Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Mark Meadows Sought to Fight Election Outcome, Jan. 6 Panel Says

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      The House committee laid out its case for a contempt of Congress charge against Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to former President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released a report on Sunday that laid out its case for a contempt of Congress charge against Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to former President Donald J. Trump, presenting evidence of Mr. Meadows’s deep involvement in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.In the 51-page document, the committee said it wanted to question Mr. Meadows about an email he had sent a day before the attack advising that the National Guard would be used to defend Trump supporters. The panel said it also wanted to ask him about an exchange with an unnamed senator about rejecting electors for Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Meadows had been cooperating with the committee’s investigation, but he refused to appear for a scheduled deposition last week or to turn over additional documents, citing Mr. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege. The committee, which is controlled by Democrats, is slated to vote on Monday to recommend a contempt of Congress charge against him for his refusal to cooperate with its subpoena. That charge carries a penalty of up to a year in jail.Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows provided more than 9,000 pages of records to the committee. The information they contained raised additional questions, the panel said.Among the emails and text messages that Mr. Meadows turned over were the following, the panel said:A Nov. 7 email that discussed an attempt to arrange with state legislators to appoint slates of pro-Trump electors instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters. Mr. Meadows’s text messages also showed him asking members of Congress how to put Mr. Trump in contact with state legislators.Text messages Mr. Meadows exchanged with an unidentified senator in which he recounted Mr. Trump’s view on Vice President Mike Pence’s ability to reject electors from certain states. Mr. Trump “thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,” Mr. Meadows wrote.A Jan. 5 email in which Mr. Meadows said the National Guard would be present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to “protect pro Trump people.”Emails from Mr. Meadows to Justice Department officials on Dec. 29, Dec. 30 and Jan. 1 in which he encouraged investigations of voter fraud, including allegations already rejected by federal investigators and courts.Text messages Mr. Meadows exchanged with members of Congress as violence engulfed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in which lawmakers encouraged him to persuade Mr. Trump to discourage the attack, as well as a text message sent to one of the president’s family members in which Mr. Meadows said he was “pushing hard” for Mr. Trump to “condemn this.”Text messages reflecting Mr. Meadows’s private skepticism about some of the wild public statements about allegations of widespread election fraud and compromised voting machines that were put forth by Sidney Powell, a lawyer working with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.The committee also said it had a number of questions prompted by Mr. Meadows’s new book, “The Chief’s Chief,” and cited it as evidence that his refusal to testify was “untenable.”“Mr. Meadows has shown his willingness to talk about issues related to the Select Committee’s investigation across a variety of media platforms — anywhere, it seems, except to the Select Committee,” the panel wrote.The committee said it also had questions about why Mr. Meadows had used a personal cellphone, a Signal account and two personal Gmail accounts to conduct official business, and whether he had properly turned over all records from those accounts to the National Archives.The report comes as the committee is scrutinizing a 38-page PowerPoint document containing plans to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. That document, which Mr. Meadows provided to the committee, urged Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency to cling to power and included an unsupported claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.Mr. Meadows’s lawyer has said he provided the document to the committee because he had received it by email and did nothing with it.Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who has promoted false claims of election fraud, said that he had circulated the document among Mr. Trump’s allies and among lawmakers on Capitol Hill in the days before the mob violence. Mr. Giuliani has identified Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign.Mr. Waldron told The Washington Post that he had visited the White House several times after last year’s election and spoken with Mr. Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times.”Emily Cochrane More

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      In Bid for Control of Elections, Trump Loyalists Face Few Obstacles

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      A movement animated by Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election lies is turning its attention to 2022 and beyond.ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. — When thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Jan. 6 for the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, one of them was a pastor and substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pa., named Stephen Lindemuth.Mr. Lindemuth had traveled with a religious group from Elizabethtown to join in protesting the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s victory. In a Facebook post three days later, he complained that “Media coverage has focused solely on the negative aspect of the day’s events,” and said he had been in Washington simply “standing for the truth to be heard.”Shortly after, he declared his candidacy for judge of elections, a local Pennsylvania office that administers polling on Election Day, in the local jurisdiction of Mount Joy Township.Mr. Lindemuth’s victory in November in this conservative rural community is a milestone of sorts in American politics: the arrival of the first class of political activists who, galvanized by Donald J. Trump’s false claim of a stolen election in 2020, have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen.This belief has informed a wave of mobilization at both grass-roots and elite levels in the party with an eye to future elections. In races for state and county-level offices with direct oversight of elections, Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns, in which they enjoy a first-mover advantage in electoral contests that few partisans from either party thought much about before last November.And legislation that state lawmakers have passed or tried to pass this year in a number of states would assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control.