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    How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions

    Curbs on drop boxes, tougher ID requirements and purges of voter rolls would have been weakened, or never even passed, if a federal oversight system had been in place.Georgia toughened identification requirements for absentee voting. Arizona authorized removing voters from the rolls if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years. Florida and Georgia cut back sharply the use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots.All of these new voting restrictions would have been rejected or at least softened if a federal civil rights protection from the 1960s were still intact, experts in election law said.For decades, the heart of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a practice known as preclearance, largely detailed under Section 5 of the statute. It forced states with a history of racial discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice before enacting new voting laws. Through preclearance, thousands of proposed voting changes were blocked by Justice Department lawyers in both Democratic and Republican administrations.In 2013, however, Section 5 was hollowed out by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a majority opinion that racial discrimination in voting no longer constituted a significant threat.As Republican-led state legislatures have tightened voting rules after the 2020 election, new restrictions have been enacted or proposed in four states that are no longer required to seek approval before changing voting laws: Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Those new restrictions would almost certainly have been halted, stalled or altered had Section 5 still been in use, according to interviews with former federal prosecutors and a review by The New York Times of past civil rights actions by the Justice Department.“There’s nothing subtle about what they’re trying to do,” said Tom Perez, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “If Section 5 were still around, those laws would not see the light of day.”The restoration of preclearance is now at the center of a debate in Congress over the passage of federal voting legislation.On Tuesday, the House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore preclearance in several states, among other changes. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has urged Congress to revive preclearance, but Senate Republicans oppose such a move, and a filibuster in the Senate threatens to sink the bill before it can reach President Biden’s desk.President Lyndon B. Johnson greeted Martin Luther King Jr. after signing the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965.Lyndon B. Johnson LibrarySection 5 covered nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and several counties in New York, Florida, California, South Dakota and North Carolina.Many changes sailed through the Department of Justice during the years of preclearance. Still, thousands of proposed voting laws and rules were found to be discriminatory. From January 1982 to July 2005, Justice Department lawyers filed 2,282 objections to 387,673 proposed voting changes under Section 5, according to a study by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.Again and again this year, states have enacted voting restrictions that closely track measures that were flagged and rejected years ago under preclearance.In Georgia, a law that toughened ID requirements for absentee voting will have a disproportionate effect on Black voters, who make up about a third of the electorate. More than 272,000 registered voters lack the forms of identification that are newly required to cast absentee ballots, according to a study by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. More than half of them are Black.“If you have a voter-ID law where a lot of people don’t have one of the IDs, that’s a red flag,” said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.Mr. Perez, the head of the civil rights division from 2009 to 2013, recalled an Arizona bill that proposed barring third parties from dropping off absentee ballots on behalf of voters. The Navajo Nation protested that some of its communities were hours from the nearest mailbox, making the act of voting by mail an arduous one.The Justice Department pushed back at Arizona lawmakers in preclearance. “We asked them a series of very pointed questions because we had real concerns that it was discriminatory, and they withdrew it,” he said. “As a result of the questions we asked, Section 5 worked in that case. But once Section 5 was emasculated in 2013, they had free rein to enact it.”That bill, Mr. Perez noted, was similar to a new Arizona ban on ballot collection upheld in a recent Supreme Court decision.Republicans across the country have defended the new voting laws and denied they are restrictive, often repeating the mantra that the laws make it “easier to vote, harder to cheat.”Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia called a Justice Department lawsuit over the state’s new ID requirements “disgusting” and a “politically motivated assault on the rule of law.”Republicans do not dispute that the current Department of Justice, under Mr. Garland, would have challenged the new laws under Section 5. But they argue that the Biden administration is focusing on the politics of voting rights and not on the merits of the laws.“Laws that would have likely been precleared in a previous Democratic administration would be easily objected to by the current Biden administration,” said Justin Riemer, the chief counsel at the Republican National Committee.He added: “And it is very apparent to us that their determinations would be politically motivated in stopping states from enacting reasonable regulations that protect the integrity of their election processes.”Six former leaders of the civil rights division under Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump declined to comment or did not respond to requests to comment.The greatest power of Section 5, voting rights experts said, was as a deterrent.The burden of proof that laws were not discriminatory was placed on covered states: They had to show that the laws were not going to further restrict voting rights among communities of color.“A lot of these provisions would have never been enacted in the first place if Section 5 were still there,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Because these states know that if they couldn’t disprove retrogression, it would go down in flames.”The recent law in Arizona that removed voters from the permanent early voting list if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years caught the eye of Deval Patrick, who led the civil rights division during the Clinton administration and later was governor of Massachusetts.People rallied in support of the Voting Rights Act outside the Supreme Court in February 2013.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesIn 1994, Mr. Patrick objected to a Georgia proposal that would purge registered voters from the rolls if they failed to vote for three years unless they reaffirmed their registration status. He said the Arizona law struck him as another example of purging.“I think purging is one of the more pernicious undertakings, and I say this as somebody who is preternaturally neat,” Mr. Patrick said. “It is easier in many states today to keep a driver’s license than it is to keep your voter registration.”Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a Republican, insisted that the new law was about election integrity. Active voters would still get ballots, while resources would be freed for “priorities like election security and voter education,” he said in a video after signing the bill. “Not a single Arizona voter will lose their right to vote as a result of this new law.”Mr. Patrick also said the preclearance process had helped prevent changes in voting rules aimed at engineering a victory.He pointed to Georgia, where Mr. Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. Georgia’s new voting law prohibits the use of provisional ballots by voters who show up at the wrong precinct before 5 p.m. on Election Day. But “out of precinct” voters accounted for 44 percent of provisional ballots last year, by far the most common reason. Of 11,120 provisional ballots counted, Mr. Biden won 64 percent.“When the margin of victory was as slim as it was, the notion that the provisional ballots might not be counted because of some very technical and frankly trivial issue, that’s a problem,” Mr. Patrick said.Voting rights lawyers also liken new laws curbing the use of drop boxes to past attempts — blocked by the Justice Department under preclearance — to reduce the numbers of polling places or absentee-ballot locations.In 1984 alone, for example, Reagan administration lawyers objected to the relocation of a Dallas polling place to a predominantly white community from a largely Black one, and challenged bills in Arizona that would have reduced access to polling places by rotating locations and cutting operating hours.In Georgia, 56 percent of absentee voters in urban Fulton County and suburban Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties returned their ballots in drop boxes, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Under Georgia’s new law, those counties will now have just 23 drop boxes, compared with 94 during the 2020 election.And in Texas last year, with roughly a month left before Election Day, Gov. Greg Abbott directed counties to offer only one location for voters to drop off mail-in ballots.“So you had counties with four million people and it was one place essentially to drop off your ballot,” said Chad Dunn, a longtime voting-rights lawyer. “Those are provisions that would have been stopped immediately.” More

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    Israel’s Spy Agency Snubbed the U.S. Can Trust Be Restored?

    Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, heads to Washington promising better relations and seeking support for covert attacks on Iran’s nuclear program.WASHINGTON — The cable sent this year by the outgoing C.I.A. officer in charge of building spy networks in Iran reverberated throughout the intelligence agency’s Langley headquarters, officials say: America’s network of informers had largely been lost to Tehran’s brutally efficient counterintelligence operations, which has stymied efforts to rebuild it.Israel has helped fill the breach, officials say, its robust operations in Iran providing the United States with streams of reliable intelligence on Iran’s nuclear activities, missile programs and on its support for militias around the region.The two countries’ intelligence services have a long history of cooperation and operated in virtual lock step during the Trump administration, which approved or was party to many Israeli operations in its shadow war against Iran.That changed after the election of President Biden, who promised to restore the nuclear agreement with Iran that Israel so vigorously opposed. In the spring, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, even curtailed intelligence sharing with the United States because he did not trust the Biden administration.The challenge for the two countries — as Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, meets with Mr. Biden at the White House on Thursday — will be whether they can rebuild that trust even as they pursue contradictory agendas on Iran. The Biden administration favors a diplomatic approach, reviving and building on the 2015 nuclear agreement, while Israeli officials say that only force can stop Iran from building an atomic bomb.A key goal for Mr. Bennett will be to determine whether the Biden administration will continue to support Israel’s covert operations against Iran’s nuclear program, senior Israeli officials said.Israeli officials hope that any new deal with Iran will not limit such operations, which in the past have included sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities and the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.The White House meeting comes just weeks after William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, traveled to Israel to meet his counterpart, David Barnea, as well as Mr. Bennett, a sign of the importance of intelligence cooperation to the bilateral relationship.“The sharing of intelligence and operational activity between Israel and the United States is one of the most important subjects on the agenda for the meeting,” said Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former director of Israeli military intelligence. “Israel has developed unique capabilities for intelligence collection in a number of enemy countries, capabilities that the United States was not able to grow on its own and without which its national security would be vulnerable. ”William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, second from left, recently met with his counterpart in Israel. The two agencies are trying to rebuild trust as their countries pursue contradictory agendas on Iran.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn his meeting with Mr. Biden, Mr. Bennett’s hand will be strengthened by the fact that the United States has become more dependent on Israel for information on Iran. The United States has other sources of information, including electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, but it lacks the in-country spy network Israel has..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The risk of such dependence became clear in April when Israel set off explosives at Iran’s Natanz nuclear plant.Mr. Netanyahu had ordered his national security officials to reduce the information that they conveyed to the United States about planned operations in Iran, American and Israeli officials said.And on the day of the attack, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, gave the United States less than two hours’ notice, according to American and Israeli officials, far too short a time for the United States to assess the operation or ask Israel to call it off.Israeli and American officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations.Israeli officials said they took the precautions because Americans had leaked information about some Israeli operations, a charge U.S. officials deny. Other Israeli officials say the Biden administration had been inattentive to their security concerns, too focused on reviving the Iran nuclear agreement that President Donald J. Trump had pulled out of.A satellite photo showing the Natanz nuclear facility in April 2021. Days earlier, Israeli operatives set off a large explosion inside the plant. Planet Labs Inc., via Associated PressIn Washington, many American officials said they believed that Mr. Netanyahu was just resuming the grudge he had held against the Obama administration, which negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran.The last-minute notification of the Natanz operation was the starkest example that Israel had changed its procedures since the Trump presidency.Senior Biden administration officials said that the Israelis, at least in spirit, had violated a longstanding, unwritten agreement to at least advise the United States of covert operations, giving Washington a chance to object.Mr. Burns called his counterpart, Yossi Cohen, the Mossad chief, expressing concern over the snub, according to people briefed on the call.Mr. Cohen said that the belated notification was the result of operational constraints and uncertainty about when the Natanz operation would take place.For the American-Israeli intelligence relationship, it was another a sharp turnabout.Relations had soured during the Obama era.The Obama White House, concerned that Israel was leaking information, kept the existence of the negotiations with Iran secret from Israel, a former Obama administration official said. Israeli intelligence learned of the meetings from its own sources.Mr. Netanyahu was also convinced that American spy agencies were keeping him under surveillance, according to a former Israeli official.During the Trump administration, cooperation reached new highs.In the spring, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, curtailed intelligence sharing with the United States because he did not trust the Biden administration.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesWhen the Mossad stole Iran’s nuclear archive in 2018, the only foreign officials briefed in advance were Mr. Trump and his C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo.Israeli officials used the documents to convince Mr. Trump that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program, and Mr. Trump cited them when he withdrew from the nuclear agreement months later, a major victory for Mr. Netanyahu.“This was clever use of intelligence,” Mr. Netanyahu told The New York Times in 2019.Iran has denied that it seeks a nuclear weapon, but the archives showed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program as recently as 2003. According to American intelligence officials, no evidence has emerged that the program continued.During meetings with senior Trump administration officials in late 2019 and early 2020, Mr. Cohen presented a new Iran strategy, arguing for aggressive covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities and killing key personnel to force Iran to accept a stricter agreement.Israel began a wave of covert operations, keeping the Trump administration in the loop on a series of cyber and bombing attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and on the assassination of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November 2020, after the American election but before Mr. Biden took office.The two countries also cooperated on two operations in 2020: a U.S. operation to kill the leader of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, and an Israeli operation to kill a Qaeda leader who had taken refuge in Tehran.Mr. Pompeo, who later served as secretary of state, said that there was no relationship more important during his four years in the Trump administration than the one that the C.I.A. had with the Mossad.“The two organizations really had a moment, an important moment in history,” he said in an interview in June.In January 2020, an American drone strike killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani as he was leaving the Baghdad airport. The strike was aided by Israeli intelligence.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesBut the warmth of the Trump years quickly gave way to chillier relations this year. The Biden administration’s announcement of its plan to return to the Iran nuclear deal and repeated delays of visits by Israeli intelligence officials to Washington deepened skepticism of the new administration in Israel.Mr. Cohen sought to repair the relationship with the United States during his final months as Mossad chief, a senior Israeli official said.On his final visit to Washington in April, a little more than two weeks after the Natanz bombing, he met with C.I.A. officials and Mr. Biden, promising a more transparent intelligence relationship. Mr. Burns gave him a warm reception, and an award for fostering the close partnership between the Mossad and the C.I.A.“You have people within both intelligence organizations that have had relationships for a very long time,” said Will Hurd, a former C.I.A. officer and former member of the House Intelligence Committee. “There is a closeness and an ability to potentially smooth out some of the problems that may manifest from the leaders.”Arguably as important in rebooting the relations between the two spy shops was the departure of Mr. Netanyahu from the prime minister’s office.Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who meets with President Biden on Thursday, said he would use the meeting with Mr. Biden to try to reset the tone of Israel’s relationship with the United States.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesMr. Bennett says he wants to open a new chapter in relations with the White House, and has promised a more constructive approach.But the Mossad is already planning more secret operations in Iran. The question for the Biden administration is which are acceptable and when, General Zeevi Farkash said.“The U.S. and Israel must jointly identify the red lines so that if Iran crosses them, Israel can act to prevent it from achieving military nuclear capacity,” he said.Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington. More

