Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Fox Leaders Wanted to Break From Trump but Struggled to Make It Happen

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      Executives and top hosts found themselves in a bind after Donald Trump began pushing unfounded claims about election fraud, court filings show.Five days after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, a board member of the Fox Corporation, Anne Dias, reached out to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch with an urgent plea.“Considering how important Fox News has been as a megaphone for Donald Trump,” she said, it was time “to take a stance.” Ms. Dias, who sounded shaken by the riot, said she thought Fox News and the nation faced “an existential moment.”As quickly as the two Murdochs began discussing how to respond, their bind became evident.“Just tell her we have been talking internally and intensely,” Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls the company, wrote in an email. Fox News, he told his son, “is pivoting as fast as possible.” But he sounded a note of caution: “We have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.”Ever since Donald J. Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News Channel have struggled with how to handle the man and the movement they helped create.“Navigating” the delicate balance between truth and “crazy” was how Mr. Murdoch described his challenge in emails made public this week as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which is expected to go to trial in April.For the most part, Mr. Murdoch has been wildly successful at striking the balance. Fox converted Mr. Trump’s mass following into loyal viewers who deliver Mr. Murdoch and his shareholders huge profits.A 2018 headline about President Donald J. Trump that was displayed outside Fox News studios in New York.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressBut the emails among the Murdochs and the senior leadership of their companies, along with depositions of both men as part of the case, revealed just how Fox and its leaders strained to push back against Mr. Trump when he began spreading unfounded claims about widespread election fraud.The leadership of Fox and its star hosts are often viewed from the outside as power brokers in Republican politics — with much justification. But in the wake of the election, they appeared fearful of alienating Mr. Trump’s supporters, almost to the point of powerlessness, court filings containing internal communications and depositions show.Privately, the executives and hosts expressed despair and disgust at the Trump associates who were using Fox News’s platforms to spread bogus allegations of voter fraud. Yet the wishes of the audience — or how the network’s executives interpreted them — dictated which guests were booked, what kind of new programming was created, what correspondents could say on the air and even which people lost their jobs, according to the details in a 212-page brief that Dominion filed in a Delaware state court this week.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Fox News has expressed confidence that Dominion’s claims will fall apart once their full context becomes apparent at the trial. “Dominion blatantly misconstrued the facts by cherry-picking sound bites, omitting key context and mischaracterizing the record,” a Fox News spokeswoman said.As it became evident that some of Fox’s audience was turning against it after it projected President Biden’s victory, and viewers started switching to hard-right alternatives like Newsmax, people inside the network scrambled to stanch the bleeding.Even as executives raised concerns about Mr. Trump to one another, they came down hard on those seen as too tough on him.Eleven days after the election, for instance, Lachlan Murdoch became irritated watching the Fox News correspondent Leland Vittert’s reporting on a pro-Trump rally in Washington, considering it too critical. Mr. Murdoch called Mr. Vittert’s coverage “smug and obnoxious” in a message to Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media. Ms. Scott responded that she was “calling now,” to direct someone to relay the message to the correspondent and his producer.As word of Mr. Murdoch’s complaint made its way down the food chain, the executive in charge of Fox’s weekend programming, David Clark, also weighed in, telling a colleague in an email that he had texted Mr. Vittert “and told him to cut it out.”To Lachlan Murdoch, there seemed to be no detail too small to complain about if he believed it was hurting the bond that Fox News had forged with its audience over the years. He also complained to Ms. Scott at one point about what he saw as the negative tone toward Mr. Trump in the chyron — the block of text that appears at the bottom of the screen. It was too wordy, he said, and too negative about the president.Lachlan Murdoch complained that a Fox News reporter’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was “smug and obnoxious.”Mike Cohen for The New York TimesRupert Murdoch offered Ms. Scott suggestions on booking guests who were known to Trump supporters as loyal defenders. One person he proposed in late November 2020 was the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with a Russian ambassador. A week after Mr. Murdoch sent his note, Dominion’s filing says, Mr. Flynn appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business program.The elder Mr. Murdoch also told Ms. Scott to get rid of a senior Fox News manager, Bill Sammon, telling her that it would go a long way with the former president’s core supporters. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” he told Ms. Scott on Nov. 20. Mr. Sammon ran the network’s Washington bureau and oversaw the unit that was responsible for Fox’s early — and correct — decision to project that Mr. Biden would win Arizona. That call had infuriated Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Murdoch explained to Ms. Scott that the firing would “be a big message with Trump people.” According to the Dominion brief, Mr. Sammon was told that he was being let go that same day.As Fox executives stamped out skepticism of Mr. Trump in the network’s coverage, they also grew disillusioned with the increasing amount of “crazy” on their airwaves, as Rupert Murdoch described the Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell in an email to a friend, according to the legal filings. By early December 2020, as Mr. Trump’s claims of being cheated grew more far-fetched, Mr. Murdoch acknowledged how difficult it had become to continue delivering coverage that didn’t insult loyal, pro-Trump viewers without stating the obvious: The president was lying to them about his loss.In one message to Ms. Scott, Mr. Murdoch lamented Mr. Trump’s performance at a rally in Georgia where he called for Gov. Brian Kemp to help overturn the election, as well as other recent comments from the president. “All making it harder to straddle the issue! We should talk through this,” he wrote.After Jan. 6, 2021, as hopes among many conservatives skeptical of Mr. Trump swelled that the Republican Party might finally be done with him, some of his biggest stalwarts inside Fox News seemed to be backing away from him — even the host Sean Hannity, one of Mr. Trump’s most dedicated on-air supporters, according to Mr. Murdoch’s emails.“Wake-up call for Hannity,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in an email on Jan. 12, 2021, to Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House and a Fox Corporation board member. Mr. Murdoch explained that the host had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”For a time, at least. It did not take long for Mr. Hannity and other prime-time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, to begin talking about the attack and its aftermath as Mr. Trump and his supporters preferred.In the opening monologue of one of his shows in June 2022, with a congressional investigation into the assault in full swing, Mr. Hannity told his audience, “January 6 is just another excuse to smear Donald Trump and anyone who supports them.” More

