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      Bipartisan Senate Group Strikes Deal to Rewrite Electoral Count Act

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      The changes outlined by the senators are intended to prevent a repeat of the effort on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the presidential election in Congress.WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators proposed new legislation on Wednesday to modernize the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, working to overhaul a law that President Donald J. Trump tried to abuse on Jan. 6, 2021, to interfere with Congress’s certification of his election defeat.The legislation aims to guarantee a peaceful transition from one president to the next, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol exposed how the current law could be manipulated to disrupt the process. One measure would make it more difficult for lawmakers to challenge a state’s electoral votes when Congress meets to count them. It would also clarify that the vice president has no discretion over the results, and it would set out the steps to begin a presidential transition.A second bill would increase penalties for threats and intimidation of election officials, seek to improve the Postal Service’s handling of mail-in ballots and renew for five years an independent federal agency that helps states administer and secure federal elections.While passage of the legislation cannot guarantee that a repeat of Jan. 6 will not occur in the future, its authors believe that a rewrite of the antiquated law, particularly the provisions related to the vice president’s role, could discourage such efforts and make it more difficult to disrupt the vote count.Alarmed at the events of Jan. 6 that showed longstanding flaws in the law governing the electoral count process, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, had been meeting for months to try to agree on the rewrite.“In four of the past six presidential elections, this process has been abused, with members of both parties raising frivolous objections to electoral votes,” Ms. Collins said on Wednesday. “But it took the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 of 2021 to really shine a spotlight on the urgent need for reform.”In a joint statement, the 16 senators involved in the talks said they had set out to “fix the flaws” of the Electoral Count Act, which they called “archaic and ambiguous.” The statement said the group believed that, in consultation with election law experts, it had “developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for president and vice president.”Though the authors are one short of the 10 Republican senators needed to guarantee that the electoral count bill could make it past a filibuster and to final passage if all Democrats support it, they said they hoped to round up sufficient backing for a vote later this year.Ms. Collins said she expected the Senate Rules Committee to convene a hearing on the measures before the August recess. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the panel, was consulted in the drafting of the legislation.The bills were announced on the eve of a prime-time hearing by the House committee investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack, including Mr. Trump’s multilayered effort to invalidate his defeat. They also came as an investigation intensified into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to have Georgia’s presidential election results reversed. A Georgia judge has ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani, who spearheaded a push to overturn election results on behalf of Mr. Trump, to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta next month.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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      Twitter Takes Round 1

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      Judge Kathaleen McCormick granted the social media giant’s request for an expedited hearing. Now, the two sides are gearing up for a trial in October.Twitter: 1, Musk: 0.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesTwitter suit takes the fast laneTwitter won its effort to expedite its trial with Elon Musk yesterday, in its lawsuit to force Musk to close his $44 billion acquisition of the company. So many people tried to listen to the proceedings that the dial-in hit capacity — and we hear advisers across Wall Street were huddled around speakerphones.It’s a big win for Twitter. In granting an expedited hearing, Judge Kathaleen McCormick effectively repudiated the notion that the court needed to allow time for a deep dive into whether Twitter had accurately counted the number of bots on its platform. She cited the “cloud of uncertainty” that was hanging over the company the longer the case went undecided as the reason for her decision to fast-track the trial. And in what may be another good sign for Twitter, Judge McCormick said she was unsure that damages would be a sufficient remedy for the social media company, which wants Musk to buy it, not pay damages to walk away.Please see Page 5. A centerpiece of Musk’s claims is that Twitter’s disclosures about the percentage of active users on its platform that are bots are misleading, which would have a “material adverse effect” on the company’s value. But Musk has yet to tell the court what, exactly, in Twitter’s disclosures might be false. This became an issue when Musk’s lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, Andy Rossman, took aim at Page 5 of Twitter’s annual report, which explains its bot count. But Twitter’s lawyer at Wachtell, Bill Savitt, in his rebuttal, noted that Twitter fills that page with hedges and warnings that numbers might be off. (It reads, in part: “Our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.”) Of Twitter’s disclosure, Savitt said: “This does not require a recreation of all things known to humanity.” Judge McCormick seemingly agreed.The two sides are gearing up for a trial in October. Over the next weeks, they have to agree on schedules for depositions and discovery. And Musk will have time to prepare for another hearing before Judge McCormick that month: a defense of his whopping Tesla pay package — money that could come in handy if she forces him to buy Twitter.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Netflix loses fewer subscribers than expected. The streaming service reported yesterday that it lost nearly 1 million subscribers in the second quarter, far fewer than it had forecast. What’s more, Netflix said some of its strategies to stem losses, like an ad-supported option for consumers and a crackdown on password sharing, would boost revenue as soon as next year.A heroic act in an Indiana mall shooting renews the debate over gun access. In the days since a 22-year-old armed bystander killed a gunman two minutes into a shooting spree, the U.S. is again debating the wisdom of easier access to guns. But an analysis of 433 active shooter attacks in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021 found just 22 had ended with a bystander shooting the attacker, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.The CHIPS Act passes a procedural hurdle in the Senate with more than 60 votes. The legislation, stalled for more than a year, gives chip manufacturers what they say is help they need to build factories in the U.S. The Senate is expected today to officially vote to pass the bill, which has been slimmed down and still needs to return to the House before it can go to the president.Intelligence agencies say Russia remains a threat in elections. Top F.B.I. and National Security Agency officials warned yesterday that Russia could still seek to meddle or promote disinformation during the 2022 midterm races, even as it wages war in Ukraine. Iran and China also remained potent threats, the officials said.The House moves to protect same-sex marriage from Supreme Court reversal. New legislation, which garnered some Republican support, would recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level, but it faces an uncertain path in the Senate. The move was a direct answer to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the ruling last month that overturned federal abortion rights.The loans that may haunt Silicon ValleyTech workers have taken out loans in recent years based on the value of their start-up stock. But as the start-up economy has deflated, that may come back to haunt them, writes The Times’s Erin Griffith.Start-up loans stem from the way workers are typically paid. As part of their compensation, most employees at privately held tech companies receive stock options. That’s where loans and other financing options come in. Start-up stock is used as a form of collateral for cash advances. The loans vary in structure, but most providers charge interest and take a percentage of the worker’s stock when the company sells or goes public. Some are structured as contracts or investments.This lending industry has boomed in recent years. Many of the providers were created in the mid-2010s as hot start-ups like Uber and Airbnb put off initial public offerings of stock as long as they could, hitting private market valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.Debate has ignited in Silicon Valley over the proliferation of loans backed by stakes in still-private start-ups. Proponents say the loans are necessary for employees to participate in tech’s wealth-creation engine. But critics say the loans create needless risk in an already-risky industry and are reminiscent of the dot-com era in the early 2000s, when many tech workers were badly burned by similar loans.As the start-up economy deflates, these loans can be risky. While most are structured to be forgiven if a start-up fails, employees could still face a tax bill because the loan forgiveness is treated as taxable income.