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      The Spectacle of the G.O.P.’s Shrinking Tent

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      On May 12, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership post. Her transgression? Vocally rebuking the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.But Cheney’s ouster is just the latest plot development in a story about the contemporary G.O.P. that goes back farther than Nov. 3, 2020, and even Nov. 8, 2016. Over the past decade, the party has decimated its former leadership class. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were pushed out. Eric Cantor lost in the primaries. George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and John McCain were viciously attacked by Donald Trump and his supporters. Cheney is just the latest victim of this ongoing party purge, and she certainly won’t be the last.So how did the Republican Party get here? And what does that tell us about its future — and the future of American democracy?Nicole Hemmer is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and a host of the podcasts “Past/Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” A political historian by training, she has followed the development of the contemporary Republican Party as closely as anyone, with specific attention to the role right-wing media has played in the party’s development.We discuss how Republican Party loyalty has morphed into unwavering fealty to Donald Trump; whether the G.O.P. is a postpolicy party; the vicious feedback loop between the G.O.P. base, right-wing media and Republican politicians; how the party of Lincoln became a party committed to minority rule; Hemmer’s grim outlook on what the current G.O.P.’s behavior will mean for the future of American democracy; and much more.(You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. A full transcript of the episode will be available midday.)Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Amber Lautigar Reichert“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristin Lin. More

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      ‘We Can’t Indulge These Insane Lies’: Arizona G.O.P. Split on Vote Audit

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      Top local Republicans are hitting back at Donald J. Trump and fellow party members in the State Senate over a review of Arizona ballots.For weeks, election professionals and Democrats have consistently called the Republican-backed review of November voting results in Arizona a fatally flawed exercise, marred by its partisan cast of characters and sometimes bizarre methodology.Now, after a week in which leaders of the review suggested they had found evidence of illegal behavior, top Republicans in the state’s largest county have escalated their own attacks on the effort, with the county’s top election official calling former President Donald J. Trump “unhinged” for his online comments falsely accusing the county of deleting an elections database.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” the official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Mr. Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.It is not the first time Republicans in county government have been at odds with the Republicans in the Legislature over the review of the vote. But Mr. Richer is among various Republicans in Maricopa County sounding like they have run out of patience.The five elected supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, plan to meet on Monday afternoon to issue a broadside against what Republican sponsors in the State Senate have billed as an election audit, which targets the 2.1 million votes cast in November in metropolitan Phoenix and outlying areas. The planned meeting follows a weekend barrage of posts on Twitter, with the hashtag #RealAuditorsDont, in which the supervisors assailed the integrity of the review.Those posts followed a letter from the leader of the audit, State Senator Karen Fann, implying that the county had removed “the main database for all election-related data” from election equipment that had been subpoenaed for review. Mr. Trump later published the letter on his website, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities.The supervisors’ Twitter rebuke was scathing. Real auditors don’t “release false ‘conclusions’ without understanding what they are looking at,” one post said, ridiculing the allegation of a deleted database. Nor do real auditors “hire known conspiracy theorists,” a reference to the firm hired to manage the review, whose chief executive has promoted theories that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s loss in Arizona.The Arizona Senate president, Karen Fann, has defended the ballot review. