Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      The Dangers of Election-Denying Secretary of State Campaigns

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      Around a dozen election-denying Republican candidates secured their party’s nomination for secretary of state this fall. This is the reality, two years on, that Donald Trump’s election lies have created.There are three types of election-denying candidates, and each one poses distinct problems for civic integrity. There are the swing-state candidates getting lots of justified attention, running in places like Arizona and Michigan, because their elections could have pivotal, clear national implications in the 2024 presidential campaign.Chuck Gray, the Republican nominee for Wyoming secretary of state, in 2018.Jacob Richard Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle, via Associated PressThere are candidates like Chuck Gray in Wyoming, who is all but certain to take office in January, as Democrats didn’t field an opponent. Election-denying candidates in very red states aren’t getting as much attention now, but they likely will come January, when they are officeholders. They will help set policies in their states — many of which will also have Republican-led legislatures and governors — where extremist ideas could become law.And there are people like Dominic Rapini, Connecticut’s Republican secretary of state nominee, who are running in blue states and unlikely to win. Their campaigns, though, will have critical fallout effects. By virtue of their statewide platforms, even losing candidates can further damage the discourse — in their states and nationally — and increase the risks to our democracy. Election deniers in blue states can uniquely exacerbate Mr. Trump’s undermining of faith in our elections, and they, like their winning counterparts in red states, can set the stage for local election-denying candidates to win now or in the future.Dominic Rapini, the Republican nominee for Connecticut secretary of state, at a Boaters for Trump parade in 2020.Arnold Gold/Hearst Connecticut Media Sixteen days after the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Rapini sent 23 tweets containing the same message to a wide range of figures, from a local radio host to Mr. Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “It’s time to admit fraud is real and stop denying it! #fraudeniers,” Mr. Rapini wrote.A month and a half later, while the Capitol building was under invasion by Mr. Trump’s supporters and more than an hour after Mike Pence, who was then the vice president, was whisked into hiding, Mr. Rapini tweeted at the official account for the Office of Connecticut’s Secretary of the State: “The real COUP has been prosecuted by Democrats with fake Russian collusion theories and wide spread, systematic voter fraud.”Like Republicans’ recently softened stance on abortion, Mr. Rapini has toned down his rhetoric in recent months. Yet as late as last summer, he remained the board chair of Fight Voter Fraud, a group that claims to “have assembled a ‘silent army’ of volunteer and professional investigators” to look for voter fraud. (He has said he left the board last year.) As recently as this spring, the group was aligned with the attorney Cleta Mitchell’s organization, the Election Integrity Network. Ms. Mitchell was one of the lawyers advising Mr. Trump on the Jan. 2, 2021, call where he asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” more votes for him there.With a candidate like Mr. Rapini running in a state like Connecticut, where the last Republican secretary of state left office in 1995 (and the last one before that left office in 1959), it would be easy enough to mistake his nomination as unimportant.Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and a leading election law expert, cautioned anyone who might ignore such candidacies. “First of all, just running these races politicizes even further the office of secretary of state,” he told me. Additionally, Mr. Hasen said that having a candidate on a statewide ballot making “constant false claims of massive voter fraud can’t help but create more doubt about election integrity in the minds of a lot of people.”Although President Biden carried Connecticut by over 20 points in 2020, about 715,000 residents voted for Mr. Trump. If national estimates of support for Mr. Trump’s election lies were to apply in Connecticut, that would mean as many as half a million voters don’t trust elections there already. A statewide candidacy by someone so dedicated to pressing unfounded claims — even if unsuccessful — could, at the least, solidify that election skepticism.It’s crucial to remember what the office actually means: In Connecticut, as in many states across the country, the secretary of state is the lead elections official. As the commissioner of elections, Connecticut’s secretary of state is responsible for administering its election laws and, under federal law, doing the same for federal elections. Mr. Rapini has made clear that he would use the position to focus on “election security,” as he wrote on the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection. This would be a marked change from the former secretary of state, who was elected three times and focused on “making voter registration and casting a ballot more convenient and obstacle free for every eligible Connecticut citizen.”Stephanie Thomas, a first-term Connecticut state representative and longtime nonprofit fund-raising and strategy consultant, is the Democratic nominee facing Mr. Rapini in November. “As a nonprofit fund-raiser, the adage used to be if you send someone an email three times, they think they know your organization and they’re more likely to give. So we know that repetition can sometimes prove effective, even if the message is incorrect,” she said in an interview last month. “This type of false narrative just chips away at the fabric of the integrity of our elections, and I think that is just as dangerous as someone in a more reliably red state saying the election was stolen.”One of the people already in these offices who went through the 2020 election and its aftermath agrees. Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, is running for re-election this year. She told me she worries about a wide range of state and local dangers to voting rights, including threats to election workers, excuses for voting restrictions and local election security breaches, because “local officials embrace conspiracies and become security threats themselves.”The point that harm doesn’t just build up but also trickles down is what most worries Sam Oliker-Friedland, who previously worked on voting rights cases at the Justice Department and is now the executive director at the Institute for Responsive Government.He said his concern in a state like Connecticut is the effect the candidacy “will have on lower races, especially races for local election officials.” While the secretary of state is the formal head of elections, it’s the registrars of voters and town clerks in Connecticut who are doing “the day-to-day work of running elections.” Many more people are involved in carrying out elections than just the top officials in a given state, and while their roles are important, they’re