Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be Underestimated

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      Like most Democrats, I initially underestimated Donald Trump. In 2015, I founded a super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton. Through all the ups and downs of the campaign, I didn’t once imagine that Americans would vote Mr. Trump in.He was an obvious pig (see the “Access Hollywood” tapes), a fraud (multiple failed businesses and bankruptcies) and a cheat (stiffing mom-and-pop vendors). Not to mention the blatant racism and misogyny. About the outcome, I was spectacularly wrong.Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee’s “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.David Brock (@davidbrockdc) is the founder of Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Missed the Part About No Do-Overs

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, I know we don’t typically talk about office politics, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid — as when our friend and colleague Nick Kristof leaves us to run for governor of his home state of Oregon. Our readers ought to know what an incredible guy he is behind the scenes.Gail Collins: Bret, I am extremely proud to say that when I was the editor of this section, I lured Nick over from the news side to be a columnist.One of his early projects was to write about the vile goings-on in a remote African country. I can’t remember all the details. But it involved a short plane ride that cost about $10,000 because he was barred from entry and had to be flown in by a brave pilot who claimed to be transporting a barrel of wheat.Bret: Now you’re going to see Nick’s opponents accuse him of flying private.Gail: I was of course impressed by the work, but the small, evil part of my brain thought, “Wow, this guy is going to cost me a fortune.” Then I started getting his bills for the long trek through Africa that followed, and they were like, hotel: $2; dinner: $1.25.Bret: Nick is one of the few people I know who actively seeks out opposing points of view, which only makes him hold his own with greater depth and zero rancor. He and I probably disagree on 95 percent of policy issues (OK, Oregon lefties, make that 100 percent). But I never missed his columns because there was always something important and interesting to learn from them.Also, accounts of Kristof family holidays fill me with a sense of both awe and deep parental inadequacy.Moving from the inspiring to the debased, what do you think the chances are that Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy will ever challenge Donald Trump on his claims of election fraud?Gail: Well, about the same as my chances of competing in the next Olympics.Bret: Your chances are better.Gail: Watching the rally Trump had recently in Iowa, I was sort of fascinated by his apparent inability to focus on anything but the last election. Don’t think a 2020 do-over is at the top of anybody else’s list of priorities.Bret: It would be nice to think that his obsession with 2020 is solely a function of his personal insecurities. But there’s a strategy involved here, which is hard to describe as anything less than sinister. Within the Republican Party, he’s making the stolen-election fantasy a litmus test, which Republican politicians defy at the peril of either being primaried by a Trump toady or losing vital Trump voters in close elections. At the national level, he’s creating a new “stab in the back” myth to undermine the legitimacy of democracy itself.Of course Joe Biden’s job performance so far isn’t helping things.Gail: About our current commander in chief: Biden’s moving into troubled waters — through no fault of his own — as chances grow of strikes or some kind of work stoppage everywhere from the cereal industry to tractor factories. He’s vowed to be “the most pro-union president” in history. Am I right in guessing that’s not something you’d look forward to?Bret: Anyone remember a certain politician from the late 1970s named James Callaghan? He was the U.K.’s Labour prime minister during the “Winter of Discontent,” when the country seemed to be perpetually on strike. Those strikes were the proximate cause of Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, which is something the Biden administration might bear in mind before getting too close to the unions.Gail: Did I ever tell you that long ago, in days of yore, I was president of the union at a small paper in Milwaukee? We only formed it because the publisher was a truly evil guy who’d threaten to write editorials denouncing local businesses unless they invested in advertising. Went on strike and the publisher closed down the whole operation.Bret: He sounds like Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.” You went on to bigger and better things.Gail: This is a prelude to saying that I think unions are critical to protecting the nation’s workers, but well aware that they don’t protect everybody who needs it.Bret: I still think the most pro-worker thing the White House can do is get the infrastructure bill passed. Biden dearly needs a political victory, especially one like infrastructure that will divide Republicans while keeping Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the Democratic side, as opposed to the social spending bill that unites Republicans and alienates those two.Gail: I’ll refrain from pointing out that Sinema appears to be the captive of big-donor business interests and that the climate change part of Biden’s bill is now under pressure because of Manchin’s ties to Big Coal.Instead, remind me how you came around to be on the side of Big Spending.Bret: I love your concept of “refraining.”In my perfect world, the federal government would be about one-third the size that it is today and we would privatize and regulate functions like the Post Office, Amtrak and Social Security. But we live with the reality of big government and a Democratic presidency, so I’d prefer my tax dollars to go into investments that produce blue-collar jobs in the short term and long-term returns in public utilization. Plus, a lot of our infrastructure could really use a major upgrade: Just think of New Jersey.Gail: Ah, New Jersey. Sending you sympathy, which you’ll have time to appreciate while caught in traffic jams and train backups.Bret: In the meantime, it looks like the commission Biden appointed to study reforms for the Supreme Court was divided on the idea of adding new justices. The commission also seemed lukewarm on other ideas, like term limits for justices. Personally, I’m pretty relieved, but some of my liberal friends seem to think this was a lost opportunity.Gail: I’d like to be on your side when it comes to court appointments. Having one arm of government that takes an apolitical, long-term view of the world is definitely desirable.I hate to say one more time that I remember when …But I remember when both parties regarded Supreme Court appointments as something special; everybody tried to join hands in search of candidates who were wise and willing to rise above short-term partisan concerns.Well, at least that’s what they said. And even pretending to be bipartisan is better than nothing.Bret: Forty years ago, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ronald Reagan’s first nominee, was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 99-0. The vote for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bill Clinton’s first nominee, was 96-3. Since then, things have pretty much gone to hell.Gail: Mitch McConnell ruined the tradition by refusing to hold hearings on Barack Obama’s nominees. I truly doubt we’ll ever be able to return to the old ways. And if so, we should do some reorganizing. That might include term limits of maybe 18 to 20 years.Bret: I would quarrel a bit about whether the blame lies solely with Mitch. Some of us remember Harry Reid, when he was Senate majority leader, blocking qualified judges nominated by George W. Bush. But I also think a 20-year term-limited appointment to the high bench wouldn’t be the worst thing.Gail: By the way, speaking of long-running arguments, I see the New York City Council is thinking about tossing Thomas Jefferson’s statue out of City Hall. We’ve talked about this before, but any change in your feelings about whether we should withdraw that kind of honor from founding father slaveholders?Bret: My mind’s unchanged. If you’re going to get rid of Jefferson’s statute on that account, then why not get rid of the statues of George Washington, since he was also a slaveholder? For that matter, why not start a campaign to rename both the national capital and the state? This is the kind of dumb, symbol-chasing leftism that can only wind up helping Trump.Gail: Not arguing for renaming all the George Washington stuff, but it’d be nice to have a state named after, say, Susan B. Anthony.Bret: Anthony’s home state of Massachusetts should consider it. It would relieve the commonwealth of the sin of cultural appropriation and is also a lot easier to spell.We should be able to see our founders’ profound flaws while also honoring the fact that they established a republic in which the principle of human liberty and equality were able to take root and flourish as nowhere else, and in which the concept of a “more perfect union” is written into the Constitution. In the context of the late 18th century, that was an extraordinary step forward.Gail: Jefferson’s always been one of my least-favorite founders — his attitude toward women could be creepy even by 18th-century standards.Bret: Him and J.F.K. and a few other presidents I could mention.Gail: My rule is that big names of the past should be honored on the basis of their main thing — I’m OK with giving Columbus a holiday to commemorate his life as an explorer, as long as we spend a good part of it recalling his slaughter of Native Americans.Bret: Agree entirely. And preserve the names of Ohio’s capital and the Upper West Side’s premier institution of higher learning in the bargain.Gail: What bothers me about the Virginia founding fathers is that although they made inspiring speeches about liberty, most of them were focused on protecting their state institutions from federal intervention. Particularly plantation life and culture, which included slaves.The New-York Historical Society may be willing to take Jefferson’s statue on a “loan” and that seems like a good plan.Bret: That’ll give us something to keep arguing about.Gail: In the meantime, I’ll honor Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence. Always appreciate somebody who’s good with words. Which is why I enjoy our conversations, Bret. Bet I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun going back and forth with Thomas J.Bret: Nor I with Susan B.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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      As Trump Thunders About Last Election, Republicans Worry About the Next One

