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      How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections

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      In Georgia, Republicans are removing Democrats of color from local boards. In Arkansas, they have stripped election control from county authorities. And they are expanding their election power in many other states.LaGRANGE, Ga. — Lonnie Hollis has been a member of the Troup County election board in West Georgia since 2013. A Democrat and one of two Black women on the board, she has advocated Sunday voting, helped voters on Election Days and pushed for a new precinct location at a Black church in a nearby town.But this year, Ms. Hollis will be removed from the board, the result of a local election law signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Previously, election board members were selected by both political parties, county commissioners and the three biggest municipalities in Troup County. Now, the G.O.P.-controlled county commission has the sole authority to restructure the board and appoint all the new members.“I speak out and I know the laws,” Ms. Hollis said in an interview. “The bottom line is they don’t like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they’re doing, because they know they can’t influence them.”Ms. Hollis is not alone. Across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats — though some are Republicans — and they will most likely all be replaced by Republicans.Ms. Hollis and local officials like her have been some of the earliest casualties as Republican-led legislatures mount an expansive takeover of election administration in a raft of new voting bills this year.G.O.P. lawmakers have also stripped secretaries of state of their power, asserted more control over state election boards, made it easier to overturn election results, and pursued several partisan audits and inspections of 2020 results.Republican state lawmakers have introduced at least 216 bills in 41 states to give legislatures more power over elections officials, according to the States United Democracy Center, a new bipartisan organization that aims to protect democratic norms. Of those, 24 have been enacted into law across 14 states. G.O.P. lawmakers in Georgia say the new measures are meant to improve the performance of local boards, and reduce the influence of the political parties. But the laws allow Republicans to remove local officials they don’t like, and because several of them have been Black Democrats, voting rights groups fear that these are further attempts to disenfranchise voters of color.The maneuvers risk eroding some of the core checks that stood as a bulwark against former President Donald J. Trump as he sought to subvert the 2020 election results. Had these bills been in place during the aftermath of the election, Democrats say, they would have significantly added to the turmoil Mr. Trump and his allies wrought by trying to overturn the outcome. They worry that proponents of Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories will soon have much greater control over the levers of the American elections system.“It’s a thinly veiled attempt to wrest control from officials who oversaw one of the most secure elections in our history and put it in the hands of bad actors,” said Jena Griswold, the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and the current Colorado secretary of state. “The risk is the destruction of democracy.”Officials like Ms. Hollis are responsible for decisions like selecting drop box and precinct locations, sending out voter notices, establishing early voting hours and certifying elections. But the new laws are targeting high-level state officials as well, in particular secretaries of state — both Republican and Democratic — who stood up to Mr. Trump and his allies last year.Republicans in Arizona have introduced a bill that would largely strip Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, of her authority over election lawsuits, and then expire when she leaves office. And they have introduced another bill that would give the Legislature more power over setting the guidelines for election administration, a major task currently carried out by the secretary of state.Had Republican voting bills been in place during the aftermath of the election, Democrats and voting rights groups say, they would have significantly added to the turmoil Mr. Trump and his allies wrought by trying to overturn the results.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesUnder Georgia’s new voting law, Republicans significantly weakened the secretary of state’s office after Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is the current secretary, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands to “find” votes. They removed the secretary of state as the chair of the state election board and relieved the office of its voting authority on the board.Kansas Republicans in May overrode a veto from Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, to enact laws stripping the governor of the power to modify election laws and prohibiting the secretary of state, a Republican who repeatedly vouched for the security of voting by mail, from settling election-related lawsuits without the Legislature’s consent.And more Republicans who cling to Mr. Trump’s election lies are running for secretary of state, putting a critical office within reach of conspiracy theorists. In Georgia, Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory, is running against Mr. Raffensperger. Republican candidates with similar views are running for secretary of state in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan.