Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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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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      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

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      Florida Senate Passes Voting Bill to Create Election Crimes Agency

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      The bill would make Florida one of the first states to have a force dedicated to election crimes and voter fraud, despite such offenses being exceedingly rare.The Florida Senate passed a sweeping new bill overhauling the state’s electoral process, adding new restrictions to the state election code and establishing a law enforcement office dedicated solely to investigating election crimes.The bill, which passed 24-14, now goes to the state’s House of Representatives, where it could pass as soon as next week and land on the desk of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who is expected to sign it. One Republican, State Senator Jeff Brandes, voted against it. A Democratic senator, Loranne Ausley, initially voted yes, but immediately posted on Twitter that she “pushed the wrong button” and has since changed her vote.Though Republicans in the state had passed another sweeping voting law in May of last year, Mr. DeSantis made election reform one of the top priorities for this legislative session as well. Both efforts come after the 2020 election in Florida was without any major issues, and Republicans in the state touted it as a “gold standard” for election administration.The legislation is poised to become the first major election-related bill to pass this year in a critical battleground state, and it would indicate no sign of cresting for the wave of new election laws, adding more restrictions to voting, that began last year — with 34 laws passed in 19 states.The core of the bill is the establishment of a permanent election crimes office within the Department of State, which would make Florida one of the first states to have an agency solely dedicated to election crimes and voter fraud, despite such offenses being exceedingly rare in the United States. An investigation last year by The Associated Press found fewer than 475 potential claims of fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The new office would assist the secretary of state’s office in investigating complaints and allegations, initiating their own independent inquiries and overseeing a voter fraud hotline. It would include an unspecified number of investigators, and Mr. DeSantis would also appoint at least one special officer in each of the regional offices of the State Department of Law Enforcement to investigate election crimes.The bill would also raise the penalties on those collecting and submitting more than two absentee ballots from a misdemeanor to a felony.Voting rights groups are worried that the continuing criminalization of the voting process could both frighten voters away from participating and leave election officials fearing prosecution over honest mistakes.“Involving law enforcement with this sort of vague mandate obviously creates issues and can have certainly a detrimental effect in terms of the ability of voters to cast ballots if they’re worried about law enforcement involvement,” said Daniel Griffith, the policy director at Secure Democracy USA, a nonpartisan organization focused on elections and voter access. “And it has a detrimental effect on election officials if they’re worried that there’s going to be law enforcement over their shoulder.”Previously, investigations into election fraud were handled by Florida’s secretary of state, the Department of Law Enforcement and the attorney general. Democrats argued that the bill effectively creates a new agency to do work that was done by existing agencies. The agency’s creation, Democrats say, is just a political ploy to signal that Florida and Mr. DeSantis are staying tough on an issue core to both the Republican base and to former President Donald J. Trump.“Why are we doing this?” said State Senator Lori Berman during debate on Friday. “The only thing I can think is that we’re motivated by the ‘Big Lie’ that the elections nationwide didn’t take place in a proper manner. But we know that is not true.”State Senator Travis Hutson, the sponsor of the bill and a Republican, defended it during debate on Friday, stating that having a dedicated force would both uncover more fraud and make the state able to handle more allegations.“We did have great elections, the governor mentioned that,” said Mr. Hutson. “But I would submit to you that we can always do better.”He added: “I will say there is no voter intimidation or no suppressing votes in this bill.”The new election office drew criticisms from some Republican members as well, who argued that it was unnecessary.“For 15 people to go after what is potentially a handful of complaints that will ultimately be substantiated is just absolutely almost comical,” said Mr. Brandes during debate on Friday, referring to suggestions from the executive branch that they assign 15 investigators to the office. “So I am not going to support this bill today.”Uniformed law enforcement officials have been used in the past to deter and suppress voters. In 1982, the Republican National Committee dispatched a group of armed, off-duty police officers known as the National Ballot Security Task Force to linger around New Jersey polling locations during a closely contested governor’s election. The Democratic National Committee sued, forcing the R.N.C. into a consent decree to ban such tactics.Those memories appeared to be still on the minds of lawmakers in the Florida legislature. During debate on Thursday, State Senator Victor Manuel Torres Jr. asked Mr. Hutson, the sponsor of the bill: “Will these individuals be in uniform or civilian attire?”Mr. Hutson responded that the current enforcement arm of the secretary of state dresses in civilian attire, and that members of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are likely to be uniformed.In addition to the new Office of Election Crimes and Security, the bill adds other new restrictions to voting, including banning ranked-choice voting; raising the cap on fines of third-party registration groups from $1,000 to $50,000; extending a ban on private funding for election administration to include the “cost of any litigation”; and replacing references to “drop boxes” with “secure ballot intake stations.” More

