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      3 Election Officials Resigned in a Texas County

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      The recent resignations of all three election officials in a Texas county — at least one of whom cited repeated death threats and stalking — has created turmoil in an area that President Donald J. Trump won by 59 percentage points in 2020.The exodus left Gillespie County, which has 27,000 residents and is about 75 miles west of Austin, without an election staff just over two months before early voting begins for the Nov. 8 midterm election, though the state planned to provide support to the county.The resignations of the county’s elections administrator, Anissa Herrera, and the office’s remaining two employees were confirmed to The New York Times on Thursday by Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state. He said the county did not provide specific details about the nature of the threats.“Threats on election officials are reprehensible, and we encourage any and all election officials who are targeted by such threats to report them to law enforcement immediately,” Mr. Taylor said in an email, adding that “unfortunately, threats like these drive away the very officials our state needs now more than ever to help instill confidence in our election system.”The resignations were reported earlier by The Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post, which Ms. Herrera told, “The year 2020 was when I got the death threats.”“I’ve been stalked, I’ve been called out on social media,” she said to The Standard-Radio Post. “And it’s just dangerous misinformation.”Ms. Herrera did not elaborate to the news organization on the nature of the grievances that led to the threats against her and the other two employees who resigned. She did not immediately respond on Thursday to a message left at a phone number listed for her.In a resignation letter that was obtained through a public records request by Votebeat, a journalism nonprofit focused on election administration and voting access, Ms. Herrera said that, in addition to threats, misinformation and insufficient staff, “absurd legislation” had completely changed her job.Republicans in Texas enacted restrictions last year that included an end to balloting methods introduced in 2020 to make voting easier during the pandemic, like drive-through polling places and 24-hour voting. The state also barred election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee-ballot applications and from promoting the use of voting by mail, while greatly empowering partisan poll watchers.It was not clear whether Ms. Herrera had filed any complaints with the Gillespie County sheriff’s office or the Fredericksburg Police Department, neither of which immediately responded to requests for comment on Thursday. More

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      On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms

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      The fast-growing platform’s poor track record during recent voting abroad does not bode well for elections in the U.S., researchers said.In Germany, TikTok accounts impersonated prominent political figures during the country’s last national election. In Colombia, misleading TikTok posts falsely attributed a quotation from one candidate to a cartoon villain and allowed a woman to masquerade as another candidate’s daughter. In the Philippines, TikTok videos amplified sugarcoated myths about the country’s former dictator and helped his son prevail in the country’s presidential race.Now, similar problems have arrived in the United States.Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times. Some videos urged viewers to vote in November while citing debunked rumors raised during the congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. TikTok posts have garnered thousands of views by claiming, without evidence, that predictions of a surge in Covid-19 infections this fall are an attempt to discourage in-person voting.The spread of misinformation has left TikTok struggling with many of the same knotty free speech and moderation issues that Facebook and Twitter have faced, and have addressed with mixed results, for several years.But the challenge may be even more difficult for TikTok to address. Video and audio — the bulk of what is shared on the app — can be far more difficult to moderate than text, especially when they are posted with a tongue-in-cheek tone. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, also faces many doubts in Washington about whether its business decisions about data and moderation are influenced by its roots in Beijing.“When you have extremely short videos with extremely limited text content, you just don’t have the space and time for nuanced discussions about politics,” said Kaylee Fagan, a research fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. TikTok had barely been introduced in the United States at the time of the 2018 midterm elections and was still largely considered an entertainment app for younger people during the 2020 presidential election. Today, its American user base spends an average of 82 minutes a day on the platform, three times more than on Snapchat or Twitter and twice as long as on Instagram or Facebook, according to a recent report from the app analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok is becoming increasingly important as a destination for political content, often produced by influencers.The company insists that it is committed to combating false information. In the second half of 2020, it removed nearly 350,000 videos that included election misinformation, disinformation and manipulated media, according to a report it released last year. The platform’s filters kept another 441,000 videos with unsubstantiated claims from being recommended to users, the report said.TikTok says it removed nearly 350,000 videos that included election misinformation, disinformation and manipulated media in the second half of 2020.TikTokThe service blocked so-called deepfake content and coordinated misinformation campaigns ahead of the 2020 election, made it easier for users to report election falsehoods and partnered with 13 fact-checking organizations, including PolitiFact. Researchers like Ms. Fagan said TikTok had worked to shut down problematic search terms, though its filters remain easy to evade with creative spellings.“We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our platform and elections with utmost seriousness,” TikTok said in a statement. “We continue to invest in our policy, safety and security teams to counter election misinformation.”But the service’s troubling track record during foreign elections — including in France and Australia this year — does not bode well for the United States, experts said.TikTok has been “failing its first real test” in Africa in recent weeks, Odanga Madung, a researcher for the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, wrote in a report. The app struggled to tamp down on disinformation ahead of last week’s presidential election in Kenya. Mr. Madung cited a post on TikTok that included an altered image of one candidate holding a knife to his neck and wearing a blood-streaked shirt, with a caption that described him as a murderer. The post garnered more than half a million views before it was removed.“Rather than learn from the mistakes of more established platforms like Facebook and Twitter,” Mr. Madun wrote, “TikTok is following in their footsteps.”TikTok has also struggled to contain nonpolitical misinformation in the United States. Health-related myths about Covid-19 vaccines and masks run rampant, as do rumors and falsehoods about diets, pediatric conditions and gender-affirming care for transgender people. A video making the bogus claim that the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May had been staged drew more than 74,000 views before TikTok removed it.Posts on TikTok about Russia’s war in Ukraine have also been problematic. Even experienced journalists and researchers analyzing posts on the service struggle to separate truth from rumor or fabrication, according to a report published in March by the Shorenstein Center.TikTok’s design makes it a breeding ground for misinformation, the researchers found. They wrote that videos could easily be manipulated and republished on the platform and showcased alongside stolen or original content. Pseudonyms are common; parody and comedy videos are easily misinterpreted as fact; popularity affects the visibility of comments; and data about publication time and other details are not clearly displayed on the mobile app.(The Shorenstein Center researchers noted, however, that TikTok is less vulnerable to so-called brigading, in which groups coordinate to make a post spread widely, than platforms like Twitter or Facebook.)During the first quarter of 2022, more than 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation were viewed by users before being removed, TikTok said. Last year, a group of behavioral scientists who had worked with TikTok said that an effort to attach warnings to posts with unsubstantiated content had reduced sharing by 24 percent but had limited views by only 5 percent.Researchers said that misinformation would continue to thrive on TikTok as long as the platform refused to release data about the origins of its videos or share insight into its algorithms. Last month, TikTok said it would offer some access to a version of its application programming interface, or A.P.I., this year, but it would not say whether it would do so before the midterms.Filippo Menczer, an informatics and computer science professor and the director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, said he had proposed research collaborations to TikTok and had been told, “Absolutely not.”“At least with Facebook and Twitter, there is some level of transparency, but, in the case of TikTok, we have no clue,” he said. “Without resources, without being able to access data, we don’t know who gets suspended, what content gets taken down, whether they act on reports or what the criteria are. It’s completely opaque, and we cannot independently assess anything.”U.S. lawmakers are also calling for more information about TikTok’s operations, amid renewed concerns that the company’s ties to China could make it a national security threat. The company has said it plans to keep data about its American users separate from its Chinese parent. It has also said its rules have changed since it was accused of censoring posts seen as antithetical to Beijing’s policy goals.The company declined to say how many human moderators it had working alongside its automated filters. (A TikTok executive told British politicians in 2020 that the company had 10,000 moderators around the world.) But former moderators have complained about difficult working conditions, saying they were spread thin and sometimes required to review videos that used unfamiliar languages and references — an echo of accusations made by moderators at platforms like Facebook.In current job listings for moderators, TikTok asks for willingness to “review a large number of short videos” and “in continuous succession during each shift.”In a lawsuit filed in March, Reece Young of Nashville and Ashley Velez of Las Vegas said they had “suffered immense stress and psychological harm” while working for TikTok last year. The former moderators described 12-hour shifts assessing thousands of videos, including conspiracy theories, fringe beliefs, political disinformation and manipulated images of elected officials. Usually, they said, they had less than 25 seconds to evaluate each post and often had to watch multiple videos simultaneously to meet TikTok’s quotas. In a filing, the company pushed for the case to be dismissed in part because the plaintiffs had been contractors hired by staffing services, and not directly by TikTok. The company also noted the benefits of human oversight when paired with its review algorithms, saying, “The significant social utility to content moderation grossly outweighs any danger to moderators.”Election season can be especially difficult for moderators, because political TikTok posts tend to come from a diffuse collection of users addressing broad issues, rather than from specific politicians or groups, said Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.“The bottom line is that all platforms can do more and need to do more for the shared set of facts that social democracy depends on,” Mr. Brookie said. “TikTok, in particular, sticks out because of its size, its really, really rapid growth and the number of outstanding issues about how it makes decisions.” More

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      In Wisconsin, Robin Vos Fires the 2020 Election Investigator He Hired

