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      Trump Has Made Claims About Caucus Fraud. What if He Underperforms?

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      The last time Donald J. Trump participated in competitive Iowa caucuses, he lost narrowly, accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of stealing the contest, claimed fraud, demanded that Iowa Republicans nullify the results, and called for a rerun.While Iowa has a history of troubles with its caucus results, there’s been no evidence of fraud. The 2016 Republican contest was, in fact, the only one since 2008 that had gone off without a hitch.And yet if Monday night ends with Mr. Trump underperforming expectations, both his history and his rhetoric during this year’s campaign suggest he won’t hesitate to cry foul and refuse to accept the result.Mr. Trump has already accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of “trying to rig” the caucuses. Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist whom Mr. Trump last year considered hiring for a campaign post, suggested on social media that “the deep state” was engaging in “weather manipulation” to instigate Iowa’s Friday snowstorm and subzero temperatures to depress Trump turnout on Monday. And Donald Trump Jr. suggested in a Telegram video that “we can’t take anything for granted, or assume that everything is going to be on the up and up. We’ve seen this rodeo before.”Those claims are not likely to be met with much support from Iowa Republicans and the party volunteers who will operate the 1,657 caucus sites across the state.“If Trump says it’s fraud, he’s full of crap,” said A.J. Spiker, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa who is backing Mr. DeSantis.Still, Iowa Republicans aim to protect themselves from campaigns claiming foul play at the caucuses.At each site, caucusgoers mark their presidential preferences on paper slips. Those slips are then counted in full view of whoever wants to watch. Typically a representative from each campaign watches the counting, and recording is allowed.“It’s the most transparent straw vote you could possibly do,” Mr. Spiker said.The Trump campaign’s headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa, on Saturday.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s pre-emptive Iowa fraud claims last month followed a flub by Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis. She called on supporters to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” she said.That earned Ms. DeSantis a rebuke from the state Republican Party.Only Iowans can participate in the caucuses. Republican volunteers are supposed to check for photo identification at the caucus sites. Still, Mr. Trump’s campaign suggested then that the DeSantis campaign had professed a “plot to rig the caucus through fraud.”Another candidate who has trafficked in conspiracies and has been sowing doubt about Iowa’s caucuses is Vivek Ramaswamy, who failed to qualify for recent debates.“The mainstream media is trying to rig the Iowa G.O.P. caucus in favor of the corporate candidates who they can control,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a campaign video this week. “Don’t fall for their trick. They don’t want you to hear from me about the truth.”Voting rights groups and disinformation experts say the pre-emptive cries about fraud and rigged elections have become something of a new normal.“This follows the general playbook, the election denier playbook of just pre-emptively laying the groundwork for claims of fraud in the event of a loss,” said Emma Steiner, the Information Accountability Project Manager at Common Cause, a left-leaning voting rights organization. “It’s sort of future-proofing.”Indeed, Mr. Trump has long trumpeted baseless claims of fraud or rigging before an election. In 2016, weeks before Election Day, Mr. Trump started questioning the veracity of mail ballots in Colorado, citing little evidence. After he won the 2016 election, Mr. Trump claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote (it did not), and he launched a commission to investigate voter fraud in the country (it folded without any significant findings).The Trump team has called elections rigged even when he is not participating in them. When the 2020 Democratic caucuses melted down because of a faulty app and a disorganized state party, Mr. Trump’s campaign questioned whether the results were “being rigged against Bernie Sanders.” His sons went further.“Mark my words, they are rigging this thing,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter the night of the 2020 caucuses. “What a mess.” More

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      Trump Deploys Familiar Tactic: I’m Rubber. You’re Glue.

