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    Trump Dominates Michigan G.O.P. Convention Amid Party Turmoil

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    The former president won all 39 delegates against Nikki Haley during the caucus-style event in Grand Rapids.Former President Donald J. Trump capped off a clean sweep of Republican delegates in Michigan on Saturday during a raucous convention, which further exposed a deep fissure in the state party that threatens to fester in one of the most important battleground states.Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, amassed at least 90 percent of the vote in all but one of the state’s 13 congressional districts against former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who was ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump.A simple majority was needed in each district to win its share of delegates at the caucus-style event, giving Mr. Trump 39, to go along with the 12 that he won in Michigan’s primary, which was held on Tuesday. Ms. Haley emerged from that contest with four delegates.Mr. Trump’s dominance earlier in the week left little doubt about the outcome of the convention on Saturday at the Amway Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids, Mich.A check-in table at the convention in Grand Rapids. An estimated 200 Republican stalwarts were denied credentials during the convention.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesBut a protracted fight over the state party’s rightful leader spilled over into the proceedings, where an estimated 200 Republican stalwarts from about 20 of Michigan’s 83 counties were denied credentials. Two other groups boycotted the event and held breakaway conventions, one more than 100 miles to the north in Houghton Lake, Mich., and another more than 50 miles southeast in Battle Creek, Mich.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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      Michigan Judge Orders Kristina Karamo to Stand Down in G.O.P. Leadership Fight

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      A circuit court judge on Tuesday ordered Kristina Karamo, the deposed leader of the Michigan Republicans, to abandon her efforts to cling to power. But what that means for Saturday, when Ms. Karamo had pledged to hold a dueling presidential nominating convention, remains unclear.“I have to comply with the judge’s orders,” she told reporters after the court hearing, according to The Detroit Free Press.She also called the ruling “egregious,” and said “I’m not going to jail.” But she did not say when asked if she would abandon her plans for the convention on Saturday in Detroit.In a two-page order, Judge J. Joseph Rossi of the 17th Circuit Court in Grand Rapids, Mich., granted a preliminary injunction to the group of Republicans that voted in January to oust her. He barred Ms. Karamo from presenting herself as the party’s leader and conducting business in its name, including organizing meetings.The judge determined that a group of state G.O.P. leaders, disillusioned over transparency issues and money problems in the party, had followed the party’s bylaws when they voted on Jan. 6 to remove Ms. Karamo as chairwoman and later elected Pete Hoekstra, whom the Republican National Committee recognized as the rightful chairman earlier this month.Mr. Hoekstra, whom Ms. Karamo had denied access to the party’s bank and email accounts, said in an interview that he was “thrilled” by the ruling.“When Michigan opens for business tomorrow, we will be going to the banks,” said Mr. Hoekstra. He had a warning for Ms. Karamo’s holdouts: “If there’s individuals that are not cooperative, as we’ve done so far, we will seek compliance through the courts.”Ms. Karamo did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.The judge also forbade her from accessing the party’s bank accounts and postal boxes, and from engaging in communication on social media on behalf of the party. In recent days, she had used the party’s social media accounts to promote her “convention” in Detroit on Saturday.The gathering had been scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern time, the same time that the convention organized by Mr. Hoekstra is scheduled to take place across the state in Grand Rapids.Both sides are loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, who weighed in on the leadership fight, backing Mr. Hoekstra, his former ambassador to the Netherlands and a former House member.Mr. Hoekstra said that he was not ruling out a situation where Ms. Karamo goes ahead with her competing gathering on Saturday.“They have shown themselves to be unpredictable,” he said. More

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      At Rally in Michigan, Trump Lashes Out at Judge Who Fined Him $355 Million

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      Former President Donald J. Trump vented about his latest legal defeat to freezing supporters at a Michigan rally on Saturday night, a day after a New York judge fined him nearly $355 million plus interest in his civil fraud case.The Republican front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, Mr. Trump denied that he had conspired to manipulate his net worth, which he was found liable of by Justice Arthur F. Engoron in a ruling that could wipe out Mr. Trump’s entire cash stockpile.“This judge is a lunatic,” he said in his opening salvo at his rally, held inside an airport hangar in Oakland County about 30 miles from Detroit.Mr. Trump used a similar line of attack against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, who had accused him of exaggerating his wealth in the lengthy case. Barred by the judge for three years from serving in top roles at any New York company, including portions of his own Trump Organization, Mr. Trump cast aspersions on the justice system and said he had been persecuted.Mr. Trump’s visit to Michigan overlapped with the first day of early, in-person voting in the state, which is using both a primary and a caucus-style convention to award delegates for the first time in Republican Party contests.At the rally, the Trump campaign placed large signs urging supporters to take advantage of early voting.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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      Michigan’s G.O.P. Nominating Process Appears Headed For Chaos

