Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Trump: A Brat, but Not a Child

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      “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”Those were the words of Representative Liz Cheney on Tuesday in her opening statement at the Jan. 6 House select committee’s seventh hearing, as she swatted away what she said was a new strategy among Donald Trump’s defenders: claiming that he was manipulated by outside advisers and therefore “incapable of telling right from wrong.”Basically, Trump lied about the election because he was lied to about the election.But, as Cheney pointed out, Trump actively chose the counsel of “the crazies” over that of authorities, and therefore cannot, or at least should not, “escape responsibility by being willfully blind.”Willful blindness is a self-imposed ignorance, but as Thomas Jefferson put it: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect because it can always be pretended.”If Trump is a pro at anything, it is pretending. He is a brat, but he’s not a child.Cheney’s argument immediately recalled for me the case of Pamela Moses, a Black woman and activist in Memphis.In 2019, Moses wanted to register to vote. A judge told her that she couldn’t because she was still on felony probation.So Moses turned to another, lower authority — a probation officer — for a second opinion. The probation officer calculated (incorrectly, as it turns out) that her probation had ended and signed a certificate to that effect. Moses submitted the certificate with her voter registration form.The local district attorney later pressed criminal charges against Moses, arguing that she should have known she was ineligible to vote because the judge, the person with the most authority in the equation, had told her so.Moses was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to six years and a day in prison, with the judge saying, “You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation.”How is this materially different from what Trump did as he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election? All the authorities — Bill Barr, head of the Department of Justice; White House lawyers; and state election officials — told him he had lost the election, but he sought other opinions, ones that confirmed his own view.This is not to say that the prosecution and conviction of Moses were justified, but rather to illustrate that we live in two different criminal justice realities: People without power, particularly minorities and those unable to pay expensive lawyers, are trapped in a ruthless and unyielding system, while the rich and powerful encounter an entirely different system, one cautious to the point of cowardice.Earlier this year, Moses’ conviction was thrown out because a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction had withheld evidence, and the prosecutor dropped all criminal charges against her.Still, by the time the ordeal was over, Moses had spent 82 days in custody, time she couldn’t get back, and she is now permanently barred from registering to vote or voting in the state.This is the least of the consequences Trump ought to face: He should be prohibited from participating in the electoral process henceforth.Some of the laws Trump may have broken in his crusade to overturn the election — like conspiracy to defraud the government — are more complicated than an illegal voter registration, but that is par for the course in a system that tilts in favor of the rich and powerful. Petty crime is always easier to prosecute than white-collar crime.This is a country in which the Internal Revenue Service audits poor families — households with less than $25,000 in annual income — at a rate five times higher than it audits everybody else, a Syracuse University analysis found.The way we target people for punishment in this country is rarely about a pursuit of justice and fairness; it simply reflects the reality that the vise squeezes hardest at the points of least resistance.The fact that Trump has thus far faced few legal repercussions for his many transgressions eats away at people’s faith.I believe this has contributed to our cratering confidence in American institutions, as measured by a recent Gallup poll. There are many factors undermining the faith Americans once had in their institutions, to be sure, but I believe a justice system rife with injustice is one of the main ones. In the poll, only 4 percent of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the criminal justice system.The only institution that did worse on that metric was Congress, with just 2 percent.We have a criminal justice crisis in this country, and people are portraying Trump’s behavior like that of a child in hopes of keeping him from facing consequences in a country that jails actual children.According to the Child Crime Prevention and Safety Center, “Approximately 10,000 minors under the age of 18 are housed in jails and prisons intended for adult offenders, and juveniles make up 1,200 of the 1.5 million people imprisoned in state and federal detention facilities.”There is no excuse for what Trump has done, and if he is not held accountable for it, even more faith in the United States as a “country of laws” will be lost.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      What Happened on Dec. 18 at ‘the Craziest Meeting of the Trump Presidency’?