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      Opposition Parties in Nigeria Call for Election Rerun, Citing Vote Rigging

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      Two parties say that the presidential vote in Africa’s biggest democracy was marred by fraud and violence, and they called for the head of the election commission to step down.Nigeria’s two major opposition parties on Tuesday called for the presidential election to be canceled and rerun, saying that it had been compromised by rigging and widespread violence.The election over the weekend in the West African nation — the most populous on the continent, with 220 million people — was the most wide open in years, with a surprise third-party candidate putting up an assertive challenge.On Tuesday, the chairmen of the two opposition parties — the People’s Democratic Party and the Labour Party — called for the head of the government’s electoral commission to resign, even as the commission continued to release results.With about one-third of the 36 states reporting results by Tuesday afternoon, the candidate of the governing All Progressives Congress party, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, appeared some distance ahead of his rivals in the count. Some 87 million people were registered to vote, but results from the first tabulations suggested low voter turnout.“This is not a credible election,” said Iyorchia Ayu, the chairman of the People’s Democratic Party, Nigeria’s main opposition party, at a joint news conference on Tuesday afternoon in Abuja, the capital. “It is not acceptable.”International observers who monitored the election reported delays, technical hitches and violence.The Independent National Electoral Commission had said in a statement on Monday that it took “full responsibility” for the logistical problems and delays.As of Tuesday afternoon, Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party trailed behind Mr. Tinubu with 32 percent of the votes, and Peter Obi, the so-called “youth candidate” of the opposition Labour Party, had 17 percent.On Monday, Mr. Obi pulled off an unexpected victory in Lagos State, home to the country’s largest city and traditionally a stronghold of Mr. Tinubu, who was its governor for eight years. More

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      Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods

