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      Defamation Suit Against Fox Grows More Contentious

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      Lachlan Murdoch is set to be deposed on Monday, the latest in a flurry of activity in the high-stakes case.Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, is expected to be deposed on Monday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for amplifying bogus claims that rigged machines from Dominion Voting Systems were responsible for Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Mr. Murdoch will be the most senior corporate figure within the Fox media empire to face questions under oath in the case so far. And his appearance before Dominion’s lawyers is a sign of how unexpectedly far and fast the lawsuit has progressed in recent weeks — and how contentious it has become.Fox and Dominion have gone back and forth in Delaware state court since the summer in an escalating dispute over witnesses, evidence and testimony. The arguments point to the high stakes of the case, which will render a judgment on whether the most powerful conservative media outlet in the country intentionally misled its audience and helped seed one of the most pervasive lies in American politics.Although the law leans in the media’s favor in defamation cases, Dominion has what independent observers have said is an unusually strong case. Day after day, Fox hosts and guests repeated untrue stories about Dominion’s ties to communist regimes and far-fetched theories about how its software enabled enemies of the former president to steal his votes.“This is a very different kind of case,” said David A. Logan, dean of the Roger Williams School of Law, who has argued in favor of loosening some libel laws. “Rarely do cases turn on a weekslong pattern of inflammatory, provably false, but also oddly inconsistent statements.”Dominion, in its quest to obtain the private communications of as many low-, mid- and high-level Fox personnel as possible, hopes to prove that people inside the network knew they were disseminating lies. Fox hopes to be able sow doubt about that by showing how its hosts pressed Trump allies for evidence they never produced and that Dominion machines were vulnerable to hacking, even if no hacking took place.The judge, Eric M. Davis, has ruled in most instances in Dominion’s favor, allowing the voting company to expand the pool of potential evidence it can present to a jury to include text messages from the personal phones of Fox employees and the employment contracts of star hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, along with those of Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and her top corporate managers.More on Fox NewsDefamation Case: ​​Some of the biggest names at Fox News are being questioned in the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. The suit could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.Exploring a Merger: Fox and News Corp, the two sides of Rupert Murdoch’s media business, are weighing a proposal that could put Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the Fox broadcasting network under the same corporate umbrella.‘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.Dominion has conducted dozens of depositions with current and former network personalities, producers, business managers and executives. The people questioned come from the rungs of middle management at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan to the corner office in Century City, Los Angeles, where Mr. Murdoch oversees the Fox Corporation and its sprawling enterprise of conservative media outlets.The fight over depositions has intensified in recent weeks as lawyers for the two companies sparred over whether Mr. Hannity and another pro-Trump host, Jeanine Pirro, should have to sit for a second round of questioning about messages that Dominion obtained from their phones as part of the discovery process. Fox lawyers have argued that the hosts should not be compelled to testify again, citing the legal protections that journalists have against being forced to reveal confidential sources.The judge ruled that Dominion’s lawyers could question both Mr. Hannity and Ms. Pirro again but limited the scope of what they could ask. Ms. Pirro’s second deposition was late last month; Mr. Hannity’s has yet to be scheduled.Fox has accused Dominion in court filings of making “escalating demands” for documents that are voluminous in quantity, saying it would have to hire a second litigation team to accommodate such a “crushing burden.” (The judge has largely disagreed.)In a sign of the simmering tensions between the two sides, Fox lawyers have asked the court to impose tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions against Dominion. Fox has accused the voting machine company’s chief executive, John Poulos, and other senior company officials of failing to preserve their emails and text messages, as parties to a lawsuit are required to do with potentially relevant evidence.After Dominion filed its lawsuit in March 2021 — claiming that Fox’s coverage of its machines not only cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in business but “harmed the idea of credible elections” — many media law experts assumed this case would end like many other high-profile defamation case against a news organization: with a settlement.Fox News has a history of settling sensitive lawsuits before they reach a jury. In the last several years alone, it has paid tens of millions of dollars in claims: to women who reported sexual harassment by its former chief executive, Roger Ailes, and by prominent hosts including Bill O’Reilly; as well as to the family of Seth Rich, a former Democratic Party staff member who was killed in a robbery that some conservatives tried to link to an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory.But a settlement with Dominion appears to be a remote possibility at this point. Fox has said that the broad protections provided to the media under the First Amendment shield it from liability. The network says it was merely reporting on Mr. Trump’s accusations, which are protected speech even if the president is lying. Dominion’s complaint outlines examples in which Fox hosts did more than just report those false claims, they endorsed them.