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      As early in-person voting began on Saturday in Michigan, a fight for control of the G.O.P. in the crucial battleground state plunged Republicans there deeper into a political maelstrom, with rival factions potentially barreling toward hosting dueling nominating conventions.As if things weren’t already confusing.In a little over a week, the state will host a traditional primary on one day, and then a caucus-style convention a few days later. Now, it seems, there could actually be two conventions, in different parts of the state, each claiming legitimacy.Former President Donald J. Trump is headed to Michigan on Saturday night, with a campaign rally in Waterford Township, about 30 miles northwest of Detroit. While he has made it clear which faction he is supporting, and so has the national party, that has done little to dissuade the Trump-styled election denier attempting to hold on to power.The feud, already being waged in state court, appears to be only gaining intensity.Pete Hoekstra, whom the Republican National Committee recognized on Wednesday as the state party’s rightful chairman after his election last month, said he was moving forward with plans to hold a statewide nominating convention on March 2 in Western Michigan.But Kristina Karamo, defying the R.N.C.’s determination that she had properly been removed as party chairwoman earlier in January and Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Hoekstra, has also indicated that she will continue hosting a convention on the same day, for the same purpose, but in Detroit.At stake at the convention will be 39 of Michigan’s 55 Republican presidential delegates. The other 16 will be decided during the state’s Feb. 27 primary, which includes at least nine days of early voting. The hybrid process, new this year, was adopted by Republicans in order to comply with R.N.C. rules after Michigan’s Democratic governor moved up the primary date.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump’s Election Lies Left the Michigan G.O.P. Broken and Battered

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      Infighting between Trump acolytes and traditionalists has driven away donors and voters. Can the Michigan Republican Party rebuild in time for the presidential election?The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists — including a former statewide candidate — was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions — including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results — the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.As the party looks toward the presidential election next year, the strains are glaring.Mr. Trump’s election lies spread like wildfire in Michigan, breaking the state party into ardent believers and pragmatists wanting to move on. Bitter disputes, power struggles and contentious primaries followed, leaving the Michigan Republican Party a husk of itself.The battleground has steadily grown safer for Democrats. No Republican has won a statewide election there since Mr. Trump won the state in 2016. (Republicans have won nonpartisan seats on the State Supreme Court.) G.O.P. officials in the state are growing concerned that they do not have a top-tier candidate to run for the open Senate seat.“It’s not going real well, and all you have to do is look at the facts,” said Representative Lisa McClain, a Republican from Eastern Michigan. “The ability to raise money, we’ve got a lot of donors sitting on the sideline. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. It’s just a plain fact. We have to fix that.”She added: “Everyone is in the blame game. We’ve got to stop.”Representative Lisa McClain at a Trump rally in Michigan in 2022. Ms. McClain says the “everyone is in the blame game” as the Michigan G.O.P. struggles with infighting and sluggish fund-raising. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesMichigan Republicans were long a force in national politics. The state was home to Gerald Ford and George Romney and to many of the “Reagan Democrats” who helped transform the party four decades ago. Ronna McDaniel, the current chair of the Republican National Committee, was the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party until 2017. Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education under Mr. Trump who resigned after Jan. 6, is a power broker in the state, managing vast wealth and a political network with influence far beyond state lines.The slow unraveling of the state party began well before the 2020 election. Throughout the Obama administration, the right wing of the party grew more vocal and active. After Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, many party posts that were once controlled largely by megadonor families and the Republican establishment began to be filled by Trump acolytes.By 2021, the new activists wanted to support only candidates who believed the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump lost in Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, was fraudulent and were committed to trying to do something about it.Those leaders soon emerged. Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who advanced false election theories, became a folk hero in the state and ran for attorney general. Kristina Karamo, a poll worker who signed an affidavit claiming she had witnessed vote stealing, became a conservative media star and ran for secretary of state. And Meshawn Maddock, the leader of Women for Trump who organized buses to Washington on Jan. 6, became co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.As co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock blamed big donors for not supporting their candidates and maintained falsehoods about the 2020 election.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo did not respond to requests for comment. The Michigan Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment. In a video released on Monday night, Ms. Karamo defended her actions as party chair and lashed out at more moderate Republicans she claimed were part of a “uniparty.”Their nominations exposed a rift within the party, with more moderate, traditional Republicans like the DeVos family swearing off both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo and withholding funds from most of the state party. Other donors similarly expressed their frustration. County nominating conventions devolved into open conflict.