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      The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing MediaVoting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.Last week, a lawyer for Antonio Mugica sent scathing letters to Fox, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name.Credit…Niklas Hallen/Getty ImagesDec. 20, 2020Updated 9:43 p.m. ETAntonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.“Sidney Powell is out there saying that states like Texas, they turned away from Dominion machines, because really there’s only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, so you can easily change votes,” the Newsmax host Chris Salcedo said in one typical mash-up on Nov. 18. Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”The Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.Credit…Monica Schipper/Getty ImagesHere’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”Now, Mr. Connolly’s target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that “we are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.”These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.And so Newsmax and OAN appear likely to face the same fate as so many of President Trump’s sycophants, who have watched him lie with impunity and imitated him — only to find that he’s the only one who can really get away with it. Mr. Trump benefits from presidential immunity, but also he has an experienced fabulist’s sense of where the legal red lines are, something his allies often lack. Three of his close aides were convicted of lying, and Michael Cohen served more than a year in prison. (Trump pardoned Michael Flynn and commuted the sentence of Roger Stone.)OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.The letters written by lawyers for Smartmatic and Dominion are “extremely powerful,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers, in an email to The New York Times. “The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both.”Mr. Abrams noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”Lawyers said they expected that the right-wing networks, if sued, would argue that Smartmatic and Dominion should be considered “public figures” — which would require the companies to prove that its critics were malicious or wildly reckless, not just wrong.Mr. Connolly said he would argue that Smartmatic was not a public figure, a legal status whose exact meaning varies depending on whether Mr. Mugica files suit in Florida, New York or another state.“They have a very good case,” another First Amendment lawyer who isn’t connected to the litigation, the University of Florida professor Clay Calvert, said of Smartmatic. “If these statements are false and we are taking them as factual statements, that’s why we have defamation law.”Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.Newsmax said in an emailed statement that the channel “has never made a claim of impropriety about Smartmatic, its ownership or software” and that the company was merely providing a “forum for public concerns and discussion.” An OAN spokeswoman didn’t respond to an inquiry.I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.In this controversy, even the voting companies’ worst critics find the coverage wildly distorted.“They’ve been mining every paper I’ve ever written and any deposition I’ve ever given and it’s nonsense,” said Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has long argued that voting software isn’t as secure as its vendors claim. He said Ms. Powell’s cybersecurity expert, Navid Keshavarz-Nia, called him on Nov. 15, apparently seeing him as a potential ally, and spent an hour going point-by-point over claims that would wind up in a deposition. “He seemed sane, but every time I would ask him for evidence that would support one of these allegations he would squirm off to a different allegation,” Mr. Jones said.As the conversation wore on, he wondered, “Was someone trying to pull a ‘Borat’ on me?”But the allegations are no joke for Smartmatic and Dominion. Mr. Mugica said he had taken worried calls from governments and politicians all over the world, concerned that Mr. Trump’s poison will seep into their politics and turn a Smartmatic contract into a liability.“This potentially could destroy it all,” he said.Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Thank the Supreme Court, for Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThank the Supreme Court, for NowThe justices did the right thing by declining to hear the case brought by red states to overturn the election results. But let’s see what happens down the road.Contributing Opinion WriterDec. 17, 2020Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe Supreme Court was never going to hear, let alone grant, the request by red-state attorneys general and the White House to overturn the election results in four battleground states that went for Joe Biden. We knew that, we privileged few who could have offered an inventory of the lawsuit’s flaws while standing on one foot. We had not the slightest doubt that the case was a non-starter.Or did we?I spent much of last week, nearly up to the moment on Friday night when the court tossed the Texas case into history’s garbage bin, assuring friends and strangers alike that Texas v. Pennsylvania had no merit whatsoever. Texas had no business invoking the court’s original jurisdiction — seeking to come directly to the Supreme Court and bypassing the lower courts — in order to complain directly to the justices about other states’ election processes. The justices, I added, would never permit themselves to be drawn into such a sorry charade.Many people who