“This does not appear to be a case that’s going to settle — but anything can happen,” said Dan K. Webb, a noted trial lawyer who is representing Fox in the dispute. “There are some very fundamental First Amendment issues here, and those haven’t changed.”In a statement, Dominion said the company was confident its case would show that Fox knew it was spreading lies “from the highest levels down.”“Instead of acting responsibly and showing remorse, Fox instead has doubled down,” the statement said. “We’re focused on holding Fox accountable and are confident the truth will ultimately prevail.”The judge has set a trial date for April of next year. A separate defamation suit against Fox by the voting company Smartmatic is not scheduled to be ready for trial until the summer of 2024.Part of the reason Fox executives and its lawyers believe they can prevail is the high burden of proof Dominion must reach to convince a jury that the network’s coverage of the 2020 election defamed it. Under the law, a jury has to conclude that Fox acted with “actual malice,” meaning that people inside the network knew that what they were reporting was false but did so anyway, or that they recklessly disregarded information showing what they were reporting was wrong.That is what Dominion hopes to show the jury with the private messages it obtained from a several-week period after the election from Fox employees at all levels of the company. Very little is known publicly about what those messages could contain.In addition to arguing that its coverage of Dominion was protected as free speech, Fox argues it was merely covering statements from newsmakers. “There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the United States and his lawyers making allegations of voter fraud,” a spokeswoman said.Fox’s lawyers are also planning lines of defense that they hope will dent Dominion’s credibility, even if that means leaning into some of the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of Dominion’s case. They may argue, for example, that it was plausible that the machines had been hacked, pointing to questions that were raised by at least one independent expert about whether the software was secure.As part of their fact-finding, Fox lawyers sought information from a University of Michigan computer scientist who wrote a report this year saying there were vulnerabilities in Dominion’s system that could be exploited, even though there is no evidence of any such breach.Mr. Webb said the intent would be to show that the fraud allegations “were not made up out of whole cloth.” But it was not his plan, he said, to pretend that Mr. Trump’s voter fraud falsehoods — which were the same as many of the falsehoods uttered on the air at Fox — were true. “The president’s allegations were not correct,” Mr. Webb said. He added that he planned “to show the jury that those security concerns were there and were real and added plausibility to the president’s allegations.”After Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on Monday, lawyers on both sides of the case said they expected one additional senior executive to be questioned by Dominion’s lawyers: Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the Fox Corporation, who founded Fox News with Mr. Ailes more than 25 years ago. More

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      They Used Robocalls to Suppress Black Votes. Now They Have to Register Voters.

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      An Ohio judge ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who concocted a 2020 robocall scheme to discourage mail-in voting, to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.Two conservative operatives responsible for placing tens of thousands of calls in Midwestern states that made false claims about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots were sentenced by an Ohio judge to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.The operatives, Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Va., and Jacob Wohl, 24, of Irvine, Calif., orchestrated a robocall scheme that targeted Black neighborhoods in Ohio in 2020, prosecutors said.More than 8,000 of the roughly 67,000 phone calls the pair made across the Midwest, using a voice broadcasting service, were sent to phone numbers in Cleveland and East Cleveland, where many Black voters reside, prosecutors said. The calls were placed during the pandemic, ahead of the 2020 election, a time of heightened interest in absentee voting because of rising concerns about health and safety.The calls falsely stated that voting by mail meant the personal information of people who cast those ballots would be added to a public database and that they would be tracked by the authorities.“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the recorded message said, according to a court filing in Michigan, which said Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl specifically targeted “Black neighborhoods” in the Midwest, including Cleveland. “Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.The prerecorded messages claimed that mail-in voting would result in a cascade of negative consequences, including pursuit by the authorities for outstanding debts and warrants, and mandatory vaccines.On Tuesday, Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl were sentenced in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland. At the hearing, which the defendants attended by videoconference, Judge John Sutula likened the robocall scheme to voter suppression efforts targeting Southern Black voters in the 1960s, Cleveland.com reported.