“In virtually every state, every election administrator is going to feel like they’re under the magnifying glass,” said Victoria Bassetti, a senior adviser to the States United Democracy Center.More immediately, it is local election officials at the county and municipal level who are being either removed or stripped of their power.In Arkansas, Republicans were stung last year when Jim Sorvillo, a three-term state representative from Little Rock, lost re-election by 24 votes to Ashley Hudson, a Democrat and local lawyer. Elections officials in Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock, were later found to have accidentally tabulated 327 absentee ballots during the vote-counting process, 27 of which came from the district.Mr. Sorvillo filed multiple lawsuits aiming to stop Ms. Hudson from being seated, and all were rejected. The Republican caucus considered refusing to seat Ms. Hudson, then ultimately voted to accept her.But last month, Arkansas Republicans wrote new legislation that allows a state board of election commissioners — composed of six Republicans and one Democrat — to investigate and “institute corrective action” on a wide variety of issues at every stage of the voting process, from registration to the casting and counting of ballots to the certification of elections. The law applies to all counties, but it is widely believed to be aimed at Pulaski, one of the few in the state that favor Democrats.State Representative Mark Lowery, a Republican, at the capitol in Little Rock, Ark. He said the new legislation provides a necessary extra level of oversight of elections.Liz Sanders for the New YorkThe author of the legislation, State Representative Mark Lowery, a Republican from a suburb of Little Rock, said it was necessary to remove election power from the local authorities, who in Pulaski County are Democrats, because otherwise Republicans could not get a fair shake. “Without this legislation, the only entity you could have referred impropriety to is the prosecuting attorney, who is a Democrat, and possibly not had anything done,” Mr. Lowery said in an interview. “This gives another level of investigative authority to a board that is commissioned by the state to oversee elections.”Asked about last year’s election, Mr. Lowery said, “I do believe Donald Trump was elected president.”A separate new Arkansas law allows a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if a committee of the legislature determines that there are questions about the “appearance of an equal, free and impartial election.”In Georgia, the legislature passed a unique law for some counties. For Troup County, State Representative Randy Nix, a Republican, said he had introduced the bill that restructured the county election board — and will remove Ms. Hollis — only after it was requested by county commissioners. He said he was not worried that the commission, a partisan body with four Republicans and one Democrat, could exert influence over elections.“The commissioners are all elected officials and will face the voters to answer for their actions,” Mr. Nix said in an email.Eric Mosley, the county manager for Troup County, which Mr. Trump carried by 22 points, said that the decision to ask Mr. Nix for the bill was meant to make the board more bipartisan. It was unanimously supported by the commission.“We felt that removing both the Republican and Democratic representation and just truly choose members of the community that invest hard to serve those community members was the true intent of the board,” Mr. Mosley said. “Our goal is to create both political and racial diversity on the board.”In Morgan County, east of Atlanta, Helen Butler has been one of the state’s most prominent Democratic voices on voting rights and election administration. A member of the county board of elections in a rural, Republican county, she also runs the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a group dedicated to protecting the voting rights of Black Americans and increasing their civic engagement.Helen Butler, who has been one of the state’s most prominent voices on voting rights and election administration in Atlanta, on Saturday. Ms. Butler will be removed from the county board at the end of the month.Matthew Odom for The New York TimesBut Ms. Butler will be removed from the county board at the end of the month, after Mr. Kemp signed a local bill that ended the ability of political parties to appoint members. “I think it’s all a part of the ploy for the takeover of local boards of elections that the state legislature has put in place,” Ms. Butler said. “It is them saying that they have the right to say whether an election official is doing it right, when in fact they don’t work in the day to day and don’t understand the process themselves.”It’s not just Democrats who are being removed. In DeKalb County, the state’s fourth-largest, Republicans chose not to renominate Baoky Vu to the election board after more than 12 years in the position. Mr. Vu, a Republican, had joined with Democrats in a letter opposing an election-related bill that eventually failed to pass.To replace Mr. Vu, Republicans nominated Paul Maner, a well-known local conservative with a history of false statements, including an insinuation that the son of a Georgia congresswoman was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.”Back in LaGrange, Ms. Hollis is trying to do as much as she can in the time she has left on the board. The extra precinct in nearby Hogansville, where the population is roughly 50 percent Black, is a top priority. While its population is only about 3,000, the town is bifurcated by a rail line, and Ms. Hollis said that sometimes it can take an exceedingly long time for a line of freight cars to clear, which is problematic on Election Days.“We’ve been working on this for over a year,” Ms. Hollis said, saying Republicans had thrown up procedural hurdles to block the process. But she was undeterred.“I’m not going to sit there and wait for you to tell me what it is that I should do for the voters there,” she said. “I’m going to do the right thing.”Rachel Shorey contributed research. More

