Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      McAuliffe Showed How You Lose Gracefully in Virginia

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      Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race surprised many people in a state that has been trending blue for years. Republican candidates also won the other top races in the state, for lieutenant governor and attorney general.All three races were high-profile, closely fought affairs. Yet there were no claims of fraud by the losers, no conspiracy theories about Venezuelan despots rigging voting machines, no spurious lawsuits demanding recounts. As of Wednesday afternoon, at least, the State Capitol in Richmond stands untouched.How refreshing to see adults accepting defeat with grace.And the stakes were plenty high. Democrats across the country had grown increasingly anxious over the polls coming out of Virginia, and for good reason. It’s considered a bellwether for the midterm elections, and Tuesday’s vote served as the first major referendum on the Biden era.The McAuliffe campaign’s reaction to his crushing loss? Gird yourselves. “Congratulations to Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin on his victory,” Mr. McAuliffe said in a statement Wednesday morning. “I hope Virginians will join me in wishing the best to him and his family.”Come again? Republican turnout was way up in key precincts; surely Mr. McAuliffe was teeing up to make some wild accusation about partisan operatives stuffing ballot boxes. “While last night we came up short, I am proud that we spent this campaign fighting for the values we so deeply believe in,” the statement said.It’s almost like listening to a foreign language, isn’t it? Over the past year, Americans have been subjected to an endless temper tantrum by one of the country’s two major political parties — a party now led by people who have apparently lost the capacity to admit defeat. One year to the day since the polls closed in 2020, Donald Trump still hasn’t formally conceded that election. He couldn’t even muster the dignity and decorum to hand over the presidency to Joe Biden in person, skipping town on Inauguration Day like a crook on the lam.This can’t-accept-defeat mentality began in earnest before the 2016 election, which Mr. Trump said was rigged even after he won, and it has set the tone for all that has come since. It emboldened the absurd and dangerous campaign of lies about election fraud in 2020, which notably focused on the big cities where larger numbers of Black voters live. It led directly to the deadly Jan. 6 riot that Mr. Trump incited at the U.S. Capitol. And it continues to infect the party 10 months later, as top Republicans still refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimately elected president and Republican-led states pass laws to make it easier for their legislatures to overturn the will of the voters if they don’t like the result.Speaking of election fraud, Republicans have been strangely quiet on the topic this time around. Interesting how that works: When a Democrat wins, it’s ipso facto proof of fraud. When a Republican wins — presto! — the election is on the level. This is how so many top Republicans managed to keep a straight face in 2020 as they argued that votes for Mr. Biden were fraudulent even while votes for winning Republican candidates farther down the same ballot were magically untainted.Hey, Republicans! This does not have to be so hard. All you have to do is value American democracy more than you value your own party’s hold on power. I guarantee that Democrats want to win just as badly as you do, and yet they take their lumps like grown-ups.Here are some examples to learn from: In 2016, Hillary Clinton conceded less than a day after polls closed, even though she was running neck and neck with Mr. Trump in key swing states and was sitting on a popular-vote lead that would eventually swell to nearly three million votes. President Obama called Mr. Trump in the middle of the night to congratulate him; this is the most basic stuff of peaceful democratic transitions, and yet Mr. Trump could never bring himself to do it.Or recall what Vice President Al Gore did on Dec. 13, 2000, conceding one of the closest elections in more than a century after the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 to stop the vote counting in Florida. “I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession,” Mr. Gore said in a nationally televised address that should stand as one of the most important moments in American history.Alas, Republicans these days seem more intent on deflecting criticism than on hearing it. Cue the references to Stacey Abrams, who refused to concede the 2018 Georgia governor’s race after losing to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp. Agreed, that wasn’t good. It also wasn’t good that Mr. Kemp, as the secretary of state at the time, was in charge of running the election in which he was a candidate. After her defeat, she and others accused him of suppressing turnout by purging Georgia’s rolls of more than 1.4 million inactive voters. It’s worth noting that Ms. Abrams was not the incumbent and that no major Democratic figures publicly supported her refusal to concede.Losing is hard. It happens to everybody. But a concession is not just a symbolic gesture. It is the sine qua non of representative democracy — a literal enactment of the loser’s acceptance of the legitimacy of his or her opponent. When a single candidate refuses to concede, it’s corrosive. When a sitting president and much of his party refuse to, it can turn deadly, as the world saw on Jan. 6.I’m no fan of Mr. Youngkin, but he won fair and square, just as Mr. Biden did a year ago. Maybe Mr. Youngkin’s victory will remind his party that it can still prevail in closely fought elections and accept the ones they lose. Meanwhile, Republicans should read Mr. McAuliffe’s statement and remember why it’s so important to lose gracefully.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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      John Eastman Blamed Pence for Violence at Jan. 6 Riot

