Elections

Florida’s top election official is facing accusations of voter suppression after two last-minute moves critics say will lead to intimidation and confusion.Alarm bells went off last week after the office of Florida’s secretary of state, Laurel Lee, abruptly notified election officials the state was beginning to flag voters for potential removal from the voter rolls if they owed money related to a felony conviction. In a second letter, the state offered an extremely restrictive view on how localities needed to operate ballot drop boxes, which voters are increasingly turning to this year amid United States Postal Service delays.Both notices threaten confusion and chaos in one of the most important swing states in the 2020 election. Mail-in voting started weeks ago and in-person early voting started on Monday. Polls show an extremely tight race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Florida, a state where elections are routinely decided by just thousands of votes.‘This is just to create fearmongering’In 2018, Florida voters repealed the state’s longstanding lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions, a move estimated to affect up to 1.4 million people. But Republicans in the state legislature quickly undercut the reform by passing a law in 2019 that requires people to repay all financial obligations associated with their sentence before they can vote again. Civil rights groups sued the state over the measure, saying it amounted to an unlawful tax on the right to vote. A federal appeals court upheld the law in September, saying Florida did not even have to tell people how much they owed before they could vote.Florida does not have a centralized system for keeping track of how much people with felony convictions owe and it can be nearly impossible for even trained officials to figure it out. And under state law, no one can be removed ahead of the November election – state law gives local election officials seven days to notify a voter and then gives the voter 30 days to respond.Still, critics are worried that voters with felony convictions could receive notices suggesting they are ineligible to vote, dissuading them from casting votes, even though they are legally entitled to do so.“If you’re not able to put a system together to let people know what they owe, how can we even trust that you have any kind of legitimate system to determine whether people should be taken off of the roster,” said Desmond Meade, the executive director of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), an advocacy group for people with felony convictions. He was concerned the state would wrongly flag people who were eligible to vote because they had been granted clemency, even though they still owed money to the state. More

Play Video

10:44

After winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised to deliver new jobs and economic prosperity to Youngstown, Ohio, a city suffering from decades of decline. But four years on those promises never manifested. Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone meet residents who lost their jobs and had their families split by economic necessity, and witness how the demise of the city’s only newspaper made it harder to hold politicians accountable for their failures
More from the Anywhere but Washington series:
Civil rights and QAnon candidates: the fight for facts in Georgia – video
Battle for the suburbs: can Joe Biden flip Texas? – video
Troubled Florida, divided America: will Donald Trump hold this vital swing state? – video

Topics

US elections 2020

Anywhere but Washington

Ohio

Donald Trump

Joe Biden

US politics More

More Than a Vote, the collective of athletes headlined by the basketball star LeBron James, on Wednesday will introduce its final political push before Election Day, a rapid response and advertisement operation meant to combat the spread of misinformation among younger Black voters.The initiative, which is a collaboration with the political group Win Black and includes some celebrity partners, will seek to educate younger Black voters on how to spot false political statements spreading on social media. The goal is to provide advice that culminates in young people making a plan to vote — either by absentee ballot or in person.Called “Under Review,” the effort will be featured on Snapchat through Election Day, and will include videos from celebrities and activists like Desus and Mero, Jemele Hill and the athletes involved in More Than a Vote.It comes after the group has invested in recruiting more than 40,000 poll workers, helping formerly incarcerated people regain their voting rights and aiding the push for N.B.A. arenas to be converted into polling locations.In a statement, the co-founders of Win Black said the videos would take on political misinformation targeted at suppressing the Black vote, a problem that federal agencies identified in the 2016 presidential election.“Harmful disinformation is being weaponized to block the voices and votes of Black Americans — but we have the power to stop it,” said the co-founders, Andre Banks and Ashley Bryant. “Through this partnership, Under Review will urgently flood the zone with the facts we need to counter the targeted attacks coming from bad actors at home and abroad.”In a phone interview with The New York Times, Mr. James discussed the importance of voting, and how he sees his evolving role as both an athlete and a social activist. Mr. James, who as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers recently won his fourth N.B.A. championship, framed off-the-court activism as a key part of how he views his legacy. More