“This is a five-alarm fire,” said Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over her state’s Trump-contested election in 2020 and may face a Trump-backed challenger next year. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”In some areas, new political battlefields are opening up where none existed before.Until this year, races for administrative positions like judge of elections were noncompetitive to the point of being more or less volunteer opportunities. Candidates ran unopposed, or sometimes not at all: The seat that Mr. Lindemuth ran for had been technically unoccupied before his election, filled by appointment by the County Board of Elections.“There’s a lot of apathy here,” said Lisa Sargen Heilner, a former Republican committeewoman in Mount Joy Township, who resigned her post shortly after local Republicans endorsed Mr. Lindemuth and his wife, Danielle, in a concurrent school board election in which they both won seats. “I just kind of wanted to disassociate myself from them,” Mrs. Heilner said.After Mr. Lindemuth won the G.O.P. primary for judge of elections in the spring, local Democrats struggled to find a candidate until Mike Corradino, an academic dean at a local community college, volunteered. “Like a lot of people, it troubles me what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Corradino said. He lost with 268 votes to Mr. Lindemuth’s 415.Mr. Lindemuth’s victory is one of the first among a class of political activists who have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term.Tim Stuhldreher/ One United LancasterKristy Moore, the local Democratic committeewoman and a seventh-grade English teacher who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Lindemuth in the school board race, said she had tried to attract the attention of county and state Democrats, but to no avail.“I’m not sure what the Democratic Party was worried about, but it didn’t feel like they were worried about school board and judge of elections races — all of these little positions,” she said.Mr. Lindemuth, whose phone was answered by a woman who refused to identify herself but declined to comment on his behalf, told The Atlantic in November that he saw the job as a public service. “It really has little to do with election results,” he said. “It’s more about filling in the gaps for the community.”But Mrs. Heilner said that Mr. Lindemuth was unknown in local Republican circles before he announced his candidacy, and Mr. Corradino expressed concern about his Jan. 6 involvement. “I hope that once he sees the responsibilities and the training, that would be a moderating influence,” Mr. Corradino said.“I’m hoping that we don’t have any constitutional crises in our neck of the woods,” he added. “But things are a bit scary.”In the months immediately after the election, Mr. Trump’s campaign to discredit the election’s outcome fueled a wave of lawsuits and partisan audits in closely contested states, none of which turned up evidence of more than extremely isolated instances of fraud.This activity — fueled by grass-roots activists, party donors, sitting Republican politicians and Mr. Trump himself — has evolved rapidly into an effort that looks forward, not backward: recruiting like-minded candidates for public offices large and small, and proposing and, in some cases, passing laws intended to give partisan actors more direct control over election systems.At every level, opponents are operating at a steep disadvantage. The electoral battles are being fought largely in areas where Democrats have struggled to maintain a foothold for over a decade. The legislative pushes are occurring in states where Republicans dominate both legislative and executive offices, and federal responses have been blocked by unified Republican opposition and Senate rules, which a dwindling but decisive number of Senate Democrats have resisted changing.Throughout, there is a stark asymmetry of enthusiasm: Where Mr. Trump’s partisans see the issue of election system control as a matter of life and death, polling suggests Democratic voters broadly do not.Secretaries of state like Ms. Benson, charged with administering elections in their states, are among the most visible targets of the Stop the Steal movement, and the clearest examples of how Mr. Trump’s election claims have opened up new, lopsided political terrain in heretofore sleepy corners of the electoral system.Although they run on party tickets, secretary of states’ campaigns have generally been amicable contests among bureaucratic professionals who pride themselves on placing civic responsibility over their parties’ pursuit of power. All of that changed when Mr. Trump and his allies, fuming over his loss in 2020, portrayed a handful of swing-state secretaries of state as supervillains, often wielding false claims of election malfeasance against them.After Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, resisted Mr. Trump’s personal pressure to overturn the election results, Mr. Trump denounced him at rallies and Mr. Raffensperger and his family became the targets of regular death threats. Demonstrators, some of them armed, gathered outside Ms. Benson’s home last December shortly after Mr. Trump baselessly claimed that there had been “massive voter fraud” in Michigan’s election.Secretaries of state like Ms. Benson are among the most visible targets of the movement.Paul Sancya/Associated PressA year later, Trump loyalists supporting his claims about the 2020 election are strong candidates and, in some cases, front-runners in Republican primaries for secretary of state across the country. In Georgia, Representative Jody Hice, who has said he is not “convinced at all, not for one second, that Joe Biden won the State of Georgia,” is running against Mr. Raffensperger in the Republican primary in May, with Mr. Trump’s backing.In November, Ms. Benson may find herself running against Kristina Karamo, a community college adjunct professor who has claimed that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, advocated for removing “traitors” from the Republican Party and accused Democrats of pursuing a “satanic agenda.” Since Mr. Trump endorsed her in September, she has considerably out-raised her rivals for the Republican nomination. (Ms. Karamo’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)Democrats fear that such contests may pit a highly motivated Republican base that has come to view these races as central fronts in the battle for America against Democratic voters who are barely aware the races are happening at all.