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      Whenever Donald Trump is accused of something, he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.Days before the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald J. Trump is appearing twice in court this week — on Tuesday in Washington and Thursday in New York.He was not required to attend either hearing. But advisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is fast becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who is describing the likely Republican nominee as a peril to the country — is the true threat to American democracy.Mr. Trump’s claim is the most outlandish and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something — no matter what that something is — he responds by accusing his opponent of that exact thing. The idea is less to argue that Mr. Trump is clean than to suggest that everyone else is dirty.It is an impulse more than a strategy. But in Mr. Trump’s campaigns, that impulse has sometimes aligned with his political interests. By this way of thinking, the more cynical voters become, the more likely they are to throw their hands in the air, declare, “They’re all the same” and start comparing the two candidates on issues the campaign sees as favorable to Mr. Trump, like the economy and immigration.His flattening moral relativism has undergirded his approach to nearly every facet of American public life, including democracy.In 2017, when the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a “killer,” Mr. Trump responded that there were “a lot of killers,” adding, “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”And in the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump applied the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” approach to a wide range of vulnerabilities.When Mr. Trump was described by voters as racist in polls after, among other things, he described undocumented immigrants from Mexico as “rapists,” he claimed that his rival, Hillary Clinton, was the true “bigot.”When Mrs. Clinton suggested he was temperamentally unfit to be entrusted with the nation’s nuclear codes, Mr. Trump declared her “trigger happy” and “very unstable.”When Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Trump a “puppet” of Mr. Putin during one of their general election debates, Mr. Trump interrupted: “No puppet. You’re the puppet.”Mr. Trump during a debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016.Damon Winter/The New York TimesA spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.For years, Mr. Trump championed and breathed life into the previously fringe “birther” movement that falsely claimed Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore an illegitimate president. When he finally renounced the conspiracy theory out of political expediency shortly before Election Day in 2016, he falsely claimed that it was Mrs. Clinton who had started attacking the first Black president with that assertion.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — “Lyin’ Ted,” Mr. Trump had dubbed him — was a victim of this Trumpian tactic in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries at a time when Mr. Trump was being called out for almost constant falsehoods. Mr. Cruz once summarized the injustice in a fit of indignation, saying of Mr. Trump: “He lies — practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”Now, Mr. Trump is repurposing his favored tool to neutralize what many see as his worst offense in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after he lost the 2020 election, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and remain in office.And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims Mr. Biden is stage-managing the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have coined a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his onetime client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now fighting Mr. Biden over an issue that many Republican consultants and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, given that candidates promoting election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.Mr. Bannon sees it differently.“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw on this, which I think you can, it’s over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview, referring to the imperiling of American democracy. “He’s got nothing else he can pitch. This is his main thing.”Mr. Bannon added, “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all this kind of ephemeral stuff, Trump will go there in a second.”It was Mr. Bannon who pushed for Mr. Trump to “go on offense” after a tape leaked of him boasting to the TV host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. Mr. Bannon helped arrange for three women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault to join Mr. Trump at a news conference shortly before a debate with Mrs. Clinton. It created a disorienting effect at a moment of acute vulnerability for Mr. Trump.“You’ve got to remember something,” Mr. Bannon said of the Trump campaign’s “Biden Against Democracy” gambit. “This is the whole reason he’s actually running: to say he believes that, burned into his soul, is the 2020 election was stolen, and that Jan. 6 was a setup by the F.B.I.”It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump actually believes that Jan. 6 was orchestrated by the “deep state.” His explanations of that day have shifted opportunistically, and he was a relative latecomer to the baseless far-right conspiracy theory that the Capitol riot was an inside job by the F.B.I.Mr. Trump has also sought to muddy the waters on voter concerns about corruption, by trying, along with his allies, to neutralize his liabilities on that front by attacking Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, for foreign moneymaking while his father was vice president.But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers think there is less to gain from the Hunter Biden angle than from the “Biden Against Democracy” theme. They recognize that Hunter Biden is not the president and doubt the issue will move voters significantly without the emergence of a connection to the president strong enough to convince Senate Republicans who remain skeptical that there is a basis for impeachment.Mr. Trump has also privately expressed concern about overplaying personal attacks on the president’s son to such an extent that they backfire and make Mr. Biden look like a caring father, according to a person who has heard Mr. Trump make these remarks.In a 2020 general election debate, Mr. Trump made such an error, when he mocked Hunter Biden’s past drug use, prompting a humanizing response from Mr. Biden: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”President Biden has repeatedly said Mr. Trump is a threat to American democracy. Mr. Trump has been lately saying the same of Mr. Biden. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Trump and his advisers are hoping to do more than paper over his liabilities related to his election lies and the violent attack on the Capitol, which Democrats are confident remain deeply troubling to a majority of voters. They hope they can persuade voters that Mr. Biden is actually the problem.Voter attitudes related to Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, among voters who said democracy was under threat, 45 percent saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared with 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Mr. Trump as such a threat.But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric seems to have already altered public opinion, even before the campaign deployed his new slogan. In another more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Mr. Trump’s re-election would pose a threat to democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought either candidate would be a threat to democracy.The repetition that Mr. Trump has used consistently in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.“If people think he’s inconsistent on message, he ain’t inconsistent on this message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s effort to brand Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and just look at how he pounds it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s very powerful.”David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said polling indicated Mr. Trump had “made headway with his base in this project.” But a general election, he said, is a “harder” race to convince people that his lies about Jan. 6, 2021, are true.It is “one of the reasons he’s so desperate to push the Jan. 6 trial past the election,” Mr. Axelrod said of the federal indictment charging Mr. Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States.“A parade of witnesses, including his own top aides, White House lawyers and advisers, testifying, followed by a guilty verdict, would damage him outside the base,” Mr. Axelrod said.Ruth Igielnik More