“Meshawn was never connected to the donor base, and so having her as the vice chair for a lot of us was a showstopper,” said Dave Trott, a former Republican congressman from Michigan who retired in 2018 and is also a former donor to the state party. “Because we just knew she would never be someone that would be rational in her approach to state party politics.”Ms. Maddock, who is no longer involved in the party, responded to Mr. Trott, saying she was “not surprised at all that he takes no responsibility for disappointing Michigan voters or anyone.” “The state party needs the wealthy RINOs who often fund it to come to terms with what the actual voters on the right want,” Ms. Maddock said. “Instead of constantly gaslighting the Republican base, the wealthy donors need to treat them with an ounce of respect for once.”As standard-bearers for the state party during the 2022 midterm cycle, Mr. DePerno, Ms. Karamo and Ms. Maddock all maintained the falsehoods about the 2020 election. In their campaigns, Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo placed extra emphasis on the 2020 election, often at the expense of other issues more central to voters.They were resoundingly defeated. Republicans also lost control of both chambers of the State Legislature. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic incumbent, sailed to a landslide victory.Republicans across the state were left pointing fingers. The state party blamed Tudor Dixon, the candidate for governor, for an unpopular abortion stance and anemic fund-raising. Ms. Dixon blamed state party leadership. Ms. Maddock blamed big donors for not supporting their candidates. Ms. Karamo refused to concede.A state party autopsy days after the election, made public by Ms. Dixon, acknowledged that “we found ourselves consistently navigating the power struggle between Trump and anti-Trump factions of the party” and that Mr. Trump “provided challenges on a statewide ballot.”Ms. Karamo, who succeeded Ms. Maddock at the helm, pledged to bring in a new donor class. But those donors never materialized. The party has lost money since Ms. Karamo took over, with under $150,000 in the bank as of June 30, according to federal campaign finance records. At the same time four years ago, the party had roughly three times as much cash on hand.Ms. Karamo and Matthew DePerno are prominent election deniers who stepped into the vacuum of leadership at the state party.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesShe has drawn condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats for her social media posts tying gun reforms to the Holocaust and has faced attempts to limit her power.The party has been plagued by infighting. In April, two county leaders were involved in an altercation, with one filing a police report claiming assault, according to video obtained by Bridge Michigan. In July, a brief brawl broke out during a state party gathering. The chairman of the Clare County Republican Party told police he had stress fractures in his spine, bruised ribs and broken dentures as a result of the fight.A memo circulated this month from the executive director and general counsel of the state party, obtained by The Times, warned of a rogue meeting being advertised under the banner of the state party that was “in no manner properly connected to or arising from the true and real Michigan Republican Party.”The issues facing the party extend beyond infighting and fund-raising; this month, Mr. DePerno, as well as a former Republican state representative and a lawyer, were charged with felonies related to a plan to illegally obtain voting machines. They have pleaded not guilty.“Tell me how that helps. Tell me how that helps get the swing voter,” said Ms. McClain. “Voters don’t care about the infighting. The swing voter wants to know, how are your policies going to help me have a better life for my family?”Prominent Michigan Republicans appear content to let the state party wither. Former Gov. Rick Snyder, among the last Republicans elected statewide in Michigan, has begun a fund-raising campaign directing money away from the state party and directly into the House Republican caucus in a desperate attempt to win back at least one chamber of the State Legislature.(The effort bears some similarities to one Gov. Brian Kemp undertook in Georgia, another state where division over Mr. Trump’s election claims hobbled the state party.)Mr. Snyder’s fund-raising, as well as some activity from the DeVos family network, have filled the coffers of the Republican House caucus, led by Matt Hall, the minority leader in the State Legislature whom many party elites are looking to as the de facto leader. The House Republican Caucus, despite being in the minority, is outpacing the House Democratic Caucus in fund-raising this year, with $2.3 million to the Democrats’ $1.7 million.Mr. Hall also has helped fuel 2020 election doubts. (He once was the chairman of a committee hearing featuring the Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani spreading lies about the election.) But he is far more likely to attack Democrats on spending or “pork” projects.Separate from Mr. Hall’s efforts, the DeVos family and other influential donors have begun raising money for congressional and state legislative races only, forgoing any presidential or Senate races, according to Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the state party.But the problems looming ahead of next year’s election are not just about money.“What can’t be replicated is the manpower infrastructure,” said Mr. Timmer, who now advises the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “You can’t just go out and buy the passion and zealousness of people who will go out knock on doors and put up signs and do all those things that require human labor in a campaign.”Prominent Republicans point to the coming Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference as a sign of how far the state party has fallen. It was once a marquee stop for presidential hopefuls looking to make an impression on the critical swing state, and not a single Republican candidate for president in 2024 is scheduled to make an appearance.Instead, the featured speaker at the September conference will be Kari Lake, who lost her race for governor in Arizona and has since claimed her loss was marred by fraud. More

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      Michigan G.O.P. Leadership Race Fixates on Election Deniers