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      Herschel Walker's Cryptic Video Could Upend Georgia Senate Race

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      If the Georgia college football legend Herschel Walker declares his candidacy it could put former President Donald J. Trump’s power as a kingmaker to the test.ATLANTA — In his 1980s prime, Herschel Walker, the Georgia college football legend, ran the ball with the downhill ferocity of a runaway transfer truck. There was no question about which way he was headed.But that was not the case this week, as Mr. Walker tweeted out a cryptic 21-second video that sent the state’s political players into a frenzy of decoding and guesswork.Did the video amount to an announcement that the Heisman-winning Mr. Walker — spurred on by the sis-boom-bah urging of his old friend Donald J. Trump — plans to enter the Republican primary for a chance to run next year against the Democratic senator the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock?That was one plausible interpretation of the clip, in which a smiling Mr. Walker, who lives in Texas, revs the motor of a sports car.“I’m getting ready,” Mr. Walker says, as the camera pans to the car’s Georgia license plate. “And we can run with the big dogs.”If Mr. Walker indeed jumps into the Senate race, it will go a long way toward firming up the 2022 pro-Trump roster in Georgia, where the former president has vowed to handpick G.O.P. candidates to exact revenge on the Republicans who declined to support his false contention that he was the true winner of the 2020 election in the state, which he in fact lost by about 12,000 votes.Mr. Walker, who once played for Mr. Trump’s professional team, the New Jersey Generals, in the short-lived United States Football League, urged Republicans to stick by Mr. Trump in the weeks after Election Day as departing president pressed his unfounded claims of voter fraud. In March, Mr. Trump, in a statement, said it would be “fantastic” if Mr. Walker ran for Senate.“He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL,” Mr. Trump said. “He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”But a Walker candidacy may also prove to be the most high-stakes test of whether Mr. Trump’s fervent wish to play kingmaker will serve his party’s best interests in a hotly contested swing state that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.Though Mr. Walker is the most revered player in the modern history of the football-crazy state — Bulldog fans still talk about where they were when they saw his jaw-dropping performance in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, the way other Americans talk about the moon landing — the former running back also brings a complicated post-football story.Mr. Walker, 59, says that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, an affliction formerly known as multiple personality disorder. His forthrightness on the topic of mental illness, outlined in his 2008 book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder,” has earned him praise in some quarters. But others have doubted the diagnosis, calling it a convenient way to excuse bad behavior.In a 2005 application for a protective order, Mr. Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, alleged that Mr. Walker had a history of “extremely threatening behavior” toward her. In one instance, she has said, he put a gun to her temple. In his book, Mr. Walker admitted to numerous instances of playing Russian roulette.Mr. Walker could not reached for comment for this article, but in a 2008 interview with The New York Times, he said he had the disorder under control with the help of therapy.Leo Smith, a Republican political consultant in Georgia, said that he hopes Mr. Walker will remain on the sidelines. “As a political consultant, I’d recommend that Mr. Walker influence politics through fund-raising and donations, not as a candidate,” he said.Senator Raphael G. Warnock of Georgia, center, greeting Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta on Friday. Some believe Mr. Walker’s Twitter video was a sign he plans to run against Mr. Warnock next year.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBut Randy Evans, a former ambassador to Luxembourg appointed by Mr. Trump, said that Mr. Walker may prove to be a “transformational” candidate who crosses boundaries of party and race (Mr. Walker is Black). “He’s got the demeanor to do it,” Mr. Evans said. “I recognize fully the difficulties of brand-new people who run who’ve never run before, but I thought Senator Tuberville did a pretty good job in Alabama, and that Herschel Walker would do a great job in Georgia.”Mr. Evans was referring to Tommy Tuberville, the staunchly pro-Trump Republican and big-time college football coach who easily won election to the Senate in November. But while Mr. Trump remains popular among Republicans in both Alabama and Georgia, the latter has seen Democrats make big inroads in part because of demographic change and a distaste for Trumpism in some important areas, including the suburbs north of Atlanta.Mr. Trump has already endorsed Representative Jody Hice, a hard-right conservative and Baptist preacher who plans to run for Secretary of State in Georgia against the incumbent Brad Raffensperger. Like Mr. Walker, Mr. Hice supports Mr. Trump’s bogus claims of a rigged election, and a Trump endorsement may be enough to hand him a primary victory.But a number of Republicans are quietly concerned that both Mr. Hice and Mr. Walker may wither in the scrutiny of a general election. Suburban, centrist women are likely to take note of Mr. Walker’s ex-wife’s story, as well as Mr. Hice’s comment that he approved of women in politics, so long as “the woman’s within the authority of her husband.”If Mr. Walker does enter the race, he will be the best known among a Republican field that already includes Kelvin King, a construction executive; Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL; and Gary Black, the state agriculture commissioner. There is also a possibility that former Senator Kelly Loeffler, who lost the seat to Mr. Warnock in the January runoff election, could try for a rematch.Mr. Warnock is the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — the home church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His victory in January, as well as the victory of his fellow Georgia Democrat, Senator Jon Ossoff, served as a stinging rebuke to Mr. Trump a few weeks after his own loss in the state.Mr. Warnock must defend his seat so soon after his election because he is serving out the remainder of a term begun by former Senator Johnny Isakson, a Republican who stepped down because of poor health. Mr. Warnock is likely to run emphasizing his support for social programs and support for Georgia businesses.“Whether it’s Trump’s handpicked candidate Herschel Walker, failed former Senator Kelly Loeffler, or any other candidate in this chaotic Republican field, not one of them is focused on what matters to Georgians,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, in a statement.Debbie Dooley, the president of the Atlanta Tea Party, said that she is hoping that Georgia might see a general election in which all four candidates for the two top offices, senator and governor, are Black, allowing voters to take racial matters out of the decision-making process and instead have a clear choice between “competing ideologies.”In the governor’s race, Ms. Dooley is hoping that Vernon Jones, a Black, pro-Trump candidate not endorsed by Mr. Trump, will defeat Gov. Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. And she is assuming, like many other Georgians, that Stacey Abrams will run for governor on the Democratic side.In the Senate race, Ms. Dooley said she wants to see Mr. Walker jump into the primary and win it. “That’s who Trump wants,” she said, although she added that doing so would betray one loyalty: She is a die-hard Alabama fan.“Roll Tide,” she said. More