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressJack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, issued a statement calling the suggestion that files were deleted “outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate,” which ordered the audit. In an interview, he said the meeting on Monday would refute claims in the letter from Ms. Fann, the Senate president.“Basically, every one of our five supervisors said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Mr. Sellers said in an interview on Sunday. “What they’re suggesting is not just criticism. They’re saying we broke the law. And we certainly did not.”The real target of the accusations, he said in the interview, “are the professionals who run the elections, people who followed the rules and who did an incredible job in the middle of a pandemic.“A lot of the questions being asked right now have been answered,” he said of those challenging the November results. “But the people asking them don’t like the answers, so they keep on asking.”At issue is the Maricopa County vote. But Ms. Fann’s letter raises the prospect that an exercise dismissed by serious observers as transparently partisan and flawed could become a potent weapon in the continuing effort by Mr. Trump and his followers to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in Arizona, and perhaps elsewhere.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.One poll by High Ground, a Phoenix firm well known for its political surveys, concluded this spring that 78 percent of Arizona Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s false claims that President Biden did not win the November election. A recent Monmouth University poll found that almost two-thirds of Republicans nationally believe that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. More than six in 10 Americans overall believe that he did.Beyond the dispute over supposedly deleted files, Ms. Fann is also pressing the county and the manufacturer of its voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, to release passwords for vote tabulating machines and county-operated internet routers.Dominion, which has been fighting a series of election-fraud conspiracy theories promoted by Trump supporters and pro-Trump news outlets, has said it will cooperate with federally certified election auditors. But it has spurned the firms hired to conduct the Arizona vote review, whose track record in election audits is scant at best.Maricopa County officials have refused to turn over router passwords, which the auditors say they need to determine whether voting machines were connected to the internet and subject to hacking. County officials say past audits have settled that question. The county sheriff, Paul Penzone, called the demand for passwords “mind-numbingly reckless,” saying it would compromise law enforcement operations unrelated to the election.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe election review was born in December as an effort by Republican senators to placate voters who had embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that Mr. Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state was a fraud. Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s votes were cast, was chosen in part because Republicans refused to believe that Mr. Biden had scored a 45,000-vote victory in a county that once was solid G.O.P. territory.What once seemed an effort to mollify angry supporters of Mr. Trump, however, has become engulfed in acrimony as Ms. Fann and other senators have steered the review in a decidedly partisan direction, hiring as its manager a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had previously suggested that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s Arizona loss.An accounting of the review’s finances remains cloudy, but far-right supporters, including the ardently pro-Trump cable news outlet One America News, have raised funds on its behalf. Nonpartisan election experts and the Justice Department have cited troubling indicators that the review is open to manipulation and ignores the most basic security guidelines.Most Arizona Republican officials who have spoken publicly have doggedly supported the review. But State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from a suburban Phoenix district evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, made headlines last week after saying that the conduct of the review made him embarrassed to serve in the State Senate.Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said he hoped the supervisors’ effort to refute the review’s claims on Monday would be the end of the affair.“It’s clearer by the day: The people hired by the Senate are in way over their heads,” his statement said. “This is not funny; it’s dangerous.” More

