Rumors and Misinformation

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      What Twitter’s Shake-Up Could Mean: Midterm Misinformation Run Amok

      by

      Declining trust in institutions is fostering mistrust about voting, leading many Americans to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.A recent exchange between David Becker, a nonpartisan elections expert, and a Twitter user named “@catturd2” — an account with nearly a million followers that sometimes exchanges posts with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter — offered a telling example of why misinformation is such an intractable problem.“Funny how we could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago,” the account tweeted. The false claim racked up 67,000 likes.“With all due respect to catturd,” Becker clarified to his much smaller list of 15,000 followers, “we have never, in the history of our nation, come close to counting all the votes on election night. Every state takes weeks to count all the ballots (incl military) and officially certify the results. Every state. Always.”Why does this matter? Because false information about the mechanics of voting fosters mistrust and is leading many Americans — overwhelmingly on the right — to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.And by the way, Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including members of the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation.“It’s an egregiously irresponsible thing to do just days before midterms that are likely to be mired by voter intimidation, false claims of election rigging and potential political violence,” said Jesse Lehrich, a co-founder of the nonprofit watchdog group Accountable Tech.First: Lest there be any doubt, the notion that America ever counts every vote on election night is both flatly untrue and easily checkable. California, for instance, has never come anywhere within shouting distance of that goal. Close races there can take weeks to call. New York State is notoriously slow at counting votes; in 2020, local election boards did not start counting absentee ballots until seven days after Election Day. Some waited even longer.There’s no conspiracy here. It takes a long time to count votes in a country as big as the United States. This is why states have processes in place to certify the results over the course of weeks. Alaska, for instance, isn’t planning to tabulate and release unofficial results of its election until Nov. 23. That’s entirely normal.But with Twitter in turmoil, Lehrich is worried about how misinformation about voting might spread unchecked over the next few days and weeks. “Things are going to fall through the cracks, even if Elon doesn’t do anything intentional to sabotage stuff,” he said.Tweeting alonePart of what’s going on here is declining levels of trust in the pillars of American civic life — a decades-long trend captured vividly in “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s famous book from 2000.The numbers are even worse now. Jeffrey Jones, an analyst at Gallup, noted in July that Americans had reached “record-low confidence across all institutions.”News organizations polled near the bottom of Gallup’s list. Just 16 percent of the public said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent said the same for TV news.The differences by party were stark. Just 5 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of independents said they had high confidence in newspapers, and only 35 percent of Democrats said the same. All of these numbers had declined from a year earlier.Coming in the middle of a midterm election in which journalists are trying to inform millions of voters about what’s happening and to help them assess the ideas and personal characteristics of the candidates, Gallup’s finding was alarming.And that’s just one data point. A recent poll by Bright Line Watch, a project run by a group of political scientists, found that 91 percent of Democrats were confident that their vote would be counted, versus just 68 percent of Republicans. That lack of trust is the starter fuel of election denialism.Organized groups on the right have been going after the press for decades, and conservative politicians often take up the chorus. Richard Nixon’s ill-fated vice president, Spiro Agnew, called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism”; Donald Trump attacked the news media as the “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ripped the “corporate media” despite being a frequent guest on Fox News — which, yes, is a corporation. If Walter Cronkite walked among us today, he’d be pilloried as a liberal shill.The left has its own beef with the news media. This week, Dan Froomkin, a reliably acerbic liberal critic of political coverage, wrote a post asking, “Why aren’t mainstream journalists sounding the alarm about the threat to democracy?” He lamented how, in his view, political reporters were “just covering it like another partisan fight.”Political reporters do cover partisan fights; there’s an election going on, and readers care about who is winning, who is losing and why.But mainstream news outlets also invested heavily this year in coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, election denialism, political violence, dangers to election workers, plots to disrupt the midterms, misinformation and threats to democracy more generally. There’s been a lot of tough, critical coverage of election denialism.Local news is often another story. Here’s a tweet from KTNV, a television station in Nevada: “Democrat Cisco Aguilar and Republican Jim Marchant are running to be the next Secretary of State in Nevada. And both have the same focus: election integrity.”The text of the article implies that Marchant, the leader of a far-right slate of candidates for top election posts in several states who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, is spreading “unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.” But it doesn’t say so explicitly.In an interview, Aguilar pointed to the KTNV article as an example of how news coverage had treated the candidates too evenhandedly and was giving Marchant a platform he didn’t deserve. (Marchant did not respond to an email sent to three of his known addresses.)When I asked Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, how he planned to combat misinformation if he wins his race against Mark Finchem, a far-right Republican who has stoked conspiracy theories about elections, he made a similar argument.