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      John Eastman, the author of a memo that some in both parties liken to a blueprint for a coup, sent a hostile email to the vice president’s chief counsel as the mob attacked.WASHINGTON — As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” a lawyer who plotted with President Donald J. Trump and his allies to try to overturn the 2020 election sent a hostile message to the vice president’s top lawyer, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence.The email, reported by The Washington Post and confirmed by a person briefed on its contents, shows the extent to which Mr. Trump and his advisers sought to pressure the vice president, who was presiding over the certification of the election, to defy the will of the voters and keep Mr. Trump in office.“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” the lawyer, John Eastman, wrote to Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s chief counsel.Mr. Pence and Mr. Jacob were in a secure room at the Capitol when Mr. Eastman sent the message, The Post said. Outside, rioters were storming the building where Congress was meeting to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election, erecting a gallows, hunting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and forcing lawmakers to evacuate in a scene of violence and mayhem. Police officers recovered guns, knives, Tasers, Molotov cocktails, explosive devices and zip ties in the area.Mr. Eastman rose within Mr. Trump’s legal circle in 2020 from a little-known conservative academic to one of the most influential voices in the president’s ear, writing a memo laying out steps he argued Mr. Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.The two-page memo written by Mr. Eastman and circulated to the White House in the days before the certification was revealed in the book “Peril” by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. In the memo, Mr. Eastman argued that as vice president, Mr. Pence was “the ultimate arbiter” of the election, essentially saying he had the power to determine who won, and that “we should take all of our actions with that in mind.”That view was rejected by Mr. Pence and his lawyers as illegal and unethical.Since his memo was made public, Mr. Eastman has sought to distance himself from its contents, arguing that the document was taken out of context. He told National Review that the strategy was not “viable” and would have been “crazy” to pursue.But the email to Mr. Jacob undercuts those comments. Mr. Jacob wrote in a draft opinion article that Mr. Eastman showed “a shocking lack of awareness” as “a band of thugs who had been sold the lie that the vice president had the power to reverse the outcome of the election” stormed the Capitol.“Vice President Pence rejected the spurious legal theories that were pitched to him, and he did his duty,” Mr. Jacob wrote. “An inquiry should be made into whether the president’s outside lawyers did theirs.”Through a spokesman, Mr. Eastman declined to comment.The liberal activist Lauren Windsor recently recorded Mr. Eastman calling Mr. Pence an “establishment guy” and standing by the contents of his memo. “These guys are spineless,” he said of lawmakers who refused to join his plan to overturn the election based on false claims of widespread voter fraud.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      On Vaccines and More, Republican Cowardice Harms America

