Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy

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      The United States has experienced deep political turmoil several times before over the past century. The Great Depression caused Americans to doubt the country’s economic system. World War II and the Cold War presented threats from global totalitarian movements. The 1960s and ’70s were marred by assassinations, riots, a losing war and a disgraced president.These earlier periods were each more alarming in some ways than anything that has happened in the United States recently. Yet during each of those previous times of tumult, the basic dynamics of American democracy held firm. Candidates who won the most votes were able to take power and attempt to address the country’s problems.The current period is different. As a result, the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent. American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades.The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.The violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, meant to prevent the certification of President Biden’s election, was the clearest manifestation of this movement, but it has continued since then. Hundreds of elected Republican officials around the country falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for statewide offices that would oversee future elections, potentially putting them in position to overturn an election in 2024 or beyond.“There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office,” said Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies democracy.The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.The run of recent Supreme Court decisions — both sweeping and, according to polls, unpopular — highlight this disconnect. Although the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees seems poised to shape American politics for years, if not decades. And the court is only one of the means through which policy outcomes are becoming less closely tied to the popular will.Two of the past four presidents have taken office despite losing the popular vote. Senators representing a majority of Americans are often unable to pass bills, partly because of the increasing use of the filibuster. Even the House, intended as the branch of the government that most reflects the popular will, does not always do so, because of the way districts are drawn.“We are far and away the most countermajoritarian democracy in the world,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and a co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” with Daniel Ziblatt.The causes of the twin threats to democracy are complex and debated among scholars.The chronic threats to democracy generally spring from enduring features of American government, some written into the Constitution. But they did not conflict with majority opinion to the same degree in past decades. One reason is that more populous states, whose residents receive less power because of the Senate and the Electoral College, have grown so much larger than small states.The acute threats to democracy — and the rise of authoritarian sentiment, or at least the acceptance of it, among many voters — have different causes. They partly reflect frustration over nearly a half-century of slow-growing living standards for the American working class and middle class. They also reflect cultural fears, especially among white people, that the United States is being transformed into a new country, more racially diverse and less religious, with rapidly changing attitudes toward gender, language and more.The attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was the clearest manifestation of the growing movement in the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election.Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesThe economic frustrations and cultural fears have combined to create a chasm in American political life, between prosperous, diverse major metropolitan areas and more traditional, religious and economically struggling smaller cities and rural areas. The first category is increasingly liberal and Democratic, the second increasingly conservative and Republican.The political contest between the two can feel existential to people in both camps, with disagreements over nearly every prominent issue. “When we’re voting, we’re not just voting for a set of policies but for what we think makes us Americans and who we are as a people,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and the author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” said. “If our party loses the election, then all of these parts of us feel like losers.”These sharp disagreements have led many Americans to doubt the country’s system of government. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, 69 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans said that democracy was “in danger of collapse.” Of course, the two sides have very different opinions about the nature of the threat.Many Democrats share the concerns of historians and scholars who study democracy, pointing to the possibility of overturned election results and the deterioration of majority rule. “Equality and democracy are under assault,” President Biden said in a speech this month in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.”Many Republicans have defended their increasingly aggressive tactics by saying they are trying to protect American values. In some cases, these claims rely on falsehoods — about election fraud, Mr. Biden’s supposed “socialism,” Barack Obama’s birthplace, and more.In others, they are rooted in anxiety over real developments, including illegal immigration and “cancel culture.” Some on the left now consider widely held opinions among conservative and moderate Americans — on abortion, policing, affirmative action, Covid-19 and other subjects — to be so objectionable that they cannot be debated. In the view of many conservatives and some experts, this intolerance is stifling open debate at the heart of the American political system.The divergent sense of crisis on left and right can itself weaken democracy, and it has been exacerbated by technology.Conspiracy theories and outright lies have a long American history, dating to the personal attacks that were a staple of the partisan press during the 18th century. In the mid-20th century, tens of thousands of Americans joined the John Birch Society, a far-right group that claimed Dwight Eisenhower was a secret Communist.Today, however, falsehoods can spread much more easily, through social media and a fractured news environment. In the 1950s, no major television network spread the lies about Eisenhower. In recent years, the country’s most watched cable channel, Fox News, regularly promoted falsehoods about election results, Mr. Obama’s birthplace and other subjects.These same forces — digital media, cultural change and economic stagnation in affluent countries — help explain why democracy is also struggling in other parts of the world. Only two decades ago, at the turn of the 21st century, democracy was the triumphant form of government around the world, with autocracy in retreat in the former Soviet empire, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, South Korea and elsewhere. Today, the global trend is moving in the other direction.In the late 1990s, 72 countries were democratizing, and only three were growing more authoritarian, according to data from V-Dem, a Swedish institute that monitors democracy. Last year, only 15 countries grew more democratic, while 33 slid toward authoritarianism.Some experts remain hopeful that the growing attention in the United States to democracy’s problems can help avert a constitutional crisis here. Already, Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed, partly because of the refusal of many Republican officials to participate, and both federal and state prosecutors are investigating his actions. And while the chronic decline of majority rule will not change anytime soon, it is also part of a larger historical struggle to create a more inclusive American democracy.Still, many experts point out that it still not clear how the country will escape a larger crisis, such as an overturned election, at some point in the coming decade. “This is not politics as usual,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book, “One Person, No Vote,” about voter suppression. “Be afraid.”The Will of the MajorityDonald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed, partly because of the refusal of many Republican officials to participate.