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    Judge Orders Sanctions Against Pro-Trump Lawyers Over Election Lawsuit

    Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood and seven other lawyers deceived federal courts and debased the judicial process, a federal judge wrote.A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday night ordered sanctions to be levied against nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, ruling that a lawsuit laden with conspiracy theories that they filed last year challenging the validity of the presidential election was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”In her decision, Judge Linda V. Parker of the Federal District Court in Detroit ordered the lawyers to be referred to the local legal authorities in their home states for possible suspension or disbarment.Declaring that the lawsuit should never have been filed, Judge Parker wrote in her 110-page order that it was “one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election,” but another to deceive “a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed.”“This is what happened here,” she wrote.Ms. Powell and Mr. Wood did not respond immediately to comment on the ruling. The other lawyers, including two who served in the Trump administration, could not be reached on Wednesday night for comment.The Michigan lawsuit, filed in late November, was one of four legal actions, collectively known as the “Kraken” suits, that Ms. Powell filed in courts around the country, claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters, such as the financier George Soros or Venezuelan intelligence agents. In the suits, she complained without merit that those conspirators began a complicated, covert plot to digitally flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.Judge Parker’s order came about a month after a marathon hearing during which she repeatedly pressed Ms. Powell and her colleagues about how — or even whether — they had verified the statements of witnesses who filed sworn statements making claims of widespread fraud and tampering with voting machines. Several times, Judge Parker expressed astonishment at the lawyers’ answers, telling them they had a responsibility to perform “minimal due diligence” and calling some of the lawsuit’s claims “fantastical.”In her decision, Judge Parker accused Ms. Powell, who is based in Dallas, and Mr. Wood, who is based in Atlanta, of abusing “the well-established rules” of litigation by making claims that were backed by neither the law nor evidence, but were instead marked by “speculation, conjecture and unwarranted suspicion.”“This case was never about fraud,” Judge Parker wrote. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”David Fink, a lawyer for the City of Detroit, called the ruling “a powerful message to attorneys everywhere.”“Follow the rules, stick to the truth or pay a price,” Mr. Fink said. “Lawyers will now know that there are consequences for filing frivolous lawsuits.”Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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    Facebook Said to Consider Forming an Election Commission

    The social network has contacted academics to create a group to advise it on thorny election-related decisions, said people with knowledge of the matter.Facebook has approached academics and policy experts about forming a commission to advise it on global election-related matters, said five people with knowledge of the discussions, a move that would allow the social network to shift some of its political decision-making to an advisory body.The proposed commission could decide on matters such as the viability of political ads and what to do about election-related misinformation, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. Facebook is expected to announce the commission this fall in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections, they said, though the effort is preliminary and could still fall apart.Outsourcing election matters to a panel of experts could help Facebook sidestep criticism of bias by political groups, two of the people said. The company has been blasted in recent years by conservatives, who have accused Facebook of suppressing their voices, as well as by civil rights groups and Democrats for allowing political misinformation to fester and spread online. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, does not want to be seen as the sole decision maker on political content, two of the people said.Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, testified remotely in April about social media’s role in extremism and misinformation. Via ReutersFacebook declined to comment.If an election commission is formed, it would emulate the step Facebook took in 2018 when it created what it calls the Oversight Board, a collection of journalism, legal and policy experts who adjudicate whether the company was correct to remove certain posts from its platforms. Facebook has pushed some content decisions to the Oversight Board for review, allowing it to show that it does not make determinations on its own.Facebook, which has positioned the Oversight Board as independent, appointed the people on the panel and pays them through a trust.The Oversight Board’s highest-profile decision was reviewing Facebook’s suspension of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. At the time, Facebook opted to ban Mr. Trump’s account indefinitely, a penalty that the Oversight Board later deemed “not appropriate” because the time frame was not based on any of the company’s rules. The board asked Facebook to try again.In June, Facebook responded by saying that it would bar Mr. Trump from the platform for at least two years. The Oversight Board has separately weighed in on more than a dozen other content cases that it calls “highly emblematic” of broader themes that Facebook grapples with regularly, including whether certain Covid-related posts should remain up on the network and hate speech issues in Myanmar.A spokesman for the Oversight Board declined to comment.Facebook has had a spotty track record on election-related issues, going back to Russian manipulation of the platform’s advertising and posts in the 2016 presidential election.Lawmakers and political ad buyers also criticized Facebook for changing the rules around political ads before the 2020 presidential election. Last year, the company said it would bar the purchase of new political ads the week before the election, then later decided to temporarily ban all U.S. political advertising after the polls closed on Election Day, causing an uproar among candidates and ad-buying firms.The company has struggled with how to handle lies and hate speech around elections. During his last year in office, Mr. Trump used Facebook to suggest he would use state violence against protesters in Minneapolis ahead of the 2020 election, while casting doubt on the electoral process as votes were tallied in November. Facebook initially said that what political leaders posted was newsworthy and should not be touched, before later reversing course.The social network has also faced difficulties in elections elsewhere, including the proliferation of targeted disinformation across its WhatsApp messaging service during the Brazilian presidential election in 2018. In 2019, Facebook removed hundreds of misleading pages and accounts associated with political parties in India ahead of the country’s national elections.Facebook has tried various methods to stem the criticisms. It established a political ads library to increase transparency around buyers of those promotions. It also has set up war rooms to monitor elections for disinformation to prevent interference.There are several elections in the coming year in countries such as Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the Philippines where Facebook’s actions will be closely scrutinized. Voter fraud misinformation has already begun spreading ahead of German elections in September. In the Philippines, Facebook has removed networks of fake accounts that support President Rodrigo Duterte, who used the social network to gain power in 2016.“There is already this perception that Facebook, an American social media company, is going in and tilting elections of other countries through its platform,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University. “Whatever decisions Facebook makes have global implications.”Internal conversations around an election commission date back to at least a few months ago, said three people with knowledge of the matter. An election commission would differ from the Oversight Board in one key way, the people said. While the Oversight Board waits for Facebook to remove a post or an account and then reviews that action, the election commission would proactively provide guidance without the company having made an earlier call, they said.Tatenda Musapatike, who previously worked on elections at Facebook and now runs a nonprofit voter registration organization, said that many have lost faith in the company’s abilities to work with political campaigns. But the election commission proposal was “a good step,” she said, because “they’re doing something and they’re not saying we alone can handle it.” More

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    House Panel Demands Records of Trump’s Movements on Jan. 6