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      Digging into the aftermath of the 2020 election, members of the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday focused on a meeting between former President Donald J. Trump and outside advisers that devolved into what they described as a chaotic confrontation over a desperate attempt to overturn the election.Drawing from testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr and others, the committee described in detail a hastily organized meeting in which advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.“On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal, and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”According to the panel, in the weeks before the meeting in December, several of Mr. Trump’s advisers including Mr. Barr and Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel, had publicly and privately dismissed the possibility of wide-scale voter fraud, and urged Mr. Trump to concede. Mr. Barr made a public announcement on Dec. 1 to affirm that he had not found significant evidence of fraud.Just four days before the meeting, on Dec. 14, the Electoral College met to certify the election results, which in a taped interview Mr. Barr told the committee “should have been the end of the matter.”But on the evening of Dec. 18, several of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, came to Mr. Trump to urge him to consider the plan to seize voting machines.As the meeting grew heated, Mr. Cipollone told the committee that other plans were discussed, including to grant Ms. Powell a security clearance and name her special counsel, putting her in charge of Mr. Trump’s legal effort to contest the election results.The meeting lasted hours, moving from the Oval Office to other areas of the West Wing before ending in the presidential residence, according to the committee. And arguments broke out throughout the evening, including “challenges to physically fight,” Mr. Raskin said.In a taped interview presented on Tuesday, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary, said, “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other — it wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chit-chatting.”The panel showed evidence suggesting that the meeting ended around midnight, without agreement among participants on how to proceed.But committee members used the hearing on Tuesday to suggest that as Mr. Trump apparently grew frustrated with the lack of options to contest the election results during the meeting in December, it was in that moment that he turned to his supporters, encouraging them to come to Washington on Jan 6.Just over an hour after the meeting was said to have ended, Mr. Trump tweeted at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19 that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost the election. In the tweet, he also urged supporters to gather in Washington to demonstrate, drawing dozens of responses from people sharing plans to occupy the Capitol building and photos of weapons they said they planned to bring.“Be there, will be wild,” the tweet said. More

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      The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State-Blue State Divide

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      Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules.To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from removing posts because of political points of view.In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governor’s race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them — only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues — including abortion, guns, the environment — and along geographic lines.The midterm elections in November are driving much of the activity on the state level. In red states, the focus has been on protecting conservative voices on social media, including those spreading baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud.In blue states, lawmakers have tried to force the same companies to do more to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and other harmful information about a broad range of topics, including voting rights and Covid-19.“We should not stand by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy,” Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview.Calling disinformation a “nuclear weapon” threatening the country’s democratic foundations, he supports legislation that would make it a crime to spread lies about elections. He praised the $28,000 fine levied against the advocacy group that challenged the integrity of the state’s vote in 2020.“We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact,” he said, referring to disinformation.The biggest hurdle to new regulations — regardless of the party pushing them — is the First Amendment. Lobbyists for the social media companies say that, while they seek to moderate content, the government should not be in the business of dictating how that’s done.Concerns over free speech defeated a bill in deeply blue Washington that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials “to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.”Governor Inslee, who faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020, supported the legislation, citing the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That ruling allowed states to punish speech calling for violence or criminal acts when “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”The legislation stalled in the state’s Senate in February, but Mr. Inslee said the scale of the problem required urgent action.Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe scope of the problem of disinformation, and of the power of the tech companies, has begun to chip away at the notion that free speech is politically untouchable.The new law in Texas has already reached the Supreme Court, which blocked the law from taking effect in May, though it sent the case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation last year, prompted in part by the decisions by Facebook and Twitter to shut down the accounts of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill.The court’s ruling signaled that it could revisit one core issue: whether social media platforms, like newspapers, retain a high degree of editorial freedom.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a dissent to the court’s emergency ruling suspending the law’s enforcement.A federal judge last month blocked a similar law in Florida that would have fined social media companies as much as $250,000 a day if they blocked political candidates from their platforms, which have become essential tools of modern campaigning. Other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed similar measures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Alaska.Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, has created an online portal through which residents can complain that their access to social media has been restricted: alabamaag.gov/Censored. In a written response to questions, he said that social media platforms stepped up efforts to restrict content during the pandemic and the presidential election of 2020.“During this period (and continuing to present day), social media platforms abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech — a principle on which they sold themselves to users — and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth,” he wrote. “Suddenly, any viewpoint that deviated in the slightest from the prevailing orthodoxy was censored.”Much of the activity on the state level today has been animated by the fraudulent assertion that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Although disproved repeatedly, the claim has been cited by Republicans to introduce dozens of bills that would clamp down on absentee or mail-in voting in the states they control.Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Sixteen states have expanded the abilities of people to vote, which has intensified pre-emptive accusations among conservative lawmakers and commentators that the Democrats are bent on cheating.“There is a direct line from conspiracy theories to lawsuits to legislation in states,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization at the New York University School of Law. “Now, more than ever, your voting rights depend on where you live. What we’ve seen this year is half the country going in one direction and the other half going the other direction.”TechNet, the internet company lobbying group, has fought local proposals in dozens of states. The industry’s executives argue that variations in state legislation create a confusing patchwork of rules for companies and consumers. Instead, companies have highlighted their own enforcement of disinformation and other harmful content.“These decisions are made as consistently as possible,” said David Edmonson, the group’s vice president for state policy and government relations.For many politicians the issue has become a powerful cudgel against opponents, with each side accusing the other of spreading lies, and both groups criticizing the social media giants. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called the “authoritarian companies” that have sought to mute conservative voices. In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the memoirist and Republican nominee for Senate, railed against social media giants, saying they stifled news about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son.In Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican nomination for Senate, released a television ad criticizing Twitter for suspending her personal account after she posted remarks about transgender athletes. “They want to cancel you,” she said in the ad, defending her remarks as “what God intended.”OnMessage, a polling firm that counts the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, reported that 80 percent of primary voters surveyed in 2021 said they believed that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Six years earlier, only 20 percent said so. “Voters have a palpable fear of cancel culture and how tech is censoring political views.” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called “authoritarian companies.”Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn blue states, Democrats have focused more directly on the harm disinformation inflicts on society, including through false claims about elections or Covid and through racist or antisemitic material that has motivated violent attacks like the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo in May.Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting and to create a position for an expert to root out misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral. A similar effort to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security provoked a political fury before its work was suspended in May pending an internal review.In California, the State Senate is moving forward with legislation that would require social media companies to disclose their policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. (The legislation would not compel them to restrict content.) Another bill would allow civil lawsuits against large social media platforms like TikTok and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram if their products were proven to have addicted children.“All of these different challenges that we’re facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat, who sponsored the legislation to require greater transparency from social media platforms. “That has significant consequences both online and in physical spaces.”It seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will have a significant impact before this fall’s elections; social media companies will have no single response acceptable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.“Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms, but the November midterms seem likely to be particularly explosive,” said Matt Perault, a director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. “With abortion, guns, democratic participation at the forefront of voters’ minds, platforms will face intense challenges in moderating speech. It’s likely that neither side will be satisfied by the decisions platforms make.” More

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      Internal Inconsistencies

