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Civil rights groups quickly challenged a new law placing restrictions on voting, while President Biden denounced it as “Jim Crow.” Republicans in other states are determined to follow suit with their own measures.The fight over voting rights is emerging as one of the defining conflicts of the Biden era, and Georgia fired the opening shot with a set of new restrictions underscoring the political, legal and financial clashes that will influence whether Republicans retake Congress and the White House.President Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new law an “attack on the Constitution” and said the Justice Department was “taking a look” at Republican voting efforts in the state, without offering any specifics.“This is Jim Crow in the 21st century, it must end,” Mr. Biden said, a day after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law. “I will take my case to the American people — including Republicans who joined the broadest coalition of voters ever in this past election to put country before party.“If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”Civil rights groups immediately challenged the Georgia law in federal court, backed by prominent Democratic voting rights lawyers. Several Black leaders described the legal skirmishes to come as an existential fight for representation, saying the law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters. Protests against voting restrictions unfolded this week in state capitols like Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, and more lawsuits are expected.In more than 24 states, Republican-led legislatures are advancing bills in a broad political effort that is the most aggressive attack on the right to vote since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It follows months of Republican efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden’s presidential victory, which scores of high-level G.O.P. officials still refuse to acknowledge as legitimate.Democrats, who have limited power in many state capitols, are looking to Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats for a new federal law to protect voting. Many in the party see the fight over voting as not just a moral cause but also a political one, given their narrow margins of victory in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia, Arizona and other battlegrounds.Georgia’s sweeping new provisions, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, represent the most substantive overhaul of a battleground state’s voting system since last November’s election. It would impose stricter voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limit drop boxes and forbid giving water and snacks to voters waiting in line.But in a state where former President Donald J. Trump tried to persuade Republican election officials to reverse his loss, the measure went even further: It shifts the power and oversight of elections to the Legislature by stripping the secretary of state from chairing the state Board of Elections and authorizing the Legislature to name members to the board. It further empowers the state Board of Elections to have sweeping jurisdiction over county elections boards, including the authority to suspend officials.Mr. Biden on Friday called Georgia’s new voting restrictions “un-American,” and sought to tie them to the Democrats’ push in Washington to enact the federal voting rights bill, which the House passed this month. The measure would put in place a raft of requirements intended to protect voting rights, including weakening restrictive state identification requirements, expanding early and mail-in voting and restoring voting rights to former felons.The president said the new Georgia law was expressly what the House bill was designed to prevent. While Democrats in Congress debate abolishing the filibuster in order to pass the voting rights bill through the Senate, Republican legislators in more than 40 states have introduced hundreds of bills targeting voting access and seizing authority over administering elections.And another crucial conflict looms this fall: the fights over redistricting to account for growing and changing populations, and the gerrymandering that will allow partisan majorities to limit the impact of votes by packing or splitting up population centers.The gerrymandering disputes will determine the look of the House and dozens of state legislatures, in many cases locking in majorities for the next decade.Gov. Bryan Kemp of Georgia signed the voting bill into law hours after it was passed on Thursday.@GovKemp, via ReutersBitter struggles over voting rights loom even in states with Democratic governors who can veto the legislation. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled legislatures are planning to advance restrictive bills, and new Republican governors would most likely sign them into law if they are elected next year.“The 2020 election is behind us, but the war over the future of our democracy is escalating,” said Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the secretary of state in Michigan, where Republicans this week introduced numerous proposed restrictions on voting. “For anyone to believe that they can sit down and rest because the 2020 election is behind need look no further than what happened in Georgia as an indication that our work is far from over.”Republicans, borrowing language from their previous efforts at curtailing voting access, have described the new bills as a way to make voting easier while limiting fraud. Mr. Kemp, upon signing the bill into law, said it would “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” even though the state’s own Republican election officials found no substantive evidence of fraud.Mr. Kemp on Friday pushed back at Mr. Biden’s criticism, saying, “There is nothing ‘Jim Crow’ about requiring a photo or state-issued ID to vote by absentee ballot.”“President Biden, the left and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box,” Mr. Kemp said. “As secretary of state, I consistently led the fight to protect Georgia elections against power-hungry, partisan activists.”Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Georgia would serve as a model for other Republican-run states.