Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Meta’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Quarter

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      At some point, the jig is up for almost every highflying tech company (consider that Cisco was, for a time in 2000, the world’s most valuable company). That’s usually because executives put on blinders to one constant rule of innovation I’ve observed: The young devour the old.So, are the worrisome quarterly results posted Wednesday by the outfit formerly known as Facebook an early sign of that? That seemed to be Wall Street’s conclusion, which until now has showered the social networking giant with unquestioning love, but nonetheless shaved more than $250 billion off its market value, or 26 percent, the largest one-day dollar drop for a U.S. company in history.That’s quite the indictment, since the money crowd has stuck beside the company despite a roiling series of controversies in the 18 years since its founding. Privacy violations, foreign interference, harmful impacts on teenage girls, data breaches, voluminous disinformation and misinformation, and the hosting of citizens charged with seditious conspiracy have made the company into the singular villain of this digital age. It has even supplanted the ire that was once aimed at Microsoft (ironically, seen today as the “good” tech company).But until now, none of these myriad sins have seemed to matter to investors, who have cheered on Facebook’s digital advertising dominance that has yielded astonishing profits.It posted $10.3 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, an 8 percent dip, despite a 20 percent sales gain to $33.7 billion. But those profits were a disappointment, dragged down in part by $10 billion in 2021 spending on its Reality Labs unit, which makes its virtual reality glasses and similar products. That’s serious money to throw at something, but it looks to be just the tip of Meta’s spear in the battle to dominate the still vaporous metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg has clearly decided to go all in on what he views as the battleground for the future.There are other troubling signs, including the meteoric rise of TikTok and the impact of Apple’s ad tracking changes that have hurt Facebook’s ability to hoover up users’ personal data in service of targeted ads.While the Apple challenge and the metaverse spending are certainly troubling, what we might be seeing is the market’s tiring of co-founder Zuckerberg at the helm, even as more exciting and energetic rivals come into play. Even Microsoft seems more relevant and vibrant, including its recent and very deft plan to snap up Activision, a move Meta wouldn’t dare make due to regulatory scrutiny.So Facebook is forced to be creative on its own, not always its strongest suit given how it is known for ham-handedly shoplifting ideas from others.Indeed, Zuckerberg did not sound much like Caesar Augustus — the techie’s favored Roman emperor — in his earnings call with investors: “Although our direction is clear, it seems that our path ahead is not quite perfectly defined.” You’d imagine $10 billion would buy a better map.Thus, right on schedule, the company is trying to soften up Washington influencers for its next act, the metaverse. According to a report by Bloomberg, Meta is focused on think tanks and nonprofits, especially those that lean libertarian or free market, to presumably convince them that what happened back in web2 will not be an issue in web3, the supposed next phase of the internet.Narrator: It will be in issue.Meta gives funding to a lot of these organizations, of course, a kind of soft way to influence. It spent $20 million on lobbying alone last year — more than five times the amount in 2012 — which is more than triple Apple’s spending and roughly double Alphabet and Microsoft’s. Amazon was the only tech company to surpass Meta, with about $20.5 million in lobbying spending.Given the increasing bipartisan furor with the company, it makes sense. As Neil Chilson of Stand Together, a nonprofit associated with Charles Koch, put it: “There’s a lot of scrutiny on them, and they are trying to move into a new space and bring the temperature down at the same time.”Ya think? In a “Sway” interview I did recently, former Disney C.E.O. and Chairman Bob Iger noted the dangers of the metaverse: “There’s been enough said and criticized about toxic behavior in internet 2.0; Twitter, Facebook, you name it. Imagine what can happen when you have a much more compelling and immersive and, I’ll call it, collective of people or avatars of people in that environment, and what kind of toxic behavior could happen.”“Something Disney is going to have to consider as it talks about creating a metaverse for themselves is moderating and monitoring behavior,” he said.So it appears Zuckerberg is right about one thing about Meta’s direction: It’s going to be a bumpy ride.4 QuestionsI caught up with Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under President Donald Trump and now runs the Krebs Stamos Group. I’ve edited his answers.Are you surprised that the conspiracy theories around election fraud have gotten worse, despite all your efforts to debunk the information, which ultimately led to your being fired in a tweet?Sadly, no, not really. That’s unfortunately the game plan — they flood the zone with garbage to overwhelm evidence-based reality. Not to necessarily prove any particular plot or conspiracy theory, but to confuse the masses so they don’t know whom to trust, they just know that “something isn’t right here.” What really set the stage was the former president’s supporters had been primed to expect a rigged election. After all, Trump had been telling them that’s the only way he could lose. This agitation was made that much easier due to most voters only having a casual understanding of how elections work, exacerbated by some of the changes and confusion around voting during Covid. So, when you’ve been told to expect shenanigans, and you don’t know how anything works, the things you don’t understand look like conspiracy theories. Even though we were regularly debunking election-related conspiracy theories, the flood of lies pushed by elites and influencers amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy that overwhelmed us.Then there’s the ecosystem of grifters that boost these conspiracy theories for their own benefit, because ultimately disinformation is about power, money and influence. Until we hold them accountable for the harm they’ve done to democracy, they’ll continue to do it. We have to place the blame squarely where