Elections

Allies of President Trump are spreading another baseless rumor about computer-based vote manipulation, days after they gained attention for falsely claiming that a widely used piece of election administration software had been used to delete votes for the president.The newest conspiracy theory involves Scytl, a software company in Barcelona, Spain, that makes software for local election officials.The false theory alleges that the U.S. Army recently raided Scytl’s office in Frankfurt and seized a computer server containing authentic vote totals for the 2020 election. This “undoctored” data, the theory claims, shows that Mr. Trump was not defeated but instead won in a landslide with 410 electoral votes.Both Scytl and the Army have refuted the claim. An Army spokesperson told The Associated Press that there had been no raid on Scytl’s offices and no servers seized. In a fact-check posted to its website, Scytl said it did not “tabulate, tally or count votes” in U.S. elections or have an office in Frankfurt.Jonathan Brill, the president and general manager of Scytl’s U.S. division, said in an interview on Tuesday that the rumor that the company’s software had been used to tamper with vote tallies was “totally false, every single bit of it.”The false claim appears to have originated with a Twitter post on Nov. 8 by a user, @zeynep_mol, who claimed to have heard about the raid. (“I haven’t been able to confirm the accuracy yet,” the account tweeted.) The story was then picked up by a little-known Indian news website, GreatGameIndia, which gained notoriety this year for spreading false claims about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.It was then repeated by Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, during interviews with Newsmax, the conservative TV network, and Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist, and has since been shared by other prominent conservatives hoping to cast doubt on the election outcome.Scytl, which was started in Spain in 2001, does make software for local election officials, including some in the United States. In the 2020 election, it says, it provided four types of products to local authorities. One is a system that allows election officials to display results from their elections in a user-friendly format. Another product, “electronic ballot delivery,” helps local election officials deliver ballots to absentee voters.But the company says none of its products are used to count votes, or allow voters to vote online.Some people who have shared the Scytl theory have alleged that the company has ties to George Soros or Bill Gates, two billionaire philanthropists who are often featured in right-wing conspiracy theories.Mr. Brill, the president of Scytl’s U.S. division, said there was no truth to those rumors, either.“We have no investment from George Soros nor Bill Gates,” he said. More

Late last week, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier declared on social media that he had unearthed definitive proof of widespread voter fraud in Detroit. He pointed to an absentee ballot cast by “118-year-old William Bradley”, a man who had supposedly died in 1984.
“They’re trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since-deleted Facebook post, though the election had already been called for Joe Biden by every major news network days before.
But the deceased Bradley hadn’t voted. Within days, Bradley’s son, also named William Bradley, but with a different middle name, told PolitiFact that he had cast the ballot. That was confirmed by Michigan election officials, who said a clerk had entered the wrong Bradley as having voted. Though the living Bradley had also received an absentee ballot for his father, he said he threw it away, “because I didn’t want to get it confused with mine”.
The false claim that the deceased Bradley had voted in the 3 November election is one of a barrage of voter fraud conspiracy theories fired off by Trump supporters across the country during recent weeks, and all have been debunked while failing to prove that widespread irregularities exist.
Instead, the theories often reveal Trump supporters’ fundamental misunderstandings of the election system while creating a game of conspiracy theory whack-a-mole for election officials.
“We are confident Michigan’s election was fair, secure and transparent, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people,” secretary of state spokesperson Tracy Wimmer told the Guardian.
Bradley was only one of dozens of allegedly dead Michigan voters who were found to be alive. Trump supporters pointed to Napoleon Township’s Jane Aiken, who they claimed was born in 1900, and cited an obituary as evidence that she was deceased. But the township’s deputy police chief investigated and found the obituary to be for a different Jane Aiken.
Police told Bridge Magazine that the Aiken who cast the ballot is “94 years old, alive and well. Quite well, actually.”
Meanwhile, CNN examined records for 50 Michiganders who Trump supporters claim are dead voters. They found 37 were dead and had not voted. Five are alive and had voted, and the remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.
