Presidential Election of 2020

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      The Fear That Is Shaping American Politics

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      It affects everyone from Joe Manchin to Joe Biden.Why is the Republican Party so determined to constrain the franchise?One answer is provided by the changing demographics of the children in the nation’s public schools, a leading indicator of shifts in the racial and ethnic makeup of the country.According to the National Center for Education Statistics,The percentage of public school students who were white was 64.8 percent in 1995, and this percentage dropped below 50 percent in 2014 (to 49.5 percent). N.C.E.S. projects that in 2029, White students will make up 43.8 percent of public school enrollment.The changing racial and ethnic makeup of the schools, something visible to parents and to anyone who walks by at recess, is a leading indicator of the day (in roughly 2045) when non-Hispanic whites of all ages will drop under 50 percent of the U.S. population, soon to be followed by the day when whites become a minority of the electorate (although that will depend on how voters self-identify — among other things, data suggests that many mixed race Americans identify as white).Hispanics and Asian-Americans are driving the ascendance of America’s minority population, while the Black share of the population will increase by a small amount. Pew Research estimates that over the 50 year period from 2015 to 2065, the non-Hispanic white share of the population — as defined by the U.S. census — will drop from 62 to 46 percent, while the Hispanic share will grow from 18 to 24 percent and the Asian-American share from 6 to 14 percent. The Black share will go from 12 to 13 percent.Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, and other experts have argued that predictions of a white minority in a little over 20 years have created a false narrative because it fails to account for the numerous second- and third-generation children of interethnic and interracial marriages, many of whom see themselves (and are seen by others) as white.False or not, the white minority prediction has become a dominant political narrative — particularly insofar as Republicans exploit this characterization — and in the process this framing has become a central element in the worldview of many conservative whites.How does the expectation of a majority-minority America affect the thinking of white Americans?Maureen Craig at N.Y.U. and Jennifer Richeson, at Yale, reported in their 2018 paper “Majority No More? The Influence of Neighborhood Racial Diversity and Salient National Population Changes on Whites’ Perceptions of Racial Discrimination” thatWhite Americans considering a future in which the white population has declined to less than 50 percent of the national population are more likely to perceive that the societal status of their racial group — in terms of resources or as the “prototypical” American — is under threat, which in turn leads to stronger identification as white, the expression of more negative racial attitudes and emotions, greater opposition to diversity, and greater endorsement of conservative political ideology, political parties, and candidates.Biden, more than either of his three Democratic predecessors — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — is putting this white reaction to the test.Not only is Biden actively supporting voting rights reform designed to protect and strengthen Black and Hispanic political participation, but he has taken assertive stands on racial issues, both in terms of appointments and in supporting racially targeted provisions in his stimulus and infrastructure legislation.The question for Biden is whether a Democrat can firm up the party’s multiracial coalition with a double-edged strategy. First, winning over enough working class whites by disbursing substantial benefits in his stimulus and infrastructure legislation; and, second, by targeting generous programs to racial and ethnic minorities to reduce disparities in income and education.The underlying question is whether more white voters will turn against Biden in the 2022 midterm elections as they turned against Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010.A large number of white people already believe that they suffer higher levels of discrimination than Black people and other minorities do.Craig and Richeson write:Organizational messages that are favorable to racial diversity have also been found to enhance the sense among whites of personal and group discrimination against them compared with race-neutral messages.In addition, many Republican and conservative-leaning whites are convinced that as minorities become more powerful, the left coalition will become increasingly antagonistic to them. Craig and Richeson write:This research suggests, in other words, that whites are likely to perceive more antiwhite discrimination under circumstances in which they perceive that their group’s position in society is under threat.Nour Sami Kteily, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, emailed to say that he and Richeson have been conducting a study that asks whites how much they agree (7) or disagree (1) with statements like:If Black Americans got to the top of the social hierarchy, they would want to stay on top and keep other groups down.andIf Black Americans got to the top of the social hierarchy, they would put all of their effort toward creating a more egalitarian social system for all groups.On average, whites fell at the midpoint but, Kteily wrote, there waslarge variation associated with being Republican vs. Democrat, with Republicans being more likely to believe that Black Americans would use power to