“No one’s been thinking about what happens when things go down,” said Rick Heitzmann, an investor at FirstMark Capital. “Everyone’s only thinking about the upside.”“The thing I’ve always been taught by my parents is to be the first one in and last one out. But there’s no one else there.”— Alex Hyman, who pictured his internship at a Los Angeles entertainment agency this summer as being one part “Entourage” and one part “The Office,” but found it more like “Home Alone.” It’s a common experience in an age of remote-working bosses.Mooch’s crypto problemAnthony Scaramucci, who is famous for his 11-day stint as former President Donald Trump’s communications director, is facing a mass exodus of investors from his funds.Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Scaramucci’s firm SkyBridge Capital had halted withdrawals from one of its smaller funds, Legion Strategies, which contains just over $200 million. But Scaramucci is also struggling to hold onto investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund, the SkyBridge Multi-Adviser Hedge Fund Portfolios, which managed as much as $2 billion at the end of March. Its investments lost nearly a quarter of their value in the second quarter.Investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund are seeking to withdraw as much as $890 million, or about half of the money that it held as of the end of last month, Scaramucci told DealBook. But many of those investors will be stuck in the fund for a while. Under its rules, investors in the Multi-Adviser fund are only allowed to withdraw money during certain windows. Those used to occur four times a year, but SkyBridge cut them to twice a year in 2020, after big losses at the beginning of the pandemic. Earlier this month, SkyBridge told investors they would only collectively receive about 16 percent of the money they requested. The letter said it was issuing investors’ notes that would be paid no later than October.Scaramucci’s losses come just over a year after SkyBridge’s pivot into crypto. SkyBridge’s flagship fund, which Scaramucci bought from Citigroup, has long specialized in buying and selling stakes of other hedge funds. For a time, that, along with strong performance in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, made Scaramucci one of the most powerful players in the hedge fund industry.Scaramucci says he is still a long-term believer in crypto. The fund manager says that about 22 percent of his flagship fund remained in crypto and related investments as of the end of last month. “I am not smart enough to time the market,” he told DealBook. “But we’ve done a tremendous amount of research and we think anyone who has will see that blockchain technology is good and is the future.”THE SPEED READ DealsPimco bought $1 billion worth of debt backing Apollo’s acquisition of a payments company at a steep discount. (Bloomberg)Start-ups are racing for share of the market for home chargers of electric vehicles, and several have already been acquired. (Reuters)“Sam Bankman-Fried Turns $2 Trillion Crypto Rout Into Buying Opportunity” (Bloomberg Businessweek)PolicyDan Cox, a Trump loyalist, won the primary to be the Republican candidate for governor of Maryland. (NYT)Novavax’s Covid vaccine was cleared for use in the U.S. (NYT)The Secret Service said texts requested by the Jan. 6 commission were probably lost for good. (NYT)U.K. inflation has exceeded economists’ forecasts, hitting 9.4 percent (FT)President Vladimir Putin signaled that Russia would resume gas deliveries through a key pipeline but at a reduced level. (NYT)Best of the restLeaked salary data at Twitter showed a pay gap of as much as 225 percent for the same role in different countries. (Input)Soaring overdose rates in the pandemic reflect widening racial disparities. (NYT)How the pain of past economic crises is haunting Italy. (NYT)“Fighting a Brutal Regime With the Help of a Video Game” (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Mail Ballots Are at Issue as States Consider New Rules and Legal Action

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      As the nation prepares for yet another pandemic election, the rules for voting by mail remain a flash point in many states, a conflict that is being waged in courtrooms and state houses over Republican-backed restrictions.Here’s what happened this week:In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections rejected a signature-matching requirement for absentee ballots that was proposed by the state Republican Party. The measure, denied by a party-line vote on Thursday, would have let counties compare signatures on applications and return envelopes for absentee ballots with those on voter registration cards.The board’s three Democrats said that the verification method would conflict with state law and would contribute to voters being treated differently, which they cautioned would be unconstitutional. The panel’s two G.O.P. members contended that checking signatures “simply builds trust in the system.”North Carolina is not the only battleground state where Republicans and Democrats are clashing over mail-in ballots.Pennsylvania’s top election official, Leigh M. Chapman, a Democrat who is the acting secretary of the commonwealth, sued three counties on Tuesday over their refusal to include undated mail-in ballots in their official tallies from the May 7 primaries.A state court had directed counties in June to report two sets of tallies to Ms. Chapman’s office, one that included ballots without dates handwritten on their return envelopes as required by law and one that did not.The three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster, which are controlled by Republicans — have prevented the state from completing its final certification of the primary results, state elections officials said.The lack of dates on ballot envelopes was a point of contention in the Republican Senate primary that was narrowly won by Dr. Mehmet Oz over David McCormick. Disputes over such ballots have resulted in legal action in state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.The conflict over mail-in voting is not limited to purple or red states.In deep-blue Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court on Monday denied a lawsuit filed by the state Republican Party that had sought to block no-excuse mail-in voting from becoming permanent.The party had argued that voting by mail, made popular during the pandemic and codified as part of a law signed last month by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is unconstitutional.The court’s order in Massachusetts was not the only setback this week for Republicans.In Texas, a lawsuit challenging voting restrictions that were enacted in 2021 was for the most part allowed on Tuesday to move forward by a federal court judge in San Antonio.The secretary of state and state attorney general, offices held by Republicans, had sought to dismiss the legal action by several voting rights groups.The restrictions forbade balloting methods introduced in 2020 to make voting easier during the pandemic, including drive-through polling places and 24-hour voting. They also barred election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee-ballot applications and from promoting the use of vote by mail.Voters must now provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on applications for mail-in ballots and on return envelopes. More

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      Gerrymandered Redistricting Maps Have Become the Norm