The Michigan secretary of state cited several reasons for confusion. Though election officials across the country purge dead people from voter rolls annually, some are missed and remain as registered voters. Occasionally a worker will accidentally enter a vote by a living person as being cast by a dead person with a similar name.
The voting software in Michigan also requires a birthday for each voter. If a clerk doesn’t have it, then 1/1/1901 is used as a placeholder until the clerk can find the accurate birthday. Rightwing conspiracy theorists pointed to multiple examples of residents with that birthday voting.
Among them was Donna Brydges, a 75-year-old Hamlin Township resident. In a phone call with the Associated Press this week, she confirmed she’s alive and passed the phone to her husband so he could do the same. He added: “She’s actually beat me in a game of cribbage.”
Michigan election officials, “are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual,” the secretary of state wrote on its website.
Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Trump supporters like Representative Matt Gaetz claimed 21,000 dead people in the state “overwhelmingly swung for Biden”.
In reality, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation had filed an 15 October federal lawsuit claiming 21,000 dead people were on the rolls, and asked a judge to order them to be removed before the election. A judge found that more than half of the voters had already been removed, questioned PILF’s intentions and methodology, and didn’t require the state to take action.
The dead voter theory is only one one of the several conspiracies Trump supporters have used to cast doubt on election results.
In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who claimed to have heard a supervisor directing staff to backdate late-arriving ballots recanted his allegation once he was visited by postal service investigators. In Arizona and Michigan, Trump supporters filed a lawsuit claiming that votes were tossed out because they had used Sharpie markers to fill out their ballot, but quickly dropped it.
Several viral videos also purported to reveal suspicious activity. In Detroit, Trump supporters claimed a video showed someone bringing late-arriving mail in ballots into a vote-counting center. In reality, it was a WXYZ Detroit cameraman wheeling his equipment in a wagon. Meanwhile, a video that Eric Trump claimed showed 80 Trump ballots being set on fire was proven to be false – the ballots were sample ballots.
The Trump campaign also claimed that recent federal lawsuits would prove widespread voter fraud with hundreds of pages of testimony from poll watchers and ballot challengers in Michigan. Almost all of them have failed in court so far.
Though Trump and his supporters have claimed thousands of dead people voted in Michigan, only one allegation was included in the lawsuits. Warren, Michigan resident Anita Chase wrote in an affidavit that her deceased son, Mark D Chase, who had died in July 2016, was marked in the secretary of state’s online voter tool as having voted in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
But the secretary of state said Anita Chase had identified one of two other Mark D Chases registered to vote in Michigan – a ballot had not been cast in her son’s name. In their response to the affidavits, Detroit election officials lambasted the Trump campaign over such errors: “Most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are grounded in an extraordinary failure to understand how elections function.” More

Officials are still counting votes for the 2020 presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped professional commentators from drawing any number of broad conclusions about the state of American politics from the results thus far.Two narratives about what happened stand out. First, the idea that left-wing slogans like “defund the police” cratered the Democratic Party in down ballot fights for the House and Senate, and second, that President Trump’s modest gains with Black and Hispanic voters herald the arrival of a working-class, multiracial Republican Party.There are obvious objections to both stories. There is no hard evidence that voters turned against Democratic congressional candidates because of “defund the police” and other radical slogans. It does not show up in the congressional generic ballot — there is no decline that corresponds with the unrest of the summer — and there’s little other data to support the idea of a direct causal relationship between the slogans and the performance of Democratic candidates.What we have, instead, are the words of moderate Democratic lawmakers who believe those slogans left them unusually vulnerable to Republican attacks. But this is a textbook case of assuming one thing caused the other because they followed in chronological order. Perhaps Democrats slipped because they were associated with “defund the police” or perhaps — as Democrats as different as Doug Jones, Beto O’Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have suggested — it had something to do with poor campaign infrastructure and a message that was unresponsive to the electorate.The problem with the second narrative — Republicans have built a new working-class, multiracial coalition — is that it takes Trump out of the context of past election results. If preliminary exit polls are any indication — and they have real flaws as measurement tools — Trump did hardly