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      Wisconsin Republicans’ 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million and turned up no evidence of significant fraud, ended on Friday when the top G.O.P. lawmaker who first announced the inquiry fired the man he had entrusted to lead it.Under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, had moved in June 2021 to hire Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, to scrutinize the state’s 2020 results.But after weeks of open tension between Mr. Vos and Mr. Gableman — partly over the speaker’s refusal to entertain decertifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, and partly over Mr. Gableman’s endorsement of a primary challenger to Mr. Vos — the speaker said he was shutting down the investigation. The firing was first reported by The Associated Press.Mr. Gableman has become a key driver of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin and a ringleader of far-right Republicans’ effort to overturn the state’s presidential results, which cannot legally be done.Mr. Vos told WISN-TV in Milwaukee that he had fired Mr. Gableman by letter and that the two had not spoken in recent weeks.“I really don’t think there’s any need to have a discussion,” Mr. Vos said. “He did a good job last year, kind of got off the rails this year.”Wisconsin Democrats, who have castigated Mr. Gableman and his investigation from its beginning, celebrated his firing and blasted Mr. Vos for hiring Mr. Gableman in the first place.“Finally,” said Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Until now, Mr. Vos had remained publicly supportive of the state-funded investigation, even as Mr. Gableman amplified increasingly outlandish theories about the 2020 election. In March, the former justice presented state legislators with a report that said they should consider decertifying the election — a proposal that has no basis in state or federal law but that has nonetheless been adopted by Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters in Wisconsin.As Mr. Vos resisted the decertification push, Mr. Gableman continued to promote false election claims. Last week, he endorsed Mr. Vos’s Trump-backed primary opponent, a far-right political neophyte named Adam Steen who came within a few hundred votes of toppling Mr. Vos.At an election-night party after his narrow victory on Tuesday, Mr. Vos said that Mr. Gableman was “an embarrassment to the state.”In the following days, Mr. Vos defended his decision to start the Gableman investigation but signaled that he would soon end it.“There were problems with the 2020 election that we need to fix — all of those things are real,” he said Wednesday on a conservative talk radio show in Milwaukee. “But somehow, Justice Gableman, as the investigation began to come to an end, decided it was more important to play to Donald Trump and to play to the very extreme of our party who thought we could unconstitutionally overturn the election than it was to be responsive to his client, which was the Legislature.”Mr. Vos said in that interview that he had given Mr. Gableman “some very clear direction: ‘You can’t be involved in politics, you can’t go to rallies. We want you to be an independent voice.’ And he broke that.”Yet when Mr. Vos announced the hire in June 2021, he did so at the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention. And he did not publicly discipline Mr. Gableman when the former justice attended a political event with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has funded many attempts to overturn the election, or when he appeared at campaign events with local Republican Party chapters.Mr. Vos and his spokeswoman did not respond to messages on Friday. Mr. Gableman’s spokesman, Zak Niemierowicz, said he had resigned from the investigation last month. Mr. Gableman did not respond to messages.Francesca Hong, a state assemblywoman from Madison, was one of four Democratic legislators who demanded a state audit of Mr. Gableman’s work on Wednesday. On Friday, she said Mr. Vos was equally responsible.“Michael Gableman, fully enabled & encouraged by Robin Vos, has been nothing but a conspiracy theorist and fraudster,” she wrote on Twitter, “sowing division in our state by undermining the integrity of our elections at a price tag of more than 1 million Wisconsin taxpayer dollars.”Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement, “Like Dr. Frankenstein, Robin Vos created a political monstrosity that wound up turning on its creator.” More

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      Liz Cheney embraces her role in the Jan. 6 inquiry in a closing campaign ad.

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      Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming is highlighting her role as the top Republican on the Jan. 6 committee in a closing ad for her all but doomed re-election campaign, as polls show her badly trailing her Trump-backed opponent, Harriet Hageman, just five days before the primary.But the nearly two-and-a-half-minute ad released online Thursday appeared aimed as much at a national audience as at the Republican primary voters in Wyoming who will decide the fate of Ms. Cheney, the state’s lone member of the House.“The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious,” Ms. Cheney said as the ad opens. “It preys on those who love their country. It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.”Ms. Cheney, who has been vilified by former President Donald J. Trump and many of his supporters, defended the work of the special House committee that is investigating the 2021 attack on the Capitol and efforts by Mr. Trump to overturn the 2020 election results.Ms. Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, has acknowledged her political peril. A poll released on Thursday by the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center showed Ms. Cheney trailing Ms. Hageman by nearly 30 points.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAug. 9 Primaries: In Wisconsin and a handful of other states, Trump endorsements resonated. Here’s what else we learned and a rundown of some notable wins and losses.Arizona Governor’s Race: Like other hard-right candidates this year, Kari Lake won her G.O.P. primary by running on election lies. But her polished delivery, honed through decades as a TV news anchor, have landed her in a category all her own.Climate, Health and Tax Bill: The Senate’s passage of the legislation has Democrats sprinting to sell the package by November and experiencing a flicker of an unfamiliar feeling: hope.Disputed Maps: New congressional maps drawn by Republicans in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio were ruled illegal gerrymanders. They’re being used this fall anyway.She is the last of the 10 House Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment to stand before voters in a primary this year. Three have lost: Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, Tom Rice of South Carolina and Peter Meijer of Michigan. Two others survived their primaries, and four declined to seek another term.Titled “The Great Task,” the ad is being promoted on social media, but is not appearing on television, according to Jeremy Adler, a campaign spokesman for Ms. Cheney.In the ad, Ms. Cheney described Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud as his legacy and said that the nation has an obligation to hold those responsible for fomenting violence.“History has shown us over and over again how these types of poisonous lies destroy free nations,” Ms. Cheney said of those insisting that Mr. Trump won the election. “No one who understands our nation’s laws, no one with an honest, honorable, genuine commitment to our Constitution would say that. It is a cancer that threatens our great republic.”Ms. Cheney did not mention Ms. Hageman by name in her ad, but drew a comparison between her opponents in Wyoming and election-denying candidates across the nation. Last week, Ms. Hageman repeated Mr. Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged.Tim Murtaugh, an adviser for Ms. Hageman’s campaign, accused Ms. Cheney of abandoning Wyoming. “This video is basically an audition tape for CNN or MSNBC,” he said.Ms. Cheney’s renunciation of Mr. Trump — and her vote to impeach him last year — have already come at a political price. The Wyoming Republican Party censured her in February 2021, a month after Ms. Cheney’s impeachment vote. House Republicans later ousted Ms. Cheney as the party’s No. 3 leader in the chamber, replacing her with Representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist from New York.As the ad closed, Ms. Cheney said that she would always seek to preserve peaceful transitions of power, “not violent confrontations, intimidation, and thuggery,” and added, “where we are led by people who love this country more than themselves.” More

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      Are Democrats Bungling Their Outreach to Voters?

