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      In Bid for Control of Elections, Trump Loyalists Face Few Obstacles

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      A movement animated by Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election lies is turning its attention to 2022 and beyond.ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. — When thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Jan. 6 for the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, one of them was a pastor and substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pa., named Stephen Lindemuth.Mr. Lindemuth had traveled with a religious group from Elizabethtown to join in protesting the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s victory. In a Facebook post three days later, he complained that “Media coverage has focused solely on the negative aspect of the day’s events,” and said he had been in Washington simply “standing for the truth to be heard.”Shortly after, he declared his candidacy for judge of elections, a local Pennsylvania office that administers polling on Election Day, in the local jurisdiction of Mount Joy Township.Mr. Lindemuth’s victory in November in this conservative rural community is a milestone of sorts in American politics: the arrival of the first class of political activists who, galvanized by Donald J. Trump’s false claim of a stolen election in 2020, have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen.This belief has informed a wave of mobilization at both grass-roots and elite levels in the party with an eye to future elections. In races for state and county-level offices with direct oversight of elections, Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns, in which they enjoy a first-mover advantage in electoral contests that few partisans from either party thought much about before last November.And legislation that state lawmakers have passed or tried to pass this year in a number of states would assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control.“This is a five-alarm fire,” said Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over her state’s Trump-contested election in 2020 and may face a Trump-backed challenger next year. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”In some areas, new political battlefields are opening up where none existed before.Until this year, races for administrative positions like judge of elections were noncompetitive to the point of being more or less volunteer opportunities. Candidates ran unopposed, or sometimes not at all: The seat that Mr. Lindemuth ran for had been technically unoccupied before his election, filled by appointment by the County Board of Elections.“There’s a lot of apathy here,” said Lisa Sargen Heilner, a former Republican committeewoman in Mount Joy Township, who resigned her post shortly after local Republicans endorsed Mr. Lindemuth and his wife, Danielle, in a concurrent school board election in which they both won seats. “I just kind of wanted to disassociate myself from them,” Mrs. Heilner said.After Mr. Lindemuth won the G.O.P. primary for judge of elections in the spring, local Democrats struggled to find a candidate until Mike Corradino, an academic dean at a local community college, volunteered. “Like a lot of people, it troubles me what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Corradino said. He lost with 268 votes to Mr. Lindemuth’s 415.Mr. Lindemuth’s victory is one of the first among a class of political activists who have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term.Tim Stuhldreher/ One United LancasterKristy Moore, the local Democratic committeewoman and a seventh-grade English teacher who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Lindemuth in the school board race, said she had tried to attract the attention of county and state Democrats, but to no avail.“I’m not sure what the Democratic Party was worried about, but it didn’t feel like they were worried about school board and judge of elections races — all of these little positions,” she said.Mr. Lindemuth, whose phone was answered by a woman who refused to identify herself but declined to comment on his behalf, told The Atlantic in November that he saw the job as a public service. “It really has little to do with election results,” he said. “It’s more about filling in the gaps for the community.”But Mrs. Heilner said that Mr. Lindemuth was unknown in local Republican circles before he announced his candidacy, and Mr. Corradino expressed concern about his Jan. 6 involvement. “I hope that once he sees the responsibilities and the training, that would be a moderating influence,” Mr. Corradino said.“I’m hoping that we don’t have any constitutional crises in our neck of the woods,” he added. “But things are a bit scary.”In the months immediately after the election, Mr. Trump’s campaign to discredit the election’s outcome fueled a wave of lawsuits and partisan audits in closely contested states, none of which turned up evidence of more than extremely isolated instances of fraud.This activity — fueled by grass-roots activists, party donors, sitting Republican politicians and Mr. Trump himself — has evolved rapidly into an effort that looks forward, not backward: recruiting like-minded candidates for public offices large and small, and proposing and, in some cases, passing laws intended to give partisan actors more direct control over election systems.At every level, opponents are operating at a steep disadvantage. The electoral battles are being fought largely in areas where Democrats have struggled to maintain a foothold for over a decade. The legislative pushes are occurring in states where Republicans dominate both legislative and executive offices, and federal responses have been blocked by unified Republican opposition and Senate rules, which a dwindling but decisive number of Senate Democrats have resisted changing.Throughout, there is a stark asymmetry of enthusiasm: Where Mr. Trump’s partisans see the issue of election system control as a matter of life and death, polling suggests Democratic voters broadly do not.Secretaries of state like Ms. Benson, charged with administering elections in their states, are among the most visible targets of the Stop the Steal movement, and the clearest examples of how Mr. Trump’s election claims have opened up new, lopsided political terrain in heretofore sleepy corners of the electoral system.Although