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe founders did not design the United States to be a pure democracy.They distrusted the classical notion of direct democracy, in which a community came together to vote on each important issue, and believed it would be impractical for a large country. They did not consider many residents of the new country to be citizens who deserved a voice in political affairs, including Natives, enslaved Africans and women. The founders also wanted to constrain the national government from being too powerful, as they believed was the case in Britain. And they had the practical problem of needing to persuade 13 states to forfeit some of their power to a new federal government.Instead of a direct democracy, the founders created a republic, with elected representatives to make decisions, and a multilayered government, in which different branches checked each other. The Constitution also created the Senate, where every state had an equal say, regardless of population.Pointing to this history, some Republican politicians and conservative activists have argued that the founders were comfortable with minority rule. “Of course we’re not a democracy,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah has written.But the historical evidence suggests that the founders believed that majority will — defined as the prevailing view of enfranchised citizens — should generally dictate national policy, as George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College and other constitutional scholars have explained.In the Federalist Papers, James Madison equated “a coalition of a majority of the whole society” with “justice and the general good.” Alexander Hamilton made similar points, describing “representative democracy” as “happy, regular and durable.” It was a radical idea at the time.For most of American history, the idea has prevailed. Even with the existence of the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, political power has reflected the views of people who had the right to vote. “To say we’re a republic not a democracy ignores the past 250 years of history,” Mr. Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, said.Before 2000, only three candidates won the presidency while losing the popular vote (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison), and each served only a single term. During the same period, parties that won repeated elections were able to govern, including the Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson’s time, the New Deal Democrats and the Reagan Republicans.The situation has changed in the 21st century. The Democratic Party is in the midst of a historic winning streak. In seven of the past eight presidential elections, stretching back to Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote. Over more than two centuries of American democracy, no party has previously fared so well over such an extended period.Yet the current period is hardly a dominant Democratic age.What changed? One crucial factor is that, in the past, the parts of the country granted outsize power by the Constitution — less populated states, which tend to be more rural — voted in broadly similar ways as large states and urban areas.This similarity meant that the small-state bonus in the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results. Both Democrats and Republicans benefited, and suffered, from the Constitution’s undemocratic features.Democrats sometimes won small states like Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the mid-20th century. And California was long a swing state: Between the Great Depression and 2000, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates won it an equal number of times. That the Constitution conferred advantages on residents of small states and disadvantages on Californians did not reliably boost either party.Joe Biden campaigning in Los Angeles in March 2020. He went on to win California in the general election by 29 percentage points.Josh Haner/The New York TimesIn recent decades, Americans have increasingly sorted themselves along ideological lines. Liberals have flocked to large metropolitan areas, which are heavily concentrated in big states like California, while residents of smaller cities and more rural areas have become more conservative.This combination — the Constitution’s structure and the country’s geographic sorting — has created a disconnect between public opinion and election outcomes. It has affected every branch of the federal government: the presidency, Congress and even the Supreme Court.In the past, “the system was still antidemocratic, but it didn’t have a partisan effect,” Mr. Levitsky said. “Now it’s undemocratic and has a partisan effect. It tilts the playing field toward the Republican Party. That’s new in the 21st century.”In presidential elections, the small-state bias is important, but it is not even the main issue. A more subtle factor — the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College in most states — is. Candidates have never received extra credit for winning state-level landslides. But this feature did not used to matter very much, because landslides were rare in larger states, meaning that relatively few votes were “wasted,” as political scientists say.Today, Democrats dominate a handful of large states, wasting many votes. In 2020, Mr. Biden won California by 29 percentage points; New York by 23 points; and Illinois by 17 points. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton’s margins were similar.Vote Margins by State in Presidential Elections since 1988 More

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      How a Spreader of Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories Became a Star

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      In 2011, Catherine Engelbrecht appeared at a Tea Party Patriots convention in Phoenix to deliver a dire warning.While volunteering at her local polls in the Houston area two years earlier, she claimed, she witnessed voter fraud so rampant that it made her heart stop. People cast ballots without proof of registration or eligibility, she said. Corrupt election judges marked votes for their preferred candidates on the ballots of unwitting citizens, she added.Local authorities found no evidence of the election tampering she described, but Ms. Engelbrecht was undeterred. “Once you see something like that, you can’t forget it,” the suburban Texas mom turned election-fraud warrior told the audience of 2,000. “You certainly can’t abide by it.”Ms. Engelbrecht was ahead of her time. Many people point to the 2020 presidential election as the beginning of a misleading belief that widespread voter fraud exists. But more than a decade before Donald J. Trump popularized those claims, Ms. Engelbrecht had started planting seeds of doubt over the electoral process, becoming one of the earliest and most enthusiastic spreaders of ballot conspiracy theories.From those roots, she created a nonprofit advocacy group, True the Vote, to advance her contentions, for which she provided little proof. She went on to build a large network of supporters, forged alliances with prominent conservatives and positioned herself as the leading campaigner of cleaning up the voting system.Now Ms. Engelbrecht, 52, who is riding a wave of electoral skepticism fueled by Mr. Trump, has seized the moment. She has become a sought-after speaker at Republican organizations, regularly appears on right-wing media and was the star of the recent film “2,000 Mules,” which claimed mass voter fraud in the 2020 election and has been debunked.She has also been active in the far-right’s battle for November’s midterm elections, rallying election officials, law enforcement and lawmakers to tighten voter restrictions and investigate the 2020 results.Ms. Engelbrecht, center, has claimed that she witnessed rampant voter fraud, while providing little evidence.Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times“We’ve got to be ready,” Ms. Engelbrecht said in an interview last month with a conservative show, GraceTimeTV, which was posted on the video-sharing site Rumble. “There have been no substantive improvements to change anything that happened in 2020 to prevent it from happening in 2022.”Her journey into the limelight illustrates how deeply embedded the idea of voter fraud has become, aided by a highly partisan climate and social media. Even though such fraud is rare, Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly amplified Ms. Engelbrecht’s hashtag-friendly claims of “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules” on platforms such as Truth Social, Gab and Rumble.