforts of member states.”Over all, the communiqué offered little in terms of any breakthrough announcements beyond general appeals for more global cooperation and “affordable and equitable access” to therapeutics and vaccines. The lack of more significant initiatives underscored how difficult it is for the G20 to carry out an agenda when the United States is indifferent — Mr. Trump skipped part of the summit to play golf — or even hostile to many of its positions, even during a pandemic that has killed more than 1.3 million people globally.The statement came the same day as another reminder of Mr. Trump’s rejection of international agreements: The United States formally withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated three decades ago to allow nations to fly over one another’s territory with elaborate sensor equipment to assure that they are not preparing for military action. American officials had long complained that Russia was violating the accord, and Mr. Trump had announced the action in May, starting a six-month clock on the withdrawal.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. had favored remaining in the treaty. When he arrives in office in January, he will quickly have to confront the expiration of the last remaining major arms control agreement with Russia, New START, a clean extension of which Mr. Trump has refused to sign off on. Mr. Biden has said he will try to save that accord.The G20’s closing statement on Sunday also referred to other areas where Mr. Trump has caused friction, calling climate change one of “the most pressing challenges of our time” and saying that the Financial Stability Board, a group of international regulators, was “continuing to examine the financial stability implications” of the issue. The United States had resisted the inclusion of climate change in a joint declaration of finance ministers this year but eventually relented.Mr. Trump, who has brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change and routinely refused to acknowledge it as a man-made problem, most recently removed the scientist responsible for the National Climate Assessment. That scientist served as the federal government’s premier contribution to climate knowledge and the foundation for regulations to combat global warming.In his remarks at the virtual meeting on Sunday morning, Mr. Trump reiterated his opposition to the Paris Agreement, claiming it was “not designed to save the environment” but instead “was designed to kill the American economy.” The United States formally withdrew from the climate accord this month, but Mr. Biden has pledged to rejoin.Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone dynamic has hampered conferences of global leaders since he took office. Before last year’s G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Mr. Trump set the tone by attacking America’s closest allies, including the host country. When he attended the 70th anniversary of NATO in London last year, Mr. Trump left abruptly after an embarrassing video of other world leaders privately mocking him surfaced.The lack of American leadership at such forums comes as the world continues to face severe economic strain from the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund projected last month that the global economy would contract 4.4 percent in 2020 and that the recovery would be long, uneven and uncertain. Poor countries have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of the virus; the World Bank estimated in October that the pandemic could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty this year.On Sunday, the leaders threw their support behind a new framework to provide debt relief for poor countries that have been hit hard by the pandemic and reiterated their commitment to freezing bilateral debt payments through June. More than 40 countries have gained over $5 billion in immediate debt payment relief this year. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, had already backed the measure, but it was not clear it was on Mr. Trump’s radar.And, after four years of Mr. Trump shaking up the global order on international trade, the communiqué underscored a commitment to the future of the World Trade Organization, expressed support for the “multilateral trading system” and called for a “stable” trade environment and open markets. Although there was no mention of tariffs, the language could be read as a rebuke to Mr. Trump’s penchant for protectionism and trade wars.It was not just the formal language that underscored the rift between European leaders and the outgoing American president. On Saturday, Mr. Trump was not listed as a participant at a sideline event at the conference on pandemic preparedness and response. Speakers at the event included President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mr. Trump, however, played golf at his club in Virginia, his fifth day there since the election, whose results he is still contesting despite no evidence to support his claims. Mr. Trump was back at Trump National Golf Club on Sunday afternoon for his sixth tee time.Former Republican advisers criticized the move.During the global financial crisis, “George W. Bush convened the first G20 leaders’ summit to chart the course for repair and reform of the world economy,” said Daniel M. Price, a former adviser to Mr. Bush who was responsible for international trade and investment. “When that forum met yesterday to address the Covid-19 crisis, Donald Trump chose to play golf, underscoring the task facing President-elect Biden to restore the trust and confidence in U.S. leadership so depleted by his predecessor.”In a statement on Sunday afternoon, the White House summarized Mr. Trump’s participation in the weekend summit and seemed to suggest that he would be involved in the G20 next year, when Italy will host.“President Trump thanked Saudi Arabia for its leadership during its G20 presidency and looked forward to working with Italy as incoming G20 president,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.Mark Landler contributed reporting from London. More