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      At 'The Villages,' the Party Never Ends for Boomers

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      THE VILLAGES, Fla. — “Which side are you on?!”A highly animated older gentleman named Ray-Ray is shouting in my ear, demanding to know my political orientation. “You still haven’t told us!”I am tucked into the outdoor bar of City Fire, a popular watering hole in the Villages, the massive senior-living community in Central Florida that has gained notoriety as a MAGA stronghold. After a couple of cold, drizzly January days — very un-Villagelike, residents keep assuring me — people are eager to fraternize once more.Inside, the restaurant is crowded, with patrons nodding along to the live music or cutting loose on the small dance floor. Outside, where heaters and plastic sheeting hold back the chill, folks are packed together watching golf on the TVs, taking advantage of the $3 happy-hour beer and swapping stories at top volume. It’s a boisterous crowd. Villagers, as the community’s 130,000 residents are known, tend to be an outgoing bunch. They are perpetually coming up to introduce themselves and then quiz you about yourself. These folks love a good party — and a good argument.An enclave of homes in the Villages.Damon Winter/The New York TimesA Saturday farmers’ market draws residents and visitors to Brownwood Paddock, one of three town centers.Damon Winter/The New York TimesI’m talking with a small gaggle of veterans — all men, all supporters of former President Donald Trump — about voting rights and voting fraud. This is a hot topic in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has become a crusader for voting restrictions — or “guardrails,” as he calls them. It is also a topic with fresh relevance at the Villages, where four residents have been arrested in recent months on allegations of voting twice in the 2020 election. (Three of the four were registered Republicans.) Legally speaking, double voting is a no-no, the kind of fraud a certain former president and his followers might consider worth fretting about.Not my City Fire companions. “You’re talking about four votes out of more than a hundred thousand people!” objects Ray-Ray. In fact, around the Villages, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than two to one, I haven’t run across many conservatives perturbed by the possible fraud in their midst. Some profess to know little if anything about the arrests. Others, like Ray-Ray and his buddy Marty, are fired up about voting fraud generally — just not the kind where a few of their neighbors may have done something careless or stupid.During the 2020 presidential campaign, supporters of Donald Trump waited to see him at a rally at the Villages Polo Club.Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the contrary, these vets say they know what real fraud looks like. They hail from places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the cities, they say, are rife with electoral malfeasance, some of which they claim to have seen firsthand. (Marty insists Detroit is a disaster.) The piddling, isolated incidents that maybe happened here? Pfft. They could not care less. And the fact that I am asking about the issue tells them which team I root for in the great blood sport of American politics. As if being part of the Fake News media weren’t bad enough. The men have already warned me that there is a gun-toting regular whom I should avoid tonight if I don’t want trouble.Marty and Ray-Ray are, of course, joking. Even in the midst of a political rant, the residents here are an overwhelmingly helpful, friendly bunch. That is, after all, the motto of this place, as trumpeted on the banners hanging all around the town squares: “The Villages: America’s Friendliest Hometown.”But for many people, “friendly” is not the first word that springs to mind to describe the Villages. The conservative community has long been a campaign stop for G.O.P. politicians, but the rise of Trumpism dialed up the tribalism. The enclave became known as a hotbed of partisan brawling during the 2020 campaign. Public screaming matches erupted. Property was vandalized. Neighbors stopped speaking to one another. Mahjong groups and golf foursomes broke up. That summer, a video went viral of a Villager shouting “white power” during a golf-cart parade celebrating President Trump’s birthday. The episode introduced the Villages to the broader public — and not in a good way.This senior Mecca — the nation’s largest — emerged from humble roots. In the early 1980s, H. Gary Morse, a onetime ad man, took over his father’s mobile home park in an unlovely patch of Florida cow country. (Some of the mobile units can still be seen in the northern end of the Villages, which residents euphemistically refer to as “the historic district.”) Mr. Morse soon realized that, to draw people to this landlocked region en masse, he needed to give them amenities — and lots of them. Soon followed the golf courses, swimming pools, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, sports facilities, rec centers (of which there are more than 100) and endless clubs (2,900-plus).Pickleball has become one of the dominant pastimes in the Villages.Damon Winter/The New York TimesPrime housing options offer easy access to the many golf courses in the Villages.