emailed me with their questions knew little about the Supreme Court and its jurisdictional quirks, but some were lawyers or avid court-followers who know a lot. Their anxiety was a measure of how much of what we once took for granted has been upended during these past four years. I confess that by the end of the week, the tiniest shadow of doubt had invaded my own mind. And no wonder: The usual inference that even young children are able to draw from experience — “This has never happened before so it’s very unlikely to be happening now” — has proved of dubious utility. We can know all the facts and all the rules, but still, we can’t be sure.In the aftermath, with the electoral votes counted and the justices off on their four-week winter recess, what more is there to say about the justices’ refusal to grant the Trump team and its statehouse enablers their day in court? It’s easy to understand why the response offered by Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, became the go-to quote in many accounts of the week’s denouement. The court, she said, delivered “an important reminder that we are a nation of laws, and though some may bend to the desire of a single individual, the courts may not.”It’s a comforting thought, one that we needed to hear and yearn to believe. But I think it gives the court too much credit. Texas v. Pennsylvania had the form of a Supreme Court case. But it was a Potemkin village of a case, with the proper Gothic typeface on the front cover but nothing inside that resembled sound legal argument. It’s as if someone filed a case asking the court to exercise its original jurisdiction and declare the moon to be made of green cheese. We would hardly pat the justices on the back for tossing out such a case. More likely, we would shrug and say, “There goes another nut case.”The court receives its share of those among the 6,000 petitions that it whittles down every year to the 65 or so accepted for decision. Of course, those cases don’t arrive, as this one did, with the support of 126 of the 196 Republican members of the House of Representatives. The fact that members of Congress are sometimes called “lawmakers” does not, evidently, bestow on them an actual regard for law.And celebrating the court for its restraint in the election cases may be premature. The 2020-21 term, nearly three months in, is still unfolding. We have yet to learn either the fate of the Affordable Care Act or how much further the court will go to elevate religion over the principle of nondiscrimination, the question presented in a case from Philadelphia. Both cases were argued last month, during the court’s first argument sitting since the arrival of the newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett.The country has learned a bit recently about the court’s original jurisdiction — its power to decide without appellate review certain disputes, including between states — something most lawyers never learn much about, let alone encounter. The last time a so-called original case received this much public notice was probably in 1998, when the court gave New Jersey administrative jurisdiction over nearly all of Ellis Island, the immigrant gateway in New York Harbor that New York had long claimed as its own.The one or two such cases the court decides in a typical year have a certain charm despite their obscurity. This week, for example, the justices decided an original case between New Mexico and Texas. The case, decided in New Mexico’s favor, involved the latest chapter in a long-running dispute over rights to water from the Pecos River. As in most original cases, the court had appointed a special master to look into the problem and recommend how to solve it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his majority opinion that the special master — the “river master” in this instance — was appointed in 1988 “and he continues to serve in that position” 32 years later. The wheels of the court’s original jurisdiction usually turn very slowly.A new original case on the court’s docket is not likely to remain obscure for long. It promises, if the court accepts it, to bring the justices into culture-war territory. Last February, Texas sued California directly in the Supreme Court over a law California passed in 2016 that prohibits state-paid travel to states with laws that permit discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.Texas has a law that permits child-welfare agencies to invoke religious reasons for not placing children with same-sex couples for foster care or adoption. Once Texas enacted that law in 2017, California added Texas to the list of states, now numbering 11, to which it will not subsidize travel by its employees. Texas claims that its sovereignty is violated by California’s policy. California argues in response that its own sovereign interest against subsidizing discrimination is at stake.In June, the justices took the somewhat surprising step of asking the Trump administration for the federal government’s view on the dispute. Early this month, the Office of the Solicitor General filed the government’s brief, urging the court to accept the case and noting that “resolving such conflicts among sovereigns falls within the core of this court’s original and exclusive jurisdiction.” The court will probably announce early in the new year whether it will assume jurisdiction.I’ll end this column with a shout-out to a federal judge who really did stand up for the rule of law in an opinion last week. The question concerns abortion, and whether, given the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration should relax its rule requiring women to