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      Palestinian Militant Will Challenge Abbas’s Party in Election

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      Marwan Barghouti, who is imprisoned for murder, filed his own candidates for the Palestinian elections, posing a challenge to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president.JERUSALEM — A popular Palestinian militant broke with the political party that controls the Palestinian Authority late Wednesday, escalating a power struggle and dimming the party’s hopes of retaining a monopoly on power in parliamentary elections.The militant, Marwan Barghouti, 61, was long a revered figure in Fatah, the secular party that runs the Palestinian Authority and was co-founded by Yasir Arafat, the former Palestinian leader. Though serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for five counts of murder, Mr. Barghouti commands considerable respect among many party cadres and is considered a potential future candidate for Palestinian president.On Wednesday night, Fatah members acting on his behalf broke with the party, forming a separate electoral slate that will compete against Fatah in the elections in May and posing a direct challenge to Fatah’s 85-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority.Mr. Barghouti’s faction joined forces with another longtime protagonist of Palestinian politics, Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew of Mr. Arafat and a former Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, who split from Fatah this year.Analysts believe their alliance could split Fatah’s vote, possibly acting as a spoiler that could benefit Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza.“This is a dramatic and major development,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Mr. Abbas and a senior analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research group in Washington. “This is as big of a challenge as can be raised to Abbas’s election strategy and more generally to his control over Fatah.”Mr. Abbas, who has led the Palestinian Authority for 16 years, called for new elections in January in the hope of reasserting his democratic legitimacy and re-establishing a unified Palestinian administration. The authority manages parts of the occupied West Bank, while Hamas runs the Gaza Strip.The authority has not held elections since 2006 for its parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council. Mr. Abbas has repeatedly postponed them, at least partly because he feared losing to Hamas, which wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in 2007.Mr. Abbas hoped new elections might finally lead to reconciliation with Hamas. Instead, they have exposed a major power struggle within Fatah itself.“This is one of the most significant political developments in Fatah since Abbas became president in 2005,” said Mr. al-Omari. “Barghouti and Kidwa are a combination that can’t be easily dismissed by the Fatah leadership. They have a very deep reservoir of legitimacy in the party and they represent a major challenge to Abbas’s hold on power in it.”Mr. Barghouti ran for president of the Palestinian Authority in 2004, before withdrawing and supporting Mr. Abbas. He had been a leader of the Palestinian uprisings in late 1980s and early 2000s, and was convicted in 2004 for involvement in the killings of five Israelis.He was sentenced to five life terms and campaigned for office from his jail cell.Fatah’s supporters will now be forced to choose among three Fatah-linked factions — the official party, the Barghouti-al-Kidwa alliance, and a third splinter group led by an exiled former security chief, Muhammad Dahlan.Members of Mr. Barghouti’s alliance said they had created the new faction to revitalize Palestinian politics, which has increasingly become a one-man show centered around Mr. Abbas, who has ruled by decree for more than a decade.“The Palestinian political system can no longer only be reformed,” said Hani al-Masri, a member of the new alliance, at a news briefing on Wednesday night. “It needs deep change.”A Fatah official dismissed the group as “turncoats.”“Even with our prophet Mohammed, there were turncoats,” said Jibril Rajoub, the secretary-general of the Fatah Central Committee, at a separate press briefing outside in Ramallah, West Bank. “Fatah is strong and sticking together.”Mr. Abbas has canceled elections in the past, and some believe he may seek to do so again in the coming weeks.But at this point, a cancellation would be “very expensive, politically,” said Ghassan Khatib, a Ramallah-based political analyst and a former minister under Mr. Abbas. “There is a high political price for that.”Mr. Abbas’s best hope would be for the Israeli authorities to intervene in the elections, Mr. Khatib said. Hamas has already accused Israel of arresting some of its leaders and warning them not to participate in the election, which Israel denies. And Palestinian officials say that the Israeli government has yet to respond to a request to allow voting in East Jerusalem.This dynamic that could give Mr. Abbas a pretext to cancel the vote.Mr. Abbas “needs an excuse that can justify such a decision,” Mr. Khatib said. More

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      A Conversation With Senator Raphael Warnock