“I think it’s a despicable thing that you guys have done,” Judge Sutula remarked, according to Cleveland.com.Mr. Wohl previously promoted false sexual assault allegations against Pete Buttigieg, then a Democratic presidential candidate, and Robert S. Mueller, the former special counsel.In the robocall case, Mr. Wohl and Mr. Burkman were each sentenced to completing two years of probation, working 500 hours at a voting registration center in Washington, D.C., and paying a $2,500 fine, a spokeswoman for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office said. They will also be electronically monitored for 12 hours, starting at 8 p.m. each day, through the first six months of their probation period.Michael C. O’Malley, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, called the sentence “appropriate.”“These two individuals attempted to disrupt the foundation of our democracy,” Mr. O’Malley said in a statement.The sentence arrived two years after they were indicted in Ohio for their voter intimidation scheme. They had initially faced up to 18 years in prison for multiple charges of bribery and telecommunications fraud but under a plea deal, the charges were merged into a single count each of telecommunications fraud, which they pleaded guilty to in October 2022.Mark Wieczorek, a lawyer representing Mr. Wohl, said that the sentence was “fair” and “in the spirit of justice.”“We think it’s a great sentence given the amount of charges he was originally indicted with,” Mr. Wieczorek said. “I think he is genuinely remorseful for his actions and took full responsibility for it.”Mr. Burkman’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.The pair also face similar charges in Michigan, where a case against them is still pending in the state’s Supreme Court, said John Nevin, a spokesman for the court. In 2020, they were charged with intimidating voters, conspiracy to intimidate voters, using a computer to intimidate voters and conspiracy to use a computer to intimidate voters, according to a criminal complaint. A judge in New York previously ordered them to call 85,000 people back to inform them that their initial calls about voting by mail had included false information. More

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      Mark Meadows Ordered to Testify in Trump Investigation

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      The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected an effort by the former White House chief of staff to avoid testifying in an investigation of election meddling.ATLANTA — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff under Donald J. Trump, to testify in the criminal investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia.In a three-paragraph written opinion, the court pointedly said Mr. Meadows’s legal efforts to avoid participating in the investigation were “manifestly without merit.”Mr. Meadows, 63, is one of three well-known Trump allies — in addition to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former national security adviser Michael Flynn — who have been trying to fend off subpoenas ordering them to testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta. Those efforts are part of a broader endeavor by a number of Trump’s allies to avoid cooperating in the Georgia investigation. That attempt has been met with mixed results. Last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina testified after a protracted legal fight that was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.The special grand jury is considering whether Mr. Trump and others broke state laws by, among other actions, spreading falsehoods about election fraud and pressuring state officials to consider changing the results of Georgia’s presidential election, which Mr. Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes.Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Flynn were ordered to travel to Atlanta to testify by judges in their respective home states of Virginia and Florida, and they have appealed those decisions.Mr. Meadows, a former Republican representative from North Carolina, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol showed that he repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to conduct investigations based on Mr. Trump’s unfounded theories about election improprieties around the country.Prosecutors say the special grand jury has evidence that Mr. Meadows set up and participated in the now infamous recorded phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump can be heard telling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he wanted to “find” the 11,780 votes that would allow him to win in Georgia. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to try to view an election audit that was in progress there. He was told by local officials that he was not authorized to see it.Like Mr. Flynn and Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Meadows has argued that he does not have to testify on the grounds that the Georgia special grand jury should be considered civil, not criminal, in nature. That, he argues, makes the subpoena unenforceable under an agreement among states that allows them to secure the attendance of out-of-state witnesses for criminal investigations.This legal strategy was successfully employed in Texas, where it found favor with a majority of members of that state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, and that most likely explains why a number of Texas-based witnesses who received subpoenas in the Georgia case have not appeared in court.In South Carolina, however, a lower court judge rejected Mr. Meadows’s argument in late October. Later, a group of current and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief arguing that if the state’s Supreme Court accepted Mr. Meadows’s argument it would “undermine interstate comity and the effectiveness of law enforcement across state borders, not just between South Carolina and its neighbor Georgia, but nationwide.”Mr. Meadows was originally scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but that appointment will most likely be pushed back. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows’s lawyer declined to comment on Tuesday, as did a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is heading up the investigation.Danny Hakim More

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      Is Donald Trump Ineligible to Be President?

