Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Donald Trump Is Desperate for Vindication in Georgia

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      ELLIJAY, Ga. — In some ways, Brian Kemp looks the part of a popular incumbent governor currently kicking butt in a high-stakes, high-profile re-election race. Decked out in boots and jeans, his checked shirt crisp and his gray hair flawless (despite the cyclonic ceiling fans), he has a casual manner as he addresses the crowd standing around the market shop of BJ Reece Orchards, one of the many orchards tucked into the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. Standing beside a counter laden with crispy fried pies, Mr. Kemp runs through a laundry list of accomplishments from his first term: signing a fetal-heartbeat law and a parents’ bill of rights, successfully crusading for a permitless-carry gun law, keeping schools and businesses open during most of the pandemic and so on.From a conservative viewpoint — the prevailing viewpoint in these parts — it is a catalog worth cheering. Yet the governor’s expression remains serious bordering on concerned, and he sounds defensive at times, especially when talking about the new “election integrity” measures the state put in place after the uproar over the 2020 elections. There were “a lot of decisions that were made by other people” that he “never got to weigh in on,” Mr. Kemp insists, obviously uneasy about the entire topic. “So it was proper that we had discussions and talked to people about those issues to make sure everybody has confidence in the elections.”The edge of anxiety and defensiveness makes sense, though. After all, the reason Mr. Kemp has been campaigning so hard this primary season — running a bus tour through some of the state’s most conservative corners — is that he has been targeted for removal in the primary by Donald Trump, who is hellbent on punishing him for refusing to help overturn the 2020 election results.Mr. Trump’s chosen vessel for revenge is former Senator David Perdue, who lost a runoff with Democrat Jon Ossoff in January 2021. Mr. Perdue has servilely fashioned his campaign around Mr. Trump’s election-fraud nonsense — and little else — basically acting as a proxy for the former president and his Big Lie. But Mr. Perdue threatens to become one of Mr. Trump’s biggest disappointments. Mr. Kemp has been dominating the polls and is expected to come out on top in Tuesday’s primary — very possibly hitting 50 percent and avoiding a runoff. (Mr. Perdue’s situation is considered so dire that even Mr. Trump has reportedly given up on him, according to NBC News.) This would be a humiliating defeat for the former president, who has worked to turn the race into the ultimate grudge match between himself and his nemesis Mr. Kemp.Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia joining Chris Christie onstage at a rally in Alpharetta.Damon Winter/The New York TimesDavid Perdue at a campaign event on Thursday.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThanks to Mr. Trump’s machinations, Georgia’s elections are once again freighted with outsized import, its primaries having become something of a referendum on the health of the Republican Party — and of American democracy. A Kemp win would be a blow not only to Mr. Trump but also to the election denialism with which he has infected the G.O.P. Just this week, “stop the steal” truthers, determined to prove that Joe Biden cheated his way into the White House, won key primaries in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Another election denier with Mr. Trump’s endorsement, Representative Jody Hice, is running for Georgia secretary of state against the Republican incumbent Brad Raffensperger.A strong win by Mr. Kemp would be the most promising signal to date that many Republican voters, at least in Georgia, are ready to move on — not from Mr. Trump per se, but from his toxic fixation on 2020. It could also provide a hopeful model for other results-oriented Republican governors, evidence that they can thrive even without bowing to the former president’s anti-democratic obsessions. And if Mr. Trump plays things wrong, he could wind up damaging his own political fortunes as well.Georgia is a sore subject for Mr. Trump. Voters didn’t simply reject him as president; they followed up by handing control of the Senate to the Democrats. Outside the ultra-MAGA bubble, within the state and beyond, even many Republicans recognize that Mr. Trump’s election-fraud ravings most likely helped depress turnout here among his followers. The former president is desperate for vindication — and, of course, vengeance.It’s not simply that Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Perdue to take on Mr. Kemp. Nor that he worked to clear the field of other challengers, disrupting several races in the process. Nor that he took the unprecedented step of cracking open the coffers of his Save America PAC, forking over $500,000 to an anti-Kemp PAC. On a more personal level, Mr. Perdue is this election cycle’s purest stand-in for Mr. Trump: a 2020 loser desperate to reframe his failure as a theft perpetrated by nefarious Democrats and enabled by weak RINOs. His political brand exemplifies that awkward MAGA posture of strength coupled with victimhood.A troubling percentage of Republicans tell pollsters they believe the stolen-election fiction. But it can be hard to know precisely what that means — or how much they really care. For many, “it’s more of a vibe than anything else,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist. It has become a cultural signifier, something Republicans grumble to their friends about but “don’t hold to that firmly,” she said. “There’s an element of voters kind of being like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, the election was stolen, but do we have to keep talking about it?’”In Georgia, this ambivalence seems to be reflected in an April poll of Republican-primary voters, only 5 percent of whom cited election integrity as their top issue.Certainly, this sentiment is prevalent among Kemp supporters. Andy and Patricia Bargeron were among the attendees at a breakfast meet-n-greet that Mr. Kemp held in Chatsworth — part of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district — before heading to Ellijay. After 64 years of marriage, the Bargerons know the value of agreeing to disagree on certain issues. She believes that the 2020 election was stolen. He remains unconvinced and thinks Mr. Trump