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      Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherRepublican-led legislatures are racing to restrict voting rights, in a broad political effort that began in the state of Georgia. To many Democrats, it’s no coincidence that Georgia — once a Republican stronghold — has just elected its first Black senator: Raphael Warnock. Today, we speak to the senator about his path from pastorship to politics, the fight over voting rights and his faith that the old political order is fading away.On today’s episodeAstead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Mr. Warnock was previously a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.Getty ImagesBackground readingGeorgia Republicans passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, making it the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of the 2020 presidential contest.Last year, Mr. Warnock ran for office in a state where people in predominantly Black neighborhoods waited in disproportionately long lines. Several Black leaders have said Georgia’s new law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

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      The Painful History of the Georgia Voting Law

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      Republicans today know that blocking access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes.Seventy-five years ago this July, a World War II veteran named Maceo Snipes reportedly became the first Black man to cast a ballot in his rural Georgia county. The next day, a white man shot him in his front yard, and Mr. Snipes would soon afterward die from those wounds.Fortunately, three generations removed from the political reign of terror that claimed Mr. Snipes’s life, voter suppression seems much less likely to arrive by bullet. But we may not be as distant in our political moment from theirs as we might think: The long struggle to block access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes to achieve what bullets and bombs alone could not.What legislators in Georgia and across the country have reminded us is that backlash to expanded voting rights has often arrived by a method that our eras share in common: by laws, like Georgia’s Senate Bill 202, passed by elected politicians.Opponents of the new Georgia law denounce the legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0” precisely because they recognize the continuities between past and present. The bill’s most ardent supporters, who lined up in front of a painting of a building on the site of an antebellum plantation to watch Gov. Brian Kemp sign it into law, seem less interested in distancing themselves from that past and more eager for Americans to forget it.“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained in 2013 in defending the Supreme Court’s gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, a decision that helped clear the way for the current voter suppression campaigns. Yet the riot at the U.S. Capitol makes clear that concerted efforts to sow seeds of distrust in the democratic process can still stoke violent reaction.The methods in the fight against voting rights have a common objective — an electorate narrowed along predictable and demonstrable fault lines. Many present-day proponents of voting restrictions are quick to distance themselves from the racist aims and attitudes of their forebears, but the most durable and enduring attacks on voting rights have long cloaked their goals in race-neutral language — at least in writing.Historians like Carol Anderson demonstrate that attempts to limit ballot access have followed in the wake of mass political mobilization and in response to federal efforts to protect or expand voting rights. At the time Mr. Snipes was killed, the U.S. Supreme Court had recently invalidated the white primary, a disenfranchisement tactic that locked Black voters out of the only election that really mattered because of one-party rule in the “Solid South.” The N.A.A.C.P., which grew from 50,000 to approximately half a million members during World War II, spearheaded the legal challenge to the white primary and grass-roots voter registration drives across the South. Anticipating that Black voters would flood the polls in 1946, Eugene Talmadge, the ex-governor running for the office again, mobilized supporters to ward off threats from local activists and federal action alike.Mr. Talmadge egged on supporters who intimidated and attacked Black voters, but his most enduring and effective tactics look much more like present-day voter suppression tactics. As the Emory researcher Hannah Charak has documented, Mr. Talmadge quietly collaborated with sympathetic local officials on illegal registration purges and blanketed the state with “challenge forms” that white residents could use to dispute Black votes.Voter suppression tactics like literacy tests and Georgia’s infamous county unit system delivered racist leadership like Mr. Talmadge (and his son) while withstanding legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings for decades in part because such measures commonly avoided mention of race.If we remember Georgia’s extremist enemies of democracy for the violence they inspired, then today’s advocates of voter suppression may well expect history to reflect favorably on their relative restraint. Yet even as many supporters of Georgia’s new voting restrictions seek to distance themselves from the violence at the Capitol, they invoke unproven claims of voter fraud and the passions they provoke as a pretext for their legislative actions — political cover for those who claim the high ground of “electoral reform.”Georgia is now a far cry from the one-party politics of Jim Crow, and its increasingly diverse population challenges the power of the overwhelmingly white and disproportionately rural ruling class that has held sway for nearly all of the state’s history — thanks in large part to an unending stream of voter suppression schemes.The ruling logic that drives those efforts, spanning generations and a dramatic shift in party affiliation, is the conviction that America would be better off if fewer Americans voted. Perhaps it is time not only to focus on those who say the quiet parts out loud but to remember that the quiet parts have been there all along.Jason Morgan Ward, a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of “Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965” and, most recently, “Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century.”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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      How China Plans to Control Hong Kong’s Elections