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      More from our inbox:Republican Outrage Over the Raid at Mar-a-Lago‘Willful Ignorance’ and the Alex Jones Case Seb AgrestiTo the Editor:Re “Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One,” by Lara Putnam and Micah L. Sifry (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Aug. 1):The on-the-ground organizing the writers favor is admirable. But in deriding letters to voters, they are far off the mark. The science is clear: Large-scale randomized controlled trials over multiple election cycles have shown that Vote Forward’s partially handwritten letters significantly boost voter turnout.A peer-reviewed research study of our 2020 program “The Big Send” found that it was among the highest impact voter turnout programs ever measured in a presidential election. Vote Forward rigorously vets volunteers and encourages personal, heartfelt messages that reach beyond their bubbles — an authentic approach that works.Letter writing is a scalable, accessible activity doable year round from anywhere. It is an enjoyable entry point to electoral activism for many volunteers who later engage in deeper community organizing. And letters can be stockpiled to send at the optimal time, leaving space for other voter contact activities like canvassing and phone banking.Letters to voters are the kind of thoughtful, sustainable approach to volunteer engagement in elections that should be encouraged if we hope to build a strong civic fabric.Scott FormanOakland, Calif.The writer is the founder and executive director of Vote Forward, a nonprofit that encourages citizens to vote.To the Editor:Lara Putnam and Micah L. Sifry nailed it in their guest essay on the serious shortcomings of Democratic Party reliance on “churn and burn” email fund-raising with apocalyptic messaging. My inbox has been swamped this year with emails from Democratic PACs and candidates around the country desperately begging for money to salvage the party’s chances in the coming election. Nancy Pelosi was sending me more than an email a day, many of which had that dispiriting tone.On May 19, I finally unsubscribed to her Nancy Pelosi for Congress PAC, and sent her an email setting forth my reasons: Too much hyperbole (for example, “I critically need 3,372 gifts before midnight” was a constant refrain; there didn’t seem to be a midnight that went by that wasn’t a crucial financing deadline); too much emotion (she was shocked, disgusted, devastated); and, most troubling, too desperate.As I explained in my email, that sense of desperation “signals likely failure and has discouraged me from devoting my time and financial resources in the Democratic midterm election effort.”By contrast, the fund-raising emails I have received from President Biden have been more upbeat, and I have responded by making contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Democrats need to shift quickly from their current desperation-tinged tone to a more confident approach, with emphasis on the president’s and the party’s positive accomplishments.Allan HubbardEverett, Wash.To the Editor:The grass isn’t any greener on the other side of the aisle. My spam folder is full of similarly apocalyptic visions of what the “Biden/Pelosi/Schumer” troika will inflict on America should Republicans not sweep to congressional power in November. It’s easy enough to just hit “delete.”What is more concerning (for both red and blue voters) is that none of these desperate and destructive pleas are for anything other than money. No information on how to get more involved in the process. No links to more dispassionate discussions of the issues. Just unwarranted demonization of some of our fellow citizens via bolded adjectives and lots of exclamation marks. We can do better.Peter J. PittsNew YorkTo the Editor:Buried in the unfortunate tone of the guest essay are many points that we can agree on. Locally led conversations about elections are extremely powerful and strengthen our democracy. It is, however, a false dichotomy to say we must choose between these important local efforts and the participation of other activists in remote voter mobilization techniques. We can and must do both.Lara Putnam and Micah L. Sifry cherry-pick a study reporting a negative impact of sending postcards to voters. However, many more studies show a positive impact of between 0.4 and 2 percent. While these are small impacts, they are sufficient to make a difference in close elections.Campaigns generally do not have the capacity to knock on every door, especially in rural areas. Not all voters will be home when a canvasser shows up, and not all will answer a phone call. An all-of-the-above approach helps ensure that as many people as possible participate in our democracy.Ronnie CohenBerkeley, Calif.The writer is executive director of Activate America.Republican Outrage Over the Raid at Mar-a-LagoF.B.I. agents reportedly searched former President Donald J. Trump’s residence and office, as a well as a storage unit, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “A Simmering Feud Peaks in a Search of Trump’s Home” (front page, Aug. 10):Surely if former President Barack Obama had left the White House and taken with him government documents, some of which may have been classified and all of which should have been delivered to the National Archives, the Republicans would have raised holy hell. But, of course, when a Republican former president does the same they sing a different tune.As that former president often says, “so sad.”Samuel A. OppenheimFranklin, Mass.To the Editor:Republican politicians and Fox News are outraged over the Justice Department raid of Donald Trump’s home and are demanding that the department explain why it did this. What they fail to mention is that Mr. Trump received a copy of the search warrant and an inventory of what was taken. If this was an outrageous intrusion, Mr. Trump could disclose the purpose of the search warrant and what was taken.Mr. Trump has already turned over 15 boxes that were wrongfully removed from the White House, implicitly indicating that this was all he originally removed. If the dozen or so boxes that were seized on Monday should have been turned over earlier, this is a clear indication that Mr. Trump knowingly broke the law.Charles W. MurdockChicagoThe writer is a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.‘Willful Ignorance’ and the Alex Jones Case Pool photo by Briana SanchezTo the Editor:As a longtime Newtown resident and the husband of a retired Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher, I followed the defamation suit against Alex Jones closely. I largely agree with the sentiments expressed in “Jones Got His Comeuppance, but Don’t Expect an End to the Lies” (front page, Aug. 7).Throughout history, groups have proved their allegiance to a political/cultural movement by adhering to bizarre and clearly false claims of their leaders. Blood libels. AIDS as a bioweapon. Pizzagate.Individuals adhering to the ideology of a political/cultural/fringe group will knowingly embrace outright falsehoods to further prove their allegiance. The wilder the conspiracy, the greater the sense of belonging. Willful ignorance: the team jersey of today.Steven TenenbaumNewtown, Conn. More