they run on party tickets, secretary of states’ campaigns have generally been amicable contests among bureaucratic professionals who pride themselves on placing civic responsibility over their parties’ pursuit of power. All of that changed when Mr. Trump and his allies, fuming over his loss in 2020, portrayed a handful of swing-state secretaries of state as supervillains, often wielding false claims of election malfeasance against them.After Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, resisted Mr. Trump’s personal pressure to overturn the election results, Mr. Trump denounced him at rallies and Mr. Raffensperger and his family became the targets of regular death threats. Demonstrators, some of them armed, gathered outside Ms. Benson’s home last December shortly after Mr. Trump baselessly claimed that there had been “massive voter fraud” in Michigan’s election.Secretaries of state like Ms. Benson are among the most visible targets of the movement.Paul Sancya/Associated PressA year later, Trump loyalists supporting his claims about the 2020 election are strong candidates and, in some cases, front-runners in Republican primaries for secretary of state across the country. In Georgia, Representative Jody Hice, who has said he is not “convinced at all, not for one second, that Joe Biden won the State of Georgia,” is running against Mr. Raffensperger in the Republican primary in May, with Mr. Trump’s backing.In November, Ms. Benson may find herself running against Kristina Karamo, a community college adjunct professor who has claimed that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, advocated for removing “traitors” from the Republican Party and accused Democrats of pursuing a “satanic agenda.” Since Mr. Trump endorsed her in September, she has considerably out-raised her rivals for the Republican nomination. (Ms. Karamo’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)Democrats fear that such contests may pit a highly motivated Republican base that has come to view these races as central fronts in the battle for America against Democratic voters who are barely aware the races are happening at all.“They have Trump hitting this one note all the time,” said Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster. Among Democrats, he said, “If you ask people what their concerns are, about Republicans or their daily lives, they don’t say ‘threats to democracy.’”In a PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist Poll in October, 82 percent of Democrats said they would trust the results of the 2024 presidential election to be accurate if their candidate did not win; only 33 percent of Republicans did. Other questions about the integrity and fairness of the election system consistently yielded comparable divides between the parties’ voters.Traditional campaign organizations have been slow to involve themselves significantly in secretary of state races, much less local election oversight offices.“Donald Trump and a lot of folks in his orbit were frankly ahead of the curve when it came to raising funds and organizing behind candidates who backed the big lie,” said Miles Taylor, a former official in Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security who this year helped to start the Renew America Movement, an organization supporting Republican and Democratic candidates running against Trump-backed Republicans.Mr. Taylor said that while his group was now active in congressional races, it did not yet have the resources to compete against Trump-endorsed candidates in state contests. Nor was the Democratic Party capable of filling the void, he said: “In a lot of these places, Democrats have no hope of winning a statewide election, and all that matters is the primary.”In other areas, Democrats are disadvantaged by pre-existing political losses. In 23 states, Republicans control both state legislatures and governors’ mansions. Democrats control both in only 15 states.The legislatures that Republicans now control have in the past year become laboratories for legislation that would remove barriers that stood in the way of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results. In seven states this year, lawmakers proposed bills that would have given partisan officials the ability to change election results in various ways. Although none passed, Republican-led legislatures in Arizona and in Georgia passed laws that directly removed various election oversight responsibilities from the secretaries of state — legislation that appeared to directly target specific officials who had been vilified by Mr. Trump.“We’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, who co-wrote a recent report on the new state-level legislation.Ms. Weiser and other advocates have called for federal legislation to head off such efforts. “We must have that in order to have a comprehensive response,” said Norm Eisen, co-chair of the States United Democracy Center. But with the Democrats most likely to lose one or both houses of Congress in the next two election cycles, the time to pass it is fleeting.Several election and voting rights reform bills have foundered this year upon unified Republican opposition in a Senate where Democrats hold a one-vote majority. Ten Senate Republicans would need to break ranks in order to overcome the party’s filibuster of the legislation. Only one, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has voted for any of the bills so far.Several election and voting rights reform bills have foundered this year upon unified Republican opposition in a Senate.John Bazemore/Associated PressAmong the very few prominent Republicans who have supported federal efforts to curb the state legislatures’ power grabs, some have faulted congressional Democrats for spending the early months of the year trying to pass a sweeping voting reform bill that included longstanding policy priorities like campaign-finance reform that were anathema to Republicans and not directly related to heading off the threats to election systems.“That wasn’t something that was going to pass, and everybody knew it,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project.But Ms. Longwell also acknowledged that any Democrat-sponsored voting rights bill was dead on arrival in the Senate. “I think they would’ve run into the same problems,” she said. “After the election, Republicans were locked in.” This year, her organization started Republicans for Voting Rights, a campaign endorsing a compromise bill co-sponsored by Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat, and trying to rally Republican support for it. The legislation earned zero Republican votes.