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      New rules give Chinese security bodies power to investigate all potential candidates, meaning that opposition politicians face steep odds of even being allowed to run.HONG KONG — China’s sweeping overhaul of Hong Kong’s election system will give national security bodies vast power over who can run for office, a move that could sideline the pro-democracy opposition for years to come.Hong Kong’s pro-democracy figures had long enjoyed a greater share of the vote in direct elections, but the system was stacked against them, ensuring the pro-Beijing camp controlled the legislature. On Tuesday, the standing committee of the Communist Party-controlled National People’s Congress in Beijing approved changes that would ensure an even stronger legislative majority for the establishment.The changes give Beijing and its handpicked local leaders vast powers to block any opposition candidate China deems disloyal, aiming to stamp out the intense antigovernment sentiment that fueled protests in 2019.Here is a look at the changes and what they mean for Hong Kong:The changes cut the proportion of directly elected seats in the Hong Kong Legislature, to less than 25 percent.Vincent Yu/Associated PressA devastating blow to Hong Kong’s democracyAmong the most significant of the changes is how the city’s lawmakers will be chosen. The move slashes the proportion of directly elected seats on the legislature, to less than a quarter from half. Forty seats on the 90-member body will be chosen by an election committee, a pro-establishment body that also selects Hong Kong’s leader.Beijing further consolidated its grip over the election committee by removing elected district council members, after pro-democracy politicians swept most of those positions in 2019. Those seats were to be replaced with appointed advisory bodies and groups representing people from Hong Kong in mainland China.Opposition groups said the changes would most likely leave them completely shut out of elections at all levels. “The feeling is surreal. It’s beyond anger,” said Avery Ng, the head of the League of Social Democrats, a leftist, pro-democracy party in Hong Kong. “With the newly established structure, the Beijing government can have a 100 percent guarantee on the result in Hong Kong.”Ventus Lau, center, an organizer of the antigovernment protests, was among the candidates barred from elections last year.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesNational security comes to the forePerhaps the most dramatic transformation will be the power that national security bodies beholden to Beijing will now have over the electoral process.Any potential candidate will first be investigated by the national security department of the Hong Kong police and the city’s national security committee, a body created by Beijing last year that includes the central government’s chief representative in Hong Kong. Their reports would be handed to a new vetting committee, whose decisions on qualifying candidates are final and cannot be appealed in court.“The amendments achieved what has been emphasized before: Patriots need to rule Hong Kong,” said Tam Yiu-chung, a pro-Beijing politician and Hong Kong’s sole delegate on the standing committee of the National People’s Congress.He said the changes would block those who “opposed China and wreaked havoc on Hong Kong” — Beijing’s depiction of many pro-democracy figures — from holding seats in the legislature and the election committee.The changes show that Beijing will decide how elections are held in Hong Kong, said Lau Siu-kai, a former senior Hong Kong government official who now advises Beijing policymakers on Hong Kong issues, including the electoral changes.A TVB news broadcast in a Hong Kong mall in 2019. TVB said this month that it would not air the Oscars for the first time in 52 years.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesIt adds to Hong Kong’s transformed political environmentThe electoral overhaul is only the latest example of how Beijing has squeezed a once raucous and freewheeling political landscape and crippled free speech in Hong Kong.The authorities have waged an intense crackdown on the opposition with arrests and detentions. Last month, they charged 47 pro-democracy politicians, including most of the camp’s most prominent figures, with subversion under a national security law. Others are in court on charges of unauthorized assembly. The prosecutions have effectively silenced much of the opposition.The security law has also loomed over the city, curbing its environment for free expression. Some politicians have warned that Hong Kong’s new art museum, M+, risks violating the security law if it displays works from artists like the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei.A local broadcaster, TVB, said this week that it would not show the Oscars after 52 years of televising the event. It said the decision was commercial, but this year’s awards include two nominees that are politically sensitive in China. “Do Not Split,” a nominee for best documentary short, focuses on the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and Chloé Zhao, the first Chinese woman and the first woman of color to be nominated for best director, has stirred a backlash over a 2013 interview in which she criticized her native country.Barriers outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong this month.