it lies: The fact that the former president continues to push lies about the 2020 election, simply because he can’t take the loss. That his own party won’t stand up for the country is really one of the more shameful chapters in American political history.The recent New York Times story that as president, Trump tried to get Homeland Security to seize the voting machines feels ominous. Were you aware of this and what is your assessment of his aims?I wasn’t aware of the scheme before I was fired in mid-November 2020, but I heard about it from a few reporters and government officials soon afterward in December. That it was even floated for consideration in the Oval Office is completely insane. It also says a lot that Trump’s own cabinet officials and advisers rejected the concept out of hand as beyond their authorities and illegal. Based on who was reportedly pushing this garbage to the president — namely Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Phil Waldron) — maybe they thought they were going to actually find something despite all available evidence. The more likely outcome? There was nothing there to find and they would either misrepresent something or manufacture a story entirely. That’s exactly what happened in Antrim County in Michigan in mid-December, where a group issued a report that was riddled with errors and misinterpretations that was then thoroughly debunked by experts in the field. Even if the plot had survived the inevitable legal action by the targeted states, it would have been the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security or some other agency analyzing any seized machines, and not the president’s rogue group of advisers. There was no evidence then or now that suggests they’d find foreign manipulation of votes or vote counting — because it didn’t happen.What are your biggest worries about the next election and what is your confidence that it will be secure?I remain confident that the work we all did through the 2020 election led to a secure, free and fair election. I also have continued confidence in the vast majority of professional election officials across the country committed to secure and transparent elections. Congress has to continue investing in elections so that we can continue the march toward 100 percent voter-verifiable paper. In 2016, less than 80 percent of votes had a paper ballot associated with the vote, with the remainder of votes stored on digital media. That’s hard to audit. In 2020, that number jumped to around 95 percent, according to a study by the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Entire states like Georgia and Pennsylvania shifted from paperless systems to paper ballot-based systems, leaving Louisiana as the only remaining state that’s broadly paperless. To its credit, Louisiana has tried, but has run into various procurement snags. We also need to continue expanding postelection, precertification audits that are based on transparent standards and methodologies conducted by election audit professionals. One of my greatest concerns looking ahead to 2022 midterms and 2024 is not necessarily a foreign cyber threat; instead, it’s a domestic insider threat posed by partisan election officials. This isn’t just speculation. In Mesa County, Colo., the Republican county clerk is under grand jury investigation for allowing unauthorized access to voting systems. More concerning, there are “Stop the Steal” candidates running in secretary of state races in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan and elsewhere that, if in office in 2024, would be in a position to affect how elections are run and even refuse to certify if their preferred candidate doesn’t win.That’s just not any American democracy that I recognize, and if you’re anything like me, you’re a single-issue voter: If you run on a stolen election platform, you’re unfit for public office.You formed your firm Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, and one of your first clients was SolarWinds, the famously hacked network software company. What do you do for your clients and what’s the most important thing companies need to pay attention to?The set of companies in the sights of high-level cyber actors are no longer limited to the big banks, energy firms and defense contractors. Instead, the hundreds of technology firms that are critical supply chain partners for just about every aspect of our nation’s economic engine are now targeted by foreign cyber actors. Companies must recognize that if you’re shipping a product, you’re shipping a target; if you’re hosting a service, you are the target, and then adjust their approach to security accordingly.We work with clients to develop and implement risk management strategies informed by this dramatic shift in geopolitical and geo-economic concerns that shape our world today. What’s happening in Eastern Europe is a perfect example. While we might not know for certain if Russia is going to attack Ukraine, Russia has plenty of offensive options, and they’ve proven time and again that they aren’t afraid to use cyber capabilities that directly impact businesses across the globe. Then there’s the Chinese government. As Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray said this week, “Whatever makes an industry tick, they target.” Using hacking, spying, covert acquisition and other techniques to steal intellectual property from advanced technology firms, they seek to gain a commercial advantage for Chinese firms. State actors exploiting our growing digital dependencies for intelligence, commercial, influence and military purposes is now the norm, rather than the exception, and every business needs a security strategy driven from the c-suite.Lovely & LoathsomeLovely: With TikTok full of some truly vile and dangerous challenges (the now-banned milk crate challenge, for one), perhaps we need to focus on the many inventive and fun ones. I am enamored of what’s known as the Drop Down Challenge, in which people, well, drop down into a squat, typically synchronized. There was a skit on it on “Saturday Night Live” this past week, but the real thing is oddly satisfying and, mostly, persistently creative. Check out this one called the “nurse edition.”Loathsome: Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, continues his reign as Twitter’s most obtuse tweeter. Last month, after walking back his repeated statements acknowledging there was a “violent terrorist attack” on the Capitol last January, Cruz the next day accused President Biden of “trying to signal weakness and surrender” to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Mockery ensued, obviously, but that digital dopiness was somehow topped this week with his tweet advising people in his state to get ready for cold conditions, noting it’s “better to be over prepared than underprepared for winter weather.” That comes just a year after he decamped to Cancún, Mexico, amid a serious home heating fuel crisis in Texas, a debacle thoroughly chronicled on Twitter.Conclusion: You cuncan’t make this stuff up! More

