Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Real Justice: Justice Jackson

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      WASHINGTON — A snarling pack of white male Republicans ripping apart a poised, brainy Black woman at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, using sordid innuendos and baseless claims about race and porn to smear her, as her pained family sits behind her.It has been 31 years since I watched this scene, disgusted, when Anita Hill was questioned during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. Now Ketanji Brown Jackson has been cast into the same medieval torture chamber on Capitol Hill, with Democrats once more struggling to shield their witness from being mauled.This time, the male Torquemadas were joined by a female inquisitor, Marsha Blackburn. The Tennessee Republican is all magnolia Southern charm — until she spits venom.“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Blackburn asked Judge Jackson, invoking the controversy over a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. Blackburn’s question inspired Tucker Carlson to later hold up a graphic of a woman’s reproductive system, along with a silhouette of a woman so shapely that Roger Ailes would have approved.What is a woman? Jackson shows that a woman is someone who stays cool in the face of calumny and is headed for the Supreme Court. And that will be justice for Justice Jackson.A better question might be: What is a senator?Is it a dolt who cares more about boosting unrealistic presidential ambitions with distorted information than making the Senate, for once, look like a dignified body?Feral Republicans took an exemplary record and twisted it to make Jackson look like an enabler of pedophiles. Tom Cotton all but accused her of lying, just as Arlen Specter accused Hill of perjury — based on nothing.Less than a year ago, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson for the D.C. Court of Appeals, calling her “qualified.” Now he berates her with odd questions and seems to blame her for Brett Kavanaugh’s grilling. If only John McCain could appear to him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost and slap him into shape.Perhaps Joe Biden sees his selection of Judge Jackson as a sort of expiation for his dismal performance as committee chairman for the Hill-Thomas hearings. Biden allowed the Republicans to run wild, and then he shut down the hearings before Hill’s backup witnesses testified. He cleared the path for Clarence Thomas, a liar and sexual harasser, to ascend to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court and impose his far-right views on the country.As Jill Abramson wrote in the Times Opinion section, the court’s 6-3 majority now “seems to be reshaping itself in Justice Thomas’s image.”In a speech at Notre Dame last year, Thomas lamented, “We have lost the capacity, even I think as leaders, to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don’t get the outcomes we like.”And yet manipulating institutions is exactly what his wife, Ginni, tried to do. As Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in a Washington Post-CBS News bombshell, the conservative activist worked frantically to overturn the results of the 2020 election, calling it an “obvious fraud,” as Donald Trump and his allies were vowing to go to her husband’s court to nullify Biden’s win.Ginni Thomas has had a chip on her shoulder since the Hill-Thomas hearings — she shamelessly left Hill a voice message in 2010 asking for an apology — and no doubt she thought if she could help claw back the presidency from Biden, that would be sweet revenge.In a cascade of text messages, she urged Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to get Trump back into the Oval. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she pleaded, adding, “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” Ginni — who attended the Jan. 6 rally before the raid on the Capitol started — urged Meadows to “Release the Kraken.”The Republicans badgering Judge Jackson aren’t asking a single question about the explosive revelations regarding Ginni Thomas — and nor are the rest of their party. Did the justice know what his wife was doing? Was he OK with it? Does he accept that he must recuse himself from cases dealing with Jan. 6 and the election?Apparently not. “Justice Thomas has already participated in two cases related to the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite his wife’s direct involvement in the so-called Stop the Steal efforts,” Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker.When the court rejected Trump’s request to prevent the Jan. 6 committee from getting his records relating to the attempt to overturn the election results, Thomas was the sole dissenter. Do the records implicate Ginni?Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethicist, told Mayer that it was Clarence Thomas’s duty to know about Ginni’s crusade: “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is not an acceptable strategy for the Thomases’ marriage.”Thomas should never have been on the court. Now that we know his wife was plotting the overthrow of the government, he should get off or be thrown off. You can’t administer justice when your spouse is running around strategizing for a coup.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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      Ginni and Clarence Thomas Are Making a Mockery of the Supreme Court

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      What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?The question usually gets directed at politicians, not judges, but it’s a fair one in light of the revelation on Thursday that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was working feverishly behind the scenes — and to a far greater degree than she previously admitted — in a high-level effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.As The Washington Post and CBS News first reported, Ms. Thomas, a supremely well-connected right-wing agitator, was in constant communication with the White House in the weeks following the election, strategizing over how to keep Donald Trump in office despite his incontrovertible loss. “Do not concede,” she texted to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, on Nov. 6, the day before the major news networks called the election for Joe Biden. “It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” (To date, Mr. Trump has not conceded.)In dozens of messages with Mr. Meadows over several weeks, Ms. Thomas raged over baseless allegations of voter fraud and shared unhinged conspiracy theories, including one that the “Biden crime family” was in the process of being arrested and sent to Guantánamo Bay for “ballot fraud.”