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday, the Villages isn’t so much a retirement community as an empire, a collection of dozens of neighborhoods covering more than 32 square miles spread over three counties, with the bulk in Sumter County. It boasts more than 60,000 households and is expanding. Fast. Dump trucks and excavators swarm the developing areas, and new buildings spring up practically overnight. Housing prices are out of control, gripe residents. (I checked out a lovely but modest home in the Village of Chitty Chatty that was priced around $460,000.) Thanks to the thousands of new Villagers who arrive each year, the Villages was the fastest growing metro area over the past decade.The Villages’ bellicose politics has made it a subject of fascination (and horror) for many. But its portrayals as a MAGA circus miss the core of its appeal, especially among the tsunami of retiring baby boomers, who are aiming to redefine aging, much as they reshaped every aspect of the culture. Seniors don’t move to the Villages for the politics. They come for the golf and the pickleball, the softball and tennis and polo. They come for the concerts and casino nights and the Senior Games (think of them as a more mature Olympics). They come for Boozy Bingo at Lazy Mac’s Tacos, karaoke night at City Fire and the line dancing taught by a D.J. called Scooter.The moment the music starts, Villagers hit the dance floor with abandon.Damon Winter/The New York TimesJust ask the Democrats.Judi Bessette is one of several members of the Villages Democratic Club who have gathered in the Tea Room of the Colony Cottage rec center to share the trials and tribulations of voting blue in this deep-red community. Ms. Bessette had her Biden flag vandalized during the campaign. Twice. The first flag lasted less than two weeks before it was torn and left hanging by a thread. She put up a new flag, only to have someone replace it with a Trump flag swiped from her neighbor’s place.It’s not just conservative neighbors who make Democrats here uncomfortable. They grumble about the family-dominated enterprise that owns and controls so much of the Villages, which they refer to simply as The Developer. Mr. Morse, who died in 2014, had been a big-time Republican donor with formidable political clout in the region. Democrats complain that he and his heirs long sought to cultivate a conservative climate here. TV sets in the shops and hotels are typically turned to Fox News. Along with local programming, Fox News Radio plays in outdoor spaces. Democrats dismiss the community paper, The Villages Daily Sun, as a propaganda machine for The Developer, which owns it and other media properties. And during election season, say the Democrats, The Developer makes office space available for the Republicans but can’t seem to find space for their team.To keep the peace in their daily lives, people of all partisan persuasions learn to keep their political views to themselves in mixed company. “I run a book club,” says Laura Goudreau, “and our No. 1 rule is: nothing political.”When Judi Bessette flew Biden flags in front of her house in 2020, someone vandalized them.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMike and Sue Faulk. Mr. Faulk is president of the local Democratic club.Damon Winter/The New York Times“If I were to not talk to any Republicans, then I wouldn’t have many acquaintances,” says Mike Faulk, the Democratic club’s president, who notes that, in his golf group of 16, he is the only Democrat. Chris Stanley, the immediate past president of the Democratic club, says she gets asked why on earth a Democrat would want to live in the Villages all the time. Her answer: Because life here is amazing, and she loves it.Dancing is very big in the Villages. Line dancing, two-stepping, twisting, awkward head-bopping — the moment the music starts, Villagers go at it with abandon. Here is a place where the over-55 set can cut loose, flaunting their Jagger-esque moves without being judged by younger, more limber folks.“I came to party!” a snowbird named Jim quips to me at City Fire. (Yes. I spent a lot of time there, and I highly recommend karaoke night.) Having raised four daughters back home in Pennsylvania, Jim spends his winters here, enjoying the fruits of his labor. He was not the only Villager to express this sentiment. These people have made their contribution to society and now intend to have themselves some fun.The enclave has been called Disney for retirees. The comparison is apt, not only because of the nonstop amusements. Its entire aesthetic is too studied and precious to feel like the real world. The three quaint town squares and main retail areas were developed around themes: Spanish Springs, Lake Sumter Landing and Brownwood Paddock. The streets and public areas are spotless and beautifully landscaped. And everywhere you look, there are golf carts.Residents dancing to live music at Edna’s on the Green.Damon Winter/The New York TimesHomes under construction in a new development in the Villages.Damon Winter/The New York TimesGolf carts are key to understanding the Villages. There are over 90 miles of cart paths here, and it is a point of pride that every corner of the community is cart accessible. The vehicles are an expression of residents’ individuality and independence. People are serious about tricking out their rides. They paint them with flames, name them and plaster