“Actually, it’s not a hard problem,” Fontes said, urging journalists to stop “chasing shiny objects” and “crazy conspiracy theories” and focus instead on what election workers do.“As secretary of state,” he said, “I plan on celebrating them, elevating them and making sure that guys like you, respectfully, don’t ignore them in favor of the weirdos.”Facts are stubborn things, except when they’re not.Increasingly, though, millions of Americans aren’t getting their information from people like me. They’re following sources that have none of the checks and balances — however imperfect — that most mainstream outlets have in place.Over the last few decades, as it has stoked mistrust in the mainstream media, the right has built up a closed-off alternate ecosystem that includes Fox News, but also fringier outlets like Newsmax or One America News Network. But even those places put their names behind their stories, and viewers have a good sense of the perspective and slant they represent.This morning, I asked @catturd2 on Twitter if the user behind the account planned to issue a correction or delete the incorrect information. No response yet, but the account wrote in another tweet: “LOL – Look what Twitter did to my tweet – trying to fact check it with the fake news commie NYT,” followed by five laugh-cry smiley face emojis.Surveys show that younger people increasingly trust what they see on social media about as much as they trust traditional news sources. Data also shows that readers often can’t tell the difference between news reporting and opinion, even when they are labeled explicitly. Social media timelines jumble them all up together.And, as the Pew Research Center has noted, people don’t even agree on what a “fact” is: “Members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side,” Pew wrote in 2018.Those people staking out drop boxes in Arizona to intimidate voters based on false information, or demanding the hand-counting of ballots in Nevada? They aren’t getting their information from mainstream sources.How do honest and fair reporters reach them with accurate news? That’s a much deeper societal challenge, and nobody seems to have any good answers.What to read tonightDonald Trump is expected to announce a third White House campaign soon after the midterms, possibly as soon as Nov. 14, Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman write.In Wisconsin, one the nation’s most evenly divided swing states, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant, even if he wins re-election, Reid Epstein reports.San Luis, Ariz., a small farming outpost on the border, played a critical role in the making of “2,000 Mules,” a conspiratorial movie about supposed election fraud in 2020. Now some residents are scared to vote, Jack Healy and Alexandra Berzon write.Sheera Frenkel looks at the phenomenon of “participatory misinformation” on the internet, where hunting for voter fraud has became a game.viewfinderDon Bolduc arriving on Wednesday at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., for his debate against Senator Maggie Hassan.John Tully for The New York TimesFist-pumping in a classic political battlegroundAt 5:30 p.m., there was an all-out sprint from campaign workers, volunteers and supporters.The goal: to find the best view of a parking lot where Senator Maggie Hassan and her Republican challenger, Don Bolduc, would arrive for their final debate. Each candidate’s supporters fought for position so their signs would be visible.Inside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, the stage was being set for Hassan, a Democrat, and Bolduc, whose Senate race has tightened in recent weeks, giving Republicans hope for an upset victory.Hassan was the first to arrive, working the line for about a minute before heading inside. Within 30 seconds or so, Bolduc arrived, to cheers and jeers.He pumped his fists in front of supporters, and I captured this image — a look at grass-roots political theater in New Hampshire.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      A Dire Outlook as Climate Action Falls Short

      by

      More from our inbox:Pennsylvania Political Ads: ‘A Flood of Falsehoods’A Republican No MoreBig Lie LawyersProtests in Brazil: A Harbinger for the U.S.?Flooded farmland in Hadeja, Nigeria, in September.Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Climate Pledges Fizzle as Havoc Looms for Globe” (front page, Oct. 26):Whatever happened to mutually assured destruction?During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union never attacked each other directly for fear of a nuclear war that would destroy both nations. But today, world-threatening climate change is apparently not enough to bring the U.S. and China to the negotiating table.Without prompt and drastic action by both nations (and others) to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is aimed at a global temperature rise of at least 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Tens of millions of people worldwide will be displaced from their homes. Hundreds of millions will suffer severe drought and food shortages due to crop loss. Billions will face dangerous, possibly deadly heat