any better with Black voters than George W. Bush in 2004 and quite a bit worse with Hispanic voters. Far from a seismic shift, Trump, with 32 percent support among Hispanics (a four-point upswing from his first run) is doing about as well as John McCain did in 2008.But even as we throw cold water on these narratives — at least until there’s more evidence to back them up — we’re still left with the unanswered question of how Trump performed as well as he did. He may not have transformed the Republican coalition, but he held onto much of his 2016 support and even enlarged it, if not in percentage terms then in absolute ones. Democrats who thought he would be swamped by high turnout were wrong; not only did he benefit, but his ability to turn nonvoters into voters is what likely kept him in the game.At the risk of committing the same sin as other observers and getting ahead of the data, I want to propose an alternative explanation for the election results, one that accounts for the president’s relative improvement as well as that of the entire Republican Party.It’s the money, stupid.At the end of March, President Trump signed the Cares Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks ($1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold) to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits. These programs were not perfect — the supplement unemployment insurance, in particular, depended on ramshackle state systems, forcing many applicants to wait weeks or even months before they received assistance — but they made an impact regardless. Personal income went up and poverty went down, even as the United States reported its steepest ever quarterly drop in economic output.Now, the reason this many Americans received as much assistance as they did is that Democrats fought for it over the opposition of Republicans who believed any help beyond the minimum would degrade the will to work for whatever wage employers were willing to pay. “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else,’ ” Senator Rick Scott of Florida argued on the floor of the Senate.But voters, and especially the low-propensity voters who flooded the electorate in support of Trump, aren’t attuned to the ins and outs of congressional debate. They did not know — and Democrats didn’t do a good enough job of telling them — that the president and his party opposed more generous benefits. All they knew is that Trump signed the bill (and the checks), giving them the kind of government assistance usually reserved for the nation’s ownership class.Nearly everything in politics has multiple explanations and there are many factors that can and do explain the election results. But I would not ignore the extent to which the Republican Party’s strong performance can be explained simply by the fact that it was the party in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didn’t have it before.The upshot of this, for the incoming Biden administration, is straightforward: Do not listen to the debt worriers and the deficit hawks. Ignore the calls for means-testing and complicated workarounds. Embrace, instead, the simplicity of cash. Take a page from the left and give as much direct help to as many people as possible.The concentration of its coalition in cities and suburbs is such that the Democratic Party faces a number of structural obstacles to winning and wielding power. There’s no easy solution to this problem, but there are ways to make the path less difficult. And one of them is as straightforward as cutting a check when there’s a national crisis and keeping it going for those who need it when there isn’t.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

As House Democrats’ top presidential investigator, Representative Adam B. Schiff saw his national profile skyrocket in opposition to President Trump, a man he charged with high crimes and misdemeanors. He does not intend to let it fall when Mr. Trump leaves the White House.With a Democratic administration poised to take charge in Washington, Mr. Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, is quietly and methodically maneuvering for a second act. As other Democrats step forward this week for a slate of leadership posts under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Schiff is biding his time but ruling out few possibilities, including a run for Senate, a Biden administration post or an eventual bid for the speakership or another top House leadership post.There is perhaps no better sign of Mr. Schiff’s ambition than the amount of campaign cash he raised this election cycle for himself and Democrats up and down the ballot: $41 million. It is an unusually high sum for a lawmaker in his position that reflects the cachet he accrued among liberals as he led the drive to impeach Mr. Trump and then served as his lead prosecutor in his trial on the Senate floor.Among House Democrats, only Ms. Pelosi and Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of their campaign arm, raised more, putting Mr. Schiff ahead of the pack of the next generation of Democratic leaders emerging in the House. (By comparison, the speaker dwarfed any other fund-raiser, bringing in more than $225 million for Democrats in the last two years.)In politics, where campaign funds are a conduit to influence and loyalty as well as a signal of political aspiration, the Los Angeles-area congressman has spread it liberally: $7 million went to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign, roughly $4 million to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, almost $5 million directly to Democrats running in swing districts and $3 million to Senate candidates, according to his campaign. Mr. Schiff kept the other $22 million for himself and his political action committee, money that could be spent on his own future political ambitions.