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      The people who claim widespread election fraud have made little effort to put together a logical argument.More than 100 Republican nominees for statewide office or Congress this year have falsely claimed that election fraud helped defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Almost 150 members of Congress — more than half of the Republicans serving there — went so far as to vote to overturn the 2020 election result.These claims of election fraud have become the mainstream Republican position. In some places, winning a nomination virtually requires making such statements. In other places, the claims appear to carry little political cost, at least in the primaries. And very few elected Republicans have been willing to denounce the falsehoods.Given the prominence of the issue, it’s jarring to see how little effort its proponents have put into making an argument on behalf of their claims. They have offered no good evidence, because there is not any. They have also failed to offer even a logically consistent argument. Consider:If anything, the rare examples of cheating from 2020 tend to involve Trump supporters. Prosecutors charged three registered Republicans living at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, with voting more than once in the presidential election. One of them has since pleaded guilty: he both voted in Florida and cast an absentee ballot in Michigan.Trump and his allies have never explained how other Republicans could have done so well if fraud were widespread. In the 2020 House elections, Republicans gained 14 seats. In the Senate, Democrats did win a 50-50 split, but the party lost races in Maine, Montana and North Carolina that it had hoped to win. In the 2021 elections, Republicans did well again, winning the governor’s race in Virginia. It’s hardly a picture consistent with Democratic election rigging.During the 2022 primaries, most Republican candidates have accepted the results without claiming fraud. That’s been true even of candidates who lost their races, as my colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti have reported. Examples include Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina; Representative Mo Brooks in the Senate primary in Alabama; and two Trump-backed candidates in Georgia. When Trump supporters lose to other Republicans, they generally accept defeat.Loyalty, not logicOf course, the claims of voter fraud are not going away. If Trump runs again, he will probably allege cheating in any election that he loses. At least some other Republicans now seem likely to do the same, perhaps in response to close or unexpected losses in 2022.A “Stop the Steal” protester in 2020.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut the lack of any substantive argument to back up these claims suggests that even some of the people making them may not believe them. The claims have instead become a way for many Republicans to show loyalty to their party and to signal that they consider Democrats to be inherently illegitimate holders of power.Sometimes, these signals are tinged with racism, as Brandon Tensley of CNN has noted: The fraud claims often involve cities with heavily Black or Latino populations, like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Rudy Giuliani, for example, alleged — without any evidence — that residents of Camden, N.J. (roughly 90 percent of whom are Black or Latino) illegally vote in Philadelphia (which, unlike Camden, is in a swing state). In Alabama, Brooks has said fraud occurs largely in Birmingham and other heavily Democratic cities.The spread of such lies has left many historians and political scientists anxious about the future of American democracy. There is no shortage of subjects on which Democrats and Republicans can reasonably — even passionately or angrily — disagree: How much should the country restrict abortion? What about gun use? Or immigration? How high should taxes or government benefits be?All those issues are valid matters of debate in a democracy. When one side loses a struggle, it can look for ways to regroup and win the next one.But a concerted campaign to delegitimize political opponents — through falsehoods and without much of an attempt at logical argument — is something quite different. It’s an attempt not to win a democratic contest but to avoid one.For moreThe Washington Post has compiled a list of the current Republican nominees who support Trump’s false election claims, and The Times has listed the congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election.In coming primaries in Arizona and Michigan, candidates who have made false fraud claims are trying to win the Republican nomination to become secretary of state, overseeing elections.THE LATEST NEWSBritainBoris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, at Downing Street yesterday.John Sibley/ReutersBoris Johnson is stepping down. He’s planning to serve as prime minister until the fall.His resignation comes after days of political drama and calls for him to quit from within his Conservative Party. More than 50 government ministers or aides had left.It’s unclear who will succeed Johnson. The Conservative Party will start a leadership contest that will determine who will be the next prime minister.War in UkraineThe main train station in Lviv in April.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAbout six million Ukrainians are displaced within the country and nearly five million others have fled to other Europe countries.President Biden told the wife of Brittney Griner, the basketball star detained in Russia, that the U.S. would pursue “every avenue” to bring the player home.PoliticsBiden has tried to remain above the partisan fray. Some Democrats wish he were more of a fighter, The Times’s Michael Shear writes.James Comey and Andrew McCabe, former F.B.I. officials who clashed with Trump, were both subjected to rare, intensive I.R.S. audits.The Jan 6. committee will interview the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who fought Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Joe Rogan said that he had refused to have Trump on his podcast, calling him “an existential threat to democracy.”Other Big StoriesFed officials are planning another big interest rate increase, even as the economy shows some signs of cooling.The Highland Park shooter had been able to legally buy weapons, even after police encounters and despite Illinois’s relatively strict laws.The glaciers of the Alps are buckling under the summer heat that is now common in Europe.A California jury found a man guilty of murder in the 2019 shooting of the rapper Nipsey Hussle.A judge sentenced Jerry Harris, a star of the Netflix documentary “Cheer,” to 12 years in prison for sex crimes involving minors.An explosion destroyed part of the Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious monument promoted as “America’s Stonehenge.”OpinionsWhat’s an ectopic pregnancy? What does Plan B do? Take Times Opinion’s Post-Roe sex ed quiz.Medical debt burdens Americans mostly because they’re underinsured rather than uninsured, Aaron Carroll argues.MORNING READSArt: She paid $90,000 for a Marc Chagall painting. Now a French panel wants to destroy it.Wimbledon: Singles matches get attention, but doubles are “a joy to play.”Roommates: A gecko and a possum family, living together in harmony.A Times classic: The science of veganism.Advice from Wirecutter: Packing cubes for smarter traveling.Lives Lived: Willie Lee Morrow was a barber in San Diego when a friend brought him a gift from Nigeria: a wooden comb meant to tease out curly hair. Morrow created what came to be known as the Afro pick. Morrow died at 82.