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      Memos Show Roots of Trump’s Focus on Jan. 6 and Alternate Electors

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      Just over two weeks after Election Day, lawyers working with the Trump campaign set out a rationale for creating alternate slates of electors as part of an effort to buy time to overturn the results.Fifteen days after Election Day in 2020, James R. Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, received a memo setting out what became the rationale for an audacious strategy: to put in place alternate slates of electors in states where President Donald J. Trump was trying to overturn his loss.The memo, from another lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro, may not have been the first time that lawyers and allies of Mr. Trump had weighed the possibility of naming their own electors in the hopes that they might eventually succeed in flipping the outcome in battleground states through recounts and lawsuits baselessly asserting widespread fraud.But the Nov. 18 memo and another three weeks later are among the earliest known efforts to put on paper proposals for preparing alternate electors. They helped to shape a crucial strategy that Mr. Trump would embrace with profound consequences for himself and the nation.The memos show how just over two weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump’s campaign was seeking to buy itself more time to undo the results. At the heart of the strategy was the idea that their real deadline was not Dec. 14, when official electors would be chosen to reflect the outcome in each state, but Jan. 6, when Congress would meet to certify the results.And in that focus on Jan. 6 lay the seeds of what became a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to accept the validity of a challenge to the outcome and to block Congress from finalizing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — a campaign that would also lead to a violent assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters and an extraordinary rupture in American politics.“It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on Dec. 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence,” the Nov. 18 memo said. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”Read the Nov. 18 Memo on Alternate Trump ElectorsThe memo is among the earliest known efforts to put on paper proposals for preparing alternate slates of Trump electors in Biden-won states.Read Document 7 pagesBoth federal prosecutors and the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 have recently confirmed that they are examining the effort to submit alternate slates of electors to the Electoral College. On Friday, congressional investigators issued subpoenas to 14 people who claimed to be official Trump electors in states that were actually won by Mr. Biden.The two memos, obtained by The New York Times, were used by Mr. Trump’s top lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and others like John Eastman as they developed a strategy intended to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, according to a person familiar with the matter.The memos were initially meant to address Mr. Trump’s challenge to the outcome in Wisconsin, but they ultimately became part of a broader conversation by members of Mr. Trump’s legal team as the president looked toward Jan. 6 and began to exert pressure on Mr. Pence to hold up certification of the Electoral College count.Neither Mr. Troupis nor Mr. Chesebro responded to requests for comment about the memos. Even before they were written, legislative leaders in Arizona and Wisconsin sought advice from their own lawyers about whether they had the power to alter slates of electors after the election took place and were effectively told they did not, according to new documents obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.Mr. Trump has long embraced the scheme. Just this past weekend, he issued a statement reiterating that he was justified in using the process in Congress on Jan. 6 to challenge the outcome and asserting that Mr. Pence “could have overturned the election.”The plan to employ alternate electors was one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive efforts to stave off defeat, beginning even before some states had finished counting ballots and culminating in the pressure placed on Mr. Pence when he presided over the joint congressional session on Jan. 6. At various times, the scheme involved state lawmakers, White House aides and lawyers like Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Troupis.James R. Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, sought to invalidate the use of absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane Counties.Pool photo by Greg NashIn the weeks after the election, Mr. Troupis oversaw the Trump campaign’s recount effort in Wisconsin, which ultimately showed that Mr. Biden had won by more than 20,000 votes. In early December 2020, Mr. Troupis filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Trump campaign that sought to invalidate the use of absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which both have large numbers of Black voters.At a hearing in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, one justice, Rebecca Dallet, noted that Mr. Troupis had not sought to invalidate votes in Wisconsin’s 70 other counties but had focused only on the “most nonwhite, urban” parts of the state. Another justice, Jill Karofsky, echoed that sentiment, telling Mr. Troupis that his lawsuit “smacks of racism.”In late December, Mr. Chesebro joined Mr. Troupis in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the question of whether competing slates of electors in Wisconsin and six other contested states could be considered on Jan. 6. The high court denied their request.The language and suggestions in the memos from Mr. Chesebro to Mr. Troupis closely echo tactics and talking points that were eventually adopted by Mr. Trump’s top lawyers.The November memo, for example, called Jan. 6 the “hard deadline” for settling the results of the election and advised that the Trump campaign had nearly two months for “judicial