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Fierce Primary Season Ends: Democrats are entering the final sprint to November with more optimism, especially in the Senate. But Republicans are confident they can gain a House majority.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.Misleading memes about ballot boxes have soared. The term “ballot mules,” which refers to individuals paid to transport absentee ballots to ballot boxes, has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter since January, up from 329 times between November 2020 and this January, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.In some places, suspicions of vote tampering have led people to set up stakeouts to prevent illegal stuffing of ballot boxes. Officials overseeing elections are ramping up security at polling places.Voting rights groups said they were increasingly concerned by Ms. Engelbrecht.She has “taken the power of rhetoric to a new place,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s having a real impact on the way lawmakers and states are governing elections and on the concerns we have on what may happen in the upcoming elections.”Some of Ms. Engelbrecht’s former allies have cut ties with her. Rick Wilson, a Republican operative and Trump critic, ran public relations for Ms. Engelbrecht in 2014 but quit after a few months. He said she had declined to turn over data to back her voting fraud claims.“She never had the juice in terms of evidence,” Mr. Wilson said. “But now that doesn’t matter. She’s having her uplift moment.”Cleta Mitchell, Ms. Engelbrecht’s former attorney and now a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and John Fund, a conservative journalist, told Republican donors in August 2020 that they could no longer support Ms. Engelbrecht. They said that her early questions on voting were important but that they were confounded by her recent activities, according to a video of the donor meeting obtained by The New York Times. They did not elaborate on why.“Catherine started out and was terrific,” said Ms. Mitchell, who herself claims the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. “But she got off on other things. I don’t really know what she’s doing now.”Mr. Fund added, “I would not give her a penny.”Others said the questions that Ms. Engelbrecht raised in “2,000 Mules” about the abuse of ballot drop boxes had moved them. In July, Richard Mack, the founder of a national sheriff’s organization, appeared with her in Las Vegas to announce a partnership to scrutinize voting during the midterms.“The most important right the American people have is to choose our own public officials,” said Mr. Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Ariz. “Anybody trying to steal that right needs to be prosecuted and arrested.”Richard Mack, the founder of a national sheriff’s organization, has announced a partnership with Ms. Engelbrecht.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesMs. Engelbrecht, who has said she carries a Bible and a pocket Constitution as reminders of her cause, has scoffed at critics and said the only misinformation was coming from the political left. She said she had evidence of voting fraud in 2020 and had shared some of it with law enforcement.“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through this exercise and how my words get twisted and turned,” she said in a phone interview.Ms. Engelbrecht has said she was just a P.T.A. volunteer and small-business owner with no interest in politics until the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Concerned about the country’s direction, she volunteered at the polls. Her critique of the voting system caught the attention of the Tea Party, which disdains government bureaucracy.In 2009, Ms. Engelbrecht created the nonprofit King Street Patriots, named after the site of the 1770 Boston Massacre, which fueled colonial tensions that would erupt again with the Tea Party uprising three years later. She also formed True the Vote. The idea behind the nonprofits was to promote “freedom, capitalism, American exceptionalism,” according to a tax filing, and to train poll watchers.Conservatives embraced Ms. Engelbrecht. Mr. Fund, who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, helped her obtain grants. Steve Bannon, then chief executive of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News, and Andrew Breitbart, the publication’s founder, spoke at her conferences.True the Vote’s volunteers scrutinized registration rolls, watched polling stations and wrote highly speculative reports. In 2010, a volunteer in San Diego reported seeing a bus offloading people at a polling station “who did not appear to be from this country.”Civil rights groups described the activities as voter suppression. In 2010, Ms. Engelbrecht told supporters that Houston Votes, a nonprofit that registered voters in diverse communities of Harris County, Texas, was connected to the “New Black Panthers.” She showed a video of an unrelated New Black Panther member in Philadelphia who called for the extermination of white people. Houston Votes was subsequently investigated by state officials, and law enforcement raided its office.“It was a lie and racist to the core,” said Fred Lewis, head of Houston Votes, who sued True the Vote for defamation. He said he had dropped the suit after reaching “an understanding” that True the Vote would stop making accusations. Ms. Engelbrecht said she didn’t recall such an agreement.“It was a lie and racist to the core,” Fred Lewis, head of Houston Votes, said of Ms. Engelbrecht’s comments of the group.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesHer profile rose. In 2012, Politico named her one of the 50 political figures to watch. In 2014, she became a right-wing hero after revelations that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofits, including True the Vote.Around that time, Ms. Engelbrecht began working with Gregg Phillips, a former Texas public official also focused on voting fraud. They remained largely outside the mainstream, known mostly in far-right circles, until the 2020 election.After Mr. Trump’s defeat, they mobilized. Ms. Engelbrecht campaigned to raise $7 million to investigate the election’s results in dozens of counties in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, according to a lawsuit by a donor.The donor was Fred Eshelman, a North Carolina-based drug company founder, who gave True the Vote $2.5 million in late 2020. Within 12 days, he asked for a refund and sued in federal court. His lawyer said that True the Vote hadn’t provided evidence for its election fraud claims and that much of Mr. Eshelman’s money had gone to businesses connected with Ms. Engelbrecht.Mr. Eshelman, who withdrew the suit and then filed another that was dismissed in April 2021, did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Engelbrecht has denied his claims.In mid-2021, “2,000 Mules” was hatched after Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips met with Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur and filmmaker. They told him that they could detect cases of ballot box stuffing based on two terabytes of cellphone geolocation data that they had bought and matched with video surveillance footage of ballot drop boxes.Salem Media Group, the conservative media conglomerate, and Mr. D’Souza agreed to create and fund a film. The “2,000 Mules” title was meant to evoke the image of cartels that pay people to carry illegal drugs into the United States.In May, Mr. Trump hosted the film’s premiere at Mar-a-Lago, bringing attention to Ms. Engelbrecht. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, said after seeing the film that it raised “significant questions” about the 2020 election results; 17 state legislators in Michigan also called for an investigation into election results there based on the film’s accusations.In Arizona, the attorney general’s office asked True the Vote between April and June for data about some of the claims in “2,000 Mules.” The contentions related to Maricopa and Yuma Counties, where Ms. Engelbrecht said people had illegally submitted ballots and had used “stash houses” to store fraudulent ballots.According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, a True the Vote official said Mr. Phillips had turned over a hard drive with the data. The attorney general’s office said early this month that it hadn’t received it.Last month, Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips hosted an invitation-only gathering of about 150 supporters in Queen Creek, Ariz., which was streamed online. For weeks beforehand, they promised to reveal the addresses of ballot “stash houses” and footage of voter fraud.Ms. Engelbrecht did not divulge the data at the event. Instead, she implored the audience to look to the midterm elections, which she warned were the next great threat to voter integrity.“The past is prologue,” she said. Alexandra Berzon More