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      How does a democracy protect itself against a political leader who is openly hostile to democratic self-rule? This is the dilemma the nation faces once again as it confronts a third presidential run by Donald Trump, even as he still refuses to admit he lost his second.Of course, we shouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. The facts are well known but necessary to repeat, if only because we must never become inured to them: Abetted by a posse of low-rent lawyers, craven lawmakers and associated crackpots, Mr. Trump schemed to overturn the 2020 election by illegal and unconstitutional means. When those efforts failed, he incited a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol, causing widespread destruction, leading to multiple deaths and — for the first time in American history — interfering with the peaceful transfer of power. Almost two years later, he continues to claim, without any evidence, that he was cheated out of victory, and millions of Americans continue to believe him.The best solution to behavior like this is the one that’s been available from the start: impeachment. The founders put it in the Constitution because they were well acquainted with the risks of corruption and abuse that come with vesting great power in a single person. Congress rightly used this tool, impeaching Mr. Trump in 2021 to hold him accountable for his central role in the Jan. 6 siege. Had the Senate convicted him as it should have, he could have been disqualified from holding public office again. But nearly all Senate Republicans came to his defense, leaving him free to run another day.There is another, less-known solution in our Constitution to protect the country from Mr. Trump: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who, “having previously taken an oath” to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to America’s enemies.On its face, this seems like an eminently sensible rule to put in a nation’s governing document. That’s how Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who has drafted a resolution in Congress enabling the use of Section 3 against Mr. Trump, framed it. “This is America. We basically allow anyone to be president,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “We set limited disqualifications. One is, you can’t incite an insurrection against the United States. You shouldn’t get to lead a government that you tried to destroy.”This was also the reasoning of the 14th Amendment’s framers, who intended it to serve as an aggressive response to the existential threat to the Republic posed by the losing side of the Civil War. Section 3 was Congress’s way of ensuring that unrepentant former Confederate officials — “enemies to the Union” — were not allowed to hold federal or state office again. As Representative John Bingham, one of the amendment’s lead drafters, put it in 1866, rebel leaders “surely have no right to complain if this is all the punishment the American people shall see fit to impose upon them.”And yet despite its clarity and good sense, the provision has rarely been invoked. The first time, in the aftermath of the Civil War, it was used to disqualify thousands of Southern rebels, but within four years, Congress voted to extend amnesty to most of them. It was used again in 1919 when the House refused to seat a socialist member accused of giving aid and comfort to Germany in World War I.In September, for the first time in more than a century, a New Mexico judge invoked Section 3, to remove from office a county commissioner, Couy Griffin, who had been convicted of entering the Capitol grounds as part of the Jan. 6 mob. This raised hopes among those looking for a way to bulletproof the White House against Mr. Trump that Section 3 might be the answer.I count myself among this crowd. As Jan. 6 showed the world, Mr. Trump poses a unique and profound threat to the Republic: He is an authoritarian who disregards the Constitution and the rule of law and who delights in abusing his power to harm his perceived opponents and benefit himself, his family and his friends. For that reason, I am open to using any constitutional means of preventing him from even attempting to return to the White House.At the same time, I’m torn about using this specific tool. Section 3 is extraordinarily strong medicine. Like an impeachment followed by conviction, it denies the voters their free choice of those who seek to represent them. That’s not the way democracy is designed to work.And yet it is true, as certain conservatives never tire of reminding us, that democracy in the United States is not absolute. There are multiple checks built into our system that interfere with the expression of direct majority rule: the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Electoral College, for example. The 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause is another example — in this case, a peaceful and transparent mechanism to neutralize an existential threat to the Republic.Nor is it antidemocratic to impose conditions of eligibility for public office. For instance, Article II of the Constitution puts the presidency off limits to anyone younger than 35. If we have decided that a 34-year-old is, by definition, not mature or reliable enough to hold such immense power, then surely we can decide the same about a 76-year-old who incited an insurrection in an attempt to keep that power.So could Section 3 really be used to prevent Mr. Trump from running for or becoming president again? As a legal matter, it seems beyond doubt. The Capitol attack was an insurrection by any meaningful definition — a concerted, violent attempt to block Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated job of counting electoral votes. He engaged in that insurrection, even if he did not physically join the crowd as he promised he would. As top Democrats and Republicans in Congress said during and after his impeachment trial, the former president was practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of Jan. 6. The overwhelming evidence gathered and presented by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has only made clearer the extent of the plot by Mr. Trump and his associates to overturn the election — and how his actions and his failures to act led directly to the assault and allowed it to continue as long as it did. In the words of Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, Mr. Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”A few legal scholars have argued that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency because it does not explicitly list that position. It is hard to square that claim with the provision’s fundamental purpose, which is to prevent insurrectionists from participating in American government. It would be bizarre in the extreme if Mr. Griffin’s behavior can disqualify him from serving as a county commissioner but not from serving as president.It’s not the legal questions that give me pause, though; it’s the political ones.First is the matter of how Republicans would react to Mr. Trump’s disqualification. An alarmingly large faction of the party is unwilling to accept the legitimacy of an election that its candidate didn’t win. Imagine the reaction if their standard-bearer were kept off the ballot altogether. They would thunder about a “rigged election” — and unlike all the times Mr. Trump has baselessly invoked that phrase, it would carry a measure of truth. Combine this with the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from right-wing media figures and politicians, including top Republicans, and you have the recipe for something far worse than Jan. 6. On the other hand, if partisan outrage were a barrier to invoking the law, many laws would be dead letters.The more serious problem with Section 3 is that it is easy to see how it could morph into a caricature of what it is trying to prevent. Keeping specific candidates off the ballot is a classic move of autocrats, from Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus to Vladimir Putin. It sends the message that voters cannot be trusted to choose their leaders wisely — if at all. And didn’t we just witness Americans around the country using their voting power to repudiate Mr. Trump’s Big Lie and reject the most dangerous election deniers? Shouldn’t we let elections take their course and give the people the chance to (again) reject Mr. Trump at the ballot box?To help me resolve my ambivalence, I called Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who sits on the Jan. 6 committee and taught constitutional law before joining Congress. He acknowledged what he called an understandable “queasiness” about invoking Section 3 to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. But Mr. Raskin argued that this queasiness is built into the provision. “What was the constitutional bargain struck in Section 3?” he asked. “There would be a very minor incursion into the right of the people to elect exactly who they want, in order to obtain much greater security for the constitutional order against those who have demonstrated a propensity to want to overthrow it when it is to their advantage.”The contours of the case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification might get stronger yet, as the Justice Department and state prosecutors continue to pursue multiple criminal investigations into him and his associates and as the Jan. 6 committee prepares to release its final report. While he would not be prohibited from running for office even if he was under criminal indictment, it would be more politically palatable to invoke Section 3 in that case and even more so if he was convicted.I still believe that the ideal way for Mr. Trump to be banished for good would be via the voters. This scenario is democracy’s happy ending. After all, self-government is not a place; it is a choice, and an ongoing one. If Americans are going to keep making that choice — in favor of fair and equal representation, in favor of institutions that venerate the rule of law and against the threats of authoritarian strongmen — they do it best by themselves. That is why electoral victory is the ultimate political solution to the ultimate political problem. It worked that way in 2020, when an outright majority of voters rejected Mr. Trump and replaced him with Joe Biden.But it’s essential to remember that not all democracies have happy endings. Which brings us to the most unsettling answer to the question I began with: Sometimes a democracy doesn’t protect itself. There is no rule that says democracies will perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Many countries, notably Hungary and Turkey, have democratically undone themselves by electing leaders who then dismantled most of the rights and privileges people tend to expect from democratic government. Section 3 is in the Constitution precisely to help ensure that America does not fall into that trap.Whether or not invoking Section 3 succeeds, the best argument for it is to take the Constitution at its word. “We undermine the importance of the Constitution if we pick and choose what rules apply,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “One of the ways we rebuild confidence in American democracy is to remind people we have a Constitution and that it has in it provisions that say who can run for public office. You don’t get to apply the Constitution sometimes or only if you feel like it. We take an oath. We swear to uphold it. We don’t swear to uphold most of it. If Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s about protecting the Constitution of the United States.”Surely the remedy of Section 3 is worth pursuing only in the most extraordinary circumstances. Just as surely, the events surrounding Jan. 6 clear that bar. If inciting a violent insurrection to keep oneself in office against the will of the voters isn’t such a circumstance, what is?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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Pennsylvania Supreme Court Says Mail-In Ballots Without Dates Should Not Be Counted