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      Ramaswamy Pushes Fringe Idea About Jan. 6 at Town Hall in Iowa

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      The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy repeated his claim, without specific evidence, that the attack on the Capitol was an “inside job.”In the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate, is pressing an unusual strategy: leaning into conspiracy theories.At a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening in Des Moines, Abby Phillip, the CNN anchor, asked Mr. Ramaswamy about previous comments in which he had said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was an “inside job” — a claim for which there is no evidence, and which has been refuted by numerous criminal indictments and bipartisan congressional investigations.Instead of walking back his remarks, he dug in.“The reality is, we know that there were federal law enforcement agents in the field. We don’t know how many,” Mr. Ramaswamy told the audience at Grand View University, at which point Ms. Phillip interrupted him to clarify. “There’s no evidence that there were federal agents in the crowd,” she said. Mr. Ramaswamy suggested, without providing specific details, that he had seen “multiple informants suggesting that they were.”He turned to another conspiracy theory — involving the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat of Michigan. He claimed, of some defendants in that case, that “government agents put them up to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done.” (That claim also has no evidence to support it.)“I don’t want to have to interrupt you, I really don’t, but I don’t want you to mislead the audience here —” Ms. Phillip began, before Mr. Ramaswamy redirected and claimed that it was “mainstream media” outlets that were misleading.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has continued to praise former President Donald J. Trump while competing against him for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, has slipped in polls. At the same time, on the campaign trail, during debates and at the CNN event, he has pushed conspiracy theories, including ones on the origin of Covid-19 as well as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Ms. Phillip’s question on Wednesday referred to Alan Hostetter, a Jan. 6 defendant who invoked Mr. Ramaswamy’s debate remarks during his sentencing hearing last week in claiming that conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen “are no longer fringe.”Mr. Ramaswamy did not address Mr. Hostetter’s remarks and instead reiterated false claims, to favorable responses from the crowd.Mr. Ramaswamy’s combative demeanor in public appearances was brought up by Rylee Miller, a law student who said that Mr. Ramaswamy seemed to have “somewhat abandoned the tact and diplomacy that I would look for in a president.” He then asked a question about how Mr. Ramaswamy would balance authenticity with a “presidential demeanor.”Mr. Ramaswamy, in answering, referred to his role as a parent who would strive to “make our children proud” as president. But, he continued, voters should not “want a wilting flower in the White House.”Mr. Ramaswamy also repeated several disputed proposals he has called for on the campaign trail. He said he would end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, effective from January 2025 onward. He reiterated his call to end aid to Ukraine and to back a deal “with some territorial concessions” for the country.He also said that he would support the Supreme Court if it ruled to take mifepristone, a commonly used abortion pill facing a legal challenge, “off the market.” More

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      Can an ‘Anarcho-Capitalist’ President Save Argentina’s Economy?

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      Carlos Prieto, Rachelle Bonja and M.J. Davis Lin and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWarning: this episode contains strong language.With Argentina again in the midst of an economic crisis, Argentine voters turned to Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who has drawn comparisons to Donald J. Trump.Jack Nicas, who covers South America for The New York Times, discusses Argentina’s incoming president, and his radical plan to remake the country’s economy.On today’s episodeJack Nicas, the Brazil bureau chief for The New York Times.In his first decree as president of Argentina, Javier Milei cut the number of government ministries from 18 to nine.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesBackground readingArgentina’s incoming president is a libertarian economist whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories has parallels with those of Donald J. Trump.Argentina braces itself for an “anarcho-capitalist” in charge.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jack Nicas More

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      Defending Trump, Ramaswamy Rattles Off Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories

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      Vivek Ramaswamy’s defense of Donald J. Trump at Wednesday’s debate quickly devolved into a laundry list of far-right conspiracy theories.After attacking his opponents for turning on Mr. Trump after supporting him, Mr. Ramaswamy took aim at “the deep state” as the real enemy of the American people.That amorphous entity, Mr. Ramaswamy claimed, clearly had a role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.“Why am I the only person, on this stage at least, who can say that Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job?” Mr. Ramaswamy said. (Dozens of criminal indictments and bipartisan congressional investigations rebut Mr. Ramaswamy’s argument.)While Mr. Trump has tried to make those convicted of crimes for their actions on Jan. 6 into political martyrs, the assertion that the riot was somehow an “inside job” is more often confined to the fever swamps of conspiracy theories.As if reading a far-right message board, Mr. Ramaswamy continued, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen by “big tech” (several intelligence agencies called it “the most secure in American history”) and that the 2016 election, which Mr. Trump won, was also “stolen from him by the national security establishment” because of the investigation into allegations that his campaign had colluded with Russia.And Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that the “great replacement theory” — the racist idea that minorities, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace white Americans — was not a conspiracy theory but instead a “basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”The “great replacement theory” has been creeping into the conservative mainstream, popularized by hosts like Tucker Carlson, and has been referenced by several mass shooters. More

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      Georgia County Signs Up to Use Voter Database Backed by Election Deniers

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      The decision ignores warnings from voting rights groups and some election experts.A suburban county in Georgia agreed on Friday to use a new voter information database endorsed by the election denial movement, a move that defied warnings from voting rights groups, election security experts and state election officials.Columbia County, a heavily Republican county outside Augusta, is the first in the country known to have agreed to use the platform, called EagleAI. Its supporters claim the system will make it easier to purge the rolls of ineligible voters.Among the leading backers for this new system is Cleta Mitchell, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the leader of the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition of activists built around the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Mitchell and others have billed EagleAI as an alternative to the Election Registration Information Center, a widely used interstate system that made it easier for officials to track address changes and deaths as they maintain the voter rolls. That system, known as ERIC, has become the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation that prompted nine states to withdraw with few backup plans.Ms. Mitchell declined to answer questions about the county’s decision.At an election board meeting Friday, around 40 people packed a room, with all speakers favoring the new system, according to Larry Wiggins, a Democratic member of the board who said he voted in favor.Mr. Wiggins said he was hopeful the tool would help the county handle an expected influx of voter eligibility challenges next year. A 2021 law made it easier for individuals to challenge large numbers of other voters’ registrations at once. Those challenges have often come from the same community of Republican activists now helping to push the EagleAI software.EagleAI was developed by a retired doctor in Columbia County, John Richards Jr., who did not response to a request for comment.Georgia state officials, who reviewed the EagleAI presentations, have found them riddled with errors and said the tools were unnecessary, according to documents provided by the groups American Oversight and Documented.In May, William S. Duffey Jr., the chairman of the State Election Board in Georgia, sent a letter to the county board of elections warning that EagleAI’s software might violate state privacy laws and state election statutes.The county responded in November that it would not allow access to private voter information and that the use of the tools would be limited.In a statement, the Georgia secretary of state’s office noted that the state still belonged to the Election Registration Information Center and that counties needed to follow state laws.Election experts have labeled the new system unnecessary and flawed.“EagleAI cannot be trusted to provide reliable information regarding who on the voter rolls is not eligible to remain there,” wrote seven voting rights and election organizations in a letter to Columbia County commissioners. It continued: “It will point you towards false positives and waste your staff’s time.”But Mr. Wiggins said the board wasn’t convinced. “We don’t put much faith in letters from outside groups,” Mr. Wiggins said. “We pay more attention to local individuals.” More

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      4,789 Facebook Accounts in China Impersonated Americans, Meta Says