Lately, I have been putting an embarrassing amount of thought into notions like jinxes and knocking on wood. The polls for Joe Biden look good, but in 2020, any hint of optimism feels dangerously naïve, and my brain has been working overtime in search of potential doom.I have become consumed with an alarming possibility: that neither the polls nor the actual outcome of the election really matter, because to a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point.If I sound jumpy, it’s because I spent a couple of hours recently chatting with Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Donovan is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation — the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society.Donovan’s research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation.This week, Donovan’s team published “The Media Manipulation Casebook,” a searchable online database of their research. It makes for grim reading — an accounting of the many failures of journalists, media companies, tech companies, policymakers, law enforcement officials and the national security establishment to anticipate and counteract the liars who seek to dupe us. Armed with these investigations, Donovan hopes we can all do better.I hope she’s right. But studying her work also got me wondering whether we’re too late. Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome. Every day I grow more fearful that the number of those Americans will be large enough to imperil our nation’s capacity to function as a cohesive society.“I’m worried about political violence,” Donovan told me. America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands. Donovan told me she fears that “people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.”Media manipulation is a fairly novel area of research. It was only when Donald Trump won the White House by hitting it big with right-wing online subcultures — and after internet-mobilized authoritarians around the world pulled similar tricks — that serious scholars began to take notice.The research has made a difference. In the 2016 election, tech companies and the mainstream media were often blind to the ways that right-wing groups, including white supremacists, were using bots, memes and other tricks of social media to “hack” the public’s attention, as the researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis documented in 2017.But the war since has been one of attrition. Propagandists keep discovering new ways to spread misinformation; researchers like Donovan and her colleagues keep sussing them out, and, usually quite late, media and tech companies move to fix the flaws — by which time the bad guys have moved on to some other way of spreading untruths.While the media ecosystem has wised up in some ways: Note how the story supposedly revealing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop landed with a splat last week, quite different from the breathlessly irresponsible reporting on the Democrats’ hacked emails in 2016. But our society remains profoundly susceptible to mendacity.Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions — a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. It’s often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Trump last week — as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Trump is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites.But that undersells QAnon’s danger. To people who have been “Q-pilled,” QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the “deep state” and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.“We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down,” Donovan said of QAnon. It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.Facebook and YouTube this month launched new efforts to take down QAnon content, but Q adherents have often managed to evade deplatforming by softening and readjusting their messages. Recently, for instance, QAnon has adopted slogans like “Save the Children” and “Child Lives Matter,” and it seems to be appealing to anti-vaxxers and wellness moms.QAnon is also participatory, and, in an uncertain time, it may seem like a salvation. People “are seeking answers and they’re finding a very receptive community in QAnon,” Donovan said.This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies they’re targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.[embedded content]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

President Trump’s re-election campaign committee ended September with only $63.1 million in the bank despite canceling some television buys late last month, leaving him badly outmatched financially against Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the final stretch of the campaign.New filings with the Federal Election Commission showed the extent of Mr. Trump’s cash troubles, which are severe enough that he diverted time from key battleground states and flew to California on Sunday for a fund-raiser with just over two weeks until Election Day. The president ended September with just over half as much money as he had at the beginning of the month.While Mr. Trump’s campaign and its shared committees with the Republican National Committee have raised $1.5 billion since the start of 2019, the disclosures late Tuesday showed that his main re-election committee — the account that must pay for many of the race’s most important costs, including most television ads — had only a small slice remaining.All told, Mr. Trump’s campaign and its shared committees with the R.N.C. had $251.4 million entering October, compared with the $432 million that Mr. Biden’s campaign and its joint accounts with the Democratic National Committee had in the bank. Some joint account funds are most likely eligible to be transferred to the main campaign committee.Fortunes have reversed sharply from this spring, when Mr. Trump and the Republicans had nearly $190 million more in the bank than Mr. Biden and the Democrats did when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. More

Few places in America have been hit harder by the coronavirus and its economic fallout than New York and New Jersey. The region is in need of strong representation in Washington. Though many eyes are on the Senate, several competitive House races here could also help reshape Congress.New York’s First District, Eastern Long IslandWe endorse Nancy Goroff, the Democrat and a scientist with a passion for fighting climate change.Ms. Goroff, the former head of the chemistry department at Stony Brook University on Long Island, would be a refreshing addition to a Congress filled with lawyers. For years, she focused on research to help make solar energy more affordable. Now, she hopes to put that scientific background to work in Washington to help protect the environment — a key issue in a district with miles of shoreline and farmland. She has promised to defend the Affordable Care Act and supported an effort to extend health care to uninsured employees at Stony Brook University.This would be an especially good time for Washington to have the kind of scientific expertise and perspective Ms. Goroff would bring.She is in a tough fight. The Eastern Long Island district voted for Barack Obama twice but swung to Donald Trump in 2016. Her opponent, a Republican incumbent, Representative Lee Zeldin, is a loyal Trump supporter.New York’s 19th District, the Hudson Valley and CatskillsRepresentative Antonio Delgado is an impressively productive member of Congress. After unseating a powerful Republican congressman in 2018, Mr. Delgado has introduced dozens of pieces of legislation.Mr. Delgado is a traditional Democrat who supports reproductive rights, voting rights and access to health care. He is the kind of public servant who fights for every constituent in his district, a largely rural area north of New York City. Farmers in New York’s 19th Congressional District especially have found a fierce advocate in Mr. Delgado, a Rhodes scholar who grew up in upstate New York. Several of his bills, focusing on aid to family farms, have been signed into law by President Trump.This freshman Democrat has earned a second term.His opponent, the Republican Kyle Van De Water, supports the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, opposes reproductive rights and defends his party’s repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction that has been so punishing for the district he aims to represent. Mr. Van De Water is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a recipient of the Bronze Star. His service is to be commended. But he speaks in talking points more appropriate to Fox News than the halls of Congress, views that are out of step in this moderate district.New Jersey’s Seventh District, Northwestern New JerseyIt’s hard to find a member of Congress better suited to serve the country than Representative Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat who has promoted human rights and democratic values around the world. In a time of rising extremism, Mr. Malinowski, a freshman Democrat, helped restore essential funding to fight domestic terrorism. This week, he introduced legislation aimed at preventing the spread of disinformation through large social media platforms like Facebook whose algorithms sometimes promote extremist content.Mr. Malinowski has also delivered much-needed infrastructure dollars to his suburban district toward the Gateway Project, a critical effort to shore up access to New York City from the surrounding region. He is a strong supporter of health care and reasonable gun control measures, as well as reproductive freedom.Mr. Malinowski’s opponent, Thomas Kean Jr., is the minority leader of the New Jersey State Senate. Like Mr. Malinowski, Mr. Kean Jr. has a good understanding of key local issues like infrastructure. Unfortunately, Mr. Kean Jr. has allowed his party to resort to lies and attack ads on his behalf that spread dangerous conspiracy theories. He also voted against elements of implementing the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Malinowski is clearly the better choice in this race.These endorsements are not meant to be comprehensive; voters across this region have many talented candidates to choose from. Instead, they are meant to serve as examples of the kind of leadership we believe the country needs in Washington: people of all walks of life who will represent every American.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