has “gone too far” in pressing the issue.No matter: Both are voting for Mr. Kemp because they feel he has done a crackerjack job. And even if he could have done more to deal with the 2020 monkey business, Ms. Bargeron reasons, “No one’s perfect.”Debra Helm — who quips that she is “one of those right-wing” evangelicals — claims to still be undecided in the race. Waiting around for the Chatsworth event to start, she says she has no idea if Mr. Kemp handled the 2020 election mess well. But after listening to his sales pitch, she is clearly impressed by his record. “To use lower-class language,” she says, “he’s pretty ballsy.”A small crowd gathered for Governor Kemp at a campaign stop in Thomaston.Damon Winter/The New York TimesPretty much everyone at Mr. Kemp’s events spoke approvingly of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and plenty had lingering doubts about the 2020 election. But they had other, more pressing items on their lists of concerns as well — many of which their governor has been busy addressing.Herein lies Mr. Kemp’s advantage over many of the candidates targeted by Mr. Trump. Governors, more than most public officials, have high-profile posts and clear records to run on. Voters expect concrete results from them. And, for better or worse, they are known quantities — a little like presidents. This can reduce the need for, and in some cases the impact of, outside endorsements, even from someone like Mr. Trump.Mr. Kemp might be in a tougher spot if Mr. Perdue were a fantastic retail politician or a charismatic speaker. But he’s not. In this matchup, the former senator has little to offer beyond his Trump ties and his Stop the Steal blather. Worse, the stench of his 2021 loss is still fresh. “Perdue didn’t beat Ossoff,” Mr. Bargeron reasons. “How is he going to beat Stacey Abrams?”In the Trump Republican Party, anything can happen come Election Day. But plenty of Republicans are poised, eager even, for Mr. Perdue to crash and burn so that they can point to the failure as proof that Mr. Trump’s Big Lie has run its course — or, better still, that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. Some are actively working to help the cause, including former President George W. Bush, who was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser for Mr. Kemp this month.Supporting Mr. Kemp is also a way for some party players to put some breathing room between themselves and Mr. Trump without taking him on directly. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and former Vice President Mike Pence are among the boldfaced names hitting the trail with the governor. Both men have evinced an interest of late in fashioning themselves as independent, principled conservatives — a brand they may anticipate will play well in a future presidential contest.The more it looks as though Georgia voters will reject Mr. Perdue, the more Republicans feel empowered to criticize his campaign. A recent CNN piece featured a parade of his former Senate colleagues expressing dismay over his election-fraud focus — again, a far safer route than directly criticizing Mr. Trump.If Mr. Kemp trounces Mr. Perdue, and by extension Mr. Trump, the key question then becomes how the former president responds — especially as people play up the Trump-is-losing-his-juice narrative. The sensible course would be for him to shrug off the taunting and walk away, letting the loss fade to just another entry in his long endorsement record.But if he bows to his ego and continues assailing Mr. Kemp deep into the general election, many Republicans could start having ugly flashbacks to 2021, posits Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia. If the party winds up faring less well in November than expected, part of the blame will most likely fall on the former president. And if Stacey Abrams wins, Mr. Williams adds, that could be traumatic enough to sour many Republicans on Mr. Trump’s Big Lie — and possibly the man himself.Georgia Republicans may still be enamored of Mr. Trump. But that doesn’t mean they want to carry his 2020 burden around with them forever — or even into November.“The people who are supporting Perdue are living in the past,” said Brian Wilson, a Kemp supporter at the breakfast event. “I want to live in the future.”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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      How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures

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      LANSING, Mich. — At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times. The tally accounts for 44 […] More

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      In Georgia, a G.O.P. Primary Tests the Power of a Trump Vendetta

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      Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is fending off a challenger fueled by Donald J. Trump’s election lies. But do voters still care about 2020 as much as the former president does?ATLANTA — An anti-Trump Republican advocacy group recently organized a focus group of G.O.P voters in Georgia to get their take on perhaps the most competitive and consequential primary election in the state. They heard a lot of indecision.Most of the voters, convened by the group, the Republican Accountability Project, knew little about the race between Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and his leading challenger, Representative Jody Hice. Mr. Raffensperger seemed to get the benefit of the doubt — until the voters were reminded of the back story.As the state official responsible for certifying the 2020 presidential election results, Mr. Raffensperger rejected President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Hice to seek revenge.“Go Jody, I guess?” said one voter.Three out of six others agreed.The exchange offered a glimpse into why the Republican primary race for the office that oversees elections remains a dogfight just days from Election Day, on May 24. Two years after Mr. Trump lost Georgia by the slimmest of margins and Democrats captured both of the state’s open Senate seats, wounds from the 2020 election have still not completely healed for some partisans.But marshaling that residual anger to unseat an incumbent is not an easy feat. Mr. Raffensperger has worked to win back Republicans by casting himself as a defender of “election integrity,” even as he has spent hours debunking a laundry list of false claims about the 2020 election. Some voters’ memories and passions have faded. Many never had strong opinions about their secretary of state.It all has made the race one of the purest tests yet of whether the 2020 election lie can be weaponized to win elections. While polls have shown that leagues of Republican voters in Georgia and elsewhere largely embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was “stolen” in its immediate aftermath, it is not clear those concerns alone, or Mr. Trump’s personal vendetta, are enough to drive voters’ choices.