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      Back in July, Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, had some strong and sensible things to say about Covid-19 vaccines. “I want folks to get vaccinated,” she declared. “That’s the cure. That prevents everything.” She went on to say that the unvaccinated are “letting us down.”Three months later Ivey directed state agencies not to cooperate with federal Covid-19 vaccination mandates.Ivey’s swift journey from common sense and respect for science to destructive partisan nonsense — nonsense that is killing tens of thousands of Americans — wasn’t unique. On the contrary, it was a recapitulation of the journey the whole Republican Party has taken on issue after issue, from tax cuts to the Big Lie about the 2020 election.When we talk about the G.O.P.’s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. But the crazies wouldn’t be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it weren’t for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the party’s entire elected wing.Consider, for example, the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. In 1980 George H.W. Bush, running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination, called that assertion “voodoo economic policy.” Everything we’ve seen since then says that he was right. But Bush soon climbed down, and by 2017 even supposed “moderates” like Susan Collins accepted claims that the Trump tax cut would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. (It increased the deficit.)Or consider climate change. As recently as 2008 John McCain campaigned for president in part on a proposal to put a cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But at this point Republicans in Congress are united in their opposition to any substantive action to limit global warming, with 30 G.O.P. senators outright denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activities are causing climate change.The falsehoods that are poisoning America’s politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation, as Republicans who know the truth decide to acquiesce in lies.Take the claim of a stolen election. Donald Trump never had any evidence on his side, but he didn’t care — he just wanted to hold on to power or, failing that, promulgate a lie that would help him retain his hold on the G.O.P. Despite the lack of evidence and the failure of every attempt to produce or create a case, however, a steady drumbeat of propaganda has persuaded an overwhelming majority of Republicans that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.And establishment Republicans, who at first pushed back against the Big Lie, have gone quiet or even begun to promote the falsehood. Thus on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published, without corrections or fact checks, a letter to the editor from Trump that was full of demonstrable lies — and in so doing gave those lies a new, prominent platform.The G.O.P.’s journey toward what it is now with respect to Covid-19 — an anti-vaccine, objectively pro-pandemic party — followed the same trajectory.Although Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott claim that their opposition to vaccine requirements is about freedom, the fact that both governors have tried to stop private businesses from requiring customers or staff to be vaccinated shows this is a smoke screen. Pretty clearly, the anti-vaccine push began as an act of politically motivated sabotage. After all, a successful vaccination campaign that ended the pandemic would have been good political news for Biden.We should note, by the way, that this sabotage has, so far at least, paid off. While there are multiple reasons many Americans remain unvaccinated, there’s a strong correlation between a county’s political lean and both its vaccination rate and its death rate in recent months. And the persistence of Covid, which has in turn been a drag on the economy, has been an important factor dragging down Biden’s approval rating.More important for the internal dynamics of the G.O.P., however, is that many in the party’s base have bought into assertions that requiring vaccination against Covid-19 is somehow a tyrannical intrusion of the state into personal decisions. In fact, many Republican voters appear to have turned against longstanding requirements that parents have their children vaccinated against other contagious diseases.And true to form, elected Republicans like Governor Ivey who initially spoke in favor of vaccines have folded and surrendered to the extremists, even though they must know that in so doing they will cause many deaths.I’m not sure exactly why cowardice has become the norm among elected Republicans who aren’t dedicated extremists. But if you want to understand how the G.O.P. became such a threat to everything America should stand for, the cowards are at least as important a factor as the crazies.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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      Las investigaciones internas de Facebook: los documentos muestran señales de alarma sobre la desinformación

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      Documentos de la empresa revelan que en varias ocasiones trabajadores de la red social advirtieron de la difusión de desinformación y teorías de la conspiración antes y después de las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos.Dieciséis meses antes de las elecciones presidenciales celebradas en noviembre del año pasado, una investigadora de Facebook describió un acontecimiento alarmante. Una semana después de abrir una cuenta experimental, ya estaba recibiendo contenido sobre la teoría conspirativa de QAnon, según escribió en un informe interno.El 5 de noviembre, dos días después de las elecciones, otro empleado de Facebook escribió un mensaje para alertar a sus colegas sobre los comentarios con “desinformación electoral polémica” que se podían ver debajo de muchas publicaciones.Cuatro días después de eso, un científico de datos de la empresa escribió una nota para sus compañeros de trabajo en la que decía que el diez por ciento de todas las vistas de material político en Estados Unidos —una cifra sorprendentemente alta— eran publicaciones que alegaban un fraude electoral.En cada caso, los empleados de Facebook sonaron una alarma sobre desinformación y contenido inflamatorio en la plataforma e instaron a tomar medidas, pero la empresa no atendió los problemas o tuvo dificultades para hacerlo. La comunicación interna fue parte de un conjunto de documentos de Facebook que obtuvo The New York Times, que brindan nueva información sobre lo ocurrido dentro de la red social antes y después de las elecciones de noviembre, cuando a la empresa la tomaron desprevenida los usuarios que convirtieron la plataforma en un arma para difundir mentiras sobre la votación. More