also much lower profile. Those officials and their races going forward “will be influenced by this discourse coming from the person running for the top elections post in the state,” Mr. Oliker-Friedland warned, adding that the discourse will also affect primary elections in those races going forward and the way those people do their jobs once elected.Mr. Rapini’s claims of voter fraud spill over into other areas as well, a dynamic that can further politicize other policy decisions. When Connecticut passed a law in the summer of 2021 restoring the right to vote to many who had returned to their communities from prison, Mr. Rapini criticized the move in part as a failure of priorities — he said it meant officials weren’t doing the work to “fix our elections in Connecticut.”Not a lot of people are giving optimistic pitches about the state of things these days, so it stood out to me when Ms. Thomas presented what she sees as a positive path out of this moment. She points to civic education and civic engagement — beyond just a focus on voting and Election Day. “We have to start thinking about this as a holistic, 365-day-a-year process,” she told me. That could restore trust in the system, she said, because the outcomes would be “more reflective of the values.”We still have a long way to go for that to happen, but it’s good that people are talking about it — and working toward it.Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) is a journalist who writes about U.S. legal matters, including the Supreme Court and politics, and publishes the newsletter Law Dork.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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      This Threat to Democracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photograph by Stephen Maturen, via Getty ImagesIn the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies were unable to get far in their attempts to prove widespread voter fraud. There were two reasons for that.First, there wasn’t any, as numerous investigations by journalists, expert reports and court rulings showed. But second, Republican election officials in multiple states repeatedly said that their counts and recounts were accurate, and they defended the integrity of the election. For all the pressure that the Trump camp brought to bear, well-trained, civic-minded election workers carried out their duty to maintain the machinery of American voting.Many top Republican Party officials and lawmakers have spent the last two years striking back, and drawn the most attention for their efforts to pass “voter integrity” laws that aim to make voting more onerous under the guise of preventing fraud. From January 2021 to May of this year, just under three dozen restrictive laws had been passed in nearly 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.These are pernicious laws, and they undermine Americans’ hard-won rights to vote. But just as important is the matter of who counts the votes, and who decides which votes count and which do not.This is where Mr. Trump’s allies have focused much of their scheming since his re-election defeat. Their mission is to take over America’s election infrastructure, or at least key parts of it, from the ground up by filling key positions of influence with Trump sympathizers. Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.Imagine a legal Jan. 6. It’s bureaucratic, boring, invisible — and it might actually succeed.These efforts require attention and mobilization from Americans across the political spectrum. America’s system of voting is complex and decentralized, with most of the oversight done at the state and local level by thousands of elected and appointed officials, along with poll workers. While it is outdated and inconvenient in many places, this system has worked relatively well for roughly 200 years.But Mr. Trump’s attempts to subvert the election also revealed the system’s vulnerabilities, and his allies are now intently focused on exploiting those pressure points to bend the infrastructure of voting to their advantage. Their drive to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, is a reminder that democracy is fragile. The threats to it are not only violent ruptures like the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but also quieter efforts to corrupt it.A key element of this strategy is dismantling the bulwarks that stopped the assault on democracy in 2020. In Georgia, the top state election official, Brad Raffensperger, its secretary of state, refused Mr. Trump’s request to help steal the election by agreeing to “find” 11,780 additional votes. In Michigan, the Board of State Canvassers certified Joe Biden’s victory despite Mr. Trump’s aggressive meddling. A host of other state and local officials, many of them Republicans, pushed back on similarly antidemocratic machinations.Mr. Trump and his allies have set about removing and replacing these public servants, through elections and appointments, with more like-minded officials. In some cases, the effort has failed. (In Georgia’s Republican primary this year, Mr. Trump backed a losing candidate in a vendetta against Mr. Raffensperger.) But in other states, Republicans have embraced election deniers as candidates, including for secretary of state.In Nevada, the Republican secretary of state nominee, Jim Marchant, maintains that the 2020 presidential race was rigged and that he would not have certified Mr. Biden’s win in Nevada. He blames voting fraud for his own failed House run that year and has said that Nevada voters haven’t truly elected their leaders in years because the system is so rigged.Mr. Marchant is a part of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, whose candidates are campaigning for measures that would make it more difficult for Americans to vote, such as by limiting voting to a single day and aggressively purging voter rolls. They have the financial backing of pro-Trump election deniers including Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.The Republicans’ pick in Michigan, Kristina Karamo, is also an America First candidate. She gained political notice with her unsubstantiated claims to have witnessed election fraud as a poll watcher in Detroit in 2020. She has also promoted the baseless conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines flipped votes in Mr. Biden’s favor and that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation conducted by “antifa posing as Trump supporters.”The most outrageous G.O.P. choice may be Arizona’s Mark Finchem. Mr. Finchem has in the past identified as a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, and he spoke at a QAnon convention last year. He was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although he denies being within about 500 yards of the building. As a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, he introduced a resolution this year to decertify the 2020 election in multiple counties, and was a sponsor of a bill to empower the Republican-led Legislature to overturn election results.Mr. Finchem wants to ban early voting and put limits on mail-in voting. In April, he filed a federal lawsuit, backed by Mr. Lindell, to block the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona in the midterms. (It was dismissed.)Installing election deniers as top election officials is just one element of this plan. Much less visible, but just as important, is the so-called precinct strategy, in which Trump allies are recruiting supporters to flood the system by signing up to work in low-level election positions such as poll workers. A prominent promoter of the precinct strategy was Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Last year, Mr. Bannon rallied the listeners of his “War Room” podcast to sign up as precinct committee members. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” he proclaimed in May 2021.The call was answered. An investigation by ProPublica in the summer of 2021 found a surge in Republicans signing up to be precinct officers or equivalent lowest-level officials in key counties. Of the 65 counties contacted, 41 reported a collective increase of at least 8,500 new sign-ups following Mr. Bannon’s call to arms. (ProPublica found no such spike on the Democratic side.)The precinct strategy has been endorsed by Mr. Trump — who declared it a way to “take back our great country from the ground up” — and adopted by segments of the Republican Party.Mr. Bannon is appealing to his supporters’ sense of civic duty by asking them to be more involved in their local election process. But unsettling details of what this effort entails emerged this summer after Politico acquired videos of Republican operatives discussing strategy with activists.New election recruits would attend training workshops on how to challenge voters at polling places, explained Matthew Seifried, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity director for Michigan, in one of the recordings. These poll workers would have access to a hotline and a website staffed by “an army” of Republican-friendly lawyers prepared to help with challenges. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?” Mr. Seifried said at a meeting last October.As testimony during the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed, the legal challenges presented by Trump allies to the 2020 election quickly collapsed in part because they lacked even the most basic documentation. But carried out as designed, the precinct strategy means that even if, ultimately, there are no instances of fraud and most of the challenges to individual voters fall apart, they could still bog down the voting by causing delays and introducing unnecessary friction and confusion, giving cover to a state election official or state legislature to say that an election is tainted and therefore invalid.In some parts of the country, this is already happening. This summer, an all-Republican county commission in rural New Mexico refused to certify the primary election results because of unsubstantiated suspicions of fraud. New Mexico’s secretary of state, a Democrat, intervened and asked the state Supreme Court to order the commission to certify the results. Two commissioners relented, but the third, Couy Griffin, refused. He admitted that his suspicion of fraud was not founded on any evidence: “It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”(Mr. Griffin, who attended the Jan. 6 melee at the Capitol, was later ruled to be ineligible to hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and later engages in insurrection.)After the May primary election in Pennsylvania, three Republican-controlled counties refused to count several hundred mail-in ballots on which voters had failed to write a date on the envelope. The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, filed suit, and last month, a judge ruled that the ballots had to be included in the results, finally clearing the way for the primaries to be certified. (State officials learned of a fourth county that had done something similar.)Litigation is an important tool in tackling this threat. But it will not save the day. The problem is too big, says Marc Elias, a Democratic voting rights lawyer. “For every one place you try to solve this in court, there are five additional places where it is happening,” he said.The real threat to America’s electoral system is not posed by ineligible voters trying to cast ballots. It is coming from inside the system.All those who value democracy have a role to play in strengthening and supporting the electoral system that powers it, whatever their party. This involves, first, taking the threat posed by election deniers seriously and talking to friends and neighbors about it. It means paying attention to local elections — not just national ones — and supporting candidates who reject conspiracy theories and unfounded claims of fraud. It means getting involved in elections as canvassers or poll watchers or precinct officers. (Mr. Bannon has the right idea about civic participation; he just employs toxic lies as motivation.)And it means voting, in every race on the ballot and in every election. To this end, employers have a role to play as well, by giving workers time off to vote and encouraging them to do so.The task of safeguarding democracy does not end with one election. Mr. Trump and others looking to pervert the electoral process are full of intensity and are playing a long game. Only an equally strong and committed countervailing force will meet that challenge.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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      Georgia Official Says County’s Voting Equipment Will Be Replaced

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      New voting equipment will be installed in Coffee County, where allies of former President Donald J. Trump copied software and other data after the 2020 election.ATLANTA — Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said on Friday that his office would replace voting equipment in Coffee County, where allies of former President Donald J. Trump and contractors working on Mr. Trump’s behalf copied software and other data after the 2020 election.But in a statement, a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit contending that Georgia’s statewide voting system is fundamentally insecure in the wake of the Trump allies’ visit to Coffee County called the changes “embarrassingly thin” and “cosmetic.” The statement said the server for the county’s election management system remained “potentially contaminated.”The move by Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, comes after the plaintiffs complained that he was moving too slowly to address the security breach in Coffee County, which took place in January 2021. The Trump allies, presumably looking for evidence of fraud, copied data and software with the blessing of local elections officials.One Trump supporter involved in the breach, Scott Hall, said in a recorded phone call that the team that traveled to Coffee County, roughly 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, had “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.”Mr. Raffensperger’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation are investigating the breach, which Mr. Raffensperger referred to in a statement as “the unauthorized access to the equipment that former Coffee County election officials allowed in violation of Georgia law.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Election Deniers in Senate Races Shift to Appeal to Voters in Middle