    The request was part of a far-reaching set of documents the select committee sought from seven federal agencies, which suggested the inquiry was focusing on the former president’s role.WASHINGTON — The select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot demanded detailed records on Wednesday about Donald J. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, in a series of requests to federal agencies that suggested it was focusing on any ties the former president may have had to the attack’s planning or execution.The committee’s demands, sent to the National Archives and Records Administration and six other agencies, show that as they ramp up their inquiry, investigators are looking closely at efforts by the former president to overturn the results of the 2020 election and any connections he or his administration had to the rioters.They are also looking into the potential involvement of at least one top aide to a Republican member of Congress who helped publicize the “Stop the Steal” rallies, which drew Mr. Trump’s supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election outcome.The panel sought communications among top Trump administration officials about attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions as Mr. Trump sought to invalidate President Biden’s victory in the run-up to the attack. Investigators are also focused on the planning, organization and funding of pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 and other attempts to stop or slow the process of Mr. Trump handing over the presidency to Mr. Biden.“Our Constitution provides for a peaceful transfer of power, and this investigation seeks to evaluate threats to that process, identify lessons learned and recommend laws, policies, procedures, rules or regulations necessary to protect our Republic in the future,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, wrote in the letters.The committee asked the National Archives, which keeps presidential records, for material it has about any plans hatched from within the White House or other federal agencies to derail the Electoral College vote count by Congress. The process was halted for hours on Jan. 6 as a mob of rioters breached the Capitol, hunting for lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence and brutalizing police officers in the name of Mr. Trump.From the Defense Department and the Justice Department, the committee asked for records of discussions about potentially invoking the Insurrection Act, which some feared Mr. Trump might use to deploy the military to cling to power; communications between government entities during the Capitol violence; and exchanges between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s campaign legal team about challenges to the election’s outcome.The committee called on the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. to furnish records of intelligence gathered before the assault; documents about the Secret Service’s protection of Mr. Pence and his family as the mob threatened him; and records tracking the spread and source of online disinformation about the election.The panel also sought information from the Interior Department about permitting for the rallies that preceded the mob violence and communications with the U.S. Park Police as the attack escalated. And it requested information from the National Counterterrorism Center about briefing materials prepared for senior officials before Jan. 6.The letters kicked off what is expected to be a flurry of records demands the committee plans to issue this week.Mr. Thompson told reporters that the committee planned to ask social media and telecommunications companies to preserve records of potentially “several hundred people,” including several unidentified members of Congress, as it scrutinizes those who worked to inflame the mob and were in communication with groups seeking to overturn the election.“We’ll look at everything that will give us information on what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson said on Capitol Hill this week. “We have quite an exhaustive list of people.”The expansion of the select committee’s investigation came after a hearing in July in which four police officers told in excruciating detail of the brutal violence, racism and hostility they suffered as a throng of angry rioters beat, crushed and shocked them on Jan. 6.After that hearing, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of two Republicans on the panel, pledged to move quickly to uncover any potential ties between the rioters and the Trump administration and campaign.Lawmakers must learn “what happened every minute of that day in the White House: every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack,” Ms. Cheney said then.Among the documents sought on Wednesday were “all calendars, schedules and movement logs regarding meetings or events attended by President Trump, including the identity of any individuals in attendance, whether virtual or in-person, on Jan. 6, 2021.”The committee asked for any documents and communications between the White House and some of Mr. Trump’s allies most involved in trying to undermine the election, including Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser; Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as his lawyer; and his longtime associate Roger J. Stone Jr.The committee is also seeking White House communications with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and confidant of Mr. Trump, and the lawyer Sidney Powell, both of whom pushed lies and conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud. And it demanded records of communications between the White House and Ali Alexander, who publicized the “Stop the Steal” rallies, as well as Tom Van Flein, the chief of staff to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who helped promote them and tried to invalidate electoral votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6.It also asked for records on extremist groups and militias that were present at the Capitol that day, including QAnon, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.The requests indicated the committee planned to investigate Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on state officials to overturn the results of the election. Among the information sought were records from Republican state officials including Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.A records demand is often the first step a congressional committee takes before issuing subpoenas to obtain documents.The investigative push came as Michael A. Bolton, the Capitol Police inspector general, is continuing his own internal investigation into security failures on Jan. 6.In his latest report, a summary of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bolton faulted the agency’s communications during the attack, when officers say their urgent pleas for help went unanswered.The report, based on interviews with 36 Capitol Police officers, criticized what the inspector general called “departmentwide command and control deficiencies related to information sharing, chain of command directions, communication, preparedness, training, leadership development, emergency response procedures and law enforcement coordination.”In response, the Capitol Police said in a statement that the agency had “acknowledged there were communication gaps on Jan. 6.”“Given the events of Jan. 6, the enormous amount of radio traffic that day was not surprising,” the statement said. “Additionally, the size and magnitude of Jan. 6 made it difficult to respond to each officer’s emergency radio broadcast in real time.”The department said it had enlisted a retired Secret Service agent to help oversee a new operational planning process. 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    The Trump Clown Car Has a Smashup in Arizona

    Monday was supposed to be a banner day for former President Donald Trump and the MAGAverse. After multiple delays, legal challenges and public controversies, the results of the third — and hopefully final — review of the presidential voting in Maricopa County, Ariz., was scheduled for delivery to its Republican sponsors in the State Senate. At long last, the proof of mass election fraud would be laid out for all to see! Mr. Trump would be vindicated! Maybe even reinstated!At least, that’s what MAGA die-hards hunkered down in their bunkers of disinformation were hoping. Most everyone else — including plenty of Arizona officials from both parties — just wanted this gong show to end.Alas, it was not to be. On Monday, the Republican president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, announced that the Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm overseeing the recount, had not yet completed a full draft report after all. It seems the firm’s chief executive and two other members of the “audit team” had come down with Covid-19. Also, the State Senate had only just received images of the ballot envelopes from Maricopa County, which still needed to be analyzed for inclusion in the final report.And so the spectacle grinds on.The clown-car chaos in Arizona is a near-perfect distillation of what Mr. Trump has done to the Republican Party, as well as much of the broader public. On what feels like a daily basis, he beats the drum about a stolen election, setting a tuneful lie that many Republican voters still dance to as the party mandarins look on, in either active support or silence. The political ramifications of this disinformation will be on display in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race next year, as well as those elsewhere, as independents and moderates assess if this is the party they want to reward.But there’s another cost that should worry all of us: the integrity of election audits, which are important and are necessary. While many secretaries of state are now pushing for new standards for such audits, the Arizona recount stands as an object lesson about the embarrassing damage to democracy that one party can inflict when led by a sore loser who still manages to scare people.For those who have blissfully forgotten the Arizona back story: Mr. Trump was mad about narrowly losing the state to Joe Biden. He was madder still when two recounts of vote-rich Maricopa County confirmed his loser status. Desperate to appease him and his devoted base, a gaggle of Republican state senators arranged for yet another review, this one run according to their preferences and overseen by private contractors of their choosing. The result has been a poisonous, partisan P.R. stunt so poorly executed that it makes the hunt for a new “Jeopardy!” host look smooth by comparison.From the jump, it was clear that Arizona’s Republican lawmakers weren’t interested in putting together a serious audit. Ms. Fann tapped the Cyber Ninjas to run the show, despite the firm’s total lack of auditing experience — and despite it not submitting a formal proposal. How did this happen? It may have helped that the firm’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had tweeted his support of some of the wackier election-fraud conspiracy theories. (Venezuela? Really?)The Republican lawmakers arranged for state taxpayers to foot part of the bill — an outrage in itself. But the Cyber Ninjas also gathered millions in private funding from Trump supporters. These include