“I think 2020 was really a turning point in how closely people looked at things,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party. “Before, people might not have even realized that the secretary of state was in charge of running the elections for the state. But now they’re keenly aware of it.”Mr. Hice, whom Mr. Trump endorsed last year, is one of more than a dozen candidates running for secretary of state under the America First banner, alongside others in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Ohio. They share an unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump and a belief that the 2020 election was marred. Some are calling for a law enforcement arm to more aggressively prosecute violators of election laws.Representative Jody Hice, who is running to be Georgia’s secretary of state, at an event of Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesPolls show large numbers of undecided voters in the race, with Mr. Hice and Mr. Raffensperger neck and neck, each with about one-third of the vote. Both campaigns are braced for a runoff.Mr. Trump’s attempt at payback for 2020 in Georgia is floundering in the state’s other marquee primary on Tuesday. Former Senator David Perdue, his pick to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp after the governor refused to overturn the election results, is trailing Mr. Kemp in polls and fund-raising. Mr. Trump has hardly weighed in publicly on Mr. Perdue’s prospects since hosting a “tele-rally” for the former senator in April. His former vice president, Mike Pence, is set to visit the state to campaign for Mr. Kemp on the eve of the primary election.Mr. Kemp has been adept at using his office to win over skeptical Republicans, passing a slew of conservative policies on elections, law enforcement and education. For voters still enthralled with false claims of fraud, Mr. Kemp can point to the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which limits provisions like ballot drop boxes and mobile voting centers.“When voters see that kind of activity around the concern they have, it just becomes difficult to drive an argument that people who are in office are being inattentive to the issue,” said Brad Alexander, an Atlanta-based political consultant and Raffensperger supporter, who was among several who argued that the potency of the “stolen” election debate has started to wane.In January, 43 percent of Georgia Republican voters said they were confident that the November elections would be fair and accurate, according to a University of Georgia poll. By April, that number had increased to nearly 60 percent. And a record number of voters have already participated in the state’s primary elections, topping more than 700,000 voters on the final day of early voting.Mr. Hice, a four-term congressman, was one of the 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the election results for President Joe Biden. He later took part in a White House meeting alongside Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to try to determine how the election results could be flipped in Mr. Trump’s favor. He has claimed, falsely, that Mr. Trump would have won in Georgia if the election had been “fair.”At a meeting with the Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday, Mr. Hice made unsupported claims about “ballot harvesting,” said he no longer wanted to use Dominion Voting machines and slammed Mr. Raffensperger for sending out unsolicited absentee ballots ahead of the last election. The voice of the people had been “violated” in 2020, he said.County officials in Georgia identified 64 cases of potential fraud out of the state’s roughly 5 million votes in the 2020 election, according to an Associated Press survey of all but 11 of the state’s 159 counties.Fulton County election workers in Atlanta counting ballots after the 2020 election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBut Mr. Hice has tried to make his case about more than just 2020 — raising the prospect of fraud in the future.“The issue is not who wins an election, but the issue is absolutely, Was it a fair election?” he said. “If the election itself is compromised or violated, then all the effort out there really doesn’t matter anymore. And that’s what we’ve got to defend. That’s what we’ve got to protect at all costs.”Most of the young Republicans in the room said they wanted to hear what Mr. Hice would do differently from Mr. Raffensperger in elections should he be elected.“Even if you’re not a dogmatic, election-was-stolen person, there are a lot of people with reasonable doubt, and that reasonable suspicion is fair,” said Chris Campbell, 39, a national accounts manager at SmartFeeds. “Raffensperger didn’t address those concerns well, and people don’t have confidence in him. But I do have confidence in Hice and trust that he would run the office with integrity.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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      It’s Trump’s Party, and He’ll Lie if He Wants To