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      As post-primary pivots go, Don Bolduc’s overnight transformation from “Stop the Steal” evangelist to ratify-the-results convert could land him in a political hall of fame. It was an about-face so sudden and jarring that it undermined the tell-it-like-it-is authenticity with which he’d earned the Republican nomination for Senate from New Hampshire.But Mr. Bolduc was hardly the only Republican candidate to edge away from his public insistence, despite a lack of evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, or that 2020 had undermined the integrity of American elections.Blake Masters in Arizona, Tiffany Smiley in Washington State and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania have all made pivots — some artfully, some not — as the ardent, Trump-loyal voters who decided the Republican primaries shrink in the rearview mirror, and a more cautious, broader November electorate comes into view. These three Senate candidates haven’t quite renounced their questioning of the 2020 election — to right-wing audiences of podcasts, radio shows and Fox News, they still signal their skepticism — but they have shifted their appeals to the swing voters they need to win on Nov. 8.The real question now is: Can they get away with it?“I can tell you generally that candidates who do a 180-degree reversal in the middle of a campaign have to have a thought-out, strategic reason for doing so,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire Republican consultant who backed Mr. Bolduc’s primary opponent, Chuck Morse, but now supports Mr. Bolduc. “The pain has to be worth it,” he added.In some sense, the contortions are about having it both ways: signaling to undecided swing voters that a candidate is willing to move toward the middle, while winking at the right-wing base.After his primary victory in the Arizona Senate race, Mr. Masters, who was Mr. Trump’s pick to take on Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, removed language from his campaign website that falsely claimed the 2020 election had been stolen. “If we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today,” the website had unambiguously proclaimed.Blake Masters removed language from his campaign website that falsely claimed the 2020 election had been stolen.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesOnce that erasure came to light, however, the Masters campaign let it be known that while the website may have changed, the candidate’s views had not. “I still believe the election was not free and not fair,” Mr. Masters told an Arizona radio station early this month. “I think if everybody followed the rules and the law as written, President Trump would be in the Oval Office.”Similarly, Dr. Oz has obscured his views more than changed them. After saying in April that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, Dr. Oz told reporters this month that he “would not have objected to” affirming President Biden’s election had he been in the Senate on Jan. 6, 2021.“By the time the delegates and those reports are sent to the U.S. Senate, our job was to approve it. That’s what I would have done,” he said.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.Later that day, however, on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Oz answered a viewer’s question about whether the election was stolen by saying, “There’s lots more information we have to gather in order to determine that, and I’d be very desirous of gathering some.”Ms. Smiley, the Republican Senate nominee in Washington, dropped “election integrity” from a remade website after her primary victory, and with it, the statement that “the 2020 elections raised serious questions about the integrity of our elections.”Still, in a recent appearance on CNN, Ms. Smiley used a coded “he is our president” answer repeatedly when she was asked if Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected — language other Republicans have used to obscure whether they believe the outcome of the 2020 voting was accurate, while still affirming that Mr. Biden is indeed the president.“The campaign’s position has not changed on this issue,” said a Smiley campaign spokeswoman, Elisa Carlson. “Tiffany has long said that it should be easy to vote and hard to cheat — a position that is still reflected on our website.”Tiffany Smiley dropped “election integrity” from a remade website after her primary victory.Ted S. Warren/Associated PressMr. Bolduc’s problem has been his complete lack of subtlety or coded messaging, said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee who is now a city councilor in Dover.At a Republican debate just before the Sept. 13 primary, Mr. Bolduc, a retired brigadier general in the Army, declared unequivocally, “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Trump won the election, and, damn it, I stand by my letter.” He added for good measure, “I’m not switching horses, baby. This is it.”.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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.His nomination clinched, Mr. Bolduc on Sept. 15 left that horse in a ditch. “I’ve done a lot of research on this,” he said on Fox News after being shown a clip of his promise to stay the course on election denial, “and I’ve spent the past couple weeks talking to Granite Staters all over the state from every party, and I have come to the conclusion — and I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.”When a flabbergasted Fox host, Dana Perino, pointed to Mr. Bolduc’s adamant statements before the primary, he shrugged: “You know, live and learn, right?”General-election turns to the center are nothing new, but few would say Mr. Bolduc, a political newcomer whose authenticity was his calling card, executed his smoothly.“Don spent the last three years hanging with primary voters, a third to a half who bought into the whole stolen-election thing, or at least thought something was fishy,” Mr. Cullen said. “When you spend that much time around people who feel that way, it’s easy to think everybody felt that way.”Then he won the primary and realized that it just wasn’t so, Mr. Cullen added.Mr. Bolduc’s post-primary switcheroo created a new problem: Even as he sought to court a general-election electorate, he now also needed to mend fences with his base. Supporters posted a Facebook message that they said Mr. Bolduc had sent them in which he explained his shift. Yes, he wrote with no evidence, election fraud in 2020 was rife — in mail-in ballots, voting machines and drop-box stuffing. But, he added: “Was Biden put into the presidency through a constitutional process … yes.”Mr. Bolduc’s Democratic opponent, Senator Maggie Hassan, has stuck largely to a campaign centered on abortion rights, and recently hit Mr. Bolduc on comments he made in August seemingly backing the privatization of Medicare. But she has used his flip-flop on election denial to say Mr. Bolduc “is trying to mislead Granite Staters and really hide his extreme record.”Dr. Mehmet Oz told reporters this month that he “would not have objected to” affirming President Biden’s election had he been in the Senate on Jan. 6, 2021.