proceedings” to challenge the outcome. It also suggested that Trump-friendly electors in Wisconsin needed to meet in Madison, the state capital, on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the Electoral College would be voting.The second memo was dated Dec. 9, 2020, and expanded on the plan. It set forth an analysis of how to legally authorize alternate electors in six key swing states, including Wisconsin. It noted that the scheme was “unproblematic” in Arizona and Wisconsin, “slightly problematic” in Michigan, “somewhat dicey” in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and “very problematic” in Nevada.Read the Dec. 9 Memo on Alternate Trump ElectorsThe document elaborated on an earlier memo about preparing alternate slates of Trump electors in Biden-won states.Read Document 5 pagesRepresentative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said the panel was examining the origins of the plans to put forward alternate electors. The panel already has in its possession memos that were written by Mr. Eastman and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, in late December 2020 and early January 2021; those memos laid out steps for Congress to take to cast aside Mr. Biden’s electors in key swing states.“We know this was a coordinated effort on behalf of the former president and those around him to overturn a free and fair election,” Mr. Aguilar said. “We continue to learn new and more details. It’s incredibly troubling to know the lengths they went to support these efforts in multiple states.”Mr. Aguilar said that he and others on the panel believed the plan to use the electors was connected to other aspects of Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in power, such as proposals to seize voting machines and to put intense pressure on Mr. Pence to throw out legitimate electoral votes.“We need to know the depth of that plan, and we need to know the different ways in which they sought to operationalize their theory,” he said. More

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      Who Believes in Democracy?

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      “There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power have raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”Against this complicated backdrop, Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting, and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could potentially win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.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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      Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      New accounts show that the former president was more directly involved than previously known in plans developed by outside advisers to use national security agencies to seek evidence of fraud.Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.The people familiar with the matter were briefed on the events by participants or had firsthand knowledge of them.The accounts about the voting machines emerged after a weekend when Mr. Trump declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol last Jan. 6 if he were re-elected. In a statement issued after the rally, Mr. Trump also suggested that his vice president, Mike Pence, could have personally “overturned the election” by refusing to count delegates to the Electoral College who had vowed to cast their votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The new information helps to flesh out how the draft executive orders to seize voting machines came into existence and points in particular to the key role played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron.According to people familiar with the accounts, Mr. Waldron, shortly after the election, began telling associates that he had found irregularities in vote results that he felt were suggestive of fraud. He then came up with the idea of having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security confiscate the machines to preserve evidence.Mr. Waldron first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, whom he says he served with in the Defense Intelligence Agency.The plans were among an array of options that were placed before Mr. Trump in the tumultuous days and weeks that followed the election, developed by an ad hoc group of lawyers like Sidney Powell and other allies including Mr. Flynn and Mr. Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Mr. Giuliani and his longtime associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his team.Around the same time that Mr. Trump brought up the possibility of having the Justice Department seize the voting machines, for example, he also tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them, people familiar with the matter said. The state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan.The meeting with Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.Mr. Trump mentioned a specific state that had used machines built by Dominion Voting Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud, although it is unclear which state Mr. Trump was referring to. Mr. Barr, who had been briefed extensively at that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the theories being pushed by Mr. Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines were unfounded, told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no basis for seizing the machines because there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.It was only after several early options were exhausted that Mr. Waldron pitched the idea of using other parts of the federal government to seize the machines to both Mr. Giuliani and members of the Trump legal team, and to Mr. Flynn and his own associates, including Ms. Powell and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election.Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, at his distillery in Dripping Springs, Texas, last year.ReutersMr. Waldron, who owns a bar and distillery outside Austin, Texas, was previously best known for having circulated a 38-page PowerPoint presentation to lawmakers and White House aides that was filled with extreme plans to overturn the election.Mr. Giuliani was vehemently opposed to the idea of the military taking part in the seizure of machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. The conflict between him and his legal team, and Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne came to a dramatic head on Dec. 18, 2020, during a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Georgia Prosecutor Investigating Trump Seeks Safety Assistance From the F.B.I.