the former chief executive of Overstock.com, himself another spreader of election-fraud manure; a nonprofit group led by the former Trump administration official and QAnon flirt Michael Flynn; and a nonprofit founded by a host on the MAGA-tastic One America News Network.As for the ballot counting process, the word “squirrelly” doesn’t begin to cover it. Among other absurdities, the ballots were examined for secret watermarks and for bamboo fibers, a nod to the conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been shipped over from Asia. And forget careful screening of workers for political bias. Among those hired was the former state lawmaker Anthony Kern, a “stop the steal” crusader who was photographed on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot. (After a reporter posted a picture on Twitter of Mr. Kern at a counting table, the ex-lawmaker was removed over concerns about “optics.”)In an independent evaluation of the process, Barry Burden, the head of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, detailed the review’s many “maladies.” “They include processing errors caused by a lack of basic knowledge, partisan biases of the people conducting the audit, and inconsistencies of procedures that undermine the reliability of the review and any conclusions they may draw. In particular, the operation lacks the consistency, attention to detail and transparency that are requirements for credible and reliable election reviews.”Even some Republican officials have had enough. In May, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a Republican-dominated body, accused state lawmakers of having “rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate” to “grifters.”Last week, the Maricopa County recorder, a Republican, issued a long prebuttal to the Ninjas’ expected report, lamenting that the process had been an unnecessary disaster, that its results could not be trusted and that it was time for his party to “move forward.”If only.Some of the costs of the recount are easier to calculate than others. Because of concerns that the security of its voting machines had been compromised during the review, Maricopa County decertified the equipment. Last week, county officials demanded that the State Senate shell out $2.8 million for the purchase of new machines. Ms. Fann promptly pooh-poohed the request, but if the Senate doesn’t officially respond within 60 days, the county can sue.However the Arizona odyssey ends, officials who care about restoring faith in the electoral system should take steps to prevent such nonsense from spreading. The Republicans’ recount was never going to change the outcome of the 2020 race. But it did become a model for Trump dead-enders across the nation — a beacon of obduracy.At its summer conference this month, the National Association of Secretaries of State overwhelmingly recommended establishing concrete guidelines for postelection audits. Among other measures, they advised states to adopt timelines for audits, to ensure that area election officials remain central to the process and to rely only on state or federally accredited test labs. Outside contractors, they urged, should be used sparingly and operate under intensive oversight.Having observed the slow-rolling Arizona debacle, states would be well served to install guard rails sooner rather than later. If there’s one thing the Trump years taught the nation, it’s that you cannot simply rely on public officials to operate in good faith or abide by widely accepted norms.Serious, well-run audits play an important role in safeguarding the integrity of elections. What Arizona’s Republican senators arranged, by contrast, is what you’d get if you crossed a clown pageant with a QAnon convention and made the whole thing open bar. The whole mess would be entertaining if it weren’t so destructive.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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    Top Pennsylvania Republican Vows to Review 2020 Election Results

    The top Republican in the Pennsylvania State Senate promised this week to carry out a broad review of the 2020 election results, a move that comes as G.O.P. lawmakers continue to sow doubts about the contest’s legitimacy by pushing to re-examine votes in battleground states like Arizona.State Senator Jake Corman, who serves as president pro tempore of the G.O.P.-controlled chamber, made the comments in an interview with a right-wing radio host, and they were first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. His remarks were the strongest sign yet that Pennsylvania — which President Biden won by more than 80,000 votes — may press forward with a review of 2020 results, despite no evidence of voter fraud that would have affected the outcome.In the interview, Mr. Corman said that he wanted to begin “almost immediately” and that hearings would begin this week. He added that he expected to use the full power of the state’s General Assembly, including subpoenas, to conduct the review, which he referred to as a “forensic investigation.”“We can bring people in, we can put them under oath, we can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do and that’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Corman said. “And so we’re going to move forward.”Previously, State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and vocal proponent of former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about the election, had called for a review of results in three counties.Until recently the chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, he sent letters requesting ballots, records and machines from Philadelphia County, which encompasses the state’s largest city and which Mr. Biden won with over 80 percent of the vote; York County, south of Harrisburg, which Mr. Trump won handily; and Tioga County, in the northern part of the state, which Mr. Trump also carried with ease. All three counties refused to comply, and Mr. Mastriano’s legal authority to enforce the requests remains unclear.Last week, Mr. Corman removed Mr. Mastriano from his position as chair of the committee and installed State Senator Cris Dush, also a Republican, to lead the panel and oversee the review.In the interview, Mr. Corman expressed his own doubts about the election.“I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” he said. “I think that there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”Jason Thompson, a spokesman for Mr. Corman, said that they were “not setting a hard cap on how long the audit will take,” but that he could not comment further because “many of the details of the audit plan are still being worked out, and Senator Dush will need a little more time to settle on the final approach.” Veronica Degraffenreid, who as the acting secretary of the commonwealth oversees Pennsylvania’s elections, has discouraged counties from participating in any election reviews, noting that any inspection of voting machines by uncredentialed third parties would result in their decertification, and that counties would have to bear the considerable costs of replacing the equipment.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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    How Eric Coomer Became the 'Perfect Villain' for Voting Conspiracists

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.It was already late on Nov. 9 when Eric Coomer, then the director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, left his temporary office on Daley Plaza in Chicago and headed back to the hotel where he’d been staying for the previous few weeks. Both the plaza and the hotel had the eerie post-apocalyptic feel of urban life during the pandemic, compounding the sense of disorientation and apprehension he felt as he made his way up to his room.Earlier that evening, a colleague sent him a link to a video of Coomer speaking at a conference with a menacing comment below it. “Hi Eric! We know what you did,” the commenter wrote. That link eventually led Coomer to a second video, which he watched in his hotel room. What he saw, he quickly realized, was something that was likely to wreck his life, hurt his employer and possibly erode trust in the electoral process.Over the past decade, Coomer, 51, has helped make Dominion one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States. He was a gifted programmer, known to be serious about his work but informal about almost everything else — prone to profanities, with a sense of humor that could have blunt force. Coomer, who traveled around the world for competitive endurance bike races, would have blended in on the campus of Google, just one in a crowd of nonconformist tech types. In the more corporate business of elections, he stood out for the full-sleeve tattoos on his arms (one of Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Popes,” some Picasso bulls) and the half-inch holes in his ears where he once wore what are known as plugs.Coomer was accustomed to working long days during the postelection certification process, but the stress that November was building quickly. Donald Trump was demanding recounts. The president’s allies in the Stop the Steal movement had spent months stoking fears of election fraud. And then on Sunday, Nov. 8, Sidney Powell, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, appeared on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that Dominion had an algorithm that switched votes from Trump to Biden.The video Coomer watched in his hotel room represented a new development in Dominion’s troubles. It was that day’s episode of “The Conservative Daily Podcast,” a program previously unknown to Coomer, which had been posted to YouTube. “We’re going to expose someone inside of Dominion Voting Systems, specifically related to antifa, and related to someone that is so far left, and is controlling elections and his fingerprints are in every state,” said the show’s co-host, a man using the pseudonym Joe Otto. Otto — who would eventually reveal himself to be Joe Oltmann, a Colorado entrepreneur — claimed that he had found a smoking gun that proved fraud at Dominion: “We 100 percent know that the election was rigged.”About 11 minutes in, Coomer heard Oltmann say his name. “The conversation will be about a man named Eric Coomer,” Oltmann said, spelling it out: “C-O-O-M-E-R.” Next Coomer was staring at a photo of himself up on the screen in what Oltmann called “his little outfit,” a bike uniform Coomer