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      Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, spoke under oath last month in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems.Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.The filings also revealed that top executives and on-air hosts had reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to various fictitious allegations about Dominion. These included unsubstantiated rumors — repeatedly uttered by guests and hosts of Fox programs — that its voting machines could run a secret algorithm that switched votes from one candidate to another, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.Read What Murdoch Said in His Deposition in the Fox-Dominion CaseRupert Murdoch made his remarks last month as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems.Read DocumentDespite those misgivings, little changed about the content on shows like Mr. Dobbs’s and Ms. Bartiromo’s. For weeks after the election, viewers of Fox News and Fox Business heard a far different story from the one that Fox executives privately conceded was real.Lawyers for Fox News, which filed a response to Dominion in court on Monday, argued that its commentary and reporting after the election did not amount to defamation because its hosts had not endorsed the falsehoods about Dominion, even if Mr. Murdoch stated otherwise in his deposition. As such, the network’s lawyers argued, Fox’s coverage was protected under the First Amendment.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsA $1.6 Billion Suit: A defamation lawsuit by the voting machine maker Dominion seeks to hold Fox News responsible for false claims after the 2020 election. Here’s what to know about the case so far.Rupert Murdoch’s Deposition: The conservative media mogul acknowledged under oath that several Fox hosts promoted the false narrative that the election was stolen. Read his deposition.Privately Expressing Disbelief: Dozens of text messages released in the lawsuit show how Fox hosts went from privately criticizing election fraud claims to giving them significant airtime.“Far from reporting the allegations as true, hosts informed their audiences at every turn that the allegations were just allegations that would need to be proven in court in short order if they were going to impact the outcome of the election,” Fox lawyers said in their filing. “And to the extent some hosts commented on the allegations, that commentary is independently protected opinion.”A Fox News spokeswoman said on Monday in response to the filing that Dominion’s case “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal scrutiny.” She added that the company had taken “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”In certain instances, Fox hosts did present the allegations as unproven and offered their opinions. And Fox lawyers have pointed to exchanges on the air when hosts challenged these claims and pressed Mr. Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani to present evidence that never materialized.But the case is also likely to revolve around questions about what people with the power to shape Fox’s on-air content knew about the validity of the fraud allegations as they gave pro-Trump election deniers a platform — often in front of hosts who mustered no pushback.“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended major media organizations in defamation cases. He added that Fox’s arguments were stronger against some of Dominion’s claims than others. But based on what he has seen of the case so far, Mr. Levine said, “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”Dominion’s filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”The document also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had implored Mr. Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested instead that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”There was some discussion at the highest levels of the company about how to make that pivot, Dominion said.On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, talked about whether Mr. Hannity and his fellow prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, should make it clear to viewers that Mr. Biden had won the election. Mr. Murdoch said in his deposition that he had hoped such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”According to the filing, Ms. Scott said of the hosts, “Privately they are all there,” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” No statement of that kind was made on the air.Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.At one point, Dominion’s lawyers accuse Ms. Pirro, who hosted a Saturday evening talk show, of “laundering her own conspiracy theories through Powell.” The filing goes on to say Ms. Pirro bragged to her friends “that she was the source for Powell’s claims.” Dominion notes that this was “something she never shared with her audience.”The filing on Monday included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, who was one of the many senior executive cautioning about the content of Fox’s coverage. After Mr. Hannity told his audience on Nov. 5, 2020, that it would be “impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results,” Mr. Dinh told a group of senior executives including Lachlan Murdoch and Ms. Scott: “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.”When asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Mr. Dinh said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”In their filing on Monday, Fox’s lawyers accused Dominion of cherry-picking evidence that some at Fox News knew the allegations against Dominion were not true and, therefore, acted out of actual malice, the legal standard required to prove defamation. “The vast majority of Dominion’s evidence comes from individuals who had zero responsibility for the statements Dominion challenges,” the lawyers said. More

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      Why Election Denialism Might Cost Fox News $1.6 Billion

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      Rikki Novetsky and Stella Tan and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicAfter the 2020 election, wild theories ran rampant on the right of an election stolen from Donald Trump through a coordinated conspiracy. The news channel Fox News became one of the loudest voices amplifying these false claims into millions of U.S. households.Now, a defamation lawsuit by Dominion, a voting machine maker that was cast as a villain in these conspiracy theories, seeks to hold the media company responsible for the false claims made by its hosts and guests, presenting evidence that Fox knew what it was doing was wrong.On today’s episodeJeremy W. Peters, a correspondent for The New York Times who covers the media and its intersection with politics, culture and law.Advertisements on Sixth Avenue featuring Fox News personalities including Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesBackground readingHere’s what Fox News hosts said privately and publicly about voter fraud.The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jeremy W. Peters More

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      What Fox News Hosts Said Privately vs. Publicly About Voter Fraud

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      Two days after the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson was furious. Fox News viewers were abandoning the network for Newsmax and One America News, two conservative rivals, after Fox declared that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Arizona, a crucial swing state. In a text message with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, Mr. Carlson appeared livid that viewers […] More