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      The Fulton County district attorney expressed concern about the former president’s comments at a rally in Texas.ATLANTA — The district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is conducting a criminal investigation of former President Donald J. Trump has asked for an F.B.I. risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta, citing “alarming” rhetoric used by Mr. Trump at a rally in Texas over the weekend.The Fulton County prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, is planning to impanel a special grand jury in May to look into accusations that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to improperly influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Among other things, the investigation is looking into a call that Mr. Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Ms. Willis, a Democrat, made her request for a security assessment in a letter on Sunday to J.C. Hacker, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Atlanta field office. Ms. Willis said that she and her staff had “already made adjustments to accommodate security concerns during the course of the investigation, considering the communications we have received from persons unhappy with our commitment to fulfill our duties.”But she also noted that Mr. Trump, at his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, made “multiple references to investigations that are known to concern his activities.” Ms. Willis’s request to the F.B.I. was reported earlier by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.At the rally, Mr. Trump said he would consider, if re-elected in 2024, pardoning people prosecuted for the attack on the National Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and told supporters to start protests in Atlanta and New York — where he is also facing civil and criminal investigations of his business — if prosecutors “do anything wrong.”Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor in Fulton County, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Willis noted that Mr. Trump told the crowd, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”She also noted that Mr. Trump said the investigations involved “prosecutorial misconduct,” and said the prosecutors were “vicious horrible people.” “They’re racist and they’re very sick,” he continued. “They’re mentally sick.”Ms. Willis is African American, as are Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is conducting a civil investigation of Mr. Trump, and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who inherited the criminal inquiry in New York from his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who is white.Ms. Willis said the rhetoric was “more alarming” in light of Mr. Trump raising the possibility of pardoning the Jan. 6 protesters.“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Willis wrote. More

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      Election Deniers Are Running for Secretary of State Across the Country

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      Brazenly partisan candidates who insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are transforming races for the once-obscure office of secretary of state.PHOENIX — Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.For decades, secretaries of state worked in relative anonymity, setting regulations and enforcing rules for how elections were administered by local counties and boards. Some held their jobs for many years and viewed themselves not as politicians but as bureaucrats in chief, tending to such arcane responsibilities as keeping the state seal or maintaining custody of state archives.The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election changed all that.In the two months between Election Day and Congress’s certification of President Biden’s victory, Mr. Trump and his allies pressured Republican secretaries of state, election board members and other officials in battleground states to overturn his defeat. In a phone call that is now the subject of an Atlanta grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s actions in Georgia, the former president urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden.That intense focus on a once-obscure state-level office has dramatically transformed its place in American politics — and the pool of candidates it attracts. Campaigns for secretaries of state this year are attracting more money, more attention and more brazenly partisan candidates than ever before.All told, some 21 candidates who dispute Mr. Biden’s victory are running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan group tracking races for secretary of state throughout the country.“It’s like putting arsonists in charge of the Fire Department,” said Joanna Lydgate, the group’s chief executive. “When we think about the anti-democracy playbook, you change the rules and you change the players so you can change the outcome.”Many of the election deniers are running in solidly red states where it is less likely that their actions could tilt a presidential election. But several others, who have formed a coalition calling itself the America First slate, are running in states won by Mr. Biden in 2020, including in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.The coalition’s members are coordinating talking points and sharing staff members and fund-raising efforts — an unusual degree of cooperation for down-ballot candidates from different states. They are in strong position to win Republican primaries in those battleground states, as well as in somewhat-bluer Colorado and heavily Democratic California.Their chances in November, should they succeed in the primaries, could rest heavily on how well Republicans fare in the midterm elections, given voters’ tendency to vote for down-ballot candidates such as secretary of state from the same party as their choices for governor or senator.