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      G.O.P. Pursues Harsher Penalties for Poll Workers in Voting Crackdown

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      Heavy fines, felony charges and jail sentences: Republicans seeking to restrict voting are proposing strict punishments for election officials and workers who make errors or violate the rules.AUSTIN, Texas — Anita Phillips has been an election judge in Texas for 17 years, responsible for managing a precinct in Waco, a city of roughly 135,000 people. But over the last four years, the civic duty she prized has become arduous. Harassment by partisan poll watchers has grown increasingly caustic, she has found, and helping voters is ever more treacherous amid a thicket of new rules.Those regulations are likely to grow stricter: Republican lawmakers in Texas, following in the footsteps of their counterparts across the country, are pressing forward with a voting bill that could impose harsh penalties on election officials or poll workers who are thought to have committed errors or violations. And the nationwide effort may be pushing people like Ms. Phillips to reconsider serving their communities.“It’s just so taxing,” Ms. Phillips said. “And if me — I’m in my 40s, and I’m having this much stress — imagine every election worker and election judge that is 65 and over with severe health issues. This is supposed to be a way for them to give back. And it’s supposed to be something that makes them feel good about what they’re doing, but now they’re starting to feel like, ‘Are we going to be safe?’”Ms. Phillips is one of millions of citizens who act as foot soldiers of the American democratic system, working long hours for low pay to administer the country’s elections. Yet this often thankless task has quickly become a key target of Republicans who are propagating former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In their hunt for nonexistent fraud, they have turned on those who work the polls as somehow suspect.That attitude has seeped into new voting laws and bills put forward by Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. More than two dozen bills in nine states, either still making their way through legislatures or signed into law, have sought to establish a rash of harsh new penalties, elevated criminal classifications and five-figure fines for state and local election officials who are found to have made mistakes, errors, oversteps and other violations of election code, according to a review of voting legislation by The New York Times.The infractions that could draw more severe punishment run the gamut from seemingly minor lapses in attention or innocent mistakes to more clearly willful actions in defiance of regulations. In Texas, taking any action that “would make observation not reasonably effective” for a poll watcher would carry new penalties. In Florida, failing to have an election worker continuously supervise a drop box would result in major fines. Willfully flouting new laws, like ones in states including Iowa and Texas that ban sending absentee ballots to voters who have not requested them, would also lead to tougher penalties.“The default assumption that county election officials are bad actors is problematic,” said Chris Davis, the county election administrator in Williamson County, Texas, north of Austin. “There’s so many moving parts and things happening at a given polling place, and innocent mistakes, though infrequent, can happen. And to assign criminal liability or civil liability to some of these things is problematic. It’s a big-time issue that we have.”“These poll workers don’t ever, in our experience, intend to count invalid votes, or let somebody who’s not eligible vote, or prevent somebody who’s eligible from voting,” said Mr. Davis, whose role is nonpartisan. “Yet we’re seeing that as a baseline, kind of a fundamental principle in some of the bills that are being drafted. And I don’t know where it’s coming from, because it’s not based on reality.”With the threat of felonies, jail time and fines as large as $25,000 hanging over their heads, election officials, as well as voting rights groups, are growing increasingly worried that the new penalties will not only limit the work of election administrators but also have a chilling effect on their willingness to do the job.Part of why last year’s voting unfolded so smoothly, without any major hiccups or reports of significant fraud, was a huge effort to recruit more poll workers, who were needed to buttress an aging election work force that was more vulnerable to the coronavirus. Secretaries of state in major battlegrounds like Michigan pleaded for thousands of additional workers as the election drew near. Philadelphia offered a raise in daily pay. And celebrities like LeBron James carried out major poll worker recruitment campaigns.But with heavy fines or even time behind bars increasingly a possibility, election officials fear some of that work could be undone.“The nit-picking by poll watchers and the penalizing of even the smallest of innocent mistakes is going to, over time, drive our most experienced election workers away,” said Isabel Longoria, the nonpartisan election administrator for Harris County, which is home to Houston and the largest county in Texas. “And I think a better solution is to provide more resources for training and education to our election workers, rather than put more bullies in the polls.”Isabel Longoria, the nonpartisan election administrator for Harris County, at a warehouse for election equipment storage.Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York TimesRepublicans in the Texas Legislature say the new penalties are necessary to force prosecutors to punish those who break the law and to ensure that election law is known and followed.“There’s an indication that sometimes lower-level offenses do not get the attention that high-level offenses do,” said State Senator Bryan Hughes, who sponsored one of the Texas voting bills. “And so if there’s a crime, it’s a problem and it’s not being prosecuted, one approach is to raise the level of offense so that the prosecutors know this is a big deal and you should take this seriously.”Mr. Hughes added that he was trying to take into account election officials’ worries of overly harsh penalties. “It’s always going to be balanced,” he said. “But people have to follow the law, and if I’m going to work for the government and I’m going to promise to follow the law and to serve the people of Texas, I’ve got to follow the law.”Some of the penalties that could affect election workers have been wrapped up in other Republican priorities as they overhaul state election codes. In bills across the country, G.O.P.-controlled legislatures have sought to limit the use of drop boxes, which are secure locations where voters can drop off their absentee ballots, rather than relying on the Postal Service.In Florida, the Legislature has mandated that each drop box be continuously staffed and monitored by an election worker. Failure to monitor a box in person carries a $25,000 fine for the election supervisor. The bill met strong opposition from election administrators in Florida, who testified against it and issued a statement criticizing the effort when it became law.“I happen to be a Democrat, but an overwhelming majority of the supervisors of elections in Florida are Republicans, and everybody opposes this law,” said Joe Scott, the supervisor in Broward County. “Because, as an elections administrator, you see that there’s just provisions in this law that are not needed.” Mr. Scott noted that video surveillance of drop boxes in 2020 had been sufficient, with no problems arising, so “having to expand additional resources in order to staff those boxes just feels very unnecessary to us.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Pat Gill, the county auditor in charge of elections in Woodbury County, Iowa, felt a similar pang. “Now you have 99 auditors that are being treated like potential criminals,” he said, referring to the number of counties in the state. “And that’s starting to feel very personal.”This year, Mr. Gill testified against Republicans’ voting bill in the state, which has since been signed into law. The legislation significantly limits the autonomy of auditors to run elections in their counties, particularly their ability to establish satellite in-person early voting centers and mail absentee ballot application forms to voters who haven’t requested them. It also adds new felony punishments for infringements of state law and creates fines of up to $10,000 for “technical infractions.”Part of the success of last year’s election was a huge effort to recruit more poll workers, who were needed to buttress an aging election work force that was more vulnerable to the coronavirus.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe new law, Mr. Gill said, has created tension between Paul Pate, the Republican secretary of state, and county auditors, a relationship that was once more harmonious and is important for election administration to function smoothly.And, Mr. Gill said, the law could make it harder to staff polling sites around the state.One of Mr. Gill’s poll workers is Richard Pope, who has been up early to work on Election Days in Iowa for “30 to 40 years,” most recently in Sloan, a rural town of about 1,200 people on the western border of Iowa.“I’ve never run into an experience where we haven’t had people all of the same mind, and that’s to apply the law equally and fairly,” Mr. Pope said. “I do not believe that there is major wide-scale fraud. If people make mistakes at the polls, they’re honest mistakes. If somebody comes in the wrong polling place, we direct them somewhere else.”Despite the new potential punishments he could face, Mr. Pope said he didn’t currently expect fellow poll workers to quit because of the law. But he added that all it would take was one publicized incident.“If we get in the news — somebody, somewhere gets punished for being a poll worker — then it’s off to the races,” he said.In Arizona, two bills that are stalled in the State Legislature would make it a felony for election officials to violate either of two existing laws. The first bill would bring felony charges against any official who sends early ballots to voters who had not requested them. (The Maricopa County recorder did so last year after the courts allowed an exception to be made because of the coronavirus pandemic.) The second bill would make it a felony to modify any deadline set by the state or federal government in the election calendar.As election officials and workers confront a future fraught with new legal exposure and doubts about their ability to oversee safe and secure voting, many continue to suspect the Republican motivation behind the bills, and the necessity for the measures.“My question as an election worker is, you know: Why?” Ms. Longoria said. “What is the problem that happened in Texas that would have led to that kind of response? And I can’t get an answer to that.”Jennifer Medina More