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      Woes mount for legal loyalists who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies

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      A crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color.Take Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump conspiracy promoter and ex-federal prosecutor.After a short stint on Trump’s legal team last December, where she made wild claims about election fraud due to a voting machine company’s alleged ties to Venezuela, which sparked a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against her, Powell in late May drew ridicule for telling a Dallas QAnon meeting that Trump could be “reinstated” this summer.There is also election law veteran Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s infamous January call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,000-plus votes to block Joe Biden’s win. Mitchell is now leading a $10m FreedomWorks drive in seven states to tighten election laws in ways that are seen as crimping voting rights.Trump’s high-pressure call led the Fulton county district attorney to open a criminal inquiry.Meanwhile, Atlanta lawyer L Lin Wood, who worked with Powell in Georgia in a failed drive to reverse Biden’s win by filing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud, told Talking Points Memo he donated $50,000 to help fund a bizarre vote “audit” in Arizona’s largest county – even though Biden’s victory there has been certified.Known for his frenzied pro-Trump advocacy, including charging that Vice-President Mike Pence ought to be executed by a firing squad, Lin has other legal headaches in Georgia, where he is battling a state bar request for him to take a confidential mental competency exam after it conducted an extensive review into his alleged legal misconduct.Further, Georgia election officials in February launched an investigation into allegations that Wood may have voted illegally in the state last year after he had bought a home in nearby South Carolina. Wood has denied voting illegally.But among Trump’s fervent legal allies Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer during the campaign, faces the gravest threats in a widening federal investigation into whether he broke lobbying disclosure laws by representing foreign officials in Ukraine, while working to gather dirt there on Biden to boost Trump’s electoral chances.The federal inquiry, led by US prosecutors in the same New York office that Giuliani once headed, gained potentially damaging evidence in late April when FBI agents raided Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan and seized more than 10 cellphones and other electronic equipment.Other pro-Trump lawyers are also feeling legal heat.Former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, who shared a $1m contract with a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the US on bribery charges and reportedly helped Giuliani’s Ukraine efforts, seem to have been ensnared in part of the Giuliani investigation. Using a search warrant, federal agents took a Toensing cellphone in late April on the same day as the Giuliani raids, but Toensing has said she was told she is not a “target”.Former senior justice department officials voice dismay about the conduct of Trump’s legal allies.Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, said he was astounded by the turn that Giuliani, Powell and diGenova have taken in “becoming cheerleaders for Trump and his assault on democracy”.“I have known them all at times over the past several decades when they each held positions of respect and some distinction,” Ayer said. “It’s a real head-scratcher for me, given that background, that they have each become so utterly disconnected from reality in pursuit of a totally unworthy cause.”Other departmental veterans say pro-Trump lawyers probably have mercenary motives.“Lawyers who make preposterous and counterfactual statements to the public typically only do it when there’s something in it for them – and that usually means money,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of DoJ’s fraud section.But there’s no doubt that Trump’s legal allies are feeling painful fallout from making suspect charges.Both Powell and Giuliani have been hit with $1.3bn defamation lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems for conspiratorial statements that tied the Denver-based election equipment firm to nefarious fraud schemes.Powell and Giuliani have separately argued that the lawsuits ought to be dismissed. Powell has stressed that her dubious allegations were protected by the first amendment free speech rights.Still, Powell’s defense was damaged in May when her lawyers incongruously claimed she was just being hyperbolic in charging Dominion had ties to left-leaning Venezuela, and that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process”.However, the legal threats facing Giuliani are notably higher due to the widening two-year-old inquiry by prosecutors into whether he was an unregistered foreign agent for Ukrainian officials who were aiding the lawyer in his quest to find damaging information about Biden.The criminal inquiry is reportedly focused on Giuliani’s part in Trump’s firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in May 2019, a move that Giuliani and two close associates – indicted separately on charges of campaign finance violations – promoted, and a key issue in Trump’s first impeachment.After the recent FBI raid that obtained his legal devices, Giuliani denounced the federal inquiry: he said he had not lobbied anyone in the US government on behalf of any foreign officials, and told Fox News the inquiry was “trying to frame him”.But more damaging details of Giuliani’s pro-Trump Ukraine blitz were released this past week by CNN, after it obtained a secret recording from 2019 where Giuliani aggressively cajoled a high-level Ukraine official to help Trump by investigating baseless conspiracies involving Biden whose son was on a Ukrainian gas company’s board.Further, after Giuliani’s lawyers cited attorney-client privilege to limit the use of potentially damaging materials from the raid, a New York judge acting on a request from federal prosecutors tapped a retired judge as a “special master” to review the materials seized, and decide what investigators can use as they pursue possible criminal charges. 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      US election officials still plagued by threats for certifying Trump defeat

