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      Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules

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      Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

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      Harris Sends a Secret Weapon to a Georgia Fish Fry: Bill Clinton

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      The smell of fried fish was lingering on Sunday afternoon, and there was Bill Clinton beneath a tree, wearing a Harris-Walz camouflage cap and edging closer and closer to his modest audience the longer he spoke.It was a fittingly intimate setting for Peach County, Ga., a county where elections are decided by mere hundreds of votes. And for Mr. Clinton, who rose to power as “the man from Hope,” drawing on his Arkansas roots, it was a chance to engage in a little homespun politicking before early voting begins Tuesday in Georgia, a key battleground state.“It’s going to come down to whether you are willing to do one more time what you did when you elected not only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four years ago, but Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to the two Democrats Georgia elected to the Senate. “And if you are, we will win. And if you are not, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”From a church service in Albany, where the former president reminisced about campaigning alongside the baseball great Hank Aaron, to the fish fry in Fort Valley attended by a few hundred people, Mr. Clinton used the opening hours of a two-day blitz to try to help Ms. Harris bump up her score wherever she can.The fish fry, in a predominantly rural area about two hours south of Atlanta, suggested few places were too small to seek votes — even for a former president.Former President Bill Clinton addresses the crowd at the Get Out The Vote Fish Fry in Fort Valley, Ga. on Sunday.David Walter Banks for The New York TimesWe 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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      This Election Will Need More Heroes

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      True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote, and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results, and even trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or even help him overturn an election loss.Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstop are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including former President Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.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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      Fulton county brawl with Georgia state election board escalates as election approaches

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      The legal brawl between Georgia’s Donald Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November.Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county.The lawsuit asks for a judgment establishing that the state board of elections does not have the authority to force the county to accept appointments to their monitoring team. Fulton county and the state board came to a voluntary agreement in May to hire a monitoring team for the 2024 election after the state board found that it may have double-scanned as many as 3,000 ballots in a recount of the 2020 election. The state board reprimanded the county for the mistake in May.Fulton county then agreed to implement a third-party monitoring system, in part to assuage critics like those on the board of elections. The monitors would observe election processes for training, ballot preparation, programming voting machines and other processes.“Since that time, the SEB has repeatedly provided conflicting information and failed to take action related to monitors,” said Sherri Allen, the Fulton county board of registration and elections chair.“State Election Board members have stated in meetings with Fulton County BRE members that the State Election Board would ‘disavow’ the Fulton County BRE if the Fulton County BRE did not accept the monitors proposed by the State Election Board,” the lawsuit states. “Any such adverse action would directly conflict with multiple provisions of the Election Code.”An advisory letter sent to the state board last month by Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, also told the board that it did not have the authority to force Fulton county to accept its monitors.“Let’s make it clear that this is a closed case under the law, as determined by the attorney general’s office,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democratic appointee to the state election board, in dissent. Ghazal noted that the county was only legally obligated to retain the 2020 documents – volumes of absentee ballot data, scanner tapes, poll pad data, ballot images and other information – for two years.But Janice Johnston, a Republican member of the state board praised by Trump as a “pit bull”, said she had been assured that the documents were available because of pending litigation. “If Fulton county cannot or does not have the documents, then the place to go is to the clerk of the court where they should be … available for completion of the investigation of Mr Rossi and Mr Moncla’s complaint.”Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and Kevin Moncla, a Texan and the director of the Election Oversight Group, are prominent activists who have continued to press a case in court and before the state elections board over the 2020 election.The county appointed a monitoring team led by Ryan Germany, former general counsel for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. But Trump-aligned members of the state board, at odds with Raffensperger over his handling of the 2020 election, want to add their own members to Germany’s team.Those members include Heather Honey, who worked on the Maricopa county, Arizona, audit of the 2020 election with the Trump-campaign funded Cyber Ninjas investigation, and Frank Ryan, a former US representative who as a state senator in Pennsylvania made false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and rejected the state’s electoral count.At the rancorous board meeting on Tuesday, the Georgia state representative Saira Draper, a litigant in a suit to block recent changes to election rules, sparred with Janelle King and Johnston, two Republican members of the state board, over the board’s investigation of some county election boards’ decision to reject voter challenges.“What we’ve seen since 2021 is a targeting of certain counties,” Draper said, responding to a report from Mike Coan, the board’s executive director who investigated how elections offices around Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, Athens and other large counties had responded to voter challenges.“We haven’t seen the mass voter challenges across Georgia any more. We have seen them against Democratic centers … counties with large numbers of Democratic voters, and that’s a nakedly partisan ploy,” she said. “There are people who are sore losers, who have brought frivolous voter challenges targeting Democratic counties, and those challenges have been appropriately dismissed. And now they want a second bite at the apple, both in the courts and here at the state elections board one week before early voting starts.”“Was Stacey Abrams a sore loser?” King asked Draper. Abrams never conceded her 2018 loss to the governor, Brian Kemp, and suggested that Kemp as secretary of state had manipulated the election apparatus to his advantage.“I wish she had conceded,” Draper replied.Fulton county is also contending with a lawsuit from the Georgia Republican party, alleging that the county’s election office hasn’t hired enough Republicans as poll workers for the 2024 election.The suit states that Georgia law requires counties to hire poll workers from a list parties provide in equal measure. Republicans submitted the names of 74 workers to Fulton county elections director Nadine Williams to hire, but out of the 800 or more elections hires, only nine have been hired for early voting and six for election day, according to the suit. Williams has instead given hiring authority to temporary staffing agencies and precinct managers, who have not given preference to names on the Republican list, it states.Williams’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the hiring of poll workers.The Fulton county board of registration and elections will meet on Thursday at 11am. Among the items on the agenda are an update on the monitoring team and the terms of the proposal, a review of the state board’s new rules and the impact to operations, and an executive session to discuss litigation and personnel matters. More