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      Hunting for Voter Fraud, Conspiracy Theorists Organize ‘Stakeouts’

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      One night last month, on the recommendation of a man known online as Captain K, a small group gathered in an Arizona parking lot and waited in folding chairs, hoping to catch the people they believed were trying to destroy American democracy by submitting fake early voting ballots.Captain K — which is what Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who espouses voting fraud conspiracy theories, calls himself — had set the plan in motion. In July, as states like Arizona were preparing for their primary elections, he posted a proposal on the messaging app Telegram: “All-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post received more than 70,000 views.Similar calls were galvanizing people in at least nine other states, signaling the latest outgrowth from rampant election fraud conspiracy theories coursing through the Republican Party.In the nearly two years since former President Donald J. Trump catapulted false claims of widespread voter fraud from the political fringes to the conservative mainstream, a constellation of his supporters have drifted from one theory to another in a frantic but unsuccessful search for evidence.Many are now focused on ballot drop boxes — where people can deposit their votes into secure and locked containers — under the unfounded belief that mysterious operatives, or so-called ballot mules, are stuffing them with fake ballots or otherwise tampering with them. And they are recruiting observers to monitor countless drop boxes across the country, tapping the millions of Americans who have been swayed by bogus election claims.In most cases, organizing efforts are nascent, with supporters posting unconfirmed plans to watch local drop boxes. But some small-scale “stakeouts” have been advertised using Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Mr. Trump. Several websites dedicated to the cause went online this year, including at least one meant to coordinate volunteers.Some high-profile politicians have embraced the idea. Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, asked followers on Twitter whether they would “be willing to take a shift watching a drop box to catch potential Ballot Mules.”Supporters have compared the events to harmless neighborhood watches or tailgate parties fueled by pizza and beer. But some online commenters discussed bringing AR-15s and other firearms, and have voiced their desire to make citizens’ arrests and log license plates. That has set off concerns among election officials and law enforcement that what supporters describe as legal patriotic oversight could easily slip into illegal voter intimidation, privacy violations, electioneering or confrontations.“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”Screenshot from Truth SocialMr. Keshel, whose post as Captain K inspired the Arizona gathering, said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, like California, but is mostly illegal in battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.“In order to quality-control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Mr. Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Mr. Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and have mostly not been adapted to ballot boxes.In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the coronavirus pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among right-wing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.“Ballot mules” have quickly become a central character in false stories about the 2020 election. Between November 2020 and the first reference to “2000 Mules” on Twitter in January 2022, the term “ballot mules” came up only 329 times, according to data from Zignal Labs. Since then, the term has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter, 63 percent of the time alongside discussion of the documentary. Salem Media Group, the executive producer of the documentary, claimed in May that the film had earned more than $10 million.Rise of the ‘Ballot Mule’Mentions of “ballot mules” surged in May after the debunked documentary “2000 Mules” claimed that an army of operatives stuffed ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

