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      Arizona Republicans Sought to Overturn Votes. Rusty Said No.

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      The speaker of the Republican-controlled Arizona House — who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020 — just torpedoed a bill that would have let lawmakers reject the results of an election.It is a dark time in the life of the American experiment. The world’s oldest democracy, once assumed to be unbreakable, often appears to be coming apart at the rivets.From his Florida exile, a defeated leader, whose efforts to overturn the last election are still coming into view, is working to place loyalists in key offices across the country, and his followers are racing to install themselves at the controls of future elections.Yet in Arizona this week, the unlikeliest of characters just stepped forward with a palm raised to the forces of Donald J. Trump.When right-wing lawmakers there pushed a bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an election and force a new one, Rusty Bowers said no.For decades, Bowers, the unassuming speaker of the Arizona House, has represented die-hard Republican beliefs, supporting the kinds of low-tax, limited-government policies that made the state’s Barry Goldwater a conservative icon.Bowers could have sat on the bill, letting it die a quiet death. Instead, he killed it through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.“The speaker wanted to put the wooden cross right through the heart of this thing for all to see,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant who has known Bowers for some 30 years.A line drawnThe bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona State Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’s tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”But to the 69-year-old Bowers, a Mormon and father of seven who first entered politics in 1992, it was clearly a matter of something bigger than parliamentary procedure.By sending Fillmore’s legislation to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it, he was also sending an unmistakable message about the direction of his party — a G.O.P. that is unrecognizably different from what it was back when Goldwater-style conservatism itself represented an insurgency.Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early voting altogether and mandated that all ballots be counted by hand.Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks election laws, called it “one of the most comprehensive attacks on nonpartisan election administration and voter access that we have seen.”Most troubling, to voting rights advocates and independent experts, was a provision that would have empowered the Arizona Legislature to “accept or reject the election results” and given a single elector the power to demand that a fresh election be held.And while the bill was never likely to become law, it was an expression of what Barnes called a “cathartic moment” for the Republican Party. “And I think Rusty is not excited about that,” he said.‘We gave the authority to the people’The Arizona dispute comes amid a national convulsion within the Republican Party, which has split into two unequal factions — the pro-Trump forces, who have rallied behind the former president’s calls to overturn the 2020 election, and a dwindling establishment, which has either avoided the subject or faced the wrath of Trump’s allies.On Friday, the Republican National Committee moved to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In so doing, the R.N.C. officially declared that the attack was “legitimate political discourse.”Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about election fraud and have pushed legislation that voting rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Among Arizona political insiders, Bowers is known as a Renaissance man — an artist who’s equally comfortable rolling up his sleeves to fix a broken vehicle in the middle of the desert as he is painting landscapes in watercolor. A 2015 profile describes him as “a beekeeper and an orchardist” who once trekked to Mexico to live with a remote native tribe.“He has always struck me as independent, his own man,” Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, told us. “He’s a doctrinaire conservative on some things, but a pragmatic, conservative problem-solver on others. Very principled, straight-shooter, full of integrity.”Bowers, a libertarian-style conservative who came of age in Goldwater’s Republican Party, backed Trump in 2020. But he resisted calls after the election to overturn the results — dismissing his colleagues’ claims, which courts and independent experts have said are unfounded, that President Biden did not win Arizona fair and square.“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” he said in December 2020. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to re-elect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”The Arizona G.O.P.’s civil warBowers’s resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.​​“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a pedophile over a loudspeaker.He is term-limited, but his stance could revive efforts to oust him from the speakership — a move that would have national reverberations.Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in voting practices that, in his view, have gone too far.“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican voters are solidly in line with me.”Arizona political observers told us it was unlikely that the right wing of the Republican caucus could find a suitable replacement for Bowers, who has survived thus far through a combination of inertia and disorganization among his critics.Fillmore, who said he did not support Trump in 2016 and hadn’t spoken with him, said he had received death threats over the bill from people who accused him of racism for wanting, as he put it, to restore Arizona’s voting laws as they were when he grew up in the 1950s.He expressed his own fortitude pithily. “You know what, people?” he said. “Kiss my grits.”What to readThe Republican Party censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and called the events of Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” Party leaders later said that the language didn’t apply to the attack on the Capitol, report Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein. Read the censure resolution here.Former Vice President Mike Pence told the Federalist Society today in Florida that “President Trump is wrong,” and that Pence “had no right to overturn the election.” Lisa Lerer reports that his remarks “offered his most forceful rebuke of Donald Trump.”Biden celebrated the Labor Department’s January jobs report today. Ben Casselman and Talmon Joseph Smith explain that the “overreaching message of the report was one of resilience in the face of a resurgent pandemic.”viewfinderIn Upper Marlboro, Md., President Biden signed an executive order on Friday requiring project labor agreements on many federal construction projects.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesEye contact, with echoesOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. On Friday, Sarahbeth Maney caught President Biden looking up at three ironworkers, their legs hanging in the air, just before he signed an executive order benefiting construction trade unions. Here’s what she told us about capturing it:I like how all three of them are looking at Biden, and he’s looking at them. I was hoping there would be some sort of interaction. He thought it was fun. “You’re nuts,” he joked, comparing them to workers who were similarly situated at a job site when he got his first-ever union endorsement. It was a little offbeat moment that makes a speech a little more personal and interesting.They seemed like they were in their natural element. They looked really relaxed. Everyone in the crowd was sitting up very straight — very attentive, just like the men above — but down below, people had their phones out and were recording. When Biden signed the executive order, a lot of people stood up, which actually made it hard for me to take a picture — because their heads and phones were in the way.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How N.Y. Democrats Are Leading a ‘Master Class’ in Gerrymandering