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      Far-right site Gateway Pundit settles defamation suit with election workers

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      The Gateway Pundit, the far-right news website that played a critical role in spreading false information about the 2020 election, has settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers it falsely accused of wrongdoing.Notice of the settlement was filed in circuit court in Missouri, where Freeman and Moss had sued the site for defamation. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing.Nearly 20 articles that Freeman and Moss said had falsely accused them of wrongdoing were no longer available on The Gateway Pundit’s website as of Thursday afternoon, according to a Guardian review.“The dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the legal team for Moss and Freeman said in a statement. Attorneys for the Gateway Pundit did not immediately return a request for comment.After the 2020 election, the Gateway Pundit published a series of stories amplifying a misleading video that showed Freeman and Moss counting ballots. The site pushed the false claim that the two women were committing fraud and counting illegal ballots after counting had ended for the night. The Gateway Pundit was the first news outlet to identify Freeman and later identified Moss, who have been cleared of all wrongdoing.Even after Georgia election officials debunked the video, the site continued to publish numerous articles falsely accusing Moss and Freeman of fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also attacked the two women publicly. A Washington DC jury ordered Giuliani to pay nearly $150m to the two women last year for libel, a decision the former New York mayor is appealing. At the trial, Giuliani’s lawyer at one point accused the Gateway Pundit of being the basis of the false claims about the two women.The two women faced vicious harassment, including death threats, and fled their homes and went into hiding after people showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home. Moss’s son received death threats on his phone and fell behind in school. Freeman testified last year that she had nowhere to live. Moss testified to the committee investigating the January 6 attack in 2022, but has otherwise not spoken much publicly.“I was terrorized,” Freeman said during a trial in Washington DC last year. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, had refused to concede that the site said anything false about the women, even though the state quickly debunked accusations of wrongdoing and a longer investigation formally cleared them. Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, also a contributor, held a press conference in Milwaukee during the Republican national convention in July and repeated many of the false claims about Freeman and Moss.The settlement with the Gateway Pundit is notable because of the influential role the site plays in spreading misinformation. One recent analysis by the group Advance Democracy found that the site is continuing to spread false information about voting and seed the idea that the 2024 election could be stolen.The two women have already settled a settled suit with One America News, another far-right outlet. The network issued an on-air apology after the settlement.They are also seeking to collect on the money Giuliani owes them. Their lawyers recently asked a New York judge to allow them to take control over Giuliani’s assets.The Gateway Pundit still faces a libel suit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of the voting system company Dominion who was falsely accused of subverting the 2020 election.The site had declared bankruptcy in an attempt to delay the case, but a judge dismissed the effort earlier this year.The case was one of several libel lawsuits filed against Trump allies and conservative networks that aired false claims about the 2020 election. Nearly all of those cases have settled, which observers have said may underscore the limited role defamation law can have in curbing misinformation.More details soon … More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned over Helene weather conspiracy theory