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      Digital mentions of “ballot mules” per week
      Note: Includes mentions on digital platforms including social media, broadcast, traditional media, and other online sites. Source: Zignal LabsBy The New York TimesThe push for civilian oversight of ballot boxes has gained traction at the same time as legislative efforts to boost surveillance of drop-off sites. A state law passed this year in Utah requires 24-hour video surveillance to be installed at all unattended ballot boxes, an often challenging undertaking that has cost taxpayers in one county hundreds of thousands of dollars. County commissioners in Douglas County in Nebraska, which includes Omaha, voted in June to allocate $130,000 for drop box cameras to supplement existing cameras that the county does not own.In June, Arizona lawmakers approved a budget that included $500,000 for a pilot program for ballot box monitoring. The 16 boxes included will have round-the-clock photo and video surveillance, rejecting ballots if the cameras are nonfunctional, and will accept only a single ballot at a time, producing receipts for each ballot submitted.Many supporters of the stakeouts have argued that drop boxes should be banned entirely. Some have posted video tours of drop box sites, claiming that cameras are pointed in the wrong direction or that the locations cannot be properly secured.Melody Jennings, a minister and counselor who founded the right-wing group Clean Elections USA, claimed credit for the Arizona gathering on Truth Social and said it was the group’s “first run.” She said in a podcast interview that any surveillance teams she organized would try to record all voters who used drop boxes. The primaries, she said, were a “dry run” for the midterms in November. Ms. Jennings did not respond to requests for comment.After the Arizona gathering, organizers wrote to high-profile Truth Social users, including Mr. Trump, claiming without evidence that “mules came to the site, saw the party and left without dropping ballots.” Comments on other social media posts about the event noted that the group could have frightened away voters wary of engaging, drawn people planning to report the group’s activities or simply witnessed lost passers-by.On Aug. 2, Ms. Lake and several other election deniers prevailed in their primary races in Arizona, where a GoFundMe campaign sought donations for “a statewide volunteer citizen presence on location 24 hours a day at each public voting drop box location.” Kelly Townsend, a Republican state senator, said during a legislative hearing in May that people would train “hidden trail cameras” on ballot boxes and follow suspected fraudsters to their cars and record their license plate numbers.“I have been so pleased to hear about all you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Ms. Townsend said.Surveillance plans are also forming in other states. Audit the Vote Hawaii posted that citizens there were “pulling together watch teams” to monitor the drop boxes. A similar group in Pennsylvania, Audit the Vote PA, posted on social media that they should do the same.In Michigan, a shaky video filmed from inside a car and posted on Truth Social showed what appeared to be a man collecting ballots from a drop box. It ended with a close-up shot of a truck’s license plate.In Washington, a right-wing group launched Drop Box Watch, a scheduling service helping people organize stakeouts, encouraging them to take photos or videos of any “anomalies.” The group’s website said all its volunteer slots for the state’s primary early this month were filled.The sheriff’s office in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, is investigating after election signs popped up at several drop box sites in the state warning voters they were “under surveillance.”One Gab user with more than 2,000 followers offered stakeout tips on the social network and on Rumble: “Get their face clearly on camera, we don’t want no fuzzy Bigfoot film,” he said in a video, with his own face covered by a helmet, goggles and cloth. “We need to put that in the Gab group, so there’s a constant log of what’s going on.”Calls for civilian surveillance have expanded beyond ballot boxes. One post on a conservative blog cheers on people who monitor “any suspect activities before, during and after elections” at ballot-printing companies, vote tabulation centers and candidates’ offices.Paul Gronke, the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College, suggested that activists hoping for improved election security should push for more data transparency measures and tracking programs that allow voters to monitor the status of their absentee ballot. He said he had never heard of a legitimate example of dropbox watchdogs successfully catching fraud.The prospect of confrontations involving self-appointed overseers largely untrained in state-specific election procedures, charged up by a steady diet of misinformation and militarized rhetoric, is “just a recipe for disaster” and “puts at risk the voters’ ability to cast their ballots,” Mr. Gronke said.“There are ways to secure the system, but having vigilantes standing around drop boxes is not the way to do it,” he said. “Drop boxes are not a concern — it’s just a misdirection of energy.”Cecilia Kang More

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      Michigan Officials Push to Investigate Matthew DePerno in 2020 Election Scheme

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      In early 2021, with the turmoil of a bitterly contested presidential contest still fresh, several election clerks in Michigan received strange phone calls.The person on the other end was a Republican state representative who told them their election equipment was needed for an investigation, according to documents from the Michigan attorney general’s office.They obliged. Soon, the machines were being picked apart in hotels and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, outside Detroit, by conservative activists hunting for what they believed was proof of fraud, the documents said. Weeks later, after the equipment was returned in handoffs in highway car-pool lots and shopping malls, the clerks found that it had been tampered with, and in some cases, damaged.The revelations of possible meddling with voting machines have set off a political tsunami in Michigan, one of the most critical battleground states in the country.The documents detail deception of election officials and a breach of voting equipment that stand out as extraordinary even among the volumes of public reporting on brazen attempts by former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters to scrutinize and undermine the 2020 results.But one of the most politically striking elements of the case is the identity of one of the people implicated in the scheme by the office of the attorney general: Matthew DePerno, who is now the presumptive Republican nominee for that very post.Mr. DePerno, a lawyer who rose to prominence challenging the 2020 results in Antrim County and has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, is vying to unseat Dana Nessel, a Democrat who is Michigan’s top law enforcement official and who fought attempts to undermine the state’s election.Now, evidence provided by her office places Mr. DePerno at one of the “tests” of voting equipment and suggests that he was a key orchestrator of “a conspiracy” to gain improper access to machines in three counties, Roscommon and Missaukee in Northern Michigan and Barry, a rural area southeast of Grand Rapids. The tampering resulted in physical damage, but the attorney general’s office indicated that there was no evidence that there was “any software or firmware manipulation” of the equipment.Even before the new accusations, the prospective race between Ms. Nessel and Mr. DePerno was one of the most closely watched contests for attorney general in the country.During his campaign, Mr. DePerno has continued to falsely claim that mail voting is rife with fraud and that voting records were deleted or destroyed after the election, and he has pledged to “prosecute the people who corrupted the 2020 election.” He has also said he would begin inquiries of Ms. Nessel, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, all Democrats.His candidacy has worried election experts, Democrats and even many Republicans, who fear that he could use his powers to carry out investigations based on fraudulent claims or engage in other forms of meddling in elections.Mr. DePerno has pledged to carry out inquiries of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Ms. Nessel and Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, all Democrats.Jake May/The Flint Journal, via Associated PressYet because Mr. DePerno is the likely Republican nominee — he clinched the state party’s endorsement this year and is expected to be formally nominated later this month — any investigation by Ms. Nessel is politically fraught and risks a conflict of interest. With that in mind, her office on Friday requested that a special prosecutor be appointed to continue the investigation and pursue potential criminal charges.The allegations against Mr. DePerno and eight others — including Daire Rendon, a Republican state representative, and Dar Leaf, the sheriff of Barry County — were detailed in a letter sent on Friday from the deputy attorney general to Ms. Benson, and in a petition from Ms. Nessel’s office requesting the special prosecutor. The Detroit News first reported the letter, and Politico first reported the petition. Reuters first reported Mr. DePerno’s alleged involvement. More