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      The G.O.P.’s Big Cancellation

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      The party’s cancel mob runs wild on Capitol Hill.Mr. Potato Head is under siege.So are the Muppets, baseball and Coca-Cola.Even a horse fell victim. “It was like a cancel culture kind of thing,” the trainer of Medina Spirit told Fox News after the Kentucky Derby-winning horse failed a drug test.In the Biden era, wailing about cancel culture has emerged as a major tenet of Trumpism, a defining principle of a Republican Party far more focused on fighting culture wars than promoting any kind of policy platform.Yet in recent weeks, it has been Republicans who seem most focused on canceling ideas they don’t like. And on Wednesday morning, the G.O.P. cancel mob came for Liz Cheney.After a defiant speech on Tuesday evening, she was purged from House Republican leadership for refusing to echo Donald Trump’s lies about the election and holding him responsible for the deadly riot on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.Her extraordinary address on the House floor came immediately after Republicans finished a series of remarks condemning the cancellation of a long list of characters that included Pepé Le Pew, J.K. Rowling, Miss Piggy, Goya Foods, George Washington, “the My Pillow guy” and kids wearing MAGA hats.Ms. Cheney made only a sly reference to the irony of the moment.“I know the topic, Mr. Speaker, is cancel culture,” she said, taking her place at the lectern. “I have some thoughts about that. But tonight, I rise to discuss freedom and our constitutional duty to protect it.”Republicans were left tying themselves into knots over whether Ms. Cheney had, in fact, been canceled.“Liz Cheney was canceled today for speaking her mind and disagreeing with the narrative that President Trump has put forth,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said on Wednesday after her ouster.Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who built his postelection brand by casting himself in his media appearances as a victim of cancellation, disagreed.“It’ll give her, certainly, a media platform,” he said. “I don’t think it’s being canceled in terms of she’s being silenced.”Republican cancel culture isn’t limited to Ms. Cheney. At times, the party seems to be trying to cancel the truth entirely.When Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was asked about Ms. Cheney’s replacement — Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — and her vote to object to the 2020 election results, he gave a head-spinning answer.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy replied after leaving a meeting at the White House with President Biden on Wednesday. “I think that is all over with, sitting here with the president today.”Six days earlier, Ms. Stefanik had raised doubts about the integrity of the election in interviews with Trump allies that helped cement her status as the front-runner for Ms. Cheney’s post.In Florida and Texas, Republican officials who once praised the handling of the 2020 election in their states now argue that a widespread lack of faith in the electoral system necessitates broadly restrictive voting laws. That justification is widespread: Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a reason to pass bills that restrict voting.It’s also slightly dizzying: As election experts told my colleague Maggie Astor for an article this week, it was the “fear of fraud” stoked by Republicans with their false claims of voter malfeasance that eroded public trust in the 2020 results.And in a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Republicans cast the riot at the Capitol in January as little more than a normal day, rewriting what many of them personally witnessed while huddling for safety on the House floor. Several downplayed the violence of the day, describing the Trump supporters who attacked the complex as “peaceful patriots.”“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall, showed people in an orderly fashion in between the stanchions and ropes taking pictures,” Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia said. “If you didn’t know the footage was from Jan. 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Sure, an average tourist stop that involved violently crushing police officers, stealing historic property and urinating in Nancy Pelosi’s office.There are plenty of reasons to believe that despite this effort to rewrite history, voters will not cancel Republicans at the polls in 2022. The party out of power typically picks up seats in a new president’s first midterm elections. Redistricting favors Republicans. And a number of House Democrats are opting against re-election bids, a sign of anxiety about their political prospects.But internal strife is never good for a party’s re-election chances. Nor is staking your political brand on the pet issues of a former president whose never-all-that-healthy favorability ratings have slipped further since leaving office. Voters generally don’t respond well to lies that are easily disproved by video footage and their own memories of a national trauma.The question that worries some Republican strategists as they look toward next year’s midterm elections is not whether the country agrees with their fears of cancellation.It’s whether voters still believe in consequences.Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or message me on Twitter at @llerer.By the numbers: 1.7 million… That’s the number of people who traveled through airports on Sunday, the most since the start of the pandemic.… SeriouslyYou’re all invited to my mask burning party. Just let me dig out my lipstick first.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election

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      Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Biden’s victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trump’s allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion. More

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      No Evidence of Voting Fraud? For the G.O.P., It’s No Problem.