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      Nigerian Politician Arrested With Nearly $500,000 on Eve of Election, Police Say

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      For years, Nigerian politicians have been accused of buying votes. The lawmaker, the police say, was caught with dollar bills and a list of possible recipients.A Nigerian politician was arrested on Friday with nearly $500,000 in U.S. bills in his car and a list of possible recipients for the money, the police said, announcing his detention on the eve of a closely watched presidential election in which vote buying has worried officials.Vote buying, long a problem in Nigeria, is one of several potential threats to the election, which is set to take place on Saturday. For years, politicians in the country have been accused of handing out cash for votes, knowing that many Nigerians — more than 60 percent of people live in poverty — are in need. The local police on Friday identified the arrested politician as Chinyere Igwe, a lawmaker in Nigeria’s lower parliamentary chamber and a member of the opposition People’s Democratic Party. They said he was arrested on suspicion of money laundering but did not announce formal charges. Mr. Igwe could not immediately be reached for comment, and it was not clear whether he had a lawyer.The police also asserted that Mr. Igwe, a representative in the southern city of Port Harcourt, was found not with the national currency, naira, but with large piles of American $100 bills in his car.The government decided last year to replace its currency with new notes, in part to prevent politicians from stockpiling naira to buy votes. President Muhammadu Buhari, who has reached his term limit and is not standing for re-election, said it had reduced the influence of money on politics. But since the transition period for changing old notes ended this month, the currency change has thrown the country into chaos, with most Nigerians unable to withdraw their cash.The possibility that a politician planned to buy votes with U.S. dollars, as the police indicated, suggested that the issue of vote buying may not be limited to Nigeria’s local currency. (It is not limited to money, either; in past elections, some votes were bought with food, like bags of rice.) Some nongovernmental organizations have urged the country’s central bank to track suspicious bank transfers before the vote.Vote buying is one of many issues that could tarnish the integrity of Nigeria’s election, a close race in which three candidates have a good chance of winning: Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a 70-year-old former governor of Lagos who is the candidate of the governing All Progressives Congress; Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president who has run for the presidency five times; and Peter Obi, a 61-year-old surprise front-runner who is seen as the candidate of the youth.In a separate operation, Nigeria’s antigraft agency announced on Friday that it had seized 32.4 million naira, or about $70,000, which it asserted was meant for vote buying in Lagos, the country’s largest city. It said someone had been taken into custody, but didn’t name the person or say whether they were acting on behalf of a party.Another threat is the risk of election-related violence, which could discourage voters from going to polling stations.Mutmaina Omobolame, a 20-year-old computer science student in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third-largest city, said this week that she did “not feel like voting,” even though she holds a voting card, because she was afraid violence could break out.Nigeria’s electoral body said this week that 87 million Nigerians had collected their voting cards and would be able to cast a ballot on Saturday, the largest figure ever for a democratic election in Africa.Whether that will translate into high voter turnout remains to be seen. More

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      Ex-Attorney General in Arizona Buried Report Refuting Voter Fraud Claims