visit their doctor’s office in order to get the medication that causes an early abortion. The F.D.A. has suspended the in-person rule for some other medications, but refused requests from medical organizations to do the same for the abortion drug mifepristone.In July, Federal District Judge Theodore Chuang, who sits in Greenbelt, Md., issued an injunction requiring the agency to permit doctors, for the duration of the pandemic, to mail or deliver the medication. In October, the Supreme Court responded to the Trump administration’s request for a stay of the injunction by sending the case back to Judge Chuang, telling him to permit the government to argue among other points, that improvements in the Covid-19 situation since the spring meant that visiting a doctor’s office was no longer a sufficient obstacle to merit relaxing the rule for mifepristone.After receiving the administration’s brief to that effect, Judge Chuang issued a 34-page opinion explaining that while conditions have indeed changed, they have changed for the worse. Noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration have warned about the increasing intensity of the pandemic, he observed that the administration “has offered no expert opinions from a scientist at one of these agencies or elsewhere in the federal government to contradict the facts and conclusions” about the rising danger.“The fact that individuals are permitted to venture out during a pandemic to restaurants or businesses does not establish that women should be mandated to risk exposure to Covid-19 in order to exercise a constitutional right,” the judge wrote. Of course, the Trump administration promptly returned to the court this week seeking a stay of Judge Chuang’s decision.So yes, let’s give credit where credit is due. Let’s thank the courts — plural — for upholding the rule of law. Let’s celebrate the judges who were there when we needed them. We still do.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMeet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” Bob Nemanich, a former elector, doesn’t. And he is hopeful that 2020 might put future electors out of a gig.Polly Baca serves as one of the Electoral College’s 538 electors, while all but calling for the group to be abolished.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesDec. 12, 2020Updated 7:06 p.m. ETFew critics of the Electoral College are quite like Polly Baca.Ms. Baca believes the Electoral College, which has chosen American presidents since George Washington, “has absolutely no reason to be.” This year, she brought, and lost, a Supreme Court case challenging her state’s rules over how electors vote. Before electors cast their ballots for president in 2016, she invited several members to her home to plot a way — also unsuccessful — to circumvent the outcome.But unlike Donald J. Trump, whose raft of legal filings and maneuvers has failed to change the result of this year’s election, Ms. Baca is a Democrat. And she even serves as one of the body’s 538 electors while all but calling for the group to be abolished.“There’s absolutely no reason why the world’s strongest democracy doesn’t elect its C.E.O. with the popular vote,” said Ms. Baca, who will cast one of Colorado’s nine electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president-elect. “I’ve been on the outside, but I prefer to go on the inside to see what I can do.”It is the Electoral College, not the direct vote of the American people, that will decide the next president on Monday, when its 538 electors, chosen mostly during state party gatherings earlier this year, sign their ballots and send them to Washington.For generations, the body was viewed as a rubber stump to the will of the voters — but as with many things, scrutiny came only when things seemed to go wrong. The 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush showed that a mere 537 popular ballots could tip Florida’s Electoral College votes, and with it, the presidency. The 2016 election proved that a president could lose by millions of popular votes, yet be handed the White House anyway.“The head of the student council in your middle school was elected by a popular vote,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian and the author of a book called “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” “I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but the most fundamental democratic value is that all votes should count equally.”(He is not a fan.)Yet it’s hard to think of a time before this year that dragged the Electoral College, and American democracy with it, into such dangerous territory.The election, where it was clear by evening on Election Day that Mr. Biden had won the popular vote, turned into a nail-biter that stretched on for days — largely because of the high volume of mail ballots in a few states rich in Electoral College votes. President Trump used the delay to make false claims from the White House that fraud was underway and that he had actually won.Mr. Trump then turned to the courts to swing the Electoral College his way, backing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. The president’s lawyers appeared to hope that a friendly judge would overturn the results in one or more states that would allow him the 270 electors he needed to remain in office.As judges dismissed his suits, the president urged Republican state lawmakers to send delegations to the Electoral College who would vote for him anyway. He then brought White House influence to bear on a county election body in Michigan — one more last-ditch effort to stall the state from sending electors for Mr. Biden.That has left electors like Ronda Vuillemont-Smith, a conservative Oklahoma activist who will cast her vote for Mr. Trump on Monday, believing the president will stay in office.