Elections

A prominent electoral map on the website of Everylegalvote.com, a self-described fraud-buster, conveyed an alternate reality on Monday.Despite the latest election results showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. winning a decisive 306 votes in the Electoral College compared with 232 for President Trump, the site’s map showed Mr. Trump as the winner of the election.Mr. Trump had received 232 votes compared with 214 for Mr. Biden, according to the site’s map, which was flecked with orange to connote states where it claimed that voter fraud had been detected. Click on a tab saying “without voter fraud,” and Mr. Trump’s vote suddenly leapt to 318 against Mr. Biden’s 220.As President Trump refuses to concede the election, a lot of internet traffic is being directed to this slickly produced website channeling the president’s mix of falsehoods, conspiracy theories and baseless accusations of voter fraud.The website has promoted the false narrative that mail-in ballots were used to steal the election from Mr. Trump. It has posited that thousands of dead people voted in Michigan when they did not. It has also posted content from a source with links to QAnon, the elaborate conspiracy movement that falsely claims the existence of a Satan-worshipping pedophile cabal run by senior Democrats, who are plotting against Mr. Trump. QAnon believers had predicted that Mr. Trump would easily win the election.“They are attempting to install Joe Biden as president without due process of law and order,” the site says, citing the media, “certain elected officials” and people in positions of power, both in the United States and in other countries.A review of Everylegalvote.com shows an attempt to delegitimize the election under a veneer of empiricism by drawing on murky and debunked theories. The site did not respond to a request for comment.Everylegalvote.com lists its sponsors and financial backers as a coalition of right-wing groups including Allied Security Operations Group, the Economic War Room, and Liberty Center for God and Country.An office manager at Allied Security Operations Group, who declined to give her name, said by phone that the group was a private Dallas-based cybersecurity firm. She said the issue of voter fraud was an area of specialty of the company’s chief financial officer, Russell Ramsland, a businessman who ran for Congress in Texas as a Republican in 2016 and was defeated in the primary. According to Mr. Ramsland’s LinkedIn profile, he has an M.B.A. from Harvard.The Economic War Room listed on Everylegalvote.com’s website appears to refer to the “Economic War Room With Kevin Freeman,” a weekly television financial news show. Mr. Freeman was not immediately available for comment.Mr. Freeman is described on Economic War Room’s website as “one of the world’s leading experts on the issues of economic warfare and financial terrorism.” He is also listed as a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank that has been designated as a hate group with anti-Muslim ideology by the Southern Poverty Law Center.Last year, Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., came under criticism after agreeing to host an event by the group.In a broadcast in the days after the election, which was posted on Economic War Room’s website, Mr. Freeman called the election “one of the most contested elections in history.” “The left is out for blood and total victory,” he said.He predicted a violent insurrection by the “far left” and said it wanted to tear down God and family and install a nanny state. As evidence, he cited attempts in states like California to curtail family gatherings during Thanksgiving and make people wear masks in between bites of turkey.Liberty Center for God and Country, the site’s other backer, said it aimed to “promote and protect our God-given, unalienable Constitutional rights and liberties” and to “support legal efforts that protect these liberties.” It recently posted on its website a request by President Trump for every registered voter to send him a handwritten letter, demanding “a full election audit of all 50 states.” The group was not immediately available for comment.Everylegalvote.com has not shied away from promoting misinformation from dubious sources.After President Trump made baseless claims that Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software that local governments use to help run their elections, had software glitches that changed voting tallies in key states, the site posted a Twitter thread on the software maker by Ron Watkins, who has been part of QAnon’s inner circle.In his thread, Mr. Watkins posited that local information technology “guys” could have hacked into the system to alter election results.A group of federal, state and local election officials have said “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised. More

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A lawyer fighting for Donald Trump in the US president’s attempt to overturn defeat by Joe Biden said shortly after election day that “no bombshells” would derail the Democrat’s victory, and “the litigation will not work”.
Trump has not conceded to Biden, despite losing the electoral college 306-232 and trailing by 5.5m ballots in the popular vote. While the president seeks redress in the courts in multiple states, the lack of a concession is delaying transition work, with detrimental effects for national security and the fight against Covid-19.
Marc Scaringi, 51 and from Harrisburg, was retained by the Trump campaign on Monday, to replace attorneys who dropped out of the attempt to overturn the result in Pennsylvania, where Biden won by about 70,000 votes.
Scaringi has previously run for a Republican Senate nomination and volunteered for the Trump campaign. On election day, he posted to Twitter a picture of people watching results in Washington DC, with the comment: “Biden’s people ready for a coup if he loses.”