dominate. The difference is highly statistically significant.In a December 2019 article, “Demographic change, political backlash, and challenges in the study of geography,” Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, wrote:The relationship between diversity and reactionary politics should be considered one of the most important sociopolitical issues facing the world today — it is a near certainty that almost every developed country and many developing countries will be more diverse a generation from now than they are today.Thus, Enos continued,if increasing diversity affects political outcomes, the relationship can point in two consequentially different directions: toward increased diversity liberalizing politics or toward increased diversity causing a reactionary backlash.The 2020 election of Biden combined with Democratic control of the House and Senate have contained, at least momentarily, the reactionary backlash, but a liberalized politics has not yet been secured. What are the prospects for Democrats seeking to maintain, if not strengthen, their fragile hold on power? More

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      Lynne Patton Fined and Barred From Government Over RNC Video

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      Lynne Patton recruited and interviewed public housing tenants in New York City for a pro-Trump re-election video. The residents accused her of tricking them into participating.The video aired on the final night of the Republican National Convention in August, a two-minute clip featuring four New York City public housing tenants praising President Donald J. Trump’s record and bashing the city’s mayor.But within hours of the broadcast, three of the tenants said they were tricked into appearing in the video, did not support Mr. Trump and accused a top federal housing official, Lynne Patton, of orchestrating the production and misleading them about its intentions.While Ms. Patton had claimed the White House signed off on her involvement, a federal agency on Tuesday found that Ms. Patton had violated a federal law known as the Hatch Act that bars most federal employees from using their government position to engage in political activities.Ms. Patton admitted to the violation, the agency said, and agreed in a settlement to pay a $1,000 fine and not to serve in the federal government for at least four years. She left her job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the end of Mr. Trump’s term in January.“By using information and NYCHA connections available to her solely by virtue of her HUD position, Patton improperly harnessed the authority of her federal position to assist the Trump campaign,” the Office of Special Counsel, the agency that enforces the Hatch Act, said in a statement. NYCHA, or the New York City Housing Authority, oversees the public housing system.In her three years as the top regional administrator over federal housing in New York and New Jersey, Ms. Patton said she helped improve New York’s troubled public housing system. But Ms. Patton had also carved out a role as a Trump cheerleader who often mixed politics and governance.She was among a number of midlevel political appointees in the Trump administration who had little if any experience in their fields and who used their positions to promote the president and his views, often amplifying falsehoods and other misinformation. On Tuesday, Ms. Patton, who was a personal assistant to the Trump family before working for the federal government, said in an email that she did not regret having created the video.“Unfortunately, after consulting multiple Hatch Act lawyers post-employment, receiving incorrect and/or incomplete legal advice, even in good faith, from your own agency does not an affirmative defense make,” Ms. Patton wrote.In the email, Ms. Patton falsely claimed that the tenants had recanted their allegations against her and had acknowledged that they knew how the video would be used. She interviewed them over four hours in a New York City Housing Authority building last summer with a video crew.Claudia Perez, one of the four tenants who appeared in the video, on Tuesday reiterated her assertion that Ms. Patton had deceived the group into believing the interview would be used to highlight chronic problems at the housing authority. Ms. Perez, who said she voted for President Biden in the November election, said she would not have participated in a pro-Trump video.“She just wants attention, and I’m not going to give it to her,” Ms. Perez said in response to Ms. Patton’s remarks on Tuesday, adding that she deserved more severe punishment. “I don’t think it was stern enough.”After the video was broadcast, several federal watchdog groups, including the Campaign for Accountability, filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel urging an investigation into Ms. Patton’s role in the production of the clip.In a statement, Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, described Ms. Patton as a repeat offender of the Hatch Act. Ms. Kuppersmith said she was pleased that the special counsel had followed up on the complaint.