“They have Trump hitting this one note all the time,” said Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster. Among Democrats, he said, “If you ask people what their concerns are, about Republicans or their daily lives, they don’t say ‘threats to democracy.’”In a PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist Poll in October, 82 percent of Democrats said they would trust the results of the 2024 presidential election to be accurate if their candidate did not win; only 33 percent of Republicans did. Other questions about the integrity and fairness of the election system consistently yielded comparable divides between the parties’ voters.Traditional campaign organizations have been slow to involve themselves significantly in secretary of state races, much less local election oversight offices.“Donald Trump and a lot of folks in his orbit were frankly ahead of the curve when it came to raising funds and organizing behind candidates who backed the big lie,” said Miles Taylor, a former official in Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security who this year helped to start the Renew America Movement, an organization supporting Republican and Democratic candidates running against Trump-backed Republicans.Mr. Taylor said that while his group was now active in congressional races, it did not yet have the resources to compete against Trump-endorsed candidates in state contests. Nor was the Democratic Party capable of filling the void, he said: “In a lot of these places, Democrats have no hope of winning a statewide election, and all that matters is the primary.”In other areas, Democrats are disadvantaged by pre-existing political losses. In 23 states, Republicans control both state legislatures and governors’ mansions. Democrats control both in only 15 states.The legislatures that Republicans now control have in the past year become laboratories for legislation that would remove barriers that stood in the way of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results. In seven states this year, lawmakers proposed bills that would have given partisan officials the ability to change election results in various ways. Although none passed, Republican-led legislatures in Arizona and in Georgia passed laws that directly removed various election oversight responsibilities from the secretaries of state — legislation that appeared to directly target specific officials who had been vilified by Mr. Trump.“We’ve never seen anything like that before,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, who co-wrote a recent report on the new state-level legislation.Ms. Weiser and other advocates have called for federal legislation to head off such efforts. “We must have that in order to have a comprehensive response,” said Norm Eisen, co-chair of the States United Democracy Center. But with the Democrats most likely to lose one or both houses of Congress in the next two election cycles, the time to pass it is fleeting.Several election and voting rights reform bills have foundered this year upon unified Republican opposition in a Senate where Democrats hold a one-vote majority. Ten Senate Republicans would need to break ranks in order to overcome the party’s filibuster of the legislation. Only one, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has voted for any of the bills so far.Several election and voting rights reform bills have foundered this year upon unified Republican opposition in a Senate.John Bazemore/Associated PressAmong the very few prominent Republicans who have supported federal efforts to curb the state legislatures’ power grabs, some have faulted congressional Democrats for spending the early months of the year trying to pass a sweeping voting reform bill that included longstanding policy priorities like campaign-finance reform that were anathema to Republicans and not directly related to heading off the threats to election systems.“That wasn’t something that was going to pass, and everybody knew it,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project.But Ms. Longwell also acknowledged that any Democrat-sponsored voting rights bill was dead on arrival in the Senate. “I think they would’ve run into the same problems,” she said. “After the election, Republicans were locked in.” This year, her organization started Republicans for Voting Rights, a campaign endorsing a compromise bill co-sponsored by Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat, and trying to rally Republican support for it. The legislation earned zero Republican votes.“I just don’t see it,” said Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democratic senator, who has sponsored bipartisan voting bills in the past and led bipartisan Rules Committee hearings on election threats this year. “We have tried every which way — not just Senator Manchin. A number of us tried and talked to them repeatedly for months.”Ms. Klobuchar is among an increasing number of Senate Democrats, including many of the party’s moderates, who have called for the filibuster rule’s elimination or reform this year — as has Mr. Biden, who said that he was “open to fundamentally altering the filibuster” at a CNN town hall in October.Several of the moderates have been meeting regularly with Mr. Manchin, the caucus’s most determined holdout, in recent months to discuss potential changes.The Hill newspaper reported this week that Mr. Manchin was in talks with some Senate Republicans about small changes to the rule that might prove acceptable to both parties, but the changes reportedly discussed appear unlikely to make passage of the proposed election and voting reform legislation any more likely.“I am frustrated that at this point, after everything we endured last year and after we all witnessed what happened on Jan. 6, there isn’t more of a sense of urgency,” Ms. Benson said. “We all have to band together and say, ‘Never again’ — as opposed to saying, ‘Well, maybe it will happen again, and maybe we’ll be ready.’” More

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      Republicans in Texas County, in Unusual Move, Upend Primary System