waves.Are the U.S. and China assuming that their populations will magically be spared? Or is an existential threat to both our nations no longer considered enough for our leaders to take seriously?Amy LivingstonHighland Park, N.J.To the Editor:There’s no doubt that our planet is fast approaching the point of no return for avoiding a future of unimaginable, ever-worsening climate chaos. As you report, the perilous position we find ourselves in is due largely to decades of gross inaction from the world’s biggest climate polluters. The only question now is what to do about it.Your article notes that some progress in the name of climate action has recently been made in the United States, with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act allocated for encouraging “cleaner technologies.” But the fact is that incentivizing the development of cleaner energy sources will not by itself make a dent in carbon emissions.Our recent analysis showed that while use of renewable energy rose significantly in the previous decade, fossil fuel production increased even more. In truth, the only way to meaningfully reduce climate-killing carbon pollution is to halt it at its source, by stopping new oil and gas drilling and fracking, and preventing the buildout of new infrastructure like pipelines and export terminals that encourage the devastating extraction.Wenonah HauterWashingtonThe writer is the founder and executive director of Food & Water Watch.To the Editor:Carbon and methane emissions cause temperature to increase, and we are reading that methane emissions are rising faster than ever. At the same time, climate pledges around the globe to cut those emissions are falling short.Many people understand the potential negative effects of climate change, but don’t see the urgency to address it. We need to rectify all of these failings and create the will for faster action. Our citizens must understand and believe that the cost of inaction is too high and demand stronger action now.Perhaps some people are more worried about the immediate economic and inflation aspects. I want to remind them that every negative effect of climate change is bad for the economy and even more inflationary. Climate-related weather events (wildfires, floods, drought, hurricanes, etc.) drain production and supply and escalate demand and prices.If we don’t decrease the use of fossil fuels soon enough, climate migration will become a large issue. Such movements will harm local economies both to and from those migration areas. Climate inaction is too costly to ignore, and we need action now.Jonathan LightLaguna Niguel, Calif.Pennsylvania Political Ads: ‘A Flood of Falsehoods’Chester County elections workers scanning mail-in ballots in 2020. Unsigned letters circulated in the county this year warning residents that their votes might not have counted.Matt Slocum/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “With Push of a Button, Lies Flood a Swing State” (front page, Nov. 1):As a Pennsylvania voter, I find that it has become increasingly difficult to cut through the deluge of disinformation that has flooded the airwaves, our mailboxes and social media channels in connection with the coming election.Regrettably, far too many people choose to peddle propaganda in a brazen attempt to mislead voters, and the relative ease with which deceptive and denigrating material is widely disseminated degrades an already tenuous political system.With an electorate that is already jaded and exceedingly cynical because of the rancor that has become so pervasive in American politics, we cannot afford to give voters yet another reason to stay home on Election Day. Pennsylvanians deserve better than a flood of falsehoods that threatens to wash away the decency and credibility that we desperately need in our electoral process.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa.A Republican No More Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:My grandfather was a conservative Pennsylvania Republican. My father was a conservative Pennsylvania Republican. And I naturally became a conservative Pennsylvania Republican, holding onto it as I moved over the years to Ohio, Connecticut and New York.Several months ago, I registered as a Democrat, pen twitching in my hand, yet knowing that it was time to speak up the only way politicians comprehend.Donald Trump brought me to this. He has yet to wear his proper label. He is, and should be publicly recognized as, a cult leader: unbelievably dangerous, persuasive and dense.Until Republican Party leaders recognize that they have been “drinking the Kool-Aid” because they are afraid of the cult leader, I have no use for them, nor should any clear-thinking Republican.J.H. QuestIthaca, N.Y.Big Lie Lawyers T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesTo the Editor:The continued attack on our free and democratic elections revealed in “Same Trump Lawyers Gear Up for Midterms” (news article, Nov. 3) is even more disturbing in light of the fact that almost all of the lawyers mentioned in the article face outstanding bar complaints from The 65 Project, the bipartisan accountability group I run.These complaints were filed months ago, and in the face of inaction by the various state bar associations, these Big Lie lawyers have continued their attacks on our democracy.Until the state bar associations take action by referring these attorneys to the relevant disciplinary committees and imposing sanctions — up to and including disbarment — their actions described in this article will just be another stop along the way to more attempts to overturn elections in 2022 and 2024.Michael TeterSalt Lake CityProtests in Brazil: A Harbinger for the U.S.?Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro gathering outside the Brazilian Army’s national headquarters on Wednesday in Brasília, the capital. Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Denying Defeat, Bolsonaro’s Supporters Ask Army to Step In” (news article, Nov. 3):It used to be that we were afraid of a coup, of a strongman or the army taking over against the will of the people. Now it seems that the people themselves are the problem. In Brazil, tens of thousands are protesting the results of their recent election, demanding a new election or, most chillingly, a military government “permanently,” as one put it.This sounds disconcertingly familiar, as millions in this country are demanding similarly authoritarian forms of government. The focus here has been on disinformation and conspiracy theories circulating on social media, and on Donald Trump himself, America’s Bolsonaro. But the real problem, here as in Brazil, is the inexplicable desire of millions of ordinary citizens to live under an authoritarian regime.We should hope that Brazil’s reaction to Jair Bolsonaro’s loss is not a harbinger of our own experience two years hence.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Town That Inspired Debunked Voter Fraud Film Braces for Election Day

      by

      It was a jumpy, 20-second video clip that touched off a firestorm: During a local primary election two years ago, the former mayor of this farm town of San Luis, Ariz., was filmed handling another voter’s ballot. She appeared to make a few marks, and then sealed it and handed a small stack of ballots to another woman to turn in.That moment outside a polling place in August 2020 thrust this town along the southern border into the center of stolen-election conspiracy theories, as the unlikely inspiration for the debunked voter fraud film “2,000 Mules.”Activists peddling misinformation and supported by former President Donald J. Trump descended on San Luis. The Republican attorney general of Arizona opened an investigation into voting, which is still ongoing. The former mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years probation for ballot abuse — or what the attorney general called “ballot harvesting” — a felony under Arizona law.Ms. Fuentes is one of four women in San Luis who have now been charged with illegally collecting ballots during the primaries, including the second woman who appears on the video. But there have been no charges of widespread voter fraud in San Luis linked to the presidential election. Liberal voting-rights groups and many San Luis residents say that investigators, prosecutors and election-denying activists have intimidated voters and falsely tied their community to conspiracy theories about rampant, nationwide election fraud. The film “2,000 Mules,” endorsed by Mr. Trump, has helped to keep those claims alive, and is often cited by election-denying candidates across the country.But the episode also unleashed long-simmering and real frustrations in San Luis over political control. Some residents cheered what they call a long-overdue crackdown on local corruption, which they say is a real issue.It has all added up to a sense of division and unease in a close-knit city of roughly 37,000 where Cesar Chavez died, a place built by generations of Mexican farm workers, where lines of migrant workers travel back and forth every day across the border to harvest lettuce and broccoli.“They’re running scared,” Luis Marquez, a retired police officer and school board member, said of voters. “They feel they’re going to get nailed if they do something wrong.”Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesThe border wall in San Luis, on Sunday. Lines of migrant workers from this close-knit town travel back and forth every day across the border to harvest lettuce and broccoli.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesNow, many here say they are afraid to cast ballots or help with voting in the midterms, for fear of receiving a visit from investigators, being monitored by activists or running afoul of a relatively new Arizona ballot abuse law that largely prohibits collecting ballots on behalf of voters other than family members or housemates.The practice is legal in more than a dozen states, and often used to help housebound seniors or people in low-income neighborhoods and rural areas vote. Conservative critics have called it a potential source of voter manipulation and fraud, though their allegations of widespread election fraud are unfounded. The terms “mule” or “ballot harvesting” are used to describe the practice of illegally ferrying other voters’ ballots to polls.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.“They’re running scared,” Luis Marquez, a retired police officer and school board member running for re-election in San Luis, said of voters. “They feel they’re going to get nailed if they do something wrong.”As early voting began last month, Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that two more San Luis residents — one of them a current city councilwoman — had been indicted on charges of ballot abuse during the 2020 primary election. Separately, the Yuma County sheriff is investigating 26 potential voting cases across this county in Southwest Arizona.José Castro, a local Baptist pastor, has been trying to persuade his congregants to go to the polls. Two longtime friends, Tere Varela and Maria Robles, normally visit a senior center during elections to guide Spanish-speaking retirees through the ballots. But they said they were planning to stay away in November.“We don’t want to help,” Ms. Robles said one recent afternoon. “We’re afraid.”