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      The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of residents identify as Latino, Black, Asian or multiracial. There aren’t too many places in Texas where you can encounter Muslim students praying on a busy downtown sidewalk, but Denton is one of them.Lindsey Wilkes, left, and Kimberlyn Spain with friends from the Muslim Student Association near the University of North Texas.Drive about seven hours northwest of Denton’s city center and you hit Texline, a flat, treeless square of a town tucked in the corner of the state on the New Mexico border. Cow pastures and wind turbines seem to stretch to the horizon. Texline’s downtown has a couple diners, a gas station, a hardware store and not much else; its largely white population is roughly 460 people and shrinking.It would be hard to pick two places more different from one another than Denton and Texline — and yet thanks to the latest round of gerrymandering by Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature, both are now part of the same congressional district: the 13th, represented by one man, Ronny Jackson. Mr. Jackson, the former White House physician, ran for his seat in 2020 as a hard-right Republican. It turned out to be a good fit for Texas-13, where he won with almost 80 percent of the vote.Denton’s bustling downtown square is a gathering point for the city’s diverse population.The city’s soccer facilities provide meeting grounds for families from all walks of life.Enjoying live music is a multigenerational undertaking, as the Rojas family did one afternoon at a performance of Latin funk at Harvest House.This was before the 2020 census was completed and Congress reapportioned, which gave the Texas delegation two more seats for its growing population, for a total of 38. State Republicans, who control the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature, were free to redraw their district lines pretty much however they pleased. They used that power primarily to tighten their grip on existing Republican seats rather than create new ones, as they had in the 2010 cycle. In the process, they managed to squelch the political voice of many nonwhite Texans, who accounted for 95 percent of the state’s growth over the last decade yet got not a single new district that would give them the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.Marsha Keffer, a volunteer and precinct chair, looking over district maps at the the Denton County Democratic Party headquarters.A development of multistory homes under construction in Denton.Denton offers a good example of how this played out. Under the old maps, downtown Denton, where the universities lie, was part of the 26th District — a Republican-majority district, but considerably more competitive than the 13th. If Texas politics continue to move left as they have in recent years, the 26th District could have become a tossup. The liberal residents of Denton could have had the chance to elect to Congress a representative of their choosing.Now that the downtown has been absorbed into the 13th District and yoked to the conservative Texas panhandle, however, they might as well be invisible. Even with the addition of all those younger and more liberal voters, the 13th remains a right-wing fortress, with a 45-point Republican lean, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight. (The redrawn 26th District, meanwhile, will likely become a few points more Republican in the absence of Denton’s downtown.)Families enjoyed a custom ride after attending a Spanish-language church service in Krum, a town in Denton County in the newly redrawn 13th Congressional District.Recycled Books, a used book, record, CD and video game store, fills several floors of an old opera house in the middle of Denton Square.This is the harm of partisan gerrymanders: Partisan politicians draw lines in order to distribute their voters more efficiently, ensuring they can win the most seats with the fewest votes. They shore up their strongholds and help eliminate any meaningful electoral competition. It’s the opposite of how representative democracy is supposed to work.A music and film festival drew Chelsey Danielle, left, and Stefanie Lazcano to the dance floor.Kinsey Davenport getting inked at Smilin’ Rick’s tattoo shop in Denton.The kitchen staff at Boca 31, an upscale Latin street-food restaurant, during a Saturday afternoon rush.Ross Sylvester, right, and Chuck Swartwood joined a crew of volunteers at a food distribution site run by First Refuge in Denton.How is it supposed to work? Politicians are elected freely by voters, and they serve at the pleasure of those voters, who can throw them out if they believe they aren’t doing a good job. Partisan gerrymanders upend that process. Politicians redraw lines to win their seats regardless of whether most voters want them to; in closely fought states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republicans drew themselves into control of the legislatures even when Democrats won a majority of votes statewide.When these gerrymanders become the norm, as they have in the absence of meaningful checks, they silence the voices of millions of Americans, leading people to believe they have little or no power to choose their representatives. This helps increase the influence of the political extremes. It makes bipartisan compromise all but impossible and creates a vicious circle in which the most moderate candidates are the least likely to run or be elected.A music class for infants and toddlers at the Explorium, a children’s museum and play and education center in Denton.Texas Republicans have been especially ruthless at playing this game, but they’re far from alone. Their counterparts in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kansas have taken similar approaches to stack the deck against Democrats. Democrats have likewise gone on offense in states where they control mapmaking, such as in Illinois and Oregon, where lawmakers drew maps for 2022 that effectively erased swathes of Republicans.After a virtual home wedding for family members in Moldova and Mexico, Matt Lisovoy and Diana Lisovaya celebrated with ice cream on the square.Diya Craft and her punk-fusion band, Mutha Falcon, playing at a nonprofit social club featuring local bands and craft beers.Iglesia Sobre la Roca serves a varied population from Mexico and Central America with Spanish-language services.The Austin-based rock band Holy Death Trio at Andy’s Bar on the square.The Supreme Court had an opportunity in 2019 to outlaw the worst of this behavior, but it refused to, claiming it had neither the authority nor any clear standards to stop gerrymanders that “reasonably seem unjust.” This was nonsense; lower federal courts and state courts have had no problem coming up with workable standards for years. Court intervention is essential, because voters essentially have no other way of unrigging the system. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority stuck its head in the sand, giving free rein to the worst impulses of a hyperpolarized society.As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent: “Of all times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”The view in Texline, Texas, on the far western edge of the 13th Congressional District.The Supreme Court isn’t the only institution to shirk its responsibility to make maps fairer. Congress has the constitutional authority to set standards for federal elections, but Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts by Democrats to require independent redistricting commissions. It doesn’t help matters that most Americans still don’t understand what redistricting is or how it works.The Amarillo office of Representative Ronny Jackson is on the far west side of the district.Visitors to Amarillo can find an astonishing selection of cowboy boots and other western wear at Cavender’s.They can also take in a film at the American Quarter Horse Foundation Hall of Fame and Museum.Left to their own devices, states are doing what they can. More than a dozen have created some type of redistricting commission, but the details matter greatly. Some commissions, like California’s and Michigan’s, are genuinely independent — composed of voters rather than lawmakers, and as a result these states have fairer maps.Isaiah Reed mastering his trampoline basketball skills in his backyard in Texline.Commissions in some other states are more vulnerable to partisan influence because they have no binding authority. In New York, the commission plays only an advisory role, so it was no surprise when Democrats in power quickly took over the process and redrew district lines to ensure that 22 of the state’s 26 seats would be won by their party. The state’s top court struck the Democratic maps down for violating a 2014 amendment to the State Constitution barring partisan gerrymanders — a good decision in a vacuum, perhaps, but the result is more chaos and infighting, because the final maps are forcing several top Democratic lawmakers to face off against one another. Meanwhile in Ohio, where the State Constitution has a similar provision barring partisan gerrymanders, the State Supreme Court repeatedly invalidated Republican-drawn gerrymanders for being unfairly biased, but Republicans have managed to ignore those rulings, and so will end up with the maps they want, at least for this cycle.A truck driver making a pit stop in Conway, Texas, which is in the 13th District.Palo Duro Canyon State Park, home to the second-largest canyon in the United States, is part of the arid landscape of northwestern Texas.Bushland, a suburb of Amarillo.Drew Merritt’s “The