“I’m going to be quite honest with you, I think Donald Trump will be president for a second term,” she said, citing continued attempts to overturn the results.Yet for other electors, the frantic moves by a sitting president — indeed, most of the election itself — has led to soul-searching, not just on who should be president, but also on how the president should be chosen.“These tactics are tantamount to those in authoritarian governments,” said Alan Kennedy, a presidential elector in Denver. He said the election reminded him of a stint when he lived in Uganda and its president jailed his main opponent ahead of an election, something Mr. Trump also has repeatedly called for during his campaigns.Mr. Kennedy plans to dutifully cast his vote on Monday for Mr. Biden. But for Mr. Kennedy, a captain in the Colorado Army National Guard who served in the Middle East, a question still looms large behind the task ahead of him: Is such a system really in keeping with the nation’s ideals?“What’s terrifying is how close we came to another election of a president who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote,” he said.Robert Nemanich is quick to point out that he had no professional qualifications for being an elector other than being a high school math teacher.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesRobert Nemanich, a former elector from Colorado Springs, puts it another way.“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” he asked.Mr. Nemanich is quick to point out his only professional qualification for the job was being a high school math teacher. After volunteering as a Bernie Sanders primary delegate in 2016, Mr. Nemanich landed the job after giving out credentials at a state Democratic convention where selecting the electors was one of the agenda items.“I was one of the few asking to be an elector, and I would say 90 percent of people didn’t know what that was,” he said.And while this year’s electors include respected party officials and well-known activists — Hillary Clinton said she would be an elector for New York State — there have also been some unexpected names recruited for the task.They include Terri Hodge, a former state representative in Dallas who was sentenced to a prison term after pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2010, whom Texas Democrats selected as an elector this year. (As Mr. Trump won Texas, Ms. Hodge will not cast a ballot.)Tracking Disinformation More

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      Two Reasons the Texas Election Case Is Faulty

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationTwo reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy.Dec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETDec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETJeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Texas filed its election challenge directly to the Supreme Court, an unusual move.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesKen Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election.The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said.And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.”Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor.Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it.The suit’s legal argument is deeply flawed, legal experts said.Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans.The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.“They all do what they do,” Mr. Foley said. “For Texas to try to complain about what Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done would be a lot like Massachusetts complaining about how Texas elects its senators.”Typically state attorneys general are protective of their rights and wary of Supreme Court intervention, which Mr. Foley said makes this case unusual. “This is just the opposite,” he said. “It would be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”The four states named in the suit denounced it on Thursday and urged the court to reject it. The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, accused Mr. Paxton and other Trump allies of running “a disinformation campaign baselessly attacking the integrity of our election system.”The remedy the lawsuit seeks — the disenfranchisement of millions of voters — would be without precedent in the nation’s history.Even if the suit were proper, it was almost surely filed too late, as the procedures Texas objects to were in place before the election.A Supreme Court brief opposing Texas’ requests by prominent Republicans, including former Senator John Danforth of Missouri and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, said Texas’ filings “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers.”“It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this court,” the brief said, “to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes.”Mr. Trump and his supporters have often pointed to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election, as a hopeful historical precedent for their side. But unlike Bush v. Gore, there is not an obvious constitutional question at issue.“It looks like an inherently political suit,” Mr. Foley said.The suit uses statistical arguments that statisticians called ‘comical.’Mr. Paxton’s filing repeatedly cites an analysis by an economist in California that statisticians have said is nonsensical. Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states in question, the analysis says, were “less than one in a quadrillion.”The economist, Charles J. Cicchetti, who donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, arrived at the minuscule probability by purporting to use the results of the 2016 election as a backstop. His flawed reasoning was this: If Mr. Biden had received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he wrote, a victory would have been all but impossible.But Mr. Biden, of course, did not receive the same number of votes as Mrs. Clinton; he received over 15 million more. Nor would any candidate be expected to receive the same number of votes as a previous candidate.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 4:09 p.m. ETWalmart is preparing to administer a coronavirus vaccine once it is available.Mastercard and Visa stop allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub.The U.S. budget deficit hit $207 billion in November.That one-in-a-quadrillion figure has echoed across social media and was promoted by the White House press secretary. But an array of experts have said that the figure and Mr. Cicchetti’s analysis are easily refutable.Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who runs its election data archive, called this analysis “comical.”The analysis omitted a number of obvious, relevant facts, he said: “the context of the elections are different, that a Covid pandemic is going on, that people reach different conclusions about the administration, that Biden and Clinton are different candidates.”By the same logic and formula, if Mr. Trump had received an equal number of votes in 2020 as he did in 2016, there is also a one in a quadrillion chance that Mr. Trump in 2020 would outperform his totals in 2016, said Stephen C. Preston, a professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College. “But that doesn’t prove Trump cheated, it just shows that the numbers are different,” he said. “It’s like finding a low probability that 2 equals 3.”Mr. Cicchetti also wrote that votes counted earlier in the process and votes counted later favored different candidates, and that there was “a one in many more quadrillions chance” that votes counted in the two time periods were coming from the same groups of voters.But that is exactly what was expected to happen: Democrats tended to prefer voting by mail, and those ballots were counted later in the four battleground states, while Republicans tended to prefer voting in person on Election Day, and those ballots were counted earlier.“The order and tempo of vote counting was unlike previous elections,” said Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.What Mr. Cicchetti wrote was not especially revelatory, experts agreed.“The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not science or statistics. It’s not even a good cartoon of elections.”Texas’ attorney general is caught up in scandal.Though the legal reasoning of Mr. Paxton’s case may be novel, the impulse behind it is not. It was just the latest example of a Trump loyalist using the power of public office to come to the aid of a president whose base of support remains deeply attached to him and overwhelmingly says the election was unfair, according to polls.Mr. Paxton, 57, has been under a cloud of scandal since October, when seven of his senior staff attorneys accused their boss of bribery, misuse of his office and other wrongdoing. Their allegations, which Mr. Paxton has denied, involve a wealthy developer and political donor, Nate Paul, whose home and offices were raided by federal agents in August.The aides accused Mr. Paxton of “potential criminal offenses,” including assisting in Mr. Paul’s defense and intervening in the developer’s efforts to get a favorable judgment in a legal battle between his properties and a nonprofit.First elected in 2014, Mr. Paxton has served much of his term under a still-unresolved securities fraud indictment stemming from events that took place before he took office. The indictment accuses Mr. Paxton of selling technology shares to investors in 2011 without disclosing that he received 100,000 shares of stock as compensation, and of failing to register with securities regulators.Mr. Paxton has nevertheless maintained a high national profile — and the affection of conservatives — with his relentless efforts to dismantle policies of the Obama era and shoulder the Trump administration’s causes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Four State A.G.s Ask Supreme Court to Reject Texas Election Lawsuit

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      Lawsuit Seeks to Halt Debut of Ranked-Choice Voting in New York

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLawsuit Seeks to Halt Debut of Ranked-Choice Voting in New YorkThe new system was approved by voters in 2019, but critics, including at least one top mayoral candidate, fear that it may disenfranchise minority voters.Under the new system being challenged in court, when New York City voters go to the polls for next year’s mayoral primary, they would be allowed to choose as many as five candidates, ranked in order of preference.