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesDr. Oz had an easier task, said G. Terry Madonna, a longtime Pennsylvania political analyst and pollster, now at Millersville University. Though Dr. Oz was endorsed by Mr. Trump and stood by the former president as he spouted lies about the 2020 election, Dr. Oz’s own statements on election fraud were vague. Now, he may be making headway with swing voters to close the gap with his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.Moreover, Mr. Fetterman has so far shied away from attacking Dr. Oz on his affiliation with Mr. Trump, said Berwood A. Yost, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, because Mr. Fetterman believes he can win over Trump voters in the state’s small towns and rural stretches. Attacks on the man they still love may not help Mr. Fetterman make that sale.“Trump attacks are not part of Fetterman’s campaign,” Mr. Yost said. “He’s trying to appeal to Trump supporters with ‘I look like you, I sound like you, and I’m running against Washington, too.’”That has allowed Dr. Oz to tack to the center to try to win over voters in the “collar counties” around Philadelphia. But Mr. Fetterman’s aides note that Dr. Oz has not locked up the core Republican vote the way the Trump-aligned State Senator Doug Mastriano has in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.What Dr. Oz is showing in appealing to moderate voters in the general election, they contend, is not so much a pivot as a forked tongue.“Oz is a total fraud who says one thing when he’s in the suburbs and one thing when he’s rallying with Trump and Mastriano,” said Emilia Winter Rowland, a Fetterman campaign spokeswoman. More

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      The Midterm Election’s Most Dominant Toxic Narratives

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      Ballot mules. Poll watch parties. Groomers.These topics are now among the most dominant divisive and misleading narratives online about November’s midterm elections, according to researchers and data analytics companies. On Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Truth Social and other social media sites, some of these narratives have surged in recent months, often accompanied by angry and threatening rhetoric.The effects of these inflammatory online discussions are being felt in the real world, election officials and voting rights groups said. Voters have flooded some local election offices with misinformed questions about supposedly rigged voting machines, while some people appear befuddled about what pens to use on ballots and whether mail-in ballots are still legal, they said.“Our voters are angry and confused,” Lisa Marra, elections director in Cochise County, Ariz., told a House committee last month. “They simply don’t know what to believe.”The most prevalent of these narratives fall into three main categories: continued falsehoods about rampant election fraud; threats of violence and citizen policing of elections; and divisive posts on health and social policies that have become central to political campaigns. Here’s what to know about them.Misinformation about the 2020 election, left, has fueled the “Stop the Steal” movement, center, and continues to be raised at campaign events for the midterms, right.From left, Amir Hamja for The New York Times, Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times, Ash Ponders for The New York Times Election FraudFalse claims of election fraud are commanding conversation online, with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to protest that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.Voter fraud is rare, but that falsehood about the 2020 election has become a central campaign issue for dozens of candidates around the country, causing misinformation and toxic content about the issue to spread widely online.“Stolen election” was mentioned 325,589 times on Twitter from June 19 to July 19, a number that has been fairly steady throughout the year and that was up nearly 900 percent from the same period in 2020, according to Zignal Labs, a media research firm.On the video-sharing site Rumble, videos with the term “stop the steal” or “stolen election” and other claims of election fraud have been among the most popular. In May, such posts attracted 2.5 million viewers, more than triple the total from a year earlier, according to Similarweb, a digital analytics firm.More recently, misinformation around the integrity of voting has metastasized. More conspiracy theories are circulating online about individuals submitting fraudulent ballots, about voting machines being rigged to favor Democrats and about election officials switching the kinds of pens that voters must use to mark ballots in order to confuse them.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.These conspiracy theories have in turn spawned new terms, such as “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules,” which is used to describe people who are paid to cast fake ballots. The terms were popularized by the May release of the film “2000 Mules,” a discredited movie claiming widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. From June 19 to July 19, “ballot mules” was mentioned 17,592 times on Twitter; it was not used before the 2020 election, according to Zignal.In April, the conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk interviewed the stars of the film, including Catherine Engelbrecht of the nonprofit voting group True the Vote. Mr. Kirk’s interview has garnered more than two million views online.“A sense of grievance is already in place,” said Kyle Weiss, a senior analyst at Graphika, a research firm that studies misinformation and fake social media accounts. The 2020 election “primed the public on a set of core narratives, which are reconstituting and evolving in 2022.”.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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.The security of ballot drop boxes, left; the search for documents at Mar-a-Lago, center; and the role of the F.B.I., right, are being widely discussed online in the context of the midterm elections. From left, Marco Garcia for The New York Times, Saul Martinez for The New York Times, Kenny Holston for The New York TimesCalls to ActionOnline conversations about the midterm elections have also been dominated by calls for voters to act against apparent election fraud. In response, some people have organized citizen policing of voting, with stakeouts of polling stations and demands for information about voter rolls in their counties. Civil rights groups widely criticize poll watching, which they say can intimidate voters, particularly immigrants and at sites in communities of color.From July 27 to Aug. 3, the second-most-shared tweet about the midterms was a photo of people staking out a ballot box, with the message that “residents are determined to safeguard the drop boxes,” according to Zignal. Among those who shared it was Dinesh D’Souza, the creator of “2000 Mules,” who has 2.4 million followers on Twitter.In July, Seth Keshel, a retired Army captain who has challenged the result of the 2020 presidential election, shared a message on Telegram calling for “all-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA.” The post was viewed more than 70,000 times.Anger toward the F.B.I. is also reflected in midterm-related conversations, with a rise in calls to shut down or defund the agency after last month’s raid of Mr. Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago.“Abolish FBI” became a trending hashtag across social media, mentioned 122,915 times on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and news sites from July 1 to Aug. 30, up 1,990 percent from about 5,882 mentions in the two months before the 2020 election, according to Zignal.In a video posted on Twitter on Sept. 20, Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, implied that he and others would take action against the F.B.I. if Republicans won control of Congress in November.“You wait till we take the House back. You watch what happens to the F.B.I.,” he said in a video captured by a left-leaning online show, “The Undercurrent,” and shared more than 1,000 times on Twitter within a few hours. Mr. Clyde did not respond to a request for comment.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, center, is among the politicians who have spread misinformation about gay and transgender people, a report said.From left: Todd Heisler/The New York Times, Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times, Todd Heisler/The New York TimesHot-Button IssuesSome online conversations about the midterms are not directly related to voting. Instead, the discussions are centered on highly partisan issues — such as transgender rights — that candidates are campaigning on and that are widely regarded as motivating voters, leading to a surge of falsehoods.A month after Florida passed legislation that prohibits classroom discussion or instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, which the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law in March, the volume of tweets falsely linking gay and transgender individuals to pedophilia soared, for example.Language claiming that gay people and transgender people were “grooming” children for abuse increased 406 percent on Twitter in April, according to a study by the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.The narrative was spread most widely by 10 far-right figures, including midterm candidates such as Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, according to the report. Their tweets on “grooming” misinformation were viewed an estimated 48 million times, the report said.In May, Ms. Boebert tweeted: “A North Carolina preschool is using LGBT flag flashcards with a pregnant man to teach kids colors. We went from Reading Rainbow to Randy Rainbow in a few decades, but don’t dare say the Left is grooming our kids!” The tweet was shared nearly 2,000 times and liked nearly 10,000 times.Ms. Boebert and Ms. Taylor Greene did not respond to requests for comment.On Facebook and Instagram, 59 ads also promoted the narrative that the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and allies were “grooming” children, the report found. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, accepted up to $24,987 for the ads, which were served to users over 2.1 million times, according to the report.Meta said it had removed several of the ads mentioned in the report.“The repeated pushing of ‘groomer’ narratives has resulted in a wider anti-L.G.B.T. moral panic that has been influencing state and federal legislation and is likely to be a significant midterm issue,” said David Thiel, the chief technical officer at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which studies online extremism and disinformation. More

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      TikTok Bans Political Fund-Raising Ahead of Midterms

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      Less than two months before the midterm elections, TikTok is blocking politicians and political parties from fund-raising on its platform.In a blog post on Wednesday, the social media platform said it would prohibit solicitations for money by political campaigns. The company said political accounts would immediately lose access to advertising features and monetization services, such as gift giving, tipping and e-commerce capabilities.Over the next few weeks, TikTok will clamp down on politicians’ posting videos asking for donations, or political parties’ directing users to online donation pages, the company said.Accounts run by government offices will be slightly less restricted. TikTok said such accounts would be allowed to advertise in limited circumstances, such as when running educational campaigns about Covid-19 booster shots. But the people operating those accounts must work with someone from the company to run that kind of campaign.The new rules will help enforce a ban on political advertising that TikTok, known for its short videos and younger-skewing audience, first put in place in 2019.The company, which has more than a billion monthly users globally, continues to describe itself as “first and foremost an entertainment platform,” but the platform is increasingly drawing political content. Researchers who track online falsehoods say TikTok is on its way to becoming a major hub of political misinformation, fueled by the same qualities that make consumer products and dance videos go viral on the platform.In a campaign season already marked by conspiracy theories and aggressive rhetoric, TikTok has announced several steps to try to civilize and secure its platform. In August, the company debuted an “Elections Center,” a hub on the app with information about voting curated from authoritative sources and presented in more than 45 languages. TikTok said it planned to label posts related to the midterms with links directing users to the elections hub.Starting on Wednesday, TikTok said it would test a requirement that political accounts in the United States be verified. TikTok also said it was trying to educate users about its sponsorship rules, which prohibit creators from being paid to produce political content. More

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      Social Media Companies Still Boost Election Fraud Claims, Report Says

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      The major social media companies all say they are ready to deal with a torrent of misinformation surrounding the midterm elections in November.A report released on Monday, however, claimed that they continued to undermine the integrity of the vote by allowing election-related conspiracy theories to fester and spread.In the report, the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University said the social media companies still host and amplify “election denialism,” threatening to further erode confidence in the democratic process.The companies, the report argued, bear a responsibility for the false but widespread belief among conservatives that the 2020 election was fraudulent — and that the coming midterms could be, too. The report joins a chorus of warnings from officials and experts that the results in November could be fiercely, even violently, contended.“The malady of election denialism in the U.S. has become one of the most dangerous byproducts of social media,” the report warned, “and it is past time for the industry to do more to address it.