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      The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered election officials in the battleground state to refrain from counting mail-in ballots that lack a written date on their outer envelope, siding with Republicans in a matter that could have national implications on Nov. 8.The Republican National Committee and several other party-aligned groups filed a lawsuit in October to stop undated ballots from being counted, citing a state law that requires voters to write the date on the return envelope when sending them in.In a two-page ruling issued a week before Election Day, the court said that noncompliant ballots should be set aside. It was the latest wrinkle in a protracted legal fight over undated ballots in Pennsylvania, where voters are set to decide pivotal contests for governor and the U.S. Senate.But the six justices were split about whether their rejection violated the voting protections of the federal Civil Rights Act. Three Democrats on the elected court said that it did violate federal law, while a fourth Democrat, Kevin M. Dougherty, joined the court’s two Republicans in saying that it did not. (The court typically has seven members, but Chief Justice Max Baer, a Democrat, died in September.)The court’s ruling directly conflicted with guidance issued in September by Leigh M. Chapman, a Democrat who is the acting secretary of the commonwealth and said ballots without a date on them should be counted as long as they are returned on time.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.It was not immediately clear whether state election officials could pursue an appeal.“We are reviewing, but the order underscores the importance of the state’s consistent guidance that voters should carefully follow all instructions on their mail ballot and double-check before returning it,” Amy Gulli, a spokeswoman for Ms. Chapman, said in an email on Tuesday night.Voters who are concerned that they might have made an error on ballots before returning them should contact their county election board or the Pennsylvania Department of State, Ms. Gulli said.Pennsylvania is where two of the most closely watched elections in the country will be decided next week. In the governor’s race, Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic attorney general, faces state Senator Doug Mastriano, the right-wing, election-denying Republican nominee. And control of the U.S. Senate could hinge on the outcome of the contest between the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat.Putting ballots on the scanning and sorting machine at the Board of Elections office in Doylestown, Pa., on Friday.Ballots are stored for Election Day after they were scanned and recorded by machine.Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chairwoman, heralded the ruling as a “massive victory for Pennsylvania voters and the rule of law.”“Republicans went to court, and now Democrats and all counties have to follow the law,” she said. “This is a milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the state Republican Party, said the decision was a “tremendous win for election integrity.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania lamented the ruling on Tuesday night on Twitter.“We’re disappointed,” the group said. “No one should be disenfranchised for an irrelevant technicality. Voters, sign and date your return envelope.”The Democratic National Committee and the state Democratic Party, which were not named as respondents in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday night.Neither did the campaigns of Mr. Fetterman and Dr. Oz.The issue of undated ballots was a major point of contention in Dr. Oz’s primary in May, which was decided by less than 1,000 votes and triggered an automatic recount.Dr. Oz had opposed the counting of about 850 undated ballots that were cast in that race. His opponent, David McCormick, sued to include the ballots, calling the date requirement irrelevant. He later conceded the race.And last year, a Republican candidate who lost a judicial race in Lehigh County sued to stop undated ballots from being counted in that contest, a case that escalated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia ruled against that candidate, David Ritter. The Supreme Court said in June that election officials in Pennsylvania may count mailed ballots that were received by the cutoff date but not dated. But in early October, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court ruling.Mail-in ballots must be received by county election boards by 8 p.m. on Election Day, otherwise they won’t be counted.Nick Corasaniti More

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      Federal Judge Allows Activists to Stake Out Ballot Boxes in Arizona