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      Under Mark Brnovich, a Republican who left office in January, a 10,000-hour review did not see the light of day. His Democratic successor, Kris Mayes, released investigators’ findings.Mark Brnovich, a Republican who served as Arizona’s attorney general until January, buried the findings of a 10,000-hour review by his office that found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, newly released documents reveal.The documents were released on Wednesday by Mr. Brnovich’s successor, Kris Mayes, a Democrat who took office last month as the top law enforcement official in the battleground state, which remains at the forefront of the election denial movement.The sweeping review was completed last year after politicians and other conspiracy theorists aligned with former President Donald J. Trump inundated Mr. Brnovich’s office with election falsehoods. They claimed baselessly that large numbers of people had voted twice; that ballots had been sent to dead people; and that ballots with traces of bamboo had been flown in from Korea and filled out in advance for Joseph R. Biden Jr., who won Arizona by a little over 10,000 votes.But investigators discredited these claims, according to a report on their findings that was withheld by Mr. Brnovich. (The Washington Post reported earlier on the findings.)“These allegations were not supported by any factual evidence when researched by our office,” Reginald Grigsby, chief special agent in the office’s special investigation’s section, wrote in a summary of the findings on Sept. 19 of last year.The summary was part of documents and internal communications that were made public on Wednesday by Ms. Mayes, who narrowly won an open-seat race in November to become attorney general.“The results of this exhaustive and extensive investigation show what we have suspected for over two years — the 2020 election in Arizona was conducted fairly and accurately by elections officials,” Ms. Mayes said in a statement. “The 10,000-plus hours spent diligently investigating every conspiracy theory under the sun distracted this office from its core mission of protecting the people of Arizona from real crime and fraud.”Efforts to reach Mr. Brnovich, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, were not immediately successful.His former chief of staff, Joseph Kanefield, who was also Mr. Brnovich’s chief deputy, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In the eight-page summary of investigators’ findings, Mr. Grigsby wrote that the attorney general’s office had interviewed and tried to collect evidence from Cyber Ninjas, a Florida firm that conducted a heavily criticized review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, at the direction of the Republican-controlled State Senate.Investigators also made several attempts to gather information from True the Vote, a nonprofit group founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, a prominent election denier, the summary stated..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations,” Mr. Grigsby wrote. “The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be inaccurate.”When investigators tried to speak to Wendy Rogers, an election-denying Republican state lawmaker, they said in the summary that she refused to cooperate and told them she was waiting to see the “perp walk” of those who had committed election fraud.Ms. Rogers, who was censured by the State Senate in March 2022 after giving a speech at a white nationalist gathering, declined to comment on Thursday.In a series of emails exchanged by Mr. Brnovich’s staff members last April, Mr. Grigsby appeared to object several times to the language in a letter drafted on behalf of Mr. Brnovich that explained investigators’ findings. Its intended recipient was Karen Fann, a Republican who was the State Senate’s president and was a catalyst for the Cyber Ninjas review in Arizona.One of the statements that Mr. Grigsby highlighted as problematic centered on election integrity in Maricopa County.“Our overall assessment is that the current election system in Maricopa County involving the verification and handling of early ballots is broke,” Mr. Brnovich’s draft letter stated.But Mr. Grigsby appeared to reach an opposite interpretation, writing that investigators had concluded that the county followed its procedures for verifying signatures on early ballots.“We did not uncover any criminality or fraud having been committed in this area during the 2020 general election,” a suggested edit was written beneath the proposed language.Ms. Fann did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In his role in Arizona, Mr. Brnovich was something of an enigma. He defended the state’s vote count after the 2020 presidential election, drawing the ire of Mr. Trump. The former president sharply criticized Mr. Brnovich in June and endorsed his Republican opponent, Blake Masters, who won the Senate primary but lost in the general election.But Mr. Brnovich has also suggested that the 2020 election revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast last spring, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.”In January, as one of Ms. Mayes’s first acts in office, she redirected an election integrity unit that Mr. Brnovich had created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression.The unit’s former leader, Jennifer Wright, meanwhile, joined a legal effort to invalidate Ms. Mayes’s narrow victory in November.Ms. Mayes has said that she did not share the priorities of Mr. Brnovich, whom she previously described as being preoccupied with voter fraud despite isolated cases. The office has five pending voter fraud investigations. More

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      Counting votes and cutting violence