He also has his own conservative talkshow on iHeartRadio. Broadcasting on 7 November, four days after election day and shortly after Pennsylvania put Biden over the top, he said: “In my opinion, there really are no bombshells that are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency, including these lawsuits.
“I’ve been saying since Wednesday morning that Biden would win.”
He also said that though some Trump legal challenges “had merit … at the end of the day, in my view, the litigation will not work. It will not reverse this election.”
On Saturday 14 November, Scaringi said it was “up to the Trump lawyers to get some good results in these lawsuits to try to flip the vote count”.
On Monday, he was retained in that effort. Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Trump, said the move to retain local counsel was “consistent with routine managing of complex litigation”.
The judge in the Pennsylvania case, however, denied Scaringi’s request for a delay to a hearing set for Tuesday afternoon, at which the state will attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, said a blogpost on Scaringi’s law firm website entitled “How President-Elect Joe Biden’s Plan Could Affect Your Taxes” appeared to have been taken down. More

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpSAD, I just heard that the ILLEGALS who built the White House did VERY SUBPAR work! Very reliable people are saying the West Wing could COLLAPSE any day! @seanhannity. So First Lady Melania & I will be temporarily moving out so we won’t be in way of renovation …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… which will add INCREDIBLE five-story addition to First Family’s living quarters! Project was estimated to cost billions. They said no way a developer could do it for a PENNY LESS that $1.5 BILLION. But I negotiated a …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… BEAUTIFUL deal with a INCREDIBLE developer who will do the WHOLE project for $1.2 billion, a TREMENDOUS Bargain! So I am HONORED to announce that the Trump Corp. will begin work on January 20, and should be done by …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… end of 2024 at the LATEST. In the meantime, VERY LOW-IQ tenant will occupy the White House during renovation, spending most of the time in the BASEMENT struggling to put simple sentences together. We have the BEST workers who will make sure the basement dweller …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… stays out the way and doesn’t interfere with the daily work, which I’ll be directing from a UNBELIEVABLE sublet that HUGELY SUCCESSFUL friends found for me in walking distance from the Kremlin. I will also be overseeing construction of a PHENOMENAL golf course on outskirts of …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… sunny Pyongyang. Such a clean city, no HUGE rats and ANTIFA SCUM like in Philadelphia. Sad to say, but no city on the WHOLE planet is as STUPID and FAILED as Philadelphia except for maybe Chicago and Detroit and Atlanta, which are all run by …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… the same Dopey Democrats who forced police to give their guns to TERRORISTS and brought in HUGE caravans of rapists and CORPSES from HONDURAS to vote in election that I won with more …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… votes than VERY OVERRATED George Washington and HIGH-TAX Abraham Lincoln COMBINED. Even with the Chinese “virus”, which people tell me I beat in RECORD TIME, I won every state and also carried …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… Greenland, Poland, Hungary AND Turkey, first president in HISTORY to sweep former Soviet RED STATES. But FAKE news won’t report. FOX now run by Cuckoo Chris Wallace, worse than Psycho Joe Scarborough. Journalists are very UNWASHED, they don’t report that …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… Jihadist Pelosi and Hunter Biden printed BILLIONS of FAKE ballots in Georgia FIVE DAYS AFTER QAnon declared me the winner. And these LYING DUMMIES ask for a concession??? If they weren’t so STUPID & DISHONEST, they’d know …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… a concession is where you buy GREASY hot dogs from ILLEGAL vendors. So our historic VICTORY celebration with GREAT ice cream & the BEST TANKS will have to wait until my return to the White House, which will …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… be BIGGER and WHITER than ever! In the meantime, I will also be tweeting my autobiography, HUGE!!!!. People say it will SELL 1000x more than BORING Barack’s DOESN’T MATTER “memoir.” Very mediocre reviews @LimbaughBookReview! KAGA!! Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, published in May by Hachette. He is also a contributing opinion writer for Guardian US
Nancy Pick is a writer based in western Massachusetts More

Democrats have long dreamed of turning Georgia blue, with young voters and nonwhite voters leading a progressive charge. Now, a blue Georgia is a reality, but with a winning coalition that might have stunned the party not that long ago. Georgia presidential results by precinct 2020 vote margin Joe Biden put Georgia in the Democratic […] More