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      A federal judge on Friday declined to ban an activist group from gathering near ballot boxes in Arizona, arguing that the members’ actions did not appear to constitute a “true threat” or intimidation and that their right to assemble in public spaces is constitutionally protected.In his 14-page ruling, Judge Michael T. Liburdi found that while “many voters are legitimately alarmed by the observers filming” at ballot boxes in Maricopa County, there was no proof that the group, Clean Elections USA, had encouraged acts of violence or posted personal or identifying information online.“While this case certainly presents serious questions,” Judge Liburdi wrote, “the court cannot craft an injunction without violating the First Amendment.”In denying the request, the judge said he would keep the case open and agreed to hear new evidence that the group has “engaged in unlawful voter intimidation.”Clean Elections USA, whose founder is a purveyor of election and QAnon theories, has said it is trying to prevent voter fraud by organizing activists across the country to station themselves near drop boxes set up to receive mail ballots. The aim, the organizers say, is to observe voters and document possible instances of voter fraud or misconduct.An individual watches a drop box from across a parking lot in Mesa, Ariz., on Monday.Bastien Inzaurralde/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA lawsuit filed on Monday by two nonprofit organizations, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino, alleged that the group’s intent was to dissuade people from voting through harassment and threats.The complaint, which asked for an injunction and restraining order against Clean Elections USA, identified several incidents in which voters in Maricopa County were followed, photographed and accused of being “ballot mules” — a term borrowed from a conspiracy theory about voters fraudulently casting dozens of ballots at once. In several cases, the activists carried firearms and wore military-style protective gear and masks.Judge Liburdi’s ruling, which is limited to Arizona, comes 11 days before a midterm election that has been riddled with false claims and specious theories about misconduct in voting, and as former President Donald J. Trump continues to spread the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Many right-wing groups have mobilized to work the polls, challenge ballots and station observers at counting centers in search of wrongdoing.Ballot drop boxes have become an early flash point. Since early voting began in Arizona on Oct. 12, Arizona’s secretary of state has referred at least six complaints of voter intimidation to the U.S. Department of Justice and the state’s attorney general for investigation. All of the incidents took place at outdoor ballot boxes in Phoenix and Mesa, a suburb.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.“Voter intimidation is illegal, and no voter should feel threatened or intimidated when trying to vote,” Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is running for Arizona’s governor, said in a statement this week. “Anyone attempting to interfere with that right should be reported.”At a hearing on Wednesday, Veronica Lucero, a lawyer for Melody Jennings, the founder of Clean Elections USA, argued that there “there is no connection” between the activists cited in the complaints in Maricopa County and Clean Elections USA. Ms. Jennings “has simply advocated that people need to follow the law,” Ms. Lucero said.Ms. Jennings has described the ballot box monitors as “my people” and “our box watchers” in social media posts. On Friday, she praised the judge’s ruling in a post on Truth Social, the social media platform founded by Mr. Trump.“The Constitution won today,” Ms. Jennings wrote. “This battle is not over, but today was a step for freedom and for your 1st amendment rights being preserved.”In a statement, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans called the ruling “truly disappointing,” adding that “American citizens should be able to cast a ballot without fear of personal injury or other harm to their safety and security.”Marc Elias, a Democratic elections lawyer whose law firm represents the plaintiffs in the suit, wrote on Twitter on Friday that he planned to appeal.Ms. Jennings, who is from Tulsa, Okla., and has described herself as a Christian pastor and counselor, has fast become a leading voice in the election-denial movement. She first proposed sending observers to ballot boxes this spring, just weeks after joining Truth Social.“I have an idea,” she wrote on April 19. “In those states where they do not outlaw drop boxes, I think we have no less than 10 patriots standing around every one of those 24/7 for the duration of the voting period.”In podcast interviews, Ms. Jennings said she was inspired by a trailer for the film, “2000 Mules,” released in May. The film, directed and produced by the right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza, relied heavily on debunked research from True the Vote, a group focused on voter fraud. The film asserts that “mules” paid by the Democratic Party ferried illegal votes to ballot boxes, often in the dead of night. It was shown in more than 400 theaters and brought in some $1.4 million at the box office.Ms. Jennings’ ideas spread quickly as her posts were shared by election deniers with large numbers of followers, including Mr. Trump and his former attorney, Sidney Powell. Ms. Jennings launched a website in May and, this summer, frequently promoted her plans on right-wing podcasts. She urged people not only to gather around ballot boxes, but to photograph voters and reveal their identities online.