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      Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.“I would know, too.”In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent. More

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      Georgia residents on Trump and Harris’s post-Helene trips: ‘He’s here to get votes, she’s here to help’

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      Mayor Garnett Johnson didn’t want to put his troubles in front of people wrestling with despair in his community of Augusta, Georgia. On Friday, he was upbeat as he spoke about shelter availability and repair trucks a week after Hurricane Helene mowed down trees and ripped roofs off of houses, leaving half the city without power. But as he talked about unburying Augusta while helping hand out boxes of grapes and bananas and carrots in a church parking lot to a line of cars stretching a mile and a half, he let something slip.“We got seven confirmed deaths as a result of Hurricane Helene. I personally was … unfortunately, I had to witness one, but we’re getting through it.”The night of the hurricane, his cousin Melissa Carter needed help.“She called me,” Johnson said. “One of the lowest points in all of this was on Friday morning, I was wondering why she called me so frantically. She said: ‘I need you to come to my house. Daverio. I can’t … there’s a tree on him, and I can’t get the tree off.”Daverio Carter, her husband of 11 years, had been crushed by a tree that fell on their house. Johnson drove there in the storm. “Of course, you know, there’s nothing I could do.”Carter died in front of them while they waited for help. He was 51, and had five children.“They were able to recover his body at about 9 o’clock that night,” Johnson said. “They actually had to call in a crane to remove the tree to recover him … You’re looking at her as a mayor. I could do a lot of things. But I couldn’t get a crane to get it off of her husband, and for them to see him actually take his last breath while he’s laying in bed.”Daverio Carter’s funeral was Saturday. Johnson made that much time to grieve.“I literally don’t have power in my home. No water,” Johnson said. Debris still blocks his personal vehicles, he said. “On Friday, I had to literally climb old trees and power lines just to get out of the neighborhood to get down to the emergency operations center. So, we have so many dedicated city employees that have been working tirelessly, sometimes 16, 20 hours a day just to try to get this city back running around. I think we’re close.”Johnson has been burying himself in work while his family buries its dead. He did talk to Kamala Harris about it when she came for an emergency management briefing Tuesday, he said. Harris also spoke to Melissa Carter.“Mayor, I want to thank you for your leadership, in particular,” the US vice-president said in Augusta on Wednesday during a visit to access damage and console families. “I was just talking with one of the members of the community and her daughter who lost her husband. And there is real pain and trauma that has resulted because of this hurricane and what has happened in terms of the aftermath of it.”Thanking first responders and local leadership, she said: “The local folks are folks who have personally – and their families have personally – experienced loss and devastation. And yet they leave their home, leave their family to go to centers like where I was earlier to do the work of helping perfect strangers. And it really does highlight the nobility of the kind of work that these public servants have dedicated themselves to, which can be, in moments of crisis like this, so selfless in the way that they do that work.”Harris pointedly toned down her presence in Augusta, giving little advance notice of her arrival last week. She toured some of the poorest parts of the city, where the downed trees on roofs and in yards from the storm compete with rotten siding and missing windows after decades of decay.People living in these neighborhoods who turned out for the fresh produce said they understood why Harris would play things quietly, even five weeks before election day. At the time, people were still struggling to find a gas station with the lights on, dodging price gougers selling gas in five-gallon jugs for $40 on the side of the street.“It shows concern, and shows that she cares,” said Annie Gardner. At 95, she’s the oldest member of Augusta’s Good Samaritan Missionary Baptist church, where people were redistributing food from nearby DeKalb county to local residents. “I’m very impressed already, I was liking her already, and I even like her even more now.”View image in fullscreenShe’s a skeptic of political theater right now, though. “Trump’s not coming here in this neighborhood. He’s out with the rich white folks. If he does, I’d be really surprised. I don’t think nobody cares if he doesn’t come, either.”Both Harris and Donald Trump have a delicate dance to perform. Visibility matters.Michael Thurmond, DeKalb county’s CEO, arranged for the delivery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in produce to Augusta after seeing the reports of devastation in Augusta. “People are looking to see that their leaders are doing something,” he said.But photo-op politics in a crisis leads to images like Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane victims. The former president and Republican presidential nominee seemed somewhat more aware of that in his appearances in Georgia over the last week.