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC Two teams can shake up college football: Rivals Oregon and Washington can dramatically shift the future for two major conferences. Meanwhile, all eyes remain on what Notre Dame is about to do. Tension is building as the college football landscape shifts.Are N.H.L. players being held in Russia? A Russian star appears in jeopardy of not being able to return to the United States. This scenario has been a concern for league executives this off-season.An N.B.A. player faces NFT scrutiny: A veteran player co-founded an NFT community, but now many investors feel they have been swindled.For access to all Athletic articles, subscribe to New York Times All Access or Home Delivery.ARTS AND IDEAS Trevor Rainbolt identifies countries in seconds.Jack Bool for The New York TimesGen Z geographyThe premise of the online game GeoGuessr is simple: You’re dropped somewhere in the world, seen through Google’s Street View, and must guess where you are. Often that means clicking to move through the landscape and scanning for clues.Trevor Rainbolt, 23, has found online fame posting videos in which he locates himself in seconds, The Times’s Kellen Browning writes. His geography skills verge on wizardry — he can identify a country by the color of its soil — and his highlights regularly get millions of views on TikTok.“Candidly, I haven’t had any social life for the past year,” Rainbolt said. “But it’s worth it, because it’s so fun and I enjoy learning.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookChristopher Testani for The New York TimesRoast peaches with boneless chicken thighs in the oven, and let them meld with those flavorful drippings.What to WatchIn the movie “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between,” an adaptation of a young adult novel, two high school seniors agree to break up in a year.What to ReadThese books will guide you through Berlin.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was chutzpah. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Our world (five letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidP.S. The word “whackadoodle” appeared in The Times for the first time, in an article about the Georgia Guidestones.Here’s today’s front page.“The Daily” is about an anti-abortion campaigner. On “First Person,” a gay Ukrainian soldier. On the Modern Love podcast, a nanny’s secret world.Matthew Cullen, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat’

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      Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.November’s midterm elections are still months away, but to many conservative commentators, the fix is already in. Democrats have cheated before, they say, and they will cheat again.Never mind that the claims are false.In Lafayette, La., Carol Ross, host of “The Ross Report,” questioned how Democrats could win a presidential election again after a tumultuous few years in power. “They’re going to have to cheat again,” she said. “You know that. There will be rampant cheating.”In Greenville, S.C., Charlie James, a host on 106.3 WORD, read from a blog post arguing that “the Democrats are going to lose a majority during the midterm elections unless they’re able to cheat in a massive wide-scale way.”And on WJFN in Virginia, Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who was indicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, summed it up this way: “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.”Mr. Trump introduced the nation to a flurry of false claims about widespread voter fraud after his electoral loss in 2020. The extent of his efforts has been outlined extensively in the past couple of weeks during the hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — including a speech that day in which he falsely said Democrats changed voting laws “because they want to cheat.”Republican politicians and cable outlets like Fox News have carried the torch for Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories ever since. But the loudest and most consistent booster of these unfounded claims has been talk radio, where conservative hosts reduce the jumble of false voter fraud theories into a two-word mantra: “Democrats cheat.” More

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      The Perils of Slow Vote-Counting and Delayed Election Results

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      Slow vote counts were the bane of the 2020 elections, inviting bogus fraud charges. But they’re not going away anytime soon.What happens when Election Day lasts for weeks?The short, glib answer to that question is that Jan. 6 happens — as we learned dramatically this week when Cassidy Hutchinson, a young former aide to Mark Meadows, gave testimony that put former President Donald Trump at the center of that day’s chaos and violence.The somewhat longer answer is that there’s so much static over how votes should be counted that we’ve seen the same dysfunctional scene twice since 2020 in the same state.First came the presidential election, where Trump seized on a slow vote count in Pennsylvania to cry fraud, declare victory and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory there and elsewhere.Round Two came about a month ago when the former president raised the specter of election cheating again and urged Dr. Mehmet Oz, his favored candidate in the race for Pennsylvania’s United States Senate seat, to prematurely declare victory in a Republican primary election — a week into the tally of ballots.Oz sidestepped Trump’s suggestion and eventually won, by just 951 votes. Trump’s insinuations of criminality vanished as quickly as they had surfaced.But in an angry, polarized nation, it was a reminder of how easily a laggard vote count can be exploited to discredit election results. And it raises the question of what will happen this November, when some counts in midterm elections are inevitably delayed — or in 2024, when the stakes will be immeasurably higher.Charles H. Stewart III, an election analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it’s a problem unlikely to go away soon, because, for a mix of reasons having to do with civil rights and also convenience, American voters have played a role in creating it.