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans appear poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.While local election officials typically oversee the counting of individual ballots, and state legislatures sign off on slates for the Electoral College, secretaries of state often certify elections and set the tone of how elections are run. Their election-management duties generally include distributing voter registration cards, allocating voting machines, educating voters, auditing election results and ordering recounts.Had secretaries of state taken their cues from Mr. Trump in the last election, they could have put their thumbs on the scales of fair elections by forcing the closure of polling places, removing ballot drop boxes or withholding other resources that could make voting easier in heavily Democratic precincts. Worse, critics say, they could have raised doubts about, or even refused to certify, Mr. Biden’s victories.The powers of secretaries of state to subvert elections vary from state to state and are largely untested in court. Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia raised the specter of out-and-out fraud in the tabulation of a presidential vote. Short of that, in states where secretaries of state have the power to certify elections, the refusal to do so could be a vital step in overturning one. In a presidential election, state legislators and the governor hold the power to approve an alternative set of presidential electors, and refusing to certify could boost such an effort.In contests for governor or for House or Senate seats, the refusal to certify the result of an election could send states into uncharted legal waters.Those who say they are alarmed at the possibilities include many current Democratic secretaries of state — and a few Republican ones.“The narrative that is being promoted by people who are ill-informed and simply trying to promote a political narrative to benefit themselves in a particular candidacy is very dangerous,” said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama who is term-limited.Former President Donald J. Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe significance of the America First coalition’s parallel efforts can be seen clearly in Arizona, where the slate’s candidate is Mark Finchem, a former firefighter and real estate agent who has served in the state House since 2015 and has become the leading Republican contender for secretary of state. He has raised some $663,000 for his campaign, according to state filings, more than the two leading Democratic candidates combined.Mr. Finchem, who declined to comment for this article, was in Washington on Jan. 6 and attended the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the Capitol. He has publicly acknowledged his affiliation with the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose leader and other members were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Capitol riot. He championed the Republican-ordered review of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County — though he never endorsed its conclusion that Mr. Biden won — and received a prime speaking spot in Mr. Trump’s Jan. 15 rally outside Phoenix.There, Mr. Finchem told the crowd that the 2020 election had prompted him to run for secretary of state, said he was part of a “nationwide populist movement to regain control over our government” and called for the State Legislature to decertify the presidential result in Arizona, which Mr. Biden carried by nearly 11,000 votes.“Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it — Donald Trump won,” Mr. Finchem said.The coalition’s other candidates include Jim Marchant in Nevada, a former state legislator; Rachel Hamm in California, who contends that Mr. Trump actually won that deep-blue state; and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, who developed a high profile in conservative media after she made uncorroborated claims that she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted in Detroit during the 2020 election, allegations that have been disproved by both local election officials and courts.Major donors to the coalition include such promoters of election conspiracies as Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, and Patrick Byrne, a former executive at Overstock.com, both of whom have also helped fund several election-denial campaigns and lawsuits. Mr. Byrne said he gave the group $15,000.“​​We would like as many like-minded secretary of state candidates to come forward as we can,” Mr. Marchant said at a Las Vegas conference that featured members of the coalition along with speakers who are well-known to followers of QAnon conspiracy theories. “I’ve got a few that have contacted me. We’re working to bring them into the coalition.”In an interview, Mr. Marchant said the group had presented its theories about the 2020 election at three “summits” in different states recently and planned others in Wisconsin, Texas, Colorado and Nevada.He brushed off concerns about undermining confidence in elections and instead assailed sitting state and local officials for resisting further audits of the 2020 vote. “If they’re so confident, wouldn’t they gloat and say, ‘See, we told you so?’” he said. “They won’t. They can’t afford to do that.”United States Representative Jody Hice of Georgia was one of the first secretary of state challengers to be endorsed by Mr. Trump.Dustin Chambers/ReutersTony Daunt, a longtime Michigan Republican official who was appointed last year to the panel that certifies the state’s election results, said Ms. Karamo, who has falsely claimed that Mr. Trump won Michigan, was unqualified to be secretary of state because of the “nonsense regarding the stolen election.”But Mr. Daunt and Mr. Merrill, of Alabama, are among very few Republican election officials who have publicly criticized the