“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ms. Thomas wrote at one point. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”Ms. Thomas had already acknowledged some involvement in the fight over the 2020 election count, recently confirming that she attended the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, but she said she went home before Mr. Trump spoke to the crowd and before a mob of hundreds stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. The texts reveal that her efforts to subvert the election were far more serious than we knew.Now recall that in January, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block the release of White House records relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Mr. Meadows had submitted a brief in the case supporting Mr. Trump. The court’s ruling came as an unsigned order, with only one noted dissent: from Justice Thomas.Perhaps Justice Thomas was not aware of his wife’s text-message campaign to Mr. Meadows at the time. But it sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?And that’s precisely the problem: We shouldn’t have to wonder. The Supreme Court is the most powerful judicial body in the country, and yet, as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, it has neither the sword nor the purse as a means to enforce its rulings. It depends instead on the American people’s acceptance of its legitimacy, which is why the justices must make every possible effort to appear fair, unbiased and beyond reproach.That may seem naïve, particularly in the face of the crippling assaults on the court that Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have carried out over the past six years in order to secure a right-wing supermajority that often resembles a judicial policy arm of the Republican Party — starting with their theft of a vacancy that was President Barack Obama’s to fill and continuing through the last-second confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while millions of voters were already in the process of casting Mr. Trump out of office.And yet the public’s demand for basic fairness and judicial neutrality is not only proper but critical to the court’s integrity, as the justices, whoever nominated them, are well aware. Partly in response to the court’s tanking public-approval ratings, several of them have grown increasingly outspoken in defense of their independence. (Though not all of them.)The most obvious way for justices to demonstrate that independence in practice, of course, is to recuse themselves from any case in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. It does not matter whether there is, in fact, a conflict of interest; the mere appearance of bias or conflict should be enough to compel Justice Thomas or any other member of the court to step aside.Many of them have over the years, out of respect for the court as an institution and for the public’s faith in their probity. Just this week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson vowed that if confirmed she would recuse herself from an upcoming case challenging Harvard’s affirmative-action policies, because of her multiple personal and professional connections to the university. Legal-ethics experts are not even in agreement that her recusal would be necessary, but Judge Jackson is right to err on the side of caution.Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”Bench memo to the justice: You know what jeopardizes public faith in legal institutions? Refusing to recuse yourself from numerous high-profile cases in which your wife has been personally and sometimes financially entangled, as The New Yorker reported in January. Especially when you have emphasized that you and she are melded “into one being.” Or when you have, as The Times Magazine reported last month, appeared together with her for years “at highly political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court.”Ms. Thomas’s efforts, and her husband’s refusal to respond appropriately, have been haunting the court for years, but this latest conflagration shouldn’t be a close call. “The texts are the narrowest way of looking at this,” Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and one of the nation’s foremost legal-ethics experts, told me. “She signed up for Stop the Steal. She was part of the team, and that team had an interest in how the court would rule. That’s all I need to know.” He said he has over the years resisted calling for Justice Thomas’s recusal based on his wife’s actions, “but they’ve really abused that tolerance.”Yes, married people can lead independent professional lives, and it is not a justice’s responsibility to police the actions of his or her spouse. But the brazenness with which the Thomases have flouted the most reasonable expectations of judicial rectitude is without precedent. From the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s Muslim ban to the 2020 election challenges, Ms. Thomas has repeatedly embroiled herself in big-ticket legal issues and with litigants who have wound up before her husband’s court. All the while, he has looked the other way, refusing to recuse himself from any of these cases. For someone whose job is about judging, Justice Thomas has, in this context at least, demonstrated abominably poor judgment.If Justice Thomas were sitting on any other federal court in the country, he would likely have been required by the code of judicial ethics to recuse himself many times over. But the code does not apply to Supreme Court justices, creating a situation in which the highest court in the land is also the most unaccountable.This is not tolerable. For years, Congress has tried in vain to extend the ethics code to the Supreme Court. For the sake of fundamental fairness and consistency, the code must apply to all federal judges; it would at the very least force the hand of those like Justice Thomas who seem unmoved by any higher sense of duty to the institution or to the American people who have agreed to abide by its rulings.The court is in deep trouble these days, pervaded by what Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently called the “stench” of partisanship — a stench arising in no small part from the Thomases’ behavior. It is hard to imagine that the other justices, regardless of their personal politics, aren’t bothered.No one should have to choose between their devotion to their spouse and their duty to the nation. But Justice Thomas has shown himself unwilling or unable to protect what remains of the court’s reputation from the appearance of extreme bias he and his wife have created. He would do the country a service by stepping down and making room for someone who won’t have that problem.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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      Adam Laxalt, Senate Candidate, Says He’s Already Gearing Up to Fight Election Fraud