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesBeijing has been unswayed by the international backlash.Beijing’s moves on Hong Kong have prompted criticism and countermeasures from foreign governments, including the United States. Both the Trump and Biden administrations imposed financial sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials deemed as having undermined the city’s autonomy.Several nations have also announced they would make it easier for people from Hong Kong to immigrate. Britain has opened up residency and a potential pathway to citizenship for millions of people from Hong Kong, a former British colony.As the political changes pushed by Beijing continue to shake Hong Kong, more people are likely to consider options for leaving, said Sonny Lo, a political analyst based in Hong Kong.“This will have a kind of chilling effect on society,” he said. “I expect a wave of migration. Because in the minds of ordinary citizens who don’t know about politics, who don’t know the complexities, they are really scared off.”Keith Bradsher More

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      New Jersey to Extend Early In-Person Voting

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      New Jersey, a state controlled by Democrats, will offer more than a week of early in-person voting for the first time before November’s election.Months after a divisive presidential election pushed voting rights to the fore, the issue has become a key political battlefield.Bills restricting ballot access are moving quickly in Republican-led states even as President Biden and his fellow Democrats in Washington press for passage of the most ambitious voting rights legislation in decades to help blunt their effect.In New Jersey, the Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, is about to sign a bill authorizing early in-person voting, sending a clear signal that making it easier to vote is crucial for a healthy democracy.It will be done in a ceremony laden with symbolism: Mr. Murphy will be joined on Tuesday in a videoconference by Stacey Abrams, whose decade-long effort to enroll voters in Georgia helped Mr. Biden win the state and cemented the Democrats’ slim majority in the United States Senate.New Jersey lawmakers’ final approval of two bills that expand voter access were not surprising in a state where Democrats control the State House and Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters by more than one million. And the practice of early in-person voting is hardly novel: New Jersey will become the 25th state to allow voters to cast ballots in person before elections for a period that includes a weekend day.But Thursday’s final votes came on the same day that Georgia became the first major battleground state to restrict voting access since the tumultuous 2020 presidential contest, adopting a law that added voter identification requirements for absentee voting, limited drop boxes and expanded the Legislature’s power over elections.Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to limit voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.Mr. Biden, criticizing voting restrictions that appear designed to appease a conservative base still outraged by the results of the presidential election, said that Georgia’s new law made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”“What an ironic moment,” said New Jersey Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat who was a prime sponsor of the early-voting legislation. “While New Jersey is doing one thing, Georgia is doing the exact opposite.”New Jersey’s legislation requires each of the state’s 21 counties to open three to seven polling places for machine voting in the days before an election. For the Nov. 2 contest, there would be nine days of early in-person voting, including two weekends, ending the Sunday before Election Day. The bill calls for fewer days of early voting before primaries.“Our accountability over government, opportunities to better our lives and the chance to elect our representatives all depend upon our ability to access the ballot,” said Senator Nia Gill, a Democrat who represents parts of Essex and Passaic Counties and was a sponsor of the bill.Separate legislation that was also approved on Thursday calls for drop boxes for paper vote-by-mail ballots to be spaced out more evenly throughout counties, ensuring that there are access points closer to residential neighborhoods.“Across our nation, there is a concerted effort to limit access to the ballot box among eligible voters,” Mr. Murphy said in a statement. “Those efforts are un-American and fly in the face of the principles that generations of Americans, from soldiers to civil rights activists, have fought for and in many cases given their lives to defend.”Some county elections leaders, while supportive of the intent of the early-voting bill, had urged lawmakers to delay implementation until after November’s election, when the governor and all members of the Legislature are up for re-election. The bill will require most counties to purchase new voting machines and electronic poll books, and could cost upward of $50 million.Some New Jersey Republicans objected to the cost and the timeline for implementing the legislation, which cleared the Assembly earlier this month and passed in the Senate on Thursday, 28 to 8, largely along party lines.Senator Kristin M. Corrado, a Republican and a former county clerk who managed elections in Passaic County for more than seven years, said she supported early in-person voting. But, she said, she voted against the measure mainly out of concern that there would not be enough time before Election Day to update the voter rolls, purchase new machines and sync them to new electronic poll books.