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      The company warned that the inauthentic accounts underscored the threat of foreign election interference in 2024.Meta announced on Thursday that it had removed thousands of Facebook accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans debating political issues in the United States. The company warned that the campaign presaged coordinated international efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election.The network of fake accounts — 4,789 in all — used names and photographs lifted from elsewhere on the internet and copied partisan political content from X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta said in its latest quarterly adversarial threat analysis. The copied material included posts by prominent Republican and Democratic politicians, the report said.The campaign appeared intended not to favor one side or another but to highlight the deep divisions in American politics, a tactic that Russia’s influence campaigns have used for years in the United States and elsewhere.Meta warned that the campaign underscored the threat facing a confluence of elections around the world in 2024 — from India in April to the United States in November.“Foreign threat actors are attempting to reach audiences ahead of next year’s various elections, including in the U.S. and Europe,” the company’s report said, “and we need to remain alert to their evolving tactics and targeting across the internet.”Although Meta did not attribute the latest campaign to China’s Communist government, it noted that the country had become the third-most-common geographic source for coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and other social media platforms, after Russia and Iran.The Chinese network was the fifth that Meta has detected and taken down this year, more than in any other nation, suggesting that China is stepping up its covert influence efforts. While previous campaigns focused on Chinese issues, the latest ones have weighed more directly into domestic U.S. politics.“This represents the most notable change in the threat landscape, when compared with the 2020 election cycle,” the company said in the threat report.Meta’s report followed a series of disclosures about China’s global information operations, including a recent State Department report that accused China of spending billions on “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment.Microsoft and other researchers have also linked China to the spread of conspiracy theories claiming that the U.S. government deliberately caused the deadly wildfires in Hawaii this year.The latest inauthentic accounts removed by Meta sought “to hijack authentic partisan narratives,” the report said. It detailed several examples in which the accounts copied and pasted, under their own names, partisan posts from politicians — often using language and symbols indicating the posts were originally on X.Two Facebook posts a month apart in August and September, for example, copied opposing statements on abortion from two members of the U.S. House from Texas — Sylvia R. Garcia, a Democrat, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican.The accounts also linked to mainstream media organizations and shared posts by X’s owner, Elon Musk. They liked and reposted content from actual Facebook users on other topics as well, like games, fashion models and pets. The activity suggested that the accounts were intended to build a network of seemingly authentic accounts to push a coordinated message in the future.Meta also removed a similar, smaller network from China that mostly targeted India and Tibet but also the United States. In the case of Tibet, the users posed as pro-independence activists who accused the Dalai Lama of corruption and pedophilia.Meta warned that while it had removed the accounts, the same networks continued to use accounts on other platforms, including X, YouTube, Gettr, Telegram and Truth Social, warning that foreign adversaries were diversifying the sources of their operations.In its report, Meta also weighed in on Republican attacks on the U.S. government’s role in monitoring disinformation online, a political and legal fight that has reached the Supreme Court in a challenge brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.While Republicans have accused officials of coercing social media platforms to censor content, including at a hearing in the House on Thursday, Meta said coordination among tech companies, government and law enforcement had disrupted foreign threats.“This type of information sharing can be particularly critical in disrupting malicious foreign campaigns by sophisticated threat actors who coordinate their operations outside of our platforms,” the report said. More

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      Arizona Officials Charged With Conspiring to Delay Election Results

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      An indictment accuses two Cochise County supervisors of interfering with the state canvass of votes. The county has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories.Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results.Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, criticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment Wednesday.Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby sought to order a hand count of the ballots that had been cast in Cochise, a heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories that had been raised by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay certification of the election before eventually relenting under pressure of a court order.The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw in the supervisors’ machinations a worrying precedent. As Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him became widely accepted in the Republican Party, local Republican officials in several closely contested states used suspicion of the election system on the right to justify delaying the certification of 2022 election results.In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Judd said she did not actually suspect there were any irregularities in the vote in Cochise County. She characterized the move as a protest against the election certification in Maricopa, the large urban county that includes Phoenix, where right-wing activists had made an array of unproven claims of malfeasance.“Our small counties, we’re just sick and tired of getting kicked around and not being respected,” Ms. Judd said.Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the supervisors last November, arguing that their protest, which threatened to delay the statewide canvass, would disenfranchise the county’s voters. (The county’s third supervisor, Ann English, a Democrat, has opposed the others’ actions.) Republican candidates lost their races for most of the top statewide races in Arizona’s election, in which Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was elected governor.In October, the local Herald/Review newspaper and Votebeat reported that Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby were subpoenaed by Ms. Mayes, a Democrat elected last year, to appear before a state grand jury in the attorney general’s investigation.Although local Republican officials interfering with election systems in other states since 2020 have faced criminal indictments on other grounds, the Cochise indictments are the first criminal charges filed over a refusal to certify an election.Jared Davidson, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a watchdog group, argued that the prosecution could set an important precedent.“Pushing for potential criminal accountability is an important message, not just to election deniers in Arizona but across the country that if they indulge conspiracy theories and ignore the law and try to disenfranchise voters, there are real consequences,” he said. More