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      The G.O.P. in Potter County is planning to break away from a nonpartisan election board and hold its own primary next year, in a move criticized by election experts.The Republican Party in the second-largest county in the Texas Panhandle is planning to conduct its own election during the state primary in March, breaking away from a nonpartisan county election board in a highly unusual move.The G.O.P. in Potter County, which includes Amarillo, plans to use ballots that will be marked and counted by hand, rather than employ the electronic systems that the county has relied on for decades. Election experts said the changes would confuse voters and create more potential for fraud.Under Texas law, county parties are allowed to run their own primary elections, but the vast majority have contracted with local boards of election for decades. The decision, which was reported by Votebeat, an election news website, comes as Republicans nationally have continued to push baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and sow doubts about the reliability of election machinery.Daniel L. Rogers, the chairman of the Potter County Republicans, said that he made the decision this week because “a lot of voters have concerns” with the electronic counters and “don’t feel comfortable with them.” He did not cite evidence of any problems arising under the current system, and studies have shown that hand counting leads to more inaccuracies. He argued that paper ballots would be more secure.“The parties have become lazy and complacent, but the primaries are actually the party’s responsibility,” said Mr. Rogers, a real estate broker whose office was decorated with red Make America Great Again hats when a New York Times reporter interviewed him last year. “The counties are spending millions of dollars on electronic systems, but this way it’s a true secret ballot.”He said that “the voters are smarter than our elected officials, than administrators — they don’t trust the voters. I do.”Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University in Houston, said the move “removes the Republican Party one more step away from the standard electoral procedure.”He added: “The integrity of our electoral system depends on institutionalizing and professionalizing election boards. There will be more doubts about the overall outcome, or it will lead to more slip-ups and more potential flaws and problems than if the professionals ran it.”Potter County has about 57,000 registered voters, and they are overwhelmingly Republican: Roughly 70 percent cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump in 2020.Mr. Rogers, when asked if the election results nationally were valid, responded, “I don’t have any idea and that’s the problem — I don’t know if it was accurate or not.”Under state law, the county elections board will still be responsible for absentee and early voting, which a majority of voters in Texas use to cast their ballots. But the two systems, experts said, could complicate the process and make it easier for voters to cast ballots twice.“It opens the door wide to fraud,” Dr. Jones said. “It doesn’t close the door to fraud.”The legal office of the Texas secretary of state, who oversees elections in the state and who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, raised several concerns about the move.“Any time that a party conducts their own election rather than contracting with a county, it is more confusing to voters,” said Sam Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for communications. Still, he added that “ultimately it’s their decision to go at it alone.”One risk, Mr. Taylor said, is that candidates in contested races could file election challenges to prompt a court to order a new primary election. “It’s not unprecedented,” he said. “But county parties usually do not invite that opportunity upon themselves.”“They have every legal right to do so,” he added. “We can’t really intervene.”Melynn Huntley, the Potter County elections administrator, said that she had been taken aback by Mr. Rogers’s decision and that she was most worried about the potential to make it easier to vote twice.“The biggest worry I have is that those two systems will not talk with each other,” Ms. Huntley said. “His desire is to eliminate fraud, but there is a vulnerability in the plan. I am concerned whether this can function with high integrity.”Ms. Huntley, who has served as elections administrator for eight years, said that when she took on the job, she pledged not to vote in either party’s primary so that she could maintain her role as a nonpartisan overseer.“I am truly trying to figure out how this is going to work,” she said. More

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      PowerPoint Sent to Mark Meadows Is Examined by Jan. 6 Panel

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      Mark Meadows’s lawyer said the former White House chief of staff did not act on the document, which recommended that President Donald J. Trump declare a national emergency to keep himself in power.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is scrutinizing a 38-page PowerPoint document filled with extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election that Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, has turned over to the panel.The document recommended that Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the election results and included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that Mr. Meadows provided the document to the committee because he merely received it by email in his inbox and did nothing with it.“We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” Mr. Terwilliger said.Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.Mr. Waldron said he was not surprised that Mr. Meadows had received a version of the document, which exists in varied forms on internet sites.“He would have gotten a copy for situational awareness for what was being briefed on the Hill at the time,” Mr. Waldron said.On Jan. 4, members of Mr. Waldron’s team — he did not identify them — spoke to a group of senators and briefed them on the allegations of supposed election fraud contained in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron said. The following day, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members; that discussion focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he made the document available to the lawmakers.Mr. Meadows is not known to have worked directly with Mr. Waldron, who has described his military background as involving “information warfare.” However, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer as he fought to stay in power, has cited Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign.Mr. Meadows remains in a legal battle with the Jan. 6 committee, which is moving forward with holding him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a scheduled deposition or to turn over documents he believes could violate Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive privilege. Mr. Trump has filed suit claiming he still has the power to keep White House documents secret, an assertion several courts have rejected, though the case appears headed for the Supreme Court.Mr. Meadows has responded by filing suit in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to block the committee’s subpoenas. His lawsuit accuses the committee of issuing “two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas” against him, including one sent to Verizon for his phone and text-message data.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries More