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      The maps approved by Democrats in the New York State Legislature could lead their party to seize as many as three House seats from Republicans.Democrats across the nation have spent years railing against partisan gerrymandering, particularly in Republican states — most recently trying to pass federal voting rights legislation in Washington to all but outlaw the practice.But given the same opportunity for the first time in decades, Democratic lawmakers in New York adopted on Wednesday an aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional districts that positions the party to flip three seats in the House this year, a greater shift than projected in any other state.The new lines would shape races in New York for a decade to come, making Democrats the favorites in redrawn districts currently held by Republicans on Long Island, Staten Island and in Central New York. They would also help tighten the party’s hold on swing seats ahead of what is expected to be a strong Republican election cycle, all while eliminating a fourth Republican seat upstate altogether.Legal and political experts immediately criticized the new district contours as a blatant and hypocritical partisan gerrymander. And Republicans, who were powerless to stop it legislatively in Albany, threated to challenge the map in court under new anti-gerrymandering provisions in New York’s Constitution, though it was unclear if they could prove partisan intent.Overall, the new map was expected to favor Democratic candidates in 22 of New York’s 26 congressional districts. Democrats currently control 19 seats in the state, compared with eight held by Republicans. New York is slated to lose one seat overall this year because of national population changes in the 2020 census.“It’s a master class in how to draw an effective gerrymander,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which has also sounded alarms about attempts by Republicans to gerrymander and pass other restrictive voting laws.“Sometimes you do need fancy metrics to tell, but a map that gives Democrats 85 percent of the seats in a state that is not 85 percent Democratic — this is not a particularly hard case,” he said. Democratic leaders in Albany rejected the charge, saying they were confident that the new districts were entirely legal and largely wrought by adjusting for population shifts that favor their candidates.State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader and leader of a task force that drew the lines, said that mapmakers had been “very conscious of potential legal pitfalls” and “more than complied” with the extensive list of standards outlined by the state. He said the maps were fair.“It’s a dangerous game to prognosticate on how elections are going to turn out before they are held,” he said. “Voters have the final say in all these districts, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone in a state as deep blue as New York, the results would reflect the reality on the ground.”Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.Many of the party’s operatives and voters were less bashful in their support of gerrymandering, arguing that Democrats could not afford to take the high road when Republicans have shown no similar inclination.Both parties have weaponized redistricting for years in the larger battle for control of the House of Representatives, but Republicans recently have been more effective in doing so, based on their control of large states like Texas and Florida, and the decision by liberal bastions like California to adopt nonpartisan redistricting commissions to handle the process.On balance, their practices have also drawn greater legal scrutiny, often related to charges of racial gerrymandering. So far, state and federal courts have considered challenges to maps advanced by Republicans in several states, including Ohio, North Carolina and Alabama, and late last year the Justice Department sued Texas over new congressional maps that it said violated the Voting Rights Act’s protections for Black and Latino voters.At the same time, Republican-led states have attracted attention from the Justice Department after they advanced a series of new election laws making it more difficult to vote.In New York, the redistricting cycle began, perhaps naïvely, in the hopes that a bipartisan outside commission — approved by voters in 2014 — would deliver a balanced, common-sense map.Instead, the commission stuck to party lines and was unable to reach consensus last month, kicking control of the process back to the State Legislature, where Democrats have amassed rare supermajorities in recent years. Those majorities, plus control of the governorship, gave them the power for the first time in decades to draw maps as they saw fit.Democratic leaders swiftly released their own maps in a matter of days, forgoing any public hearings and largely keeping even their own members in the dark about the new lines until they became public.Wednesday’s vote fell mostly along party lines, as Democrats limited defections to narrowly pass the map in the Assembly, 103 to 45, and the Senate, 43 to 20.The Legislature planned to proceed as soon as Thursday to pass state legislative maps drawn by Democrats divvying up State Senate and Assembly districts. Most notably, they were expected to help solidify Democrats’ hold of the State Senate in an election year when Republicans are trying to reclaim a chamber they controlled for all but three years between the mid-1940s and 2019.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is widely expected to sign all the maps into law in the coming days.But Republicans were already taking steps on Wednesday to prepare a lawsuit challenging at least the congressional lines as unconstitutional in state court. Several good-governance groups in the state said they agreed with the Republicans’ view, though it was unclear if they would sign onto a suit.“The congressional maps are clearly unconstitutional under the new anti-gerrymandering provisions,” said John Faso, a former Republican congressman who is helping coordinate the effort between Albany Republicans and the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “There is a decent likelihood that there will be litigation as a result of it, but when and where I could not say.”Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader, defended the Democrats’ redrawn maps as being fair and constitutional.Hans Pennink/Associated PressAny court case would likely hinge on how judges interpret language included in the same 2014 constitutional amendment that created the defunct redistricting commission and how Democrats actually arrived at their lines. The language has not previously been tested in court and says that districts “shall not be drawn to discourage competition” or boost one party or incumbent candidate over another.New York State courts have historically been reluctant to overturn plans passed by the Legislature. But Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that could change this year based on the new anti-gerrymandering language and the example set by other states’ courts that have grown more comfortable blocking gerrymandered plans.“The provision is written in a strict prohibitory language,” Mr. Pildes said. “Proving that was what actually took place will inevitably trigger these debates about were these lines drawn to preserve particular communities of interest or a range of legitimate purposes.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      N.Y. Democrats Could Gain 3 House Seats Under Proposed District Lines