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      Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo, both Trump loyalists who resoundingly lost their midterm races, are the front-runners to lead the state party.LANSING, Mich. — Trump loyalists are expected to cement their takeover of Michigan’s Republican Party during its leadership vote on Saturday, most likely elevating one of two election deniers whose failed bids for office in November were emblematic of the party’s midterm drubbing in the state.Matthew DePerno, an election conspiracy theorist who is under investigation in a case involving voting equipment that was tampered with after the 2020 presidential race, is widely considered a front-runner from a field of 11 that includes no high-profile members of the Republican old guard.His closest rival appears to be Kristina Karamo, another vocal champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s election falsehoods. Both lost resoundingly last fall: Mr. DePerno, in his run for attorney general, by eight percentage points and Ms. Karamo by 14 points in the secretary of state race.The selection of either Mr. DePerno or Ms. Karamo would signal a recommitment to Mr. Trump as the state party’s north star, even though voters rejected many of his favored candidates in the midterms. The fractured state G.O.P. appears to have either purged or alienated more moderate voices and is now plotting a defiant course as the 2024 presidential election approaches.Mr. Trump urged Republican delegates to back Mr. DePerno during a telephone rally on Monday, saying that winning Michigan in 2024 was critical to his returning to the presidency. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has sowed conspiracy theories about election fraud, also endorsed Mr. DePerno and showed up Friday night during a packed event to support him at The Nuthouse, a sports bar near the convention center. A vehicle with video billboards on its sides touting Ms. Karamo’s candidacy circled the bar outside.Kristina Karamo at the party convention in Lansing, Mich., this past week. She lost her secretary of state race by 14 points in November.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesA consultant for Mr. DePerno, Patrick Lee, declined to answer questions about the leadership vote or the status of a prosecutor’s inquiry into the voting machines breach. But Mr. DePerno, a lawyer who has maintained that he did not break the law, used the call with Mr. Trump to cast himself as an aggressive tactician who would return the state Republican Party to viability.Ms. Karamo did not respond to requests for comment.The party’s hard-right transformation has exasperated more traditional Republicans, who said in interviews that refusal to heed the lessons of the midterms would deepen the competition gap politically and financially between the G.O.P. and Democrats in a battleground state.Former Representative Peter Meijer, whom Republican primary voters ousted last year after he voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said in a recent interview that the state party was on the wrong track.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“In our state, this civil war is benefiting no one but the Democrats,” he said. “Part of what the Republican Party in the state of Michigan needs to get back to is being a broad tent. To me, the fundamental challenge is, how do you rebuild trust in the state party after losses like we saw in November?”Democrats swept the governor’s race and other statewide contests last fall, in addition to flipping the full Legislature for the first time in decades.“Sadly, it looks like they want an encore,” said former Representative Fred Upton, a Republican who declined to run for re-election last year after also voting to impeach Mr. Trump.Matthew DePerno at a rally in October. Mr. DePerno lost his bid for attorney general in Michigan by eight points.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesGarrett Soldano, an unsuccessful G.O.P. candidate for governor last year who has balked at acknowledging Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory, is running for co-chairman on the same pro-Trump “America First” ticket as Mr. DePerno..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.They both have called for reinventing the party’s donor base to include more grass-roots supporters, as has Ms. Karamo, a departure from recent history when Michigan Republicans had become reliant on prolific donors like Ron Weiser, its departing chairman, and the powerful DeVos family. But the party’s financial reserves have dwindled.Meshawn Maddock, the party’s departing co-chair, has attributed Republican losses in the state to the lack of support from longstanding donors, saying in a private briefing in November that big donors would rather “lose this whole state” than help the party’s candidates because they “hate” Mr. Trump, The Detroit News reported. Ms. Maddock did not respond to requests for comment.Both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo were badly out-raised by their opponents in last year’s election, raising questions about their ability to mine cash from political donors.“Donors have said, ‘we’re not buying the crazies that you’re selling,’” said Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser for the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, and a former Republican who previously served as executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.Some current and former Republican leaders in the state have suggested that Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s estranged former education secretary who raised the idea of using the 25th Amendment to have him removed from office after the Capitol riot, is pulling back from the state party.The DeVos family did not marshal dollars for Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo last year, but it did pour $2.9 million into a super PAC supporting Tudor Dixon, a Trump-endorsed Republican who lost the governor’s race, according to campaign finance records, and it gave at least $1 million to Michigan Republicans during the most recent campaign cycle. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for the DeVos family, said they “invest based on enduring first principles, not fleeting flash points of the day” and in “those they believe have a serious and credible plan to win.”Michigan’s Republicans will pick a new chair during a leadership vote on Saturday. Emily Elconin for The New York TimesMr. DePerno and Mr. Soldano have outlined an intent to pack the party’s leadership ranks with Trump loyalists, close primaries to just Republicans and ratchet up the distribution of absentee ballot applications to G.O.P. voters — despite what Mr. DePerno said was lingering opposition to voting by mail within the party’s ranks.Mr. Soldano echoed Mr. DePerno during a Facebook Live broadcast on Monday, saying that relying on Election Day votes had become a flawed strategy for Republicans.“We can’t just scream anymore, ‘Hey, just show up and vote,’ because it didn’t work,” he said.While Mr. DePerno has nabbed the big-name endorsements, Ms. Karamo has her fans as well — including Mr. Forton, who said that if he doesn’t get enough votes to win he would support her instead.He highlighted that after the November election — when Ms. Karamo lost the secretary of state’s race — she did not concede, while Mr. DePerno eventually did.“To a lot of us, that makes her somewhat of a heroine,” Mr. Forton said of Ms. Karamo’s defiance.But Mr. DePerno’s legal entanglements — including the open investigation into his role in accessing voting machines after the 2020 election — have also burnished his standing with right-wing stalwarts, according to Mr. Timmer. He described Mr. DePerno as having the “it” factor for many convention delegates.“It’s similar to Trump,” he said.Last August, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat who went on to defeat Mr. DePerno in the November election, asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to consider criminal charges against him and eight other election deniers in connection with what Ms. Nessel characterized as the illegal tampering with voting machines used in the 2020 election.Ms. Nessel referred to Mr. DePerno as “one of the prime instigators of the conspiracy,” but said it would not be appropriate for her to conduct an investigation into her political opponent.D.J. Hilson, the special prosector in the case, an elected Democrat from Muskegon County, said in an email on Feb. 10 that the investigation was still open. He declined to comment further and would not say whether Mr. DePerno had been subpoenaed. More

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      Fueled by Falsehoods, a Michigan Group Is Ready to Challenge the Vote

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      In private meetings, activists, lawyers and G.O.P. officials laid out their strategy. “If there is a close election, it’s going to be up to us to fix it,” one said.DETROIT — The invitation went out in early July.Republican activists, lawyers and elected officials in Michigan who call the results of the 2020 election fraudulent would unite with a single focus: “to provide ongoing citizen oversight, transparency, and accountability” in elections. They adopted the name Michigan Fair Elections and the simple slogan, “Choose Freedom.”Over the next months, the participants got to work trying to remake democracy in the nation’s 10th largest state under the banner of integrity.They recruited and trained challengers to spot and document minute ballot irregularities; filed lawsuits to undermine protections for the vote-counting process; and debated the merits of calling 911 on poll workers deemed to be violating rules. In weekly Zoom meetings, they discussed friendly insiders positioned on Michigan canvassing boards, which certify results; repeated debunked conspiracy theories about election machines, ballot “mules” and widespread voter fraud; and obsessed over the idea that Democrats “cheat” to win elections.“If there is a close election, it’s going to be up to us to fix it,” said Erick Kaardal, a lawyer with the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group in Chicago, during an Oct. 27 Zoom attended by more than 50 people. “We’re the team that’s going to have to fix an election in Michigan if it’s rigged.”The New York Times reviewed more than 20 hours of recordings of Michigan Fair Elections meetings, along with training sessions and organizing calls from closely linked groups. What emerged was a picture of an organization fueled by falsehoods, bent on trying to influence the 2022 midterms and determined to change the voting system in ways that would benefit Republicans.The Michigan group has counterparts around the country. Since the 2020 election, activists have rallied behind Donald J. Trump’s claims about rigged elections and set out to find evidence to prove their theories and change the system. They have staked out ballot drop boxes, recruited thousands of volunteers to monitor voting in the midterm elections and filed legal challenges.In Michigan, the organizers behind the effort include both Republican stalwarts and grass-roots activists. Attendees on the calls included Cleta Mitchell, the longtime elections lawyer who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn his 2020 loss; Ann Bollin, the chairwoman of the Elections and Ethics Committee in the Michigan House of Representatives; Patrick Colbeck, a former Michigan state senator who has called election denial a “spiritual battle”; and Sandy Kiesel, a Michigan activist who runs a group still pushing to decertify the 2020 election nearly two years after Mr. Trump left office.The coalition grew out of Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, which has established groups doing similar work in states including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia.A ballot drop box on Sunday in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich.Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“What you’re doing is really reclaiming our country,” Ms. Mitchell said at a meeting in August. “Just remember that what we are collectively trying to do is save our country from the radical left.”Someone with access to video and audio recordings of the calls shared them with The Times. Several participants confirmed the material’s authenticity.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Final Landscape: As candidates make their closing arguments, Democrats are bracing for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country as Republicans predict a red wave.The Battle for Congress: With so many races on edge, a range of outcomes is still possible. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, breaks down four possible scenarios.Voting Worries: Even as voting goes smoothly, fear and suspicion hang over the process, exposing the toll former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods have taken on American democracy.In a statement to The Times about her work, Ms. Mitchell said her network “is about following the law and restoring the election process to one that is accurate, honest, and protects the secret ballot for all voters.”Patrice Johnson, who sent the July invitation and oversees meetings of Michigan Fair Elections, referred requests for comment to Mr. Kaardal, who did not respond to queries.Ms. Kiesel said in an interview that she wanted “to unify the United States through transparent and trusted elections.” She said that although she attended some meetings she is not a member of the coalition.Election officials and governance experts say that if there is an erosion of trust in elections, Mr. Trump and his supporters are causing it. In Michigan, election officials say they are prepared for activists and lawyers to challenge close races in court by asking the judges to discard thousands of ballots in Democratic strongholds such as Detroit and Grand Rapids, and by filing lawsuits that seek to delay or block the certification of results.On one recent Zoom meeting, Mr. Kaardal spoke about plans to try to force the entire governor’s race to be rerun. Mr. Colbeck last week called for a “full forensic audit” — a buzz word for the type of discredited, partisan examination of votes conducted in Arizona last year — regardless of the outcome.But election experts say that they have confidence that the system is sound and that votes will be fairly and accurately counted. Millions of Americans already have cast ballots early without widespread disruption or trouble. Still, they say that such endeavors could further dent public confidence in the electoral system, which could have repercussions in the future.“I think it really undermines public confidence in the system because to some people where there’s smoke there’s fire,” said Dan Korobkin, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. “It’s true our democracy didn’t fall apart in 2020, and maybe it won’t in 2022, but how many years in a row can you have that kind of situation until we really are in deep trouble?”One focus in the meetings has been defeating a ballot proposal backed by Democrats that would amend the Michigan constitution to make voting easier and force canvassing boards to certify results, among other measures.The Michigan Fair Elections participants see it as a crisis.“It’s a nuclear bomb to our elections,” Marian Sheridan, the grass-roots vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said in an Oct. 13 meeting.Braden Giacobazzi, an activist and engineer from the outskirts of Detroit, has led a series of training sessions for poll challengers.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesInstead, she and others associated with the group support a measure requiring voter ID and barring outside groups from donating money to election offices. The measure failed to get on the ballot, but participants hope to push it through the legislature ahead of the 2024 election, along with legislation that would make it easier for voters to sue elections officials.Ms. Sheridan did not respond to requests for comment.The most pressing issue on the calls in recent months has been preparing for the midterm elections. Planning has included some talk of monitoring ballot boxes and demanding hand recounts, strategies pursued by groups in other states, but the Michigan coalition has largely kept its focus on the courts.“Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits,” Mr. Colbeck said in a meeting in early August. (A promoter of theories about hacked election machines, Mr. Colbeck is a close associate of Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and a leading figure in the election denial movement.)Some groups involved have been preparing for lawsuits by stationing trained volunteers — labeled “challengers” in Michigan election law — at the vote-counting centers to collect what they claim will be evidence of problems.Late last month, Braden Giacobazzi, an activist and engineer from the outskirts of Detroit, led one of a series of poll challenger trainings for the Election Integrity Force and Fund, a group headed by Ms. Kiesel. The goal, he said, is documenting activity that can be used later in legal challenges. “You just keep gathering data, all of that as evidence,” Mr. Giacobazzi, who has been kicked out of counting centers twice in the past two years, said to around 50 new recruits.Mr. Giacobazzi said in an interview that he follows the law and wants to try to help catch fraud if there is any, to ensure a more transparent process.In September, the Election Integrity Force and others sued Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, as well as its secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, in a bid to decertify the 2020 election.In another recent lawsuit, Mr. Giacobazzi and the Election Integrity Force joined with Kristina Karamo, Republican candidate for secretary of state, to ask a judge to effectively declare the absentee ballot system used in Detroit unlawful.Over the course of a four-hour hearing on that case last week, their lawyers referred to debunked conspiracy theories from the discredited film “2000 Mules.”“This is again part of a right-wing fever dream,” said David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, during the hearing.In a ruling issued on Monday, Judge Timothy Kenny rejected the claims, noting that the plaintiffs’ demands would disenfranchise 60,000 voters who had already cast ballots. Every one of 12 accusations submitted “are unsubstantiated and/or misinterpret Michigan law,” he wrote.By last Thursday, there were 1,100 people signed up statewide to be poll challengers as election officials begin to process absentee ballots.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesConspiracy theories frequently crept into Michigan Fair Elections’ planning meetings. In an Oct. 27 meeting, Ms. Kiesel said a lawyer had sent letters to 1,600 elections clerks in Michigan advising them to recount ballots by hand based in part on a debunked theory about voting machines.In another meeting, Ms. Kiesel boasted that her group had tried to challenge 22,000 voters before the August primaries. The secretary of state’s office said the challenges were invalid, but last week Ms. Kiesel sent out thousands more.