“My philosophy up to this point, which has suited me well, has been to focus on doing my current job as best I can and let the future take care of itself,” he said in an interview on Monday. “What all of us can do right now, whatever anyone’s ambition may be, is bring our caucus together and focus on maximizing the talents that everyone brings to the job.”That is no small task at the moment, after Democrats sustained painful and unexpected losses on Election Day that will substantially narrow their majority next term and have unleashed a wave of recriminations. And Mr. Schiff, 60, is facing a daunting test of his own, of whether he can parlay national security expertise, investigative prowess and a knack for oratory into continued relevance on the national stage after Mr. Trump exits and Republicans look for revenge.For now, Mr. Schiff’s chances of a top intelligence position in the Biden administration appear remote, his allies concede, in large part because of his success as Mr. Trump’s leading antagonist. Mr. Schiff remains radioactive among Republicans who viewed his pursuit of Mr. Trump as craven and partisan, and he would therefore be unlikely to get through the Senate confirmation process.The Californian has made little secret of his interest in moving across the Capitol to the Senate, but Democrats in Washington believe he may be boxed in on that front for the moment, as well. Though the ascension of Senator Kamala Harris of California to the vice presidency will create a vacancy in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has left party officials in his state with the distinct impression that he wants to appoint a historic “first” to replace her, most likely a Latino.That could change if Mr. Newsom appoints a short-term placeholder instead, or if the state’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, 87, were to retire. Mr. Schiff has positioned himself to jump into a statewide race in the nation’s most populous state, with his hefty campaign war chest and highly recognizable name.As the extremes of his party battle to determine what went wrong with voter turnout programs, digital data-mining and the party’s ideological tilt, Mr. Schiff’s view of the election outcome is pretty straightforward. The 2020 contest, he argued, was a referendum on Mr. Trump, delivered by a historically polarized country. Mr. Biden won the referendum, but Democrats lost House seats they picked up in 2018 where Mr. Trump remained popular.In the election’s wake, he argued that Democrats should follow Mr. Biden’s lead and redouble their focus on the economy, prioritizing job creation, cutting health care costs and putting forward coherent answers to the forces of globalization and automation that have helped income inequality explode and left millions jobless or underemployed.“We are the party of working families, but not all working families recognize that,” he said. “That’s the first challenge.”The second, he said, was addressing the dangerous divergence of Americans’ information streams, which Mr. Schiff argued were reinforcing divisions that prevent the kind of consensus necessary to address the country’s most pressing problems.Mr. Schiff, a member of the moderate New Democrats despite his fiery leadership in the Trump resistance, praised both extremes of the Democratic Caucus. He called Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken progressive whose democratic socialist views have been weaponized by the right, “enormously talented,” suggesting that Democrats had benefited from her work motivating younger voters. He said more moderate members like Representatives Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia had “unlocked the key to winning in really difficult parts of the country.”“We are a big enough party to not only accommodate all of them, but to draw on their talents and their experience,” he said.Mr. Schiff has emerged as one of Ms. Pelosi’s closest and most trusted confidants. Both are Californians who cut their teeth on the intelligence committee and served as appropriators. He is not the only potential dark horse candidate for a top post-Pelosi leadership post. Another prominent Los Angeles-area House member, Representative Karen Bass, is said to harbor similar ambitions if she is not offered a position by Mr. Biden.But as a white man in an increasingly diverse caucus, Mr. Schiff could run into challenges if he tries to ascend the House leadership ranks, at least in the race for the top slot. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus whom many in the party view as the favorite to succeed Ms. Pelosi, would be the first Black speaker or leader of either major party. (Were he to run and win, Mr. Schiff would be the first Jewish speaker.)For now, Mr. Schiff appears to have resigned himself to doing that work from his perch on the Intelligence Committee, where he will play a role in the unglamorous and nonpublic work of rebuilding an intelligence community hollowed out by Mr. Trump.As incoming Democrats must decide whether to pursue retroactive Justice Department investigations into Mr. Trump, his family and his administration, Mr. Schiff made clear the same questions would be before Congress.“All of us in Congress will need to balance the need for accountability with the goals of the new administration,” Mr. Schiff said, “and the necessity of healing and bringing the country together.” More