them with bumper stickers. Those with money to burn splurge on carts that look like vintage autos. Even seniors who have no business driving anymore zip around like teenage joy riders, say residents. Crashes are not uncommon, and visitors are warned to watch out for bad drivers — and drunk ones. One afternoon during my visit, Marsha Shearer, a board member for the Democratic club, emails that a friend and fellow board member had witnessed a doozy of a wreck by what appeared to be a highly intoxicated driver. “She was also an anti-vaxxer and a very belligerent Trumper who kept screaming over and over again ‘I’m not vaccinated’” and cursing President Biden, the friend, Sue Dubman, reported. The police eventually came to deal with the mess.Golf cart parades are part of the culture. Villagers use any excuse to organize one: Christmas, Halloween, the start of a big Supreme Court case, delivering their ballots to the polling station. Andy Kleiman considers the parades the most fun part of the local political life. “You go by and see all these people giving you the thumbs up,” he beams. Of course, you’re likely to get other fingers waved at you as well.Michael Farrell took his dog Baby out on the town at Lake Sumter Landing.Damon Winter/The New York TimesGolf carts are key to understanding the Villages and its residents.Damon Winter/The New York TimesDamon Winter/The New York TimesIt is easy to mock all the clubs and events as boomer hedonism mixed with golden-years YOLO nihilism. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow you may get diagnosed with shingles or need a double hip replacement! And the frenzied socializing can definitely veer in that direction. Residents mentioned that alcohol abuse is a real problem here. And for years, the community has fought its reputation (based in part on a 2008 book) as a den of sexual iniquity, where seniors get jiggy in golf carts and S.T.D.s run rampant. Many Villagers are definitely on the hunt for companionship, and the men are quick with the offer to buy a gal a drink. (At City Fire, you can send over a poker chip for someone to use as a drink token.) The surreal effect of living in a bubble where everyone is encouraged to act as if on perpetual holiday was a focus of the 2020 documentary “Some Kind of Heaven,” co-produced by The Times.But the parades and games and clubs, most definitely the political ones, also give people a sense of belonging and purpose — of still being able to make a difference. Whatever their ideological persuasion, residents are constantly reminded that civic engagement matters. That they matter. Like at all retirement communities, the social life at the Villages tackles head-on the scourges of isolation, despair and loneliness that are eating away at so many Americans as the nation’s social fabric frays. In a culture that can feel as though it is leaving seniors behind, the Villages is designed to bring people together. And despite the at times harrowing political warfare, the community largely succeeds in doing so — even if it isn’t always easy.People here feel responsible for one another. Marty Schneider — of Marty and Ray-Ray — is a longstanding member of the Band of Brothers, a group of mostly Vietnam-era vets founded over a decade ago to, as Mr. Schneider puts it, “give veterans who were having trouble somewhere to go.” People were really struggling and some died by suicide, he recalls. What began as a small gathering on Tuesday afternoons at City Fire has morphed into a 501(c)3 organization with several hundred members that puts together social outings (bowling, golf…) and community events and holds weekly raffles and other fund-raisers to support veterans and related causes. When the weather permits, the Tuesday social features a drive-by from a member who tricked out a golf cart like a tank. With a nod to “the ladies” who have joined, Mr. Schneider says the group recently discussed whether to change the name to the Band of Brothers and Sisters. “So that’s a possibility down the road.”Marty Schneider, center, at City Fire in Lake Sumter Landing with some of his fellow Band of Brothers members.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe central problem, of course, is that this sense of belonging may flow as much from who is not a part of the Villages as who is. The populace here is 98 percent white, putting it increasingly out of touch with the broader nation. The entire place, in fact, has a time-warped quality. It is reminiscent of college or summer camp — but for people who no longer have to worry about what they’re going to be when they grow up or what their political choices will bring. For Villagers, the future is less of a concern than living their best life. Right. Now. Here, baby boomers still reign supreme, in a place that caters to some of their most self-absorbed, self-indulgent impulses. The culture, like the overwhelmingly conservative politics, can feel like a scrupulously maintained bulwark against the onslaught of time and change.In this way, the community is a distillation of the cultural crosscurrents at play in an America that is simultaneously graying and diversifying. Baby boomers, long accustomed to setting the agenda, are being eased out of their slot atop the sociopolitical ladder — especially conservative, white boomers. This shift can be painful. One of Donald Trump’s shrewdest political moves has been to exploit some people’s nostalgia for a bygone era where the cultural hierarchy was clear and the world made sense. The Villages works overtime to maintain a replica of that fantasyland — a shiny, happy, small-town bubble where seniors can tune out the rest of the world and party like it’s 1969.Crowds gather for the nightly live band and dancing at Lake Sumter Landing.Damon Winter/The