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      Sean Hannity and Other Fox Stars Face Depositions in Defamation Suit

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      The depositions are one of the clearest indications yet of how aggressively Dominion Voting Systems is moving forward with its suit against the media company.Some of the biggest names at Fox News have been questioned, or are scheduled to be questioned in the coming days, by lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network, as the election technology company presses ahead with a case that First Amendment scholars say is extraordinary in its scope and significance.Sean Hannity became the latest Fox star to be called for a deposition by Dominion’s legal team, according to a new filing in Delaware Superior Court. He is scheduled to appear on Wednesday.Tucker Carlson is set to face questioning on Friday. Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was canceled last year, is scheduled to appear on Tuesday. Others who have been deposed recently include Jeanine Pirro, Steve Doocy and a number of high-level Fox producers, court records show.People with knowledge of the case, who would speak only anonymously, said they expected that the chief executive of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott, could be one of the next to be deposed, along with the president of Fox News, Jay Wallace. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, whose family owns Fox, could follow in the coming weeks.The depositions are among the clearest indications yet of how aggressively Dominion is moving forward with its suit, which is set to go to trial early next year, and of the legal pressure building on the nation’s most powerful conservative media company. There have been no moves from either side to discuss a possible settlement, people with knowledge of the case have said.More Coverage of Fox News‘American Nationalist’: Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, the TV host transformed Fox News and became former President Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.Defamation Case: ​​Legal scholars say that the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.How Russia Uses Fox News: The network has appeared in Russian media as a way to bolster the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine war.It is common for large media companies like Fox to settle such cases well before they reach the point where journalists or senior executives are forced to sit for questioning by lawyers from the opposing side. But both Dominion and Fox appear to be preparing for the likelihood that the case will end up in front of a jury.The suit accuses Fox of pushing false and far-fetched claims of voter fraud to lure back viewers who had defected to other right-wing news sources. In its initial complaint, Dominion’s lawyers framed their lawsuit as a matter of profound civic importance. “The truth matters,” they said, adding, “Lies have consequences.”The judge overseeing the case allowed Dominion in late June to expand the suit to include the cable news network’s parent company, Fox Corporation, potentially broadening the legal exposure of both Murdochs. Shortly after, Fox replaced its outside counsel on the case and hired one of the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers, Dan Webb.A spokesman for Fox Corporation has said that the First Amendment protected the company from the suit, and that any attempt by Dominion lawyers to put the Murdochs at the center of their case would be a “fruitless fishing expedition.”Both Dominion and Fox appear to be preparing for the case to go before a jury.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesThe network is “confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected,” a Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement. She added that the $1.6 billion in damages that Dominion is seeking are “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis.” According to court filings, Dominion estimates business losses at hundreds of millions of dollars and values the company at around $1 billion.Dominion’s legal complaint lays out how Fox repeatedly aired conspiracy theories about the company’s purported role in a plot to steal votes from former President Donald J. Trump, and argues that its business has suffered considerably as a result. Those falsehoods — including that Dominion was a pawn of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and that its machines were designed with a feature that allowed votes to be flipped from one candidate to another — aired night after night as Fox hosts like Mr. Hannity and Mr. Dobbs allowed guests to make them on their shows, and in some cases vouched for them.Legal experts say the case is one of the most potentially consequential libel suits brought against an American media company in more than a generation, with the potential to deliver a judgment on a falsehood that has damaged the integrity of the country’s democratic system and remains an article of faith among many Trump supporters.Defamation is extremely difficult to prove in a case like this because of the broad constitutional protections that cover the news media. A company like Dominion has to prove either that a media outlet knew what it was publishing or broadcasting was false, or that it acted so hastily it overlooked facts proving that falsity, a legal standard known as demonstrating a “reckless disregard for the truth.”Dominion’s legal strategy, which it has detailed in court filings, hinges on getting testimony and unearthing private communications between Fox employees that prove either such recklessness or knowledge that the statements were false.The case has stirred considerable unease inside Fox all summer, as employees have had to turn over months of emails and text messages to Dominion lawyers and prepare for depositions. Other current and former Fox personalities who have been deposed include Dana Perino, Shepard Smith and Chris Stirewalt, who was part of the team that made the election night projection that Mr. Trump would lose Arizona, and the presidency as a result.This is not the first time that Mr. Hannity has been in the middle of a high-profile defamation suit. In 2018, Fox was sued by the parents of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staff member whom Mr. Hannity and others at Fox falsely linked to a hacking that resulted in committee emails being published by WikiLeaks. Mr. Rich was murdered in an apparent botched robbery in 2017, though conspiracy theorists tried to blame his death on Democratic operatives. Fox News later retracted some of its reporting on the story, saying it did not meet the network’s editorial standards.Fox settled the Rich case in the fall of 2020, before Mr. Hannity could be deposed. More