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      Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills

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      Republicans plan to carry their push to reshape the nation’s electoral system into next year, with Democrats vowing to oppose them but holding few options in G.O.P.-led states.A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia and a voting rights champion for her party, promise to put the issue front and center.But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview, adding that the country needed a Senate willing to “protect our democracy regardless of the partisanship of those who would oppose it.”Democrats and voting rights groups say some of the Republican measures will suppress voting, especially by people of color. They warn that other bills will increase the influence of politicians and other partisans in what had been relatively routine election administration. Some measures, they argue, raise the prospect of elections being thrown into chaos or even overturned.Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, though electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in American elections.“This is going to be one of the big political issues for at least the next year,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has helped craft voting legislation. He said the group wanted lawmakers to “stop thinking of election-related policies as something that only comes up once in a blue moon,” adding that “it should instead be something that comes up in every legislative session — that you take what you just learned from the last election.”G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states have put forward legislation to review the 2020 election and institute new procedures for investigating the results of future elections.Many of the other bills are similar to those passed this year, which aim to limit access to mail-in voting; reduce the use of drop boxes; enact harsher penalties for election officials who are found to have broken rules; expand the authority of partisan poll watchers; and shift oversight of elections from independent officials and commissions to state legislatures.It remains unclear how new voting bills might affect turnout, and some election experts say that any measures designed to suppress voting carry the potential to backfire by energizing voters of the opposing party.Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing for Florida to create an election law enforcement unit that would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election.”Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesIn Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is pushing for changes to election laws that build on the major bill his party passed this year, including a special force to investigate voting crimes. In New Hampshire, Republicans are proposing to require that all ballots be counted by hand and may try to tighten residency requirements. In Georgia, G.O.P. lawmakers are trying to restructure the Democratic-led government of the state’s most diverse county.The biggest potential changes to voting could come in Florida, which had just one prosecuted case of voter fraud in the 2020 election.Mr. DeSantis, who had been facing pressure from conservatives to greenlight a review of the 2020 election results in the state, has urged state lawmakers to send new election measures to his desk. One proposal would increase the penalty for the collection of more than two ballots by a third party from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony. Another calls for more routine maintenance of voter rolls, which voting rights advocates say would lead to more “purges” of eligible voters.The governor said last month that the prospective election law enforcement unit would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election” and would include sworn law enforcement officers, investigators and a statewide prosecutor. Critics argued that such a unit could intimidate voters and be prone to abuse by politicians.In New Hampshire, where Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, faces a potentially challenging re-election bid, Republicans have proposed to scrap the ballot-scanning machines that the state has used for decades in favor of hand-counting.That bill — introduced by Mark Alliegro, a Republican state representative who declined to comment about it — has drawn opposition from Democrats, who say that a lengthy delay between Election Day and the results would create an opening for those who want to challenge the election’s legitimacy.“Republicans are trying to sow distrust and discord in the process,” said Matt Wilhelm, a Democratic state representative. “If they’ve got an additional window of time of hours, days, weeks when Granite Staters don’t know the results of the election that they just participated in, that’s going to cast doubt on our democratic institutions.”A separate G.O.P. bill in New Hampshire introduced in the legislature’s prefiling portal contained a brief description: “Provide that only residents of the state may vote in elections.”Republicans have long tried to tighten residency requirements in New Hampshire, whose small population means that the elimination of even relatively small numbers of college students from the voter rolls could help give the G.O.P. an edge in close elections. This year, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected a 2017 state law requiring proof of residence to vote.A spokeswoman for Regina Birdsell, the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, said that it was “currently in draft form” and that Ms. Birdsell would not comment until the language had been finalized.Ballot-counting machines used in New Hampshire’s 2020 election were transported in May for a review of the results. A Republican proposal would scrap the machines in favor of hand-counting.Josh Reynolds/Associated PressIn Georgia, a plan by Republicans in the state legislature to restructure the government of Gwinnett County would effectively undercut the voting power of people of color in an increasingly Democratic area.Gwinnett, which includes northeastern suburbs of Atlanta, has swung from full Republican control to full Democratic control over four years, culminating last year with the selection of the first Black woman to oversee the county commission. President Biden carried the county by 18 percentage points last year.But last month, Clint Dixon, a Republican state senator, filed two bills that would allow the G.O.P.