“If [Trump] brought a thousand trucks like this, he would still not get my vote,” said April Terry, an Augustan waiting for a box of produce Friday morning. “All that is showing that he’s got money, showing that all he wants is your vote.”Trump spoke to reporters in Evans, Georgia, just north-east of Augusta, on Thursday. There was no attempt to stage a massive rally, though about 100 supporters staked out the road near the venue to wave flags. But he did appear side by side with Governor Brian Kemp, whom the former president has pointedly attacked as unsupportive of his election claims.On Thursday, Trump said Kemp “is doing a fantastic job”.Kemp in turn praised the former president for “keeping the national focus on our state as we recover”, then recited the litany of destruction, noting that major Georgia crops had been all but wiped out. The Georgia governor noted that that the federal government is quickly approving his requests for federal disaster declarations, which will help move relief funding and federal reimbursement.View image in fullscreenAhead of those comments, the state insurance commissioner John King took issue with the political implications of Harris’s promise of 100% federal reimbursement. Doing so would require an appropriation that hasn’t yet been made, essentially daring the House speaker Mike Johnson to refuse. “It’s political blackmail,” he said.Evans, in Columbia county, Georgia, is comparatively affluent. But it also sustained catastrophic damage, and its mostly conservative voters are digging out of much the same hole as everyone else in the region.“You’ll see, if you go in there, at least our street, all the yards along the road are lined with cut-up logs,” said Gage Gabriel, a 19-year-old Trump supporter watching for the motorcade. Public reaction to the storm could change the way people vote, he said. “Depending on the concern showed from the federal government. If the federal government doesn’t seem to show concern to a large section of the country … it should at least sway some results, depending on how caring politicians seem to the plight of especially North Carolina.”Gabriel wants to see leaders with a chain saw in their hands cutting down trees. “Not just shaking the hands of people putting up some power lines.”Jordan Johnson, a Richmond county commissioner, said: “It’s hard to really focus on politics in this very moment, because folks are trying to find power and folks are trying to find food.” But the contrast between the two candidates is stark, he added.“If you look at where Kamala Harris went, she went to a very hard struck part of town in south Augusta. She went to a shelter. She spoke to people, she gave food. Donald Trump is going to one of the most affluent parts of the [Augusta area]. I don’t know what impact their business will have. I’m not really interested in the campaign aspect. He has no purpose here in Augusta other than as a campaign stop. Kamala Harris came as vice-president of the United States announcing that help and aid is on the way. I mean, it tells you a lot about the two candidates are and what their missions are. He’s here to get votes, and she’s here to help.” More

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      Hurricane Helene Aftermath: 6 Issues Across the Southeast

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      The worst fallout from the hurricane is in western North Carolina, but at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems. More than a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm, state officials across the Southeast are scrambling to repair damaged electrical lines, roads and bridges affecting tens of thousands across the path of destruction.Helene wreaked havoc from Florida to the Appalachian states after making landfall on the Gulf Coast on Sept. 26. The worst fallout is still in western North Carolina, where, in addition to the mass wreckage of destroyed buildings, teams are searching for dozens of missing people, some areas have no potable water, cellphone communication remains spotty, more than 170,000 customers still don’t have power, and hundreds of roads are closed. But at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems from impassable highways to ruined farmland.President Biden, who surveyed the storm’s toll this week, said Helene most likely caused billions of dollars in damage, and he asked Congress on Friday to quickly replenish disaster relief funds to help. Here are some of the biggest current issues in the Southeast:In North Carolina, an untold number of people are still missing.The remains of a home in Swannanoa, N.C.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesIn the western part of the state, many families’ greatest concern is their unaccounted loved ones. But looking for them in mountain-ringed towns and rugged ravines has been a daunting task for search teams, and the effort has been hampered by poor cell service and widespread power losses.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