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      In an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, Adam Laxalt, a Republican running for Senate in Nevada, said he’s already gearing up to fight election fraud.We have an item tonight from our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who reports on how a Republican running for Senate in Nevada has been anticipating an election-fraud fight in November.Nevadans still have 231 days until they head to the polls in November. But Adam Laxalt, the former attorney general of Nevada and a Republican candidate for Senate, is already laying detailed groundwork to fight election fraud in his race — long before a single vote has been cast or counted.In conversations with voters at an event at his campaign headquarters this month, Laxalt explained how he’s vetting outside groups to help him establish election observer teams and map out a litigation strategy.“I don’t talk about that, but we’re vetting which group we think is going to do better,” Laxalt told an attendee, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times from a person who attended the event and opposes Laxalt’s candidacy.At the event, Laxalt criticized the 2020 Trump campaign and outside groups for their handling of election-fraud claims, saying that they went on the offensive too late. “In 2020, it was nothing,” he said, according to the audio recording. “And then the campaign was late and the party was late. So, it’s just different now. There’s a lot of groups that are saying there’s election fraud.”And should he be unable to find help, Laxalt pledged that his campaign would shoulder the cost of bringing in lawyers and mapping out a strategy, even at the expense of other core programs necessary to run a campaign.“If I get into July and I’m like, ‘Dear God, no one’s going to do this right,’ we will pay from our campaign, which means less voter contact for the reason you said,” Laxalt told an attendee. “If someone’s not going to do it, we’ve got to do it. And I’m willing to lose on the other side because we’re going to take it off.”The ‘biggest issue’ of the campaignOf course, there was no widespread fraud in the Nevada presidential election in 2020, nor anywhere else in the country, as numerous audits, recounts, court challenges and investigations have confirmed. The secretary of state in Nevada spent more than 125 hours investigating allegations brought by the Nevada Republican Party and found no widespread fraud. And there has been no evidence in the run-up to this year’s election of any fraud in the state.But the pledge from Laxalt is yet another indication of how vital the specter of voter fraud remains to the Republican base, an issue deemed so critical that a statewide candidate would be willing to sacrifice one of the most essential campaign tasks to ensure a litigation path was in place, months before any actual voting occurred.When asked about the comments, Laxalt reiterated his criticisms of the 2020 election, particularly in Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas and the majority of Democratic voters in the state.“Every voter deserves more transparency and to be confident in the accuracy of their election results, and I will proudly fight for them,” Laxalt said in a statement.A court ruling against the Trump campaign in 2020 found no evidence “that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud,” both in Clark County and throughout the state.Laxalt, who was one of the leaders of the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the results in Nevada, has stated before that voter fraud is the “biggest issue” of the campaign and has publicly talked about establishing a large force of election observers and his plan to file election lawsuits early.“With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election,” Laxalt said in August in an interview with Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative radio host.Members of the media documenting a staff member counting ballots at the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas in November 2020.Bridget Bennett for The New York Times‘It’s about the court of public opinion’Laxalt’s legal strategy foreshadows a likely new permanent battleground for political campaigns: postelection court battles.While election-related lawsuits have long been common in American politics, the traditional fights have often been over polling hours and locations or last-minute policy changes to voting rules. But in 2020, the Trump campaign drastically altered the legal landscape, filing 60 cases after Election Day. The campaign lost 59 of them. The single case the campaign won had to do with challenging a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the submission of personal identification for mailed ballots.Despite that losing record, Republican candidates like Laxalt appear poised to repeat the Trump legal strategy of trying to overturn an election in court, even months before there has been any votes or any theoretical voter fraud. Experts note that while these legal strategies are likely doomed to fail in courtrooms, they risk further eroding public trust.“At the end of the day, this isn’t just about the court of law, it’s about the court of public opinion, and seeing how dangerous these lies about our elections can be,” said Joanna Lydgate, who is a former deputy attorney general of Massachusetts and who co-founded the States United Democracy Center. “We saw the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. We see those same lies showing up on the campaign trail all across the country.”In his conversations with voters, Laxalt reiterated that he wanted to amass a large coalition to tackle fraud as part of a “formal program,” and expected help from Republican Party leadership and “the senatorial committee,” a reference to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He also discussed a group featuring Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, though the group’s title was inaudible.The attendees at the event seemed to support Laxalt’s plans, and he was sure to mention his most prominent endorser.