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      Late on the night of 24 April, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”That followed a 5 April text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident”.Those messages, which have not been previously reported, are examples of the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after Donald Trump’s November election defeat.While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide, from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers.The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims.The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the justice department will prosecute threats against election officials, amid other additional measures to protect democracy.Tricia Raffensperger has now spoken out publicly about the threats of violence to her family, and shared menacing text messages.Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66, began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in Georgia, long a Republican bastion.Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled weekly visits in her home with two young grandchildren, the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.“I couldn’t have them come to my house any more,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them.That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s election lies, were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. “Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement: “Vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for US election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December, is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.Many others whose lives have been threatened were low- or mid-level workers. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric could reverberate into the 2022 midterm congressional elections and the 2024 presidential vote. Many election offices will lose critical employees with years or decades of experience, predicted David Becker, executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.“This is deeply troubling,” he said.Carlos Nelson, elections supervisor for Ware county in south-eastern Georgia, shares that fear.“These are people who work for little or no money, 12 to 14 hours a day on election day,” Nelson said. “If we lose good poll workers, that’s when we’re going to lose democracy.”In Georgia, Trump faces an investigation into alleged election interference, the only known criminal inquiry into his attempts to overturn the 2020 vote.Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not respond to Reuters’ questions, including why Trump has not forcefully denounced the torrent of threats being made in his name.One email, sent on 2 January to Georgia officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites, saying: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.”It was forwarded to the FBI, which declined to comment.In Georgia, threatening violence against a poll officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. Making death threats is a separate crime carrying up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.Criminal law specialists say the widespread threats could increase the legal jeopardy for Trump in the Georgia investigation. Among other matters, investigators are examining a 2 January call in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss.That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering investigation into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton county prosecutor.Since launching her inquiry in February, Willis has added several high-profile attorneys to her team, including a leading racketeering expert, to assist on cases including the Trump investigation, Reuters reported on 6 March.“I think there’s going to be a big-picture look at all of it,” said Rucker, a Democrat, who once prosecuted a high-profile racketeering case with Fanni Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, which includes Atlanta.A Fulton county district attorney spokesman, Jeff DiSantis, did not respond to requests for comment on the office’s inquiries into election-related threats of violence.In April, two investigators from Willis’s office, met with the county elections director, Richard Barron seeking information on “hundreds” of threats against Barron and his staff, Barron said. He said his staff was made up almost entirely of Black election workers. “The racial slurs were disturbing and sickening,” he said of the threats.Barron’s election registration chief, Ralph Jones, 56, received abhorrent, racist messages, and strangers showed up at his house.“It was unbelievable: your life being threatened just because you’re doing your job,” he said.And Barron was bombarded with threats after Trump accused him of criminal election fraud at a rally in December. “I underestimated how hard he was going to push that narrative and just keep pushing it,” Barron said.Between Christmas and early January, Barron received nearly 150 hateful, vicious calls, many accusing him of treason or saying he deserved to he hanged or killed by firing squad, according to Barron and a Reuters review of some of the phone messages.Election officials in at least 11 Georgia counties received an email in January – during the Senate runoff that resulted in a historic win for the Democrats in both the state’s US Senate seats – threatening “death and destruction” unless Trump continued to be president, and the bombing of all election sites.It added: “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play,” apparently referring to the 2013 extremist attack on the Boston Marathon.During the Senate runoff, Vanessa Montgomery, 58, was a polling manager in the Georgia city of Taylorsville. When polls closed that night, she set off to deliver ballots to an elections office in Bartow county, a predominantly white, Republican district in north-western Georgia. Montgomery, who is Black, was traveling with her daughter, also a poll worker hired temporarily for the election.They were followed by an SUV, which nearly ran them off the road. They had to call 911 and be guided to safety. The scare triggered a panic attack in Montgomery, something she had not experienced since being an army officer in Bosnia, seeing people blown up by landmines.Her manager, Joseph Kirk, Bartow county elections supervisor, said he worried the ugly reactions to Trump’s loss could result in shortages of good election workers nationwide in future.Many other election officials told of incidents such as receiving violent, “ranting” calls, threatening people that could go to prison for “rigging” the election against Trump.Brad Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs, said she had received death threats and obscene images after a Trump supporter posted her contact details online.Hostile messages, including calls for public hangings of officials, began pouring in to the office after Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” last year and continued as he refused to overturn the election results.“I don’t think any of us anticipated this level of nastiness,” said Fuchs, 31, who grew up in a conservative Christian family and has worked for years to help elect Republicans.Vivian Ho contributed reporting More