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesDana Rubinstein and Dec. 9, 2020Updated 9:03 a.m. ETNext year was supposed to be when New York City would revolutionize how voters choose their mayor — not merely selecting one candidate, but picking as many as five and ranking them in order of preference.New York’s take-no-prisoners political landscape was to be remade: Candidates would most likely be more collegial and would be obliged to reach out to voters beyond their bases in the hope that other candidates’ supporters would list them as a second or third choice. Runoff elections, often expensive and with limited turnout, would be eliminated.But just as the city is poised to implement the ranked-choice voting system, opposition is mounting. Black elected officials have raised objections, arguing that absent substantial voter education, the system will effectively disenfranchise voters of color.At least one leading Black mayoral candidate — Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, who once supported the system — now says it’s being rushed and suggested that New York should emulate Minneapolis, which took years to slowly implement ranked choice.Critics also question whether it makes sense for the city’s problem-prone Board of Elections to roll out such a complicated system during a once-in-a-century pandemic.Now that opposition has coalesced into a court challenge.Six New York City Council members filed suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan late Tuesday night against New York City, its Board of Elections and its Campaign Finance Board, contending that the city and the two boards had violated the law by failing to adequately explain the software that will be used tabulate the votes and by failing to conduct a sufficient public education campaign to familiarize voters with the new system.The suit seeks to prohibit the city from starting the new system in a February special election, a race that was poised to be a trial run for the June Democratic mayoral primary, which will use the same system and is likely to determine the city’s next mayor.“The board does not comment on pending litigation,” said Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the elections board. “However, as we have previously stated we will be ready to implement ranked-choice voting just as we successfully implemented a new voting system in 2010 and launched early voting in 2019.”The litigants include the two leaders of the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, who, with their colleagues, criticized the new system during a contentious City Council hearing on Monday.“They say all throughout the country that ranked-choice voting is working well for communities of color,” Laurie A. Cumbo, a Black Democratic councilwoman from Brooklyn, and one of the litigants, said during the hearing on Monday. “Well, New York City is a totally different city.”New York City voters approved ranked-choice voting in 2019. Under the new system, if a candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins outright. If no candidate wins a majority, the last-place winner is eliminated. The second-choice votes of those who had favored the last-place candidate would be counted instead. The process continues until there is a winner.Among the mayoral candidates who already seemed to be factoring the new voting system into their campaign strategies was Shaun Donovan, the former Obama administration cabinet member who formally announced his run on Tuesday. An “electability” slide show circulated on his behalf argued that “Shaun’s broad appeal makes him a natural second and third choice for voters, even when they are already committed to another candidate.”Good-government groups say that the new system enhances democracy.“This reform will foster more positive, issue-focused campaigns, give voters more choice, ensure that elected officials are accountable to a broader spectrum of their constituents and avoid costly, time consuming and unnecessary runoff elections,” Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of Citizens Union, said in a recent statement.But critics of the system argue that without adequate public education, the system confuses voters and thus disenfranchises them. They also contend that the voting system targets a party system heavily populated by leaders of color.Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice, said he was exploring a lawsuit with Hazel N. Dukes, the president of the New York State chapter of the NAACP, arguing that Black and other minority voters would be disenfranchised by ranked choice voting.“Some progressive white folks got together in a room and thought this would be good, but it’s not good for our community,” Ms. Dukes said. “The voters did vote, so we can’t overturn that, but we want a stay because there’s been no education about this in our community.”Mr. Foy also questioned the motives of those leading the effort to enact ranked-choice voting.“The primary argument for ranked-choice voting is that it expands access to elected office for Black and brown officials, but we don’t have that problem,” said Mr. Foy, who listed a string of positions from state attorney general to borough presidents that are held by Black and Latino elected officials. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”Ranked-choice voting has a long and complicated history in the United States.“There was a period over 100 years ago when it was in use in some cities,” but it fell out of favor around World War II, according to David C. Kimball, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.In the past two decades, it has gained traction in places including San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., and in Maine.The research on its impact on voter turnout is, however, mixed, he said, and voter education is a must, as American voters are accustomed to voting for just one candidate, not five.“I don’t know quite how to put this politely, but the New York City elections board has trouble tying its shoes, metaphorically speaking,” Professor Kimball said. “So asking them to roll out new voting rules in a matter of months is a big ask.”Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More