Chase” in downtown Amarillo.The patchwork of litigation and different outcomes around the country only strengthens the case for a national standard, which is nowhere in sight. It’s a maddening situation with no apparent solution — until you widen the lens and look at the larger structure of American government. When you do, it becomes clear that extreme partisan gerrymandering is more a symptom than a cause of democratic breakdown. The bigger problem is that the way we designed our system of political representation incentivizes the worst and most extreme elements of our politics.On the federal level, at least, there are clear solutions that Congress could adopt tomorrow if it had the will to do so.The 190-foot-tall cross in Groom, Texas, is among the largest in the country.First, expand the House of Representatives. As The Times’s editorial board explained in 2018, the House’s membership, 435, is far too small for America in the 21st century. It reached its current size in 1911, when the country had fewer than one-third as many people as it does today, and the national budget was a tiny fraction of its current size. In 1911, each representative had an average of 211,000 constituents — already far more than the founders had envisioned. Today that number is more than 750,000. It is virtually impossible for one person, Ronny Jackson or anyone else, to accurately represent the range of political interests in a district of that size.In the Texas Panhandle, which lies almost entirely in the 13th District, wind turbines dot the landscape, and cattle outnumber voters.The region is littered with desolate downtowns like Shamrock, where a stray cat was among the few signs of life.On the far northwestern edge of the district, in Texline, Carlos Mendoza tossed a few pitches to his neighbor Sebastian Reed. They live about 450 miles from the opposite corner of the district.Why are we still stuck with a House of Representatives from the turn of the last century? The founders certainly didn’t want it that way; the original First Amendment to the Constitution, which Congress proposed in 1789, would have permanently tied the size of the House to the nation’s population; the amendment fell one state short of ratification.Still, as the country grew Congress kept adding seats after every decennial census, almost without fail. After 1911, that process was obstructed by rural and Southern lawmakers intent on stopping the shift in political power to the Northern cities, where populations were exploding. In 1929, Congress passed a law that locked the House size at 435 seats and created an algorithm for reapportioning them in the future.A bigger House is necessary to more accurately reflect American politics and to bring the United States back in line with other advanced democracies. But on its own it wouldn’t solve our failure of representation. The larger culprit is our winner-take-all elections: From the presidency down, American electoral politics gives 100 percent of the spoils to one side and zero to the other — a bad formula for compromise at any time, and especially dangerous when the country is as polarized as it is today. But at least some of that polarization can be attributed to the manner in which we choose our representatives.Texline is at one end of the 13th District.Tattoos of a musician in Denton.In Congress, districts are represented by a single person, which is harmful in two ways: First, it’s hard to see how one person can adequately represent three-quarters of a million people. Second, even though representatives are supposed to look out for all their constituents, the reality of our politics means most people who didn’t vote for the winner will feel unrepresented entirely.The solution: proportional multimember districts. When districts are larger and contain three or even five members, they can more accurately capture the true shape of the electorate and let everyone’s voice be heard. And if the candidates are chosen through ranked-choice voting, then Republicans, Democrats and even third parties can win representation in Congress in rough proportion to their vote share. It’s no longer a zero-sum game that leaves out millions of Americans.A farm in Texline at the New Mexico border. The founders were comfortable with multimember districts, just as they were with a House of Representatives that kept expanding. In fact, such districts were common in the early years of the Republic, but Congress outlawed them at the federal level, most recently in 1967, partly out of a concern that Southern lawmakers were using them to entrench white political power — a problem that ranked-choice voting would solve.These reforms may sound technical, but they are central to saving representative democracy in America.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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      The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State-Blue State Divide

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      Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules.To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from removing posts because of political points of view.In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governor’s race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them — only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues — including abortion, guns, the environment — and along geographic lines.The midterm elections in November are driving much of the activity on the state level. In red states, the focus has been on protecting conservative voices on social media, including those spreading baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud.In blue states, lawmakers have tried to force the same companies to do more to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and other harmful information about a broad range of topics, including voting rights and Covid-19.“We should not stand by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy,” Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview.Calling disinformation a “nuclear weapon” threatening the country’s democratic foundations, he supports legislation that would make it a crime to spread lies about elections. He praised the $28,000 fine levied against the advocacy group that challenged the integrity of the state’s vote in 2020.“We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact,” he said, referring to disinformation.The biggest hurdle to new regulations — regardless of the party pushing them — is the First Amendment. Lobbyists for the social media companies say that, while they seek to moderate content, the government should not be in the business of dictating how that’s done.Concerns over free speech defeated a bill in deeply blue Washington that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials “to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.”Governor Inslee, who faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020, supported the legislation, citing the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That ruling allowed states to punish speech calling for violence or criminal acts when “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”The legislation stalled in the state’s Senate in February, but Mr. Inslee said the scale of the problem required urgent action.Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe scope of the problem of disinformation, and of the power of the tech companies, has begun to chip away at the notion that free speech is politically untouchable.The new law in Texas has already reached the Supreme Court, which blocked the law from taking effect in May, though it sent the case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation last year, prompted in part by the decisions by Facebook and Twitter to shut down the accounts of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill.The court’s ruling signaled that it could revisit one core issue: whether social media platforms, like newspapers, retain a high degree of editorial freedom.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a dissent to the court’s emergency ruling suspending the law’s enforcement.A federal judge last month blocked a similar law in Florida that would have fined social media companies as much as $250,000 a day if they blocked political candidates from their platforms, which have become essential tools of modern campaigning. Other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed similar measures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Alaska.Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, has created an online portal through which residents can complain that their access to social media has been restricted: alabamaag.gov/Censored. In a written response to questions, he said that social media platforms stepped up efforts to restrict content during the pandemic and the presidential election of 2020.