Elections

On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times.By late afternoon, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk had shared the hashtag along with a video claiming voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Their post was shared over 3,800 times.That night, the conservative activist Brandon Straka asked people to protest in Michigan under the banner #StoptheSteal. His post was shared more than 3,700 times.Over the next week, the phrase “Stop the Steal” was used to promote dozens of rallies that spread false voter fraud claims about the U.S. presidential elections.New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affected the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.The voter fraud claims have continued to gather steam in recent weeks, thanks in large part to prominent accounts. A look at a four-week period starting in mid-October shows that President Trump and the top 25 superspreaders of voter fraud misinformation accounted for 28.6 percent of the interactions people had with that content, according to an analysis by Avaaz.“What we see these people doing is kind of like setting a fire down with fuel, it is designed to quickly create a blaze,” Mr. Quran said. “These actors have built enough power they ensure this misinformation reaches millions of Americans.”In order to find the superspreaders, Avaaz compiled a list of 95,546 Facebook posts that included narratives about voter fraud. Those posts were liked, shared or commented on nearly 60 million times by people on Facebook.Avaaz found that just 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of those interactions. Those 33 posts had created a narrative that would go on to shape what millions of people thought about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections.A spokesman for Facebook said the company had added labels to posts that misrepresented the election process and was directing people to a voting information center.“We’re taking every opportunity to connect people to reliable information about the election and how votes are being counted,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. The company has not commented on why accounts that repeatedly share misinformation, such as Mr. Straka’s and Diamond and Silk’s, have not been penalized. Facebook has previously said that President Trump, along with other elected officials, is granted a special status and is not fact-checked.Many of the superspreader accounts had millions of interactions on their Facebook posts over the last month, and have enjoyed continued growth. The accounts were active on Twitter as well as Facebook, and increasingly spread the same misinformation on new social media sites like Parler, MeWe and Gab.Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator with a following of nearly four million people on Facebook, had over 7.7 million interactions on Facebook the week of Nov. 3. Mark Levin, a right-wing radio host, had nearly four million interactions, and Diamond and Silk had 2.5 million. A review of their pages by The Times shows that a majority of their posts have focused on the recent elections, and voter fraud narratives around them.None of the superspreaders identified in this article responded to requests for comment.One of the most prominent false claims promoted by the superspreaders was that Dominion voting software deleted votes for Mr. Trump, or somehow changed vote tallies in several swing states. Election officials have found no evidence that the machines malfunctioned, but posts about the machines have been widely shared by Mr. Trump and his supporters.Over the last week, just seven posts from the top 25 superspreaders of the Dominion voter fraud claim accounted for 13 percent of the total interactions on Facebook about the claim.Many of those same accounts were also top superspreaders of the Dominion claim, and other voter fraud theories, on Twitter. The accounts of President Trump, his son Eric, Mr. Straka and Mr. Levin were all among the top 20 accounts that spread misinformation about voter fraud on Twitter, according to Ian Kennedy, a researcher at the University of Washington who works with the Elections Integrity Partnership.Mr. Trump had by far the largest influence on Twitter. A single tweet by the president accusing Dominion voting systems of deleting 2.7 million votes in his favor was shared over 185,000 times, and liked over 600,000 times.Like the other false claims about voter fraud, Mr. Trump’s tweet included a label by Twitter that he was sharing information that was not accurate.Twitter, like Facebook, has said that those labels help prevent false claims from being shared and direct people toward more authoritative sources of information.Earlier this week, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook employees questioned whether the labels were effective. Within the company, employees have sought out their own data on how well national newspapers performed during the elections, according to one Facebook employee.On the #StoptheSteal hashtag, they found that both The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the top 25 pages with interactions on that hashtag — mainly from readers sharing articles and using the hashtag in those posts. (People sharing the articles could have been intending to debunk the campaign.)Combined, the two publications had approximately 44,000 interactions on Facebook under that hashtag. By comparison, Mr. Straka, the conservative activist who shared the call to action on voter fraud, got three times that number of interactions sharing material under the same hashtag on his own Facebook account.Jacob Silver contributed reporting. More