BOZEMAN, Mont. — During the recent U.S. Senate race in Montana — the most expensive in state history — those scamps at the Lincoln Project spent more than $2.5 million trying to help Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock usurp the incumbent Republican Steve Daines. Did their investment pay off? Definitely — assuming it was a sneaky plot to bankroll trail maintenance at Yellowstone.Mr. Bullock — the current governor — and all the other Montana Democrats running statewide were, as a Billings Gazette headline put it, “trounced.” When I heard a TV pundit mention that the party will spend the next few years “in the wilderness,” it occurred to me that given Montanans’ affection for the backcountry we need a more regionally appropriate figurative sphere of exile — perhaps “North Dakota”?The fact that moderate, experienced Democratic candidates from Governor Bullock on down won urban precincts in Butte, Bozeman and Missoula but could not overcome this election’s sky-high rural turnout confirms senior Senator Jon Tester’s admonition in his recent memoir, “Grounded,” warning his fellow Democrats that in rural America, “We are getting whupped in the messaging war.”The messages that do seem to work are getting more disturbing and less true. I wonder how many voters fell for Mr. Daines’s darkest campaign ad, in which the Wibaux County sheriff accused Mr. Bullock of being a tool of the “liberal mob” and “left-wing radicals” who will “defund our police, erase our history and turn America into a socialist country.”The closest the strait-laced Mr. Bullock has ever gotten to a liberal mob was that time he and Mr. Tester filmed themselves enjoying the state’s lack of a sales tax at the drive through of a Taco John’s. And in fact, during the last legislative session, Governor Bullock signed into law a Republican bill to increase the lodging tax to pay for a new history museum, the Montana Heritage Center, and attended its groundbreaking ceremony in September. Yet I suspect “erase our history” is a nativist, pro-Confederate dog whistle that indicates how political rhetoric has been nationalized here in the former Montana Territory, designated by Abraham Lincoln in 1864.Further south in the mountain time zone, John Hickenlooper of Colorado defeated the Republican Senator Cory Gardner. Though Mr. Bullock was thwarted and Mr. Hickenlooper has yet to be sworn in, they are nevertheless already the most accomplished conservation senators of this century. Panicked by the threat posed to a Republican-controlled Senate by this pair of mild-mannered Rocky Mountain dads, in August Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump rushed into law the Great American Outdoors Act.Public lands account for more than a third of Colorado and Montana. As Governor Bullock once bellowed to a raucous rally in Helena’s capitol rotunda, “Whether you’re a bird hunter or a bird watcher, each and every one of us equally owns these public lands!”The Great American Outdoors Act was a frantic attempt to fluff up the ecological credentials of Senators Gardner and Daines to appeal to the Mountain West’s constituency of independents, woodsy conservatives and the outdoor recreation work force, which provides Montana more than 71,000 jobs. Thus a coal-monger president who gutted the Bears Ears National Monument and a U.S. Senate majority leader with a lifetime score of 7 percent from the League of Conservation Voters made the dreams of generations of tree-huggers come true.The Outdoors Act earmarks $9.5 billion to address the age-old maintenance backlogs in national parks and other public lands. If Americans no longer share our supposedly shared ideals, we still have joint custody of the Everglades and Glacier Bay, Mesa Verde and the Angel Island immigration station, the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial and Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park.This law also permanently and fully finances the Land and Water Conservation Fund, founded during Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1964, at $900 million per year. The Conservation Fund has supported 40,000 projects assisting parks, coastlines, monuments, deserts, forests, wetlands and wildlife in every county in the United States. It is subsidized not by taxpayers but primarily by fossil fuel companies engaged in offshore oil and gas drilling. But before the Outdoors Act, it rarely received what it was owed, partly because senators like Mr. Daines voted against it.That the Outdoors Act was a cynical election year ruse to prop up Mr. Trump’s senatorial groupies was made obvious this month when the Interior Department blew the deadline to follow through on Outdoors Act projects for the coming year and ordered the Conservation Fund to seek local approval of land purchases, endangering, as Montana Public Radio reported, $13 million earmarked for Montana “that would protect hunting and other recreation land along the Blackfoot River” and “open up over 9,000 acres of land near the Musselshell River.”Like all his other cabinet officials, a daunting to-do list awaits Mr. Biden’s interior secretary.Two days before Mr. Biden was proclaimed president-elect, Senator Daines texted his supporters to kick in $5 to pay for President Trump’s legal shenanigans to undermine the continuing vote count because “Dems are stealing the election.”I want to do my part to help Joe Biden bring the country back together, but on the other hand I’m a smart aleck who’s stuck with six more years of Senator Daines, my new state auditor is a convicted poacher and I refer to my governor-elect, Greg Gianforte, who famously pleaded guilty to assaulting a journalist, as “Buffy the Reporter Slayer.”When Mr. Gianforte — Mr. Daines’s old boss at a Bozeman software firm — was running for Montana’s lone House seat in 2017, Freeman E. Robinson of Big Arm, a town on Flathead Lake, wrote a letter to the Flathead Beacon about reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” as a boy and how Mr. Gianforte exemplified the Montana value of self-reliance by starting his own successful business (which he sold to Oracle in 2011 for $1.5 billion).At Bozeman High School, which is also Mr. Daines’s alma mater, when my English teacher read aloud from Emerson’s essay, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” I looked over at the class’s other beatnik and we both grinned because an illustrious dead New Englander had just given us permission to go forth and live lives of bohemian adventure. And I wanted to light out and see the world precisely because I wanted to encounter strangers who do not think like me.Based on the recent Montana election results I didn’t need to schlep all the way to Tibet. I should just spend a week hanging around exotic Richland County, where Mr. Daines beat Mr. Bullock by 62 points. And I would start by asking the people of Sidney or Fairview the icebreaker question that almost never fails: What’s your favorite national park?