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      On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms

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      The fast-growing platform’s poor track record during recent voting abroad does not bode well for elections in the U.S., researchers said.In Germany, TikTok accounts impersonated prominent political figures during the country’s last national election. In Colombia, misleading TikTok posts falsely attributed a quotation from one candidate to a cartoon villain and allowed a woman to masquerade as another candidate’s daughter. In the Philippines, TikTok videos amplified sugarcoated myths about the country’s former dictator and helped his son prevail in the country’s presidential race.Now, similar problems have arrived in the United States.Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times. Some videos urged viewers to vote in November while citing debunked rumors raised during the congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. TikTok posts have garnered thousands of views by claiming, without evidence, that predictions of a surge in Covid-19 infections this fall are an attempt to discourage in-person voting.The spread of misinformation has left TikTok struggling with many of the same knotty free speech and moderation issues that Facebook and Twitter have faced, and have addressed with mixed results, for several years.But the challenge may be even more difficult for TikTok to address. Video and audio — the bulk of what is shared on the app — can be far more difficult to moderate than text, especially when they are posted with a tongue-in-cheek tone. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, also faces many doubts in Washington about whether its business decisions about data and moderation are influenced by its roots in Beijing.“When you have extremely short videos with extremely limited text content, you just don’t have the space and time for nuanced discussions about politics,” said Kaylee Fagan, a research fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. TikTok had barely been introduced in the United States at the time of the 2018 midterm elections and was still largely considered an entertainment app for younger people during the 2020 presidential election. Today, its American user base spends an average of 82 minutes a day on the platform, three times more than on Snapchat or Twitter and twice as long as on Instagram or Facebook, according to a recent report from the app analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok is becoming increasingly important as a destination for political content, often produced by influencers.The company insists that it is committed to combating false information. In the second half of 2020, it removed nearly 350,000 videos that included election misinformation, disinformation and manipulated media, according to a report it released last year. The platform’s filters kept another 441,000 videos with unsubstantiated claims from being recommended to users, the report said.TikTok says it removed nearly 350,000 videos that included election misinformation, disinformation and manipulated media in the second half of 2020.TikTokThe service blocked so-called deepfake content and coordinated misinformation campaigns ahead of the 2020 election, made it easier for users to report election falsehoods and partnered with 13 fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact. Researchers like Ms. Fagan said TikTok had worked to shut down problematic search terms, though its filters remain easy to evade with creative spellings.“We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our platform and elections with utmost seriousness,” TikTok said in a statement. “We continue to invest in our policy, safety and security teams to counter election misinformation.”But the service’s troubling track record during foreign elections — including in France and Australia this year — does not bode well for the United States, experts said.TikTok has been “failing its first real test” in Africa in recent weeks, Odanga Madung, a researcher for the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, wrote in a report. The app struggled to tamp down on disinformation ahead of last week’s presidential election in Kenya. Mr. Madung cited a post on TikTok that included an altered image of one candidate holding a knife to his neck and wearing a blood-streaked shirt, with a caption that described him as a murderer. The post garnered more than half a million views before it was removed.“Rather than learn from the mistakes of more established platforms like Facebook and Twitter,” Mr. Madun wrote, “TikTok is following in their footsteps.”TikTok has also struggled to contain nonpolitical misinformation in the United States. Health-related myths about Covid-19 vaccines and masks run rampant, as do rumors and falsehoods about diets, pediatric conditions and gender-affirming care for transgender people. A video making the bogus claim that the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May had been staged drew more than 74,000 views before TikTok removed it.Posts on TikTok about Russia’s war in Ukraine have also been problematic. Even experienced journalists and researchers analyzing posts on the service struggle to separate truth from rumor or fabrication, according to a report published in March by the Shorenstein Center.TikTok’s design makes it a breeding ground for misinformation, the researchers found. They wrote that videos could easily be manipulated and republished on the platform and showcased alongside stolen or original content. Pseudonyms are common; parody and comedy videos are easily misinterpreted as fact; popularity affects the visibility of comments; and data about publication time and other details are not clearly displayed on the mobile app.