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      Republicans are out to create the rigged voting system they claim to be victims of | Lawrence Douglas

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      “Our entire democracy is now at risk.” That was the note of alarm sounded last week by a group of prominent intellectuals on both the left and the right. The source of their concern are the Republican efforts, underway across the nation, to operationalize the “big lie”: the bogus claim that a vast conspiracy of fraud cost Trump the 2020 election.Consider the audit recently ordered by the Republican-controlled state senate in Arizona of the 2.1m votes cast in Maricopa county in the 2020 presidential contest. Lest the audit confirm what has already been proven ad nauseam – that the count was accurate and free of fraud – the senate chose an obscure company called Cyber Ninjas to conduct the recount. Based out of Florida, Cyber Ninjas has no record of ever having conducted an election audit and neglected to even submit a bid for the Arizona job. But the tiny firm did have one thing going for it: its CEO, Doug Logan, a self-proclaimed “follower of Jesus Christ” and proud father of 11, was on record attacking the 2020 election as riddled with fraud.Inspired by the Arizona case, Republicans in Georgia have demanded that their state undertake a similar “forensic” audit of the 2020 presidential count. And last Wednesday, a group of Republican state lawmakers from Pennsylvania paid a visit to the Arizona audit site, demanding that their home state conduct a like review.The aim of these efforts is not to overturn the result of the 2020 election, despite Donald Trump’s fantasies to the contrary. Evidently the former president anticipates his reinstatement in the White House roughly two months from now, and his coming rallies will no doubt give him the opportunity to grandly cast himself as a latter-day Napoleon returning triumphantly to power from his palmy exile. But the audits are not designed to stamp Trump a ticket back to DC – at least not at present. The goal is not to oust Biden now, but to conspire against his reelection in 2024.Suppressing the Black vote has been a staple of Republican politics for decadesIn this, the audits are of a piece with larger Republican campaigns to disenfranchise huge numbers of voters – specifically Black voters. The very Arizona Republicans who retained Cyber Ninjas recently passed a law that dramatically restricts the distribution of mail-in ballots. Republicans in Georgia have passed a sweeping law that limits the use of drop boxes and criminalizes the simple act of offering water to citizens stuck on long voting queues. And Texas Republicans are on the cusp of passing the most restrictive law of all: one that would restrict absentee ballots and ban drive-through voting altogether. Dozens of other states with Republican-controlled legislatures are racing to pass similar measures.True, suppressing the Black vote has been a staple of Republican politics for decades. But what distinguishes these new laws is both their sweep and the cynicism of their justification. For it is one thing to use the specter of possible fraud to justify such measures; another, to operationalize a lie about history to justify restrictions in the name of electoral integrity.Indeed, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these new laws is that they lower the bar for partisans to challenge and alter election results. In Georgia, for example, the new law prohibits the secretary of state from certifying results, a move designed to target Brad Raffensperger, the intrepid Republican who refused Trump’s demand that the secretary “find” enough votes to overcome Biden’s victory in the Peach State. And in Texas, partisans would no longer need to show that improper votes had materially affected the outcome of an election in order to seek to reverse the results.In the words of the bipartisan group, thanks to these changes, “several states … no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections”. Here I might add –that is precisely what the Republicans want. Fair elections entail uncertainty, and Republican lawmakers want to have none of it. They no longer trust the democratic process, not because they genuinely believe it corrupt, but because they legitimately fear that they cannot fairly win. And so, in good Orwellian fashion, they labor to create the very rigged system they falsely claim to be the victims of. Should their efforts to systematically restrict the voting opportunities of millions of citizens fail to secure them the White House in 2024, they will have in place the mechanisms Trump invoked but could not fully control in 2020. If Republicans have their way, come 2024, Trump or his rough successor will not have the likes of a Brad Raffensperger standing in their way.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2o2o and is also a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US. He teaches at Amherst College More