“During this period (and continuing to present day), social media platforms abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech — a principle on which they sold themselves to users — and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth,” he wrote. “Suddenly, any viewpoint that deviated in the slightest from the prevailing orthodoxy was censored.”Much of the activity on the state level today has been animated by the fraudulent assertion that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Although disproved repeatedly, the claim has been cited by Republicans to introduce dozens of bills that would clamp down on absentee or mail-in voting in the states they control.Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Sixteen states have expanded the abilities of people to vote, which has intensified pre-emptive accusations among conservative lawmakers and commentators that the Democrats are bent on cheating.“There is a direct line from conspiracy theories to lawsuits to legislation in states,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization at the New York University School of Law. “Now, more than ever, your voting rights depend on where you live. What we’ve seen this year is half the country going in one direction and the other half going the other direction.”TechNet, the internet company lobbying group, has fought local proposals in dozens of states. The industry’s executives argue that variations in state legislation create a confusing patchwork of rules for companies and consumers. Instead, companies have highlighted their own enforcement of disinformation and other harmful content.“These decisions are made as consistently as possible,” said David Edmonson, the group’s vice president for state policy and government relations.For many politicians the issue has become a powerful cudgel against opponents, with each side accusing the other of spreading lies, and both groups criticizing the social media giants. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called the “authoritarian companies” that have sought to mute conservative voices. In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the memoirist and Republican nominee for Senate, railed against social media giants, saying they stifled news about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son.In Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican nomination for Senate, released a television ad criticizing Twitter for suspending her personal account after she posted remarks about transgender athletes. “They want to cancel you,” she said in the ad, defending her remarks as “what God intended.”OnMessage, a polling firm that counts the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, reported that 80 percent of primary voters surveyed in 2021 said they believed that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Six years earlier, only 20 percent said so. “Voters have a palpable fear of cancel culture and how tech is censoring political views.” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called “authoritarian companies.”Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn blue states, Democrats have focused more directly on the harm disinformation inflicts on society, including through false claims about elections or Covid and through racist or antisemitic material that has motivated violent attacks like the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo in May.Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting and to create a position for an expert to root out misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral. A similar effort to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security provoked a political fury before its work was suspended in May pending an internal review.In California, the State Senate is moving forward with legislation that would require social media companies to disclose their policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. (The legislation would not compel them to restrict content.) Another bill would allow civil lawsuits against large social media platforms like TikTok and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram if their products were proven to have addicted children.“All of these different challenges that we’re facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat, who sponsored the legislation to require greater transparency from social media platforms. “That has significant consequences both online and in physical spaces.”It seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will have a significant impact before this fall’s elections; social media companies will have no single response acceptable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.“Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms, but the November midterms seem likely to be particularly explosive,” said Matt Perault, a director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. “With abortion, guns, democratic participation at the forefront of voters’ minds, platforms will face intense challenges in moderating speech. It’s likely that neither side will be satisfied by the decisions platforms make.” More

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      Next Time Trump Tries to Steal an Election, He Won’t Need a Mob

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      Last week, the Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, a challenge to North Carolina’s new congressional map.The long and short of the case is that North Carolina Republicans proposed a gerrymander so egregious that the state Supreme Court ruled that it violated the state’s Constitution. Republicans sought to restore the legislative map, citing the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which asserts that state legislatures have almost absolute power to set their own rules for federal elections. Once passed into law, then, those rules cannot be overturned — or even reviewed — by state courts.A Republican victory at the Supreme Court would, according to the election law expert Rick Hasen, “radically alter the power of state courts to rein in state legislatures that violate voting rights in federal elections. It could essentially neuter the ability of state courts to protect voters under provisions of state constitutions against infringement of their rights.”This radical interpretation of the Elections Clause of the Constitution also extends to the Presidential Electors Clause, such that during a presidential election year, state legislatures could allocate Electoral College votes in any way they see fit, at any point in the process. As I argued earlier this year, we could see Republican-led states pass laws that would allow them to send alternative slates of electors, overruling the will of the voters and doing legally what Donald Trump and his conspirators pressured Republicans in Arizona and Georgia to do illegally. Under the independent state legislature doctrine, the next time Trump tries to overturn the results of an election he lost, he won’t need a mob.There are many problems with this doctrine beyond the outcomes it was engineered to produce. Some are logical — the theory seems to suggest that state legislatures are somehow separate and apart from state constitutions — and some are historical. And among the historical problems is the fact that Americans have never really wanted to entrust their state legislatures with the kind of sweeping electoral powers that this theory would confer.For most of the first 50 years of presidential elections, there was no uniform method for the allocation of electors. In the first truly competitive race for president, the election of 1800, two states used a winner-take-all system where voters cast ballots to pick their electors directly, three states used a system where electors were chosen on a district-by-district basis, 10 states used a system where the legislature simply chose the electors, and one state, Tennessee, used a combination of methods.Methods changed from election to election depending on partisan advantage. Virginia moved from the district system in 1796 to the winner-take-all “general ticket” in 1800 to ensure total support for Thomas Jefferson in his contest against John Adams. In retaliation, Adams’s home state of Massachusetts abandoned district elections for legislative selection, to ensure that he would get all of its electors.This kind of manipulation continued until the mid-1830s, when every state save South Carolina adopted the “general ticket.” (South Carolina would not allow voters to directly choose electors until after the Civil War.)Beginning in 1812, however, you can start to see the public and its elected officials turn against this use of state legislative power.Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party was still in power. James Madison, his longtime friend and political ally, was president. But he, and the war he was now fighting, were unpopular.Most members of Congress had backed Madison’s call for war with Great Britain. But it was a partisan vote with most Republicans in favor and every Federalist opposed.The reasons for war were straightforward. The “conduct of her government,” said Madison in his message to Congress requesting a declaration of war, “presents a series of acts hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation.” Among those acts were impressment of American seaman (“thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national flag, have been torn from their country”) and attacks on American commerce (“British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts.”).In fighting Britain, the administration and its allies hoped to pressure the crown into a more favorable settlement on these maritime issues. They also hoped to conquer Canada and shatter British influence in the parts of North America where it allied with Native tribes to harass American settlers and stymie American expansion.Those hopes crashed into reality, however, as an untrained and inexperienced American militia flailed against British regulars. And as the summer wore on, bringing him closer and closer to the next presidential election, Madison faced defeat abroad and division at home. In New England especially, his Federalist opponents used their hold on local and state offices to obstruct the war effort.“In Hartford,” writes the historian Donald Hickey in “The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict,” “Federalists sought to end loud demonstrations by army recruiters by adopting a pair of city ordinances that restricted public music and parades.” In Boston, “the Massachusetts legislature threatened to sequester federal tax money if militia arms due to the state under an 1808 law were not delivered.”Fearing defeat in the presidential race as a result of this anger and discontent over the war, Republicans did everything they could to secure Madison’s victory. The historian Alexander Keyssar details these shenanigans in the book “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” He notes that,In North Carolina, which had utilized a district system since 1796, the legislature announced that it would choose electors by itself: its majority feared that Madison might lose the state to DeWitt Clinton, who ran with the support of both Federalists and dissident Republicans.On the other side, “the Federalist legislature in New Jersey announced, just days before the election, that it was canceling the scheduled balloting and appointing electors of its own.” And in Massachusetts, the Republican-led senate and Federalist-led lower house could not agree on a method for choosing electors. “In the end,” notes Keyssar, “an extra legislative session had to be convened to save the state from losing its electoral votes altogether.”Madison was re-elected, but according to Keyssar, the attempt on both sides to manipulate the outcome “ignited firestorms of protest and recrimination.” A number of lawmakers would try, in the immediate aftermath and the years that followed, to amend the Constitution to end legislative selection of electors and mandate district-based elections for the Electoral College.District elections, according to one supportive congressman, were best because they fit the “maxim that all legitimate power is derived from the people” and because they would reduce the chance that “a man may be elected to the first office of the nation by a minority of votes of the people.”This concern for democracy (or “popular government”) was a big part of the case for reform. For Senator Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey, allowing legislators to choose electors without giving voters a say was “the worst possible system” as it “usurped” power from the people and departed from “the spirit if not from the letter of the Constitution.”Even at this early juncture in our nation’s history, many Americans believed in democratic participation and sought to make the institutions of the Republic more receptive to the voice of the people. One supporter of district elections, Representative James Strudwick Smith of North Carolina, put it simply: “You will bring the election near to the people, and, consequently you will make them place more value on the elective franchise, which is all-important in a republican form of Government.”There is a somewhat common view that the counter-majoritarianism of the American system is acceptable because the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy.” That notion lurks behind the idea of the “independent state legislature,” which would empower partisans to limit the right of the people to choose their leaders in a direct and democratic manner.But from the start, Americans have rejected the idea that their system is somehow opposed to more and greater democracy. When institutions seemed to subvert democratic practice, the voters and their representatives pushed back, demanding a government more responsive to their interests, desires and republican aspirations. It is not for nothing that the men who claimed Jefferson as their political and ideological forefather labeled their party “The Democracy.”As Americans recognized then, and as they should recognize now, the Constitution is not a charter for states or state legislatures, it is a charter for people, for our rights and for our right to self-government.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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      The Long Path to Reclaim Abortion Rights

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      The Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe, far from settling the matter, instead has launched court and political battles across the states likely to go on for years.Attempting to recover from their staggering loss in the Supreme Court, abortion rights groups have mounted a multilevel legal and political attack aimed at blocking and reversing abortion bans in courts and at ballot boxes across the country.In the week since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, litigators for abortion rights groups have rolled out a wave of lawsuits in nearly a dozen states to hold off bans triggered by the court’s decision, with the promise of more suits to come. They are aiming to prove that provisions in state constitutions establish a right to abortion that the Supreme Court’s decision said did not exist in the U.S. Constitution.Advocates of abortion rights are also working to defeat ballot initiatives that would strip away a constitutional right to abortion, and to pass those that would establish one, in states where abortion access is contingent on who controls the governor’s mansion or the state house.And after years of complaints that Democrats neglected state and local elections, Democratic-aligned groups are campaigning to reverse slim Republican majorities in some state legislatures, and to elect abortion rights supporters to positions from county commissioner to state supreme court justices that can have influence over the enforcement of abortion restrictions.“You want all the belt and suspenders that you can have,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which litigated Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe. While the Supreme Court said it wanted to end five decades of bitter debate on abortion, its decision has set up a new fight, one that promises to be long and equally bitter.Although abortion rights supporters say their strategy is promising, the path ahead is slow and not at all certain. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly say that the decision to have an abortion should be made by women and their doctors rather than state legislatures. But Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed hundreds of restrictions on abortion over the last decade, and legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered to protect Republican incumbents. Litigation in state courts will be decided by judges who in many cases have been appointed by anti-abortion governors.Although abortion rights supporters say their strategy is promising, the path ahead is not at all certain.Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesAbortion rights groups say their cases relying on state constitutions offer a viable path forward to establish Roe-like protections in states. Even in conservative states such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, they see an opportunity to overturn abortion bans and establish a constitutional backstop against further restriction.But in other places, the goal of the litigation is to at least temporarily restore or preserve abortion access, now that the court’s decision stands to make it illegal or effectively so in more than half the states, which include 33.5 million women of childbearing age.In Louisiana, for example, though the state constitution expressly says there is no right to abortion, the legal challenge has allowed three clinics to continue serving women whose plans to end their pregnancies were thrown into disarray by the court’s decision.From Opinion: The End of Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end ​​the constitutional right to abortion.Michelle Goldberg: “The end of Roe v. Wade was foreseen, but in wide swaths of the country, it has still created wrenching and potentially tragic uncertainties.”Spencer Bokat-Lindell: “What exactly does it mean for the Supreme Court to experience a crisis of legitimacy, and is it really in one?”Bonnie Kristian, journalist: “For many backers of former President Donald Trump, Friday’s Supreme Court decision was a long-awaited vindication.” It might also mark the end of his political career.Erika Bachiochi, legal scholar: “It is precisely the unborn child’s state of existential dependence upon its mother, not its autonomy, that makes it especially entitled to care, nurture and legal protection.”