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      A Brief History of Messy Elections

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      Three times the results were disputed after the votes were in.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.America is the world’s oldest democracy. And part of why it has worked for so long is that people have faith that its elections are fair and honest. But not every election has gone smoothly. In the more than two centuries that we’ve been electing presidents, there have been a handful of elections in which people disputed the results.1876: A divided nationAbout a decade after the Civil War ended, America was still deeply divided between North and South. The 1876 election, between Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, came down to three Southern states where the results were disputed. Neither candidate had a majority of the Electoral College without those three states. So Congress appointed a committee to decide, and a deal was struck: Hayes would become president. But in exchange, the federal government would ease control over the Southern states that had been part of the Confederacy.2000: A 537-vote winThe 2000 election was very, very close. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, won more votes across the country than his competitor, George W. Bush. But he didn’t have a majority in the Electoral College. It all came down to a single state, Florida, where Bush had a very slim lead. Gore went to court to challenge the vote counts in several counties there. But after a 36-day legal battle, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to end the recounts. That left Bush with just 537 more votes in Florida, which meant that he won the Electoral College and the presidency. After that, Gore conceded. “I accept the finality of this outcome,” he said.2020: A capitol riotIn 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by seven million votes nationwide and won the Electoral College. But Trump wouldn’t accept the loss. He filed many lawsuits and pressured state officials, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help switch the results to him. It didn’t work. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told supporters to march to the Capitol, where Congress was counting the Electoral College votes. His supporters stormed the Capitol, and many people were hurt. Eventually, the police cleared the mob out, and Congress declared Biden the winner. More

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      How Kids and Teenagers Are Getting Involved in Elections

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      Teens around the country are volunteering, canvassing and registering voters.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.You have to be 18 years old to vote in national elections. But you don’t have to be 18 to care — or to play a role. Young people can advocate for issues they care about, support candidates and make sure everyone is able to have their ballots counted. Here’s how kids and teens are getting involved in the election before they’re old enough to actually vote in it.Registering New VotersIt bothers Shivansh B., 17, that some people where he lives in Pleasanton, Calif., don’t seem to care much about voting. He wants to make people in his generation more active in democracy. For Shivansh, that means starting now. “I read an article that said that if you can get people to vote in their very first election, they’ll be voting for a lifetime,” he says. So he spent seven months organizing a rally for all 1,100 juniors and seniors at his high school to encourage them to register to vote for the first time. (In California, you can preregister at 16, so as soon as you turn 18 you’re able to vote.) Shivansh says he hopes to create “a ripple effect of people feeling empowered by their government.”Knocking on DoorsFor Bayly H., making a difference requires some serious footwork. The 17-year-old volunteers for her local state representative in Connecticut by canvassing, which means going door to door to speak directly with voters. She reminds them about the upcoming election, asks what issues matter to them and shares how her candidate promises to address their concerns. “You’re going to trust people in your community who have a conversation with you a lot more than you’re going to trust an ad you see on TV,” she says.Helping at the PollsThis Election Day, Maggie M., a high school senior, will be at a middle school that will serve as a voting site near her home in Fairfax, Va. She’ll show people where to cast their ballots, assist with curbside voting and hand out stickers. One thing she learned in a two-hour training session to be a high school election page is that poll workers have to keep their political views to themselves. The job isn’t to influence anyone’s decisions — it’s to make sure everyone has the “opportunity to vote and choose who gets to go into office,” she says. More

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      Trump Offends Women as His Campaign Reaches Out to Young Men

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      How Donald Trump’s allies are honing their message to young men in the campaign’s final days.For Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who is the founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, the most frightful Halloween trick of all might be this: Women are outvoting men.“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” he wrote yesterday on X, warning that, if men stay home, Vice President Kamala Harris will be elected.“If you want a vision of the future if you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling, forever,” Kirk added. “Men need to GO VOTE NOW.”It was a post that managed to both bemoan and explain a dynamic that has come to define the country’s first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. The gender gap between Harris and former President Donald Trump has grown large enough that just the fact of high turnout among women is enough to spook Republicans — and yet they keep talking about women in ways that may further intensify that gap.So Kirk may well be right that they need to scare up more men.And that’s exactly what he and Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, seemed to be trying to do this morning when they appeared together near High Point University in North Carolina. Trump has opened an enormous lead among young men, and I traveled to High Point to hear Vance and Kirk’s message in a space with lots of them.“I think you guys have a lot to lose,” Vance said.“Do you want a person like Kamala Harris negotiating in private rooms with people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?” Vance asked, not mentioning the fact that Trump has praised both dictators. “Or do you want a person like Donald Trump actually sticking up for the United States of America?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Tiny Panel, Up for Election, Could Steer Arizona Away From Clean Power