“Is that the purpose of this?” Ms. Varela asked. “To keep us from voting?”Members of the Sol Azteca dance company performed on Sunday at a church fund-raising festival at San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesA sunset view from San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church on Sunday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesSan Luis offers a glimpse into the tensions unfurling across this strained democracy as Election Day approaches. So far, more than 33 million early votes have been cast nationwide with few reported problems, but there have also been flashes of volatility: election workers have been threatened, poll watchers have staked out ballot boxes and elected officials are girding for challenges to the legitimacy of the midterm results.Arizona was a flash point in Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims immediately after the 2020 presidential election, and the scene of a divisive partisan audit of ballots. Crowds of angry, armed Trump supporters gathered nightly outside election offices.Since then, Republican nominees for statewide office have spread falsehoods about election fraud, and several voters have filed complaints saying that they had been filmed and questioned by strangers at ballot drop boxes. The volunteer poll watchers, some masked or armed, described themselves as there for “election security.” Their presence is part of an organized national effort by conservative groups galvanized by lies that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.The authorities in the Phoenix area have stepped up security in response. The sheriff of Maricopa County has referred two incidents to prosecutors, and said his officers would sit outside polling places “if that’s what we have to do to protect democracy.”Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is also Arizona’s Democratic candidate for governor, has referred six voter-intimidation complaints to the U.S. Justice Department. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona restricted election-monitoring activists from filming voters, carrying weapons near polling sites or spreading election falsehoods online.The upheaval over voting in San Luis erupted shortly after the 2020 primaries. That year, the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office announced on Aug. 7 that it had opened an investigation in coordination with the attorney general’s office after local elections officials received complaints of election tampering.Some of those complaints had originated with two local Republicans, David Lara and Gary García Snyder.Campaign signs, including for Luis Marquez, seen on Sunday near the border wall in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMayor-elect Nieves Riedel in San Luis on Monday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesAfter they complained to law enforcement, Mr. Snyder and Mr. Lara said they were contacted by two leaders with True the Vote, a conservative vote-monitoring group based in Houston that for years has promoted false claims of rampant fraud. The organization’s leaders, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, traveled to Arizona later in 2020 to meet with Mr. Snyder and Mr. Lara, the men said.Inspired by what they heard in Yuma, True the Vote focused on proving, through voter fraud, the existence of an elaborate national conspiracy to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election — a theory since debunked by experts, governmental agencies and media outlets that have looked into it.This spring, Salem Media Group, a conservative media company, and the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza released “2,000 Mules,” which centered on Ms. Engelbrecht, Mr. Phillips and their claims. In the film, an unidentified woman from San Luis appears, saying that the city’s elections have been “fixed” for years by local politicians running a cash-for-votes scheme.Ms. Fuentes, the former San Luis mayor, and the woman seen on the video with her, Alma Juarez, were charged in December 2020 with violating Arizona’s ballot abuse law. Earlier this year, they each pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, for accepting four ballots of other San Luis residents.Ms. Fuentes became the first person in Arizona sentenced to jail time under the law, enacted in 2016. Ms. Fuentes’s lawyer, Anne Chapman, criticized the sentence as “an unjust result in a political prosecution.”Activists with the Arizona Voter Empowerment Task Force, a voter-rights group, said the law prohibiting “ballot harvesting” had the effect of criminalizing ballot collection efforts that had helped older residents and people with disabilities in rural and low-income communities like San Luis get their ballots to the polls.People bought breakfast from a food truck before sunrise in San Luis on Monday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesDavid Lara was one of two local Republicans who complained of election tampering in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesWhile more than 80 percent of Arizona voters typically cast early ballots, many of them through the mail, there is no home-mail delivery in San Luis, limited public transportation and many people do not have cars, making it harder to vote.Ms. Fuentes has many admirers in San Luis who praised her for fighting to register and turn out voters.She first ran for office in 1994 and served multiple terms on the City Council and was still on the school board when she was sentenced last month to 30 days in jail. Now, she will be barred from holding elected office or voting.