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      Having fueled mistrust in elections, Republicans are pointing to voters’ fears to justify new voting laws.You’ve heard this koan a million times: If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?Now let’s try a variation: If a tree doesn’t fall, and nobody was there to watch it stay upright, could you be persuaded to believe that it made a crashing sound anyway?What am I driving at here? Read the latest article by our reporter Maggie Astor, and you’ll get it: In state legislatures across the country, Republicans have put forward hundreds of bills this year aimed at limiting access to the ballot — and they’ve justified it with the argument that, even if widespread election fraud isn’t a real problem (it isn’t), the fact that some voters believe it is ought to be reason enough to do something about it.For decades, suspicion of voter fraud has far outpaced actual instances of impropriety. That is partly because, as Republican politicians have increasingly focused on restricting access to the ballot, they have justified it with a crescendo of claims (mostly fallacious) about improprieties.But not until President Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election last year had false claims of voter fraud become a central political issue. Nowadays, addressing supposed fraud is at the heart of the G.O.P. platform. Representative Liz Cheney is proof of that: This week, she lost her Republican leadership post in the House because she was willing to call out Trump on “the big lie.”This stuff gets very meta very fast — so to wrap my head around it all, I contacted my colleague Maggie to ask her what she’d found in the process of reporting her story. Here’s what she said.Hi, Maggie. Your story is specifically about restrictive voting laws, but it’s also about something broader: the way that, as you describe it, “disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come.” To what degree was this a longstanding problem — and how much is it something that Donald Trump and his supporters have taken to a new level?The basic problem predates President Trump. You can see a similar pattern in, say, the campaigns against routine childhood vaccinations. The disinformation about supposed side effects spreads, and eventually you start to see politicians talking about how they’ve spoken to lots of parents who have serious concerns about vaccinations and arguing that those parents’ concerns should be accommodated in policy.There’s no question that we’re seeing this happen more because of Trump and his supporters. But it’s not that the feedback-loop pattern is becoming more common, per se — it’s that Trump has promoted so much disinformation, and the disinformation campaigns among his supporters have become so enormous and effective, that we end up seeing the pattern more just because of the volume of disinformation.One quotation that didn’t make it into my article was from Matt Masterson, a fellow at the Stanford Internet Observatory who was previously a senior election security official in the Department of Homeland Security. He told me: “There’s no question, none, that this was the broadest campaign that I have seen to undermine confidence in elections, and so now the push is broader and more pervasive across the states because the lies are broader and more pervasive across the states.”States across the country are using worries about fraud to justify legislation. How widespread have voter-restriction laws become at the state level this year? Are we looking at something on a historic scale?It’s absolutely on a historic scale. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting-related bills, legislators in 47 states have introduced a total of 361 bills with restrictive provisions this year. For comparison, in 2017, the Brennan Center counted 99 bills in 31 states.That doesn’t mean the push to restrict voting is new, of course. Far from it — 99 bills in 2017 is still a lot, and more broadly, these sorts of laws have proliferated since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But the scale is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and many of the individual bills are really sweeping.In your story, you quote a state senator from North Carolina, Ralph Hise, who wrote to you: “Elected officials have a responsibility to respond to declining voter confidence, and failure to do so is dangerous to the health of our republic.” But what about responding to declining voter confidence by simply shoring up voters’ faith in the election system, given that widespread fraud basically isn’t real? Are there any Republicans who seem willing to do that?You do see a very small number of Republicans doing that. Think Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger. But the Republicans who are saying that the election was secure, and who have tried to push other Republicans to acknowledge the same, have not been received well by the broader party, to put it mildly. Just yesterday, of course, Cheney was ousted from her leadership position in the House Republican caucus because she denounced the disinformation.So yes, there are Republicans who are willing, but they’re just not influential voices within the party now — even when they’re people like Romney who were once extremely influential voices within the party.Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Elections

      Biden Courts Democrats and Republican Leaders on Infrastructure

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      The meeting produced little progress, underscoring the political challenge for President Biden as he seeks to exploit the narrowest of majorities in Congress to revive the country’s economy.WASHINGTON — To hear the participants tell it, President Biden’s first-ever meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress was 90 minutes of productive conversation. It was cordial. There were no explosions of anger. More