“I was just in Mar-a-Lago last week with the president,” Laxalt said, referring to Trump. “And the president was just like, all over election fraud still, obviously.”What to readJason Zengerle looks into Tucker Carlson’s influence on conservative Senate candidates’ political ads for The New York Times Magazine.The confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson offer a preview of Republicans’ midterm attack lines, Annie Karni reports. The New York Times provided live coverage of the hearings.President Biden will ask allies to apply more aggressive economic sanctions against Russia, Michael D. Shear reports.in the momentJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings today.Doug Mills/The New York TimesCrime and confirmation hearingsRepublicans made their strategy for the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson painfully clear: A tour of grievance politics that criticized Democrats for transgressions spanning decades.For Democrats, however, there was also a political strategy. It just wasn’t quite as loud.As Democrats attempt to defuse allegations that they’re anti-law enforcement, an attack that some party leaders blame for losses in the House in 2020, they’ve gone full out in supporting the police ahead of the midterms. It’s a key line of defense that Democrats prepared for ahead of the hearings and another way to discredit an attack line that could hurt the party in future elections.Representative Val Demings of Florida has been highlighting her role as chief of the Orlando Police Department in her Senate race. President Biden called for funding the police in his State of the Union address. And Biden’s nominee spoke at length today about her family members in law enforcement, often in response to questions by senators.Jackson has two uncles and a brother who have served in law enforcement, noted Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.“What do you say to people who say you’re soft on crime, or even anti-law enforcement, because you accepted your duties as a public defender?” Leahy asked.“Crime and the effects on the community and the need for law enforcement, those are not abstract concepts or political slogans to me,” Jackson responded.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs 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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      Mark Meadows’s 2020 Vote Is Under Investigation in North Carolina

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      Records show that Mr. Meadows cast an absentee ballot from the address of a remote mobile home, but reports have cast doubt on whether he lived there.North Carolina officials said on Thursday that they planned to investigate whether Mark Meadows, who as former President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff helped amplify false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, cast a legal vote in that year’s presidential race.The North Carolina Department of Justice has asked the State Bureau of Investigation to examine whether Mr. Meadows broke the law when he registered to vote, and voted from, a remote mobile home where he did not live, said Nazneen Ahmed, a spokeswoman for Josh Stein, the state attorney general, who is a Democrat.“We have asked the S.B.I. to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” Ms. Ahmed said.Law enforcement officials in Macon County, a rural community in the mountains of western North Carolina, first became aware of questions surrounding Mr. Meadows’s voter registration last week after The New Yorker revealed that he had voted from a home where he did not live, the local district attorney, Ashley Welch, wrote in a letter to the state Justice Department.“Until being contacted by the media, I was unaware of any allegations of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows,” she wrote.Mr. Meadows did not respond to messages Thursday evening. He has not yet offered any public explanation for his 2020 voter registration.The letter and the state investigation were first reported on Thursday by WRAL, a television station in Raleigh, N.C.North Carolina voter registration records show that Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote at a three-bedroom mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., six weeks before the 2020 election. He voted absentee by mail from that address, according to the state records.The former owner of the Scaly Mountain home told The New Yorker that she did not believe Mr. Meadows had ever visited the residence. A neighbor told the magazine Ms. Meadows had stayed there only one or two nights.Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.In 2021, he also registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor.In her letter, Ms. Welch asked state officials to investigate Mr. Meadows because she had a conflict of interest. Mr. Meadows, Ms. Welch said, contributed to her 2014 campaign and appeared in political advertisements for her. At the time, Mr. Meadows was a member of Congress representing eastern North Carolina.“It is in the best interest of justice and the best interest of the people of North Carolina that the Attorney General’s office handles the prosecution of this case,” Ms. Welch wrote. More

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      Republicans Push to Crackdown on Voter Fraud

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      Election fraud is exceedingly rare and often accidental. Still, G.O.P. lawmakers and prosecutors are promoting tough new enforcement efforts.The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.It is a new phase of the Republican campaign to tighten voting laws that started after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. The effort, which resulted in a wave of new state laws last year, has now shifted to courthouses, raising concern among voting rights activists that fear of prosecution could keep some voters from casting ballots.“As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we’re seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.It’s nearly impossible to assess whether the talk of getting tough on voter crime is resulting in an increase in prosecutions. There is no nationwide data on how many people were charged with voter fraud in 2020 or in previous elections, and state data is often incomplete. The state numbers that are available show there were very few examples of potential cases in 2020 and few prosecutions.Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud in the state from the 2020 election.In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”The political incentives to draw attention to the enforcement of voting laws are clear. A Monmouth University poll in January found that 62 percent of Republicans and just 19 percent of Democrats believed voter fraud was a major problem.That may mean the odds of being charged with voter fraud can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor.In Fond du Lac County, Wis., District Attorney Eric Toney was in office for nine years without prosecuting a voter fraud case. But after he started his campaign for attorney general in 2021, Mr. Toney, a Republican, received a letter from a Wisconsin man who had acquired copies of millions of ballots in an attempt to conduct his own review of the 2020 election. The letter cited five Fond du Lac County voters whose registrations listed their home addresses at a UPS Store, a violation of a state law that requires voters to register where they live.Mr. Toney charged all five with felony voter fraud.A report the Wisconsin Election Commission released last week said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to.Scott Olson/Getty Images“We get tips from community members of people breaking the law through the year, and we take them seriously, especially if it’s an election law violation,” Mr. Toney said in an interview. “Law enforcement takes it seriously. I take it seriously as a district attorney.”One of the voters charged, Jamie Wells, told investigators that the UPS Store was her “home base.” She said she lived in a mobile home and split time between a nearby campground and Louisiana. Ms. Wells did not respond to phone or email messages. If convicted, she stands to serve up to three and a half years in prison — though she would most likely receive a much shorter sentence.In La Crosse County, Wis., District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a Democrat, received a similar referral: 23 people registered to vote with addresses from a local UPS Store, and 16 of them voted in 2020. But Mr. Gruenke said he had concluded that there was no attempt at fraud. Instead of felony charges, the local clerk sent the voters a letter giving them 30 days to change their registrations to an address where they lived.“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.”Mr. Toney linked his decision to his views about the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which the Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., won by more than 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast.While he had never challenged Mr. Biden’s win, he said he believed that “there is no dispute that Wisconsin election laws weren’t followed and fraud occurred.”“I support identifying any fraud or election laws not followed to ensure it never happens again, because elections are the cornerstone of our democracy,” Mr. Toney said.(Ms. Wells, one of the voters Mr. Toney has charged, also said she believed something was amiss in the 2020 election. “They took it away from Trump,” she told investigators.)Mr. DeSantis in Florida is perhaps the best-known politician who is promoting efforts to bolster criminal enforcement of voting-related laws. The governor, who is up for re-election in November, made the new police agency a top legislative priority. .The unit, called the Office of Election Crimes and Security, takes on work already done by the secretary of state’s office, but reports directly to the governor.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Much of Smartmatic Case Against Fox News Can Proceed, Judge Rules

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      The $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by the election technology company Smartmatic can move forward, a New York judge ruled on Tuesday. But the judge tossed out Smartmatic’s defamation claims against the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and a network guest, Sidney Powell.Smartmatic sued Rupert Murdoch’s cable news networks last year, along with several Fox hosts and guests. The lawsuit accused them of damaging the company by promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election: that Smartmatic and other voting systems companies tried to rig the race against President Donald J. Trump. Smartmatic later expanded its legal battle against disinformation to the right-wing media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network.On Tuesday, Justice David B. Cohen of State Supreme Court in Manhattan said in a 61-page ruling that, “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth.”He added, “At this nascent stage of the litigation, this court finds that plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”He also declined to dismiss Smartmatic claims against Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business star, and Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s defeat. Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s program last year, one day after Smartmatic sued.Citing a legal technicality, Justice Cohen dismissed most of Smartmatic’s defamation claims against Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, appearing on Fox News as a legal representative for Mr. Trump, said the technology company had “tried-and-true methods for fixing elections,” among other false assertions. Even so, Justice Cohen said there was “substantial” evidence that Mr. Giuliani “acted with actual malice insofar as he evinced a reckless disregard for the truth” and ruled that Smartmatic could try again. The judge allowed another part of Smartmatic’s defamation case against Mr. Giuliani to go forward.Fox News vowed a swift appeal.“While we are gratified that Judge Cohen dismissed Smartmatic’s claims against Jeanine Pirro at this early stage, we still plan to appeal the ruling immediately,” the network said in a statement. The network added that it would “continue to litigate these baseless claims by filing a counterclaim for fees and costs” under New York’s anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute, which is meant to quickly set aside lawsuits that may be intended to chill free speech.Fox News said it would do so “to prevent the full-blown assault on the First Amendment which stands in stark contrast to the highest tradition of American journalism.”In dismissing the claim against Ms. Pirro, Justice Cohen said that while she had asserted on her show that Democrats “stole votes,” she had not specifically blamed Smartmatic’s software.A spokesman for Smartmatic did not reply to a request for comment.Fox News is also battling a related $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused the channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business. A Delaware judge rejected an attempt by Fox News to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit in December. More

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      Mark Meadows Spread Trump’s Voter Fraud Claims. Now His Voting Record Is Under Scrutiny.