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      Nevada Man Is Charged With Voting Using His Dead Wife’s Ballot

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      Donald Kirk Hartle, a Republican, had claimed that someone voted in the 2020 election by using the mail-in ballot of his wife, who died in 2017. He now faces two counts of voter fraud.Speaking to a Las Vegas news station in November, Donald Kirk Hartle described being “surprised” by the possibility that someone had stolen his dead wife’s mail-in ballot and used it to vote in the 2020 election. “That is pretty sickening to me, to be honest with you,” he told KLAS-TV.But this week, the Nevada attorney general filed two charges of voter fraud against Mr. Hartle, 55, claiming that he was the one who forged his wife’s signature to vote with her ballot.“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens it undercuts trust in our election system and will not be tolerated by my office,” the attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, said in a statement on Thursday. “I want to stress that our office will pursue any credible allegations of voter fraud and will work to bring any offenders to justice.”The announcement from Mr. Ford’s office comes months after waves of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, falsely asserted that the 2020 election had been tainted by widespread voter fraud, including in Nevada, a state that Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hartle, a registered Republican, was charged with voting using the name of another person and voting more than once in the same election, the attorney general’s office said in the statement. Each charge carries a prison sentence of up to four years and a fine of up to $5,000, the prosecutors said.The criminal complaint did not explain how prosecutors came to the conclusion that Mr. Hartle had committed voter fraud. Questions sent to the office of Mr. Ford, a Democrat elected to the position in 2018, were not immediately responded to on Saturday.David Chesnoff, a lawyer for Mr. Hartle, said in a statement that his client “looks forward to responding to the allegations in court.” Mr. Hartle is scheduled to appear in the Las Vegas Township Justice Court on Nov. 18.The Nevada Republican Party had cited Mr. Hartle’s story as evidence of voting irregularities on Twitter last year, saying that Mr. Hartle “was surprised to find that his late wife Rosemarie, a Republican, cast a ballot in this years election despite having passed away” in 2017.Since the announcement of the charges against Mr. Hartle, however, the party has not corrected the record, said Callum Ingram, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.“The state Republican Party has been pretty quiet certainly on this case since the narrative got flipped on its head,” Dr. Ingram said in an interview on Saturday.Mr. Hartle is the chief financial officer and treasurer of Ahern Rentals, according to his LinkedIn profile. The business rents out construction equipment and is a part of the Ahern Family of Companies. One of its businesses, Xtreme Manufacturing, was fined $3,000 in 2020 for hosting a Trump rally that did not comply with the state’s Covid regulations at the time, said Kathleen Richards, a spokeswoman for the city of Henderson, Nev.Nevada was one of several states in November that was dealing with dubious claims of voter fraud after the presidential election.The Nevada secretary of state, Barbara K. Cegavske, said in a document posted in December titled “Facts vs. Myths” that there was no evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the state.Ms. Cegavske’s office led the investigation of Mr. Hartle’s case.“Our office takes voter fraud very seriously,” Ms. Cegavske said in the statement released by Mr. Ford’s office. “Our securities division worked hard to bring this case to a close.”Conservative news outlets spread Mr. Hartle’s story. After the state Republican Party highlighted the case on Twitter, the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza discussed the case on his show. Then the Fox News host Tucker Carlson promoted Mr. Hartle’s account, saying: “We don’t know who did this. We wish we did, because it’s fraud.”For many voters in the state, Dr. Ingram said, proving that widespread voter fraud did not occur “is something that no amount of counterevidence, no amount of effort to prove folks wrong with facts or reason, is ever going to touch because it’s an unquestionable article of faith.” More