For months, some of China’s best-known dissidents have served up a striking anomaly: While pushing for democracy and free speech at home, they have supported the re-election of Donald Trump, a president who has disdained democratic norms in the United States, sometimes even mimicking China’s leaders, for example by calling for political opponents to be locked up.Now that Joe Biden has defeated Mr. Trump, this paradox might seem to be of interest only to historians of Chinese thought. In fact, these Chinese liberal thinkers offer a stark warning about the potential direction of U.S. foreign policy and, more so still, the pitfalls facing American society.Many Chinese liberals have expressed enthusiasm for Mr. Trump for so demonstrably ignoring the conventional wisdom of diplomatic engagement with China, in particular the claims that more trade would soften China’s authoritarian politics and that it is better to talk quietly behind closed doors than openly confront China over any disagreements.In some ways this position can be chalked up to the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: For some Chinese liberals, Mr. Trump’s strident opposition to the Chinese Communist Party automatically made him seem like an ally.Now these thinkers and activists are worried because President-elect Biden was at the center of the old U.S. foreign policy establishment for decades. As vice president, for example, Mr. Biden met President Xi Jinping of China on numerous occasions in the hope that what Mr. Biden calls “strategic empathy” could win Mr. Xi’s support for U.S. positions — but the tactic failed to curb China’s growing ambitions in Asia.People like the Hong Kong-based media tycoon Jimmy Lai think a return of the Washington consensus would be a mistake. A fervent supporter of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Mr. Lai is also a staunch Trump supporter.“Biden will try to make progress through trade-offs, but that hasn’t worked in the past,” Mr. Lai told me by phone recently. “Trump has succeeded by playing hardball.”Mr. Lai pointed out, for example, that Mr. Trump had dramatically increased weapons sales to Taiwan, a self-governing island off China’s coast that China claims as its own, a move that could help deter an attack from the mainland. Past U.S. administrations had tiptoed around weapons sales for fear of angering Beijing, arguably weakening Taiwan’s defenses in the process.Yet these diplomatic issues are secondary to what really interests many Chinese liberal intellectuals: the American culture wars, in which some see a reflection of the debates about the limits of free speech in China. Given how robust public discussion is in the United States, the comparison may seem overdrawn. But it speaks to the intensity with which many Chinese thinkers want Western liberal democracies to remain free.The issue of political correctness in particular fascinates them, with many seeing in it uncomfortable echoes of their own experiences in a society where speech is severely constrained. They perceive Mr. Trump as embodying the sort of no-filter approach to free speech that they dream of, while viewing American liberalism as having strayed from its core values.Sun Liping, a leading Chinese sociologist, argued in an essay published last year on WeChat that while political correctness in America began as a way to avoid insulting people and to promote equality, it has helped turn a set of debatable beliefs into an edifice of near dogmas — that immigration, free trade and globalization are unquestionably good; that minorities are almost all victims; that major countries are responsible for setting the world right. Nowadays, Mr. Sun wrote, political correctness is “a burden, a kind of shackle America has placed on itself, a kind of self-inflicted bondage.”Referring to the end of rigid Maoist ideology in the late 1970s, Mr. Sun added that “Trump’s attack on political correctness has a similar significance to the attack on the rigid dogma of the past carried out by the campaign to liberate thought at the beginning of reform and opening period.”Mr. Trump’s defeat in this month’s election has not lessened support from these Chinese liberals. The Tsinghua University sociologist Guo Yuhua recently retweeted a Trump tweet that predicted, “we will win,” adding emojis of a clenched fist and two hands pressed together in thanks. Ms. Guo, a strong advocate for impoverished farmers and detained academics in China, praises Mr. Trump as a realist who didn’t follow the “utopian” policies popular among some on the American left, such as income redistribution.A handful of Chinese liberals disagree that Mr. Trump is a fitting symbol for liberal beliefs. One is the historian Xu Jilin, who in a recent WeChat post called Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 one of the four major examples of the rise of destructive populism over the past century.Another skeptic is the Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, who chides Chinese liberals for being so enamored of free-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek that they mistakenly believe any right-wing U.S. politician is a defender of freedom.