“Laws like the Hatch Act exist for a reason and we hope this sends a message to other officials that violating the law has consequences,” she said.The video was not the first time that Ms. Patton was found to have run afoul of the Hatch Act. In 2019, the Office of Special Counsel determined that she violated the law when she displayed a Trump campaign hat in her New York office and for “liking” political tweets.While Ms. Patton worked for the federal government she also pursued a role in a proposed reality TV show featuring two other prominent Trump supporters, Candace Owens and Katrina Pierson. Ms. Patton claimed that a production company had wanted her to appear on a reality show for several years.To avoid a possible Hatch Act violation, she offered to temporarily resign or take an unpaid absence from HUD so she could film the series, according to records obtained by the American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group. The show, which she told HUD could include scenes from Trump campaign events, never materialized.At the time of the convention video, Ms. Patton was the HUD administrator for the New York region and had some oversight of the city’s public housing agency. She entered the orbit of the Trump family around 2009 after meeting Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Mr. Trump, who connected her with Eric Trump, one of the former president’s sons. Ms. Patton first joined HUD as an assistant under Ben Carson, then the department secretary, and then relocated to its regional office in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Patton said she had produced tangible results, including spurring the city’s housing authority, long plagued by mismanagement and substandard conditions, to hire companies to help clean its 326 developments.In the final months of the 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Patton echoed some of Mr. Trump’s most outlandish falsehoods about the election and his opponent, Mr. Biden.In a Facebook post last July, Ms. Patton suggested that she had no interest in helping tackle the homelessness crisis in New York because its leaders opposed Mr. Trump. “EVERY Democratic run city deserves EVERYTHING coming to it,” she wrote. More

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      American Flags Are Not Useful Political Clues, And Other Lessons From Google Street View

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      We recently showed Times readers images culled from Google Street View of 10,000 neighborhoods around the United States. Could readers guess, we wondered, how residents in a given place voted in the 2020 presidential election just by eyeballing a typical street scene? Our neighborhoods were representative of where American voters live, meaning they included about […] More

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      How Georgia's New Law Risks Making Election Subversion Easier

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      A reminder from a January phone call that the reform bill by congressional Democrats may not have the proper protections.What would have happened if the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had responded, “OK, I’ll try,” in a January phone call after President Trump asked him to “find” 11,000 votes?No one can be sure. What is clear is that the question has been overlooked in recent months. Public attention has mostly moved on from Mr. Trump’s bid to overturn the election; activists and politicians are focused more on whether to restrict or expand voting access, particularly by mail.But trying to reverse an election result without credible evidence of widespread fraud is an act of a different magnitude than narrowing access. A successful effort to subvert an election would pose grave and fundamental risks to democracy, risking political violence and secessionism.Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote.Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain. And it’s a risk that H.R. 1, the reform bill congressional Democrats are pushing, does relatively little to address.The new Georgia law does not inherently make it easier to “find” 11,000 votes. Almost all of the powers that the Legislature might use already existed — they were just vested in other people or bodies. They could have been abused before and could be in the future, regardless of the new law.And the law has eligibility requirements for a chair that exclude many of the sort of people who would seem likeliest to abuse their authority, including anyone who has been a political candidate, campaign contributor or party organizer in the two years before the appointment. This is not guaranteed to preclude a rabid partisan leading the board, but no such checks had existed on the secretary of state. (Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, previously served in the Georgia House of Representatives.)The law takes power from the very person, Mr. Raffensperger, who a mere three months ago rebuffed Mr. Trump’s plea to find 11,000 votes. State legislators demoted Mr. Raffensperger for a reason: Many were probably sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s allegations. And if the Legislature had a problem with how Mr. Raffensperger handled the 2020 election, it is reasonable to wonder whether it might have supported board members aggressively backing the claims advanced by Mr. Trump.Can state boards, county boards or anyone else use their administrative powers to flip electoral outcomes? After the November election, a majority of Republican members of Congress and state attorneys general signed on to efforts that would have invalidated millions of votes and brought about a constitutional crisis. With that backdrop, it seems naïve to assume that no one would try to abuse such power, whether in Georgia or elsewhere.It’s worth going back to Mr. Trump’s infamous call. While the oft-quoted line about “finding” votes makes it sound as if he wanted Mr. Raffensperger to manufacture votes out of thin air, Mr. Trump said he had already found the votes, in the form of thousands of ballots he said were cast illegally:“We have all the votes we need. You know, we won the state. If you took, these are the most minimal numbers, the numbers that I gave you, those are numbers that are certified, your absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses, your out-of-state