“We have to take these things in steps,” said Joanna Wright, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner who, with the Center for Reproductive Rights, is leading the Louisiana case. “A lot can change in a day, a month and six months. Time will tell the rest, but this is the fight right now.”The Supreme Court’s decision has flipped the dynamic of abortion strategy that has prevailed for the half-century since Roe, when anti-abortion groups chipped away at legal access by electing like-minded state legislators and passing increasingly strict laws, and abortion rights groups could rely on Roe to prevent the most severe bans from taking effect.Now, anti-abortion groups and congressional Republicans discuss federal legislation that would ban abortion across the country after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and abortion rights groups have begun climbing the steeper and narrower path state by state. “Democracy is a collective action,” said Ms. Wright, “and what we’ve seen from the anti-abortion movement is an ability to mobilize all the pieces of that,” which culminated, she added, with the overturning of Roe.By Friday, the groups had temporarily blocked bans from taking effect in Utah, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida; judges have set hearings over the next several weeks to consider permanent injunctions. But they lost bids to hold off bans in Ohio and Texas.Anti-abortion groups had argued for decades that the question of abortion should be left up to states, not to unelected judges in Washington. Within hours of the court’s decision, Republican politicians and law enforcement officials announced that bans, once held up in court, were now in effect, and would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.They decried their opponents’ strategy in the courts.“To say that the State Constitution mandates things like dismemberment abortions, I just don’t think that’s the proper interpretation,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said after Florida’s ruling temporarily blocking a law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks.The legal challenges argue that the Supreme Court’s decision has thrown abortion providers and patients into chaos, subjecting them to state laws that are often unclear, contradictory or confusing. Women have shown up for appointments only to be told that their pregnancies have now progressed too far to be eligible for abortion under new laws banning abortion after six weeks. In Montana, Planned Parenthood clinics said recently that they would require proof of residency for women seeking abortion pills, because of fears that prosecutors in other states might prosecute anyone who helped their residents get abortions.Abortion rights groups have not given up on hopes of federal action to protect abortion: They are pushing President Biden to use a declaration of a public health emergency to allow the Department of Health and Human Services to authorize out-of-state providers to prescribe and provide abortion pills to women in states where abortion bans have made them illegal.They are also pushing the Senate to suspend its filibuster and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a right to abortion before viability, as was provided in Roe. Mr. Biden reversed himself on Thursday to say that he supported lifting the filibuster, though he also told a group of Democratic governors that there were not enough votes in the Senate to do so.Abortion rights groups have not given up on hopes of federal action to protect abortion, but they have begun pursuing legal and legislative action state by state. Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesBut by necessity, the groups are focused first on state action.While the Supreme Court’s opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, declared that it was returning the regulation of abortion regulation “to the people and their elected representatives,” its decision has delivered the issue to other courts, those in the states.“If the Supreme Court and Justice Alito and the anti-abortion advocates thought this was going to settle the question, they are going to see just how wrong they are,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a news conference Friday alongside lawyers and leaders from the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood. “The proliferation of litigation that will embroil the states in our country for years to come is going to underscore that this is not settled in the public’s mind.”The lawsuits argue that state constitutions offer more protection for abortion than the federal constitution, either by quirk of state tradition or history. Some, such as Florida’s, include an explicit right to privacy. In Kentucky, lawyers argue their constitution provides a right to “bodily autonomy” as well as privacy. The Roe decision in 1973 declared that the U.S. Constitution afforded a right to privacy that included a woman’s right to abortion; while the Supreme Court overturned that decision, it generally cannot overturn what states say in their own constitutions.The suit in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country, seeks to protect abortion under a provision of the state constitution — adopted in 1896 — that provides that “both males and female citizens of this state shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges.”Largely because of the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the constitution also ensures that state residents have the right to plan their own families; the lawsuit argues this includes the right to choose abortion.Even in states where lawsuits have been successful, abortion rights groups say they are playing Whack-a-Mole. In Utah, as soon as the court put a temporary injunction on the state’s trigger law banning abortion, a legislator declared that the state’s law against abortion after 18 weeks, which courts had upheld while Roe was in effect, was now the operative law.“We’re in a chess game and we haven’t gotten checkmate,” said Karrie Galloway, the chief executive of Planned Parenthood in Utah. “We’re doing check, check, check, check. Unfortunately, we’re doing check, check, check with pregnant people and their families’ lives.”In Kansas, a state Supreme Court decision in 2019 found a right to abortion under the constitutional provisions for “equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But anti-abortion groups put an initiative on the primary ballot this August that seeks to amend the constitution to explicitly say that it does not include a right to abortion, and that the Legislature has the authority to pass further restrictions.That vote will be the first indication of how much the outrage seen in response to the Supreme Court’s decision translates into support for abortion rights in elections.Historically, voters who oppose abortion have been more driven to vote on the issue than those who support a right to abortion. But polls taken since the leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in May and the final decision in late June show that those who support abortion rights — largely Democrats — now cite it as one of their top concerns, and that the court’s decision has motivated them more to vote in elections this fall.Vote Pro Choice is attempting to turn out women, especially Black and Latina women, to vote in races including county commissioners, judges and sheriffs, particularly in states such as Texas and Georgia with restrictive abortion laws — positions responsible for enforcing anti-harassment laws outside abortion clinics, and deciding whether to give government money to crisis pregnancy centers, which anti-abortion groups have used to steer women away from abortions.Democrats need to learn from the successes of the anti-abortion groups and Republicans, said Sara Tabatabaie, the group’s chief political officer.“We have been out-raised, out-organized and out-funded for 50 years, and that is across the board,” she said. But she is encouraged by the number of people who say abortion will guide their votes in November: “In moments of tragedy, I am hopeful that there comes solidarity and increased clarity.” More

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      How Rules Fuel Populist Anger in Rural America