“This misunderstanding will not only cost us allies in the fight against totalitarianism, but has already created a confusion of values within the world of Chinese liberals, and may even change the very meaning of ‘liberalism,’” Mr. Zhang wrote in a blog post last month, which was translated by the University of Montreal professor David Ownby on his “Reading the China Dream” website.“If Chinese ‘liberalism’ is opposed to equality, to ‘one man, one vote,’ to the separation of church and state and secularism, and to at least some freedoms (such as gay marriage) for religious reasons, and if they advocate a particular religious belief as a kind of national orthodoxy, then what’s left of liberalism?” he added, referring to Chinese liberals.One answer is provided by the political scientist Yao Lin in an article for The Journal of Contemporary China earlier this year. Mr. Lin wrote that many Chinese liberal intellectuals are victims of what he calls “beaconism”: an idolization of the United States that treats ideas from there as a guiding light to follow. One effect, Mr. Lin warned, is that even as these thinkers fight for human rights, they also reflect colonialist, racist attitudes.Some Chinese liberals sympathized with Mr. Trump’s 2017 policy to stop Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States. In a 2018 discussion about Edmund Burke that appeared in the magazine Open Times, the Chinese constitutional scholar Gao Quanxi justified the immigration ban by arguing that it was meant to defend “the uniqueness of the American people” and oppose “the weakening of American society due to unrestrained pluralism.”Mr. Biden’s presidency is unlikely to dampen many Chinese liberals’ support for American conservatism.Many criticize left-leaning U.S. politicians such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Retweeting a video mash of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez speaking with rhetorical flourishes, Ms. Guo commented, “it seems we’ve seen something like this before in China.” She was alluding to the Cultural Revolution.These fierce debates among scholars point to China’s febrile intellectual landscape. They also suggest that it may be easier for Washington to calibrate a new foreign policy toward Beijing than to engage with the people the Biden administration wants to help the most: China’s dissidents and liberal intellectuals.Ian Johnson, a 2020-21 grantee of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Public Scholars program, is the author, most recently, of “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.” @iandenisjohnsonThe 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

Two weeks after Election Day, New York State was still counting hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots on Tuesday at a sluggish pace that some officials attributed to bureaucratic dysfunction and arcane state laws.Whatever the cause, New York was sure to be among the last states, if not the last, to finish counting votes, and even some officials in charge of the process acknowledged that the delay was an embarrassment.And while attention remained focused on battleground states where mail-in ballots helped clinch the election for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., New York, a Democratic stronghold that was called for Mr. Biden almost immediately after polls closed, had mostly dodged national scrutiny for its lagging performance.“If we were a swing state in this presidential election, we would be getting ridiculed across the world right now,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy leader of the Democratic majority. “Florida, with all its terrible history of vote counting, manages to count votes before and on Election Day, even if they were mailed in.”Still, there has been notable fallout from the slow counting in New York. An initial perception, based on Election Day returns, that Republicans had won many down-ballot races has faded as more absentee ballots, which lean Democratic, are counted, cutting into their leads.The outstanding votes will play a crucial role in several contests that had not been called as of Tuesday.In Central New York, the race between Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a Democrat, and Claudia Tenney, a former Republican congresswoman vying to reclaim her seat, remained too close to call.In the State Senate, where Democrats hope to secure a supermajority, results still were not final in key races in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island, where Democratic incumbents faced strong Republican challengers.The number of votes still to be counted, especially in New York City, where Democrats dominate, was also bound to boost Mr. Biden’s already-wide margin in the national popular vote.Mr. Gianaris introduced legislation last week that is meant to expedite the vote-counting process in future elections, especially as New York considers expanding absentee voting to all voters permanently, not confining it to circumstances like those created by the pandemic.The bill would revise state law to allow election officials to open and count absentee ballots beginning on Election Day. This year, local boards did not begin to open and count absentee ballots until seven days after Election Day, and some did not start until Monday, nearly two weeks after voters went to the polls.The challenges extended to getting a precise figure for how many votes were yet to be counted. Nearly 6.8 million votes, most of them cast in person, had been tallied by Tuesday, and one research firm estimated that roughly two million ballots — most of them absentee, but also some military, overseas and provisional ballots — could still be outstanding.To many people, the protracted count was reminiscent of what happened during the June primaries, when two congressional races were not decided until six weeks after Election Day as officials struggled to handle an avalanche of absentee ballots.Even with final results beginning to trickle in for some races, local election boards have until Nov. 28 to report official counts to the state Board of Elections, meaning the tallying could drag on for more than a week in some counties.