“The country was watching closely what Georgia would do,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “The fact that they were able to get these reforms through sets the tone and puts Georgia in a leadership role for other states.”The Justice Department was aware of Georgia’s voting law, a spokeswoman said on Friday, but provided no further comment. A White House official said the president, in his comments, was assuming this was an issue the department would review.The department’s civil rights division would most likely have lawyers investigate whether to file an independent lawsuit, said Tom Perez, the former labor secretary who also previously ran the department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. It could also take part in the case that was filed by civil rights groups by filing a so-called statement of interest or moving to intervene as the plaintiff, he said.But this is a precarious time for the federal protections in place. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted one of the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act, clearing the runway for much of the current legislation aimed at restricting voting. The remaining protection, in Section 2 of the act, is facing a new challenge before the Supreme Court, with arguments heard last month.The debate is also spilling over into the corporate arena. Activists across the country have been chastising companies they see as silent on the issue of voting rights. In Georgia on Friday, numerous civil rights groups and faith leaders issued a call to boycott some of the standard-bearers of the Georgia business community — including Coca-Cola — until they took action against the effort to restrict voting access.The early battle lines are increasingly centering on two key states that flipped from Republican to Democratic in 2020, Arizona and Georgia. Those states are also home to large populations of voters of color, who have historically faced discriminatory laws at the polls.Two battleground states that remained in Republican control in 2020 — Texas and Florida — are also moving forward with new laws restricting voting.A drive-through voting station in Houston in October. Bills being considered by the Texas Legislature would ban the practice.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesIn Florida, lawmakers are looking to ban drop boxes and limit who can collect ballots for other voters, among other provisions, even after an election that the Republican chair of the state party touted as the “gold standard” and that Republicans won handily.Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative who has sponsored some of the legislation, said that while the election was successful, it was “not without challenges and problems that we think we needed to fix.” He cited the use of ballot drop boxes, which he helped write into law but he said were not adequately being administered.“They said the same thing with the last election bill, that we wrote it and they said it was voter suppression, and the exact opposite happened: We had more people vote in the state of Florida than ever before,” he said. “We have 40 days of election with three different ways to vote. How can anyone say voter suppression?”In Arizona, Republican lawmakers have advanced legislation that would drop voters who skip consecutive election cycles from the permanent early voting list. The list currently consists of roughly 3.2 million voters, and critics of the legislation estimate it would purge roughly 100,000 voters.Lawmakers in Florida are seeking to limit drop boxes for ballots.Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesWisconsin Republicans have proposed many restrictions on the disabled, new limits on who can automatically receive an absentee ballot and a requirement that absentee voters provide photo identification for every election — as opposed to having one on file with their municipal clerk.The measures are certain to be vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, but their sponsor, the Republican State Senator Duey Stroebel, said Friday that the legislation would encapsulate the party’s principles heading into the midterm elections.“It will define that we as Republicans are people who want clean and fair elections in the state,” Mr. Stroebel said. Wisconsin Democrats, confident in Mr. Evers’s veto, are eager to have a voting rights fight be front and center ahead of the 2022 elections, said State Senator Kelda Roys, a Democrat.“People hate the idea that their right to vote is under attack,” Ms. Roys said. “The freedom to vote is just popular. It’s a great issue for Democrats.”The torrent of Republican voting legislation, Democrats say, undermines faith in elections.“Even in states where they won’t be passed and have been introduced, like in Colorado, they’re dangerous,” said Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado. “The rhetoric of lying and trying to manipulate Americans to keep political power is dangerous. It led to all the death threats that secretaries of state and election officials received in 2020. It led to the insurrection.”Reporting was contributed by More
Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, accused the news channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Fox News and its powerful owner, Rupert Murdoch, are facing a second major defamation suit over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election, a new front in the growing legal battle over media disinformation and its consequences.Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that was at the center of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy about rigged voting machines, filed a lawsuit on Friday that accused Fox News of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Dominion, which has requested a jury trial, is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and named several Fox anchors, including Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, as defendants.In a 139-page complaint filed in Delaware Superior Court, Dominion’s legal team, led by the prominent defamation firm Clare Locke, portrayed Fox as an active player in spreading falsehoods that Dominion had altered vote counts and manipulated its machines to benefit Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the election.Those claims were false, but they were relentlessly pushed by President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, in public forums, including appearances on Fox programs. In January, Dominion sued Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for defamation. The company also sued Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a Trump ally who was also a frequent guest on Fox programs, as well as shows on other conservative media outlets. Each of those suits seeks damages of more than $1 billion.