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

With control of the Senate at stake, the Jan. 5 runoff for Georgia’s two Senate seats has become the political focal point of the nation. Two Republican incumbents, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are facing runoffs against well-funded Democratic opponents.If the victory goes to those two Democrats — Jon Ossoff facing Mr. Perdue, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock facing Ms. Loeffler — control of the Senate will become evenly split, 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tiebreaking vote.National interest in the election is so high that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, has warned out-of-staters that it is a felony to relocate temporarily to Georgia for the sole purpose of voting in the runoff, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.For those who are eligible to vote, here are the rules:When is the voter registration deadline?The deadline for registering to vote in the Georgia runoff is Dec. 7. Georgia’s voter registration portal asks for a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number. Interested residents may register by clicking here.How can voters obtain an absentee ballot?Absentee ballots will not be automatically mailed to voters, but it’s not hard to request one. Residents can request one from their county registrar’s office by clicking here and locating their county or by following this link. So far, 687,528 absentee ballots have been requested statewide.In Georgia’s general election this month, a record number of people — more than 1.3 million — voted by absentee ballot, a number attributed to the coronavirus, which election officials expect will drive up absentee voting during the runoff as well.When will absentee ballots arrive?Absentee ballots will be mailed beginning Nov. 18. Voters may track the status of their absentee ballot request by clicking here.How do Georgians vote by mail?Georgia voters can follow the instructions included on their ballots to return them by mail. The U.S. Postal Service recommends allowing seven days for ballots to be received by elections officials, so voters should return theirs as quickly as possible to make sure they arrive by Jan. 5.Will drop boxes be available?Yes. Just as in the November general election, Georgia election officials will place secure drop boxes at locations in their counties where voters can return completed ballots. The deadline for submitting ballots is 7 p.m. on Jan. 5.Can I vote early in person?Yes. In-person voting in Georgia begins Dec. 14. Voters can check the early-voting locations in their counties on this site. A record number of Georgians — nearly 2.7 million — cast early, in-person votes for the Nov. 3 general election.Can I vote on Election Day?As always, polls will be open on Election Day, Jan. 5. Voters can check the location of their precincts at this site. More

As ballots were counted on Election Day, many people were quick to observe that Latinos went for President Trump in 2020.It’s true that in places like Miami-Dade County in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Latinos were significantly less enthusiastic about Joe Biden than they were about Hillary Clinton. But as someone who has worked to organize Latinos for years, I know this rightward shift is hardly the whole story of what happened this election.The numbers already show that Latinos were a major factor in Democratic victories in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. And in cities where Black voters broke hard for Mr. Biden, Latinos helped expand the margins, going 75 percent for him in Philadelphia, 77 percent in Milwaukee and 75 percent in Gwinnett County, Ga., according to exit polling from U.C.L.A.’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.The varied results in areas with high Latino density, like Maricopa County, Ariz.; Miami-Dade County; and the Rio Grande Valley simply show that Latinos are not monolithic. Together, these outcomes are a window into the future of a growing Latino electorate. And they offer a warning sign to the Democratic Party: Don’t expect Latinos to be reliably blue if we cannot rely on you.Let’s start with Arizona. From 2000 to 2010, legislative bills and ballot initiatives took aim at immigrants in general and Latinos in particular, culminating with the passage of S.B. 1070, the “show us your papers” bill. In 2011, voters recalled State Senator Russell Pearce, its architect. In 2016, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was defeated at the polls.And in 2020, Arizona voters chose Joe Biden, the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1996. According to the polling organization Latino Decisions, Latinos cast about 600,000 votes in Arizona — 17 percent of the state’s total ballots. An