“My mom is not a criminal,” said her daughter, Lizette Esparza. “It’s a political persecution.”Ms. Fuentes had also been charged with forgery and conspiracy, but ultimately pleaded guilty only to a charge relating to ballot collection. A sentencing report from her defense team said she was “extremely remorseful for her involvement in this matter” but had done nothing fraudulent. Her lawyers wrote that in the Election Day video in which Ms. Fuentes handled another voter’s ballot, she was actually checking to make sure the ovals were properly filled.But other residents said the criminal investigation shined light on real corruption and bare-knuckle politics inside their city. In 2012, for example, Ms. Fuentes and others in city government challenged a political rival’s ability to hold office based on her limited English proficiency.In interviews, several residents said they had grown cynical about politics in San Luis. They felt that local officials hoarded power and traded votes for government jobs and benefits. In a court filing, prosecutors with the attorney general’s office said the video of Ms. Fuentes indicated she had been “running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods.”Nieves Riedel, who runs a prominent home-construction business, is a Democrat who rejects lies about the 2020 election. But she was also convinced that some of her city’s leaders had for years tilted local races and manipulated voters into casting ballots for powerful incumbents.“Was voter fraud being committed in the city of San Luis? Yes,” she said. “But not at the national level. It’s small-town politics.”Over the summer, Ms. Riedel won an election to become San Luis’s next mayor. She said she was concerned with improving the jammed two-lane roads and providing better jobs and colleges to keep young adults from leaving. She said she was dismayed, but not surprised, to see outsiders latch onto her city’s troubles for their own ends.“Both parties are capitalizing on this, to settle scores and prove points,” Ms. Riedel said. “I can assure you that both parties can care less about the people of San Luis.”As voting gets underway in San Luis and the candidates for City Council and school board knock doors and plant campaign signs along the desert roads, Mr. Lara said he would again be on the hunt for irregularities. He is coordinating efforts to monitor the main ballot drop box in San Luis.“We have our people,” he said, but declined to be more precise about their activities. “We don’t want to tip off the enemy.” More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies

      by

      FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — Standing before a dozen volunteer poll workers gathered in an old wood-paneled community auditorium that would soon be transformed into a polling place, Mac Warner invited his audience to look at his socks.They were stitched with the hashtag #TRUSTEDINFO2020: a souvenir of a campaign that Mr. Warner, West Virginia’s secretary of state since 2017, had waged with his fellow secretaries across the country before the last presidential election, an effort to raise awareness of disinformation efforts targeting voters.“Don’t get your information from Facebook,” he told the poll workers. “Don’t get it from Google. Don’t get it from social media. Get it from trusted sources.”A former officer in the Army with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps who has assisted government ministries running elections in Afghanistan, Mr. Warner earned the respect of his fellow secretaries of state — most of whom, like Mr. Warner, serve as the top election official in their states — in 2020 for his particular commitment to fighting misinformation and security threats at the ballot box.But some of them have been more reluctant to praise him since December 2020, when he climbed onstage at a rally outside the State Capitol in Charleston the month after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election, holding up a sign that said “STOP THE STEAL.”“It’s so important to keep him in office,” Mr. Warner, speaking of Mr. Trump, told an interviewer from Right Side Broadcasting Network at the rally.Today, Mr. Warner walks a delicate line. He acknowledges that Joseph R. Biden Jr. “was elected,” in 2020, but questions whether the election was run fairly in some states. He has worked to debunk conspiracy theories about voting machines and laments the rise of fringe views within his party. But he also compares the voting rights bills congressional Democrats tried to pass this year to the foreign influence campaigns he fought in 2020, and he blames the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in part on the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a long-shot challenge to the election from Texas’s attorney general, which he supported.“I believe that’s what spurred on the Jan. 6 people,” he said.In 40 states, secretaries serve as the chief elections officer, overseeing the voting process — a role that only rarely attracted attention until Mr. Trump and his allies, promoting a range of lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, thrust it into the center of partisan politics.Mr. Trump has continued to loudly blame his loss on secretaries of state in several states — most often Georgia, where Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, resisted Mr. Trump’s direct entreaties to overturn the election. A handful of secretary of state races have commanded national political attention and spending this year as Trump loyalists like Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan have campaigned for the office on claims of the stolen election.“When I ran for this job in 2019, the first question I always got was, ‘What does your office do?’” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky. “I don’t get that question anymore.”Testing voting machines in Fayette County in West Virginia. Voting machines are often a target of conspiracy theorists.