spreading of lies about the 2020 election. Instead, pro-Trump Republicans are enthusiastic about those candidates, and both the candidates and their supporters say the changes they are pushing for will make it more difficult to commit election fraud, which they portray as a pressing threat.Mr. Finchem is sponsoring a bill in Arizona that would treat all voters’ ballots as public records and make them searchable online. Another of his bills would require all ballots to be counted by hand, although studies show that hand counting introduces more errors. And he has repeatedly called for “currency grade” paper as a countermeasure against fake ballots, though there is no evidence that fake ballots have posed a threat to fair elections.Nothing and no one has catalyzed Republican enthusiasm for secretary of state contests more than Mr. Trump himself, who has offered three endorsements for Mr. Finchem, Ms. Karamo and United States Representative Jody Hice, who is challenging Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia’s Republican primary. Mr. Hice reported more than $575,000 in donations for his secretary of state candidacy in June, twice Mr. Raffensperger’s total.And Mr. Marchant, in Nevada, said he entered the race after being encouraged by allies of Mr. Trump.While the money being spent on races for secretary of state as yet does not approach the fund-raising by candidates for governor or Senate, they are no longer the low-budget affairs they once were. In Georgia, Michigan and Minnesota, fund-raising is more than double what it was at this point during the 2018 midterms, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Despite their fund-raising struggles in the Arizona contest, Democrats are having some success creating a national support structure for secretary of state candidates.Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan who is facing a likely re-election battle against Ms. Karamo, has raised $1.2 million this campaign cycle, more than six times what her Republican predecessor raised by this point in 2014. Nationally, Democratic candidates for secretary of state raised six times as much money in 2021 — and from five times as many donors — as they did in 2017, according to ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform.Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, claimed she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted during the 2020 election.Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesJena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said she had hired full-time staff for the first time in the association’s history. She said the group had set a fund-raising goal of $15 million for this cycle, far surpassing the $1.8 million it raised in 2019 and 2020, and had raised $4.5 million toward that goal so far.“The stature of the office is different, and the stature of what officeholders are doing is also different,” Ms. Griswold said.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Amanda Gorman’s Message to the World

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      More from our inbox:Teaching During Omicron: A Dinner Party AnalogyLet’s Consider SecessionAmerica Needs a Long GameA National Identity CardReasons to Be VeganAmanda Gorman delivering “The Hill We Climb” on Jan. 20, 2021.Pool photo by Patrick SemanskyTo the Editor:“If You’re Alive, You’re Afraid,” by Amanda Gorman (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 23), was one of the most insightful, provocative and emotionally uplifting pieces I have read in a very long time. It should be required reading for all world and American leaders.In just a relatively few words, Ms. Gorman, the poet at the inauguration a year ago, managed to touch my heart and the hearts of so many others who are in constant emotional turmoil because of events over the past several years: fear of getting sick, fear of losing one’s life or the lives of loved ones, and a fear of democracy on the edge of collapse, here and around the world.The rise of overt racism, antisemitism and hatred of immigrants that has taken hold of so many of us has been sheer torture.It is time for us to heal. That will not come from hatred, it will not come from greed and it will not come from destructive behavior. It will come only from compassion, love, patience and tolerance.Morton H. GruskySanta Fe, N.M.To the Editor:In this time of widespread fear in America, Amanda Gorman sends an important message: Strength comes from actively coping with fear rather than suppressing it. Recognizing that fear is an automatic and necessary alert to danger, Ms. Gorman provides an implied rebuttal to the common advice parents often give to their children, “Don’t be afraid.”Instead, worried families can best comfort their understandably anxious children by asking them, “How can I help you feel safe, in spite of your scary feelings?” That discussion can reassure children, validate their feelings and let them know that their own actions, words and/or play can make them feel safer and less overwhelmed.Robert AbramovitzNew YorkThe writer, a child psychiatrist and child trauma expert, is a senior consultant at the National Child Trauma Workforce Institute.To the Editor:As an American abroad, I was moved to tears by Amanda Gorman’s openness, clarity and courage! In a time of flagging hopes, spiraling hatred and wholesale despair, her words shone with their resilience and honesty.Any time I worry about being overtaken by my own fears I will reread it and continue my efforts to produce positive change in our country.Reavis Hilz-WardFrankfurtTeaching During Omicron: A Dinner Party AnalogyDeborah Aguet, the principal at Normont Early Education Center in Los Angeles, took Mila Gomillion’s temperature before school.