-led legislature to roughly double the size of the county’s Democratic-led board of commissioners and redraw new districts for the school board — moves that Democrats and civil rights leaders said would essentially go over the heads of voters who elected those officials.The changes would keep the county in Democratic control, but would most likely guarantee multiple safe Republican districts, including some that would be predominantly white despite the county’s diversity.After an outcry on the left, Republicans pushed the bills to the January session.Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county’s board of commissioners, said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”Mr. Dixon defended the bills, asserting that with more commissioners, voters would have more representation and elected leaders would be more accountable.“I don’t see any kind of swing back to a Republican majority; it has nothing to do with a power grab,” he said in an interview. “I think at that local level, local governance is intended at lower populations.”Investigating the 2020 election also remains a focus of many Republican state lawmakers.At least five states are pursuing partisan reviews of the 2020 election, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.“There was suspiciously high voter turnout that broke all projections,” said Nathan Dahm, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who sponsored a bill to review the results. “That alone is not enough to say that there absolutely was fraud, but it was suspicious enough to say that maybe there are some questions there.”Lawmakers will be aided in writing new voting bills by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which helped craft some of the 2020 legislation. A spokeswoman for the group said it would continue to push for measures including more maintenance of voting rolls; increased authority for poll watchers; reductions in the use of absentee ballots; more power for state legislatures in the election process; and additional voter identification regulations.Republicans around the country have highlighted polling that shows broad bipartisan support for some voter identification requirements.Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, has called for the state’s legislature to pass a bill that would require a state or federal photo ID to vote.“The idea that the voters of my state are too stupid to follow a simple photo ID requirement like this is ridiculous and ludicrous,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ashcroft noted that the Missouri bill would not ban people without IDs from voting; they would be allowed to vote provisionally and their ballots would be validated through signature matching.Voting rights leaders like Ms. Abrams, meanwhile, have sought to frame the issue as one that should transcend politics.“This isn’t simply about who wins or loses an election,” she said. “It is about what type of nation we intend to be. And are there consequences for undermining and breaking our system of government?” More

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      The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      Antebellum pro-slavery radicals spoke freely of secession and violence; Democratic Party paramilitaries planned their attacks on Reconstruction governments in public view; and the men who codified segregation into Jim Crow did so in the open. Bad actors, in other words, do not always make their plans in secret.When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”Those listeners were, well, listening. “Suddenly,” according to a recent ProPublica investigation, “people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”Many of these new activists very much want to “stop the steal.” In Michigan, ProPublica notes, “one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned.” In Arizona, likewise, new Bannon-inspired precinct officers have “petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the State Senate Republicans’ ‘forensic audit’ of 2020 ballots.”The obvious point of all this is to eliminate resistance should the outcome of the 2024 presidential election come down, once again, to the fortitude of local officials. In his desperate fight to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump looked for and found the soft spots in our electoral system. His supporters are fighting to make them more vulnerable.In tandem with the fight to seize control of election administration is an effort to gerrymander battleground states into nearly permanent Republican legislative majorities. “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia,” according to my colleagues in the newsroom, “Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.”In these states, Democrats could win a narrow majority of voters but gain fewer than half of the seats in the state legislature, while Republicans could win with that same majority and gain far more than half the seats. It’s an affront to the ideal of political equality, to say nothing of the “one person, one vote” standard enshrined in the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. A system in which some voters are worth much more than others — and where popular majorities are locked out of power if they contain the wrong kinds of people — is many things, but it isn’t a democracy (or, if you prefer, a “republic”).These impenetrable supermajorities serve a purpose beyond simple partisan advantage. The belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election is backed by the belief that elections are less about persuasion and more about rigging the process and controlling the ballots. And in the swing states that Trump lost, his strongest allies have pushed the radical idea that state legislatures have plenary authority over presidential elections even after voters have cast their ballots. Trump may lose the vote in Arizona, but under this theory, the legislature could still give him the state’s electoral votes, provided there is some pretext (like “voter fraud,” for example). What this would mean, in practice, is that these legislatures could simply hand their state’s electoral votes to Trump even if he were defeated at the ballot box.It’s with this in mind that we should look to Wisconsin, where Republicans are fighting to seize control of federal elections in the state now that they’ve gerrymandered themselves into an almost permanent legislative majority. (The Wisconsin Republican Party, along with the one in North Carolina, has been at the vanguard of the authoritarian turn in the national party.)Last month, Senator Ron Johnson said that lawmakers in his state could take control of federal elections even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in opposition. “The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Johnson said, in reference to the bipartisan commission Republicans had established to manage elections. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”And of course, Trump is taking an active role in all of this. From his perch in Mar-a-Lago, he has endorsed candidates for state legislative elections in Michigan with the clear hope that they would help him subvert the election, should he run as the Republican nominee for president in 2024. “Michigan needs a new legislature,” Trump wrote last month in one such endorsement. “The cowards there now are too spineless to investigate Election Fraud.”Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.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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      Wisconsin Republicans Push to Take Over the State’s Elections

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      Led by Senator Ron Johnson, G.O.P. officials want to eliminate a bipartisan elections agency — and maybe send its members to jail.Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election system, building off their attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race by pressing to give themselves full control over voting in the state.The Republican effort — broader and more forceful than that in any other state where allies of former President Donald J. Trump are trying to overhaul elections — takes direct aim at the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, an agency Republicans created half a decade ago that has been under attack since the chaotic aftermath of last year’s election.The onslaught picked up late last month after a long-awaited report on the 2020 results that was ordered by Republican state legislators found no evidence of fraud but made dozens of suggestions for the election commission and the G.O.P.-led Legislature, fueling Republican demands for more control of elections.Then the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His suggestion was nonetheless echoed by Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who is conducting the Legislature’s election inquiry.Republican control of Wisconsin elections is necessary, Mr. Johnson said in an interview on Wednesday, because he believes Democrats cheat.“Do I expect Democrats to follow the rules?” said the senator, who over the past year has promoted fringe theories on topics like the Capitol riot and Covid vaccines. “Unfortunately, I probably don’t expect them to follow the rules. And other people don’t either, and that’s the problem.”Senator Ron Johnson said that Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin should unilaterally assert control of federal elections.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe uproar over election administration in Wisconsin — where the last two presidential contests have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes each — is heightened by the state’s deep divisions and its pivotal place in American politics.Some top Republican officials in Wisconsin privately acknowledge that their colleagues are playing to the party’s base by calling for state election officials to be charged with felonies or for their authority to be usurped by lawmakers.Adding to the uncertainty, Mr. Johnson’s proposal has not yet been written into legislation in Madison. Mr. Evers has vowed to stop it.“The outrageous statements and ideas Wisconsin Republicans have embraced aren’t about making our elections stronger, they’re about making it more difficult for people to participate in the democratic process,” Mr. Evers said Thursday. The G.O.P.’s election proposals, he added, “are nothing more than a partisan power grab.”Yet there is no guarantee that the Republican push will fall short legally or politically. The party’s lawmakers in other states have made similar moves to gain more control over election apparatus. And since the G.O.P. won control of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2010, the state has served as an incubator for conservative ideas exported to other places.“In Wisconsin we’re heading toward a showdown over the meaning of the clause that says state legislatures should set the time, manner and place of elections,” said Kevin J. Kennedy, who spent 34 years as Wisconsin’s chief election officer before Republicans eliminated his agency and replaced it with the elections commission in 2016. “If not in Wisconsin, in some other state they’re going to push this and try to get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on this.”Next year, Wisconsin will host critical elections for Mr. Johnson’s Senate seat and for statewide offices, including the governor. Rebecca Kleefisch, the leading Republican in the race to challenge Mr. Evers, is running on a platform of eliminating the state election commission. (On Monday, she filed a lawsuit against the agency asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare that the commission’s guidance violates state law.)The Republican anger at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans that G.O.P. lawmakers created in part to eliminate the investigatory powers of its predecessor agency, comes nearly 20 months after commissioners issued guidance to local election clerks on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.Republicans have seized in particular on a March 2020 commission vote lifting a rule that required special voting deputies — trained and dispatched by municipal clerks’ offices — to visit nursing homes twice before issuing absentee ballots to residents. The special voting deputies, like most other visitors, were barred from entering nursing homes early in the pandemic, and the commission reasoned that there was not enough time before the April primary election to require them to be turned away before mailing absentee ballots.The vote was relatively uncontroversial at the time: No lawsuits from Republicans or anyone else challenged the guidance. The procedure remained in place for the general election in November.But after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast, Republicans began making evidence-free claims of fraudulent votes cast from nursing homes across the state. Sheriff Christopher Schmaling of Racine County said the five state election commissioners who had voted to allow clerks to mail absentee ballots to nursing homes without the visit by special voting deputies — as is prescribed by state law — should face felony charges for election fraud and misconduct in office.