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      A new map drawn by legislative leaders would reconfigure state congressional districts to benefit Democrats in their fight to maintain a grip on the House of Representatives.ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Democrats on Sunday proposed a redesign of the state’s congressional map that would be one of the most consequential in the nation, offering the party’s candidates an advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 House districts in this fall’s midterm election. Party leaders in Albany insisted that the redrawn districts were not politically motivated, and they appeared to be somewhat less aggressive than many Democrats had wanted and analysts had forecast.But the proposed lines promise to be a major boon for the party for a decade to come, beginning with a hard-fought national battle with Republicans this year for control of the House of Representatives. With President Biden’s agenda hanging in the balance, Democratic gains in New York could help offset those Republicans expect to rack up in red states like Texas, Florida and Georgia. “With the stroke of a pen they can gain three seats and eliminate four Republican seats,” said Dave Wasserman, a national elections analyst with the Cook Political Report, who called the proposed lines “an effective gerrymander” by Democrats.“That’s a pretty big shift,” he added. “In fact, it’s probably the biggest shift in the country.”The new lines give Democrats opportunities to pick up seats on Long Island, in upstate New York and in New York City, where Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican, would be drawn into a Democratic-leaning district. Republicans are likely to lose a fourth seat because New York, which had less population growth than some other states, must shed one district overall.The new boundaries will be in place for the next 10 years. Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesOther proposed changes could help shore up Democrats’ hold on swing districts on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley ahead of what is expected to be a punishing election season for the party overall.In 2014, New York State voters had empowered a bipartisan commission to draw the new districts, but the panel broke down on party lines and could not reach consensus. Its stalemate left it to Democratic leaders in Albany to redesign the map.“We did the best we could with a flawed process,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris, who chairs the legislative redistricting task force that took over the process from the commission. He added: “This is a very Democratic state, let’s start there. It’s not surprising that a fairly drawn map might lead to more Democrats getting elected.”Lawmakers plan to vote on the congressional map as soon as Wednesday. New maps for the State Senate and Assembly are also expected this week. Democrats dominate both houses, and the new maps offer the party a chance to maintain majorities, if not supermajorities, in the Legislature.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has indicated that she supports using the redistricting process to help her party and is likely to approve the maps if they pass both chambers.Republicans are expected to oppose them en masse, but have little power to stop them legislatively. They accused Democrats of undertaking a blatant and unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to approve the new map if the Legislature passes it. In the last redistricting, she lost her seat when her Buffalo area district became one of the most conservative in the state.Libby March for The New York TimesNick Langworthy, the chairman of the New York Republican Party, blasted the map as a “textbook filthy, partisan gerrymandering” and hinted that Republicans could challenge the proposed district as unconstitutional in court.“These maps are the most brazen and outrageous attempt at rigging the election to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” he said, adding that Democrats “can’t win on the merits so they’re trying to win the election in a smoke-filled room rather than the ballot box.”Republicans were not the only interested parties alarmed by Democrats’ swift action. Lawmakers are poised to vote this week without convening a single public hearing, drawing the ire of good governance groups and community leaders. Even rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers only saw the proposed lines for the first time in the last few days, leading to last-minute changes.The redistricting stakes could scarcely be higher. Democrats control the House of Representatives by the thinnest of margins and are preparing for stiff challenges to their hold on Albany as well. Midterm elections are often difficult for the party in power, and with Mr. Biden’s approval rating at about 40 percent, Democrats are on the defensive.Around the country, battles over redistricting have become increasingly bare-knuckle, with high-stakes brawls between ruling Republicans and disempowered Democrats in North Carolina, Alabama and Ohio landing in state court. In some cases, the pitched battles reflect the tensions not just over party representation, but over race and voting rights at a time when states across the country are advancing laws concerning the right to vote: some expanding it, and others restricting it.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Republicans Want New Tool in Elusive Search for Voter Fraud: Election Police

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      Republicans in three states have proposed strike forces against election crimes even though fraud cases remain minuscule.WASHINGTON — Reprising the rigged-election belief that has become a mantra among their supporters, Republican politicians in at least three states are proposing to establish police forces to hunt exclusively for voter fraud and other election crimes, a category of offenses that experts say is tiny at best.The plans are part of a new wave of initiatives that Republicans say are directed at voter fraud. They are being condemned by voting rights advocates and even some local election supervisors, who call them costly and unnecessary appeasement of the Republican base that will select primary-election winners for this November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race.The next round of voting clashes comes after the apparent demise of Democratic voting rights legislation in Washington on Thursday. It is a reminder that while the Democratic agenda in Washington seems dead, Republican state-level efforts to make voting harder show no sign of slowing down.Supporters say the added enforcement will root out instances of fraud and assure the public that everything possible is being done to make sure that American elections are accurate and legitimate. Critics say the efforts can easily be abused and used as political cudgels or efforts to intimidate people from registering and voting. And Democrats say the main reason Republican voters have lost faith in the electoral system is because of the incessant Republican focus on almost entirely imagined fraud.The most concrete proposal is in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the State Legislature last week for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office. The plan, which Mr. DeSantis has been touting since the fall, would include 20 sworn police officers and field offices statewide.Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the Florida Legislature for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThat was followed on Thursday by a pledge by David Perdue, the former Georgia senator who is a Republican candidate for governor, to create his own force of election police “to make Georgia elections the safest and securest in the country.” Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat in 2020, claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking re-election, weakened election standards and refused to investigate claims of fraud following President Biden’s narrow win in the state.And in Arizona, a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.Ms. Rogers’s bill probably faces an uphill road in the Legislature, where Republicans are only narrowly in control and have been battered for their support of a widely ridiculed multimillion-dollar inquiry into 2020 election results. Prospects for the Florida and Georgia proposals are less clear.The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him.Mr. DeSantis took a tough line in November when he unveiled his proposal, saying that the new unit would chase crimes that local election official shrug at. “There’ll be people, if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don’t do anything,” he said at an appearance in West Palm Beach.“I guarantee you this,” he added. “The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that.”None of the three states — and for that matter, none of the other 47 and the District of Columbia — reported any more than a minuscule number of election fraud cases after the 2020 races. Mr. DeSantis said after the 2020 vote that his was “the state that did it right and that other states should emulate.” The only notable hint of irregularity in Florida was the recent arrest on fraud charges of four men in a retirement complex north of Orlando. At least two of them appeared to be winter Floridians accused of casting ballots both there and in more frigid states to the north.Trump supporters gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in downtown Phoenix as ballots were counted in November 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Perdue say their strike forces are still needed to root out other election irregularities and to bolster their constituents’ sagging faith in the honesty of the vote. The same rationale has powered so-called audits of election results and clampdowns on election rules by Republican-run legislatures across the country.Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.Mr. Trump comfortably won Florida by about 370,000 votes in 2020, and his narrow losses in Arizona and Georgia were confirmed by expert audits, recounts and even the notorious Cyber Ninjas inquiry into the vote in Maricopa County.“We don’t need further investigations into elections that are freely and fairly conducted,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “We’ve established that again and again and again. This is more pablum to the people who believe in fraud and conspiracy theories and lies that the last election was stolen.”Neither the new laws nor election autopsies appear to have shaken the conviction of many Trump supporters that the election system is suspect. Some scholars say they see the police forces as the latest bid by politicians to scratch that itch.Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.The idea of an election police force is not new, even in the states where they are being proposed. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already oversees 23 investigators whose purview includes election irregularities, and an assistant state attorney general exclusively prosecutes crimes in elections, the judiciary and local governments. The Arizona attorney general manages a relatively new “election integrity” investigative unit, and Florida election violations are prosecuted by both state and local authorities, as is true in most states. More

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      No One Is Coming to Save Us From the ‘Dagger at the Throat of America’

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      This article is part of a collection on the events of Jan. 6, one year later. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s politics editor Ezekiel Kweku in our Opinion Today newsletter.The saturation coverage of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection and of Donald Trump’s attempt to bully his way into a reversal of his loss in the 2020 presidential election has felt dispiriting. More than 70 percent of Republican voters say that they believe Mr. Trump’s false claim of a stolen election, and 59 percent say that accepting the Big Lie is an important part of what it means to be a Republican today.As we all know, the hyperpolarized, social media-driven information environment makes it virtually impossible to persuade those voters that the 2020 election was fairly run. Those who believe the last election was stolen will be more likely to accept a stolen election for their side next time. They are more willing to see violence as a means of resolving election disputes. Political operatives are laying the groundwork for future election sabotage and the federal government has done precious little to minimize the risk.Many people who are not dispirited by such findings are uninterested. Exhausted by four years of the Trump presidency and a lingering pandemic, some Americans appear to have responded to the risks to our democracy by simply tuning out the news and hoping that things will just work out politically by 2024.We must not succumb to despair or indifference. It won’t be easy, but there is a path forward if we begin acting now, together, to shore up our fragile election ecosystem.Let’s begin by reviewing some of the key problems. Those who administer elections have faced threats of violence and harassment. One in four election administrators say that they plan to retire before 2024. Republican election and elected officials who stood up to Mr. Trump’s attempt to rig the 2020 vote count, like Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who refused Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip the election to him, are being pushed out or challenged for their jobs in primaries by people embracing Mr. Trump’s false claims, like Representative Jody Hice.The new Republicans running elections or certifying or counting votes may have more allegiance to Mr. Trump or his successor in 2024 than to a fair vote count, creating conditions for Democrats to join Republicans in believing the election system is rigged. If Mr. Hice is Georgia’s Secretary of State in 2024 and declares Mr. Trump the winner of the 2024 election after having embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won Georgia in 2020, which Democrats will accept that result?Trumpist election administrators and Mr. Trump’s meddling in Republican primaries and gerrymandered Republican legislatures and congressional districts create dangerous electoral conditions. They make it more likely that state legislatures will try to overturn the will of the people — as Mr. Trump unsuccessfully urged in 2020 — and select alternative slates of presidential electors if a Democrat wins in their states in 2024. A Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025 could count the rogue, legislatively submitted slates of presidential electors instead of those fairly reflecting actual election results in the states. In the meantime, some Republican states are passing or considering additional laws that would make election sabotage more likely.The federal government so far has taken few steps to increase the odds of free and fair elections in 2024. Despite the barely bipartisan impeachment of Mr. Trump for inciting an insurrection and the barely bipartisan majority vote in the U.S. Senate for conviction, Mr. Trump was neither convicted under the necessary two-thirds vote of the Senate nor barred from running for office again by Congress, as he could have been under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment for inciting insurrection. While the Department of Justice has prosecuted the rioters — obtaining convictions and plea agreements for hundreds who trespassed and committed violence — so far no one in Mr. Trump’s circle, much less Mr. Trump, has been charged with federal crimes connected to Jan. 6 events. He faces potential criminal action in Georgia for his call with Mr. Raffensperger, but neither indictment nor conviction by a jury is assured.Congress has fallen down, too. House and Senate Republicans bear the greatest share of the blame. Some were just fine with Mr. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Others abhorred his actions, but have done nothing of substance to counteract these risks. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, gave an impassioned speech against Mr. Trump’s actions after Jan. 6, but he did not vote for conviction, perhaps fearing the wrath of the Republican base.More surprisingly, Democratic House and Senate leaders have not acted as if the very survival of American democracy is at issue, even though leading global experts on democratic backsliding and transitions into authoritarianism have been sounding the alarm.President Biden put it well in his Jan. 6 anniversary speech about Mr. Trump and his allies holding “a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy.” But we need action, not just strong words.Here are the three principles that should guide action supporting democratic institutions and the rule of law going forward.To begin with, Democrats should not try to go it alone in preserving free and fair elections. Some Democrats, like Marc Elias, one of the leading Democratic election lawyers, are willing to write off the possibility of finding Republican partners because most Republicans have failed to stand up to Mr. Trump, and even those few Republicans who have do not support Democrats’ broader voting rights agenda, such as passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.Flying solo is a big mistake. Democrats cannot stop the subversion of 2024 election results alone, particularly if Democrats do not control many statehouses and either house of Congress when Electoral College votes are counted on Jan. 6, 2025. Why believe that any legislation passed only by Democrats in 2022 would stop subversive Republican action in 2024? A coalition with the minority of Republicans willing to stand up for the rule of law is the best way to try to erect barriers to a stolen election in 2024, even if those Republicans do not stand with Democrats on voting rights or other issues. Remember it took Republican election officials, elected officials, and judges to stand up against an attempted coup in 2020.Other Republicans may find it in their self-interest to work with Democrats on anti-subversion legislation. Senator Minority Whip John Thune recently signaled that his party may support a revision of the Electoral Count Act, the old, arcane rules Congress uses to certify state Electoral College votes. While Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to get his Republican vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election to him or at least into chaos, Republicans know it will be Democratic vice president Kamala Harris, not Mr. Pence, who will be presiding over the Congress’s certification of Electoral College votes in 2025. Perhaps there is room for bipartisan agreement to ensure both that vice presidents don’t go rogue and that state legislatures cannot simply submit alternative slates of electors if they are unsatisfied with the election results.Reaching bipartisan compromise against election subversion will not stop Democrats from fixing voting rights or partisan gerrymanders on their own — the fate of those bills depend not on Republicans but on Democrats convincing Senators Manchin and Sinema to modify the filibuster rules. Republicans should not try to hold anti-election subversion hostage to Democrats giving up their voting agenda.Second, because law alone won’t save American democracy, all sectors of society need to be mobilized in support of free and fair elections. It is not just political parties that matter for assuring free and fair elections. It all of civil society: business groups, civic and professional organizations, labor unions and religious organizations all can help protect fair elections and the rule of law. Think, for example, of Texas, which in 2021 passed a new restrictive voting law. It has been rightly attacked for making it harder for some people to vote. But business pressure most likely helped kill a provision in the original version of the bill that would have made it much easier for a state court judge to overturn the results of an election.Business groups also refused to contribute to those members of Congress who after the insurrection objected on spurious grounds to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden. According to reporting by Judd Legum, “since Jan. 6, corporate PAC contributions to Republican objectors have plummeted by nearly two-thirds.” But some businesses are giving again to the objectors. Customers need to continue to pressure business groups to hold the line.Civil society needs to oppose those who run for office or seek appointment to run elections while embracing Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Loyalty to a person over election integrity should be disqualifying.Finally, mass, peaceful organizing and protests may be necessary in 2024 and 2025. What happens if a Democratic presidential candidate wins in, say, Wisconsin in 2024, according to a fair count of the vote, but the Wisconsin legislature stands ready to send in an alternative slate of electors for Mr. Trump or another Republican based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud or other irregularities? These gerrymandered legislators may not respond to entreaties from Democrats, but they are more likely to respond to widespread public protests made up of people of good faith from across the political spectrum. We need to start organizing for this possibility now.The same applies if Kevin McCarthy or another Republican speaker of the House appears willing to accept rogue slates of electors sent in by state legislators — or if Democrats try to pressure Kamala Harris into assuming unilateral power herself to resolve Electoral College disputes. The hope of collective action is that there remains enough sanity in the center and commitment to the rule of law to prevent actions that would lead to an actual usurpation of the will of the people.If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes.One could pessimistically say that the fact that we even need to have this conversation about fair elections and rule of law in the United States in the 21st century is depressing and shocking. One could simply retreat into complacency. Or one could see the threats this country faces as a reason to buck up and prepare for the battle for the soul of American democracy that may well lay ahead. If Republicans have embraced authoritarianism or have refused to confront it, and Democrats in Congress cannot or will not save us, we must save ourselves.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy” and the forthcoming “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.”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

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      ¿Qué significa el 6 de enero para Estados Unidos?