“I’ve been raising that question because I want to monitor to make sure that everybody is going to be done by Thanksgiving,” said Douglas A. Kellner, a co-chair of the state Board of Elections.Officials in Onondaga County, which includes Syracuse, have already said they will miss the Nov. 28 deadline. The ballot count there was postponed until after Thanksgiving after eight election workers tested positive for coronavirus.The pandemic forced election officials in New York to adapt on the fly as the state offered all voters the option of voting by absentee ballot in an effort to reduce crowding at polling sites because of the coronavirus. It was a major change for a state that does not have a robust vote-by-mail system like other states where voting by mail is more popular.Although accustomed to voting in person, New Yorkers were receptive to the change: More than 1.9 million voters, or about 14 percent of all those who are registered to vote in the state, returned absentee ballots for the presidential election. That strained local boards, many of which are already understaffed and underfinanced.The sheer number of ballots does not tell the entire story.New York is one of a few states where a voter can mail in an absentee ballot, but cast a vote later in person. In New York City, the local election board sent as many as 100,000 voters in Brooklyn absentee ballot packages that contained incorrect names and addresses to voters. Fears that absentee ballots would not be counted pushed people to the polls.An in-person vote nullifies an absentee ballot so that a vote is not counted twice, but ensuring that a voter did not cast two ballots can take a few days.Mr. Gianaris’s bill would address that by amending state law to count only the first ballot cast by a voter, not the last. That would allow boards begin processing, but not opening, absentee ballots before Election Day, as other states do. Under the bill, election officials could begin opening ballots three hours before polls close on election night.Election boards currently have plenty of leeway to decide when to open absentee ballots as long as they begin to do so no later than 14 days after Election Day, as required under state law. Most opted to begin their counts on Nov. 10, a week after Election Day and also the last day on which they could receive an absentee ballot postmarked by Election Day.The proposed changes, Democratic lawmakers hope, could allow New York to finalize election results more quickly after polls close.Improving how officials handle absentee ballots will be crucial if New York adopts what is known as no-excuse absentee voting, which allows any voter to request an absentee ballot without providing an excuse.Had there not been a pandemic this year, a voter would have had to choose from a narrow set of reasons, including having a disability or being away from home, to cast a ballot by mail. Democratic lawmakers hope to place a constitutional amendment calling for no-excuse absentee voting on the ballot as a statewide referendum next November.The counting was further delayed this year by campaigns that objected to the validity of ballots in what Mr. Kellner described as “a very slow and arduous process.” The legislation proposed by Mr. Gianaris, Mr. Kellner said, would effectively move the objections process up so that it begins before Election Day.Despite the long wait for final tallies, even those who favor reforming the state’s voting system urged patience given the unprecedented pressure the pandemic has placed on election officials.“New York voters should understand that we will not know the results of many close races until some weeks later,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group. ”And that is not the death of democracy, but a sign of life.”Annie Daniel contributed research. More

The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias More

President Trump on Tuesday night fired his administration’s most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election, Christopher Krebs, who had systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s false declarations in recent days that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and software glitches that changed millions of votes.The announcement came via Twitter, the same way Mr. Trump fired his defense secretary a week ago and has dismissed other officials throughout his presidency. Mr. Trump seemed set off by a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security late last week, the product of a broad committee overseeing the elections, that declared the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate,” Mr. Trump wrote a little after 7 p.m., “in that there were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.” He said Mr. Krebs “has been terminated” as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a post to which Mr. Trump himself had appointed him.Mr. Krebs, 43, a former Microsoft executive, has been hailed in recent days for his two years spent preparing the states for the challenges of the vote, hardening systems against Russian interference and setting up a “rumor control” website to guard against disinformation. The foreign interference so many feared never materialized; instead, the disinformation ultimately came from the White House.The firing stirred an immediate backlash in the national security community and on Capitol Hill.