“I just don’t see it,” said Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democratic senator, who has sponsored bipartisan voting bills in the past and led bipartisan Rules Committee hearings on election threats this year. “We have tried every which way — not just Senator Manchin. A number of us tried and talked to them repeatedly for months.”Ms. Klobuchar is among an increasing number of Senate Democrats, including many of the party’s moderates, who have called for the filibuster rule’s elimination or reform this year — as has Mr. Biden, who said that he was “open to fundamentally altering the filibuster” at a CNN town hall in October.Several of the moderates have been meeting regularly with Mr. Manchin, the caucus’s most determined holdout, in recent months to discuss potential changes.The Hill newspaper reported this week that Mr. Manchin was in talks with some Senate Republicans about small changes to the rule that might prove acceptable to both parties, but the changes reportedly discussed appear unlikely to make passage of the proposed election and voting reform legislation any more likely.“I am frustrated that at this point, after everything we endured last year and after we all witnessed what happened on Jan. 6, there isn’t more of a sense of urgency,” Ms. Benson said. “We all have to band together and say, ‘Never again’ — as opposed to saying, ‘Well, maybe it will happen again, and maybe we’ll be ready.’” More

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      Former Trump Lawyer to Oversee Election Review in Texas

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      The selection of a new secretary of state arrives as Gov. Greg Abbott is facing pressure to allow an expanded 2020 election audit in Texas.HOUSTON — Amid pressure from former President Donald J. Trump to support a broad review of the 2020 election in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday appointed as secretary of state a lawyer who briefly joined Mr. Trump’s challenge to the 2020 results in Pennsylvania.The new secretary of state, John Scott, will oversee Texas elections at a time when a new law imposing further restrictions on voting and a Republican redistricting plan have raised alarm among voting rights advocates that the state’s growing nonwhite population would not be fairly represented.More immediately, Mr. Scott, a Fort Worth lawyer who worked for Mr. Abbott when he was the state’s attorney general, will take charge of a limited review of the 2020 election results that Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered last month for four of the most populous counties in Texas.“I am confident that John’s experience and expertise will enhance his oversight and leadership over the biggest and most thorough election audit in the country,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement announcing the appointment.Though he must eventually be confirmed by the State Senate, Mr. Scott can serve in the role in the interim. The Senate is not in regular session again until 2023.The appointment brought immediate criticism from Democrats and voting groups. “The timing of this announcement is clearly intended to subvert our democratic process in a way that allows Greg Abbott’s completely unsuitable nominee to oversee our 2022 elections without having to face confirmation hearings,” said Stephanie Gómez, the Texas associate director for Common Cause.Mr. Scott was among the lawyers representing Mr. Trump’s campaign as it filed suit to challenge the results of the November 2020 election in Pennsylvania, a state that President Biden won by 80,555 votes.But Mr. Scott withdrew from the case, as did another member of his law firm, Bryan Hughes, on the eve of a hearing, after a circuit court ruling that effectively gutted their arguments. The case was ultimately dismissed.“The lesson from the Pennsylvania case is that John Scott is a guy you can trust to follow the law,” said Mr. Hughes, a Republican state senator from Tyler, Texas. He added that, while in the attorney general’s office, Mr. Scott represented Texas in litigation over the state’s voter identification law, “so this area of the law is not unfamiliar to him.”Mr. Hughes was the lead sponsor of Texas’ restrictive new election rules, which passed this year over concerted opposition from Democrats. The new rules broaden the authority of the secretary of state in elections.No credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election in Texas or in any other state. Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 5 percentage points and Republicans maintained a lock on the statehouse despite a well-funded effort by Democrats to try to flip control.Still, with supporters of Mr. Trump believing he should have won the state by an even greater margin, Mr. Abbott has faced growing calls for legislation authorizing a “forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential vote in Texas. Last month, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Mr. Abbott urging him to back the legislation.“Despite my big win in Texas, I hear Texans want an election audit! You know your fellow Texans have big questions about the November 2020 Election,” read the letter, steeped in arcane Texas legislative language and signed by the former president.Political operatives in the state have suspected that the former president received assistance in his foray into Austin politics by Texas conservatives, perhaps the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who twice chaired Mr. Trump’s campaign in the state. Under Mr. Patrick’s leadership, the Senate has already passed a 2020 election review bill.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      In Arizona, G.O.P. Lawmakers Strip Power From a Democrat