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      To win a Republican primary in 2022, you’ll probably need to support a coup attempt.It’s not sufficient — David Perdue, a former senator, looks like he’s going to lose to the incumbent governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, in next week’s primary, despite his support for the “big lie” — but it makes a difference.The Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, won his race on the strength of his enthusiastic support for Donald Trump’s effort to subvert and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As a state senator, Mastriano demanded that lawmakers invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral votes. He attended the “stop the steal” rally on Jan. 6 and has continued to accuse Democrats of fraud. Mastriano has not commented on the 2024 election, but he has let it be known that he supports the view that state legislatures can assign electoral votes against the will of the voting public.The Republican nominee for the Senate in North Carolina, Ted Budd, was similarly committed to Trump’s effort to keep himself in office. He was among the 139 House members who objected to certifying the presidential election in Biden’s favor.J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Ohio, has not endorsed the claim that Biden stole the election from Trump, but he did play footsie with the idea during his campaign. “I think we’ve got to investigate as much as possible,” Vance said of the 2020 election results. “I believe sunshine is the best disinfectant. And we’re going to learn a lot about what happened. But, you know, I think at a basic level we already know mostly what happened.”Overall, there are hundreds of Republican candidates in races across the country who have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat. Many, like Budd, voted against Biden’s Electoral College victory. Some, like Mastriano, attended the “stop the steal” protest in Washington on Jan. 6. And others signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory.The extent to which election denialism and pro-insurrectionism are now litmus tests for Republican politicians is clearly attributable to Trump’s huge influence over the Republican Party. Despite his defeat, he is still the leader. But even if that were not true — if, instead of the boss, Trump were only one influential figure among many — there would still be reason for Republicans to embrace this view.That’s because Republican election denialism is simply the strongest form of a belief that has defined the Republican Party since at least the Newt Gingrich era in the 1990s. For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect, their policies un-American, even when they have the support of most people in the country.You see this in the years of voter fraud hysteria that preceded Trump’s claim, after the 2016 election, that he had been cheated of millions of votes. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he said, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”In 2001, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud, accusing unnamed actors (presumably Democrats) of manipulating elections. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he said at a news conference that year. “The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”After the 2008 election, Republicans went into a frenzy over the group ACORN, accusing it of perpetrating fraud on a national scale. How else, after all, could you explain Barack Obama’s unexpected victories in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina?The obsession with nonexistent voter fraud is hard to ignore. But there were other ways that Republicans expressed their belief that they were the only legitimate members of the political community.Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about the “real America,” very much in evidence during the 2008 presidential campaign — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America” — was one of these ways. So was the Tea Party movement, whose members understood themselves as a disenfranchised majority, under siege by a Democratic Party of burdensome illegal immigrants, ungrateful minorities and entitled young people. The Fox News commentator Glenn Beck captured some of this feeling during a 2010 broadcast. “This is the Tea Party. This is you and me,” he said. “You are not alone, America. You are the majority.”Mitt Romney’s infamous claim that there are “47 percent of the people” who are “dependent upon government,” “believe they are victims” and are unable to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” was condemned as classist and prejudiced during the 2012 presidential election. But you can also read it as an expression of the belief that there are some Americans who count — the “makers,” in the language of his vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan — and some Americans who don’t.Yes, the Republican Party’s present-day election denialism is much more extreme than the rhetoric surrounding voter fraud or the idea that there is a “real America.” But the difference is ultimately one of degree, not kind: Republicans have been trying to write Democrats out of the political community in one way or another for decades. It was only a matter of time before this escalated to denying that Democrats and Democratic voters can win elections at all.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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      Melissa Carone, an Election Denier Who Was Parodied by ‘S.N.L.,’ Is Disqualified

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      Melissa Carone was supposed to be a star witness for Rudolph W. Giuliani on his election denial tour, but she is perhaps better known as a caricature on “Saturday Night Live” — a mercurial purveyor of wild conspiracy theories about fraud and miscounted ballots whom Mr. Giuliani shushed in the middle of her testimony.Her next move was to run for the legislature in Michigan, joining a host of election deniers across the nation who have sought public office since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.But her plans were short-circuited on Tuesday, when the Michigan Department of State disqualified Ms. Carone, 35, a former election contractor, as a Republican primary candidate for a State Senate seat outside of Detroit.The office said that Ms. Carone, along with 10 other legislative candidates, had made false statements on an affidavit that candidates were required to submit to election administrators. On one of the forms that was signed by Ms. Carone, she had attested that she did not have any unpaid fines for election law violations and that all of her public campaign filings were up-to-date. The county clerk where Ms. Carone was running for office said on Wednesday that had not been the case.It was the second time in recent months that Ms. Carone had been disqualified as a candidate: The Macomb County Clerk & Register of Deeds barred her in March from the Aug. 2 primary for state representative.When she signed the affidavit, Ms. Carone had owed at least $125 in late fees for missing the deadline twice for quarterly campaign filings in 2021, according to a letter from the clerk that was obtained by The New York Times. She had also failed to file an annual statement for 2022 for her campaign and an amendment to a quarterly report last October, the letter said.Ms. Carone, who was played by the “Saturday Night Live” cast member Cecily Strong in the show’s cold open in December 2020, blamed the situation on a former campaign manager whom she said in an interview on Wednesday did not file the paperwork.She accused Republican election officials and the party’s leaders of conspiring to keep her off the ballot.