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesRegardless of how the most outspoken election deniers perform on Tuesday, the furious political climate has already transformed an office whose occupants have often prided themselves on their remove from partisan trench warfare. At a time when Republican and Democratic congressmen barely talk to each other, secretaries of state still speak with warmth about their colleagues from the other party. They socialize over cocktails at annual meetings and exchange text messages over election law cases they vigorously disagree about.But those relationships have been tested by the last two years, several secretaries of state said in interviews. Democrats have been offended by some Republicans’ sowing doubt without evidence about elections in other states. Republicans charge that Democrats have used Mr. Trump’s election lies as a pretext to paint legitimate conservative policy aims as threats to democracy.“It’s still a good working relationship,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state. “But I would say it is fraught with the realities of what’s going on outside of us.”Secretaries of state, who are elected on party tickets in most of the country, have never been immune to partisan politics. Still, “as we were approaching Election Day” in 2020, said Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the Democratic secretary of state of New Mexico who at the time was the chairwoman of the national association, “we still felt very much on the same page.”But as Mr. Trump’s election claims persisted, fissures began to appear. Democrats were dismayed to see Mr. Warner and Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, speak at Stop the Steal rallies at their respective state capitols in late 2020.At a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in August 2021, in response to a wave of highly partisan reviews billed as “audits” of the 2020 election results, a group of four Republican and four Democratic secretaries of state drew up a resolution setting clear standards for audits. The measure passed unanimously with the exceptions of Mr. Warner, who voted against it, and Mr. Ashcroft, who abstained, and shortly after that left the association entirely in protest of the measure, which he argues violated the group’s bylaws.Neither Mr. Warner nor Mr. Ashcroft directly claims that the election was stolen. Both have instead maintained that a significant number of ballots were cast “outside of the law” in key states on account of expansions in remote voting made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and that these issues have yet to be sufficiently settled in court.Although many legal challenges to the election were rejected by judges on the merits, others were dismissed on technical grounds. One postelection challenge, to the use of drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin, won in the state’s Supreme Court this year.Some Republican secretaries who stood by the outcome of the 2020 election have nevertheless given credence to lesser claims, directly or indirectly. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, has publicly rebuked conspiracy theorists’ claims about the election in Ohio, but also raised questions about “things that happened in other states” in interviews. “Could it have changed the electoral count?” he said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in April. “Who knows.”In December, Louisiana’s Voting Systems Commission, a panel led by the Republican secretary of state Kyle Ardoin, invited Phil Waldron, a prominent election conspiracy theorist, to testify at a hearing. In January, Mr. Ardoin announced that Louisiana would no longer participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a cross-state information-sharing platform used to maintain voter rolls, which had lately become the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.This has angered some Democratic secretaries of state, who note that election officials and often secretaries of state themselves have faced personal threats as a result of the conspiracy theories that their Republican counterparts have been reluctant to check.In October, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making threats against Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, on social media.Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, and her counterpart in Kentucky, Michael Adams, at a conference for secretaries of state this summer.Matthew Hinton/Associated PressBut some Democratic secretaries of state said they were sympathetic to the increasingly difficult position that colleagues like Mr. LaRose and Mr. Ardoin are in. Since last year, a grass-roots movement driven by right-wing conspiracy theories has put pressure on election officials, even those in deeply red states, to respond to convoluted claims of malfeasance.Mr. Adams of Kentucky and John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state of Alabama, have both been vilified by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and influential election denier, over bogus claims of fraudulent votes in their states, both of which Mr. Trump won easily in 2020.In solidly Republican Montana, the state’s Republican secretary of state has had to fend off efforts to gain access to voting machines in several counties by activists and Republican state legislators who had attended an August 2021 conference hosted by Mr. Lindell.As recently as that August, “we didn’t really see election denialism happening in all 50 states,” Mr. Adams said, noting that it was limited to battlegrounds. Now, he said, “it’s gone everywhere.”Republican secretaries were also rattled this spring when Republican incumbents in South Dakota and Indiana lost primary elections to candidates who refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in the last election. Running to replace Barbara Cegavske, the term-limited Republican secretary of state of Nevada, is Jim Marchant, a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a Trump-loyalist group funded by prominent election deniers. He is leading in the polls.Mr. Adams, who ran for office in 2019 on Republican priorities like strict voter I.D. laws and regular clearance of voter rolls, has found that his record on these issues counts for little with many in the crowds he now encounters at Republican events in his state, he said.