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesTo the Editor:What is it like teaching during Omicron?Imagine you are assigned to cater a dinner party, only you don’t know how many people are expected to show up. You are given a list of the guests, their allergies, food preferences, who is vegan, kosher, halal. Perhaps half the guests will stay home. You will know who is coming to dinner only when you open your door. You are expected to provide an excellent dinner, regardless of who is present to enjoy it.The next night, you are scheduled to have another party for those same guests. But with a slightly different menu. Something that builds upon the previous meal. Except for the people who didn’t show up for the first party. They need to have the meal they missed and the new meal. Again, you will not know who is coming to your dinner party until you open your doors.And the people who are still home need to have all the meals they missed. Even if they don’t have an appetite.And that is sort of what it is like to teach during Omicron.The remarkable thing is, you would not know how crazy this is if you joined me in visiting our classes. What you would see are teachers thoroughly engaged in their work. You would see our students enthusiastically engaged in the topics at hand. You would hear laughter and animated conversations, complex discussions and thoughtful questions. You would see learning taking place.David GetzNew YorkThe writer is a middle school principal.Let’s Consider Secession Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “We Need to Think the Unthinkable About the U.S.,” by Jonathan Stevenson and Steven Simon (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 14):I agree with the article, but here’s my unthinkable: secession — no war, no violence, just go separate ways. It is increasingly clear that there are two competing stories of American values.Let’s actually consider what will happen if Texas splits from the United States and is followed by a number of other red states. Maybe by thinking the unthinkable we can prevent it. Or maybe it is better to live in two different countries, separated by philosophical differences, while cooperating for economic and defense reasons, as in Europe.Think of how productive both countries could be if they didn’t have to waste time arguing over the things that currently divide us.Dan EvansHuntington, N.Y.America Needs a Long Game  Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times; photographs by Aurelien Meunier, Chip Somodevilla, Mikhail Svetlov, Ira Wyman via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Playing a Long Game, Putin Has America Where He Wants It,” by Fiona Hill (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 25):Ms. Hill’s excellent essay underscores a serious weakness in the government of the United States. Simply stated, this country does not have a long game, and our cultural bias toward short-term results means that we have little idea how to play it.Whoever is in political power disregards thinking the long game in favor of retaining political superiority and one-upmanship against adversaries in our own country.Playing against China’s long game of attracting foreign companies, many U.S. firms moved manufacturing to China to achieve short-term profits. The pandemic exposed the inherent weakness of manufacturing far away. Now our country is faced with the difficult task of unwinding the supply chain of various goods, cheap and expensive, after we victimized ourselves with critical, even lifesaving, goods in short supply during this pandemic.Economics, business, politics, the military and foreign relations are all very much intertwined. Except for strategic thinkers like Ms. Hill, we tend to compartmentalize them, to our detriment. It behooves the leaders of this nation, both political and business, to understand our close allies and our adversaries well in all aspects, so we can take the best actions in our long-term national interests. I am not sure I will live long enough to see this happen.Ben MyersHarvard, Mass.A National Identity CardTo the Editor:Re “Democrats Face Costly New Slog on Voting Curbs” (front page, Jan. 16):Many of the issues regarding the new voting regulations being implemented by both Democratic- and Republican-controlled state legislatures could be mitigated if the United States adopted a national identity card issued — free — by the federal government to everyone 18 years and older.The card would confirm both citizenship and identity, and could be used as an ID for voting, banking, domestic travel, and purchases of tobacco and alcoholic beverages. In fact, a prototype of this card already exists: the U.S. passport card.Many of the concerns voiced by Democrats regarding burdensome paperwork requirements that impedes voting by disadvantaged Americans and by Republicans regarding alleged fraud by voters would be eliminated. Anyone who believes that a mandatory national identity card raises a privacy issue should avoid using a smartphone!Ira SohnNew YorkReasons to Be VeganIn Tel Aviv, Eager Tourist offers vegan culinary tours that visit food markets, farmers and restaurants.Eager TouristTo the Editor:Re “Vegan Travel: It’s Not Fringe Anymore” (Travel, nytimes.com, Jan. 21):It was heartening to hear that veganism is being taken seriously in the travel industry. The article cites an elevated environmental awareness that is prompting people to go vegan. Preventing further environmental degradation is indeed an important reason to become vegan.But an equally vital reason is the world’s nonhuman animals that are regularly abused and exploited in our agricultural system as well as in fashion, entertainment and science.Veganism is so much more than a diet; it’s a commitment to live as compassionate a life as possible.April LangNew York More

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      Justice Dept. Is Reviewing Role of Fake Trump Electors, Top Official Says

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      Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”Luke Broadwater More