(The Shorenstein Center researchers noted, however, that TikTok is less vulnerable to so-called brigading, in which groups coordinate to make a post spread widely, than platforms like Twitter or Facebook.)During the first quarter of 2022, more than 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation were viewed by users before being removed, TikTok said. Last year, a group of behavioral scientists who had worked with TikTok said that an effort to attach warnings to posts with unsubstantiated content had reduced sharing by 24 percent but had limited views by only 5 percent.Researchers said that misinformation would continue to thrive on TikTok as long as the platform refused to release data about the origins of its videos or share insight into its algorithms. Last month, TikTok said it would offer some access to a version of its application programming interface, or A.P.I., this year, but it would not say whether it would do so before the midterms.Filippo Menczer, an informatics and computer science professor and the director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, said he had proposed research collaborations to TikTok and had been told, “Absolutely not.”“At least with Facebook and Twitter, there is some level of transparency, but, in the case of TikTok, we have no clue,” he said. “Without resources, without being able to access data, we don’t know who gets suspended, what content gets taken down, whether they act on reports or what the criteria are. It’s completely opaque, and we cannot independently assess anything.”U.S. lawmakers are also calling for more information about TikTok’s operations, amid renewed concerns that the company’s ties to China could make it a national security threat. The company has said it plans to keep data about its American users separate from its Chinese parent. It has also said its rules have changed since it was accused of censoring posts seen as antithetical to Beijing’s policy goals.The company declined to say how many human moderators it had working alongside its automated filters. (A TikTok executive told British politicians in 2020 that the company had 10,000 moderators around the world.) But former moderators have complained about difficult working conditions, saying they were spread thin and sometimes required to review videos that used unfamiliar languages and references — an echo of accusations made by moderators at platforms like Facebook.In current job listings for moderators, TikTok asks for willingness to “review a large number of short videos” and “in continuous succession during each shift.”In a lawsuit filed in March, Reece Young of Nashville and Ashley Velez of Las Vegas said they had “suffered immense stress and psychological harm” while working for TikTok last year. The former moderators described 12-hour shifts assessing thousands of videos, including conspiracy theories, fringe beliefs, political disinformation and manipulated images of elected officials. Usually, they said, they had less than 25 seconds to evaluate each post and often had to watch multiple videos simultaneously to meet TikTok’s quotas. In a filing, the company pushed for the case to be dismissed in part because the plaintiffs had been contractors hired by staffing services, and not directly by TikTok. The company also noted the benefits of human oversight when paired with its review algorithms, saying, “The significant social utility to content moderation grossly outweighs any danger to moderators.”Election season can be especially difficult for moderators, because political TikTok posts tend to come from a diffuse collection of users addressing broad issues, rather than from specific politicians or groups, said Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.“The bottom line is that all platforms can do more and need to do more for the shared set of facts that social democracy depends on,” Mr. Brookie said. “TikTok, in particular, sticks out because of its size, its really, really rapid growth and the number of outstanding issues about how it makes decisions.” More

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      Hunting for Voter Fraud, Conspiracy Theorists Organize ‘Stakeouts’

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      One night last month, on the recommendation of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in an Arizona parking lot and waited in folding chairs, hoping to catch the people they believed were trying to destroy American democracy by submitting fake early voting ballots.Captain K — which is what Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who espouses voting fraud conspiracy theories, calls himself — had set the plan in motion. In July, as states like Arizona were preparing for their primary elections, he posted a proposal on the messaging app Telegram: “All-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post received more than 70,000 views.Similar calls were galvanizing people in at least nine other states, signaling the latest outgrowth from rampant election fraud conspiracy theories coursing through the Republican Party.In the nearly two years since former President Donald J. Trump catapulted false claims of widespread voter fraud from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, a constellation of his supporters have drifted from one theory to another in a frantic but unsuccessful search for evidence.Many are now focused on ballot drop boxes — where people can deposit their votes into secure and locked containers — under the unfounded belief that mysterious operatives, or so-called ballot mules, are stuffing them with fake ballots or otherwise tampering with them. And they are recruiting observers to monitor countless drop boxes across the country, tapping the millions of Americans who have been swayed by bogus election claims.In most cases, organizing efforts are nascent, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to watch local drop boxes. But some small-scale “stakeouts” have been advertised using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Mr. Trump. Several websites dedicated to the cause went online this year, including at least one meant to coordinate volunteers.Some high-profile politicians have embraced the idea. Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, asked followers on Twitter whether they would “be willing to take a shift watching a drop box to catch potential Ballot Mules.”Supporters have compared the events to harmless neighborhood watches or tailgate parties fueled by pizza and beer. But some online commenters discussed bringing AR-15s and other firearms, and have voiced their desire to make citizens’ arrests and log license plates. That has set off concerns among election officials and law enforcement that what supporters describe as legal patriotic oversight could easily slip into illegal voter intimidation, privacy violations, electioneering or confrontations.“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”Screenshot from Truth SocialMr. Keshel, whose post as Captain K inspired the Arizona gathering, said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, like California, but is mostly illegal in battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.