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      The vote, in a sunny state with huge solar potential, reflects a growing nationwide fight over America’s energy transition.As Arizona voters go the polls, they have more control over their state’s power plants and climate policies than they might realize.This year three of the five seats are up for grabs on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates electric utilities. The commission has authority over how electricity is generated, among other things, and what customers pay.In recent years, it has taken steps toward rolling back a clean-energy mandate passed by a previous Republican-led board. It has also made it harder to build community solar in a state renowned for its sunniness, its critics say, and easier to build new fossil-fuel-burning power plants.These boards exist in states nationwide, and while most are appointed, similarly contentious races playing out in states like Louisiana and Montana, where they’re debating the future of coal power, which is particularly dirty, and what role natural gas, another fossil fuel, should have.“It’s a fourth branch of government that nobody knows about who’s in your pocket every day,” said Robert Burns, a Republican who served on Arizona’s commission for eight years.Starting two decades ago, the Republican-controlled commission had encouraged a transition to renewable energy based on simple economics: Renewables were getting cheaper than fossil fuels. It initially required utilities it regulates to become 15-percent renewable by 2025 and later, during Mr. Burns’s tenure, he sought to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants by 2050.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      North Korea, in the Spotlight Over Ukraine, Launches a Long-Range Missile

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      The launch, into waters west of Japan, came shortly after the United States and South Korea criticized the North for sending troops to join Russia’s war. North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile off its east coast on Thursday, South Korean defense officials said, shortly after the United States and South Korea condemned the country for deploying troops near Ukraine to join Russia’s war effort.The missile was fired from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, at a deliberately steep angle so that it reached an unusually high altitude but did not fly over Japan, the South Korean military said in a brief statement. The missile landed in waters between North Korea and Japan.The military said it was analyzing data to learn more about the missile, but that it believed it was an ICBM. North Korea last tested a long-range missile​ in December, when it test-fired its solid-fueled Hwasong-18 ICBM.The launch on Thursday was the North’s first major weapons test since September, when it fired a new type of Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile, which it said could carry a “super-large” conventional warhead weighing 4.5 tons.On Wednesday, South Korean defense intelligence officials told lawmakers that North Korea might conduct long-range missile tests before the American presidential election next week. They also said that the North was preparing to conduct its seventh underground nuclear test, in a bid to raise tensions and gain diplomatic leverage with the next U.S. president. North Korea conducted its last nuclear test in 2017.In recent weeks, North Korea has posed a fresh security challenge to Washington and its allies by sending an estimated 11,000 troops to Russia to fight in its war against Ukraine. Thousands of them, outfitted with Russian uniforms and equipment, have moved closer to the front lines, preparing themselves for possible battle against Ukrainian troops, South Korean and American officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Japan Election: Asia’s Most Stable Democracy Is Sent Into Chaos

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      Deep-seated grievance among Japanese voters has put the Liberal Democrats, longstanding custodians of the status quo, on notice.For years, Japan has managed to resist the populist waves that have swept Europe and the United States as disaffected electorates have demanded radical change.But as voters handed the longtime governing party of Japan a resounding blow in snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, there were signs that their frustration could convert one of the region’s most stable democracies into a much more chaotic one.On the surface, it appeared that the center had held. Even though the Liberal Democratic Party, which has dominated Japanese politics for most of the postwar era, lost its majority in the lower house of Parliament, the Constitutional Democrats, who won the second-most seats behind the L.D.P., are another relatively centrist party.But minority parties on the far left and far right both gained seats. And while Shigeru Ishiba, who was selected by the Liberal Democrats as prime minister only a month ago, blamed the party’s dismal showing on a protracted political finance scandal, analysts said the sense of grievance among voters went far deeper.“The last 30 years of stagnation and the deterioration of the living standards, especially for young people — the frustration is there,” said Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat who is now a special adviser at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo.Election results reflected voter discontent over flat wages, labor shortages and a rapidly aging population.Eugene Hoshiko/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Japan’s Political Uncertainty Means for Its Market Rally

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      The long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party has lost its parliamentary majority, raising questions about the policy stability that has lured investors.The steady course of the Japanese economy and business environment that has helped attract a torrent of investment in the past two years could be undercut by the political turmoil resulting from the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday.Japan’s economy, though not growing by leaps and bounds, has inched back from the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. The emergence of long-sought inflation has given the Bank of Japan room to raise interest rates for the first time in nearly two decades.Following moves by Warren Buffett last year to increase his holdings in some of Japan’s biggest trading firms, investors have shifted their money to Japan from China, which has economic and geopolitical risks. Corporate earnings in Japan have remained solid and government-led changes, such as guidelines recommending takeover offers be given serious consideration, have prompted companies to take steps to enhance their appeal to investors.Stocks in Japan have experienced one of their strongest rallies in decades. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index is up nearly 50 percent since the beginning of 2023.Now, the Liberal Democrats — the political party that has governed Japan for all but four years since 1955 — has lost its majority in the powerful lower chamber of Parliament, leaving the future structure of the government and direction of its economic policies uncertain.“The reasons that Warren Buffett and others got excited about Japan are not lost, but you need the background that is a stable macro environment,” said Jesper Koll, a director at Monex Group, a financial services firm. “For now, the bastion of stability element that has made Japan attractive is not going to be working.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More