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      in Elections

      Vermont Governor Phil Scott Agrees to Expand Voting Rights

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      Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill on Monday requiring that all registered voters receive mail-in ballots. His decision contrasted with Republican-led efforts to restrict voting rights in several states.Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont signed legislation on Monday that requires all registered voters in the state to receive mail-in ballots, an expansion of voting rights that counters a movement among Republicans in other states to restrict them.Mr. Scott, a Republican, signed the bill nearly four weeks after the Vermont General Assembly approved the legislation, which also allows voters to fix, or “cure,” a ballot that was deemed defective if it was filled out or mailed incorrectly.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Scott said he had signed the bill “because I believe making sure voting is easy and accessible, and increasing voter participation, is important.”He added that he would push lawmakers to expand the provision beyond statewide general elections, “which already have the highest voter turnout.”“For greater consistency and to expand access further,” he said, “I am asking the General Assembly to extend the provisions of this bill to primary elections, local elections and school budget votes when they return to session in January.”Last year, during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Vermont officials agreed to send out mail-in ballots to voters so they could cast their votes safely.The measure was extremely popular. More than 75 percent of registered voters cast ballots early or by mail, according to the office of Jim Condos, Vermont’s secretary of state. Voter turnout was high, with more than 73 percent of the state’s 506,000 registered voters casting ballots in November, according to the state’s election results.Among registered voters in Vermont, 68 percent wanted to keep the policy of giving every registered voter a mail-in ballot while 29 percent opposed it, according to a poll conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies, a survey group. Seventy-eight percent of residents also supported giving voters a chance to fix, or “cure,” ballots with small errors.Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to sign the Vermont bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights.Wilson Ring/Associated PressVermont’s Senate approved the measure in March. The legislation passed in the General Assembly with bipartisan support, in a 119-to-30 vote, though some Republican lawmakers had resisted the push for mail-in ballots, arguing that they could allow for voter fraud.Independent studies and government reviews have found that voter fraud is extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.“We should be proud of our brave state,” Mr. Condos, a Democrat, said in a statement last month. Though he did not name states where lawmakers have worked to restrict voting rights — Florida, Georgia and Texas among them — Mr. Condos contrasted those Republican-led efforts with the measure in Vermont, where the Republican governor had expressed support for a bipartisan bill.“While others are working to make it harder to vote, in Vermont we are working to remove barriers to the ballot box for all eligible voters, while strengthening the security and integrity of the voting process,” Mr. Condos said.Mr. Condos, who noted that mail-in ballots had been available to American voters since before the Civil War, said in his statement that ballots would be mailed only to active registered voters and would not be forwarded to people who had changed their addresses.Ballots must include a signed affidavit from voters identifying themselves, and each envelope will contain voter data such as a unique identification number and a bar code, Mr. Condos said.The law will give municipalities the option to send mail-in ballots for local races and allow voters to cast their ballots at drive-in polling places, said State Senator Cheryl Hooker, a Democrat, who was a sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.Becca Balint, the president pro tempore of the State Senate, said in a statement that the approval of the bill “stands in stark contrast to legislatures across the country who continue voter suppression efforts, targeting practices like mail-in voting that have correlated with higher turnout among people of color.”Ms. Balint, a Democrat, said Mr. Scott’s signature “represents bipartisan agreement that our democracy, and our state, are strengthened when we make elections more accessible to all.”Both chambers of Vermont’s General Assembly are controlled by Democrats, and Mr. Scott has said he voted for President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. After casting his ballot in November, Mr. Scott told reporters that it was the first time in his life that he had voted for a Democrat. Mr. Biden won 66 percent of the vote in Vermont.Mr. Scott’s decision to sign the bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights. Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor but which former President Donald J. Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, is the only state with a Republican-controlled legislature that has significantly expanded voting rights.“Amid a scourge of anti-voter bills being proposed and signed into law in the states, it’s encouraging to see Vermont moving in the opposite direction,” Josh Silver, chief executive of RepresentUs, a bipartisan voting rights advocacy group, said in a statement.Mr. Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost and his monthslong campaign to delegitimize the results have gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system and led to baseless claims about the integrity of the election.In their public comments, lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in the electoral system to justify pushing for bills that restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times.States such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa have already passed laws restricting the ability of voters to cast ballots. In Texas, Democrats stalled legislation that has been viewed by many voting rights groups as perhaps the harshest of all.Christine Hauser More

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      in Elections

      State Election Officials Are Under Attack. We Will Defend Them.