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in Friday’s complaint against Fox. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”In a statement on Friday, Fox said that its 2020 election coverage “stands in the highest tradition of American journalism” and pledged to “vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Fox Corporation previously filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic lawsuit, arguing that the false claims of electoral fraud made on its channels were part of covering a fast-breaking story of significant public interest. “An attempt by a sitting president to challenge the result of an election is objectively newsworthy,” Fox’s legal team wrote in the motion.The narrative that Mr. Trump and his allies told about Dominion was among the more baroque creations of the president’s monthslong effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and persuade Americans that Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate.Dominion, which was founded in 2002, is one of the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment in the United States, and its machines were used by election authorities in at least 28 states last year, including several states carried by Mr. Trump.Allies of Mr. Trump falsely portrayed the company as biased toward Mr. Biden and argued, without evidence, that it was tied to Hugo Chávez, the long-dead Venezuelan dictator. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder, and other employees received harassing and threatening messages from people convinced that the company had undermined the election results.Fox News and Fox Business programs were among the mass-media venues where Mr. Trump’s supporters denounced Dominion. The lawsuit also cites examples where the Fox hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Dobbs, uncritically repeated or actively vouched for the false claims made by Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion wrote in the lawsuit. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Dominion’s lawyers on Friday also cited an unusual argument made by Ms. Powell in a motion, filed on Monday, to dismiss the separate Dominion suit against her.In that motion, Ms. Powell’s lawyers asserted that because political language is often inexact, “reasonable people” would not accept Ms. Powell’s baseless claims as facts. Ms. Powell — who never allowed in public appearances that she was anything less than confident in her assertions — was essentially arguing that her conspiratorial claims were self-evidently hyperbolic and therefore not defamatory.Dominion says it recently lost major contracts with election officials in Georgia and Louisiana, adding that the company is now facing “the hatred, contempt, and distrust of tens of millions of American voters.”Right-wing media has already faced a reckoning of sorts from the threat of defamation litigation, a relatively novel tactic in a battle against disinformation that had previously been limited to ad boycotts and liberal public pressure campaigns.In February, two days after Smartmatic filed its suit, Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” its highest rated program. Newsmax, a pro-Trump cable channel also facing potential legal action, cut off Mr. Lindell when he repeated falsehoods about rigged voting machines. More
The state’s new Republican-crafted law is set to restrict voting access in ways that Democrats and voting rights groups say will have an outsize impact on Black voters.After record turnout flipped Georgia blue for the first time in decades, Republicans who control the state Legislature moved swiftly to put in place a raft of new restrictions on voting access, passing a new bill that was signed into law on Thursday.The law will alter foundational elements of voting in Georgia, which supported President Biden in November and a pair of Democratic senators in January — narrow victories attributable in part to the turnout of Black voters and the array of voting options in the state.Taken together, the new barriers will have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.The Republican legislation will undermine pillars of voting access by limiting drop boxes for mail ballots, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting and making it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Long lines to vote are common in Black neighborhoods in Georgia’s cities, particularly Atlanta, where much of the state’s Democratic electorate lives.The new law also expands the Legislature’s power over elections, which has raised worries that it could interfere with the vote in predominantly Democratic, heavily Black counties like Fulton and Gwinnett.Black voters were a major force in Democratic success in recent elections, with roughly 88 percent voting for Mr. Biden and more than 90 percent voting for Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections, according to exit polls.Democrats say that Republicans are effectively returning to one of the ugliest tactics in the state’s history — oppressive laws aimed at disenfranchising voters.“Rather than grappling with whether their ideology is causing them to fail, they are instead relying on what has worked in the past,” Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist, said as the bill made its way through the Legislature, referring to what she said were laws designed to suppress votes. “Instead of winning new voters, you rig the system against their participation, and you steal the right to vote.”The Georgia law comes as former President Donald J. Trump has continued to publicly promote the lie that the election was stolen from him, which has swayed millions of Republican voters. It also puts further pressure on Republican state legislatures across the country to continue drafting new legislation aimed at restricting voting rights under the banner of “election integrity” as a way of appeasing the former president and his loyal base.People waited in line to vote early at a community center in Suwanee, Ga., in October.