“Over the last couple of decades, we’ve enjoyed an expansion of access to the ballot and convenience of voting,” he said. “And nine times out of ten, that expansion has occurred without regard to the blocking and tackling of election administration.”Translation: Many voters, including Republican voters, love the shift to mail ballots, early voting, voting within minutes of registering, drop boxes and other efforts to make voting easier and more accessible. But those innovations make voting costlier and more complex — and governments have neither ponied up money nor changed election laws to deal with it.Outside experts say election officials already need well over $2 billion just to replace aging voting machines and beef up security against both physical and cyber attacks. And that doesn’t include the cost of improvements like high-speed ballot scanners, envelope-opening machines and additional employees that would make counting faster. Some of these ideas are under discussion on Capitol Hill.Elections have always run long because of the days of backstage work, validating tallies and verifying questionable ballots, that has to happen even when winners are declared early.The public never saw that sausage-making. But now it is causing delays in some states, opening the door to much of the misinformation and disinformation that is clouding election results and casting doubt on the integrity of the vote.Different parties, different views of the problemAdvocates on the left and right see different problems.California can be particularly thorny because of how slowly and unevenly it counts in votes. In 2018, The Associated Press called one Central Valley congressional race for Representative David Valadao, a Republican, only to make a rare retraction when the Democrat pulled ahead weeks later.More recently, the slow vote-counting in last month’s primaries caused a shift in final results from the initial tallies. On election night, the early leader in the Los Angeles mayoral contest, the mall developer and self-styled crimefighter was Rick Caruso. He now trails a more liberal Democrat, Karen Bass, who argued that “Los Angeles cannot arrest its way out of crime.”Progressives complained, loudly, about how the initial results — in Los Angeles and from the successful recall of San Francisco’s district attorney — were framed as a warning about the potency of crime, including in this newspaper. Some progressive prosecutors won, such as Diana Becton in Contra Costa County, whose campaign received a late $1 million ad blitz fund by a PAC linked to the liberal financier George Soros.On the right, Trump and like-minded candidates are quick to claim fraud whenever a slow vote count leaves one of them endangered or defeated. And Republican officeholders, increasingly hostile to voting by mail, may see little incentive to make it work better.But there is a whiff of hypocrisy to many of their claims: In Nevada, a Republican candidate for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, argued on the campaign trail that every winner of a state election since 2006 had actually been “installed by the deep-state cabal” — only to declare that “Nevadans made their voices heard” when he won the state’s primary in mid-June.Swamped by vote by mailIf laggard election results encourage misinformation, deliberate or otherwise, the obvious remedy is to count votes faster, and declare winners sooner. So why aren’t states doing that?In California, at least, a leisurely tally is effectively state policy. The state embraces mail ballots — about two thirds of votes are cast via mail or drop box — and accepts properly postmarked mail ballots up to a week late. In a state that mails out 22 million absentee ballots for every election, processing that takes time.In some other states, the swing to mail voting has swamped election officials who can’t afford high-speed equipment to process ballot envelopes. And while 37 states allow at least some processing of mail ballots as they come in, laws in other states force workers to wait until Election Day before even opening ballot envelopes, much less counting votes and verifying signatures.That was the case this spring in Pennsylvania, which sent out nearly 910,000 mail ballots to voters who requested them. To compound the task, a printing error forced a days-long hand recount of some 21,000 mail ballots.Election judges in Denver counting votes during the primary on Tuesday.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesDoing it rightThat said, states like Oregon, Colorado and Utah conduct all-mail elections seamlessly and report results promptly. And Wisconsin, which also bars opening mail ballots before Election Day, managed to report 2020 general election results by 3 a.m. on the day after the polls closed.“It just comes down to process and procedure and having the right equipment,” said Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners.Wisconsin doesn’t require signature verification of ballots, which speeds counting considerably, she said. But the purchase of additional high-speed tabulators also has allowed the city to process more than twice as many ballots in the same amount of time.Just because the tallies can be accelerated does not mean that they will be. The next two elections face challenges that could prolong counts even further.One is a potential shortage of poll workers, deterred from volunteering because of threats of violence. Another is a shortfall of money, now that some states have barred help from outside groups that donated hundreds of millions of dollars to finance local election work in 2020.A third is an exodus of seasoned election administrators, who are retiring in droves after the pressures of the 2020 election cycle. Running a secure election is an extraordinarily complex task, and that institutional knowledge will be hard to replace, said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Colorado and Utah and now a partner in The Elections Group, a consulting firm.And that could lead to more cracks in fraying foundations of American democracy.