“Of all the things this president has done, this is the worst,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who led a commission on improving cyberdefenses. “To strike at the heart of the democratic system is beyond anything we have seen from any politician.”He said Mr. Krebs was one of the most competent people he had met in the government. “In this administration, the surest way to get fired is to do your job,” Mr. King said.Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, issued a statement calling Mr. Krebs “a dedicated public servant who has done a remarkable job during a challenging time.”“I’m grateful for all Chris has done,” Mr. Burr said.Only two weeks ago, on Election Day, Mr. Krebs’s boss, Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, had praised Mr. Krebs’s work, including the “rumor control” effort. But behind-the-scenes efforts by some administration officials to keep Mr. Trump from firing Mr. Krebs apparently failed.Mr. Krebs started telling colleagues he expected to be fired after the election as early as June, when the president started claiming that mail-in voting would be “rigged.”The refusal by Mr. Krebs and his agency to back up the president’s claims put him on a list of disloyal officials, Mr. Krebs believed, that included Mark T. Esper, who was fired as secretary of defense shortly after the election; Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director; and Gina Haspel, the director of the C.I.A. Mr. Wray and Ms. Haspel remain in their jobs.In recent weeks, Mr. Krebs drew the president’s ire again with his refusal to echo Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories about software glitches and dead people voting. Quite the contrary: Within hours of Mr. Trump tweeting false reports that millions of Trump votes were deleted, Mr. Krebs joined election officials in calling the election “the most secure in American history.”As of Tuesday, he was still scheduling public speaking engagements on behalf of his agency. On Wednesday, he was due to participate in two, including a fireside chat on “Foreign Interference and Election Meddling.”Mr. Krebs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But after his termination, he tweeted from his personal account: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomrorow. #Protect2020.”Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency had nothing to add to the president’s tweet.Mr. Krebs had told friends he was planning to leave government after Mr. Trump’s term. Mr. Krebs has five young children and was running one of the fastest-growing agencies in the federal government, with a broad mandate to secure power plants, water systems and networks that were subject to relentless cyberattacks by criminals and foreign states. Until recently, members of the Trump administration often cited the agency’s progress and its innovations, as did some prominent Democrats. Last week, a parade of Silicon Valley executives praised his work in securing the election.The day before the election, he had given briefings every few hours, describing how the usual tribulations of the day were being dealt with, and squelching rumors. “It’s just another Tuesday on the internet,” he said with a shrug when asked about some of the misinformation.Many in the administration believed that Mr. Trump, while angered, would not actually fire him — it would only highlight how the president’s claims were being contradicted by his own department.And Mr. Krebs himself kept turning out announcements over the weekend, including a brief celebration of the second anniversary of his agency: He included a photograph of homeland security officials, himself included, crowded behind Mr. Trump’s desk as he signed legislation. Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush and a Republican, called the firing of Mr. Krebs “nothing more than Trump’s personal vindictiveness.”“He’s done everything you would want a senior official at D.H.S. to do,” Mr. Chertoff said. “As far as I’m concerned, this firing is a badge of honor for Chris Krebs.”Even if he were invited to return in President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration, Mr. Krebs has told colleagues he would most likely demur. Not out of politics, but because, he said, he enjoyed the freedom of public speaking and engaging with the news media and feared that Mr. Biden’s administration, like President Barack Obama’s before it, would keep a tighter lid on officials.Before he was fired Tuesday, Mr. Krebs managed to engage with the public once more, firing off a pointed retweet aimed at the president: “Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president,” said the original tweet from David Becker, an election expert. “These fantasies have been debunked many times.”Julian Barnes and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting. More