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      Pro-Putin Candidates Sweep Russia’s Local Elections

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      Against a backdrop of tightening press freedom and repression amid the war in Ukraine, Russians voted overwhelmingly for pro-Kremlin candidates in regional and municipal elections over the weekend, according to results published on Monday.Candidates nominated by the ruling United Russia Party or those loyal to the Kremlin won races for heads of all of the 14 Russian regions where elections were held, according to Russia’s Central Electoral Commission. United Russia, the party of President Vladimir V. Putin, also won a majority in six regional legislatures where voting occurred, the commission said.In the city of Moscow, where lawmakers were up for election in most municipalities, more than 77 percent of seats went to pro-Kremlin candidates, according to Tass, a Russian state news agency.Many anti-government politicians have fled the country. Some have been sentenced to prison terms for publicly criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Although Mr. Putin has dominated Russian politics for more than two decades, he has long used elections that carry a veneer of competitiveness to try to legitimize his rule. And while the elections are often rife with fraud, they typically offer an opening for the political opposition to express discontent.In some instances, especially at the relatively low level of municipal councils, candidates who have been critical of the Kremlin were able to get elected. And on Monday, already-serving municipal deputies from 18 councils in Moscow and St. Petersburg signed a petition calling on Mr. Putin to resign. The petition came after a municipal council in St. Petersburg last week called on the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, to investigate Mr. Putin for treason over his decision to invade Ukraine. Those deputies have been charged by police with discrediting the Russian army, an administrative offense.Mr. Putin’s grip on Russia’s political system has held largely because of his policymakers’ ability to maintain relative economic stability. The elections this weekend were an early test of whether the economic upheaval caused by Western sanctions stemming from Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has had an effect on voters.They took place in the climate of almost total censorship of the mainstream press, making it hard to gauge people’s true attitudes toward the government. Following the invasion in February, Mr. Putin tightened media laws, forcing the few remaining liberal news outlets to shut down.The campaigning and voting periods were marred by multiple violations, according to a report by Golos, a Russian elections watchdog, which cited official intimidation of election observers and unequal access to state media for opposition candidates.The report called the elections “unfree and unequal,” saying that “it is impossible to determine the real will of the voters under these conditions.”The elections were held over three days, which made them more vulnerable to fraud because election observers could not ensure the security of ballots overnight. Critics also said that online voting made it easier to falsify the results.Still, some voters appeared to use their ballots to criticize the Kremlin or its war in Ukraine. Messages including “Russia without Putin!” or “For peace” were scrawled on some ballots, according to photographs posted on social media. The photos could not be independently verified. More

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      The Future of Election Skepticism Is Arizona

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      Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, talks a lot about tracking: procedures, processes, audits, the path a ballot takes from voter to tabulator.He’s a member of the Arizona state House of Representatives, and has a formal way of speaking, full of numerical legislation titles and terminology, but also talks about things seen and unseen. Like a number of other Republican nominees for secretary of state this year, Mr. Finchem claims the last election was fraudulent.“Here’s why we know it didn’t happen,” he told an interviewer who had just suggested Arizona may have actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020. “It’s nonsense intuitively. Leading up to the election, this would be August, September, October. It first started off that you’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars, and this is in my community. It’s one community, but I think it’s fairly representative of Arizona. You’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars.” The hosts start cracking jokes about Biden trains behind gas stations these days, but in the interview, Mr. Finchem remains undeterred and unlaughing: First it was 12 cars, then 24, then 48, culminating in a three-mile Trump train. This is the kind of thing Mr. Finchem will abruptly say amid talk of election procedure.In November 2020, Mr. Finchem was part of a hearing in Arizona where Rudy Giuliani aired claims of election fraud; Mr. Finchem went to Washington on Jan. 6. He wants to decertify the 2020 election and for Arizona to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonpartisan organization funded by participating states that helps them to find potential voters and determine duplicate active registrations. He also could win in Arizona this year; the state has been decidedly close the last several elections.His public comments tend to be both premised on the possibility of rampant voter fraud — which, in actuality, takes place rarely — and reflect a kind of individualism that’s a part of the tech and society we already have, where individuals routinely arbitrate and police disputes online.Mr. Finchem has called himself “probably an evangelist” for a 2013 book by Matthew Trewhella called “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates.” A favorite of some extreme anti-abortion activists, the book argues that officials have an obligation to stop enforcement of laws that violate, in the author’s view, God’s wishes, specifically laws that legalize abortion or acceptance of homosexuality.The author praises the former Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore in his efforts to defy court rulings about placing the Ten Commandments on government property. “Some of the most important and necessary actions down through history were done without a majority,” Mr. Trewhella writes. “In fact, human nature is such that the majority usually only have an interest in their own well-being and livelihood. In truth, the lesser magistrate does not need any support from the people in order to act.”After his primary victory this summer, in one interview Mr. Finchem brought up an app where people can submit perceived voting irregularities and observed, “We’ve basically turned the entire polity — the entire citizen pool in Arizona — into witnesses, and that’s even more robust than having poll watchers.”In April, a podcast interviewer asked Mr. Finchem if he’d discovered anything “determinative” to Arizona’s close election, which Mr. Biden won by about 10,000 votes. Even the audit of Maricopa, the state’s largest county — which was supported by Arizona Republicans like Mr. Finchem and criticized by elected officials — found Mr. Biden won the county. Mr. Finchem replied, “So yeah, part of that was a Psyop [psychological operation]; they worked very, very hard to convince the American people that, ‘Oh it’s going to be a close race.’ No, it wasn’t; it was a blowout.”How much doubt can the system take on? I really wonder how we get out of a situation where some segment of the population believes people rigged the vote against Mr. Trump, and some other segment believes, maybe a little hazily, that something must have been amiss, given all the noise from Mr. Trump and people like Mr. Finchem. Doubt can be difficult to overcome once it’s in the air.How would you talk someone out of this? Pull out a bunch of maps and charts and show how Donald Trump improved his share with voters in some cities and places like the border, but it was no match for Joe Biden’s performance in the suburbs in enough states, the kind of demographic pattern that you can see in states both won and lost by Mr. Trump? Ask them to get involved and see the process themselves? Hope this just fades, if Mr. Trump fades?If Mr. Trump’s endless refusal to concede has vastly expanded and sustained the universe of fraud believers and election skeptics, the sentiment has begun to detach from his personal fortunes.Kansas officials recently had to perform a recount of the blowout referendum to keep abortion legal in the state; candidates who’ve won primaries this year have suggested there might be fraud inherent in the process; one Texas county election staffer who quit his job recently told The Associated Press, “That’s the one thing we can’t understand. Their candidate won, heavily. But there’s fraud here?” In a town hall this summer, after detailing how Utah’s elections work and its security measures, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox called unsubstantiated fraud claims “dangerous” and “not healthy.” Mr. Cox added, “Making people prove a negative — something that doesn’t exist — is virtually impossible.”One of Mr. Finchem’s big plans as Arizona’s would-be secretary of state hinges on the idea that there’s space for fraud in the unseen. He wants to end Arizona’s early voting program, which the state first implemented in the 1990s and many, many voters in both parties regularly use. He claims that to end fraud, you must end early voting. “Here’s what happened: You received a ballot in the mail,” he told an interviewer this year. “You fill that ballot out. And then you put it in the mail. You have just broken [the] chain of custody. You have just put somebody in between you and the county official who’s supposed to be counting your ballot.”Instead, as a federal judge outlined recently in his dismissal of a lawsuit Mr. Finchem and the gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake filed, Mr. Finchem envisions ballots counted by hand, at the precinct level, “one at a time, by three independent counters” in “full view of multiple, recording, streaming cameras,” with a serial number known to the voter but no other personal identification on each ballot.This is just one thing Mr. Finchem has said, but it’s worth lingering on and considering. In the end, this is a really big country with a secret-ballot system: each vote cast must eventually go someplace to be counted, on your faith and trust. A machine counts the ballot — or sometimes, human hands do, if there’s a recount — and that input gets piled up with all the other inputs and then reported to the public, somewhere beyond each voter’s vision. This would still be true under Mr. Finchem’s livestreamed hand-count system — the secret moment would just be flipped to the front end, where some authority would distribute serial numbers to each voter.But it’s striking where this kind of thinking can lead you and leave you. If you follow this broken-chain-of-custody logic, you could not trust the mail carrier or the guy who picks up the ballot dropbox, even if your own mail shows up every day. If you really commit, you might not be able to trust the mechanism that counts the votes, whether that’s a person or a machine or the official feeding the machine, since it’s easy to imagine how this idea of an individual’s subversion could carry from one civic process to the next, once someone pushes that kind of doubt into the system. If you follow the logic all the way, this kind of thinking could leave you, ultimately, alone vs. everything, surrounded by the eternal possibility of subversion.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      A Local Prosecutor Takes on Trump and Crime in Atlanta

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      ATLANTA — Fani T. Willis strode up to a podium in a red dress late last month in downtown Atlanta, flanked by an array of dark suits and stone-faced officers in uniform. Her voice rang out loud and clear, with a hint of swagger. “If you thought Fulton was a good county to bring your crime to, to bring your violence to, you are wrong,” she said, facing a bank of news cameras. “And you are going to suffer consequences.”Ms. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., had called the news conference to talk about a street gang known as Drug Rich, whose members had just been indicted in a sprawling racketeering case. But she could have been talking about another crew that she is viewing as a possible criminal enterprise: former President Donald J. Trump and his allies who tried to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in Georgia.In recent weeks, Ms. Willis has called dozens of witnesses to testify before a special grand jury investigating efforts to undo Mr. Trump’s defeat, including a number of prominent pro-Trump figures who traveled, against their will, from other states. It was long arm of the law stuff, and it emphasized how her investigation, though playing out more than 600 miles from Washington, D.C., is no sideshow.Rather, the Georgia inquiry has emerged as one of the most consequential legal threats to the former president, and it is already being shaped by Ms. Willis’s distinct and forceful personality and her conception of how a local prosecutor should do her job. Her comfort in the public eye stands in marked contrast to the low-key approach of another Trump legal pursuer, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Ms. Willis, 50, a Democrat, is the first Black woman to lead Georgia’s largest district attorney’s office. In her 19 years as a prosecutor, she has led more than 100 jury trials and handled hundreds of murder cases. Since she became chief prosecutor, her office’s conviction rate has stood at close to 90 percent, according to a spokesperson.Her experience is the source of her confidence, which appears unshaken by the scrutiny — and criticism — the Trump case has brought.Poll workers sort ballots in Decatur, Ga., in 2021.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesShe tends to speak as if the world were her jury box. Sometimes she is colloquial and warm. In a recent interview, she noted, as an aside, how much she loved Valentine’s Day: “Put that in there, in case I get a new boo,” she said. But she can also throw sharp elbows. In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of a grand jury appearance by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, Ms. Willis called the governor’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused,” and “rude,” among other things.“You have taken my kindness as weakness,” she wrote, adding: “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Rudy Giuliani Is Alone

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      It has been 21 years since Rudy Giuliani led a terrified city through the deadliest attack in its history. As a reporter covering him from a few feet away that morning, I ran with him from the hurricane of ash and debris following the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, trekked a mile up a Manhattan avenue as he and his aides searched for safe harbor and watched his security detail break into a firehouse with a crowbar.He gave orders to aides calmly and decisively, reassured a frightened police officer, shushed a cheering crowd and spoke to the world from a tiny office. Like countless others, I was grateful that someone had taken charge, undaunted by the madness of the situation.These images often come to me when I try to reconcile that brilliant leader with the confused, widely ridiculed figure facing potential indictment for trying to subvert the 2020 election.Mr. Giuliani is virtually alone at this desperate hour. Supporters have abandoned him; once-friendly news organizations have banished him from their airwaves; and few have helped him fend off bankruptcy from numerous lawsuits and investigations. At 78 years old, the man who helped to lead New York City and the nation out of some of our most horrible days is a shadow of his old self.Mr. Giuliani finds himself in this situation not in spite of his actions on Sept. 11 but rather because of them. The choices he made to leverage his fame from that period — and his efforts to hold on to it when it started to slip away — have led to his troubles today.Mr. Giuliani received overwhelming acclaim for his performance as mayor in the weeks following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He was transformed from a term-limited politician to “America’s Mayor,” addressing the United Nations and receiving an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. New Yorkers’ long love-hate relationship with him turned into something closer to hero worship. He was a warrior who had spent a career fighting battles as a mob-busting prosecutor and crusading mayor, and they had prepared him for the greatest battle of all, his effort to save a stricken city.With his fame at its pinnacle following Sept. 11, every possible career door swung open. But instead of preserving his statesman’s role — a hero above mere politics — he chose to cash in.His mercenary vehicle was Giuliani Partners, which was billed primarily as a management consulting firm, though neither he nor his group of former City Hall aides had management consulting experience. He was doubtlessly aware that it wasn’t his expertise his clients would pay for, but rather his name.