“This is how our elected officials keep good candidates from getting elected,” Ms. Carone said. “I’m going to fight it. Even if I don’t end up on the ballot, my voice will be heard. I’m not going anywhere. I will still be exposing these establishment sellout RINOs in the Michigan G.O.P.”Anthony G. Forlini, a Republican who is the Macomb County clerk, said on Wednesday that his office had been following the law and that the disqualification of Ms. Carone was not politically motivated.“From our standpoint, she was kicked off the ballot because she basically perjured herself,” Mr. Forlini said.Mr. Forlini said that it is a felony in Michigan to make a false statement on affidavits like those signed by candidates.“We’re just sticking to the letter of the law,” he said. “She likes the drama, and she’s been feeding on it.”Mr. Forlini said that he could not speak to the specifics of Ms. Carone’s recent disqualification by the Michigan Department of State, a separate agency headed by Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is secretary of state.A spokeswoman for that agency said on Wednesday that she could not further discuss the nature of the false statements that led to Ms. Carone’s disqualification, which was announced in conjunction with the other candidates who were barred on Tuesday.A receipt filed with the secretary of state’s office showed that Ms. Carone had paid $125 in late fees with a check on March 24, three days after she signed the affidavit attesting that she did not owe anything.Gustavo Portela, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, rejected Ms. Carone’s assertions that there was a concerted effort to keep her off the primary ballot.“Terrible candidates seem to find it hard to take accountability for themselves so they pass the blame to others,” he said in an email on Wednesday.Ms. Carone claimed she was contracted by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that has been the target of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory about rigged voting machines. The company called her claims defamatory and sent her a cease and desist letter.During an election oversight hearing held by legislators in Michigan in December 2020, she testified that she had observed over 20 acts of fraud — not counting ballots found in rivers and under a rock — and that at least 30,000 ballots had been counted multiple times. A judge in Wayne County Circuit Court had already found Ms. Carone’s claims — made in an affidavit seeking to stop the certification of votes — were “not credible.”At times combative and glib, Ms. Carone’s performance was widely mocked, including by “Saturday Night Live.”“To be honest with you, I didn’t watch it for a really long time,” she said on Wednesday. “I think it’s funny. That kind of stuff doesn’t make me mad. I don’t care.” More

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      Court Must Reconsider Case of Woman Sentenced to 5 Years for Voter Fraud

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      Crystal Mason has insisted that she did not know she was ineligible to vote when she cast a provisional ballot in Texas in 2016. She was sentenced to five years in prison, but a court ruling on Wednesday raised questions about the conviction.A Texas woman whose five-year prison sentence for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election prompted outrage among voting-rights activists will have her case reconsidered by an appeals court, the state’s highest criminal court ruled on Wednesday.The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that a lower appeals court had incorrectly upheld parts of the conviction of the woman, Crystal Mason, who had voted in the general election in 2016, when she was a felon on probation, and filled out a provisional ballot that was never officially counted or tallied. Ms. Mason has insisted that at the time, she did not know she was ineligible to vote and had been advised by a poll worker to submit her provisional ballot.The Second Court of Appeals in Tarrant County had said in 2020 that Ms. Mason’s unawareness “was irrelevant to her prosecution.” But the Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed, opening a channel for the conviction to be overturned.“This is great news for Ms. Mason, but the fight is not over,” Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas who is representing Ms. Mason, said by phone on Wednesday.The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment on Wednesday.Ms. Mason, who is free on bond, said in a statement that she was pleased with the court’s decision and that she was “ready to defend myself against these cruel charges.”“My life has been upended for what was, at worst, an innocent misunderstanding of casting a provisional ballot that was never even counted,” she said. “I have been called to this fight for voting rights and will continue to serve my community.”The case of Ms. Mason, who is Black, has spurred anger among voting rights supporters who say her experience and those of others in recent years highlight racial disparities in the criminal prosecution of voter fraud cases. They have described voting rights laws as opaque and confusing for people with felony convictions unsure of their rights.Republican officials have moved to crack down on voter fraud since the 2020 election, despite the fact that the crime remains a very rare and often accidental occurrence.Mr. Buser-Clancy said that the Court of Criminal Appeals had clarified “that for an individual to be convicted, they have to actually know that they are ineligible to vote.”The case is now heading to the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth, which will re-examine the evidence.Lawyers for Ms. Mason have argued that the federal government had made it clear in the Help America Vote Act of 2002 that provisional ballots should not be criminalized because they represent an offer to vote — not an actual vote. They have also argued that Texas’s election laws stipulate that a person must knowingly vote illegally to be guilty of a crime.In a similar case, a Tennessee prosecutor last month dropped all criminal charges against Pamela Moses, a Memphis woman with a previous felony conviction who was sentenced to six years and one day in prison in January after she tried to restore her right to vote in 2019. More