“Groups that ignore the law and spread misinformation and lies do nothing of value,” Ms. Benson said in a statement. Participants on the calls share updates on their recruitment of both poll monitors and poll workers, the temporary workers who run polling places.On a call in August, Matt Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s elections integrity director for Michigan, said the party had installed 1,500 Republican poll workers in the state during the August primary. Some 500 of them were in Detroit alone, up from just 170 in 2020.“That is a huge accomplishment,” Mr. Seifried said.Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said the party’s election integrity operation is separate from outside groups.By last week, there were 1,100 people signed up statewide to be poll challengers as election officials begin to process absentee ballots. On Election Day, Mr. Seifried said in a Zoom meeting on Thursday, there will be 30 lawyers ready to take calls from challengers who spot problems, with 65 more at polling locations, plus additional lawyers inside counting rooms in Democratic strongholds.During that meeting, Mr. Kaardal, the lawyer from the Thomas More Society, gave a final motivational speech.“Everyone on these phone calls should be very proud that we advanced the election integrity effort this far,” he said, reminding the 75 participants that there was no time to rest.“We start our forensic investigation on Election Day.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      Michigan G.O.P. Candidates Show Unity as Midterm Campaigns Enter Homestretch

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      CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. — As the midterm campaign enters the homestretch, it’s time for unity rallies.Here in Michigan, that meant bringing the Republican candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general together in an empty lot outside a church on a breezy Friday night to speak to a few hundred supporters, who had been amped up by a soundtrack strikingly similar to the set list played before a Trump campaign rally. And each candidate focused their remarks on issues currently animating Republican voters.Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor, anchored her stump speech to the issue that helped drive Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia to victory just a year ago: education.“It is crucial to get our kids back on track,” she said, spending nearly the first half of her speech on issues surrounding education. “We want to see 25 hours of tutoring for every student, and the funding is there.”She was introduced by Riley Gaines, the collegiate swimmer who has been a vocal critic of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Ms. Dixon embraced the college sports cause at the very top of her speech. “Did you ever think we would be here, where we have to defend women’s sports?” Ms. Dixon said.Matthew DePerno, the candidate for attorney general, ticked off crime statistics. Kristina Karamo, the candidate for secretary of state, made allegations of election impropriety against her opponent, Jocelyn Benson, the current secretary of state and a Democrat.That all three candidates have been campaigning together would have seemed unlikely during the primary, when a contentious nominating convention caused a fracture in the Michigan Republican Party. Many moderate Republican donors swore off Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo, fearful that they could tank a ticket. Ms. Dixon offered tepid support during the primary for the two of them, though she did not endorse anyone before the convention.Now, with polls showing Ms. Dixon gaining ground but still trailing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, the entire slate was looking for support from this Republican-leaning county.In a brief news conference after her speech, Ms. Dixon said she was encouraged by her team’s election apparatus in the state, but declined to directly answer whether she would accept the results on election night.“We feel like we have a good team out there watching the election, a lot stronger than in 2020,” she said. “I feel strong about the election.” More

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      This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photograph by Stephen Maturen, via Getty ImagesIn the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies were unable to get far in their attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. There were two reasons for that.First, there wasn’t any, as numerous investigations by journalists, expert reports and court rulings showed. But second, Republican election officials in multiple states repeatedly said that their counts and recounts were accurate, and they defended the integrity of the election. For all the pressure that the Trump camp brought to bear, well-trained, civic-minded election workers carried out their duty to maintain the machinery of American voting.Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass “voter integrity” laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not.This is where Mr. Trump’s allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America’s election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.Imagine a legal Jan. 6. It’s bureaucratic, boring, invisible — and it might actually succeed.These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America’s system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years.But Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system’s vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it.A key element of this strategy is dismantling the bulwarks that stopped the assault on democracy in 2020. In Georgia, the top state election official, Brad Raffensperger, its secretary of state, refused Mr. Trump’s request to help steal the election by agreeing to “find” 11,780 additional votes. In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers certified Joe Biden’s victory despite Mr. Trump’s aggressive meddling. A host of other state and local officials, many of them Republicans, pushed back on similarly antidemocratic machinations.Mr. Trump and his allies have set about removing and replacing these public servants, through elections and appointments, with more like-minded officials. In some cases, the effort has