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      Counting votes and cutting violenceShattered glass at Brazil’s Supreme Court after supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brasília in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesThe resilience of Brazilian democracy, in the face of efforts by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro to undermine the validity of the recent presidential election, is a story that has just about everything. Courtroom drama, baseless claims of voter fraud, brawls in the halls of power, and hopeful hints that democracy may not be as fragile as it has seemed in recent years.There has been, unsurprisingly, a lot of focus on the powerful individuals whose decisions ensured that the election result was respected, such as an aggressive Supreme Court justice and the leaders of its military. Their decisions were undoubtedly important. But focusing on a few people’s choices can obscure another important issue: the strength of Brazil’s democratic institutions — and how that affects ordinary Brazilians’ lives.I know that “institutions” can sound dry as a topic — a second ago we were talking about riots, now I’m conjuring visions of paperwork and buzzing fluorescent lighting — but stay with me here.Because I want to talk about a new paper about Brazilian political institutions by Camilo Nieto-Matiz, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and Natán Skigin, a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame. It reads a bit like political science as scripted by Martin Scorsese — light on the paperwork, heavy on the murders and gangland politics. And although it is not specifically about Bolsonaro or the recent election, it offers important context about the conditions that brought the country into, and potentially out of, a democratic crisis.A surprising way to reduce violent crimeBrazil’s electronic voting system has made headlines around the world with the false claims by Bolsonaro, as president, that it was rife with fraud.But Nieto-Matiz and Skigin began studying the system years earlier, when Brazil first began rolling it out to districts across the country. They noticed that it seemed to be having a surprising effect: When electronic voting was introduced into a particular area, violent crime there quickly fell.“That was really puzzling,” Nieto-Matiz told me when we spoke last week. They had expected to perhaps find a relationship between electronic voting and particular policies: perhaps a benefit to illiterate citizens, whose votes were more likely to be counted under the new electronic system than the old paper one. But the decrease in violence seemed to happen almost immediately, before any new policies had a chance to take effect. What could account for that?When they dug a little deeper, they found that the new voting system seemed to make it slightly less likely for political parties that gain votes by promising goods or resources in exchange for support — what political scientists call clientelistic parties — to win elections. Those parties may have been more likely to rely on ballot fraud to win, the researchers hypothesized, which became harder once electronic voting was introduced.By contrast, so-called programmatic parties, which tend to mobilize support by promising to enact certain policies — for example the leftist agenda of the Workers Party, the party of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — did slightly better under the new system. (Programmatic parties can have right-wing agendas, too. And no party is exclusively one model or another, but they tend to skew in one direction.)Nieto-Matiz and Skigin wondered whether there might be a link between violence and the type of party that prevailed in elections, so they set out to test that more rigorously — resulting in the current paper.They examined a set of local elections so tight that they were essentially coin flips, making the results as close to random as it would be possible to be in real-world politics. That way, they could be reasonably confident that differences were because of the type of party that won, rather than the underlying conditions in the district.The results were striking: When programmatic parties won, local homicide rates immediately fell. But when clientelistic parties won, violence in their districts actually got worse. And, once again, the researchers said, the effect showed up far too quickly for it to be the result of new laws or policies.One study isn’t enough to conclusively say why they found a correlation between programmatic parties and reduced violence, the researchers were careful to note when we spoke. But they had a hypothesis — and that’s where things start getting Scorsese-ish.They suggest that clientelistic parties are more likely to collaborate with local armed groups, which in Brazil include criminal gangs and paramilitary groups backed by landowners and oligarchs.Research has shown that clientelistic parties tend to have relatively loose internal controls on membership and candidates, which can make them useful vehicles for criminals looking to get into politics — something that other studies have found in India and Colombia. Additionally, gangs and paramilitaries can help get rid of political opposition, assist with election fraud, or deliver the votes of people from groups or areas under their control.By contrast, because programmatic parties need to maintain ideological discipline, they tend to have stronger institutional controls over who can be a party candidate or official. And they might also face more of a backlash if voters perceive them as corrupt or violent, because their appeal to voters is based on how well they enact their ideological agendas in office. That’s harder to do while mired in investigations or prosecutions for wrongdoing, which means they have less incentive to collaborate with violent groups.So the theory goes that, while individual politicians’ decisions might vary quite a bit, clientelistic parties had more of an incentive to enter into mutually beneficial relationships with gangs, paramilitaries or other violent actors. And that gave those armed groups more impunity and local power, which in turn increased violent crime.Which brings us back to the resilience of Brazilian democracy.Research has shown that over time, programmatic parties tend to crowd out clientelistic parties, because support for the latter tends to collapse as soon as they’re out of power and unable to distribute resources to supporters. Skigin and Nieto-Matiz’s work adds to that by showing how the process might also reduce the power of violent groups.“We should expect that those that those criminal actors or generally coercive actors, they should be either weakened, or, if they are able to survive, they are not going to be able to resort to as much violence,” Skigin said.Viewed through that lens, the broader story of Brazil’s democracy starts to look less like an episode of democratic crisis, and more like turbulence on a long, slow and still incomplete trajectory of democratization.And it suggests that the recent election, which saw the victory of a candidate for the Workers Party — the largest programmatic party in the country — may have implications for ordinary citizens’ lives that go far beyond his party’s policies or ideology.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. 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