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      What Happened When Facebook Employees Warned About Election Misinformation

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      Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues. The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote. More

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      Former Trump Lawyer to Oversee Election Review in Texas

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      The selection of a new secretary of state arrives as Gov. Greg Abbott is facing pressure to allow an expanded 2020 election audit in Texas.HOUSTON — Amid pressure from former President Donald J. Trump to support a broad review of the 2020 election in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday appointed as secretary of state a lawyer who briefly joined Mr. Trump’s challenge to the 2020 results in Pennsylvania.The new secretary of state, John Scott, will oversee Texas elections at a time when a new law imposing further restrictions on voting and a Republican redistricting plan have raised alarm among voting rights advocates that the state’s growing nonwhite population would not be fairly represented.More immediately, Mr. Scott, a Fort Worth lawyer who worked for Mr. Abbott when he was the state’s attorney general, will take charge of a limited review of the 2020 election results that Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered last month for four of the most populous counties in Texas.“I am confident that John’s experience and expertise will enhance his oversight and leadership over the biggest and most thorough election audit in the country,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement announcing the appointment.Though he must eventually be confirmed by the State Senate, Mr. Scott can serve in the role in the interim. The Senate is not in regular session again until 2023.The appointment brought immediate criticism from Democrats and voting groups. “The timing of this announcement is clearly intended to subvert our democratic process in a way that allows Greg Abbott’s completely unsuitable nominee to oversee our 2022 elections without having to face confirmation hearings,” said Stephanie Gómez, the Texas associate director for Common Cause.Mr. Scott was among the lawyers representing Mr. Trump’s campaign as it filed suit to challenge the results of the November 2020 election in Pennsylvania, a state that President Biden won by 80,555 votes.But Mr. Scott withdrew from the case, as did another member of his law firm, Bryan Hughes, on the eve of a hearing, after a circuit court ruling that effectively gutted their arguments. The case was ultimately dismissed.“The lesson from the Pennsylvania case is that John Scott is a guy you can trust to follow the law,” said Mr. Hughes, a Republican state senator from Tyler, Texas. He added that, while in the attorney general’s office, Mr. Scott represented Texas in litigation over the state’s voter identification law, “so this area of the law is not unfamiliar to him.”Mr. Hughes was the lead sponsor of Texas’ restrictive new election rules, which passed this year over concerted opposition from Democrats. The new rules broaden the authority of the secretary of state in elections.No credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election in Texas or in any other state. Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 5 percentage points and Republicans maintained a lock on the statehouse despite a well-funded effort by Democrats to try to flip control.Still, with supporters of Mr. Trump believing he should have won the state by an even greater margin, Mr. Abbott has faced growing calls for legislation authorizing a “forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential vote in Texas. Last month, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Mr. Abbott urging him to back the legislation.“Despite my big win in Texas, I hear Texans want an election audit! You know your fellow Texans have big questions about the November 2020 Election,” read the letter, steeped in arcane Texas legislative language and signed by the former president.Political operatives in the state have suspected that the former president received assistance in his foray into Austin politics by Texas conservatives, perhaps the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who twice chaired Mr. Trump’s campaign in the state. Under Mr. Patrick’s leadership, the Senate has already passed a 2020 election review bill.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      The Irony in Glenn Youngkin’s Push for Early Voting in Virginia