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNew restrictions on voting have already passed in Iowa, and multiple other states are lining up similar efforts, while the Supreme Court signaled this month that it was ready to make it harder to challenge all sorts of limits on voting around the nation.Should the high court make changes to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows after-the-fact challenges to voting restrictions that may disproportionately affect members of minority groups, Democrats and voting rights groups could be left without one of their most essential tools to challenge new laws.For decades, Georgia has been at the center of the voting rights battle, with Democrats and advocacy groups fighting back against repeated efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in the state.As recently as 2018, Georgians faced hourslong lines to vote in many predominantly Black neighborhoods, and thousands of Black voters were purged from the voting rolls before the election. Now Republicans have again changed the state’s voting laws ahead of critical Senate and governor’s races in 2022.Democrats, shut out of power in the Statehouse despite holding both United States Senate seats, were relatively powerless in the legislative process to stop the voting bill, though they do now have avenues through the courts to challenge the law.The initial iterations of the bill contained measures that voting rights groups said would have even more directly targeted Black voters, like a proposal to restrict early voting on the weekends that would limit the longstanding civic tradition of “Souls to the Polls,” in which Black voters cast ballots on Sunday after church services.Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, may challenge Gov. Brian Kemp again in 2022.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn an interview earlier this month, Ms. Abrams, the former Democratic minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, called Republicans’ effort “a sign of fear” over their failure to win support from young and minority voters, two of the fastest-growing sectors of the state’s electorate.She added that the measure was also potentially self-defeating for the G.O.P. in that large percentages of rural white voters, a traditionally Republican-leaning bloc, could also be impeded by laws that make it harder for citizens to cast absentee ballots and vote by mail.Republicans have defended the new measures, saying they are focused on election security. In remarks on Thursday after signing the new law, Gov. Brian Kemp said that after the 2020 election, “we quickly began working with the House and Senate on further reforms to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” He added, “The bill I signed into law does just that.”Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting. More
The law, which has been denounced by Democrats and voting rights groups, comes as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country mount the most extensive contraction of ballot access in generations.Georgia Republicans on Thursday passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, introducing more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limiting drop boxes and expanding the Legislature’s power over elections. The new measures make Georgia the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of last year’s presidential contest. The legislation, which followed Democratic victories that flipped the state at the presidential and Senate levels, comes amid a national movement among Republican-controlled state legislatures to mount the most extensive contraction of voting access in generations. Seeking to appease a conservative base that remains incensed about the results of the 2020 election, Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to restrict voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.Democrats and voting rights groups have condemned such efforts, arguing that they unfairly target voters of color. They say the new law in Georgia particularly seeks to make voting harder for the state’s large Black population, which was crucial to President Biden’s triumph in Georgia in November and the success of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections.Mr. Biden joined Georgia Democrats on Thursday in denouncing efforts to limit voting, calling Republicans’ push around the country “the most pernicious thing.”“This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said at his first formal news conference since taking office.Though the law is less stringent than the initial iterations of the bill, it introduces a raft of new restrictions for voting and elections in the state, including limiting drop boxes, stripping the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposing new oversight of county election boards, restricting who can vote with provisional ballots, and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. The law also requires runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, instead of the current nine weeks.The law does not include some of the harshest restrictions that had been proposed, like a ban on Sunday voting that was seen as an attempt to curtail the role of Black churches in driving turnout. And the legislation now, in fact, expands early voting options in some areas. No-excuse absentee voting, in which voters do not have to provide a rationale for casting a ballot by mail, also remains in place, though it will now entail new restrictions such as providing a state-issued identification card.State Representative Alan Powell, a Republican, spoke in favor of the voting bill on Thursday.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe law passed the Georgia House on Thursday morning by a party-line vote of 100 to 75, and was approved by the Senate in the evening on a 34-to-20 vote before being signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.In brief remarks on Thursday evening, Mr. Kemp said the drafting of the bill had started after the 2020 election. “We quickly began working with the House and Senate on further reforms to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” he said. “The bill I signed into law does just that.” The governor, who is up for re-election in 2022 and was heavily criticized by Donald J. Trump after the election for not abetting the former president’s effort to subvert the outcome, detailed his own history as a secretary of state fighting for stronger voter identification laws, which Democrats have denounced as having an outsize impact on communities of color. Mr. Kemp said that protests against the bill were pure politics. “I fought these partisan activists tooth and nail for over 10 years to keep our elections secure, accessible and