wore in 2016 for a six-day endurance mountain-biking race. Coomer was looking at his own half-smirk, half-smile, the face of a middle-aged man with a sparse goatee, staring into the glare in sunglasses. What other photos did Oltmann have? What other artifacts of his life, of his family — and how hard was this man looking for all of it?Oltmann claimed that, earlier that year, he had infiltrated what he said was an antifa phone call and overheard someone — someone he claimed had been identified as Eric at Dominion — assure his supposed fellow antifa members that Trump would lose. “He responds — and I’m paraphrasing this, right? — ‘Don’t worry about the election, Trump is not going to win. I made effing sure of that,’” Oltmann said. He told his listeners that he thought little of who this Eric at Dominion might be until after the election, when a friend sent him a Facebook post about election troubles that mentioned Eric Coomer’s name. Suddenly, Oltmann said, his interest was reawakened. He started looking into Coomer, he said, and “the more information I got, the scarier it got.”Coomer had given conspiracy theorists a valuable resource, a grain of sand they could transform into something that had the feel — the false promise — of proof.Oltmann said that in his research he found that Coomer had written “vile” anti-Trump Facebook posts. Oltmann proceeded to read from one of those posts, from July 2016, which characterized Donald Trump as “autocratic,” “narcissistic” and a “fascist,” among other, more vulgar insults. “I don’t give a damn if you’re friend, family or random acquaintance,” Oltmann read. Anyone who decided to “pull the lever, mark an oval, touch the screen for that carnival barker … UNFRIEND ME NOW.” Oltmann displayed a screenshot of the post, which said that the author’s opinions “are not necessarily the thoughts of my employer, though if not, I should probably find another job. Who wants to work for complete morons?” Oltmann’s co-host, Max McGuire, also read from an anonymous open letter that explained that, while there was no formal organization known as “antifa,” the ideas the public associates with it are worth supporting. “There’s no such thing as being antifascist; either you are a decent human being with a conscience, or you are a fascist,” McGuire read. The letter, Oltmann said, had appeared on Coomer’s Facebook.Coomer watched the video in shock. He is adamant that he never participated in any antifa phone call, and he felt disgusted by the accusation that he had done anything to change the results of the election. The Trump campaign and its allies have introduced more than 60 lawsuits claiming election fraud in this country, but no court has found persuasive evidence to support the idea that Coomer, Dominion or anyone else involved in vote-counting changed the election results. Bipartisan audits of paper ballots in closely contested states such as Georgia and Arizona confirmed Biden’s victory; and prominent Republicans, including Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s official in charge of election cybersecurity, have reaffirmed the basic facts of the election: Over all, the results were accurate, the election process was secure and no widespread fraud capable of changing the outcome has been uncovered.Oltmann is now the subject of a defamation suit brought by Coomer. It currently names, as co-defendants, 14 parties responsible for the dissemination of Oltmann’s claims about that alleged antifa phone call, including Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and the Trump campaign. (Dominion has filed separate defamation suits against Giuliani, Powell, Fox News and others. Lawyers for Giuliani, Powell and for the Trump campaign declined to comment. Fox called the Dominion litigation “baseless” and defended its right to tell “both sides” of the story.) Oltmann’s best defense would be to provide corroboration of his claims about that phone call — he has said there were as many as 19 people on the line — but he has so far declined to do so.As Coomer watched the video, though, he felt a second strong emotion: a powerful sense of regret — because the Facebook posts were, in fact, authentic. Why, he thought, hadn’t he just deleted them? Coomer could imagine how his words would sound to just about any Republican, let alone someone already hearing on Fox News that Dominion was switching votes for Biden. He told me that he believed every word of what he said on Facebook, but when colleagues later asked him what he was thinking, he was frank: He had screwed up. At a time when well-​funded efforts to sow mistrust in the election were already underway, Coomer had given conspiracy theorists a valuable resource, a grain of sand they could transform into something that had the feel — the false promise — of proof.Elections in the United States are impossibly convoluted. Every county — and, in some states, every municipality — runs its own election, creating a patchwork system in which voters in one place may have a remarkably different voting process from their neighbors just a few miles away. That variation can breed mistrust: If voters in one county believe their election process is being administered correctly, different methods in other counties might strike them as suspect.Local governments also rely on private companies like Dominion and its competitors ES&S and Hart InterCivic, which together control 90 percent of the voting-machine market, to provide machines, software and technical support. For Americans who are suspicious about an election result — or are looking to create suspicions — these relatively obscure, private companies present an obvious target. In 2004, after George W. Bush narrowly won the presidency, Democrats focused on possible irregularities in Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes would have given the presidency to John Kerry. The voting machines used in Ohio that year came from Diebold, whose chief executive, Walden O’Dell, was a longtime Republican donor. A year before the election, O’Dell wrote a letter to about 100 people inviting them to a fund-raiser: “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,” he wrote. The language reinforced mistrust of Diebold machines among some Democrats. O’Dell later said the letter was a “huge mistake,” and Diebold ultimately sold its voting-machine business.Dominion was founded in the wake of a different controversy: the failure of punch-card voting machines — and their infamous hanging chads — in the 2000 election. After Congress funded a bill to replace those machines, many counties purchased direct-recording electronic (D.R.E.) voting machines, which eliminated paper ballots altogether. The limits of that approach became apparent in 2006, when, in Sarasota, Fla., a Congressional race that used D.R.E. machines made by ES&S produced a result that struck partisans and neutral observers as unlikely. ES&S stood by the results, but in the absence of a paper ballot, doubts and uncertainty lingered.Dominion was well-positioned at that moment. John Poulos, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders, started the business in 2003, serving a small circle of clients who favored a paper ballot. Additionally, Dominion developed a tabulator that kept a digital image of the paper ballots so they could be easily audited. (They also sold machines that met the needs of visually impaired voters, with audio interfaces and headphones that allowed for independence and anonymity.)Dominion grew fast, acquiring the assets of a competitor, Sequoia Voting Systems, in 2010. Among Sequoia’s staff was Eric Coomer, who became Dominion’s vice president of engineering for the United States. Coomer worked with Poulos for more than a decade at Dominion. (The investment firm Staple Street Capital owns a majority share in the company.) Coomer’s role shifted over time from overseeing the company’s engineers to a more strategic role, working directly with election officials in various states and discussing Dominion’s services on technical panels.For the 2020 election, activists and experts pushed for paper ballots nationwide, to offer a straightforward, easily audited record. Coomer, expressing a common assurance among election specialists, has pointed out that because every Dominion system “creates a durable, voter-verifiable, paper record of the cast votes, which is the official record,” voters had concrete evidence of how the vote went in the face of any allegations of electronic vote-switching or other fraud.At the same time, voting-machine businesses knew that paper ballots can create some confusion among voters — such as the worry that ink from Sharpies and other markers could bleed through the page and invalidate their vote. In fact, ballot layouts can avoid misreads from bleed-throughs, and Sharpies have the advantage drying quickly, so ink doesn’t smudge on the scanner.Concerns about Sharpies, however, ending up feeding into coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election. In Maricopa County, Ariz., the most populous county in a key swing state, Dominion ballots with a Sharpie-friendly layout were used, and poll workers handed the markers out. Some voters weren’t prepared to use Sharpies after years of being told to avoid them. The confusion reached social media, where, in the hands of partisan messaging networks, the charge quickly became: Republicans were being given Sharpies in Maricopa County in an effort to invalidate their votes.Dominion was still trying to help election officials address so-called Sharpiegate when Poulos got a call, on Nov. 4, with more bad news: in Antrim County, Michigan, ballots were updated shortly before Election Day but the system used to tabulate them was not. A series of fail-safe procedures meant to address such an error had been overlooked. As a result, preliminary returns showed Joe Biden leading in the heavily Republican county before they were corrected. To the frustration of key players in the election community, neither local officials nor Dominion immediately released a statement explaining what went wrong; the silence created an opportunity for those charging fraud to fill the vacuum with unfounded allegations.Security experts distinguish between disinformation — straightforward lies — and malinformation, information that starts with a detail that is true but is then used or taken out of context to support a false story line. “It’s harder to fight malinformation, because of the fundamental truth being used to spread the lies,” says Matthew Masterson, who was a senior adviser for election security at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Trump Administration. Antrim County, he worried at the time, could be used as a prime source of malinformation.It was not until Nov. 6 that Michigan election officials began explaining what happened. By then, rumors — including the false suggestion that Nancy Pelosi’s husband owned Dominion — had spread. Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, held a news conference asserting that “the fight is not over,” and that Antrim County made her worry that there could be similar irregularities elsewhere. The Michigan State Legislature issued a subpoena to state election officials asking for more information.That same week, reports emerged of an Election Day glitch in Spalding County, Ga. There, Dominion machines were unable to call up voters’ ballots because of a problem with an outside vendor’s database and because procedures that would have caught the error or provided other ways of calling up the ballots were not followed. The local elections supervisor, however, told Politico that a Dominion representative had explained that the problem was the fault of an update the company made the night before the election.Poulos was baffled: The technology did not allow for that kind of remote update, as the machines are not connected to the internet. “It would be like me saying I came into your house and updated your kitchen table without your knowing it,” Poulos said. None of his employees’ phone records reflected any such call, and Georgia election authorities reported that a log file that would have reflected an update the previous day showed none. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, eventually called for the ouster of the official. (She is no longer in that position.) But the incident was another story that would stick to Dominion. “Georgia Counties Using Same Software as Michigan Counties Also Encounter ‘Glitch,” ran the headline on Breitbart News on Nov. 7.After Sidney Powell’s Nov. 8 appearance on Fox News, Dominion became a fixture in election-conspiracy theories. Originally, right-wing chatter was linking Dominion to election fraud even in cities like Pittsburgh, which the company did not serve. Over time, the focus shifted to three important swing states — Georgia, Arizona and Michigan — that used Dominion machines.Sidney Powell, right, and Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressBefore he left for work on Nov. 10, Coomer checked the settings on his Facebook account. Had he been careless? As he thought, his privacy settings ensured that his posts were only visible to his 300 or so Facebook friends. Coomer started deleting old posts, but he realized how foolishly he had put his faith in a notion of digital privacy. Any one of Coomer’s “friends”— and he had several whom he knew to be Trump supporters — could have taken screenshots of his posts and sent the information along to someone who could use it.At work, Coomer felt an increasing sense of dread, but Poulos, the chief executive, seemed confident that the Oltmann story would blow over. From Poulos’s perspective, the Conservative Daily Podcast was hardly a top concern when Fox News was allowing Sidney Powell to air claims that Dominion switched votes.Coomer’s younger brother, who requested that his name not be used out of fear for his safety, set up a dashboard to track online references to Eric Coomer. “I deleted it within two days,” he said — the material was too disturbing and overwhelming. He recalled some of what he saw: “People were essentially taking bets on how my brother’s corpse would be found and which nefarious shadow group would be behind his death. He would be executed by the state or he would be found with a falsified suicide note and two gunshots in the back of his head.” He and Eric’s older brother, Bill, deleted their social media profiles and alerted friends and associates not to answer questions about them; they directed their parents to do the same. The younger brother packed a go bag in case he had to flee his home.Before long, hundreds of Dominion employees had their private information — address, phone numbers, names of loved ones — published on social media, and threats started pouring in to their Dominion email. Angry email messages kept arriving for Coomer as well, and hostile posts continued to appear on social media: “He’s goin’ to GITMO. No one escapes this. Pain is comin’!”Over the next few days, as Coomer tried to focus on wrapping up the election certification in Chicago, he thought about his complicated past and wondered what else might surface. He grew up the rebellious child of a high-ranking military officer, a Vietnam veteran who fought during the Tet offensive and was awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars. Coomer, brainy and restless, received an R.O.T.C. scholarship but it was rescinded because of his asthma. As a teenager and into his 20s, he considered himself a skinhead, but he was aligned with a faction who were opposed to racism. “To me, being skin is being proud that you have a shaved — at least short — hair,” he wrote in 1991.Coomer earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Berkeley in 1997 but grew disenchanted with academia. He started to fill more of his time with rock climbing and moved to Colorado. He summited Yosemite’s El Capitan several times and became well known enough among elite climbers that he landed a job at Planetoutdoors.com, which employed top athletes to answer customer questions. While he was there, he started writing code for the company. He continued climbing, until problems in his personal life slowed him down.In 2004, at age 34, he wrote on a climbing message board about his struggles with heroin and cocaine and how much they had damaged his life. By then, he was on the verge of bankruptcy, had lost his marriage and had ended up in prison after being charged with several counts of driving under the influence. “Another bout of dry heaves racked my body as I lay on the cold cement floor of the jail cell,” he wrote. “Jail is no picnic under the best of circumstances — being in jail while withdrawing from heroin is absolutely the worst I can imagine.”In 2005 he managed to stop using heroin for good. “I stayed with a friend for a week and told him to take my shoes and my wallet,” Coomer told me. Three months later, while he was still in withdrawal, he received a cold call from someone asking if he would consider doing programming work for Sequoia, the voting-machine company whose assets Dominion purchased five years later.Soon, he was channeling the same obsessive focus he had for climbing into the voting-machine business, its obscure state laws and county regulations, its competing and complicated demands for privacy, security, access and verifiability. “I fell in love with the election business,” Coomer said. “There’s no money in it, and you only ever hear from people complaining about what went wrong. But it felt meaningful.”Eric Coomer from Dominion Voting Systems demonstrating his company’s touch-screen tablet, which produces a paper ballot, in Grovetown, Ga. Bob Andres/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressIn 2016, Coomer was on Facebook when he came across a few posts from a relative referring to Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya. Coomer was appalled that one of his own family members was spreading disinformation, but instead of confronting his cousin directly, he poured all his disgust and disappointment into a 200-word anti-Trump screed that he posted on Facebook. “It was not intended for the general public,” Coomer said. “It was a lashing out.” Years later, after the death of George Floyd, Coomer posted links to a punk band singing “Pigs for Slaughter” and a hip-hop song called “Cop Shot.” (On his podcast, Oltmann highlighted Coomer’s linking to both songs.)About a year before the 2020 election, Coomer was part of several conversations among Dominion employees about how to balance their right to express themselves with the sensitivities specific to their industry. Dominion also searched through its employees’ social media accounts, checking for comments or tweets that might reflect poorly on the company. No one ever raised any concerns with Coomer about his posts, because his posts were available only to his Facebook friends.On Friday, Nov. 13, the right-wing news outlet the Gateway Pundit, picking up on Oltmann’s podcast, ran a story that mentioned Coomer by name in the headline, included links to videos in which Coomer was talking about election security, and ran a full reprint of the open letter about antifa that he had reposted on Facebook. While most of that letter was uncontroversial — “Antifa supports and defends the right of all people to live free from oppressive abuse of power” — one line concluded that while nonviolent protest was preferable, “we cannot and will not take responsibility for telling people how they are allowed to be righteously outraged.” The letter also called for President Trump and Vice President Pence to resign, although “Nancy Pelosi isn’t a great deal of improvement.” (Coomer says he considered the letter satirical.) As soon as the Gateway Pundit article ran, Coomer knew he no longer could hope, realistically, that his name would recede from the news.Later that evening, Poulos asked Coomer to join a call with Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state. Sterling met Coomer in 2019, when Dominion won a contract to help Georgia upgrade its voting machines. Someone had forwarded Sterling an article — possibly the one in the Gateway Pundit, he says — that featured the Facebook posts as well as Oltmann’s claim about Coomer rigging the election. “My gut told me it was crap to begin with, but I had to ask the question,” Sterling says.Yes, Coomer told both men, I did write or repost those things; no, it has never affected my work. No, I never was on an antifa phone call. No, I never said that I would interfere in the election in any way. Sterling — who considered Coomer “one of the best” in the business — told Coomer that those postings, especially the one about antifa, were “a dumb-ass thing to do.” Coomer sounded deflated to Sterling. Coomer says it was “excruciating” to realize that Sterling’s reputation might suffer.When they hung up the phone, Poulos made it clear that he found the