“I hope we’re not setting everyone up for failure, but we’re just not there,” she said. “We don’t have the machines. We don’t have the poll books. We don’t have the workers.”Senator Declan O’Scanlon Jr., a Republican who represents much of the Jersey Shore, said he opposed the bill for similar reasons.“Like many things we do in Trenton, we’re doing it incompetently,” he said. “It’s impossible to do it instantly, yet we make no allowance in the bill for any delay.”Still, supporters of expanding voting rights said they were hopeful that county election officials could successfully complete the necessary preparations in seven months.“We applaud the Legislature’s commitment to removing obstacles to the ballot in recognition of the simple truth that our democracy is better when all voices can participate,” Jesse Burns, executive director of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey, said in a statement.Henal Patel, a director at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a nonprofit that advocates racial and social justice, said the inclusion of voting on two Sundays would encourage more nonwhite churchgoers to cast ballots as part of a nationwide tradition known as “souls to the polls.”“Early in-person voting encourages participation by more people, increases satisfaction, and results in shorter lines on Election Day,” Ms. Patel said in a statement.During the pandemic, voting in New Jersey has occurred primarily with vote-by-mail ballots. Last fall, every registered voter in the state was sent a paper ballot, which could be mailed back or delivered by hand to drop boxes or election offices, resulting in record-setting voter turnout in November.Under the new legislation, drop boxes would be positioned farther apart and efforts would be made to include more in poor communities.“Passing legislation for early voting and allowing more equitable drop-box placement will expand our democracy for New Jersey’s Black voters, who have historically faced obstacles to the ballot,” Richard T. Smith, president of the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said in a statement.Ms. Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia Statehouse, spent a decade building a Democratic political infrastructure in the state, first with her New Georgia Project and then with Fair Fight, the voting rights organization she founded after losing a campaign for governor in 2018.Her efforts contributed to January’s election of two Democratic U.S. senators in Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, swinging the balance of power in the Senate back to the Democrats.Mr. Zwicker, who represents parts of several counties near Princeton, said he was excited by Ms. Abrams’s expected participation in Tuesday’s bill signing.“If there’s anything good about doing things online, it’s that you can do things like this,” he said. “Talk about a single person changing the course of our country’s history with the work she did in Georgia. I’ll be thrilled to be within the same electrons as her.” More

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      Georgia Law Kicks Off Partisan Battle Over Voting Rights

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      Civil rights groups quickly challenged a new law placing restrictions on voting, while President Biden denounced it as “Jim Crow.” Republicans in other states are determined to follow suit with their own measures.The fight over voting rights is emerging as one of the defining conflicts of the Biden era, and Georgia fired the opening shot with a set of new restrictions underscoring the political, legal and financial clashes that will influence whether Republicans retake Congress and the White House.President Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new law an “attack on the Constitution” and said the Justice Department was “taking a look” at Republican voting efforts in the state, without offering any specifics.“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century, it must end,” Mr. Biden said, a day after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law. “I will take my case to the American people — including Republicans who joined the broadest coalition of voters ever in this past election to put country before party.“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”Civil rights groups immediately challenged the Georgia law in federal court, backed by prominent Democratic voting rights lawyers. Several Black leaders described the legal skirmishes to come as an existential fight for representation, saying the law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters. Protests against voting restrictions unfolded this week in state capitols like Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, and more lawsuits are expected.In more than 24 states, Republican-led legislatures are advancing bills in a broad political effort that is the most aggressive attack on the right to vote since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It follows months of Republican efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden’s presidential victory, which scores of high-level G.O.P. officials still refuse to acknowledge as legitimate.Democrats, who have limited power in many state capitols, are looking to Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats for a new federal law to protect voting. Many in the party see the fight over voting as not just a moral cause but also a political one, given their narrow margins of victory in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia, Arizona and other battlegrounds.Georgia’s sweeping new provisions, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, represent the most substantive overhaul of a battleground state’s voting system since last November’s election. It would impose stricter voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limit drop boxes and forbid giving water and snacks to voters waiting in line.But in a state where former President Donald J. Trump tried to persuade Republican election officials to reverse his loss, the measure went even further: It shifts the power and oversight of elections to the Legislature by stripping the secretary of state from chairing the state Board of Elections and authorizing the Legislature to name members to the board. It further empowers the state Board of Elections to have sweeping jurisdiction over county elections boards, including the authority to suspend officials.Mr. Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new voting restrictions “un-American,” and sought to tie them to the Democrats’ push in Washington to enact the federal voting rights bill, which the House passed this month. The measure would put in place a raft of requirements intended to protect voting rights, including weakening restrictive state identification requirements, expanding early and mail-in voting and restoring voting rights to former felons.The president said the new Georgia law was expressly what the House bill was designed to prevent. While Democrats in Congress debate abolishing the filibuster in order to pass the voting rights bill through the Senate, Republican legislators in more than 40 states have introduced hundreds of bills targeting voting access and seizing authority over administering elections.And another crucial conflict looms this fall: the fights over redistricting to account for growing and changing populations, and the gerrymandering that will allow partisan majorities to limit the impact of votes by packing or splitting up population centers.The gerrymandering disputes will determine the look of the House and dozens of state legislatures, in many cases locking in majorities for the next decade.Gov. Bryan Kemp of Georgia signed the voting bill into law hours after it was passed on Thursday.@GovKemp, via ReutersBitter struggles over voting rights loom even in states with Democratic governors who can veto the legislation. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled legislatures are planning to advance restrictive bills, and new Republican governors would most likely sign them into law if they are elected next year.“The 2020 election is behind us, but the war over the future of our democracy is escalating,” said Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the secretary of state in Michigan, where Republicans this week introduced numerous proposed restrictions on voting. “For anyone to believe that they can sit down and rest because the 2020 election is behind need look no further than what happened in Georgia as an indication that our work is far from over.”Republicans, borrowing language from their previous efforts at curtailing voting access, have described the new bills as a way to make voting easier while limiting fraud. Mr. Kemp, upon signing the bill into law, said it would “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” even though the state’s own Republican election officials found no substantive evidence of fraud.Mr. Kemp on Friday pushed back at Mr. Biden’s criticism, saying, “There is nothing ‘Jim Crow’ about requiring a photo or state-issued ID to vote by absentee ballot.”“President Biden, the left and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box,” Mr. Kemp said. “As secretary of state, I consistently led the fight to protect Georgia elections against power-hungry, partisan activists.”Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Georgia would serve as a model for other Republican-run states.“The country was watching closely what Georgia would do,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “The fact that they were able to get these reforms through sets the tone and puts Georgia in a leadership role for other states.”The Justice Department was aware of Georgia’s voting law, a spokeswoman said on Friday, but provided no further comment. A White House official said the president, in his comments, was assuming this was an issue the department would review.The department’s civil rights division would most likely have lawyers investigate whether to file an independent lawsuit, said Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who also previously ran the department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. It could also take part in the case that was filed by civil rights groups by filing a so-called statement of interest or moving to intervene as the plaintiff, he said.But this is a precarious time for the federal protections in place. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted one of the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act, clearing the runway for much of the current legislation aimed at restricting voting. The remaining protection, in Section 2 of the act, is facing a new challenge before the Supreme Court, with arguments heard last month.The debate is also spilling over into the corporate arena. Activists across the country have been chastising companies they see as silent on the issue of voting rights. In Georgia on Friday, numerous civil rights groups and faith leaders issued a call to boycott some of the standard-bearers of the Georgia business community — including Coca-Cola — until they took action against the effort to restrict voting access.The early battle lines are increasingly centering on two key states that flipped from Republican to Democratic in 2020, Arizona and Georgia. Those states are also home to large populations of voters of color, who have historically faced discriminatory laws at the polls.Two battleground states that remained in Republican control in 2020 — Texas and Florida — are also moving forward with new laws restricting voting.A drive-through voting station in Houston in October. Bills being considered by the Texas Legislature would ban the practice.