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      The State Legislature shifted legal authority from the secretary of state to a Republican attorney general, and enacted election measures it said would stop fraud.WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled State Legislature in Arizona voted Thursday to revoke the Democratic secretary of state’s legal authority in election-related lawsuits, handing that power instead to the Republican attorney general.The move added more discord to the politics of a state already roiled by the widely derided move by Senate Republicans to commission a private firm to recount the vote six months after the November election. And it was the latest in a long series of moves in recent years by Republicans to strip elected Democrats of money and power in states under G.O.P. control.The measure was part of a grab bag of proposals inserted into major budget legislation, including several actions that appeared to address conspiracy theories alleging manipulated elections that some Republicans lawmakers have promoted. One of the items allotted $500,000 for a study of whether social media sites tried to interfere in state elections by promoting Democrats or censoring Republicans.The State House approved the legislation late Thursday. It now goes to Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, who has the power to accept or reject individual parts of the measure.Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Mark Brnovich have sparred before over election lawsuits, with Mr. Brnovich arguing that Ms. Hobbs would not adequately defend the state against suits, some of them filed by Democrats, that seek to broaden access to the ballot. Ms. Hobbs has denied the charge.The bill approved on Thursday gives Mr. Brnovich’s office exclusive control of such lawsuits, but only through Jan. 2, 2023 — when the winners of the next elections for both offices would be about to take power. The aim is to ensure that the authority given to Mr. Brnovich would not transfer to any Democrat who won the next race for attorney general.Attorney General Mark Brnovich of Arizona would gain new powers under the legislation.Bob Christie/Associated PressOn Friday, Ms. Hobbs called the move “egregious,” saying Republicans were “weaponizing the process to take retribution against my office.”The move against Ms. Hobbs continues a Republican strategy of weakening elected Democrats’ authority that dates at least to 2016, when the G.O.P.-controlled legislature in North Carolina stripped the state’s executive branch of political appointments and control of state and county election boards just before Roy Cooper, a Democrat, took over as governor.Lawmakers said then that Democrats had behaved similarly in the past, citing a Democratic governor’s decision in 1976 to oust 169 policymakers hired by Republicans. But similar tactics have since been employed to weaken new Democratic governors in Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan. Democrats in many states with Republican-controlled legislatures have fought efforts to curb their governors’ emergency powers to deal with the pandemic.Most recently, Georgia Republicans have been in the forefront of G.O.P. attempts nationwide to exert more control over local election officials. In both Georgia and Kansas, legislators even voted to defang the offices of Republican secretaries of state who had defended the security and fairness of elections.Most other election provisions in the Arizona budget legislation are billed as safeguards against fraud, almost none of which has been found in the past election. One orders a review of voter registration databases in counties with more than a million residents — that is, the counties that are home to the Democrat-leaning cities of Phoenix and Tucson.A new Election Integrity Fund would dole money to county election officials to toughen security and to finance hand counts of ballots after elections. That would appear to open the door to more fraud investigations like the Republican-ordered review of November election ballots in Maricopa County, which was carried by President Biden and Arizona’s two Democratic senators.That effort has been mocked by experts for its high-resolution examination of ballots for evidence of fakery, including bamboo fibers and watermarks that, according to a QAnon conspiracy theory, are visible only under ultraviolet light.Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election were examined by contractors working for the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt York, via Associated PressBut the legislation requires all future ballots to contain at least three anti-fraud countermeasures like holograms, watermarks, ultraviolet-visible numbers or intricate engravings and special inks.It also appropriates $500,000 to determine whether social media and search engine algorithms are biased for or against “one or more candidates of a political party” and whether candidates’ access to them has been restricted. The legislation suggests that such actions could amount to in-kind contributions to candidates or parties that were not reported under Arizona law.Republican legislators cast the anti-fraud clauses as common-sense steps to make elections safer. State Senator Sonny Borrelli, who proposed the changes to ballots, said many of the countermeasures were already used to make it hard to produce counterfeit currency.“Shouldn’t your ballot have the same protections?” he said.The bill drew immediate criticism from voting-rights advocates, who called its provisions the stuff of conspiracy theories. “This is legislating based on the big lie,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of one group, Progress Arizona. “And it’s a really dangerous way to approach making law.”County election officials said they were skeptical about whether the ballot countermeasures were either needed or practical. Aside from the cost, it is unclear whether there are enough printing companies that are able to produce such ballots to allow for competitive bidding on printing contracts, said Leslie Hoffman, the recorder in Yavapai County, whose main city is Prescott.The ballots also would require new equipment to verify their authenticity before being tabulated, and it is unclear whether existing tabulators would even accept them, said Jennifer Marson, the executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties.“This gives the impression that everyone’s ready to go and all we have to do is opt in” to the new countermeasures, she said. “And everything is not ready to go.” More

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      Bee Nguyen, Georgia Democrat, Enters Race for Secretary of State