President Trump on Tuesday called on William P. Barr, the attorney general, to take action before Election Day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcement to help him politically.The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox & Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Mr. Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the news media and, increasingly, Mr. Barr. He recently said the attorney general would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Democrats like Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama.“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, when asked whether he wants to see investigations into unverified information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter that the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims he recently obtained. Mr. Giuliani, who has made a range of outlandish and false assertions in an effort to damage the president’s rivals and critics, has refused to provide news outlets with the information he claims to have.Mr. Trump called on Mr. Barr to appoint a special prosecutor or similar official, saying: “He’s got to act. And he’s got to act fast.”“This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election. And, by the way, we’re doing very well. We’re going to win the election.”A spokesman for Mr. Biden declined to comment.Critics have accused Mr. Barr on a number of occasions of intervening on issues to help Mr. Trump politically. But for the president to publicly call on him to take action against a political opponent was remarkable, especially two weeks before a presidential election. On Monday, Mr. Trump repeatedly called Mr. Biden “a criminal.”“He is sounding desperate,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor who was solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “He’s been urging the attorney general in several ways to investigate his political opponents and to somehow validate his preposterous charges of criminality.” More

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Nick Corasaniti, your host on Tuesdays for our coverage of all things media and messaging.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.ImageUntil a month ago, the biggest-spending Democratic super PAC in the general election had aired only a single television ad during the campaign. Now the group, Future Forward, is on pace to spend more than $108 million on television ads supporting Joe Biden and two Senate candidates, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm.The group is barreling into the race a month after Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor and presidential candidate, pledged to spend $100 million to support Mr. Biden — exclusively in Florida. And Priorities USA, one of the biggest and oldest Democratic super PACs, has already spent $66 million since the start of the general election.The result is yet another yawning advantage on the airwaves for Mr. Biden, who has already outspent President Trump in TV advertising by a nearly 2-to-1 margin since the general election kicked off in earnest in April. With outside groups factored in, Democratic spending in the presidential campaign has reached nearly $400 million for the final month of the race, compared with nearly $200 million in Republican spending, according to Advertising Analytics. (Check out our visual comparison of the Biden and Trump spending.)Future Forward is backed by a Rolodex of influential Silicon Valley donors, according to records filed today with the Federal Election Commission, and first reported by Recode. It’s betting that the expensive gambit of late-campaign television advertising can still be effective in an exceptionally polarized electorate, even as more than 33.7 million ballots have already been cast, the equivalent of roughly 24 percent of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 general election.The group’s biggest funder is Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, who kicked in more than $20 million to the group, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Other donors include Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; Kathryn Murdoch, of the Murdoch family; Samuel Bankman-Fried, a founder of a cryptocurrency exchange; and Patty Quillin, the wife of the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.The team behind Future Forward has a background in data-driven television advertising. Chauncey McLean, who is listed as the group’s president on forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service, was the director of media tracking for the Democratic Party in 2012 and was part of a team that revolutionized political ad buying by targeting television ads to persuadable voters with the precision of the internet. The effort was known as “the optimizer,” as my colleague Jim Rutenberg wrote in 2013.While the group is joining the fight in major swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, it’s also spending money in some traditionally Republican states that have shown tightening polls, like Texas.Though Texas has the second most Electoral College votes in the country, it is an extraordinarily expensive state to run an ad campaign in. And given that Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, spending money there can appear to campaign strategists like a quixotic, Napoleon-invades-Russia strategy, even for a well-funded campaign like Mr. Biden’s. More