voters, 4,925. You know when you add them up, it’s many more times, it’s many times the 11,779 number.”In addition to the 4,925 out-of-state voters mentioned, Mr. Trump baselessly asserted in the call that there were hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots with forged signatures. He alleged, based on imperfect matches between lists of voters, that there were 4,502 voters who voted but weren’t registered; 18,325 voters with vacant addresses; 904 voters who voted only with a P.O. box address; and nearly 5,000 votes by dead people. And with virtually no evidence whosever, he alleged great malfeasance in Atlanta’s Fulton County, including 18,000 votes having to do with someone who did something nefarious and “3,000 pounds” of shredded ballots.County and state election officials hold a variety of powers relevant to such claims. They evaluate whether to accept or reject ballots, and they certify results. In Georgia, they hear eligibility challenges. It would have been hard to employ these powers to aid Mr. Trump, let alone to survive a subsequent court challenge. But there are levers that they could have at least tried to pull, even if it’s not clear what would have come of it.One option is that the state board could have usurped the power of Fulton County, based on the president’s allegations in the general election and other allegations from the primary (the law requires evidence of failed administration in at least two elections over the prior two years). The state board could have either used the president’s allegations as a basis to refuse to certify the result or to disqualify otherwise eligible voters.It would be hard or even impossible to pull this off immediately after an election. The law requires a fairly drawn-out hearing process before the state can interfere in county elections. The preliminary hearing can’t be held for at least 30 days after an initial petition, which is after the Georgia certification deadline. But perhaps a nefarious board could lay the groundwork earlier, potentially putting a newly appointed superintendent in control before the elections, when he or she would have the ability to pre-emptively disqualify voters and ballots.County election boards heard similar kinds of challenges to voter eligibility during the Georgia runoff. The state Republican Party and a Texas group challenged the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in December, based on whether a voter appeared to match someone on the Postal Service list of people in the National Change of Address Registry. A few small counties actually went through with trying to invalidate voters on this basis.This eligibility challenge was rejected by the U.S. District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, who happens to be the sister of Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia to Brian Kemp. But although the eligibility challenge faltered in the runoff, it is not obvious that ironclad protections exist against eligibility challenges, either as a matter of court precedent or federal law. A narrower challenge could have had a better chance of surviving a court challenge. And the new Georgia law makes these kinds of challenges easier, by allowing a single person to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.Another option to thwart an election might be to stop certification. The new Georgia law does not do much to make it easier to block certification, as the secretary of state — not the board or the Legislature — still certifies results statewide.But county election boards, including in Georgia, generally certify their election results, which the secretary of state then certifies statewide. Mr. Trump tried to thwart efforts to certify the results certification, turning routine hearings into televised events. In the end, Mr. Trump’s effort failed. Election officials overwhelmingly acted to preserve the integrity of the election, despite immense political pressure to act. Even so, the president did manage to persuade a handful of officials to vote against certification on dubious grounds.If secretaries of state had not certified election results, whether in Georgia or elsewhere, it might have plunged the country into crisis with uncertain consequences. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether there’s a chance of something similar occurring in the future, given how many House Republicans refused to certify the electoral count.Election administrators may have other options to undermine elections, besides disqualifying ballots and voters or decertifying the results, either in Georgia or in other states.All of this represents an obvious threat to American democracy. And yet the risk of election subversion has been overshadowed by the fight over new restrictions on voting, especially by mail. Progressives have been concerned about these kinds of restrictions for years, and the reform bill H.R. 1 was written in part as a response. But since the law was mainly devised before the 2020 election, its provisions don’t directly address the new risk that election officials could subvert election results. There’s no provision, for instance, requiring nonpartisan administration or certification of federal elections.H.R. 1 does have provisions that would indirectly limit the options available to actors who might try to subvert elections. One notable example is a provision against voter caging, which precludes eligibility challenges based on matched lists, like the change of address notification challenge attempted in December. It also includes provisions that ensure basic election administration, like requiring that people don’t wait in line longer than 30 minutes.But with the main focus of the proposed law being to improve democracy, by expanding voting access and more, it is not at all obvious whether H.R. 1 amounts to a comprehensive effort to protect democracy. And even if it does have the protections it needs, the risk of election subversion has received such little attention that relevant provisions might not be included in a slimmed-down bill. Those provisions have not been mentioned in most proposals for a narrower bill. More