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who represents Racine County, quickly concurred, saying that the five commissioners — including his own appointee to the panel — should “probably” face felony charges.The commissioners have insisted they broke no laws.Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who is the commission’s chairwoman, said she had no regrets about making voting easier during the pandemic and added that “even my Republican colleagues” were afraid about the future of fair elections in the state.“We did everything we could during the pandemic to help people vote,” she said. Mr. Johnson — a two-term senator who said he would announce a decision on whether to seek re-election “in the next few weeks” — is lobbying Republican state legislators, with whom he met last week at the State Capitol, to take over federal elections.“The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Mr. Johnson said. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”Mr. Johnson acknowledged that his proposal could leave the state with dueling sets of election regulations, one from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and another from the Legislature.“I suppose some counties will handle it one way and other counties will handle it another,” he said.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      Chris Christie Wants the Post-Trump G.O.P. to Move Past 2020

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      In a new book and in an interview, Mr. Christie says that if the former president wants to be a positive force, “he’s got to let this other stuff go.”Chris Christie wants to be very clear about something: The election of 2020 was not stolen.“An election for president was held on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden won. Donald Trump did not,” Mr. Christie writes in his new book, “Republican Rescue: Saving the Party From Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden.”“That is the truth. Any claim to the contrary is untrue,” Mr. Christie says.It is not a popular view in the Republican Party right now, as Mr. Trump has promoted his baseless claims of widespread election fraud for more than a year, and as many Republicans have either echoed those claims or averted their gaze.But it’s a view that Mr. Christie has been repeating since Election Day, as he urges the G.O.P. — and Mr. Trump — to move on from looking backward.“It’s not a book about him,” Mr. Christie said in a recent interview about the book, which will be released on Wednesday. “It’s a book about where we go from here and why it is important for us to let go of the past.”Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie was blunt: “If he wants to be a positive force in the future, he’s got to let this other stuff go. If he doesn’t, I don’t think he can be.”Mr. Christie pointed to the Virginia governor’s race and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the state party convention without Mr. Trump’s endorsement and then kept him at bay during the general election. Mr. Youngkin ultimately defeated his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.Mr. Christie said the Youngkin victory knocks down “this idea that if you don’t agree with Donald Trump on everything, and pledge unfettered fealty to him, then you can’t win because his voters quote unquote won’t come out to vote,” Mr. Christie said. “No candidate owns voters. They don’t.”He described Mr. Trump’s conduct in the year since he left office — and the anxiety felt by lawmakers who worry about crossing him — in stark terms. “Donald Trump’s own conduct is meant to instill fear,” he said.Mr. Christie is a former governor of New Jersey, a former presidential candidate and a possible future one. He was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016 after he ended his own national candidacy, was a potential vice-presidential candidate, led Mr. Trump’s transition effort until he was fired from that role and helped lead Mr. Trump’s opioids commission.He was with Mr. Trump throughout a tumultuous presidency, a fact that Mr. Christie’s critics say makes his critiques too late to be meaningful. Mr. Christie argues that his support for Mr. Trump, and their 15-year friendship before that, makes him a credible critic.“I think it was really important for people to understand why I did support the president for so long,” Mr. Christie said. “And the reason was, because I generally agreed with the policies that he was pursuing.” When they would argue over the years, he added, “it was rarely over policy.”Mr. Christie was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe arguments were generally over how things were handled, Mr. Christie added, citing Mr. Trump’s throwing of “bouquets” at President Xi Jinping of China as an example. Being generous with Mr. Xi when the Chinese government was withholding information about the coronavirus was “unacceptable,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Christie does not blame Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 for the violence that followed at the Capitol by his supporters. He said instead that it was the months of Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him that instilled anger in those who believed him.The responsibility for what happened “was months long in coming,” he said. “As a leader, you need to know that there are consequences to the words you use. And that those consequences at times can be stuff that you may not even be able to anticipate. I don’t believe he anticipated that people would cause violence up on Capitol Hill. But I don’t think he thought about it, either.”Mr. Christie began road-testing his themes in a speech at the Reagan presidential library in September, during which he didn’t name Mr. Trump. When he spoke again at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Nevada last weekend, Mr. Trump took notice, and delivered a broadside that his aides intended as a warning shot.Mr. Christie “was just absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 Election Fraud,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that also attacked Mr. Christie for a low approval rating, which Mr. Trump mischaracterized by half.Mr. Christie said that Mr. Trump should focus less on “personal vendetta,” and added, “I just think if he wants to have that kind of conversation about me then I’m going to point out that I got 60 percent of the vote in a blue state with 51 percent of the Hispanic vote.”Mr. Christie said he would not make a decision about running for president in 2024 until after the midterm elections in 2022. He said that Mr. Trump would not factor into his thinking and that he would not rule out supporting the former president if he saw no path for himself.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More