fair,” Mr. Kemp said. Georgia has quickly become fiercely contested political territory, and a focal point of the continuing clashes over voting rights. During the contentious months after the November election, the state became a particular obsession of Mr. Trump, who spun falsehoods, lies and conspiracy theories about electoral fraud and pressured election officials, including the Republican secretary of state, to “find” him votes.Yet after election officials rebuffed Mr. Trump, and multiple audits reaffirmed the results, Republican legislators held hearings on the election, inviting some of the president’s allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani to speak. After the hearings, G.O.P. lawmakers promised to introduce new legislation to help “restore confidence” in elections, even though the last one had been held safely and securely.Outside the Statehouse in Atlanta on Thursday, a coalition of Black faith leaders assembled a protest, voicing their opposition to the bill and calling for a boycott of major corporations in Georgia that they said had remained silent on the voting push, including Coca-Cola.The faith leaders also sought a meeting with Mr. Kemp and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, also a Republican. Mr. Duncan met with the group for three minutes; Mr. Kemp did not.“I told him exactly how I felt: that these bills were not only voter suppression, but they were in fact racist, and they are an attempt to turn back time to Jim Crow,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees all African Methodist Episcopal churches in the state.The voting legislation’s approval in the House on Thursday morning came after an impassioned debate on the floor of the chamber.Erica Thomas, a Democratic state representative from outside Atlanta, opened her remarks by recalling the memory of former Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights leader who died last year. She quoted an old speech of his before voicing her opposition to the bill.“Why do we rally, why do we protest voter suppression?” she said. “It is because our ancestors are looking down right now on this House floor, praying and believing that our fight, and that their fight, was not in vain. We call on the strength of Congressman John Lewis in this moment. Because right now, history is watching.”Demonstrators protesting Georgia’s bill of voting restrictions in Atlanta on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesOther Democrats said the bill was rooted in the election falsehoods that have been spread by Mr. Trump and his allies.“Where is the need for this bill coming from?” said Debbie Buckner, a Democratic representative from near Columbus. “From the former president who wanted the election fixed and thrown out, even when Georgia leadership told him they couldn’t do it if they wanted to.”Representative Zulma Lopez, who represents a majority-minority district on the outskirts of Atlanta, said the bill would have an outsize impact on voters of color. In her district, she said, the number of drop boxes would be reduced to nine from 33. This was partly the result, she said, of Democrats’ being excluded from discussions.“Close to 2.5 million Democrats voted in the general election in 2020,” Ms. Lopez said. “Yet Democrats in this House were left out of any meaningful input into the drafting of this bill.”Democratic state senators sounded similar alarms during an afternoon debate.“It is like a Christmas tree of goodies for voter suppression,” said State Senator Jen Jordan, a Democrat from near Atlanta. “And let’s be clear, some of the most dangerous provisions have to do with the takeover of the local elections boards.”In a sign of the high tensions in Georgia, Mr. Kemp’s speech was abruptly cut off after about 10 minutes. A Democratic state representative, Park Cannon, had tried to attend the signing and remarks, but the doors to the governor’s office were closed. After officers would not let her enter, Ms. Cannon lightly knocked on the door. Two officers immediately detained her, placing in her handcuffs and escorting her through the State Capitol. Neither Ms. Cannon nor the governor’s office immediately responded to requests for comment. Alan Powell, a Republican representative from northeastern Georgia, defended the state’s bill, saying it would bring needed uniformity to an electoral system that was pushed to the brink last year.“The Georgia election system was never made to be able to handle the volume of votes that it handled,” he said. (Multiple audits affirmed the results of Georgia’s elections last year, and there were no credible reports of any fraud or irregularities that would have affected the results.) “What we’ve done in this bill in front of you is we have cleaned up the workings, the mechanics of our election system.”“Show me the suppression,” Mr. Powell said. “There is no suppression in this bill.”The law is likely to be met by legal challenges from Democratic groups, and voting rights organizations have vowed to continue to work against the provisions.Bishop Jackson said he would be working with his constituents to make sure that they had the proper identification, registered in time, and knew how to vote under the new rules.“This is a fight,” he said. “I think we’re probably at halftime. I think we got another half to go.”Thomas Kaplan More
The chief executives of Google, Facebook and Twitter are testifying at the House on Thursday about how disinformation spreads across their platforms, an issue that the tech companies were scrutinized for during the presidential election and after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The hearing, held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the first time that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Sundar Pichai of Google are appearing before Congress during the Biden administration. President Biden has indicated that he is likely to be tough on the tech industry. That position, coupled with Democratic control of Congress, has raised liberal hopes that Washington will take steps to rein in Big Tech’s power and reach over the next few years.The hearing is also be the first opportunity since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot for lawmakers to question the three men about the role their companies played in the event. The attack has made the issue of disinformation intensely personal for the lawmakers since those who participated in the riot have been linked to online conspiracy theories