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      How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

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      Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Katie Currid for The New York TimesMarketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via WinRed and ActBlue. More

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      Georgia’s Election Law, and Why Turnout Isn’t Easy to Turn Off

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      Making voting convenient doesn’t necessarily translate into more votes, research shows.There’s nothing unusual about exaggeration in politics. But when it comes to the debate over voting rights, something more than exaggeration is going on.There’s a real — and bipartisan — misunderstanding about whether making it easier or harder to vote, especially by mail, has a significant effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. The evidence suggests it does not.The fight over the new Georgia election law is only the latest example. That law, passed last week, has been condemned by Democrats as voter suppression, or even as tantamount to Jim Crow.Democrats are understandably concerned about a provision that empowers the Republican-controlled State Legislature to play a larger role in election administration. That provision has uncertain but potentially substantial effects, depending on what the Legislature might do in the future. And it’s possible the law is intended to do exactly what progressives fear: reshape the electorate to the advantage of Republicans, soon after an electoral defeat, by making it harder to vote.And yet the law’s voting provisions are unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances. It could plausibly even increase turnout. In the final account, it will probably be hard to say whether it had any effect on turnout at all.The Georgia lawThe full text of the Georgia bill is here, but the bill’s major effects can be boiled down to a few points:The law makes absentee voting harder. People must have a qualifying form of identification to vote by mail. The law also makes it harder to request and return an absentee ballot, restricting the period when people can apply for one and limiting the number of drop boxes where voters can return such a ballot in person.On balance, it might make in-person voting easier, especially in the general election (though it contains provisions that cut in both directions).The law expands the number of required days of early voting, including on the weekend days that progressives covet (two Saturdays are now required instead of one). There’s also a provision that requires large precincts with long lines to add machines, add staff or split the precinct. Depending on how this is rolled out, it could be a big win for voters in Georgia’s urban areas, who have dealt with some of the longest lines in the country.Cutting in the other direction is the gratuitous and probably ineffectual limitation on handing out food and water to people standing in line to vote. Of more concrete but still limited importance is a rule that makes it harder for people to cast a provisional ballot if they show up at the wrong precinct. (It’s worth noting that many states don’t count these ballots at all, and there were only around 10,000 total provisional ballots in Georgia in the last election, including those cast in the right precinct).It shortens the runoff period. Runoffs would be held four weeks after an initial election, instead of the nine weeks that had been in place for federal elections in the last few years. A main consequence would be to shorten early runoff voting to one week, instead of three, plausibly affecting turnout in exactly the kind of close, low-turnout race where it could easily be decisive.It empowers the State Legislature to play a larger role in election administration. It removes the secretary of state as chair of the state board of elections and allows the Legislature to appoint a majority of the board’s members, including the chair. And it empowers the state board to take over county boards of elections, if the circumstances merit it.These might prove to be very important. But for the purposes of this article, we are not considering them “voter suppression” provisions. They do not inherently make it harder for people to vote by restricting whether or how they can vote.If we leave aside the administrative provisions and the question of intent, the core question on voter suppression is to what extent does reducing voting options — like early voting in the runoffs or mail voting in general — reduce turnout and Democratic chances?The limited import of convenience votingFor decades, reformers have assumed that the way to increase turnout is to make voting easier.Yet surprisingly, expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting. One prominent study even found that early voting decreases turnout, though that’s a bit of an outlier.There’s essentially no evidence that the vast expansion of no-excuse absentee mail voting, in which anyone can apply for a mail absentee ballot, had any discernible effect on turnout in 2020. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise: Even universal vote by mail, in which every registered voter is automatically sent a mail ballot (as opposed to every voter having an opportunity to apply for one), increases turnout by only about 2 percent with no discernible partisan advantage.Believe it or not, turnout increased just as much in the states that didn’t have no-excuse absentee voting as it did in the states that added it for the first time. Similarly, Joe Biden improved over Hillary Clinton’s performance by three percentage points in the states that added it, compared with 2.9 points in the states that did not.A more rigorous study by political scientists at Stanford found that no-excuse mail voting might have increased turnout by a whopping 0.02 percent in the 2020 election. The study used a novel approach: The researchers compared the turnout among 65-year-olds in Texas, who were eligible to vote by mail without an excuse, with 64-year-olds in Texas, who weren’t. The turnout among 64-year-olds was indistinguishable from that of 65-year-olds, even though the latter group voted by mail in large numbers.Like Georgia, Texas did not require an identification to vote by mail, but has a strict ID requirement for in-person voting.The partisan makeup of the electorate didn’t appear to change, either. The Democratic share of voters appeared to tick up by two-tenths of a percentage point — enough to decide a very close election. But it’s also so small that it could just be statistical noise, with no effect at all. Social science methods just don’t offer the level of precision necessary to nail down whether this, or any, change might move the needle by a tenth of a point.The Georgia law doesn’t come anywhere close to eliminating no-excuse absentee voting, unlike what the political scientists tested in Texas. As a result, one might expect the new law to have an even smaller effect. (You could make a counterintuitive argument that making absentee voting harder is worse for Democrats than eliminating it altogether, and that Democrats might be better off discouraging people from mail voting to avoid unnecessary ballot rejections of people who could have successfully voted in person.)The Georgia runoff elections, while hardly a scientific case study, nonetheless offer another useful example. There were fewer opportunities to vote in advance compared with the general election, because of the shorter election campaign and the holiday season. Based on the drop-off in early voting, many analysts wound up underestimating the final turnout by 20 percent or more. In the end, turnout exceeded expectations. The number of Election Day voters was higher than it was in the general election, as many people who might have voted early if it weren’t for Christmas or New Year’s Day now turned out on Election Day.Maybe runoff turnout would have been higher with the same early voting opportunities as in the general. But maybe not. And none of this had any discernible negative effect on the Democrats, who of course did better than they did in the general.Why doesn’t convenience matter?How is it possible that something like eliminating no-excuse absentee mail voting, a method beloved by millions of voters, wouldn’t materially affect turnout or election results?One simple answer is that convenience isn’t as important as often assumed. Almost everyone who cares enough to vote will brave the inconveniences of in-person voting to do so, whether that’s because the inconveniences aren’t really so great, or because they care enough to suffer them.This supposes a certain reasonable level of convenience, of course: Six-hour lines would change the calculation for many voters. And indeed, long lines do affect turnout. It also supposes a certain level of interest. Someone might think: There’s no way I’m waiting a half-hour in line to vote for dogcatcher. Similarly, the importance of a convenient voting option probably grows as the significance of a race decreases.The implication, though, is that nearly every person will manage to vote if sufficiently convenient options are available, even if the most preferred option doesn’t exist. That makes the Georgia election law’s effort to curb long lines potentially quite significant. Not only might it mitigate the already limited effect of restricting mail voting, but it might even outweigh it.Another reason is that convenience voting may not be as convenient for lower-turnout voters, who essentially decide overall turnout. Low-turnout voters probably aren’t thinking about how they’ll vote a month ahead of the election, when they’ll need to apply for an absentee ballot. Someone thinking about this is probably a high-turnout voter. Low-turnout voters might not even know until Election Day whom they’ll support. And that makes them less likely to take advantage of advance voting options like no-excuse early voting, which requires them to think about the election early and often: to submit an application, fill out a ballot and return it.As a result, convenience voting methods tend to reinforce the socioeconomic biases favoring high-turnout voters. The methods ensure that every high-interest voter has many opportunities to vote, without doing quite as much to draw less engaged voters to the polls.A final reason is that voting restrictions may backfire by angering and energizing Democratic voters. This law’s restrictions on handing out water in line, for instance, may do more to mobilize Democrats than to stop them from voting. One recent study even theorized that the Supreme Court’s decision to roll back elements of the Voting Rights Act didn’t reduce Black turnout because subsequent efforts to restrict voting were swiftly countered by efforts to mobilize Black voters.That doesn’t mean the Georgia law or other such laws are without consequence. Many make voting more difficult, enough to intimidate or discourage some voters. Many outright disenfranchise voters, even if only in small