“Overall, I think election administration is better today than it’s ever been,” Ms. Morrell said. “The flip side is that the misinformation and election conspiracies are bigger than they’ve ever been. I’m super concerned.”We want to hear from you.Tell us about your experience with this newsletter by answering this short survey.What to readThe Supreme Court term that ended on Thursday was the most conservative since 1931, Adam Liptak writes in a sweeping assessment of the Roberts Court’s achievements, with help from graphics by Alicia Parlapiano.Annie Karni looks at “the 20-somethings who help the 70-somethings run Washington,” a city teeming with ambitious young people who have more power than you might think.A question rarely asked: How will states like Texas handle the surge in babies now that abortion is largely illegal there?viewfindeRCassidy Hutchinson testifying on Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesA momentous hearingOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Haiyun Jiang told us about capturing the image above:Doug Mills, the well-known New York Times photographer, always reminds me not to take scenes on Capitol Hill for granted, even if I have seen them a thousand times. So I always try to approach photo coverage with a fresh eye, striving to make frames of aesthetic and storytelling value.When I covered the Jan. 6 House committee hearing featuring testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to President Donald J. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, I was in the “cuts” — meaning I had the freedom to move around the room, as opposed to being in the “well,” where you are stationed between the committee members and the witness and have very little room to move.I tried to show what I saw by capturing a fuller picture. As I stood on the side, photographers formed a curve with their cameras, and the audience, even the stenographers, focused on the witness. So I decided to include all of those characters in the frame, taking people into the hearing room and hopefully making them feel present.Thanks for reading. Enjoy the July 4 holiday; we’ll see you on Tuesday.— BlakeWere you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Abortion on the Ballot: ‘Remember, You Are Alone in the Voting Booth’

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      More from our inbox:The Supreme Court Ruling About a Gerrymandered MapTalks in the Russia-Ukraine War‘Stolen’ Election? Prove It.Time for a New Constitutional Convention?To the Editor:I am a 41-year-old white, upper-class, single, childless professional, a Midwestern Republican and a practicing Catholic woman. I am disgusted by the overturning of Roe v. Wade.This does not match my conservative values of smaller government and fiscal conservatism. Practically, why is it a government matter to ensure the completion of truly unwanted and/or dangerous pregnancies?Personally, I have seen the toll of abortion on friends and relatives. Reasons I’ve seen for having one include date rape, accidental pregnancies, irresponsible lack of birth control and unviable pregnancies. No one took the decision lightly or evaded the psychological impact of the actual event.Women across their lifetimes deal with everyone else’s interest in and opinion of their bodies. We also deal with managing access to our bodies in ways I do not think most men can understand. Men who want to put part of their bodies inside ours. Doctors who probe inside. Lives that grow inside and can cause serious injury and death in the process.It’s a lot to manage. I suggest we leave each person to their own management, in a truly Republican way.Emily SmithSt. LouisTo the Editor:When my son was born, I had an overpowering feeling of love. I couldn’t imagine loving anyone more than I loved him. Giving birth and having a child are what I cherish most about my life. Every child deserves to be wanted and be the recipient of that powerful love.I am a pro-choice Democrat. I am also pro-life. And by pro-life I don’t mean the pro-fetus, anti-abortion view of the conservative, religious right. To me pro-life means ensuring that women have prenatal care and adequate family leave, and affordable child care. Pro-life means good nutrition, parental jobs that pay a living wage, safe, affordable housing, excellent public education and health care for everyone.It is time for Democrats and all who love children to claim the mantle of “pro-life” as ours and to recognize that anti-abortionists care only about the delivery of a fetus no matter how it was conceived and whether is it born alive or dead. We must restore women’s bodily autonomy and right to choose when and how to have a child.Nancy H. HenselLaguna Woods, Calif.To the Editor:Those Americans celebrating our nation’s reactionary lurch back to the dark days of government control over women’s bodies are, no doubt, deeply grateful to the millions of self-described progressive and/or Democratic Party-aligned voters who in 2016 opted not to cast a vote at all rather than to vote for Hillary Clinton.Without the help of those anti-Clinton members of the electorate, it’s highly unlikely the radical right could have fulfilled its dream of creating a top court controlled by overtly activist justices who now, one decision at a time, are ensuring that the politics of white privilege and patriarchal thinking reign supreme.The End of Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s decision to end ​​the constitutional right to abortion.Michelle Goldberg: “In the aftermath of the anti-abortion movement’s catastrophic victory, it’s worth asking what we can learn from their tactics.”Maureen Dowd: “The court is out of control. We feel powerless to do anything about it. Clarence Thomas, of all people, has helped lead us to where we are.”Peter Coy: “People on the losing end of Supreme Court decisions increasingly feel that justice is not being served. That’s a scary situation for American democracy.”Jamelle Bouie: “The power to check the Supreme Court is there, in the Constitution. The task now is to seize it.”Michele Goodwin, law professor: “The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery.”It’s a stark reminder that polls indicating that a majority of voters continue to favor a woman’s right to choose are meaningless if lots of those same voters choose not to vote.Andy ParkerPortland, Ore.To the Editor:At this tragic time for women’s rights, I remember a letter to the editor, in this very paper, that was written 30 years ago. We were at the crux of a significant presidential election, in which several Supreme Court seats were potentially at stake.The writer of that letter took the liberty of doctoring a quote from Julia Child, who was a known ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood. On one of her cooking shows, Julia accidentally flipped food out of the pan and onto the floor.As she picked it up from the floor and tossed it back into the pan, she looked into the camera and said, “Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”The writer of that letter reminded women, “Remember, you are alone in the voting booth.”As we fight to get our rights back, I hope that women, regardless of their political party, will remember that advice this November.Katrina SabaOakland, Calif.The Supreme Court Ruling About a Gerrymandered Map Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Justices Revive G.O.P.