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      In Wisconsin Primary, G.O.P. Voters Call for Decertifying 2020 Election

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      SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — When she started her campaign for governor of Wisconsin, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican, acknowledged that President Biden had been legitimately elected.She soon backtracked. Eventually, she said the 2020 election had been “rigged” against former President Donald J. Trump. She sued the state’s election commission.But she will still not entertain the false notion that the election can somehow be overturned, a fantasy that has taken hold among many of the state’s Republicans, egged on by one of her opponents, Tim Ramthun.And for that, she is taking grief from voters in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary.At a campaign stop here last week, one voter, Donette Erdmann, pressed Ms. Kleefisch on her endorsement from former Vice President Mike Pence, whom many of Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters blame for not blocking the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. “I was wondering if you’re going to resort to a RINO agenda or an awesome agenda,” Ms. Erdmann said, using a right-wing pejorative for disloyal Republicans.Ms. Kleefisch’s startled answer — “don’t make your mind up based on what somebody else is doing,” she warned, defending her “awesome agenda” — was not enough.“I’m going to go with Tim Ramthun,” Ms. Erdmann said afterward.Ms. Kleefisch’s predicament illustrates how Mr. Trump’s supporters have turned fury over his 2020 election loss and the misguided belief that its results can be nullified into central campaign issues in the Republican primary for governor in Wisconsin, a battleground state won by razor-thin margins in the last two presidential elections. G.O.P. candidates have been left choosing whether to tell voters they are wrong or to engage in the fiction that something can be done to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat.Dozens of Republican voters and activists interviewed across the state in the last week said they wanted to see lawmakers decertify the state’s election results and claw back its 10 electoral votes, something that cannot legally be done. Nearly all of them pointed to a July decision from the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled that drop boxes used to collect ballots during the pandemic were illegal under state law, as evidence that hundreds of thousands of 2020 votes should be thrown out.“Everybody that I’ve talked to voted for Trump,” said Cyndy Deeg, a food industry worker from Larsen, Wis. “He should be reinstated and resume the position, because he never surrendered it.”Cyndy Deeg at a campaign event for Tim Michels in Kaukauna, Wis. Mr. Michels says that if elected, he will consider legislation to decertify the 2020 election results. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThere is no mechanism in Wisconsin law or federal law for a state to retract electoral votes or undo presidential election results two years after the contest, a fact Ms. Kleefisch finds herself explaining to voters, reporters and audiences of televised debates.Her top Wisconsin ally, former Gov. Scott Walker, said Republicans wanted to move on from discussing Mr. Trump’s defeat two years ago.“Across the nation, a great many people who love what the president did are starting to grow tired of hearing about 2020 and want to get focused on winning 2022 and 2024,” Mr. Walker said in an interview.But even as Ms. Kleefisch campaigns on an agenda of restricting voting access and eliminating the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, two Republican rivals promise to do that and more.Tim Michels, a wealthy construction magnate who has been criticized for sending his children to school in New York and Connecticut, where he owns a $17 million home, has been endorsed by Mr. Trump and says that if elected, he will consider legislation to decertify the 2020 results. Mr. Ramthun is the state’s leading proponent of decertification, but polling shows him trailing Ms. Kleefisch and Mr. Michels, who are in a tight race.The winner of the primary will face Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who has vetoed more than a dozen voting bills passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the last two years. Because of the G.O.P.’s large majorities in the gerrymandered Legislature, a Republican governor would be given a wide berth to change how the state casts and counts votes in the 2024 presidential election.Mr. Michels, who has blanketed Wisconsin’s airwaves with advertisements reminding voters that he is Mr. Trump’s choice, has learned that running as the candidate backed by the former president comes with certain obligations.Mr. Michels has walked back recent statements that angered Trump supporters in Wisconsin.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTwice in recent weeks, he has walked back statements that departed from Trump-wing doctrine.First, Mr. Michels said at a debate that decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results — which Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly urged the top Republican in the State Assembly to do — would not be a priority in his administration. He soon corrected himself, saying that he was “very, very fired up about this election integrity issue” and pledging to consider signing a decertification bill if legislators passed one.Then, during a town hall-style debate on Monday night, Mr. Michels was asked if he would support a presidential bid by Mr. Trump in 2024.