New York TimesSurrounded by people at a similar life stage, many with similar values, Villagers can maintain a distance from the demographic and cultural changes reshaping the nation and from many of its more intractable problems. Crime, inequality, homelessness, climate change, racial strife, the high cost of child care and college — these are challenges for other communities to grapple with. Other generations even. Big Government is eyed with skepticism, even as the aging populace commands an increasingly larger chunk of the federal budget for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. So long as taxes stay low and the golf courses stay open, Villagers can stay focused on living the dream. They have earned this retreat, dammit. The escapism is the point. And escapism, by definition, means separating oneself from unsettling trends and people.Early one evening, I settle in near the Sumter Landing bandstand to watch the Hooligans, a local favorite that plays all the classics — Pink Floyd, the Clash, the Police, Rod Stewart. At one point, a trim, relatively young woman sporting short dark hair and a golf visor wanders over to ask if I’m the band’s agent, noting that I look very official sitting there with my notebook. After quizzing me about who I work for and what I’m working on, she introduces herself succinctly: “Brenda. Strong conservative and strong Christian.” She and her husband are snowbirds visiting from Minnesota, spending their second winter in the Villages. They love it here. Except … Brenda has noticed a distinct lack of diversity, and she’s not entirely sure if that’s an OK thing. On the other hand, she adds, “it feels safe,” because “anyone here who doesn’t belong stands out.”And with that, she drifts back into the sea of seniors swaying as the band belts out Radiohead’s “Creep”: “What the hell am I doin’ here? I don’t belong here. …”Diners in the Brownwood Paddock Town Center seek shelter from the glare of the evening sun.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Where the Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

      by

      One of the highest profile investigations into the former president appeared to stall on Wednesday, but several other inquiries are in progress around the country.The abrupt resignation of the two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump leaves the future of the inquiry, which had been put on a monthlong pause, in doubt.But that does not mean that the former president or his family business, the Trump Organization, are out of legal jeopardy.In addition to the Manhattan criminal investigation — which resulted in criminal charges last summer against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer — Mr. Trump and his business face civil and criminal inquiries into his business dealings and political activities in several states.Mr. Trump and his family have criticized the Manhattan investigation, and the other investigations, as partisan or inappropriate, and have denied wrongdoing.Here is where each notable inquiry now stands.Manhattan Criminal CaseThe Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has said that his office’s investigation is ongoing and that it will continue without the two prosecutors. How it will proceed is unclear, though the investigation has already produced criminal charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.In July, before Mr. Bragg’s election, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the Trump Organization with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from authorities.The office, then under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also accused Mr. Weisselberg of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that should have been reported as income.On Tuesday, lawyers for the company and for Mr. Weisselberg argued in court documents that those charges should be dismissed. The district attorney’s office will have a chance to respond before the judge overseeing the case decides whether to dismiss some of the charges.The case has been tentatively scheduled to go to trial at the end of this summer.New York State Civil InquiryThe New York attorney general, Letitia James, had been working with Manhattan prosecutors on their criminal investigation. But she is also conducting a parallel civil inquiry into some of the same conduct, including scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump’s company fraudulently misled lenders about the value of its assets.Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall, is expected to continue her civil investigation.The inquiry is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets — which Ms. James has said were marked by repeated misrepresentations — were part of a pattern of fraud, or simply Trumpian showmanship.Last week, a state judge ruled that Ms. James can question Mr. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, under oath as part of the inquiry in the coming weeks.The Trumps said they would appeal the decision. Even if their appeals are unsuccessful, it is likely they would decline to answer questions if forced to sit for interviews under oath. When another son of Mr. Trump’s, Eric Trump, was questioned in October 2020, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself, according to a court filing.Westchester County Criminal InvestigationIn Westchester County, Miriam E. Rocah, the district attorney, appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course to reduce its taxes. She has subpoenaed the company for records on the matter.But the Manhattan investigation, in which prosecutors had been bringing witnesses before a grand jury before pausing in mid-January, appeared to be more advanced.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More