“I am FULLY STOKED that ballot trafficking mules are about to be completely doxxed and put on blast at every drop box across America VERY SOON,” Ms. Jennings posted on Truth Social on Sept. 8.Ms. Jennings’s following on the platform has grown from barely 100 in April to more than 35,000.Internal membership rolls show that roughly 4,500 people in 48 states have registered with Clean Elections USA, according to a report in Votebeat, a nonprofit news outlet. The group tells volunteers that the information they collect will be shared with True the Vote, which in turn works with Protect America Now, a group of sheriffs who have pledged to investigate election fraud, the report found.It is unclear if Ms. Jennings has significant financial support. A fund-raiser she set up online in August had raised $3,600 as of Friday.Over the summer, several Republican officeholders and candidates in Arizona encouraged the effort and Ms. Jennings organized what she called a “dry run” during the state’s Aug. 2 primary elections.A second organization, the Lions of Liberty, began organizing ballot box surveillance in Yavapai County, north of Phoenix. The group is an offshoot of a third organization: a local chapter of the Oath Keepers called the Yavapai County Preparedness Team.In an interview, Jim Arroyo, an Oath Keeper and member of the Lions of Liberty board of directors, said the intent of what his group called “Operation Drop Box” was to “watch for people stuffing more than 30, 40, 50 ballots in the box and to photograph it and send that to law enforcement.”There is no evidence of a widespread ballot-stuffing operation in the 2020 election. William P. Barr, who served as Attorney General under Mr. Trump, described the evidence presented in “2000 Mules” as “singularly unimpressive” in an interview with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Most states with early voting allow individuals to return other peoples’ ballots to boxes although rules vary significantly by state. In Arizona, family and household members, as well as caregivers, are legally permitted to do so. The laws are designed to make it easier for older, ill or disabled voters to cast ballots.Arizona does not permit observers to remain within 75 feet of ballot boxes or polling places, and even outside that perimeter they are prohibited from making “any attempt to intimidate, coerce, or threaten a person to vote or not vote,” according to the secretary of state. That behavior includes “aggressive or ostentatious display of weapons” or “directly confronting or questioning voters in a harassing or intimidating manner.”Voto Latino and Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, represented by the voting rights firm Elias Law Group, claimed Clean Election USA was violating federal law, citing the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which prohibit voter intimidation.In his decision on Friday, Judge Liburdi dismissed Voto Latino from the suit, saying that it did not have standing because it had not demonstrated a financial impact from the problems it identified in the complaint. Judge Liburdi, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona by Mr. Trump in 2019, will have an opportunity to weigh in on the matter again. The League of Women Voters filed on Tuesday a second federal suit naming Clean Elections USA, and Ms. Jennings, adding the Lions of Liberty and the Yavapai County Preparedness Team as defendants. That lawsuit, citing the same federal laws, noted that “Congress passed both statutes to prevent the very kinds of vigilante-led voter intimidation defendants are now deploying.”That complaint was prepared by the Protect Democracy Project, which this week also filed a defamation claim against Mr. D’Souza and True the Vote, among others, over “2000 Mules.” Mr. D’Souza and Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Melody Jennings is not operating in an absolute vacuum,” said Orion Danjuma, an attorney at Protect Democracy Project who worked on the Arizona case. More

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      Mark Meadows Ordered to Testify in Georgia Election Investigation

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      Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, has been fighting to avoid testifying about efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.PICKENS, S.C. — Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff who was deeply involved in efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after the 2020 election, was ordered on Wednesday to travel to Atlanta to testify in a criminal investigation into election meddling.Mr. Meadows, 63, has been fighting to avoid appearing before a special grand jury that has been investigating election interference in Georgia by Mr. Trump and his allies. The inquiry is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga.Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, James Bannister, said he would appeal the decision. He is employing a legal strategy that has been used in Texas, the home of three witnesses who were summoned by Fulton County but have not appeared. After a legal challenge by one of the three witnesses, a majority of judges on Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals expressed the view that the Georgia grand jury was not a proper criminal grand jury because it lacked indictment authority, and thus probably lacked standing to compel the appearance of witnesses from Texas.The strategy could have implications for a number of out-of-state witnesses whose testimony is still being sought by the special grand jury, including Michael Flynn and Newt Gingrich, a native Georgian who now lives in Virginia — not to mention Mr. Trump, if his testimony is sought by Ms. Willis’s office. However, the district attorney could elect to conduct depositions of witnesses in their home states if their local courts refuse to produce them.Mr. Meadows, a South Carolina resident, did not appear at the hearing Wednesday morning. In court, Mr. Bannister tried to persuade Circuit Court Judge Edward W. Miller that the special grand jury in Georgia was not criminal in nature.But the South Carolina judge noted that the judge in Fulton County, Robert C.I. McBurney, who is overseeing the Atlanta proceeding, had considered the question, and recently ruled that the special grand jury was indeed criminal in nature. More