numbers. Perhaps the disenfranchisement of even a single voter merits outrage and opposition, especially if the law is passed on dubious or even fabricated grounds, and with Jim Crow mass disenfranchisement as a historical backdrop.But setting aside intent, it does mean that many such voting provisions, like that in Georgia, are unlikely to have a huge effect on turnout or Democratic chances.There are consequences to misunderstanding the stakes of changing voting laws. Minor changes in voting access can overshadow larger issues, including the kinds of potentially significant provisions in the Georgia law that empower the State Legislature. The democracy reform bill H.R. 1, for instance, would do quite a bit to expand voting access but relatively little to protect against partisan interference in election administration.The perception that voting laws have existential stakes for democracy or the political viability of the two parties has made bipartisan compromise extremely difficult. The virtue of bipartisanship is often and understandably dismissed as naïve, but voting laws are a rare case where bipartisanship has value of its own. Democracy, after all, depends on the consent of the loser. More

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      One Republican’s Lonely Fight Against a Flood of Disinformation

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      After losing an ugly congressional race last year, Denver Riggleman is leading a charge against the conspiracy-mongering coursing through his party. He doesn’t have many allies.AFTON, Va. — Denver Riggleman stood virtually alone.It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman congressman from Virginia, had his own personal experiences with fringe ideas, both as a target of them and as a curious observer of the power they hold over true believers. He saw a dangerous movement becoming more intertwined with his party, and worried that it was only growing thanks to words of encouragement from President Donald J. Trump.“Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” asked Mr. Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer. “We should not be playing with fire.”Six months later, conspiracy theories like QAnon remain a threat that most Republicans would rather ignore than confront, and Mr. Riggleman is out of office. But he is ever more determined to try to expose disinformation from the far right that is swaying legions in the Republican base to believe in a false reality.Mr. Riggleman is a living example of the political price of falling out of lock step with the hard right. He lost a G.O.P. primary race last June after he officiated at the wedding of a gay couple. And once he started calling out QAnon, whose followers believe that a satanic network of child molesters runs the Democratic Party, he received death threats and was attacked as a traitor, including by members of his own family.The undoing of Mr. Riggleman — and now his unlikely crusade — is revealing about a dimension of conservative politics today. The fight against radicalism within the G.O.P. is a deeply lonely one, waged mostly by Republicans like him who are no longer in office, and by the small handful of elected officials who have decided that they are willing to speak up even if it means that they, too, could be headed for an early retirement.“I’ve been telling people: ‘You don’t understand. This is getting worse, not better,’” Mr. Riggleman said, sitting on a stool at his family bar one recent afternoon. “People are angry. And they’re angry at the truth tellers.”Mr. Riggleman, 51, is now back home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he and his wife run the bar and a distillery. And for his next move in a career that has included jobs at the National Security Agency and founding a military contracting business, he is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.His experience with the issues and emotions at work is both professional and personal. He was so intrigued by false belief systems that he self-published a book about the myth of Bigfoot and the people who are unshakably devoted to it.Mr. Riggleman is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.Matt Eich for The New York TimesMr. Riggleman, who first ran and won in 2018 after the Republican incumbent in his district retired, joined the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and was endorsed by Mr. Trump. Now he says it “gives me shivers” to be called a Republican. He hopes to show that there is still a way to beat back the lies and false beliefs that have spread from the fringe to the mainstream. It is a heavy lift, and one that depends on overcoming two strong impulses: politicians’ fear of losing elections and people’s reluctance to accept that they were taken in by a lie.Mr. Riggleman summarized his conversations with the 70 percent of House Republicans he said were privately appalled at the former president’s conduct but wouldn’t dare speak out.“‘We couldn’t do that in our district. We would lose,’” he said. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”Stocky, fast-talking and inexhaustibly curious, the former congressman is now working for a group of prominent experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of disinformation in American politics and how to thwart it. The group has undertaken several extensive investigations into how extremists have used propaganda and faked information to sow division over some of the most contentious issues of the day, like the coronavirus pandemic and police violence.Their reports have also given lawmakers a better understanding of the QAnon belief system and other radical ideologies that helped fuel the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.Mr. Riggleman said he had written one report about the involvement of far-right militants and white supremacist groups in the attack specifically at the request of a Republican member who needed help convincing colleagues that far-left groups were not the culprits.Getting lawmakers to see radical movements like QAnon as a threat has been difficult. Joel Finkelstein, the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said that in June, when the group tried to sound the alarm on QAnon to members of Congress, Mr. Riggleman was the only one who responded with a sense of urgency and agreed to help.