like QAnon.Before the hearing, Democrats signaled in a memo that they were interested in questioning the executives about the Jan. 6 attacks, efforts by the right to undermine the results of the 2020 election and misinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic.Republicans sent the executives letters this month asking them about the decisions to remove conservative personalities and stories from their platforms, including an October article in The New York Post about President Biden’s son Hunter.Lawmakers have debated whether social media platforms’ business models encourage the spread of hate and disinformation by prioritizing content that will elicit user engagement, often by emphasizing salacious or divisive posts.Some lawmakers will push for changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that shields the platforms from lawsuits over their users’ posts. Lawmakers are trying to strip the protections in cases where the companies’ algorithms amplified certain illegal content. Others believe that the spread of disinformation could be stemmed with stronger antitrust laws, since the platforms are by far the major outlets for communicating publicly online.“By now it’s painfully clear that neither the market nor public pressure will stop social media companies from elevating disinformation and extremism, so we have no choice but to legislate, and now it’s a question of how best to do it,” said Representative Frank Pallone, the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the committee.The tech executives are expected to play up their efforts to limit misinformation and redirect users to more reliable sources of information. They may also entertain the possibility of more regulation, in an effort to shape increasingly likely legislative changes rather than resist them outright. More
Democrats characterized the far-reaching elections overhaul as the civil rights battle of modern times. Republicans called it a power grab that would put their party at a permanent disadvantage.Democrats began pushing on Wednesday for the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century, laying the groundwork in the Senate for what would be a fundamental change to the ways voters get to the polls and elections are run.At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders made a passionate case for a bill that would mandate automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early and mail-in voting, end gerrymandering that skews congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage and curb the influence of money in politics.The effort is taking shape as Republicans have introduced more than 250 bills to restrict voting in 43 states and have continued to spread false accusations of fraud and impropriety in the 2020 election. It comes just months after those claims, spread by President Donald J. Trump as he sought to cling to power, fueled a deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that showed how deeply his party had come to believe in the myth of a stolen election.Republicans were unapologetic in their opposition to the measure, with some openly arguing that if Democrats succeeded in making it easier for Americans to vote and in enacting the other changes in the bill, it would most likely place their party permanently in the minority.“Any American who thinks that the fight for a full and fair democracy is over is sadly and sorely mistaken,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government.”Mr. Schumer’s rare appearance at a committee meeting underscored the stakes, not just for the election process but for his party’s own political future. He called the proposed voting rollbacks in dozens of states — including Georgia, Iowa and Arizona — an “existential threat to our democracy” reminiscent of the Jim Crow segregationist laws of the past.He chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at Republicans who were promoting them.It was the start of an uphill battle by Senate Democrats, who have characterized what they call the For the People Act as the civil rights imperative of modern times, to overcome divisions in their own ranks and steer around Republican opposition to shepherd it into law. Doing so may require them to change Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster, once used by segregationists to block civil rights measures in the 1960s.Republicans signaled they were ready to fight. Conceding that allowing more people to vote would probably hurt their candidates, they denounced the legislation, passed by the House this month, as a power grab by Democrats intent on federalizing elections to give themselves a permanent political advantage. They insisted that it was the right of states to set their own election laws, including those that make it harder to vote, and warned that Democrats’ proposal could lead to rampant fraud, which experts say has never been found to be widespread.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, on Wednesday at the hearing.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“This is an attempt by one party to write the rules of our political system,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has spent much of his career opposing such changes.“Talk about ‘shame,’” he added later.Some Republicans resorted to lies or distortions to condemn the measure, falsely claiming that Democrats were seeking to cheat by enfranchising undocumented immigrants or encouraging illegal voting. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said the bill aimed to register millions of unauthorized immigrants, though that would remain unlawful under the measure.The clash laid bare just how sharply the two parties have diverged on the issue of voting rights, which attracted bipartisan support for years after the civil rights movement but more recently has become a bitter partisan battleground. At times, Republicans and Democrats appeared to be wrestling with irreconcilably different views of the problems plaguing the election system.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee, which convened the hearing, said states were taking appropriate steps to restore public confidence after 2020 by imposing laws that require voters to show identification before voting and limiting so-called ballot harvesting, where others collect voters’ completed absentee ballots and submit them to election officials. He said that if Democrats were allowed to rush through changes on the national level, “chaos will reign in the next election and voters will have less confidence than they currently do.”The suggestion piqued Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the committee chairwoman, who shot back that it was the current elections system — an uneven patchwork of state laws and evolving voting rules — that had caused “chaos” at polling places.