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      Un año después del humo y los vidrios rotos, de la horca simulada y la violencia demasiado real de ese día atroz, es tentador hacer una retrospectiva e imaginar que, de hecho, podemos simplemente hacer una retrospectiva. Es tentador imaginar que lo que sucedió el 6 de enero de 2021 —un asalto mortal en la sede del gobierno de Estados Unidos incitado por un presidente derrotado en medio de una campaña desesperada por frustrar la transferencia de poder a su sucesor— fue terrible pero que ahora está en el pasado y que nosotros, como nación, hemos podido avanzar.Es un impulso comprensible. Después de cuatro años de caos, crueldad e incompetencia, que culminaron en una pandemia y con el trauma antes impensable del 6 de enero, la mayoría de los estadounidenses estaban impacientes por tener algo de paz y tranquilidad.Hemos conseguido eso, en la superficie. Nuestra vida política parece más o menos normal en estos días: el presidente perdona pavos y el Congreso se pelea por la legislación de presupuesto. Pero si escarbamos un poco, las cosas están lejos de ser normales. El 6 de enero no está en el pasado: está presente todos los días.Está en los ciudadanos de a pie que amenazan a funcionarios electorales y otros servidores públicos, está en quienes preguntan “¿Cuándo podemos usar las armas?” y prometen asesinar a los políticos que se atrevan a votar con conciencia. Son los legisladores republicanos que luchan por hacer que el voto sea más difícil para las personas y, si votan, que sea más fácil subvertir su voluntad. Está en Donald Trump, quien continúa avivando las llamas del conflicto con sus mentiras desenfrenadas y resentimientos ilimitados y cuya versión distorsionada de la realidad todavía domina a uno de los dos principales partidos políticos de la nación.En pocas palabras, la república enfrenta una amenaza existencial por parte de un movimiento que desdeña de manera abierta la democracia y que ha demostrado su disposición a usar la violencia para conseguir sus propósitos. Ninguna sociedad autónoma puede sobrevivir a una amenaza así negando que esta existe. Más bien, la supervivencia depende de mirar al pasado y hacia el futuro al mismo tiempo.Encarar de verdad la amenaza que se avecina significa entender plenamente el terror de ese día hace un año. Gracias en gran medida a la labor tenaz de un comité bipartidista en la Cámara de Representantes, una toma de conciencia está en proceso. Ahora sabemos que la violencia y el caos transmitidos en vivo a todo el mundo fue solo la parte más visible y visceral de un esfuerzo por revertir las elecciones. Ese esfuerzo llegaba hasta el Despacho Oval, donde Trump y sus aliados planearon un autogolpe constitucional.Ahora sabemos que los principales legisladores republicanos y figuras de los medios de comunicación de derecha entendieron en privado lo peligroso que era el asalto y le pidieron a Trump que lo detuviera, incluso cuando públicamente decían lo contrario. Ahora sabemos que quienes pueden tener información crítica sobre la planificación y ejecución del ataque se niegan a cooperar con el Congreso, incluso si eso significa ser acusado de desacato criminal.Por ahora, el trabajo del comité continúa. Ha programado una serie de audiencias públicas para exponer estos y otros detalles, y planea publicar un informe completo de sus hallazgos antes de las elecciones intermedias de este año. Después de los comicios, si los republicanos recuperan el control de la Cámara, como se espera, indudablemente el comité será disuelto.Aquí es donde entra la mirada hacia el futuro. A lo largo del año pasado, legisladores republicanos en 41 estados han intentado promover los objetivos de los alborotadores del 6 de enero, y lo han hecho no rompiendo leyes, sino promulgándolas. Se han propuesto cientos de proyectos de ley y se han aprobado casi tres decenas de leyes que facultan a las legislaturas estatales para sabotear sus propios comicios y anular la voluntad de sus votantes, según el recuento activo de un consorcio no partidista de organizaciones a favor de la democracia.Algunos proyectos de ley cambiarían las reglas para hacer más fácil que los legisladores rechacen los votos de sus ciudadanos si no les gusta el resultado. Otros proyectos legislativos reemplazan a los funcionarios electorales profesionales con figuras partidistas que podrían tener un interés claro en que gane su candidato predilecto. Y, otros más intentan criminalizar los errores humanos de funcionarios electorales, en algunos casos incluso con amenaza de cárcel.Muchas de estas leyes se están proponiendo y aprobando en estados que suele ser cruciales en las elecciones, como Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia y Pensilvania. A raíz de la votación de 2020, la campaña de Trump se enfocó en los resultados electorales en estos estados: demandó para reclamar un recuento o trataba de intimidar a los funcionarios para que encontraran votos “faltantes”. El esfuerzo fracasó, en buena medida debido al profesionalismo y la integridad de los funcionarios electorales. Desde entonces, muchos de esos funcionarios han sido despojados de su poder o expulsados de sus cargos y reemplazados por personas que dicen abiertamente que las últimas elecciones fueron fraudulentas.De este modo, los disturbios del Capitolio continúan presentes en los congresos estatales de todo Estados Unidos, en una forma legalizada y sin derramamiento de sangre y que ningún oficial de policía puede detener y que ningún fiscal puede juzgar en un tribunal.Esta no es la primera vez que las legislaturas estatales intentan arrebatarle el control de los votos electorales a sus ciudadanos, ni es la primera vez que se advierte de los peligros que entraña esa estrategia. En 1891, el presidente Benjamin Harrison advirtió al Congreso del riesgo de que ese “truco” pudiera determinar el resultado de una elección presidencial.La Constitución garantiza a todos los estadounidenses una forma republicana de gobierno, dijo Harrison. “Las características esenciales de tal gobierno son el derecho del pueblo a elegir a sus propios funcionarios” y que sus votos se cuenten por igual al tomar esa decisión. “Nuestro principal peligro nacional”, agregó, es “el derrocamiento del control de la mayoría mediante la supresión o distorsión del sufragio popular”. Si una legislatura estatal lograra sustituir la voluntad de sus votantes por la suya, “no es exagerado decir que la paz pública podría estar en peligro serio y generalizado”.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      Odds of Gerrymandering Grow in New York as Redistricting Panel Falters