situation deeply problematic. Coomer began to fear he might lose his job but became defiant. “I was like — ‘I don’t know, First Amendment?’” Coomer told me. Dominion, he reminded Poulos, had done nothing wrong; he had done nothing wrong. “My attitude was: This is bullshit. I’ve never done anything but try to make the whole process more transparent and auditable and free and fair.”Election officials who knew Coomer were surprised that he would express his political views so bluntly. “It’s not what we do in this industry,” says Masterson, the election-security adviser in the Trump administration. “Generally, this community is very tough on people who don’t toe that line.” Masterson considered the misstep an anomaly for Coomer, someone he had known for about a decade. “He was serious about his job,” Masterson said. “I never encountered him as being anything other than professional and making the system as good as he could.”The posts also pained Jennifer Morrell, a founder of the Elections Group, a company that helps counties and states comply with voting regulations. “It didn’t look good,” she said. “And that’s the frustrating part. I know this individual to be a really decent person who cares a lot about democracy and getting things right and transparency — and you read something like that, and it is a really hard thing to get past, for critics.” Morrell, who came to know Coomer through a Colorado working group intended to improve the state’s audit system, described him as “irreverent” but clearly ethical; the posts, she said, did not reflect the person she knew.Coomer was hardly the first person to seek the rush of righteous self-expression on social media, only to discover the long-lasting costs later. He spent a lot of time wondering how Oltmann got his hands on those posts. Had a political operative been doing opposition research on various election officials, keeping it at the ready, depending on the election results? Coomer, a self-described motorhead with an interest in vintage cars, started to think the source might have been a Facebook friend he made at Bandimere Speedway, a racetrack he sometimes visited. The racetrack had hosted a meeting organized by a local businessman who was starting to make a name for himself in Colorado politics, Joe Oltmann. Joe Oltmann of “The Conservative Daily Podcast.” Oltmann displayed screenshots of Coomer’s Facebook posts on his show.Conservative Daily Podcast, via YouTubeIf Eric Coomer’s life changed on Nov. 9, so did Joe Oltmann’s. On his follow-up podcast the next day, Oltmann told his audience that he had good news. “I have been in touch with someone who has put us in touch with the Trump attorneys,” he said.That week, Oltmann spoke to Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign lawyer who frequently appeared with Giuliani to promote lawsuits to challenge the election results. She told him that he should prepare a notarized affidavit of his allegations, which he did with help from the lawyer and conservative radio host Randy Corporon. That Saturday, Corporon invited Oltmann on his radio show, and Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, called in to talk about the election. She thanked Oltmann for his work.Before the election upended his life, Oltmann was the chief executive of PIN Business Network, a digital-marketing company that he founded, which had about 60 employees. The co-owner of a gun shop, he was politically conservative and community-minded — a member of the United Way Tocqueville Society and a board member for a nonprofit group that assists refugees. (Oltmann asked that I not name the organization, though it confirmed his association. He also rejects the label “conservative” despite the name of his podcast.) The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic marked his move into a more public role: In the spring of 2020, he helped start the Reopen Colorado movement, which organized anti-lockdown protests. People were struggling as others were “throwing the Constitution in the trash,” he told me. He began giving impassioned interviews about the public-health measures imposed by the state’s governor, Jared Polis.By that October, following the 2020 summer of protests, he had founded a nonprofit group, FEC United, intended, its website says, “to defend the foundation of our American Way of Life through the pillars of Faith, Education and Commerce.” FEC formed a partnership with a group known as the United American Defense Force, which, the site explains, offers “protection and support when first responders are unwilling or unable to fulfill their civic duties.” Oltmann characterizes it as a humanitarian group, though he added in an email, “We are all armed.” At one early FEC event, a so-called Patriot Muster, a Trump supporter assaulted and pepper-sprayed a security guard, who shot and killed him. (The guard was charged with second-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty.)The Coomer story took Oltmann from the small world of right-wing politics in Colorado into broader Republican circles. The same week that he spoke to Jenna Ellis, Oltmann gave an interview about Coomer to Michelle Malkin, a former Fox contributor in Colorado who had joined the even-further-right network, Newsmax.Around this time, Oltmann began developing his theory of how a voting system could allow for fraud, which he later explained at length in a film called “The Deep Rig”: Someone could manipulate the system in various ways to allow for the possibility of adding fake or phantom ballots, which could be entered into the tabulation system. Real ballots would be replaced with the fake ones without a history of that happening. “It’s clear from the video that Joe Oltmann does not understand how elections are conducted or how the technology works,” says Morrell, who said some of what Oltmann proposed would require a widespread effort of workers from both parties colluding to bypass some key systems.Thanks to Oltmann and others, the conviction that Dominion had helped rig the election for Joe Biden seemed to solidify among some of Trump’s most loyal supporters. On Thursday, Nov. 12, One America News Network, also known as OAN, ran a story about Dominion. Shortly after that, Trump retweeted: “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE,” the first of many times Trump went to Twitter to attack Dominion. Five days later, an OAN correspondent, Chanel Rion, tweeted out Oltmann’s claims about what Coomer supposedly said on that antifa phone call. Then, just eight days after Oltmann first mentioned Coomer on his podcast, Eric Trump broadcast it to its widest audience yet. “Trump’s not gonna win. I made f**ing sure of that!” Eric Trump tweeted, above a photo of Coomer and a link to another Gateway Pundit article that called Coomer, in its headline, “an unhinged sociopath.” (Lawyers for Malkin, Rion, OAN and the Trump campaign, each a defendant in the Coomer lawsuit, did not respond to requests for comment. Lawyers for the Gateway Pundit, another Coomer defendant, declined to comment.)Rion later invited Oltmann on her show to discuss his claims, and the segment became one of OAN’s highest rated clips, amassing 1.5 million views on YouTube. By then, Eric Coomer’s name started trending on Twitter, along with #ArrestEricCoomer.On Nov. 19, Poulos, sitting in his office at his home in Toronto, turned on a small television to watch a news conference happening at the Republican National Committee headquarters, which Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were hosting. He knew that Giuliani and Powell had each separately accused Dominion of wrongdoing on Fox News and on right-wing news sites; but he dreaded hearing his company’s name at an event that seemed to have the full legitimacy of the R.N.C. behind it.After half an hour of watching the event at the R.N.C., what Poulos had feared came to pass: Giuliani referenced hacking “being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud,” then turned the microphone over to Sidney Powell. Powell listed a series of implausible claims about Dominion in deadpan, lawyerly tones, pushing up a sleeve of her leopard-print cardigan as if to show she had real work to do. She spoke of “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China” on Dominion’s operations.Poulos says that while he watched, he was in such a state of disbelief that he had to remind himself that what he was seeing was real and not part of a nightmare. “Oh, my God!” he screamed. “I can’t believe what’s going on!” He yelled so loudly that his wife and two teenage children came running into his home office. They found him there, beside himself, crying. His children had never seen him remotely emotional about his work; now they stared, shocked and mute. Poulos felt anger toward Giuliani and Powell for using their power to spread false information. He also felt some sympathy for those voters, disappointed by their candidate’s loss, who would inevitably be eager to believe what they were hearing from people so close to the president. The way many people felt watching the insurrection on Jan. 6, Poulos told me, was how he felt during that news conference. “It was an assault on democracy,” he says.Powell mentioned Coomer by name, embellishing Oltmann’s story by claiming that there was an actual recording of Coomer on the antifa call. Giuliani brought Coomer up as well. “By the way, the Coomer character, who is close to antifa, took off all of his social media. Aha! But we kept it. We’ve got it. The man is a vicious, vicious man,” Giuliani said. The room where he was speaking was, from all reports, hot and airless; Giuliani was sweating. Brown liquid started snaking down both sides of his face. “He wrote horrible things about the president,” Giuliani continued. “He is completely warped. And he specifically says that they’re going to fix this election. I don’t know what you need to wake you up to do your job!”When Coomer watched the news conference, he started sweating and shaking; he thought he might vomit. Already, earlier that week, he had met with security officials that Dominion hired, who told him it was not safe for him to go home. The day before the news conference, he had gone back to Colorado, where he had arranged to stay at a friend’s cabin in the mountains.‘People were essentially taking bets on how my brother’s corpse would be found and which nefarious shadow group would be behind his death.’Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More