“We were screaming it from the rooftops,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “We said: ‘This is going to be a problem. They’re growing increasingly militant in their conspiracies.’” When the institute’s members spoke to Mr. Riggleman, he said, “We showed him our data and he said, ‘Holy moly.’”Far from a theoretical or overblown concern, disinformation and its role in perpetuating false beliefs about Mr. Trump’s election loss and its aftermath are problems that some Republicans believe could cripple their party if left ignored.In a sign of how widespread these conspiracy theories are, a recent poll from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 58 percent of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a few Trump supporters.“There was a troika of us who said, ‘This is going to a bad place,’” said Paul Mitchell, who represented Michigan in the House for two terms before retiring early this year in frustration. He said he had watched as members dismissed Mr. Riggleman, despite his experience in intelligence. “There weren’t many people who gave a damn what your expertise was,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It was inconsequential compared to the talking points.”Bob Good defeated Mr. Riggleman in a state Republican Party convention in June.Amy Friedenberger/The Roanoke Times, via Associated PressMr. Riggleman’s loss last summer in a closely held party convention allowed him to be more outspoken. The winner, Representative Bob Good, is a former associate athletic director at Liberty University who took issue with Mr. Riggleman’s officiation at the gay wedding and called him “out of step” with the party’s base.And as Mr. Riggleman kept it up and spoke out more aggressively against Mr. Trump after the election, his fight got lonelier.“I had a colleague of mine pat me on the shoulder and say: ‘Denver, you’re just too paranoid. You’re killing yourself for the rest of your life politically by going after the big man like this,’” Mr. Riggleman recalled.When he returned to Virginia for good in January, he said he sometimes felt just as isolated. Family members, former constituents and patrons at the distillery insisted that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. And they couldn’t be talked out of it, no matter how hard he tried.He recalled a recent conversation with one couple he is friends with that he said was especially exasperating.“I go over stats,” he said. “I go over figures. I go over the 50 states, how that actually works. How machines that aren’t connected are very hard to hack. How you’d have to pay off hundreds of thousands of people to do this.”“Did not convince them,” he added.Other friends of his, some of whom are also members of the growing group of former Republican lawmakers now publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, said that many conservative politicians saw no incentive in trying to dispel disinformation even when they know it’s false.“What some of these guys have told me privately is it’s still kind of self-preservation,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois who ran a short-lived primary campaign against Mr. Trump last year. “‘I want to hang onto the gig. And this is a fever, it will break.’”That is mistaken, Mr. Walsh said, because he sees no breaking the spell Mr. Trump has over Republican voters anytime soon. “It’s done, and it was done a few years ago,” he said.Mr. Riggleman, who is contemplating a run for governor in Virginia and is writing a book about his experience with the dark side of Republican politics, sees a way forward in his experience with Bigfoot. The sasquatch was how many people first learned about him as a politician, after an opponent accused him of harboring a fascination with “Bigfoot erotica,” in 2018.“I do not dabble in monster porn,” he retorts in his book, “Bigfoot … It’s Complicated,” which he based in part on a trip he took in 2004 on a Bigfoot expedition.Mr. Riggleman paid $2,000 to go on a Bigfoot expedition with his wife in 2004.Matt Eich for The New York TimesThe book is full of passages that, if pulled out and scrubbed of references to the mythical creature, could be describing politics in 2021.Mr. Riggleman quotes one true believer explaining why he is absolutely convinced Bigfoot is real, even though he has never seen it. In an answer that could have come straight from the lips of someone defending the myth that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, the man says matter-of-factly: “Evidence is overwhelming. Check out the internet. All kinds of sightings and facts.”At another point, Mr. Riggleman describes a conversation he had with someone who asked if he really thought that all the people claiming to have seen Bigfoot over the years were liars. “I don’t think that,” Mr. Riggleman responds. “I do believe that people see what they want to see.”He did find one way to crack the Bigfoot false belief system: telling true believers that they were being ripped off to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to go on expeditions where they would never actually see the creature.“They got very angry,” he said. But eventually, some started to come around. More