“We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma,” said the embattled pharmaceutical company’s chief attorney after it hired Mr. Giuliani in 2002, as Purdue was fending off almost 300 lawsuits for its role in helping to hook a generation of Americans on opioids. Many other clients followed, troubled companies seeking a seal of approval from the internationally beloved leader.Giuliani Partners grossed an estimated $100 million in its first five years. A man who as mayor bought his suits off the rack at Bancroft for $299 grew addicted to luxury, ultimately purchasing six homes and 11 country club memberships.He leveraged his Sept. 11 fame for power as well as money. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were as attracted to Mr. Giuliani’s brand as any scandal-ridden company was, finding him to be a powerful ally when their efforts in Iraq went sideways.At the 2004 Republican National Convention, he bestowed his blessings upon the president. As Mr. Giuliani told an adoring crowd, after the first tower fell on Sept. 11, “I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, ‘Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.’”The alliance with Mr. Bush afforded him more client business as well as a launchpad for his ultimate goal, which was the presidency.Kathy Livermore, Mr. Giuliani’s girlfriend in his college years, recalled to The New York Daily News in 1997 that he had vowed to someday become America’s first Italian-Catholic president. “Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian-Catholic president of the United States,” he’d tell her, enjoying the sound of it.His 2008 presidential run is now remembered as a footnote, if it is remembered at all. Some people might recall it because of a gag from Joe Biden, running in the Democratic primary, who said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”The collapse of his candidacy — he dropped out of the Republican primaries with just a single delegate — marked the end of his political dreams; he would never run for office again.In the years that followed he seemed increasingly desperate to salvage both the financial benefits and political power that came with being “America’s Mayor,” accumulating a roster of shady foreign clients for his company and endorsing Donald Trump — whom he considered a “carnival barker” at the time, according to an aide — for president in 2016.Rudy Giuliani speaking to journalists outside the West Wing of the White House, July 2020.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHis reliance on Mr. Trump was a driving force behind his serial disasters supposedly in support of the administration: his bizarre efforts to frame Joe Biden in the Ukraine scandal, which resulted in the president’s first impeachment, and his catastrophic efforts to tamper with the 2020 presidential election, which could land him in jail.The man of law and order, famed for his rectitude as United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, is a subject of investigations in Georgia and Washington, D.C. Both center on deeply cynical actions to upend the 2020 election results. They reveal a corruption of character, triggered by a succession of moral compromises over the years undertaken to maintain the power and money that he’d grown accustomed to after Sept. 11.What would have become of Mr. Giuliani if the attack on the World Trade Center had never happened? At some point he might have run for senator or governor in New York, based upon his strong record as mayor, or perhaps landed the attorney general’s job in a Republican administration, based on his record as a trailblazing prosecutor.He wouldn’t have accumulated as much cash or achieved worldwide fame. But then again his hero’s reputation is long gone. (“I am afraid it will be on my gravestone — ‘Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump,’” he told The New Yorker in 2019.) His political power has evaporated, and his riches have been almost exhausted — he’s been selling personalized video greetings for $325, and he dressed as a feathered jack-in-the-box for the Fox show “The Masked Singer” this spring. Even his accomplishments on the day the World Trade Center was attacked have been tarnished by numerous findings of disastrous mistakes he and his administration made.History will pay Rudy Giuliani his due for leading New York through its darkest hour. But it will also record that his exploitation of his actions on Sept. 11 led him to the abyss.Andrew Kirtzman, a former New York political reporter and the writer of books about Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty and the Bernie Madoff scandal, is the author of “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.”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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      In Voter Fraud, Penalties Often Depend on Who’s Voting

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      WASHINGTON — After 15 years of scrapes with the police, the last thing that 33-year-old Therris L. Conney needed was another run-in with the law. He got one anyway two years ago, after election officials held a presentation on voting rights for inmates of the county jail in Gainesville, Fla.Apparently satisfied that he could vote, Mr. Conney registered after the session, and cast a ballot in 2020. In May, he was arrested for breaking a state law banning voting by people serving felony sentences — and he was sentenced to almost another full year in jail.That show-no-mercy approach to voter fraud is what Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has encouraged this year during his re-election campaign. “That was against the law,” he said last month about charges against 20 other felons who voted in Florida, “and they’re going to pay a price for it.”But many of those cases seem to already be falling apart, because, like Mr. Conney, the former felons did not intend to vote illegally. And the more typical kind of voter-fraud case in Florida has long exacted punishment at a steep discount.Last winter, four residents of the Republican-leaning retirement community The Villages were arrested for voting twice — once in Florida, and again in other states where they had also lived.Despite being charged with third-degree felonies, the same as Mr. Conney, two of the Villages residents who pleaded guilty escaped having a criminal record entirely by taking a 24-hour civics class. Trials are pending for the other two.Florida is an exaggerated version of America as a whole. A review by The New York Times of some 400 voting-fraud charges filed nationwide since 2017 underscores what critics of fraud crackdowns have long said: Actual prosecutions are blue-moon events, and often netted people who didn’t realize they were breaking the law.Punishment can be wildly inconsistent: Most violations draw wrist-slaps, while a few high-profile prosecutions produce draconian sentences. Penalties often fall heaviest on those least able to mount a defense. Those who are poor and Black are more likely to be sent to jail than comfortable retirees facing similar charges.The high-decibel political rhetoric behind fraud prosecutions drowns out how infrequent — and sometimes how unfair — those prosecutions are, said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law and democracy issues at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.“It’s hard to see felons in Gainesville getting jail terms, and then look at people in The Villages getting no time at all, and see this as a rational system,” he said.The Times searched newspapers in all 50 states, internet accounts of fraud and online databases of cases, including one maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation, to compile a list of prosecutions in the last five years. But there is no comprehensive list of voter fraud cases, and The Times’ list is undoubtedly incomplete.Election workers in Riviera Beach, Fla., prepared ballots to be counted by machine after the November 2020 general election.