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.Times/Siena Poll: Our second survey of the 2022 election cycle found Democrats remain unexpectedly competitive in the battle for Congress, while G.O.P. dreams of a major realignment among Latino voters have failed to materialize.Ohio Senate Race: The contest between Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, appears tighter than many once expected.Pennsylvania Senate Race: In one of his most extensive interviews since having a stroke, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, said he was fully capable of handling a campaign that could decide control of the Senate.The major platforms — Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube — have all announced promises or initiatives to combat disinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms, saying they were committed to protecting the election process. But the report said those measures were ineffective, haphazardly enforced or simply too limited.Facebook, for example, announced that it would ban ads that called into question the legitimacy of the coming elections, but it exempted politicians from its fact-checking program. That, the report says, allows candidates and other influential leaders to undermine confidence in the vote by questioning ballot procedures or other rules.In the case of Twitter, an internal report released as part of a whistle-blower’s complaint from a former head of security, Peiter Zatko, disclosed that the company’s site integrity team had only two experts on misinformation.The New York University report, which incorporated responses from all the companies except YouTube, called for greater transparency in how companies rank, recommend and remove content. It also said they should enhance fact-checking efforts and remove provably untrue claims, and not simply label them false or questionable.A spokeswoman for Twitter, Elizabeth Busby, said the company was undertaking a multifaceted approach to ensuring reliable information about elections. That includes efforts to “pre-bunk” false information and to “reduce the visibility of potentially misleading claims via labels.”In a statement, YouTube said it agreed with “many of the points” made in the report and had already carried out many of its recommendations.“We’ve already removed a number of videos related to the midterms for violating our policies,” the statement said, “and the most viewed and recommended videos and channels related to the election are from authoritative sources, including news channels.”TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.There are already signs that the integrity of the vote in November will be as contentious as it was in 2020, when President Donald J. Trump and some of his supporters refused to accept the outcome, falsely claiming widespread fraud.Inattention by social media companies in the interim has allowed what the report describes as a coordinated campaign to take root among conservatives claiming, again without evidence, that wholesale election fraud is bent on tipping elections to Democrats.“Election denialism,” the report said, “was evolving in 2021 from an obsession with the former president’s inability to accept defeat into a broader, if equally baseless, attack on the patriotism of all Democrats, as well as non-Trump-loving Republicans, and legions of election administrators, many of them career government employees.” More

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      These Trump-Backed Candidates Won’t Promise to Accept Election Results

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      Six Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in key midterm states, all backed by Donald Trump, would not commit to accepting the November outcome. Five others did not answer the question.WASHINGTON — Nearly two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes might follow in his footsteps.When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All of them, along with many other G.O.P. candidates, have pre-emptively cast doubt on how their states count votes.The New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate. All of the Democrats said, or have said publicly, that they would respect the November results — including Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who refused to concede her 2018 defeat to Brian Kemp in the state’s race for governor. Mr. Kemp, now running against her for another term, “will of course accept the outcome of the 2022 election,” said his press secretary, Tate Mitchell.But several Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump are hesitant to say that they will not fight the results.Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.The candidates and their aides offered an array of explanations. Some blamed Democratic state election officials or made unsubstantiated claims that their opponents would cheat. In Alaska, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka pointed to a new ranked-choice voting system that has been criticized by Republicans and already helped deliver victory to a Democrat in a House special election this year.Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican candidate for Senate in Alaska, at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Anchorage. She has also declined to say whether she will respect this year’s election results.Ash Adams for The New York TimesAn aide to Ms. Dixon, Sara Broadwater, said “there’s no reason to believe” that Michigan election officials, including Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, “are very serious about secure elections.”To some degree, the stances by these Republican candidates — which echo Mr. Trump’s comments before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections — may amount to political posturing, in an effort to appeal to G.O.P. voters who do not believe the former president lost in 2020. An aide to one Republican nominee insisted that the candidate would accept this year’s results, but the aide declined to be publicly identified saying so.And unlike Mr. Trump two years ago, the candidates who suggest they might dispute the November results do not hold executive office, and lack control of the levers of government power. If any were to reject a fair defeat, they would be far less likely to ignite the kind of democratic crisis that Mr. Trump set off after his 2020 loss.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.But they do have loud megaphones in a highly polarized media environment, and any unwarranted challenges from the candidates and their allies could fuel anger, confusion and misinformation.“The danger of a Trumpist coup is far from over,” said Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who in early 2020 convened a group to brainstorm ways Mr. Trump could disrupt that year’s election. “As long as we have a significant number of Americans who don’t accept principles of democracy and the rule of law, our democracy remains in jeopardy.”The positions of these Republican candidates also reflect how, over the last two years, some of those aligned with Mr. Trump increasingly reject the idea that it is possible for their side to lose a legitimate election.