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      Hopelessly gridlocked, the commission voted to send a pair of proposals to Albany, but Democratic lawmakers are increasingly likely to take over the process.The independent commission created to strip politics from New York’s redistricting process veered toward collapse on Monday, as the same partisan forces the panel was designed to circumvent threatened to undo it.With time running out, the panel’s Republican and Democratic members bitterly conceded during a virtual meeting that they could not reach consensus on a single set of maps to determine congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade. Instead, they voted to send two dueling, nonbinding proposals to Albany for consideration.Lawmakers in the Democratic-led State Legislature could still adopt one of the proposals or send them back to the commission for further revision. But with the commission deadlocked, another outcome appeared increasingly likely: Eight years after New Yorkers voted to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians, the politicians are poised to wrest it back.Indeed, Democrats in Washington and Albany have been quietly planning for just that eventuality for months, even as the commission, which held two dozen public hearings last year and was granted a $4 million budget, crowed about the possibility of finding agreement. The political stakes, and potential gains for Democrats, are staggeringly high.With Democrats battling nationally to fend off a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives this November, New York offers perhaps the single best opportunity for the party to use its unified control of a large blue state to flip a handful of congressional seats by drawing itself more favorable lines, with as many as half a dozen seats hanging in the balance.New York Democrats could also use the process to try to shore up their commanding majorities in the State Assembly and State Senate, where Republicans are optimistic about mounting an aggressive campaign to reclaim territory lost in blue waves in 2018 and 2020.State Senator Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat who is one of the leaders of the legislative task force that would draw the maps if the State Assembly and State Senate reject the commission’s proposals, said on Monday that lawmakers would begin reviewing the maps and “move expeditiously given the very tight political calendar.” They could vote to approve or reject the initial plans as early as next week.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.The window is exceedingly narrow. New York trails many other states in adopting new maps as part of the once-in-a-decade redistricting process and must reach a final conclusion by mid-to-late February. More than half of states have already completed their new maps, and Republicans are on track for a modest net gain in seats nationally.If New York lawmakers fail to reach an agreement by next month, the courts could step in to take over the process, as they did during the last redistricting cycle. The courts would be likely to appoint a special master to redraw the district lines.Political analysts and party leaders in Washington expect Democrats, who control supermajorities in Albany and the governorship, to reject both initial map sets that commissioners proposed on Monday and push for more favorable lines.“If Democrats in Albany think the votes are there to pass what they want, it’s hard to see why they would take anything the commission does seriously,” said Dave Wasserman, a national elections analyst with the Cook Political Report.Mr. Wasserman said that even the Democratic commissioners’ proposal for the state’s 26 congressional districts would leave as many as nine districts in play for possible Republican victories in this fall’s midterm elections, a bad result for Democrats in a deep blue state. A more aggressive gerrymander by the Legislature could limit Republicans to just three or so seats — and none in New York City.The current congressional delegation in the state consists of 19 Democrats and eight Republicans; New York will lose one seat in the next election cycle.In a sign that New York’s maps could quickly become a national flash point, a new left-leaning federal super PAC sent out a statement on Monday urging Democrats to ignore the concerns of incumbents and adopt maps with “the greatest chance of expanding our majority and defeating radical Republicans aligned with violence, hatred and sedition.”The group, called No Surrender NY, was created last year by Tom Watson, a progressive consultant, and Shannon Powell, a former journalist and activist, but has yet to disclose any funders.Voters adopted an amendment to the state Constitution to create the redistricting commission in 2014, ostensibly to remove politicians from the mapmaking process and try to force bipartisan consensus around the lines that determine congressional, Assembly and State Senate districts.The current redistricting cycle is the first to take place since the amendment was adopted.But the commission had struggled since its inception to transcend partisanship. It was supposed to release a set of draft maps in September and gather feedback on them in hearings across the state. Instead, Republican and Democratic members put out their own competing maps.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Michigan’s New Congressional Maps Undo Years of Gerrymandering