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe number of individuals charged — roughly one and one-half per state per year — is infinitesimal in a country where more than 159.7 million votes were cast in the 2020 general election alone.For all the fevered rhetoric about crackdowns on illegal voting, what’s most striking about voter fraud prosecutions is how modest the penalties for convictions tend to be.Most fraud cases fall into one of four categories: falsely filling out absentee ballots, usually to vote in the name of a relative; voting twice, usually in two states; votes cast illegally by felons; or votes cast by noncitizens.Edward Snodgrass, a trustee in Porter Township, Ohio, said he was trying to “execute a dying man’s wishes” when he filled out and mailed in his deceased father’s ballot in the 2020 election. He was fined $800 and sentenced to three days in jail.Charles Eugene Cartier, 81, of Madison, N.H. and Attleboro, Mass., pleaded guilty in New Hampshire to voting in more than one state, a Class B felony, in the 2016 election. He was fined $1,000 plus a penalty assessment of $240, and had his 60-day prison sentence suspended on condition of good behavior.At least four Oregonians cast votes in two states in 2016; none were fined more than $1,000, and felony charges were reduced to violations, akin to traffic tickets.Two federal prosecutors in North Carolina, Matthew G.T. Martin and Robert J. Higdon, made national headlines in 2018 with a campaign to prosecute noncitizens who voted illegally. In the end, around 30 charges were brought, out of some 4.7 million votes cast in 2016. But prison sentences in those cases were few, and usually measured in months; fines, usually in the hundreds of dollars or less.Still, there are exceptions, often apparently meant to send a message in states where politicians have tried to elevate fraud to a major issue.Foremost is Texas, where convictions that would merit probation or fines elsewhere have drawn crushing prison sentences. Rosa Maria Ortega, a green-card holder who cast illegal votes in 2012 and 2014, was sentenced to eight years in prison for a crime she says she unknowingly committed. Crystal Mason, who cast a ballot in 2016 while on federal probation for a tax felony, drew five years for violating felon voting laws. The court has been ordered to reconsider her case.Both prosecutions were the work of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, perhaps the nation’s most zealous enforcer of voter-fraud laws. Mr. Paxton runs a $2.2 million-a-year election integrity squad that claims a 15-year record of prosecutions, though some of its high-profile cases, like a lengthy one against a South Texas mayor, ended in acquittals.Many of the squad’s cases have turned out to be decidedly small-bore affairs. Mr. Paxton’s integrity sleuths recorded 16 prosecutions in 2020, all of them Houston-area residents who put wrong addresses on registration applications, The Houston Chronicle has reported. None resulted in jail time. A handful of states have followed Texas’s lead. In Tennessee, Pamela Moses, a Black activist who violated a ban on voting by felons — mistakenly, she said — drew a six-year prison sentence in 2021. Prosecutors abandoned the charge after she won a new trial.In Florida, Kelvin Bolton, 56 and homeless, attended the same presentation that Mr. Conney did, and also voted in 2020. He has been awaiting trial in the Gainesville jail for five months, unable to make the $30,000 bond slapped on him by a county judge.“I said, ‘Kelvin, why did you vote?’” his sister, Derbra Bolton Owete, said in an interview. “And he said, ‘Well, they told me I could vote, so I voted.’ ”An amendment to the Florida Constitution that voters approved in 2018 restored voting rights to Mr. Bolton and other former felons who had completed their sentences. But the Republican legislature passed a law requiring full payment of fines and court fees to complete a sentence. The state has no central record of what former felons owe, adding another hurdle to their efforts to regain voting rights.Because Mr. Bolton owes fines or court costs, he faces felony charges of perjury and casting illegal votes.People of means usually fare better.In Kansas, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Steve Watkins, railed during his 2020 re-election campaign against a “corrupt” prosecutor after Mr. Watkins was charged with illegally misstating his residence for voting and with lying to law enforcement officers, both felonies. Mr. Watkins later quietly accepted a diversion plea, escaping a criminal record in return for paying court costs and hewing to requirements like staying out of legal trouble. (Mr. Watkins lost his re-election bid.)Steve Watkins, a Kansas state legislator, faced felony voting fraud charges in 2020 and lost his bid for re-election. He spoke at a rally in Topeka with President Donald Trump in 2018.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesIn North Carolina, prosecutors have yet to decide after six months of scrutiny the seemingly straightforward question of whether Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump and a former North Carolina congressman, essentially did the same thing.Mr. Meadows stated on a 2020 voter registration form that his residence for voting purposes was a mobile home in the western part of the state, although there is no public evidence that he ever actually lived there. A few prosecutions have approached the sort of broader allegations of fraud that are common in political messaging, though all were local affairs.A convoluted tale of election shenanigans in the Canton, Miss., city government produced charges against at least nine people in 2019, though punishment was minimal, and one woman was cleared. An absentee-ballot scheme that forced a rerun of the 2018 Ninth Congressional District race in North Carolina led to seven fraud indictments. The alleged ringleader, Leslie McCrae Dowless, a Republican operative, died before he could stand trial.In Florida, where attacks on voter fraud have been a staple of Mr. DeSantis’s term as governor, prosecutors have adjudicated at least 25 voting law cases since 2017. Until recently, penalties have been mild — probation, small fines, jail time served concurrent with other sentences.The 20 cases of voting by felons announced last month nearly double that total. But those prosecutions appear endangered, because the state itself approved the felons’ applications to vote and even issued them registration cards. The Republican who sponsored the state law requiring felons to pay court costs, State Senator Jeff Brandes, told The Miami Herald that he believed those who were charged had no intent to break the law.Asked about that, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis noted that the governor said that local election officials vet registration applications, not the state. That contradicts what his own former secretary of state, Laurel Lee, told journalists in 2020, The Herald reported.“When people sign up” to vote, “they check a box saying they’re eligible,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference last week. “If they’re not eligible and they’re lying, then they can be held accountable.”Critics of Mr. DeSantis say his goal is less to stop fraud than to make political hay from Republican voters’ obsession with the subject, something the party has relentlessly stoked for years.“This is political grandstanding,” said Daniel Smith, an expert on elections and voting at the University of Florida. “Individuals are registering, being told they can vote, handed registration cards and then told they’ve committed a felony. It’s tragic.”Sometimes the focus on voter fraud can become self-fulfilling.An Iowa woman, Terri Lynn Rote, said she cast two ballots for Mr. Trump in 2016 because she believed her first vote would be switched to favor Hillary Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice — it was spur of the moment,” she later told The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “The polls are rigged.”A judge fined her $750 and sentenced her to two years’ probation.Kitty Bennett, Isabella Grullón Paz and Heather Bushman contributed research. More

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      Kenya’s Supreme Court Upholds Presidential Election Results