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      In Arizona, a Swing State Swings to the Far Right

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      SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. — Kari Lake has a strategy to get elected in 2022.Keep talking about 2020.Minutes into her pitch at the Cochise County Republican headquarters in the suburbs of southern Arizona, Ms. Lake zeroed in on the presidential election 18 months ago, calling it “crooked” and “corrupt.” She claimed nearly a dozen times in a single hour that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, a falsehood that the audience — some of whom wore red hats reading “Trump Won” — was eager to hear. Ms. Lake, a former local Fox anchor who won Mr. Trump’s endorsement as she campaigns to become Arizona’s next governor, calls the 2020 election a key motivation in her decision to enter the race.“We need some people with a backbone to stand up for this country — we had our election stolen,” Ms. Lake said in an interview after the Cochise County event in March, adding, “I don’t know if it’s a winning issue, but it’s a winning issue when it comes to saving this country.”Republicans in many states have grown increasingly tired of the Stop the Steal movement and the push by Mr. Trump to reward election deniers and punish those who accept President Biden’s victory. At a time when Mr. Biden’s approval ratings are sinking, leaders in the party are urging candidates to focus instead on the economy, inflation and other kitchen-table issues.But 12 weeks before its Republican primary in August, Arizona shows just how firm of a grasp Mr. Trump and his election conspiracy theories still have at every level of the party, from local activists to top statewide candidates. And this week’s victory for J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who received the former president’s endorsement in the Republican primary for an Ohio Senate seat, shows that loyalty to Trumpism goes a long way in battleground states.Still, some establishment Republicans worry that party leaders have gone too far and are effectively handing the closely divided swing state to Democrats in November.“Anybody who is still re-litigating 2020 will lose the general election,” said Kathy Petsas, a Republican who has served as a precinct captain and collected signatures for several candidates this year. “I think people at home have caught on, and I don’t think a lot of our candidates have caught on.”Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona with President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The race to replace Mr. Ducey, who cannot run again because of term limits, has become among the most expensive governor’s races in state history.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTwo forces have helped ensure election denialism remains a core issue in Arizona: the Republican-sponsored and widely derided review of the presidential vote in the state’s largest county, and Mr. Trump’s continued attacks on the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, for rebuffing his efforts to block election certification. More than three dozen Republicans running for office in Arizona — including six candidates for statewide posts — have made denying the 2020 results a centerpiece of their campaigns, according to two groups tracking candidates, States United Action and Pro-Democracy Republicans. States United Action is nonpartisan; Maricopa County’s top elections official, a Republican, began Pro-Democracy Republicans earlier this year.In interviews with more than a dozen voters at Ms. Lake’s campaign events, nearly all said “election integrity” was their top issue, and none believed that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the presidential election.“We need strong Republicans to get rid of the RINOs who aren’t willing to do anything, like our governor,” said Claribeth Davis, 62, using the acronym for “Republicans in name only” to refer to Mr. Ducey. Ms. Davis, a medical aide, said she recently moved from the Phoenix suburbs to Cochise County’s Sierra Vista, a rural section of southern Arizona, to “be with more like-minded people.”Trump supporters in November 2020 gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix, where ballots were being counted.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesNumerous courts and reviews have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The Republican-ordered review by Cyber Ninjas, a now-defunct company with no previous experience in elections, concluded that there had actually been even more votes for Mr. Biden and even fewer for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County. The county’s board of supervisors rebutted nearly all of the group’s claims. But none of that has tamped down the fervent belief among many Republicans that control of the country has been snatched away from them.“There’s nothing but elitists in charge,” said Suzanne Jenkins, a 75-year-old retiree who described herself as a Tea Party Republican and who drove about an hour to Sierra Vista to hear Ms. Lake speak.Understand the Ohio and Indiana Primary ElectionsTrump’s Grip: J.D. Vance’s win in Ohio’s G.O.P. Senate primary was a strong affirmation of the former president’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.How Vance Won: The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” got a big endorsement from Donald J. Trump, but a cable news megaphone and a huge infusion of spending helped pave his way to victory.Ohio Takeaways: It was a good night for Mr. Trump, and not just because of Mr. Vance. Here’s why.Winners and Losers: A progressive challenger was defeated (again) in Ohio, and a Trump-endorsed Pence (not that one) won in Indiana. These were some of the key results.There has been little political upside for moderate and more establishment Republicans in Arizona to speak out against the party’s far-right wing. Instead, the handful of them who have done so have faced protests, censure from local Republican organizations and harassment. Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who has repeatedly defended the state’s 2020 election, has received death threats.