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      Ms. Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is the first major Democrat to announce a bid for the seat held by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who defied former President Donald Trump.ATLANTA — Next year’s secretary of state election in Georgia was already shaping up to be a tense and dramatic fight: the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger — who enraged former President Donald J. Trump for refusing to overturn the state’s election results — is facing a primary challenge from a Trump-endorsed fellow Republican, Representative Jody Hice.On Tuesday morning, the race got even more interesting with the entry of the first major Democratic candidate, State Representative Bee Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who has helped lead the fight against Republican-backed bills that restrict voting rights in the state.“Republicans have done everything in their power to silence the voices of voters who chose an America that works for all of us, and not just some of us,” she said in her announcement video. “But we will not allow anyone to stand in the way of our right to a free and fair democracy.” In an interview this week, Ms. Nguyen, 39, said that Mr. Raffensperger deserved credit for standing up to Mr. Trump and rejecting his false claims of voter fraud after the November election. But she also noted that since then, Mr. Raffensperger had largely supported the voting rights law passed by the Legislature in March and continued to consider himself a Trump supporter after the former president promulgated his falsehoods about the Georgia election.“I’ve been at the forefront of battling against voter suppression laws in Georgia,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Watching everything unfold in 2020 with the erosion of our Democracy, I recognized how critically important it was to defend our right to vote.”She added, “I believe Georgians deserve better, and can do better.”Mr. Trump lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes. After the election, he made personal entreaties to both Mr. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, asking the two Republicans to intervene and help overturn the results. When they declined, Mr. Trump vowed revenge.In late March, the former president endorsed Mr. Hice, a pastor and former radio talk-show host from Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.It’s not the only race in Georgia that Mr. Trump is hoping to influence in an attempt to exact retribution against those he deems disloyal. In January, Mr. Trump vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp as he sought re-election. Since then, former State Representative Vernon Jones, a former Democrat and a vocal Trump supporter, has entered the race, but Mr. Trump has not endorsed him.On Monday, however, the Georgia political world took notice when State Senator Burt Jones, a Republican, tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Trump meeting at Mr. Trump’s Florida home. Mr. Jones, who did not return calls for comment Monday, hails from a wealthy family and could put his own funds into a statewide race. But if he is interested in higher office, he has a number of choices beyond governor, including possibly jumping into next year’s contest for the U.S. Senate seat held by the Democrat Raphael Warnock.Ms. Nguyen, a supporter of abortion rights and critic of what she has called Georgia’s “lax” gun laws, could struggle to connect with more conservative voters beyond her liberal district in metropolitan Atlanta. She first won the seat in December 2017 in a special election to replace another Democrat, Stacey Abrams, the former state House minority leader who left her position to make her ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Mr. Kemp in 2018.Ms. Abrams, who is African-American, may be gearing up to run against Mr. Kemp again next year, and if Ms. Nguyen can land a spot on the general election ballot, it will reflect the changing demographics that helped Democrats like President Biden score upset wins in Georgia in recent months.In March, Ms. Nguyen was among a group of Asian-American Georgia lawmakers who forcefully denounced the mass shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors in which eight people were killed, including six women of Asian descent.Georgia’s secretary of state race, normally a low-profile affair, will be watched particularly closely next year given the razor-thin margins of the state’s recent elections, and its growing reputation as a key battleground in the presidential election.Mr. Raffensperger finds himself in a frustrating position. A statewide poll in January found that he had the highest approval rating of any Republican officeholder in the state, the likely result of the bipartisan respect he earned for standing up to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hice has a good chance of overpowering Mr. Raffensperger in a G.O.P. primary, given rank-and-file Republicans’ loyalty to the former president.Two other Republicans, David Belle Isle, a former mayor of the city of Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, and T.J. Hudson, a former probate judge, are also running.Daniel Victor More

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      Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections

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      Not content with limiting voting rights, they are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger’s successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.Even those who have not been stripped of power have been censured by Republican Party organizations, including not just Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but also Barbara Cegavske, the Republican secretary of state of Nevada who ran a fair election and rejected spurious arguments that the election was stolen. The message that these actions send to politicians is that if you want a future in state Republican politics, you had better be willing to manipulate election results or lie about election fraud.Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but also to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Law Forward and the States United Democracy Center, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.Combating efforts that can undermine the fair administration of elections and vote counting is especially tricky. Unlike issues of voter suppression, which are easy to explain to the public (what do you mean you can’t give water to voters waiting in long lines?!?), the risks of unfair election administration are inchoate. They may materialize or they may not, depending on how close an election is and whether Mr. Trump himself or another person running for office is willing to break democratic norms and insist on an unfair vote count.So what can be done? To begin with, every jurisdiction in the United States should be voting with systems that produce a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a disputed election. Having physical, tangible evidence of voters’ choices, rather than just records on electronic voting machines, is essential to both guard against actual manipulation and protect voter confidence in a fair vote count. Such a provision is already contained in H.R. 1, the mammoth Democrat-sponsored voting bill.Next, businesses and civic leaders must speak out not just against voter suppression but also at efforts at election subversion. The message needs to be that fair elections require not just voter access to the polls but also procedures to ensure that the means of conducting the election are fair, auditable and verifiable by representatives of both political parties and nongovernmental organizations.Congress must also fix the rules for counting Electoral College votes, so that spurious objections to the vote counts like the ones we saw on Jan. 6 from senators and representatives, including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, are harder to make. It should take much more than a pairing of a single senator and a single representative to raise an objection, and there must be quick means to reject frivolous objections to votes fairly cast and counted in the states.Congress can also require states to impose basic safeguards in the counting of votes in federal elections. This is not part of the H.R. 1 election reform bill, but it should be, and Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress wide berth to override state laws in this area.Finally, we need a national effort to support those who will count votes fairly. Already we are seeing a flood of competent election administrators retiring from their often-thankless jobs, some after facing threats of violence during the 2020 vote count. Local election administrators need political cover and the equivalent of combat pay, along with adequate budget resources to run fair elections. It took hundreds of millions of dollars in private philanthropy to hold a successful election in 2020; that need for charity should not be repeated.If someone running for secretary of state endorses the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, they should be uniformly condemned. Support should go to those who promote election integrity, regardless of party, and who put in place fair and transparent procedures. Ultimately, we need to move toward a more nonpartisan administration of elections and create incentives for loyalty to the integrity of the democratic process, not to a political party.We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion. That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now. It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”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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      Democrats Begin Push for Biggest Expansion of Voting Since 1960s

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      Democrats characterized the far-reaching elections overhaul as the civil rights battle of modern times. Republicans called it a power grab that would put their party at a permanent disadvantage.Democrats began pushing on Wednesday for the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century, laying the groundwork in the Senate for what would be a fundamental change to the ways voters get to the polls and elections are run.At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders made a passionate case for a bill that would mandate automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early and mail-in voting, end gerrymandering that skews congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage and curb the influence of money in politics.The effort is taking shape as Republicans have introduced more than 250 bills to restrict voting in 43 states and have continued to spread false accusations of fraud and impropriety in the 2020 election. It comes just months after those claims, spread by President Donald J. Trump as he sought to cling to power, fueled a deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that showed how deeply his party had come to believe in the myth of a stolen election.Republicans were unapologetic in their opposition to the measure, with some openly arguing that if Democrats succeeded in making it easier for Americans to vote and in enacting the other changes in the bill, it would most likely place their party permanently in the minority.“Any American who thinks that the fight for a full and fair democracy is over is sadly and sorely mistaken,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government.”Mr. Schumer’s rare appearance at a committee meeting underscored the stakes, not just for the election process but for his party’s own political future. He called the proposed voting rollbacks in dozens of states — including Georgia, Iowa and Arizona — an “existential threat to our democracy” reminiscent of the Jim Crow segregationist laws of the past.He chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at Republicans who were promoting them.It was the start of an uphill battle by Senate Democrats, who have characterized what they call the For the People Act as the civil rights imperative of modern times, to overcome divisions in their own ranks and steer around Republican opposition to shepherd it into law. Doing so may require them to change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, once used by segregationists to block civil rights measures in the 1960s.Republicans signaled they were ready to fight. Conceding that allowing more people to vote would probably hurt their candidates, they denounced the legislation, passed by the House this month, as a power grab by Democrats intent on federalizing elections to give themselves a permanent political advantage. They insisted that it was the right of states to set their own election laws, including those that make it harder to vote, and warned that Democrats’ proposal could lead to rampant fraud, which experts say has never been found to be widespread.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, on Wednesday at the hearing.