overwhelming majority of Latinos voted blue in key areas: roughly 75 percent in Maricopa County, 80 percent in Pima County and 74 percent in Yuma County. This election, a state that is home to the politics of Barry Goldwater, the Minutemen border vigilantes and modern-day chain gangs brought some hope to the rest of the country.Demographic changes have led to projections that Arizona would turn blue, but without organizers mobilizing voters and engaging Latinos in continuing campaigns, the shift would not have happened at this pace and scale. Local organizations and labor unions have also contributed to this shift in Nevada and Colorado, and they are critical to maintaining these advantages moving forward.Since 2010, I have been part of organizing efforts in Arizona in response to anti-immigrant, racist laws. My fellow organizers and I recognized that the gaps in Latino infrastructure we saw in Arizona also existed across the country, so we formed Mijente, a national effort to build a network of organizations and change-makers across Latino communities. Mijente is one of several organizations doing Latino voter mobilization nationally; others include United We Dream Action, Mi Familia Vota, Poder Latinx and Voto Latino.This election, Mijente started the Fuera Trump campaign to mobilize Latinos to defeat Donald Trump through phone and text banking, digital content and coronavirus-safe door-knocking campaigns in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.When we knocked on doors in Latino neighborhoods, people told us over and over that they’d never been contacted before. They often lacked basic information about the primary election process and how to vote by mail. Organizations tried to fill the gaps, stave off voter suppression efforts and influence policy. It was a lot of ground to cover, and we were largely doing it on our own.Meanwhile, the Republican Party was looking to peel off voters in traditionally Democratic areas. This brings us to Texas and Florida. Latinos have reliably voted Democratic in the Rio Grande Valley and Miami-Dade County. So what happened in this election?Republicans invested early, tailored their message and enlisted local residents as ambassadors of the party. This level of engagement and outreach was also a big part of the Bernie Sanders campaign during the Democratic primaries.But too often in political campaigns, communities of color are prioritized late, if at all. Many people feel abandoned by the Democratic Party, and this was exploited by Republicans’ outreach in these districts. Their focus on Mr. Trump’s record on the economy resonated in economically depressed areas. Directly questioning what Democrats have done for reliable voters also hit home. And they sought to put socialism on the ballot by depicting Mr. Biden and the Democratic platform as socialist.Latino voters cite the economy, health care, education, climate and immigration as top-line issues. Politicians hoping to connect with Latino voters must make the case for how their policy solutions will reach communities that have been historically marginalized or barred from benefiting from their policies. A pitch to voters that simply posits that Democrats are not as racist as Republicans is not good enough to get people to vote, much less to volunteer or donate.Couple this with the huge Spanish-language disinformation campaigns that matched the scale of Kremlin-directed efforts in 2016 and you get a clearer picture of what happened.This vicious cycle of writing off Latinos as infrequent voters — and then blaming us for election outcomes and using that to justify inaction on issues that matter to us — must end. The story of Latinos in this election is complicated, as is the story of Latinos in the United States over all. Many continue to ask if this umbrella term can actually hold the diversity and difference of people coming from Latin America. From a power-building standpoint the reality is that politics is a game of addition, of building bridges and alliances. Although we may see profound differences among ourselves, our adversaries see us all as the same: a threat.Latinos are a multinational, multiracial and multiethnic group that has a history of working together for justice, from the barrios to the ballot box — of organizing independent of the party system as well as within it. Latinos can push the Democratic Party to do better, but it’s up to us to realize the potential power of our communities.This can be done with an emphasis on pluralism and respecting what is unique across race, ethnicity, language and the many places Latinos call home. It comes from prioritizing tangible change over partisanship. This is not unlike what Democrats have to do to maintain unity among the diverse electorate that has defeated President Trump.It is those people, the counted out and the overlooked, the ones who often get the raw deal who helped win this election, who turned up in record numbers during a pandemic that has decimated our communities. A diverse multiracial coalition just fought to save democracy knowing that the systems in place have often functioned precisely to exclude us — as Black people, women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants, Indigenous people, Asians and Latinos.Our choice in this election went beyond candidates. We chose each other. We chose to have a fighting chance. Our work is not done, and core to that work is continuing to choose each other. Our parties and elected leaders must take heed and do the same.Marisa Franco (@marisa_franco) is a community organizer and a co-founder of the Latino grass-roots group Mijente.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