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      The former Trump aide listed a mobile home in rural North Carolina as his residence at the same time that he was running operations at the White House.Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who helped former President Donald J. Trump spread false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is facing questions about his own voting record, following a report that he registered to vote from a North Carolina mobile home where he did not live.There’s no indication that Mr. Meadows, a former congressman from North Carolina, ever resided — or even spent the night — at the rural mountain home, according to The New Yorker, which first reported on the residence that Mr. Meadows listed on his 2020 voter registration.While it’s not unusual for politicians to maintain residency in their home states, even as they spend most of their time in Washington, Mr. Meadows’s arrangement stood out for its timing and details. Mr. Meadows claimed the modest mobile home with a rusted roof as his residence at the same time that he was running day-to-day operations at the White House and was frequently warning of the possibility of voter fraud.Neither Mr. Meadows nor his wife, Debra, responded to calls or messages Tuesday. Mr. Meadows’s spokesman, Ben Williamson, also did not respond to calls or messages.North Carolina voter registration records show that Mr. Meadows and his wife registered to vote at the three-bedroom mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., six weeks before the 2020 election. Records show that he voted absentee by mail from that address and that Ms. Meadows voted early, in person.Mr. Meadows’s exact connection to the home is unclear. He never owned it. On a voter registration application submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, Mr. Meadows stated that he intended to move in the following day.North Carolina law requires that a voter live at their address for 30 days before the election in which they are voting. It is a felony to file a fraudulent voter registration application, though prosecutions are rare and typically do not lead to jail sentences.Only a registered voter from Macon County, which includes Scaly Mountain along the Georgia border, can file a challenge to Mr. Meadows’s voter registration. Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said Tuesday that there have been no voter challenges filed against Mr. Meadows.Before and after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows was among the foremost amplifiers of Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud. During an August 2020 interview on CNN, he warned of fraud in voting by mail and said people are able to register to vote in multiple places at once, leading to fraud.“Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m re-registering,’” Mr. Meadows said.Voters are not required to notify a state’s election officials about a move. Mr. Meadows, in fact, is currently registered in both North Carolina and Virginia.Virginia voter registration forms obtained by The New York Times show that nearly a year after registering at the mountain mobile home, on Sept. 13 and Sept. 15, 2021, Mr. Meadows and Ms. Meadows registered to vote at a condominium in the Old Town neighborhood of suburban Alexandria, Va. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows purchased the unit in July 2017.Both Mr. Meadows and Ms. Meadows voted early in person in Virginia’s heated election for governor in 2021, Virginia election records show. In that contest, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican elected governor of Virginia in 12 years.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows served as a revolving door between Mr. Trump and an array of lawyers, supporters and conspiracy theorists who aimed to overturn the election results to keep Mr. Trump in the White House. He introduced Mr. Trump to Mark Martin, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice who told the then-president, falsely, that Vice President Mike Pence could stop the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.In January 2021, Mr. Meadows facilitated the call between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “to find 11,780 votes” to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, several members of his White House inner circle, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Steve Bannon, an on-again-off-again adviser, were registered to vote in two states. There was no evidence that any of them voted twice in the same election.At the time he registered to vote in Scaly Mountain, Mr. Meadows was said to be considering running for the Senate seat to be vacated after the 2022 election by Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina. Shortly after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows said he would not run for the Senate.The owner of the home when Mr. Meadows registered there told The New Yorker that Ms. Meadows reserved it for two months sometime in the past few years, but stayed at the home for just one or two nights. Mr. Meadows never visited, the former homeowner, who asked that her name not be used, told the magazine.The former homeowner did not respond to messages. The current owner, who bought the property in 2021, also did not respond to messages.A neighbor, Tammy Talley, told the magazine that she is a friend of the couple’s and that Ms. Meadows and her adult children stayed at the home on at least one occasion. A message left at Ms. Talley’s home was not returned Tuesday.Two weeks after Mr. Meadows registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain address, his wife submitted an absentee ballot request on his behalf. Mr. Meadows’s absentee ballot request was first reported by WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.Kitty Bennett More

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      in Elections

      How to Keep the Rising Tide of Fake News From Drowning Our Democracy