“Chaos is what we’ve seen in the last years — five-hour or six-hour lines in states like Arizona to vote. Chaos is purging names of longtime voters from a voter list so they can’t go vote in states like Georgia,” she said. “What this bill tries to do is to simply make it easier for people to vote and take the best practices that what we’ve seen across the country, and put it into law as we are allowed to do under the Constitution.”With Republicans unified against them, Democrats’ best hope for enacting the legislation increasingly appears to be to try to leverage its voting protections — to justify triggering the Senate’s so-called nuclear option: the elimination of the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to advance most bills.Even that may be a prohibitively heavy lift, though, at least in the bill’s current form. Liberal activists who are spending tens of millions of dollars promoting it insist that the package must move as one bill. But Senator Joe Manchin III, a centrist West Virginia Democrat whose support they would need both to change the filibuster rules and to push through the elections bill, said on Wednesday that he would not support it in its current form.Speaking to reporters in the Capitol, Mr. Manchin said he feared that pushing through partisan changes would create more “division” that the country could not afford after the Jan. 6 attack, and instead suggested narrowing the bill.Voters waited in line to cast ballots in the 2020 election in Suwanee, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There’s so much good in there, and so many things I think all of us should be able to be united around voting rights, but it should be limited to the voting rights,” he said. “We’re going to have a piece of legislation that might divide us even further on a partisan basis. That shouldn’t happen.”But it is unclear whether even major changes could win Republican support in the Senate. As written, the more than 800-page bill, which passed the House 220 to 210 mostly along party lines, is the most ambitious elections overhaul in generations, chock-full of provisions that experts say would drive up turnout, particularly among minorities who tend to vote Democratic. Many of them are anathema to Republicans.Its voting provisions alone would create minimum standards for states, neutering voter ID laws, restoring voting rights to former felons, and putting in place requirements like automatic voter registration and no-excuse mail-in balloting. Many of the restrictive laws proposed by Republicans in the states would move in the opposite direction.The bill would also require states to use independent commissions to draw nonpartisan congressional districts, a change that would weaken the advantages of Republicans who control the majority of state legislatures currently in charge of drawing those maps. It would force super PACs to disclose their big donors and create a new public campaign financing system for congressional candidates.Democrats also said they still planned to advance a separate bill restoring a key enforcement provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted it. The ruling paved the way for many of the restrictive state laws Democrats are now fighting.In the hearing room on Wednesday, Republicans ticked through a long list of provisions they did not like, including a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to make it more partisan and punitive, a host of election administration changes they predicted would cause mass “chaos” if carried out and the public campaign financing system.“This bill is the single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered,” Mr. Cruz said. “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.”Mr. Cruz falsely claimed that the bill would register undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots, too.In fact, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the bill would do nothing to change that or a requirement that people registering to vote swear they are citizens. It would extend the franchise to millions of former felons, as some states already do, but only after they have served their sentences.Senator Amy Klobuchar pressed against Republicans saying that it was the current elections system that had caused “chaos” at polling places.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThough few senators mentioned him by name, Mr. Trump and his false claims of election fraud hung heavily over the debate.To make their case, Republicans turned to two officials who backed an effort to overturn then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory. Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, and Todd Rokita, the attorney general of Indiana, both supported a Texas lawsuit late last year asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in key battleground states Mr. Biden won, citing groundless accusations of voting improprieties being spread by Mr. Trump.On Wednesday, Democrats balked when Mr. Rokita, a former Republican congressman, asserted that their proposed changes would “open our elections up to increased voter fraud and irregularities” like the ones that he said had caused widespread voter mistrust in the 2020 outcome.Senator Jon Ossoff, a freshman Democrat from Georgia, chastised the attorney general, saying he was spreading misinformation and conspiracies.“I take exception to the comments that you just made, Mr. Rokita, that public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election is born of anything but a deliberate and sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat,” Mr. Ossoff said.Mr. Rokita merely scoffed and repeated an earlier threat to sue to block the legislation from being carried out should it ever become law, a remedy that many Republican-led states would most likely pursue if Democrats were able to win its enactment.Election workers re-counting ballots in November in Atlanta.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“You are entitled to your opinion, as misinformed as it may be, but I share the opinion of Americans,” Mr. Rokita said.Sixty-five percent of voters believe the election was free and fair, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in late January, but only 32 percent of Republicans believe that. 