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      Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor, is encouraging early voting despite catering to the Trump base that believes the former president’s election conspiracies.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.With the much-watched election for Virginia governor 12 days away, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee, has been getting the word out: Vote early.His campaign texts supporters asking if they know their early voting site, and door knockers ask if voters have requested a mail-in ballot. Youngkin holds rallies near early polling locations, including a recent one in Rockingham County after which the campaign said 100 people walked in to vote.“We’ve been encouraging all Virginians to come vote, vote early,” Youngkin said when he cast his own ballot weeks before Election Day on Nov. 2.There is no small irony in that message. Former President Donald J. Trump has loudly, falsely and egregiously claimed that early voting, especially by mail, led to a “rigged” election in 2020 that cost him a second term. (His latest provocation was a statement on Thursday: “The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. Jan 6 was the protest!”)In response to baseless claims of fraud, Republican-led states around the country have enacted laws this year to narrow access to the polls by groups that tend to vote for Democrats.Virginia, where Democrats are in charge, has gone the opposite way, expanding voting access, including establishing a 45-day window to vote early in person or by mail, and extending the hours and locations of early polling sites.Youngkin, a former financial executive who reminds many of an even-tempered Mitt Romney more than the bullying Trump, has still catered to the Trump base that believes the former president’s election conspiracy theories.Youngkin early on said his top issue was “election integrity,” code for the false view that the 2020 vote was stolen, and he offered supporters a “membership card” in his Election Integrity Task Force. He campaigned with State Senator Amanda Chase, a prolific spreader of conspiracy theories about Jan. 6. This month he said voting machines should be audited, even though Virginia’s Elections Department audited machines after the 2020 vote and confirmed the results. (Trump lost by 10 points.)Still, Youngkin has invested heavily in turning out his supporters early, a strategy at which Republicans once excelled in many places. An early vote, cast in person or by mail, means a campaign doesn’t have to pursue that voter with phone calls and door knocks in the final frenzied weeks.Kristin Davison, a senior strategist for the Youngkin campaign, rejected the notion that Youngkin was sending supporters mixed messages about early voting through his emphasis on election security.“Glenn has been consistent the entire way through that the best way to ensure a safe and fair election is to go and be a voter,” Davison said.As of Wednesday, 515,000 Virginians had voted early, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, drawing on state Elections Department data.Virginia voters don’t register by party, but the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, using demographic information, has modeled the early voters. It estimates that 55.4 percent of early ballots have been cast by Democrats, 30.1 percent by Republicans and 14.4 percent by independents.The overall early voting total is 31 percent of early votes cast in the same period in 2020. Even though off-year turnout is bound to drop off from a presidential year, the Youngkin campaign maintained that it was an ominous sign for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee, showing low enthusiasm from his supporters.“Republicans typically don’t win the early vote,” Davison said. “If Terry were in place to win, turnout would be at least 10 points higher.”McAuliffe’s campaign dismissed that analysis. It argued that there were important differences between early voting this year and last year, when the pandemic drove up the use of mail ballots. Last year was the first time Virginia offered no-excuse absentee voting; in 2021, the McAuliffe campaign said, Virginia voters are returning to what they are used to, namely Election Day voting.“The comparison to 2020 isn’t really a good one,” said Simon Vance, a data adviser to McAuliffe. “What you’re seeing is not any drop-off, but people reverting back to behaviors they’ve done for years.”The McAuliffe campaign pointed to the large number of mail ballots that have been requested but not yet returned — around 175,000. “We know those are our people and we’re aggressively chasing them,” Vance said.To boost his get-out-the-vote effort, McAuliffe is welcoming top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and President Biden, to campaign with him in coming days. Last Sunday, Stacey Abrams, the Georgia voting rights activist, visited three churches in Norfolk, Va., and appeared with McAuliffe at a rally outside an early voting site. “We’ve got to get everybody out to vote,” McAuliffe said at the event.Total in-person early voters in Norfolk that day was 370. The Youngkin campaign called that an anemic figure. “If Terry’s base was excited, that number should have been at least three times that,” Davison asserted.Vance disagreed. He said that McAuliffe was on track to have the turnout needed to win.“If we’re seeing 70, 65 percent of the total electorate voting on Election Day, that’s where the real story will be told,” he said.nine days of ideas to remake our futureAs world leaders gather in Glasgow for consequential climate change negotiations, join us at The New York Times Climate Hub to explore answers to one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we adapt and thrive on a changing planet? Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 3-11; in person and online. Get tickets at nytclimatehub.com.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More