“In order to quality-control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Mr. Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Mr. Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and have mostly not been adapted to ballot boxes.In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the coronavirus pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among right-wing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.“Ballot mules” have quickly become a central character in false stories about the 2020 election. Between November 2020 and the first reference to “2000 Mules” on Twitter in January 2022, the term “ballot mules” came up only 329 times, according to data from Zignal Labs. Since then, the term has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter, 63 percent of the time alongside discussion of the documentary. Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the documentary, claimed in May that the film had earned more than $10 million.Rise of the ‘Ballot Mule’Mentions of “ballot mules” surged in May after the debunked documentary “2000 Mules” claimed that an army of operatives stuffed ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

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      Digital mentions of “ballot mules” per week
      Note: Includes mentions on digital platforms including social media, broadcast, traditional media, and other online sites. Source: Zignal LabsBy The New York TimesThe push for civilian oversight of ballot boxes has gained traction at the same time as legislative efforts to boost surveillance of drop-off sites. A state law passed this year in Utah requires 24-hour video surveillance to be installed at all unattended ballot boxes, an often challenging undertaking that has cost taxpayers in one county hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County in Nebraska, which includes Omaha, voted in June to allocate $130,000 for drop box cameras to supplement existing cameras that the county does not own.In June, Arizona lawmakers approved a budget that included $500,000 for a pilot program for ballot box monitoring. The 16 boxes included will have round-the-clock photo and video surveillance, rejecting ballots if the cameras are nonfunctional, and will accept only a single ballot at a time, producing receipts for each ballot submitted.Many supporters of the stakeouts have argued that drop boxes should be banned entirely. Some have posted video tours of drop box sites, claiming that cameras are pointed in the wrong direction or that the locations cannot be properly secured.Melody Jennings, a minister and counselor who founded the right-wing group Clean Elections USA, claimed credit for the Arizona gathering on Truth Social and said it was the group’s “first run.” She said in a podcast interview that any surveillance teams she organized would try to record all voters who used drop boxes. The primaries, she said, were a “dry run” for the midterms in November. Ms. Jennings did not respond to requests for comment.After the Arizona gathering, organizers wrote to high-profile Truth Social users, including Mr. Trump, claiming without evidence that “mules came to the site, saw the party and left without dropping ballots.” Comments on other social media posts about the event noted that the group could have frightened away voters wary of engaging, drawn people planning to report the group’s activities or simply witnessed lost passers-by.On Aug. 2, Ms. Lake and several other election deniers prevailed in their primary races in Arizona, where a GoFundMe campaign sought donations for “a statewide volunteer citizen presence on location 24 hours a day at each public voting drop box location.” Kelly Townsend, a Republican state senator, said during a legislative hearing in May that people would train “hidden trail cameras” on ballot boxes and follow suspected fraudsters to their cars and record their license plate numbers.“I have been so pleased to hear about all you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Ms. Townsend said.Surveillance plans are also forming in other states. Audit the Vote Hawaii posted that citizens there were “pulling together watch teams” to monitor the drop boxes. A similar group in Pennsylvania, Audit the Vote PA, posted on social media that they should do the same.In Michigan, a shaky video filmed from inside a car and posted on Truth Social showed what appeared to be a man collecting ballots from a drop box. It ended with a close-up shot of a truck’s license plate.In Washington, a right-wing group launched Drop Box Watch, a scheduling service helping people organize stakeouts, encouraging them to take photos or videos of any “anomalies.” The group’s website said all its volunteer slots for the state’s primary early this month were filled.The sheriff’s office in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, is investigating after election signs popped up at several drop box sites in the state warning voters they were “under surveillance.”One Gab user with more than 2,000 followers offered stakeout tips on the social network and on Rumble: “Get their face clearly on camera, we don’t want no fuzzy Bigfoot film,” he said in a video, with his own face covered by a helmet, goggles and cloth. “We need to put that in the Gab group, so there’s a constant log of what’s going on.”Calls for civilian surveillance have expanded beyond ballot boxes. One post on a conservative blog cheers on people who monitor “any suspect activities before, during and after elections” at ballot-printing companies, vote tabulation centers and candidates’ offices.Paul Gronke, the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College, suggested that activists hoping for improved election security should push for more data transparency measures and tracking programs that allow voters to monitor the status of their absentee ballot. He said he had never heard of a legitimate example of dropbox watchdogs successfully catching fraud.The prospect of confrontations involving self-appointed overseers largely untrained in state-specific election procedures, charged up by a steady diet of misinformation and militarized rhetoric, is “just a recipe for disaster” and “puts at risk the voters’ ability to cast their ballots,” Mr. Gronke said.“There are ways to secure the system, but having vigilantes standing around drop boxes is not the way to do it,” he said. “Drop boxes are not a concern — it’s just a misdirection of energy.”Cecilia Kang More

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      On Election Day, G.O.P. Raise Doubts about Arizona Elections