“You accept the results of the election if the election is fair and honest,” said John Fredericks, a syndicated talk radio host who was a chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaigns in Virginia in 2016 and 2020. “If it’s not fair and honest, you don’t.”Still, many Republican candidates, including several who have cast doubt on the 2020 outcome, said they would recognize this year’s results. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois — who said in a June interview that he did not know if the 2020 election had been decided fairly — responded that “yes,” he would accept the 2022 result.In Nevada, the campaign of Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee for Senate, said he would not challenge the final results — even though Mr. Laxalt, a former state attorney general, helped lead the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state, spoke last year about plans to file lawsuits to contest the 2022 election and called voter fraud the “biggest issue” in his campaign.Joe Lombardo, left, a Republican running for governor of Nevada, and Adam Laxalt, center, the party’s nominee for the Senate, said they would not challenge the state’s results.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“Of course he’ll accept Nevada’s certified election results, even if your failing publication won’t,” said Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.And Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, who said during his successful Republican primary campaign for Senate that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, promised to uphold voters’ will.“Yes, Dr. Oz will accept the result of the PA Senate race in November,” Rachel Tripp, an Oz spokeswoman, wrote in a text message.Three other Republican Senate candidates — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Joe O’Dea in Colorado and Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska — committed to embracing their state’s election results. So did several Republicans running for governor, including Mr. Kemp, Joe Lombardo in Nevada and Christine Drazan of Oregon.Aides to several Republican nominees for governor who have questioned the 2020 election’s legitimacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their own races in November. Those candidates included Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Kari Lake of Arizona, Tim Michels of Wisconsin and Dan Cox of Maryland.Ms. Lake was asked in a radio interview this month whether she would concede a defeat to Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival and Arizona’s secretary of state. “I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Ms. Lake replied.Ms. Hobbs’s spokeswoman, Sarah Robinson, said her candidate “will accept the results of the election in November.”Aides to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire, declined to answer questions about acknowledging the results. Mr. Johnson has been a prolific spreader of misinformation about the 2020 election and the Capitol riot. Mr. Bolduc claimed that the 2020 contest was stolen from Mr. Trump until Thursday, when he announced two days after winning his primary that President Biden had won legitimately.During a Republican primary debate in Michigan in June, Ms. Dixon would not commit to honoring the results of the primary — which she went on to win — or the general election, pre-emptively accusing Ms. Benson, the secretary of state, of election fraud.“If we see the secretary of state running a fair election the way she should be, then that’s a different story,” Ms. Dixon said. “We have to see what she’s going to do to make sure it’s going to be a fair election.”In a statement, a representative for Ms. Benson said she and her staff “work tirelessly to ensure the state’s elections are secure and accurate, and expect every candidate and election official to respect the will of the people.”A crowd in Phoenix watched in September 2021 as the findings of a widely criticized Republican-led review of the state’s 2020 votes were presented to state lawmakers.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesIn Arizona — where Republicans spent months on a government-funded review of 2020 ballots that failed to show any evidence of fraud — Mr. Masters, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate, baselessly predicted to supporters in July that even if he defeated Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, enough votes would somehow be produced to flip the result.“There’s always cheating, probably, in every election,” Mr. Masters said. “The question is, what’s the cheating capacity?”A Masters aide, Katie Miller, sent The Times an August article in The Arizona Republic in which Mr. Masters said there was “evidence of incompetence” but not of fraud in the state’s primary election. Ms. Miller declined to say if Mr. Masters would respect the November results.Mr. Kelly “has total trust in Arizona’s electoral process,” said a spokeswoman, Sarah Guggenheimer.An aide to Mr. Vance, Taylor Van Kirk, cited the candidate’s primary-season endorsement from Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose. At the time, Mr. Vance predicted “a successfully run primary election.” But Ms. Van Kirk would not say if Mr. Vance would recognize the November outcome. Mr. Vance did not respond to messages.Mr. Vance’s Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “will accept the results of the election,” said his spokeswoman, Jordan Fuja.In Alaska, Republican hesitancy to accept election results centers on the new ranked-choice voting system. After losing an August special election for the House, Sarah Palin warned baselessly that the method was “very, very potentially fraught with fraud.”Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka, who is challenging Ms. Murkowski, a fellow Republican, said his candidate would not commit to honoring the race’s outcome. Mr. Murtaugh said — not without merit — that the new voting system “was installed to protect Lisa Murkowski.”Ms. Murkowski’s spokesman, Shea Siegert, said that “the Alaskan people can trust” the state’s elections.Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate — who in Congress voted against certifying the 2020 election — declined to say if Mr. Budd would uphold the state’s results and claimed without evidence that Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee and a former State Supreme Court justice, might try to disenfranchise voters.Ms. Beasley said, “I trust that our 2022 election will be administered fairly.”Officials on other Republican campaigns expressed worries that if voters heard too much skepticism about the validity of this year’s elections, it could lead to a replay of the Georgia Senate races in January 2021, when Democrats eked out two narrow victories after Mr. Trump spent weeks railing falsely about election fraud.“The most important thing is to not get depressed about the elections and say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be stolen, so what’s the point of doing this?’” Mr. Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts, said in a recent radio interview. Mr. Diehl’s spokeswoman, Peggy Rose, replied “no comment” when asked if he would agree to the outcome of the November election.His Democratic opponent, Maura Healey, the state’s attorney general, said, “We will always accept the will of the people.” More