“How do you reason with someone that really thinks that Venezuelan socialists are hacking into paper ballot counters that don’t have a modem?” said Mr. Adams, who is seeking re-election next year. “All I can do is just say all day, every day, that it’s not true. And just hope that I’ll survive.”Several secretaries of state said that, as the prospect of an election denier bloc emerging among their ranks drew closer to reality, it had drawn Democrats and Republicans closer together as they openly wondered what would become of their once-convivial interactions.“It may be very challenging to have some of these same conversations or bipartisan happy hours with people who are spewing nonsense about us or demonizing those of us who are not in their party,” said Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state.A preview of sorts was offered this July in Baton Rouge at the annual conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State. During a meeting there with federal cybersecurity officials, Cord Byrd, Florida’s newly appointed Republican secretary of state, launched into a speech condemning electronic voting, according to several people in attendance. (A spokesman for Mr. Byrd said this account was “unequivocally false.”)But the secretaries also took heart when Mr. Merrill, a generally Trump-friendly Republican, offered his own experience as an election observer in Russia as testimony that paper ballots were just as manipulable as electronic voting.Mr. Merrill is term-limited, and will be leaving his post this year. A spokeswoman for Wes Allen, the Republican running to replace him, said that Mr. Allen believed the 2020 election was “conducted in a safe and secure manner” in Alabama. Asked who Mr. Allen believed had won the 2020 election nationwide, she declined to answer. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      America Can Stop Violent Extremism

      by

      Americans are right to be nervous about the coming midterm elections, and not only about the results. It will be the first time that the nation’s electoral machinery will be tested after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.I’m nervous for another reason as well: the embrace of violent extremists by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party. Today’s editorial, the first in a series on violent extremism, will explore this peril and what we can do about it.During the past five years, incidents of political violence have soared. Last month’s attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives, is just the most recent example, and federal officials are deeply worried about the threat of violence around the midterms.That’s why it is so alarming to read about far-right extremists and paramilitary and anti-government groups planning to act as poll watchers. Masked, armed people in military gear were spotted last month in a parking lot in Arizona where early voting has been underway. This kind of intimidation is illegal under the Voting Rights Act, but it appears extremist poll watchers are undeterred even as they face lawsuits and restraining orders.It’s an ill omen that it has become routine to see heavily armed extremists at political events or harassing librarians or poll workers or members of Congress. It is even more concerning that some Republican politicians, in their own coded and not so coded ways, are encouraging it.To be clear, the overwhelming number of incidents of political violence in recent years has come from the right. Most Republicans oppose it without reservation, and we have seen conservatives targeted. Yet one faction of Republicans is using the threat of violence not only against their opponents on the left, but also in their battle to win control of the G.O.P.There are things we can do to push this violent extremism offstage, as the arrest of more than 900 people for the attack on Jan. 6 shows. Every state, for instance, has laws banning private paramilitary groups — they just rarely use them, as the editorial explains.In the past few years, there have been plenty of points at which it feels as if the future of the nation hangs in the balance. Peaceful politics are all we have to manage our deeply divided democracy. Lose that and the country is headed for a dark place — that’s what this series of pieces on extremism is trying to help avoid. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right

      by

      One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground “truth,” like the left-wing conspiracies of old.One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform’s imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?But the alternative to Musk’s reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.But everyone understands those efforts’ current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it’s notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter’s then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It’s a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving “rightward,” but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush’s national security state.The point of emphasizing this reversal isn’t to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn’t that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day’s events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.Social-media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌ ‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim, not simply at transgression, but at truth itself.In addition to my two weekly columns, I’m starting a newsletter, which will go out most Fridays and cover some of my usual obsessions — political ideas, religion, pop culture, decadence — in even more detail. You can subscribe here.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More