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      Republican candidates and conservative media organizations seized on reports of voting issues in Arizona on Tuesday to re-up their case that the state’s elections are broken and in need of reform, even as state and county officials said the complaints were exaggerated.“We’ve got irregularities all over the state,” Mark Finchem, who won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in Arizona, said before his victory was announced.Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona’s secretary of state, at a rally last month with Donald Trump in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesGateway Pundit, a conservative website that breathlessly covered the election rumors on Tuesday, wrote that Arizona’s largest counties were apparently “rife with serious irregularities that have been occurring all day long, sparking even more concern for election integrity.”There is no evidence of any widespread fraud in Tuesday’s election. But the concerns raised were bolstered by a number of problems in Pinal County, the state’s third-most populated county, located between Phoenix and Tucson. More than 63,000 ballots were mailed with the wrong local races on them, requiring new ballots to be issued. On election night, at least 20 of 95 precincts in Pinal County were running low on ballots or ran out entirely.Sophia Solis, the deputy communications director of Arizona’s secretary of state, said voters could still cast a ballot at those precincts using voting machines that are typically used by disabled voters.“We did not hear of any widespread problems,” Ms. Solis said, adding that “one of the main issues that we did see yesterday was the spread of mis- and disinformation.”Kent Volkmer, the attorney for Pinal County, said there were more in-person voters in the county than had been seen before, including far more independent voters. He added that many voters surrendered their mail-in ballot so they could vote in person, possibly motivated by the ballot-printing issues.“We don’t think that there’s nearly as many people who were negatively impacted as what’s being related to the community,” Mr. Volkmer said.One common talking point on Tuesday resurrected a false theory from 2020, known as Sharpiegate, which claimed that markers offered by poll workers were bleeding through and invalidating ballots. Election officials have said that machines can read ballots marked with pens, markers and other instruments, and any issues can be reviewed manually.“This is Sharpiegate 2.0,” Ben Berquam, a conservative commentator, said on a livestream. Mr. Finchem shared the conspiracy theory on his Twitter account. The campaign for Ron Watkins, a congressional candidate for Arizona’s Second District who came in last place in his race on Tuesday, also suggested that Mr. Watkins’s votes were being artificially slashed.Sorting mail-in ballots at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix, Ariz., on Tuesday.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMany election fraud theories focused on the governor’s primary race between Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed former news anchor, and Karrin Taylor Robson, who was endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Lake was badly trailing her competitor for most of the night, whipping up election fraud theories among her supporters. She eventually took the lead.Ms. Lake’s allies suggested during a livestream that the results were suspicious because many other Trump-aligned candidates were winning their races. In Arizona, mail-in ballots received before Election Day are counted first, and polling suggested those would slightly favor Ms. Taylor Robson. In-person votes were counted on election night, and Ms. Lake’s supporters preferred voting in person.As counting continued late into the night, Ms. Lake claimed victory while she was still trailing Ms. Taylor Robson.“When the legal votes are counted, we’re going to win,” Ms. Lake said at her election night party. The Associated Press has not yet called the race. More

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      Trump-Backed Conspiracy Theorist Vies to Take Over Arizona Elections

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      PHOENIX — This spring, Mark Finchem traveled to Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a documentary advancing the specious notion that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from President Donald J. Trump by an army of leftists stuffing drop boxes with absentee ballots. As a state representative and candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, Mr. Finchem was a minnow among the assembled MAGA stars, the likes of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.But he still got his face time.“President Trump took 20 minutes with me,” Mr. Finchem later recounted during a campaign stop. “And he said: ‘I want you to understand something. The Arizona secretary of state race is the most important race in the United States.’”Arizona, of course, occupies a special place on Mr. Trump’s map of election indignities — as the onetime Republican stronghold where President Biden’s narrow and crucial victory was first called by, of all networks, Fox News. Should Mr. Trump run again in 2024, a friendly secretary of state, as administrator of the state’s elections, could be in a position to help him avoid a repeat.Now, as Arizona prepares for its primaries on Tuesday, Mr. Finchem is the candidate of a Trump-backed America First coalition of more than a dozen 2020 election deniers who have sought once-obscure secretary of state posts across the country. While most of them have been considered extremist long shots, a recent poll gave Mr. Finchem an edge in Arizona’s four-way Republican race, though a significant majority of voters are undecided.Mr. Finchem’s campaign pronouncements are testament to the evolution of the “Stop the Steal” movement: It is as much about influencing future elections as it is about what happened in 2020.Mark Finchem, a proponent of the “Stop the Steal” narrative, appeared with former President Donald J. Trump at a rally this past month in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesTo that end, Mr. Finchem, who has identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers militia in the past, may be the perfectly subversive candidate. Like his America First compatriots, he seeks, quite simply, to upend voting.He wants to ban early voting and sharply restrict mail-in ballots, even though the latter were widely popular in Arizona long before the pandemic. He is already suing to suspend the use of all electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona, in litigation bankrolled by the conspiracy theorist and pillow tycoon Mike Lindell. And he has co-sponsored a bill that would give the state’s Republican-led legislature authority to overturn election results.If he loses his own race, Mr. Finchem told a June fund-raiser, “ain’t gonna be no concession speech coming from this guy.”Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment for this article, and one of his lawyers declined to comment. But in a May email he assured Republican supporters that if he had been in office in 2020, “we would have won. Plain and simple.” In the days after the election, he was co-host of an unofficial hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel where Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, aired bogus stolen-elections claims. He was instrumental in trying to advance a slate of fake Trump electors in Arizona — part of a scheme to overturn the elections in a number of states that is being investigated by the Justice Department — and he is helping gather signatures to petition to decertify the state’s election results, even though that is not legally possible.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Pushing an Immigration Conspiracy Theory, While Courting Latinos

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      Blake Masters, a venture capitalist running for Senate in Arizona, is among the many Republicans who argue that the left’s obsession with racial identity politics is driving Latino voters away from the Democratic Party.But as he vies for the Republican nomination, Mr. Masters has pushed a different sort of racial politics that could repel Latinos in the state.For months, Mr. Masters has promoted a specious theory portraying illegal immigration across the southern border as part of an elaborate Democratic power grab. In speeches, social media videos and podcast interviews, he has asserted that Democrats are trying to encourage immigration so their party can dilute the political power of native-born voters.“What the left really wants to do is change the demographics of this country,” Mr. Masters said in a video posted to Twitter last fall. “They do. They want to do that so they can consolidate power and so they can never lose another election.” In May, he told an interviewer that Democrats were “trying to manufacture and import” a new electorate.What Mr. Masters calls an “obvious truth” is what experts in extremism describe as a sanitized version of the “great replacement,” a once-fringe, racist conspiracy theory that claims that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace white Americans with immigrants to weaken the influence of white culture. The idea has been linked to the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May, the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 and the killings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.Mr. Masters’s version — one that makes no references to Jews or white people, but instead sets up a conflict between immigrants and the native-born — has become pervasive in Republicans’ immigration rhetoric. It has risen to prominence alongside the debunked claims that immigrants living in the United States illegally are voting in elections in large numbers.“This is a view in which there are institutional bad actors maliciously causing change, which will then lead to political subordination of whites,” said Robert A. Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “That is the root of the fear, and that’s the root of what the fearmongers are provoking.”Mr. Masters, who declined to be interviewed, disputes that he has promoted the great replacement theory.“It is obvious to everyone that Democrats see illegal immigrants as future voters,” he said in a statement. “No ‘theory’ is needed to observe that.” He criticized “fake experts” who claimed otherwise.Mr. Masters is widely expected to win in the Arizona primary on Tuesday. The 35-year-old Stanford graduate and first-time candidate was propelled to the front of the pack by support from Peter Thiel, the tech mogul he once worked for, and by an endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      2020 Election Deniers Seek Out Powerful Allies: County Sheriffs

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      LAS VEGAS — An influential network of conservative activists fixated on the idea that former President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election is working to recruit county sheriffs to investigate elections based on the false notion that voter fraud is widespread.The push, which two right-wing sheriffs’ groups have already endorsed, seeks to lend law enforcement credibility to the false claims and has alarmed voting rights advocates. They warn that it could cause chaos in future elections and further weaken trust in an American voting system already battered by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.One of the conservative sheriffs’ groups, Protect America Now, lists about 70 members, and the other, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, does not list its membership but says it conducted trainings on various issues for about 300 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 sheriffs in recent years. It is unclear how many sheriffs will ultimately wade into election matters. Many aligned with the groups are from small, rural counties.But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.“I’m absolutely sick of it,” said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but they’ve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.”In recent years, sheriffs have usually taken a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are typically handled by state agencies with input from local election officials. Republican-led state legislatures, at the same time, have pushed to impose harsher criminal penalties for voting infractions, passing 20 such laws in at least 14 states since the 2020 election.