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      In a sweeping rejection of claims that the Aug. 9 vote had been rigged, the court confirmed Vice President William Ruto as the country’s fifth president.NAIROBI, Kenya — The Supreme Court of Kenya on Monday upheld the election of William Ruto as president, ending a courtroom battle over disputed results from the Aug. 9 election and confirming Mr. Ruto as the fifth president of a country often seen as an indicator of democratic strength in Africa.In a lengthy judgment that rejected the claims by Mr. Ruto’s rival, Raila Odinga, that the vote had been rigged, Chief Justice Martha Koome swept aside claims of ballot stuffing, computer hacking and falsified results that she variously described as “sensationalism,” “hot air” and “a wild-goose chase that yielded nothing of value.”The unanimous verdict means that Mr. Ruto, the charismatic and populist vice president who pitched his campaign at Kenya’s “hustlers,” or young strivers, could be inaugurated as early as Sept. 13.Supporters of Mr. Ruto erupted in celebration as the verdict was announced, flooding the streets in towns across the Rift Valley, his main stronghold. Addressing supporters at his mansion in Karen, outside Nairobi, a jubilant and smiling Mr. Ruto lauded the court, extended a conciliatory hand to his rivals and promised to unite the country.“We are not enemies,” he said. “Let us unite to make Kenya a nation that everyone will be proud to call home.The court’s decision was yet another stinging defeat for Mr. Odinga, 77, a political veteran making his fifth bid for the presidency, having lost the first four. The election was hard fought: The court confirmed that Mr. Ruto had won 50.5 percent of the vote to Mr. Odinga’s 48.9 percent, a difference of about 233,000 votes. In a statement, Mr. Odinga said that while he respected the court’s verdict, he “vehemently” disagreed with it. “We find it incredible that the judges found against us on all nine grounds” and on “occasion resulted to unduly exaggerated language to refute our claim,” he said. At hearings last week, Mr. Odinga’s lawyers argued that Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of Kenya’s election commission, had swung the vote in favor of Mr. Ruto by conspiring with foreign agents who hacked into the commission’s computer system.President-elect William Ruto of Kenya speaks in Nairobi after the Supreme Court upheld his victory on Monday.Monicah Mwangi/ReutersBut Chief Justice Koome, flanked by six other judges, systematically demolished those claims in a judgment that took nearly 90 minutes to read out.The court found “no credible evidence” that the electoral computer system had been interfered with or hacked, or that the technology employed by the commission failed to meet standards of integrity.Chief Justice Koome dismissed claims by four of the country’s seven election commissions which dramatically disowned the election result minutes before it was announced. “Are we to nullify an election on the basis of a last-minute boardroom rupture?” she said. “This we cannot do.”And she offered scathing criticism of the most lurid rigging accusations, which she said were based on forgeries and hearsay, and warned lawyers against introducing sworn statements that were demonstrably based on “falsehoods.”Following the court proceeding by television in Kamagut village, about 200 miles north of Nairobi, where Mr. Ruto grow up, Esther Cherobon joined in the scenes of exultation. “I am very excited that someone who knows me by name, who never wore a shoe to school, has become president,” she said in a phone interview.It was “a miracle” that Mr. Ruto, whose campaign made much of his humble background and early years selling chicken on the roadside, had won, she added.Equally remarkable is Mr. Ruto’s rise to the top following accusations that he once committed crimes against humanity. A decade ago, Mr. Ruto was facing trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which indicted him on charges of orchestrating communal violence after the 2007 election that resulted in over 1,200 deaths.The trial collapsed in 2016 after the Kenyan government withdrew its cooperation and key witnesses recanted their testimony. But the court did not formally acquit Mr. Ruto, then the country’s vice-president. The judgment on Monday was delivered to a courtroom packed with lawyers less than a month after a fiercely fought electoral battle that was closely followed across Africa and the world.Kenya’s stability matters to the region and beyond. The economic powerhouse of East Africa, it has emerged as a key Western ally in the fight against terrorism, a burgeoning technology hub and a stable democracy in a region shaped by autocrats and conflicts.Some schools in the capital closed, and the police closed roads leading to the court, but worries of a backlash from Mr. Odinga’s supporters did not immediately materialize. In Kisumu, a major Odinga stronghold in western Kenya, traffic flowed and businesses reopened soon after the verdict was announced.Supporters of Raila Odinga in Nairobi last month. The court battle that unfolded in the past week had threatened to erode Kenya’s democratic foundations.Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile some residents said they were shocked by the judges’ decision, they voted to abide by it. “Life has to go on,” Maurice Ogange, a motorcycle taxi driver, said by phone.That reaction stoked hopes that Kenya’s closely watched election, although messy and hotly disputed like the country’s previous three votes, could yet prove to be an example to the region.In contrast to recent elections, the vote was largely peaceful, although the chaotic scenes as the results were declared on Aug. 16, and the often sensational rigging accusations made in court last week, risked undermining voter confidence in the democratic system.When it became clear the result was going against Mr. Odinga, the top election official for his coalition denounced the vote-counting center as a “crime scene,” then rampaged through it with other supporters, clashing with security officials.It was not lost on anyone that the four rebel electoral commissioners were appointed last year by Kenya’s current president, Uhuru Kenyatta — Mr. Ruto’s political nemesis and Mr. Odinga’s ally.But the Supreme Court justices’ evenhanded treatment of the sensitive case over the past two weeks appeared to underscore the growing strength of Kenya’s senior judiciary. The judges narrowed a slew of accusations down to nine key questions, including whether Mr. Ruto had attained over 50 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff. Since Friday they spent three sleepless nights to reach a unanimous decision, the deputy chief justice, Philomena Mwilu, said in brief remarks on Monday.“Now, you allow us to go home and sleep,” she said before the hearing adjourned.Other key institutions, however, emerged from the election damaged or discredited.While the verdict largely vindicated the election commissioner, Mr. Chebukati, he was not totally without fault in the eyes of the court. It suggested he overstepped his mandate in delivering the final result without backing from his own commissioners.The court also heard disturbing testimony that senior police, defense and security officials had tried to pressure Mr. Chebukati into denying victory to Mr. Ruto just hours before the result was announced, suggesting a dangerous rift in key state institutions.Despite the defeat, Mr. Odinga’s legacy as a champion of democracy remains undiminished. For decades he was the outsider in Kenya’s politics, a dogged opposition leader who served years in prison under the authoritarian leader Daniel arap Moi, who in 1982 accused him of fomenting an attempted coup.This time, however, Mr. Odinga was running as an establishment candidate thanks to a political pact that he sealed with Mr. Kenyatta in 2018. But that deal, known as the “handshake,” dismally failed to deliver the votes Mr. Odinga needed to win.Mr. Ruto’s candidacy was also riven with contradictions. A wealthy businessman, he cast himself as an underdog, playing up his humble past, and largely ignored that he has been in power as vice president under Mr. Kenyatta since 2013.But his appeal to what he called the “hustlers,” the millions of young Kenyans who, like his younger self, were striving to make ends meet, struck a chord with many.Even so, many young Kenyans were turned off by both candidates. Turnout fell to 65 percent of the country’s 22.1 million registered voters, down from 80 percent in 2017.Presidential ballot boxes taken to the court after the justices ordered ballots from some 15 polling stations to be recounted.Daniel Irungu/EPA, via Shutterstock More