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      Tucked into many of the election laws Republicans are pushing or enacting in states around the country are pernicious provisions threatening punishment of elections officials and workers for just doing their jobs.Laws like those already passed in Republican-controlled states like Georgia and Iowa, no matter their stated intent, will be used as a weapon of intimidation aimed at the people, many of them volunteers, charged with running fair elections at the local and state levels. By subjecting them to invasive, politically motivated control by a state legislative majority, these provisions shift the last word in elections from the pros to the pols. This is a serious attack on the crucial norm that our elections should be run on a professional, nonpartisan basis — and it is deeply wrong.It is so wrong that having once worked together across the partisan divide as co-chairs of the 2013-14 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, we have decided to come together again to mobilize the defense of election officials who may come under siege from these new laws.Bear in mind that this is happening after the 2020 election, run in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, went off much better than expected. Voter turnout was the highest since 1900. A senior official in the Trump administration pronounced it the “most secure election in American history,” with “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.” Multiple recounts, contests and court cases brought by former President Donald Trump and his allies failed to persuade any courts or state officials to overturn the results of any election.The new laws establish civil penalties for technical infractions and subject officials to threats of suspension and even criminal prosecution. Iowa state election officials are now subject to fines of $10,000 and suspension for any actions that “hinder or disregard the object of the law.” They are also subject to criminal penalties when seeking to address disruptive conduct by partisan poll watchers. In Georgia, an election official threatened with suspension may appeal, but the law restricts state-financed support for the individual’s legal defense. The Georgia secretary of state, the chief election official, has been removed from the chairmanship of the State Elections Board, demoted to nonvoting ex officio status.Other states are considering laws containing similar threats to the impartial administration of elections. It can be no surprise that officials around the country are also experiencing threats and harassment ranging from physical confrontation to social media postings of personal information from their Facebook pages. And this dangerous behavior is spreading throughout the electoral process. Last month, election officials in Anchorage, Alaska, issued a report describing the “unprecedented harassment of election officials” during the conduct of a mayoral runoff election.The partisan efforts to control election outcomes will result in the corruption of our system of government, which is rooted in fair, free elections. We say this as longtime election lawyers from opposing political parties. In jointly leading the presidential commission, we worked with numerous local and state elections officials. We saw firsthand the dedication and professionalism they brought to their jobs. They work hard with inadequate resources and are rarely praised for what goes well and are quickly blamed for what goes wrong.In 2020, after the pandemic struck, these officials performed the near-impossible task of locating replacements for thousands of poll workers, reconfiguring polling places to offer safe voting spaces for voters and poll workers and ramping up effective mail voting where allowed under state law.Now their nonpartisan performance of their duties is under attack — even to the point of being criminalized. So we are committed to providing these officials a defense against these attacks and threats by recruiting lawyers around the country, Democrats and Republicans, to establish a network that would provide free legal support to election officials who face threats, fines or suspensions for doing their jobs. This national network will monitor new threats as they develop and publicly report on what it learns.The defense of the electoral process is not a partisan cause, even where there may be reasonable disagreements between the parties about specific voting rules and procedures. The presidential commission we led concluded that “election administration is public administration” and that whenever possible, “the responsible department or agency in every state should have on staff individuals who are chosen and serve solely on the basis of their experience and expertise.” To serve voters, those officials would require independence from partisan political pressures, threats and retaliatory attacks.These state laws, and the blind rage against our election officials that they encourage or reinforce, will corrode our electoral systems and democracy. They will add to the recent lamentable trend of experienced officials’ retiring from their active and vitally needed service — clearing the way for others less qualified and more easily managed by partisans. Early surveys show that in our nation’s larger jurisdictions, up to a quarter of experienced election officials are planning to leave their jobs. A primary reason they cite: “the political environment.”No requirement of our electoral process — of our democracy — is more critical than the commitment to nonpartisanship in the administration of our system for casting and counting of ballots now being degraded by these state laws. This challenge must be strongly and forcefully met in every possible way by Democrats and Republicans alike.Bob Bauer, a former senior adviser to the Biden campaign, is a professor at New York University School of Law and a co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” Ben Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years representing Republican candidates and parties.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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      in US Politics

      Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterConservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process.Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.“It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Research.The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.“Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines,” Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. “It’s amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.”Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the state’s top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county – another hotbed of conspiracy theories – that boards didn’t have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.“We have every reason to want transparency,” Jocelyn Benson, the state’s top election official, said in an interview. “But that’s not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.”San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the county’s clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trump’s baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials’ custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Biden’s win over Trump last year.Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.“Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.“The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth – the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.” More