“There’s not enough pushback,” said State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican who is not running for re-election. “Because everyone is afraid of a primary.”For generations, Arizona was a reliably red state. Even as Senator John McCain fashioned himself into a moderate maverick, the state was a hotbed of conservative anti-immigration politics that helped give rise to Mr. Trump’s candidacy and presidency. Mr. McCain’s name is now invoked as an insult by conservative Republicans, including Ms. Lake.But in the last four years, voters have elected two Democratic senators and chosen a Democrat for president for the first time in more than two decades, though Republicans remain in control of the State Legislature and the governor’s mansion.Arizona has long been a source of right-wing enthusiasm for the national party. The former Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, made national headlines in the early 2000s for his anti-immigrant policies, and in 2010 the Legislature passed what became known as the “show me your papers” law, effectively legalizing racial profiling. It was later struck down, and Mr. Arpaio is now running for mayor in a Phoenix suburb.Ms. Lake, who quit her job as an anchor for the local Fox station because of what she called its bias and dishonesty, frequently blasts the media as “brainwashed,” “immoral” and “the enemy of the people.” And her widespread name recognition has helped give her an early lead in the polls.But winning the crowded Republican primary is far from certain. Ms. Lake faces especially fierce opposition from Karrin Taylor Robson, a Phoenix-based business owner who has contributed millions to her own campaign. Already, the race to replace Mr. Ducey, who cannot run again because of term limits, has become among the most expensive governor’s races in state history, with $13.6 million in spending so far.Ms. Taylor Robson has not made the 2020 election the major focus of her campaign, but when asked whether she considered Mr. Biden the fairly elected president, she responded in a statement, “Joe Biden may be the president, but the election definitely wasn’t fair.”“We need some people with a backbone to stand up for this country — we had our election stolen,” said Kari Lake, who won Mr. Trump’s endorsement in her campaign for governor.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesMs. Lake says Arizona should finish the border wall that Mr. Trump began building. She has emphasized her ties to the former president, appearing with him at his rally in the state earlier this year, fund-raising with him at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and including his name on her campaign signs.Ms. Lake has made conspiracy theories a centerpiece of her campaign — releasing a television ad that told viewers that if they were watching the ad, they were in the middle of a “fake news” program. “You know how to know it’s fake?” she says to the camera. “Because they won’t even cover the biggest story out there: the rigged election of 2020.” She also touts her endorsement from the chief executive of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, a key financier of right-wing efforts to discredit the 2020 election.From first-time candidates to incumbents in Congress and the State Legislature, many Republicans in Arizona have increasingly embraced an extremist brand of right-wing politics.Representative Paul Gosar and State Senator Wendy Rogers both spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, a group with strong ties to white nationalists, and both were censured by their legislative bodies for their violent rhetoric and antics. Ms. Rogers and State Representative Mark Finchem, a Republican who is running for secretary of state, have acknowledged ties to the Oath Keepers militia group. Ron Watkins, who is widely believed to have played a major role in writing the anonymous posts that helped spur the pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon, is running for Congress. Jim Lamon, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, falsely claimed to be an elector for Arizona last year.Even Mr. Ducey, who was formally censured by the state Republican Party last year for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has acknowledged the energy on the state’s hard-right, signing a bill that will require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. When reporters asked about his support for Ms. Rogers, Mr. Ducey said that “she’s still better than her opponent,” a Democrat, though he later applauded the Legislature’s vote to censure her. Mark Brnovich, the Arizona attorney general who is now running for U.S. Senate, has faced repeated criticism from other Republicans, including Ms. Lake and Mr. Trump, and accusations that he is dragging out the investigation into the presidential election.Representative Paul Gosar spoke at a Trump rally in Florence, Ariz., in January.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesState Senator Wendy Rogers, an Arizona Republican, addressed the crowd at a Trump rally. She was censured by the State Senate in March after giving a speech to a white nationalist gathering.Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressA few Republican candidates have made the economy and immigration the focus of their campaign. But even among those candidates, almost none have offered a full-throated defense of the 2020 election. Some Republicans believe that while focusing on 2020 is both irresponsible and politically unwise, it may not matter in Arizona, where the president’s approval rating is now at its lowest since he took office, a dive largely driven by independent voters.Because independent and third-party voters make up roughly 34 percent of the electorate, it is impossible to win the state with Republicans alone. Ms. Lake and other candidates like her may have already hit a ceiling even among primary voters, as polls show many voters remain undecided, and there is evidence of growing support for other candidates.“I am concerned that if these people get elected it will make another decade of craziness,” said Bob Worsley, a former state senator who describes himself as a moderate Republican. “I don’t know who has the stature to say, ‘Let’s bring this party back, bring the establishment base back into power.’ Now we’re a purple state and we don’t have a John McCain to try to crack the whip.” More

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      Georgia Jury to Consider Whether Trump Illegally Interfered in 2020 Election