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G.O.P. lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are trying to gain broad influence over the mechanics of voting, in an effort that could further undermine the country’s democratic norms.In the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.Now state Republicans are trying to strip these officials of their power.Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections. The bill, which could clear the House as soon as Thursday and is likely to be passed by the Senate next week, would allow state lawmakers to seize control of county election boards and erode the power of the secretary of state’s office.“It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.”It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules. In Tennessee, a Republican legislator is trying to remove a sitting judge who ruled against the party in an election case.Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.The maneuvers risk adding an overtly partisan skew to how electoral decisions are made each year, threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy. The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.“Republicans are brazenly trying to seize local and state election authority in an unprecedented power grab,” said Stacey Abrams, the Democratic voting rights advocate who served as the minority leader in the Georgia State House. She said it was “intended to alter election outcomes and remove state and county election officials who refuse to put party above the people.”She added, “Had their grand plan been law in 2020, the numerous attempts by state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters would have succeeded.”As Mr. Trump carried out his pressure campaign to try to overturn the election results in swing states, he found many sympathetic lawmakers willing to go along with him — but he was rebuffed by numerous election officials, as well as state and federal courts.The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.One of those officials is Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, who rebuffed Mr. Trump in the face of mounting pressure to falsely declare the election rife with fraud, despite multiple audits that affirmed the outcome.In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, repeatedly rejected Donald J. Trump’s entreaties to help him overturn the election results.Audra Melton for The New York TimesBut perhaps more consequential is Republicans’ targeting of county election boards. If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley, the sole Democratic member of the five-person state board.The provision has worried Democratic officials in major left-leaning counties like Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta, and Gwinnett County, as well as their surrounding suburbs. They fear that a partisan state board influenced by the Legislature may enact more restrictive policies for their counties, which are home to the majority of the Democratic voters in the state and a large concentration of the state’s Black voters.Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight. Asked for comment, his office offered only that he was in favor of “strengthened voter ID protections.”At the local level, at least nine Republican counties in Georgia have passed local legislation since November dissolving their current election boards — often composed of three Republicans and two Democrats — and replacing them with a new membership entirely appointed by the county commissioner, resulting in single-party boards.A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.“We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”He joked on Facebook that he would be setting up a GoFundMe page because “I have a pretty good idea which auditors will be fined first.”Election officials checked information on absentee ballot envelopes in Newton, Iowa, in October. A new law in the state restricting access to voting has targeted county election officials. Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesBobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.“There were multiple things that these county auditors did to take the law into their own hands, which is why we put these strict punishments and oversight in for auditors that go beyond the scope of their job,” Mr. Kaufmann said, referring to the auditors who proactively mailed ballots. “That’s the role of the Legislature, not the role of an auditor.”In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight. One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.“They don’t serve any purpose, except for the Legislature just trying to insert themselves into the process, create obstruction, and say that they did something in the name of election integrity without actually doing anything that does that,” said Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona.Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican state senator who has been a sponsor of many of the bills, did not respond to a request for comment.Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills. In North Carolina, which also has a Democratic governor, Republican legislators have publicly discussed introducing a similar bill, but have not yet done so.Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.That member, Aaron Van Langevelde, sided with the two Democrats on the state board in November, clearing the path for Michigan’s Electoral College votes to be awarded to President Biden.If Mr. Van Langevelde is ousted from the board, election officials in Michigan worry that the state Republican Party may again seek to hold up certification of a statewide election and possibly succeed, regardless of the success and security of the vote.It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.And Democrats could find a path to challenging some of these laws in deep-red Kansas.That state’s Republican-led Legislature put forward a proposal similar to those in Georgia and Arizona, seeking to limit the authority of the secretary of state to make emergency decisions and provisions for elections. But the Republican secretary of state, Scott Schwab, informed the Legislature that the proposal “could run afoul” of federal voting laws regarding military and overseas voters.The legislation was quickly amended the next day. More