“This is all part and parcel of returning to a world where we’re using the criminal law in a way to make voting harder,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the interim co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “All the things that used to feel more fringy no longer feel so fringy, as we’re starting to see this very much collective effort.”Richard Mack, center, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, appeared at FreedomFest, a recent event in Las Vegas attended by a range of libertarians and conservatives.Alexandra Berzon/The New York TimesThe sheriff of Racine County in Wisconsin, the state’s fifth-most-populous county, is trying to charge state election officials with felonies for measures they took to facilitate safe voting in nursing homes during the pandemic.In Barry County in Michigan, a rural area that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, the sheriff has been investigating the 2020 election after becoming involved with efforts by people working on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to gain access to voting machines.And the sheriff of Johnson County in Kansas, which includes suburbs of Kansas City and is the most populous county in the state, has said he is broadly investigating the county’s 2020 election. At a recent meeting with election officials, he questioned their procedures and integrity, according to a written account from the county’s top lawyer, who sent him a letter expressing concern that he was interfering in election matters.The Johnson County sheriff, Calvin Hayden, said in an interview that sheriffs faced a learning curve.“We don’t know anything about elections,” he said. “We’re cops. We have to educate ourselves on the system, which takes a long, long time.”More From Democracy ChallengedRight-Wing Radio Disinformation: Conservative commentators falsely claim that “Democrats cheat” to win elections, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Jan. 6 Timeline: We pieced together President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to subvert American democracy and cling to power.The Far-Right Christian Push: A new wave of U.S. politicians is mixing religious fervor with conspiracy theories, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state.A Cautionary Tale on Democracy: A New Hampshire man pushed through a drastic budget change in his “Live Free or Die” town, angering the community — and jolting it out of indifference.Hatching election plans in Las VegasThe three sheriffs gathered with a few hundred others at a forum this month in Las Vegas hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.Attendees included leaders of True the Vote, a group whose work spreading discredited theories of mass voter fraud inspired the conspiratorial film “2000 Mules”; Mike Lindell, the Trump ally and MyPillow chief executive; and other prominent figures in the 2020 election-denial movement.Speakers urged more sheriffs to open investigations of the 2020 election, which they compared to a rigged sporting event, presenting evidence that rehashed long-disproved theories. One speaker said the way that betting odds had changed on election night constituted proof of a stolen election.Some of the arguments centered on the premise of “2000 Mules”: that an army of left-wing operatives wrongfully flooded drop boxes with absentee ballots in 2020. Many, including William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general and Georgia state officials, have pointed to major flaws in the supposed findings and the flimsy evidence presented.Still, Richard Mack, the founder of the constitutional sheriffs association, said the accusations made in “2000 Mules,” which was released in May, were a “smoking gun” and had persuaded him to make election issues his group’s top priority.Mr. Lindell said in an interview that he and his team had offered the three sheriffs “all of our resources,” including computer experts and data on voters, but that he had made no financial commitments.Mr. Mack speaking at FreedomFest. He said in an interview that accusations of voter fraud made in the conspiratorial film “2000 Mules” were a “smoking gun.”Alexandra Berzon/The New York TimesThe Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which was formally founded about a decade ago by Mr. Mack, is dedicated to the theory that sheriffs are beholden only to the Constitution and serve as the ultimate authority in a county — above local, state and federal officials and statutes. The group, whose leaders have promoted Christian ideology in government, has been active in supporting fights against gun control laws, immigration laws and federal land management.Protect America Now, founded by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Ariz., and Republican operatives, was announced shortly after the 2020 election. Its principles closely align with many of the constitutional sheriffs association’s, but it has employed more traditional political methods such as running ads.Attempts to interview Mr. Lamb, who has not announced local investigations into election issues, were unsuccessful. Discussing his partnership with True the Vote at a Trump rally in Arizona on Friday, he said sheriffs would do more to hold people accountable for violating election laws. “We will not let happen what happened in 2020,” he said.For conservative activists focused on voter fraud, an alliance with law enforcement seemed natural.True the Vote initially approached state and federal law enforcement agencies with its election claims, but did not provide sufficient evidence to warrant an investigation, officials said.In partnership with Protect America Now, the group has now raised $100,000 toward a goal of $1 million for grants to sheriffs for more video surveillance and a hotline to distribute citizen tips.True the Vote’s executive director, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a speech at the Las Vegas event that in sheriffs, she had found a receptive audience for her claims.“It’s the sheriffs,” she said. “That’s who we can trust.”A troubled history of law enforcement at the pollsSome conservative activists have also floated the idea of increasing the presence of sheriffs wherever ballots are cast, counted and transported, echoing a proposal by Mr. Trump in 2020 that didn’t gain steam.Deputizing volunteers could even be an option, said Sam Bushman, the national operations director for the constitutional sheriffs association.Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state of Nevada and an attendee in Las Vegas, said that if elected, he would try to “bring sheriffs back in” to the election process.“The deputies are going to be there at the locations to watch for any anomaly,” he said in an interview.Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, said he would like to involve sheriffs in the election process.John Locher/Associated PressFor voting rights groups, the potential presence of law enforcement officers at polling locations evokes a darker period in American democracy, when the police were weaponized to suppress turnout by people of color.Because of this history, state and federal protections limit what law enforcement can do. In California and Pennsylvania, for example, it is a crime for officers to show up at the polls if they have not been called by an election official. In other states, including Flor­ida, North Caro­lina, Ohio and Wiscon­sin, officers must obey local elec­tion offi­cials at the polls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Sheriffs interviewed at the Las Vegas event said they were aware of such restrictions and did not want to impede voting. The Barry County, Mich., sheriff, Dar Leaf, said he was more focused on 2020 rather than looking ahead. Others, like Mr. Hayden, said they were considering increased video surveillance of drop boxes.Mr. Mack said, “I don’t think any sheriff is trying to intimidate people not to vote.”Some sheriffs from rural Trump-voting counties said they hadn’t observed major problems to fix in their own counties but supported more sheriff involvement overall. Richard Vaughn, a sheriff in rural Grayson County in Virginia, said he wanted officers to be involved in observing vote counts, and would support election investigations “in areas where there are allegations.” “A lot of people are losing confidence,” he added.Wide-ranging investigative scrutinyElection experts say the activities of the three sheriffs already raise concerns.Sheriff Hayden of Johnson County, Kan., said he had started investigating elections after receiving 200 citizen complaints.He is scrutinizing “ballot stuffing,” “machines” and “all of the issues you hear of nationally,” he said in an interview. Asked what he meant by ballot stuffing, he described the practice of delivering absentee ballots on behalf of other voters. (During the 2020 election, Kansas did not have a law regarding that practice; last year, it passed legislation allowing people to return no more than 10 ballots from other voters.)Mr. Hayden said in a statement that he disagreed with the county lawyer’s depiction of his meeting with election officials and that he was treating the elections work like any other investigation.“Our citizens want to have, and deserve to have, confidence in their local elections,” he said.Election workers sorting mail ballot applications in Olathe, Kan., in 2020. The sheriff of Johnson County, which includes Olathe, has said he is investigating elections.Charlie Riedel/Associated PressMr. Leaf has led an effort to try to investigate voting machines.Emails obtained last year from his department by the news site Bridge Michigan showed that a lawyer identifying Mr. Leaf as his client had communicated about seizing machines with Trump allies who were trying to prove 2020 election conspiracy theories.In December 2020, Mr. Leaf met with a cybersecurity specialist — who was part of the Trump allies’ network — to discuss voting machine concerns, Mr. Leaf said in an interview.Mr. Leaf said he had also been provided with a private investigator for election matters by another lawyer of his, who previously helped Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump, bring a conspiratorial lawsuit seeking to overturn Michigan’s 2020 results.At one point, someone connected to Mr. Leaf’s investigation gained access to a voting tabulator, according to state police records. State authorities intervened and began investigating Mr. Leaf’s office.Over 18 months, Mr. Leaf’s investigative efforts have changed focus several times, and he has had three search warrant requests rejected for lack of evidence, Julie A. Nakfoor Pratt, the county’s top prosecutor, said in an interview.Mr. Leaf said in a statement, “I took an oath and obligation as sheriff to investigate all potential crimes reported to my office, including election law violations.”In Wisconsin, Mr. Schmaling has tried to charge statewide election officials with violating the law by temporarily suspending election oversight work in nursing homes.Those officials, who serve on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the state’s bipartisan arbiter of election matters, voted for the suspension in March 2020, as the pandemic was first raging. After investigating a complaint in November 2021, Mr. Schmaling said he had found eight instances of potential fraud.No fraud charges were filed in any of the cases.But in November, Mr. Schmaling issued criminal referrals for five of the six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, recommending that the district attorneys in the counties where they live charge them with crimes including felonies.Three of the district attorneys have dismissed the referrals; two have not yet made a decision.Mr. Schmaling, who said his nursing home inquiry took up hundreds of hours, described his decisions as routine. “The bigger picture for me is we exposed something that was wrong, something illegal,” he said. “My goal is to make certain that the law is followed.”But others involved said the actions were an overreach of power.“The idea that the solution for an election whose results you didn’t like is, after the fact, to threaten criminal charges for that public work of a government official is shocking,” said Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, who faced a criminal referral. “It is chilling. It is the antithesis of how democracy works.” More

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      QAnon Candidates Aren’t Thriving, but Some of Their Ideas Are

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      PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Pamphlets, buttons and American flags cluttered booth after booth for political candidates at a conference center in Prescott, Ariz., this month. But the table for Ron Watkins, a Republican candidate for Congress who rose to fame for his ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, sat empty.“I thought it started at 11:30,” said Orlando Munguia, Mr. Watkins’s campaign manager, who arrived about 30 minutes after the event had begun and hastily laid out campaign materials without the candidate in tow.Mr. Watkins, a computer programmer in his 30s, is running into the same reality that many other QAnon-linked candidates have confronted: Having ties to the conspiracy theory does not automatically translate to a successful political campaign.More established Republican rivals have vastly outraised Mr. Watkins in Arizona’s Second District. Two other congressional candidates in Arizona who have shown some level of support for QAnon also trail their competitors in fund-raising ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. A fourth Arizona candidate with QAnon ties has suspended his House campaign. The same trend is playing out nationally.Primary results for QAnon-linked candidates More