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“This is an attempt by one party to write the rules of our political system,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has spent much of his career opposing such changes.“Talk about ‘shame,’” he added later.Some Republicans resorted to lies or distortions to condemn the measure, falsely claiming that Democrats were seeking to cheat by enfranchising undocumented immigrants or encouraging illegal voting. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the bill aimed to register millions of unauthorized immigrants, though that would remain unlawful under the measure.The clash laid bare just how sharply the two parties have diverged on the issue of voting rights, which attracted bipartisan support for years after the civil rights movement but more recently has become a bitter partisan battleground. At times, Republicans and Democrats appeared to be wrestling with irreconcilably different views of the problems plaguing the election system.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee, which convened the hearing, said states were taking appropriate steps to restore public confidence after 2020 by imposing laws that require voters to show identification before voting and limiting so-called ballot harvesting, where others collect voters’ completed absentee ballots and submit them to election officials. He said that if Democrats were allowed to rush through changes on the national level, “chaos will reign in the next election and voters will have less confidence than they currently do.”The suggestion piqued Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the committee chairwoman, who shot back that it was the current elections system — an uneven patchwork of state laws and evolving voting rules — that had caused “chaos” at polling places.“Chaos is what we’ve seen in the last years — five-hour or six-hour lines in states like Arizona to vote. Chaos is purging names of longtime voters from a voter list so they can’t go vote in states like Georgia,” she said. “What this bill tries to do is to simply make it easier for people to vote and take the best practices that what we’ve seen across the country, and put it into law as we are allowed to do under the Constitution.”With Republicans unified against them, Democrats’ best hope for enacting the legislation increasingly appears to be to try to leverage its voting protections — to justify triggering the Senate’s so-called nuclear option: the elimination of the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to advance most bills.Even that may be a prohibitively heavy lift, though, at least in the bill’s current form. Liberal activists who are spending tens of millions of dollars promoting it insist that the package must move as one bill. But Senator Joe Manchin III, a centrist West Virginia Democrat whose support they would need both to change the filibuster rules and to push through the elections bill, said on Wednesday that he would not support it in its current form.Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Mr. Manchin said he feared that pushing through partisan changes would create more “division” that the country could not afford after the Jan. 6 attack, and instead suggested narrowing the bill.Voters waited in line to cast ballots in the 2020 election in Suwanee, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There’s so much good in there, and so many things I think all of us should be able to be united around voting rights, but it should be limited to the voting rights,” he said. “We’re going to have a piece of legislation that might divide us even further on a partisan basis. That shouldn’t happen.”But it is unclear whether even major changes could win Republican support in the Senate. As written, the more than 800-page bill, which passed the House 220 to 210 mostly along party lines, is the most ambitious elections overhaul in generations, chock-full of provisions that experts say would drive up turnout, particularly among minorities who tend to vote Democratic. Many of them are anathema to Republicans.Its voting provisions alone would create minimum standards for states, neutering voter ID laws, restoring voting rights to former felons, and putting in place requirements like automatic voter registration and no-excuse mail-in balloting. Many of the restrictive laws proposed by Republicans in the states would move in the opposite direction.The bill would also require states to use independent commissions to draw nonpartisan congressional districts, a change that would weaken the advantages of Republicans who control the majority of state legislatures currently in charge of drawing those maps. It would force super PACs to disclose their big donors and create a new public campaign financing system for congressional candidates.Democrats also said they still planned to advance a separate bill restoring a key enforcement provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted it. The ruling paved the way for many of the restrictive state laws Democrats are now fighting.In the hearing room on Wednesday, Republicans ticked through a long list of provisions they did not like, including a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to make it more partisan and punitive, a host of election administration changes they predicted would cause mass “chaos” if carried out and the public campaign financing system.“This bill is the single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered,” Mr. Cruz said. “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.”Mr. Cruz falsely claimed that the bill would register undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too.In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens. It would extend the franchise to millions of former felons, as some states already do, but only after they have served their sentences.Senator Amy Klobuchar pressed against Republicans saying that it was the current elections system that had caused “chaos” at polling places.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThough few senators mentioned him by name, Mr. Trump and his false claims of election fraud hung heavily over the debate.To make their case, Republicans turned to two officials who backed an effort to overturn then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory. Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, and Todd Rokita, the attorney general of Indiana, both supported a Texas lawsuit late last year asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in key battleground states Mr. Biden won, citing groundless accusations of voting improprieties being spread by Mr. Trump.On Wednesday, Democrats balked when Mr. Rokita, a former Republican congressman, asserted that their proposed changes would “open our elections up to increased voter fraud and irregularities” like the ones that he said had caused widespread voter mistrust in the 2020 outcome.Senator Jon Ossoff, a freshman Democrat from Georgia, chastised the attorney general, saying he was spreading misinformation and conspiracies.“I take exception to the comments that you just made, Mr. Rokita, that public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election is born of anything but a deliberate and sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat,” Mr. Ossoff said.Mr. Rokita merely scoffed and repeated an earlier threat to sue to block the legislation from being carried out should it ever become law, a remedy that many Republican-led states would most likely pursue if Democrats were able to win its enactment.Election workers re-counting ballots in November in Atlanta.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“You are entitled to your opinion, as misinformed as it may be, but I share the opinion of Americans,” Mr. Rokita said.Sixty-five percent of voters believe the election was free and fair, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in late January, but only 32 percent of Republicans believe that. 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      Trump Endorses a Loyalist, Jody Hice, for Georgia Secretary of State

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      By supporting a challenger to Georgia’s current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, the former president signaled that he wants Republicans who opposed his election falsehoods to pay politically.Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday took aim at a Georgia official he considers one of his biggest enemies: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the state’s election results last year.By endorsing Jody Hice, a Republican congressman, in his bid to unseat Mr. Raffensperger, the former president made his most prominent effort yet to try to punish elected officials who he believes have crossed him. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is among the top targets for Mr. Trump, along with the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.Mr. Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials certified President Biden’s victory after conducting several recounts. They have said the results were fair and accurate, dismissing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.In a statement issued shortly after Mr. Hice announced his candidacy for the position on Monday, Mr. Trump praised him as “one of our most outstanding congressmen,” and alluded to his own baseless claims of voter fraud, which he has said deprived him of victory in the state. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said. “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”The race in Georgia for secretary of state — until the 2020 election a relatively low-profile job across the country — carries outsize implications in the battleground state, with Republicans there working to roll back voting rights and Democrats fighting those efforts.Should Mr. Hice beat Mr. Raffensperger in the Republican primary, his nomination could energize Democrats who are alarmed by the prospect of elections in the state being run by a Trump loyalist. No date for the primary has been set yet.Mr. Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, stretching south and east from Atlanta, in January condemned the second House impeachment of Mr. Trump as “misguided” and aimed at “scoring cheap political points.” In the weeks after the November election, he supported Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, including a challenge before the Supreme Court that sought to overturn the results in states Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hice also served in the House Freedom Caucus with former Representative Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s fourth and last chief of staff. Mr. Meadows was integral in Mr. Trump’s efforts to recruit Mr. Hice, two Republicans briefed on the discussions said.As he seeks to retain control of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is determined to remain a kingmaker for down-ballot elections, while seeking retribution against those he perceives as having betrayed him.So far, he has endorsed only one other candidate running against someone he feels personally aggrieved by: Max Miller, a former White House aide, who is challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican representing Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District. Mr. Gonzalez was one of 10 House members who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Hice’s challenge — against a Trump nemesis in a critical swing state — will be a higher-profile test of Mr. Trump’s political clout among Republicans.The move to back Mr. Hice against the sitting secretary of state is also extraordinary given that Mr. Raffensperger has confirmed his office is investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results, including a phone call the former president made to him. Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Fulton County prosecutors into whether he and others tried to improperly influence the election.Mr. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of a now-infamous call in early January, in which Mr. Trump pushed baseless claims of widespread election irregularities and asked the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the win for Mr. Biden.“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Mr. Trump said during the call.Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly told him his data was wrong. “We have to stand by our numbers,” he said. “We believe our numbers are right.”Mr. Trump, when he had a Twitter feed, repeatedly attacked Mr. Raffensperger for not acceding to his demands.In a statement on Monday afternoon, Mr. Raffensperger was scathing about his future opponent. “Few have done more to cynically undermine faith in our election than Jody Hice,” he said, adding, “Georgia Republicans seeking a candidate who’s accomplished nothing now have one.”Richard Fausset More