-Drawn Map in Louisiana” (news article, June 29):The Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the highly partisan gerrymandered voting map by the Louisiana Legislature simply highlights the politicization of the six conservative justices and the court’s continued decline of legitimacy in the public eye.The trial court found that the Republican-drawn map diluted Black voters’ rights and required the Louisiana Legislature to redraw the map for the coming November election. The six justices arbitrarily blocked the trial court’s order without giving any reason.Although overshadowed by the abortion, gun permit and church-state cases, this result-oriented order simply reinforces the public’s skepticism of the court’s partisan bent. So much for the Republicans’ historic denunciation of “activist judges.”Ken GoldmanBeverly Hills, Calif.The writer is a lawyer.Talks in the Russia-Ukraine WarTo the Editor:According to the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, the conflict in Ukraine appears likely to last for some time. In recent days, though, leading voices in Europe, those who want Russia pushed back and punished as well as those who want the war to end quickly, have expressed serious interest in talks.Negotiation may be more promising if the focus shifts from a final resolution of the protracted conflict to an interim plan with these initial objectives: (a) to cease the fighting and (b) to consider occupied territory “neutral,” and under a protectorate, until a complete resolution can be determined.Implementing these steps will take some doing, but each, in some form, is essential to limit human suffering, physical damage and economic loss as well as to establish and support a forum for negotiations, one in which “the interests” of the nations, rather than their “positions,” frame the discussions.This approach allows neither side to claim a victory. They can, however, commit to work for a peaceful Europe, as essential for Ukraine and Russia as for the stability, and prosperity, of the world.Linda StamatoSanford M. JaffeMorristown, N.J.The writers are co-directors of the Center for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.‘Stolen’ Election? Prove It.To the Editor:The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has methodically laid out a compelling, fact-based argument as to what happened that day, and why.I am still awaiting the same from those who believe that the 2020 election was “stolen.” What is their case? Where are their facts? Instead of a disciplined, marshaled argument, I hear only shrieks, shouts and hyperbole.I am reminded of President Lincoln’s observation in the midst of a similar hysteria: “Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”As a nation, this must be our watchword moving forward.Philip TaftHopewell, N.J.Time for a New Constitutional Convention?To the Editor:Many of us are frustrated that the institutions we look to for guiding our democracy are not working: a Supreme Court that interprets law as written hundreds of years ago; a Senate and a House often mired in gridlock; an executive branch that has suffered a near coup from partisans chanting false information about election fraud.Clearly something is not working, and we the people need to be the adults in the room to provide guidance.Perhaps it’s time for a new constitutional convention to update the contract between the people and our government so it works for all of us again.Richard M. SchubertPortland, Ore. More

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      Missouri Enacts Strict New Voter Rules and Will Switch to Caucuses

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      Missouri overhauled its election rules on Wednesday, enacting a voter identification law similar to one the state’s highest court blocked two years ago and doing away with its presidential primary in favor of a caucus system.The new law, which Gov. Michael L. Parson signed at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, requires voters to present a photo ID when casting a regular or absentee ballot. Those without such documentation will be required to fill out a provisional ballot that would be segregated until they provide photo identification or their signature is matched to the one kept on file by election officials.The voter identification rule was the latest instituted in a Republican-controlled state, and reflected the party’s continued mistrust of common voting practices, including the use of voting machines. It requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots statewide starting in 2023, with limited exceptions for certain touch-screen systems until the end of next year.Among the other changes is a prohibition against the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — a practice that many Republicans criticized during the 2020 presidential election — and replacing Missouri’s presidential primary, held in recent years in March, with a series of caucuses.The proposal advanced in the spring from the Legislature, where its Republican sponsors have continued to cite unsubstantiated and nonspecific voter fraud claims — just as former President Donald J. Trump has done — as the impetus for the voter ID law.The law will take effect on Aug. 28, in time for the November election but not until after Missouri holds its primaries on Aug. 2.Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2016 that led to a previous set of voter ID rules, but the state Supreme Court gutted those rules in 2020. The rules had stipulated that voters without the required ID had to fill out an affidavit or use provisional ballots until their identity could be validated.The president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch this month to expect legal challenges to the new law, which the group said could disenfranchise voters of color and those who are young or older.While paper ballots are already overwhelmingly used in Missouri, Republicans have sought to scale back the use of electronic voting equipment nationwide, spreading falsehoods that the devices were rigged during the 2020 presidential election.The new law repealed provisions enacted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic that permitted mail and absentee voting in the 2020 general election, but Republicans compromised with Democrats to allow two weeks of no-excuse in-person absentee balloting. However, those ballots must be submitted at a local election office. Military and overseas voters will still be permitted to mail their ballots.The law also makes it illegal for local election authorities to accept private donations in most circumstances. More