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      The panel will have up to a year to recommend whether the prosecutor should pursue criminal charges against the former president and his allies.ATLANTA — As the criminal investigation of Donald J. Trump by Manhattan prosecutors appears to be stalling out, the separate investigation into whether the former president and his allies illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election results took a significant step forward on Monday, as 23 people were chosen to serve on a special investigative grand jury.The panel will focus exclusively on “whether there were unlawful attempts to disrupt the administration of the 2020 elections here in Georgia,” Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court told 200 potential jurors who had been called to a downtown Atlanta courthouse swarming with law enforcement agents.The ability of the special grand jury to subpoena witnesses and documents will help prosecutors, who have encountered resistance from some potential witnesses who have declined to testify voluntarily. The panel will have up to a year to issue a report advising District Attorney Fani T. Willis on whether to pursue criminal charges.Some legal experts have said the inquiry could be perilous for Mr. Trump, who, in a January 2021 phone call, asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to put Mr. Trump ahead of his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in Georgia’s presidential election tally.The seating of the Georgia grand jury comes as a criminal inquiry in Manhattan has come to an apparent standstill. Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, is said to be concerned about the strength of the New York case, which focuses on whether Mr. Trump exaggerated the value of assets in annual financial statements. People close to the investigation have told The New York Times that the inquiry may lose steam if other witnesses do not step up to cooperate.In the Georgia case, a group of legal experts, in an analysis published last year by the Brookings Institution, wrote that the call to Mr. Raffensperger, and other postelection moves by Mr. Trump, put the former president at “substantial risk” of criminal charges in Georgia, including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The investigation is also likely to look at Trump allies who inserted themselves into election administration matters in Georgia, including Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff. The investigation is within the purview of the Fulton County district attorney because many of the actions in question took place in or involved phone calls to officials in Fulton County, which includes the State Capitol building in downtown Atlanta and numerous government offices.In addition to the call with Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Trump has publicly described how he called Gov. Brian Kemp after the election and asked him to call a special election to “get to the bottom” of “a big election-integrity problem in Georgia.” Mr. Trump also called Chris Carr, the state attorney general, asking him not to oppose a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia and other states, and Mr. Raffensperger’s chief investigator, asking her to find “dishonesty” in the election.In January 2021, Mr. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to put Mr. Trump ahead in Georgia’s presidential election tally.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe investigations into such matters were already underway, Judge McBurney said in court on Monday. “But now it’s time for 26 members of our community to participate in that investigation,” he said, referring to the 23 jurors and three alternates.Judge McBurney told potential jurors to announce that they had a potential conflict if they were convinced that a crime had definitely been committed in regard to the 2020 elections — or if they were convinced that no crimes at all had occurred. Roughly 25 said they had such a conflict.The special grand jurors will issue subpoenas, hear testimony and review documents. The meetings will be confidential, and jurors will not be allowed to discuss the proceedings outside of their meetings. But the judge noted that witnesses could speak about the proceedings publicly if they so wished.In January, a majority of the judges in the Fulton County Superior Court system approved Ms. Willis’s request for the special grand jury, allowing it to meet for up to a year beginning May 2. After the panel makes recommendations regarding criminal prosecutions, it will be up to Ms. Willis, a Democrat, to return to a regular grand jury to seek criminal indictments.Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, said that impaneling the grand jury was a sign that prosecutors had acknowledged the complexity, sensitivity and unique nature of the case. Among other things, Ms. Willis has raised the possibility that Mr. Trump and his allies violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. Like the federal RICO law, which has been used to target the Mafia and other organized crime networks, Georgia’s state racketeering statute is a tool that can be used to go after a broad range of groups that take part in patterns of criminal conduct. Proving that case would require a deep examination of multiple moving parts.Among them, potentially, are a call that Mr. Graham made to Mr. Raffensperger asking whether mail-in votes could be discarded in counties with high rates of questionable ballot signatures; a visit Mr. Meadows made to suburban Atlanta to monitor an election audit there; and postelection appearances that Mr. Giuliani made before state legislative committees in which he asked for an alternative pro-Trump slate of electors to be appointed.“There’s a lot more than just the phone call,” said Mr. Kreis, who added that the case involved areas of the law that were “underdeveloped.”“We don’t have a lot of claims or potential claims that someone violated Georgia law by soliciting election fraud, because you’d have to be pretty crazy to go to the secretary of state’s office to demand a change in vote tabulations,” he said. “These are things so brazen it’s almost beyond belief.”Mr. Trump has other legal challenges to overcome in the wake of his one-term presidency, all of them taking on greater importance given the fact that he appears to be positioning himself to make another presidential run in 2024.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 7Numerous inquiries. 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