failed. (In Georgia’s Republican primary this year, Mr. Trump backed a losing candidate in a vendetta against Mr. Raffensperger.) But in other states, Republicans have embraced election deniers as candidates, including for secretary of state.In Nevada, the Republican secretary of state nominee, Jim Marchant, maintains that the 2020 presidential race was rigged and that he would not have certified Mr. Biden’s win in Nevada. He blames voting fraud for his own failed House run that year and has said that Nevada voters haven’t truly elected their leaders in years because the system is so rigged.Mr. Marchant is a part of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, whose candidates are campaigning for measures that would make it more difficult for Americans to vote, such as by limiting voting to a single day and aggressively purging voter rolls. They have the financial backing of pro-Trump election deniers including Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.The Republicans’ pick in Michigan, Kristina Karamo, is also an America First candidate. She gained political notice with her unsubstantiated claims to have witnessed election fraud as a poll watcher in Detroit in 2020. She has also promoted the baseless conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines flipped votes in Mr. Biden’s favor and that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation conducted by “antifa posing as Trump supporters.”The most outrageous G.O.P. choice may be Arizona’s Mark Finchem. Mr. Finchem has in the past identified as a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, and he spoke at a QAnon convention last year. He was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although he denies being within about 500 yards of the building. As a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, he introduced a resolution this year to decertify the 2020 election in multiple counties, and was a sponsor of a bill to empower the Republican-led Legislature to overturn election results.Mr. Finchem wants to ban early voting and put limits on mail-in voting. In April, he filed a federal lawsuit, backed by Mr. Lindell, to block the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona in the midterms. (It was dismissed.)Installing election deniers as top election officials is just one element of this plan. Much less visible, but just as important, is the so-called precinct strategy, in which Trump allies are recruiting supporters to flood the system by signing up to work in low-level election positions such as poll workers. A prominent promoter of the precinct strategy was Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Last year, Mr. Bannon rallied the listeners of his “War Room” podcast to sign up as precinct committee members. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” he proclaimed in May 2021.The call was answered. An investigation by ProPublica in the summer of 2021 found a surge in Republicans signing up to be precinct officers or equivalent lowest-level officials in key counties. Of the 65 counties contacted, 41 reported a collective increase of at least 8,500 new sign-ups following Mr. Bannon’s call to arms. (ProPublica found no such spike on the Democratic side.)The precinct strategy has been endorsed by Mr. Trump — who declared it a way to “take back our great country from the ground up” — and adopted by segments of the Republican Party.Mr. Bannon is appealing to his supporters’ sense of civic duty by asking them to be more involved in their local election process. But unsettling details of what this effort entails emerged this summer after Politico acquired videos of Republican operatives discussing strategy with activists.New election recruits would attend training workshops on how to challenge voters at polling places, explained Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Michigan, in one of the recordings. These poll workers would have access to a hotline and a website staffed by “an army” of Republican-friendly lawyers prepared to help with challenges. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?” Mr. Seifried said at a meeting last October.As testimony during the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed, the legal challenges presented by Trump allies to the 2020 election quickly collapsed in part because they lacked even the most basic documentation. But carried out as designed, the precinct strategy means that even if, ultimately, there are no instances of fraud and most of the challenges to individual voters fall apart, they could still bog down the voting by causing delays and introducing unnecessary friction and confusion, giving cover to a state election official or state legislature to say that an election is tainted and therefore invalid.In some parts of the country, this is already happening. This summer, an all-Republican county commission in rural New Mexico refused to certify the primary election results because of unsubstantiated suspicions of fraud. New Mexico’s secretary of state, a Democrat, intervened and asked the state Supreme Court to order the commission to certify the results. Two commissioners relented, but the third, Couy Griffin, refused. He admitted that his suspicion of fraud was not founded on any evidence: “It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”(Mr. Griffin, who attended the Jan. 6 melee at the Capitol, was later ruled to be ineligible to hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and later engages in insurrection.)After the May primary election in Pennsylvania, three Republican-controlled counties refused to count several hundred mail-in ballots on which voters had failed to write a date on the envelope. The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, filed suit, and last month, a judge ruled that the ballots had to be included in the results, finally clearing the way for the primaries to be certified. (State officials learned of a fourth county that had done something similar.)Litigation is an important tool in tackling this threat. But it will not save the day. The problem is too big, says Marc Elias, a Democratic voting rights lawyer. “For every one place you try to solve this in court, there are five additional places where it is happening,” he said.The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system.All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.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