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      ROCK HALL, Md. — When Dave Harden decided to run for Congress as a Democrat on Maryland’s conservative Eastern Shore, a friend gave him a piece of free advice.“Democrats lose on three things: abortion, guns and regulations,” the friend said. “If you keep one, you have to give up the other two.”Abortion and gun rights have both inspired passionate activism and countless front-page news articles. Regulations — not so much. Yet nitpicky government rules remain a potent and underappreciated source of populist anger against Democrats, especially in rural areas.On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions: Why are wineries in Maryland limited to serving only 13 kinds of food? Why does a woman who sells her grandmother’s cobbler have to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to build a commercial kitchen? Why does a federal inspector have to be on hand to watch wild catfish get gutted — but not other kinds of seafood? The short answer is that restaurant associations tend to wield more political clout than wineries, and catfish farmers in Mississippi are more powerful than seafood harvesters in Maryland. Big businesses can afford to hire lawyers to help them cut through red tape and lobbyists to bend government rules to their will. Small businesses, especially in rural places, get slammed.Dave Harden campaigning during the annual fireman’s parade in Ocean City.“The claim of overregulation is especially animating on the political right,” Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me. He said misleading rumors that the Environmental Protection Agency planned to regulate farm dust or that President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would have taxed belching cows played right into the stereotype of Democrats as city folk who were infuriatingly eager to regulate almost anything in rural America.In 2006, Democrats and Republicans had similar views on government regulation of business: About 40 percent of Republicans said there was too much, compared to about 36 percent of Democrats. But the percentage of Republicans who felt that way climbed steadily under President Barack Obama, who enacted more economically significant rules than his predecessors. By the end of his first term, 84 percent of Republicans thought that government meddled too much in business, while only 22 percent of Democrats agreed, according to Gallup. Democrats were more likely to say that the government doesn’t regulate businesses enough.With business owners more likely to be Republicans and government workers more likely to be Democrats, you have the makings of a yawning partisan divide. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to remove two rules for every new one that was put in place.Can Democrats flip the script and win over conservative districts, particularly small- business owners in those areas, by speaking out against government red tape? Mr. Harden, a 59-year-old former Foreign Service officer who is running for Congress in Maryland’s First District, is trying. He hopes to replace Andy Harris, the sole Republican in Maryland’s congressional delegation. (Mr. Harris voted to overturn the results of the presidential election in 2020 and reportedly once tried to bring a gun onto the House floor.)Mr. Harden greets Bobby Higgins, the owner of an all-you-can-eat crab house in Ocean City.Crabs are Maryland’s iconic cuisine.Mr. Harden must first win a July 19 primary against Heather Mizeur, a progressive herb farmer who once represented Montgomery County, a much more urban area, in the state legislature. Ms. Mizeur has more money and name recognition than Mr. Harden, but he believes he has a chance because she seems out of step with the conservative district, which is considered a safe Republican seat.Mr. Harden is trying to chart an alternative path for Democrats in rural areas. He’s no fan of Donald Trump. He left a 22-year career in the Foreign Service in 2018 because he didn’t want to serve the Trump administration. But when it comes to regulations, Mr. Harden doesn’t sound all that much different from Mr. Trump.“The regulations in rural economies are ridiculous,” he told me.Mr. Harden is trying to walk a difficult line, appealing to voters who are angry about government overreach without turning off the Democratic base. He says he doesn’t oppose reasonable environmental regulations, but he rails against rules that make it harder for small businesses to survive.It’s a message that comes naturally to him. He spent years trying to improve the business environments in Iraq and the Palestinian territories as a senior U.S.A.I.D. official. He led a program in the West Bank town of Jenin that opened up a border crossing with Israel and prevailed on the Israeli government to allow more Israeli cars into Jenin so that Israeli Arabs could shop there, helping to start an economic revival.Mr. Harden’s campaign manager, Marty Lostrom, on Chris Lingerman’s lawn. Lingerman’s shop, Chester River Seafood, is behind his house.Ford’s Seafood in Rock Hall, Md., is family-owned.Mr. Harden is now trying to bring those lessons home to Maryland, where he grew up. On a recent Saturday, he squinted out at Chesapeake Bay, riffing about how to promote local economic development with Capt. Rob Newberry, the head of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, which represents licensed watermen in the area. Captain Newberry is a Republican who once hung a sign cursing Joe Biden on his boat. But he supports Mr. Harden, who listens patiently to his complaints about regulations.Captain Newberry represents people who harvest crabs, Maryland’s iconic cuisine, from the Chesapeake Bay, and he complains that excessive regulations are putting watermen like him out of business. He contends that the roughly 1,800 fishermen, clammers, crabbers and oystermen in his association are among the most highly regulated workers in the state.Captain Newberry, right, listened as Mr. Harden spoke to Chris Lingerman, the owner of Chester River Seafood, about regulations that hurt watermen.A Maryland blue crab.“When you get halfway to work and you pull up at a stoplight, does a policeman pull you over?” he asked. “When you get into work, does he come in and bother you two or three times and ask you what are you doing, do you have a license? That happens to me every time I go out on the harbor.”Captain Newberry has grievances with people across the political spectrum: with the environmentalists who lobby for more restrictions on the watermen; with the cities and companies responsible for faulty wastewater treatment systems and runoff that pollutes the bay; and with Mr. Harris, the incumbent.He told me that Mr. Harris refused to speak out against a nonsensical regulation that stipulated that catfish had to be treated like meat under federal law. The rule, which advantages catfish farmers in states like Mississippi at the expense of foreign fish farmers and Maryland fishermen, requires federal inspectors to be on site when catfish get gutted, even though there’s little evidence of a risk to public health.The rule is so outrageous that the Government Accountability Office once called for it to be repealed. Yet it remains in place. When the watermen complained to their congressman, Mr. Harris arranged for the government to pay for the inspectors. But inspectors still have to be called in whenever a fisherman brings in catfish for processing. (Mr. Harris’s office said he’s still working on it.)Captain Newberry says he has become disillusioned with the political sausage-making behind government rules. But he still works within the system to try to change them. He testifies before lawmakers and serves on committees, hoping that it will make a difference.On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions.However, those same frustrations have led some other watermen to fall under the sway of the “sovereign citizens” movement, which preaches that the federal and state governments have no right to require licenses for hunting, driving or owning a gun. Some adherents believe that the local sheriff is the only legitimate authority under the Constitution. Beliefs about the illegitimacy of the federal government appeared to be at the root of an armed standoff between federal authorities and cattle ranchers in Nevada in 2014.Maryland’s Eastern Shore hasn’t seen anything like that, Somerset County’s sheriff, Ronald Howard, told me. But he said he has faced mounting pressure to defy state rules and allow watermen to harvest oysters from sanctuaries that have been declared off limits. He refused. “I said, ‘Look, if I interfere, that’s obstruction of my duties; I can be charged criminally,’” he told me. “I had one waterman tell me, ‘That’s a chance you’ve got to take.’”Sheriff Howard doesn’t blame the watermen; he blames the rigid rules made by politicians who rarely take the time to listen to rural people. That’s where Dave Harden sees an opening for himself, however slim.Democrats have to find a way to reconnect with rural America, Mr. Harden told me. Frank talk about regulations is a good place to start.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