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      The same information revolution that brought us Netflix, podcasts and the knowledge of the world in our smartphone-gripping hands has also undermined American democracy. There can be no doubt that virally spread political disinformation and delusional invective about stolen, rigged elections are threatening the foundation of our Republic. It’s going to take both legal and political change to bolster that foundation, and it might not be enough.Today we live in an era of “cheap speech.” Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at U.C.L.A., coined the term in 1995 to refer to a new period marked by changes in communications technology that would allow readers, viewers and listeners to receive speech from a practically infinite variety of sources unmediated by traditional media institutions, like newspapers, that had served as curators and gatekeepers. Professor Volokh was correct back in 1995 that the amount of speech flowing to us in formats like video would move from a trickle to a flood.What Professor Volokh did not foresee in his largely optimistic prognostication was that our information environment would become increasingly “cheap” in a second sense of the word, favoring speech of little value over speech that is more valuable to voters.It is expensive to produce quality journalism but cheap to produce polarizing political “takes” and easily shareable disinformation. The economic model for local newspapers and news gathering has collapsed over the past two decades; from 2000 to 2018, journalists lost jobs faster than coal miners.While some false claims spread inadvertently, the greater problem is not this misinformation but deliberately spread disinformation, which can be both politically and financially profitable. Feeding people reassuring lies on social media or cable television that provide simple answers to complex social and economic problems increases demand for more soothing falsities, creating a vicious cycle. False information about Covid-19 vaccines meant to undermine confidence in government or the Biden presidency has had deadly consequences.The rise of cheap speech poses special dangers for American democracy and for faith and confidence in American elections. To put the matter bluntly, if we had the polarized politics of today but the information technology of the 1950s, we almost certainly would not have seen the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. Millions of Republican voters would probably not have believed the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and demanded from state legislatures new restrictive voting rules and fake election “audits” to counter phantom voter fraud.According to reporting in The Times, President Donald Trump took to Twitter more than 400 times in the almost three weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, to attack the legitimacy of the election, often making false claims that it had been stolen or rigged to millions and millions of people. In an earlier era, the three major television networks, The Times and local newspaper and television stations would most likely have been more active in mediating and curtailing the rhetoric of a president spewing dangerous nonsense. Over at Facebook, in the days after the 2020 election, politically oriented “groups” became rife with stolen-election talk and plans to “stop the steal.” Cheap speech lowered the costs for like-minded conspiracy theorists to find one another, to convert people to believing the false claims and to organize for dangerous political action at the U.S. Capitol.A democracy cannot function without “losers’ consent,” the idea that those on the wrong side of an election face disappointment but agree that there was a fair vote count. Those who believe the last election was stolen will have fewer compunctions about attempting to steal the next one. They are more likely to threaten election officials, triggering an exodus of competent election officials. They are more likely to see the current government as illegitimate and to refuse to follow government guidance on public health, the environment and other issues crucial to health and safety. They are comparatively likely to see violence as a means of resolving political grievances.But cheap speech has already done damage to our democracy and has the potential to do even more. The demise of local newspapers — and their replacement in some cases with partisan or even foreign sources of information masquerading as legitimate journalism — fosters a loss of voter competence, as voters have a harder time getting objective information about candidates’ records and positions. Cheap speech also decreases officeholder accountability; studies show that corruption rises when journalists are not there to hold politicians accountable. And as technology makes it easier to spread “deep fakes” — false video or audio clips showing politicians or others saying or doing things they did not in fact say or do — voters will increasingly come to mistrust everything they see and hear, even when it is true.The rise of anonymous speech facilitated by the information revolution, particularly on social media, increases the opportunities for foreign interference to influence American electoral choices, as we saw with Russian efforts in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Domestic copycats have followed suit: In the 2017 Doug Jones-Roy Moore U.S. Senate race in Alabama, Mr. Jones’s supporters — acting without his knowledge — posed on social media as Russian bots and Baptist alcohol abolitionists supporting Roy Moore in an effort to depress moderate Republican support for Mr. Moore. Mr. Jones, a Democrat, narrowly won that election, though we cannot say that the disinformation campaign swung the result.The cheap speech environment increases polarization and the risk of demagogy by individual candidates. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who before entering Congress embraced dangerous QAnon conspiracy theories and supported the execution of Democratic politicians, need not depend upon party leaders for funding; by being outrageous, she can go right to social media to cheaply raise funds for her campaigns and political activities.We now live in an era of high partisanship but weak political parties, which can no longer serve as the moderating influence on extremists within their ranks. Cheap speech accelerates this trend.We cannot — and would not want to — go back to a time when media gatekeepers deprived voters of valuable information. Cheap speech helped fuel Black Lives Matters protests and the racial justice movement both before and after the murder of George Floyd, and virally spread videos of police misconduct can help catalyze meaningful change. But the cheap speech era requires new legal tools to shore up our democracy.Among the legal changes that could help are an updating of campaign finance laws to cover what is now mostly unregulated political advertising disseminated over the internet, labeling deep fakes as “altered” to help voters separate fact from fiction and a tightening of the ban on foreign campaign expenditures. Congress should also make it a crime to lie about when, where and how people vote. A Trump supporter has been charged with targeting voters in 2016 with false messages suggesting that they could vote by text or social media post, but it is not clear if existing law makes such conduct illegal. We also need new laws aimed at limiting microtargeting, the use by campaigns or interest groups of intrusive data collected by social media companies to send political ads, including some misleading ones, sometimes to vulnerable populations.Unfortunately, the current Supreme Court would very likely view many of these proposed legal changes as violating the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. Much of the court’s jurisprudence depends upon faith in an outmoded “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, which assumes that the truth will emerge through counterspeech. If that was ever true in the past, it is not true in the cheap speech era. Today, the clearest danger to American democracy is not government censorship but the loss of voter confidence and competence that arises from the sea of disinformation and vitriol.What’s worse, some justices on the court who otherwise fashion themselves as free speech libertarians have lately espoused positions that could exacerbate our problems. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has indicated that he would most likely treat social media companies like telephone companies and allow states to pass laws requiring them not to deplatform politicians who violate the companies’ terms of use (as Facebook and Twitter did to Mr. Trump), even those who constantly spread election disinformation and encourage political violence. Justice Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch have also signaled an interest in loosening up libel laws, as Mr. Trump has urged, making it harder for legitimate journalists to expose or criticize the actions of politicians.Even if Congress adopted all the changes I have proposed and the Supreme Court upheld them — two quite unlikely propositions — it would hardly be enough to sustain American democracy in the cheap speech era. For example, the First Amendment would surely bar a law that would require social media companies to remove demagogic candidates who undermine election integrity from social media platforms; we would not want a government bureaucrat (under the control of a partisan president) to make such a call. But such speech is among the greatest dangers we face today.That’s why efforts to deal with the costs of cheap speech require political action as well. As consumers and voters, we need to pressure social media companies and other platforms to protect our democracy by taking strong steps, including deplatforming political figures in extreme circumstances, when they consistently undermine election integrity and foment or threaten violence. Twitter’s recent decision to no longer remove false speech about the integrity of the 2020 election is a step in the wrong direction. And if the social media companies are unresponsive to consumer pressure or become too powerful in controlling the political speech environment, the solution is to use antitrust laws to create more competition.Society needs to figure out ways to subsidize real investigative journalism efforts, especially locally, like the excellent journalism of The Texas Tribune and The Nevada Independent, two relatively new news-gathering organizations that depend on donors and a nonprofit model.Journalistic bodies should use accreditation methods to send signals to voters and social media companies about which content is reliable and which is counterfeit. Over time and with a lot of effort, we can reestablish greater faith in real journalism, at least for a significant part of the population.The most important steps to counter cheap speech are the hardest to take. We need to rebuild civil society to strengthen reliable intermediaries and institutions that engage in truth telling. As a starting point, think of all the institutions Mr. Trump tried to undermine: the free press, the opposition party, his own party, the judiciary and the F.B.I., to name just a few. And we need an educational effort — including among older Americans, who are actually the most likely to spread political misinformation — to inculcate the values of truth, respect for science and the rule of law.This is easier said than done. It will require an all-hands-on-deck mobilization and not just the government: civics groups, bar and professional associations, religious institutions, labor unions and businesses all have a role to play.The future of American democracy in the cheap speech era is hardly ensured. We don’t have all the solutions and can’t even foresee political problems that will come with the next technological shift. But legal and political action taken now has the best chance of giving voters the tools to make competent decisions and reject election lies that will continue to spew forth on every platform that can be built to threaten the foundation of our democracy.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.” In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.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