“I’m focused on this election right now,” he said. “I have made no commitments to any candidates in 2024.”Trump supporters saw the remarks as a betrayal of the former president, and the next day, Mr. Michels corrected himself.“The day President Trump announces that he’s going to run for president in 2024, if he does, I will support him and I will endorse him,” he told supporters Tuesday in Kaukauna.Mr. Michels declined to explain the flip-flop. “I talked about it last night,” he said after the Kaukauna stop, as his aides and supporters physically pushed reporters away from the candidate.Complicating matters for both Ms. Kleefisch and Mr. Michels is Mr. Ramthun, a state assemblyman whose campaign for governor is scoring low in the polls but held in high regard by the state’s most devoted conspiracy theorists. It was Mr. Ramthun, in February, who pioneered the decertification push after Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, prevented his proposal for a “cyber-forensic audit” of the 2020 election from coming to a vote.Tim Ramthun, a state assemblyman running for governor, is the state’s leading proponent of decertifying the 2020 results.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Ramthun’s campaign is infused with Christian nationalism, presenting him as a messianic figure who will lead the state to correct what he presents as the injudicious 2020 election results.“I’m what you’ve been looking for for decades,” he said at Monday’s debate.Mr. Vos has aggressively tried to restrict voting access in Wisconsin. Along with passing the bills Mr. Evers vetoed, last year he called for felony charges against five members of the state election commission for guidance they issued for voting during the pandemic that he said violated state election law. He also ordered a $1 million investigation into the 2020 election, led by a former State Supreme Court justice, that endorsed debunked conspiracy theories.But as with Ms. Kleefisch, Mr. Vos’s refusal to allow a decertification vote has exposed him to an attack — in his case, from a primary challenger, Adam Steen, who has no paid staff and barely enough money to print and mail his campaign literature.Mr. Steen, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump on Tuesday and was given a prime speaking slot at a Trump rally on Friday night in Waukesha, has built his campaign around decertifying the election and has also said he would seek to make contraception illegal.During a lunch of cheeseburgers and cheese curds, Mr. Steen said he would not have challenged Mr. Vos had Mr. Trump been re-elected.Adam Steen, right, has been backed by Donald J. Trump in his challenge to Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who has resisted decertification calls.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“Without the knowledge that I have right now, I don’t think I would be running, because it wouldn’t have been exposed,” said Mr. Steen, who drives a Lincoln Town Car with a commemorative license plate from the 2017 presidential inauguration that says “TRUMP.” “I don’t think there was that catalyst to see those problems without him losing.”Mr. Vos declined to be interviewed. After Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Steen, Mr. Vos issued a statement reiterating that decertification is impossible.The party’s grass-roots base is not convinced.In April, a poll from Marquette University Law School found that 39 percent of the state’s Republicans backed decertification. Since then, momentum for decertification has built, especially after the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s drop box decision. The chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee, along with dozens of the state’s county Republican Parties, have called for the election to be decertified.Dennis Gasper, the finance director of the Sheboygan County Republican Party, which last month passed a resolution calling for legislators to withdraw the state’s 10 Electoral College votes, said he believed elected officials and Ms. Kleefisch were resisting voters’ decertification calls to spare themselves grief in the news media.“You know, the press is very powerful, and if they would say what they thought, they would be held up as being a little bit crazy,” Mr. Gasper said.Ms. Kleefisch has faced pressure from Republican voters on election issues even though she is campaigning on an agenda of restricting voting access and eliminating the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMs. Kleefisch is left trying to navigate a party that, not long ago, considered her local royalty.A former Milwaukee television reporter, she was Gov. Scott Walker’s deputy when he led Wisconsin Republicans to revoke most public employees’ collective bargaining rights, a political earthquake in state politics that led to weeks of protests and eventually sapped Democrats’ power here for a generation.During two interviews last week, she dismissed the ideas that she had crossed Mr. Trump or that his endorsement of Mr. Michels would be decisive. She said she still supported the former president and praised his policies, though she would not commit to backing him in 2024.But she acknowledged that the issue most forcefully driving Wisconsin Republicans in the current post-Trump era is not grounded in reality.“I’m not saying that the passion is imaginary, I’m not saying that the mistrust is imaginary,” she said after her Sheboygan stop. “I’m saying the idea that you can disavow the Constitution and statutes and do things that are not articulated anywhere in law is a lost cause, and there’s no path that is articulated to do that.”Mr. Michels and Mr. Ramthun, she said, are playing with fire by telling voters they’ll deliver something impossible.“It’s irresponsible to pander,” she said. “You’ve got to tell the truth.” More