Even as the campaign lawsuits brought by President Trump over the 2020 election enter their death throes, many people continue to worry that Mr. Trump will find three Republican legislatures to magically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They are concerned that he will pull off an antidemocratic hat trick through maneuvers like delaying recounts in Wisconsin and blocking certification in Michigan to allow these legislatures to submit competing slates of electors to Congress. The goal is to prevent Joe Biden from securing the Electoral College votes he needs on Jan. 6 for Congress to declare him president.The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles.Let’s start on the positive side. A federal district court opinion issued in Pennsylvania Saturday laid bare both the dangerousness and vacuousness of Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy. Rudy Giuliani, acting as one of the president’s lawyers, failed to persuade Judge Matthew Brann — an Obama-appointed Federalist Society member and former Republican official — to disenfranchise nearly seven million Pennsylvania voters and to let the state legislature name a slate of presidential electors. The court held that the Trump campaign offered a “Frankenstein’s monster” of a legal theory and that the complaint was full of nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”Although the campaign has appealed the case to the Third Circuit, it is so weak it will get no better reception there or at the Supreme Court. There are no remaining legal cases that could plausibly overturn the election results in even one state where Mr. Trump has lost (much less the three he would need for a different result in the Electoral College).Dilatory tactics like delaying certification or recounts will be rejected by courts or governors, and not even a single state legislature (much less three) seems eager to incur the wrath of the American people through a power grab that would violate the rule of law, trigger massive street protests and call the legislators’ own elections into question. Most state legislators appropriately defer to the will of their own voters despite pressure from the president.And even if three state legislatures engaged in broadly antidemocratic action by purporting to appoint their own slates of electors, federal law favors Electoral College slates sent in by governors, and we can expect Democratic governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to submit slates reflecting their voters’ choice of Mr. Biden. On top of that, Democrats will control the House, which will not accept rogue alternative electors. If Congress stalemates, Mr. Trump is out of office on Jan. 20 under the Constitution’s 20th Amendment.All of that is indeed good news, but I am quite concerned about what comes next. By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since the election, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy also will make things worse when it comes to voting rights. The common thread in his campaign’s postelection litigation connecting Trump allegations of people of color illegally voting in Democratic cities in swing states and corrupted voting machines is a lack of any evidence to support the claims. Many of the lawsuits have been laughed out of court for lack of evidence, voluntarily dismissed, or involve so few votes that they could not plausibly change the outcome. These unsuccessful lawsuits will nonetheless provide a false narrative to explain how it is that Mr. Biden declared victory and serve as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws in Republican states. They already provided a basis for the now-aborted attempt of Republican canvassing board members in Wayne County, Mich., to reject votes from Democratic-leaning Detroit, and could be the basis for a similar move by Republicans when the Michigan state canvassing board meets Monday.And even as Mr. Trump has lost most of his postelection lawsuits, he and his allies had a good bit of success before the election in cases that will stymie voting rights going forward. Following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appeals courts now routinely say that federal courts should be deferential when states engage in balancing voting rights — even during a pandemic — against a state’s interests in election administration and avoiding fraud, even when states come forward with no evidence of fraud. Under the so-called “Purcell principle,” courts increasingly allow states to make voting harder. They can do this whenever states are able to stall judicial proceedings long enough that they can claim a voting change comes too close to the election and will confuse voters and election administrators. Courts have issued other disturbing opinions, including allowing for age discrimination in the availability of mail-in ballots only for those older than 60 or 65, essentially short-circuiting litigation under the 26th Amendment, which bars discrimination in voting on the basis of age.The worst appears yet to come. In one of the lawsuits that remains technically alive at the Supreme Court out of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump and his allies have advanced a muscular version of something that’s become known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine. Taken to its extreme, the doctrine says that state legislatures have complete authority to set election rules absent congressional override, and that their power to set election rules cannot be overcome even by state supreme courts applying right-to-vote provisions in state constitutions.That’s the basis for Mr. Trump’s claim in the U.S. Supreme Court that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court order, requiring the receipt of mail-in ballots arriving up to three days after Election Day, had to be counted. (This is now a question for future elections because there are not enough ballots at stake to affect the 2020 count.) The doctrine also could be potentially violated by state and local election agencies even when they act under the Legislature’s authority to administer elections.In the course of pre-election proceedings, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas issued or signed onto separate opinions endorsing the strong reading of this doctrine. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, may well agree. And Chief Justice John Roberts, while not agreeing it was appropriate to apply this doctrine in these pre-election cases, was the lead dissenter in a 2015 case out of Arizona advancing a similar theory about broad legislative power to set the rules for federal elections.Either in the Pennsylvania case or in another, the court’s conservative majority could soon embrace a strong version of the independent state legislature doctrine. This could take state courts out of their essential role in protecting voting rights. It could potentially eliminate the ability of voters to use ballot measures to enact nonpartisan redistricting reform and other measures that apply to federal elections. It could give conservative courts looking for an excuse a reason to scuttle voter-protective rules enacted by state election boards.Together, the Trump-related precedents mean that neither state nor federal courts are likely to be able to play a backstop role when Republican state legislatures pass new restrictive voting laws, and that efforts to get around these state legislative efforts are likely to fail as well. Although in theory Congress has the power to override state legislatures with voter-protective legislation for federal elections, it is hard to see any of that getting through the next Congress even if Democrats barely grab control by winning the upcoming pair of Senate runoffs in Georgia.Mr. Trump has not admitted it, but he lost the 2020 election. His attack on voting rights and the legitimacy of our election system, however, will live far beyond his presidency. At stake is whether this country continues to adhere to the rule of law and to allow elections to be decided by a majority of voters.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”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

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. 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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