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      A citizen ballot initiative took redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators. The result: competitive political districts — and an example of how to push back against hyperpartisanship.One of the country’s most gerrymandered political maps has suddenly been replaced by one of the fairest.A decade after Michigan Republicans gave themselves seemingly impregnable majorities in the state Legislature by drawing districts that heavily favored their party, a newly created independent commission approved maps late Tuesday that create districts so competitive that Democrats have a fighting chance of recapturing the State Senate for the first time since 1984.The work of the new commission, which includes Democrats, Republicans and independents and was established through a citizen ballot initiative, stands in sharp contrast to the type of hyperpartisan extreme gerrymandering that has swept much of the country, exacerbating political polarization — and it may highlight a potential path to undoing such gerrymandering.With lawmakers excluded from the mapmaking process, Michigan’s new districts will much more closely reflect the overall partisan makeup of the hotly contested battleground state.“Michigan’s a jump ball, and this is a jump-ball map,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel who focuses on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a lot of competition in this map, which is what you would expect in a state like Michigan.”The commission’s three new maps — for Congress, the State House and the State Senate — restore a degree of fairness, but there were some notable criticisms. All of the maps still have a slight Republican advantage, in part because Democratic voters in the state are mostly concentrated in densely populated areas. The map for the State House also splits more than half of the state’s counties into several districts, despite redistricting guidelines that call for keeping neighboring communities together.The maps may also face a legal challenge from Black voters in the Detroit area, to whom the commission tried to give more opportunities for representation by unpacking them, or spreading them among more legislative districts.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.Detroit’s State Senate delegation will jump to nine members from five, and its State House delegation to 15 representatives from nine. But local Black elected officials and civil rights groups contend that while the intention may have been noble, the result actually dilutes Black voting strength, not only in general elections but also in primaries, in which elections for Black legislators are almost always decided.The reduced percentages of Black voters in some of the new districts may prevent candidates from winning primary elections on the strength of the Black vote alone, those critics say.“The goal of creating partisan fairness cannot so negatively impact Black communities as to erase us from the space,” said Adam Hollier, a state senator from the Detroit area. “They think that they are unpacking, because that is the narrative that they hear from across the country, without looking at what that means in the city of Detroit.”Republicans were also discussing possible challenges to the new maps.“We are evaluating all options to take steps necessary to defend the voices silenced by this commission,” Gustavo Portela, a Michigan G.O.P. spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday, without elaborating on whose voices he meant.The G.O.P. advantage in Michigan’s Legislature has held solid for years even as Democrats carried the state in presidential elections and won races for governor and U.S. Senate. In 2014, Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, won the seat formerly held by Carl Levin by more than 13 percentage points. Yet in the same year, Republicans in the State Senate expanded their supermajority, winning 27 of 38 seats.So great a divergence between statewide and legislative elections is often a telltale sign of a gerrymandered map. And a lawsuit in 2018 unearthed emails in which Republicans boasted about packing “Dem garbage” into fewer districts and ensuring Republican advantages “in 2012 and beyond.”But the new State Senate map would create 20 seats that President Biden would have carried in 2020 and 18 that former President Donald J. Trump would have carried, giving Democrats new hopes of competitiveness.The new maps offer no guarantee that Democrats will win either chamber, however. And in a strong year for the G.O.P., which 2022 may be, Republicans could retain their advantage in the Legislature and could also come away with a majority of the state’s new 13-seat congressional delegation.The congressional map includes three tossup seats where the 2020 presidential margin was less than five points, and two more seats that could be competitive in a wave year, with presidential margins of less than 10 points. Two current Democratic representatives, Haley Stevens and Andy Levin, were drawn into the same district, setting up a competitive primary in the 11th District. Both declared their intention to run on Tuesday.The State House will also feature at least 20 competitive districts.Preserving such competition, election experts say, is one of the key goals in redistricting reform.“This is the quintessential success story of redistricting,” said Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “These maps treated the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, about as fairly as you could ever imagine a map being. In all three cases, whoever gets the most votes statewide is likely to control the chamber or the delegation. And there’s competition in all three maps.”Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More