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIn Florida, lawmakers are looking to ban drop boxes and limit who can collect ballots for other voters, among other provisions, even after an election that the Republican chair of the state party touted as the “gold standard” and that Republicans won handily.Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative who has sponsored some of the legislation, said that while the election was successful, it was “not without challenges and problems that we think we needed to fix.” He cited the use of ballot drop boxes, which he helped write into law but he said were not adequately being administered.“They said the same thing with the last election bill, that we wrote it and they said it was voter suppression, and the exact opposite happened: We had more people vote in the state of Florida than ever before,” he said. “We have 40 days of election with three different ways to vote. How can anyone say voter suppression?”In Arizona, Republican lawmakers have advanced legislation that would drop voters who skip consecutive election cycles from the permanent early voting list. The list currently consists of roughly 3.2 million voters, and critics of the legislation estimate it would purge roughly 100,000 voters.Lawmakers in Florida are seeking to limit drop boxes for ballots.Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesWisconsin Republicans have proposed many restrictions on the disabled, new limits on who can automatically receive an absentee ballot and a requirement that absentee voters provide photo identification for every election — as opposed to having one on file with their municipal clerk.The measures are certain to be vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, but their sponsor, the Republican State Senator Duey Stroebel, said Friday that the legislation would encapsulate the party’s principles heading into the midterm elections.“It will define that we as Republicans are people who want clean and fair elections in the state,” Mr. Stroebel said. Wisconsin Democrats, confident in Mr. Evers’s veto, are eager to have a voting rights fight be front and center ahead of the 2022 elections, said State Senator Kelda Roys, a Democrat.“People hate the idea that their right to vote is under attack,” Ms. Roys said. “The freedom to vote is just popular. It’s a great issue for Democrats.”The torrent of Republican voting legislation, Democrats say, undermines faith in elections.“Even in states where they won’t be passed and have been introduced, like in Colorado, they’re dangerous,” said Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado. “The rhetoric of lying and trying to manipulate Americans to keep political power is dangerous. It led to all the death threats that secretaries of state and election officials received in 2020. It led to the insurrection.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Pompeo Meets With Iowa Voters as He Lays Groundwork for 2024

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      If there was ever any doubt of Mike Pompeo’s political ambitions, the former secretary of state put them to rest on Friday by becoming the first big-name Republican to meet with voters in Iowa this year and lay the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign.Speaking near Des Moines in Urbandale, Iowa, Mr. Pompeo largely cast his remarks to the Westside Conservative Club as an effort to win a Republican majority in Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. But his breakfast speech was tinged with references to the presidential campaign in 2024 — a race that Mr. Pompeo has never denied eyeing.“These elections in 2022 will have a real impact on how 2024 ultimately goes as well, and it’s why I’m out here today,” Mr. Pompeo told the small crowd, according to Fox News. “It’s why I’m going to continue to go out and campaign.”“If we get 2022 right, 2024 will solve itself,” Mr. Pompeo said.The former top diplomat — who also served as C.I.A. director to former President Donald J. Trump before becoming secretary of state in 2018 — is also scheduled to speak to Republicans in New Hampshire on Monday on a video call to a fund-raiser for a state House candidate.Iowa and New Hampshire have been the first two states to cast votes in presidential campaigns in recent election cycles. Mr. Pompeo said he is also helping Republicans in Texas, Nebraska and Alabama.While at the State Department, Mr. Pompeo made little secret of his political aspirations.He was the first sitting secretary of state in modern history to address a party’s national convention, a platform he used to introduce himself to a domestic audience while on a taxpayer-funded diplomatic visit to Jerusalem last August. He also hosted about two dozen dinners at the department, over a two-year period, for foreign policy discussions with American business leaders and political conservatives whose support would be crucial in future campaigns.In the two months since leaving office, Mr. Pompeo has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration’s policies on a range of topics, including China, immigration and aid to Palestinians. (He has, however, steered clear of directly criticizing his successor, Antony J. Blinken, the current secretary of state.) Mr. Pompeo has also taken aim at social issues, like transgender athletes and the so-called cancel culture movement, to firmly establish his conservative bona fides.He has adopted Mr. Trump’s mantra of “America First” and on Friday told the breakfast crowd in Iowa that “America will be the country that comes out in a way that delivers good outcomes for our people and for people all across the world — and it’ll be because of all the good work that we all do.”Curiously, in a Fox News interview earlier this week, Mr. Trump did not mention his former secretary of state while enumerating the Republicans he thinks are the future of the party. More