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      Donald Trump is the Republicans’ greatest asset in mobilizing voters. But some fret that his obsession with false claims about the 2020 election could cost the G.O.P. in 2022.Republicans believe they have a good shot at taking Congress next year. But there’s a catch.The G.O.P.’s ambitions of ending unified Democratic control in Washington in 2022 are colliding with a considerable force that has the ability to sway tens of millions of votes: former President Donald J. Trump’s increasingly vocal demands that members of his party remain in a permanent state of obedience, endorsing his false claims of a stolen election or risking his wrath.In a series of public appearances and statements over the last week, Mr. Trump has signaled not only that he plans to work against Republicans he deems disloyal, but also that his meritless claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the White House in 2020 will be his litmus test, going so far as to threaten that his voters will sit out future elections.“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020,” Mr. Trump said in a statement last week, “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”The former president’s fixation on disproved conspiracy theories is frustrating to many in his party who see it as needlessly divisive at a time when Republicans feel they are poised to take back the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. They worry he could cost Republicans otherwise winnable seats in Congress and complicate the party’s more immediate goal of winning the governor’s race in Virginia next month.The concern over Mr. Trump’s attempts to make all federal elections a referendum on him points to the larger debate among Republicans over what his role should be, as someone who remains singularly popular with the party’s base but is also a liability with swing voters and a motivator for Democrats to turn out.Some rising stars in the Republican Party — like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who ousted Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from a House leadership post in a bitter intraparty fight over the Jan. 6 riots and Mr. Trump’s attempts to downplay them — have been clear: They want Mr. Trump to play a role in the 2022 midterms. Ms. Stefanik called him “an asset to Republicans on the ballot” at a fund-raiser last week.And top party strategists said they expected the former president to remain front and center in the Republicans’ campaign to retake control of the House. “He’s the leader of the party,” said Corry Bliss, a consultant to Republicans on congressional races. “The more energized and engaged he is, the better we’ll do.”But party officials believe Mr. Trump’s threat about his supporters staying home en masse is real. And the potency of his false claims about 2020 caught even some of his staunchest allies in the party off guard.The stakes are amplified by Mr. Trump’s increasingly pointed hints that he plans to be the party’s nominee in 2024.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump and the claims of voting irregularities during the 2020 election.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesRepresentative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has supported exhaustive audits of the 2020 results to look for evidence of voting irregularities that repeated reviews have failed to produce. Still, she has told colleagues that she was surprised by a recent survey of Republican voters in her district, according to one person who spoke with her about it.The internal survey found that 5 percent of Republican voters said they would sit out the 2022 election if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election — a demand that some of Mr. Trump’s hard-core supporters have made. Another 4 percent said they would consider sitting out the election absent an audit.The possibility that nearly 10 percent of Republicans could sit out any election — even one in a solidly red district like the one held by Ms. Taylor Greene — was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.Since Mr. Trump left office, polls have repeatedly shown that large majorities of Republican voters want him to run in 2024. And roughly 40 percent of Republicans say they consider themselves to be primarily his supporters rather than supporters of the party — about the same share who said so last November, according to the political research firm Echelon Insights.Many Republicans don’t seem to want to hear anything critical about him. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for instance, highlighted the lack of an appetite for much dissent. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, Pew found, said their party should not be accepting of elected officials who criticize Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump’s recent interference in the Virginia contest — where polls show the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, narrowly trailing his Democratic rival, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe — worried advisers to Mr. Youngkin’s campaign. They watched as their carefully scripted plan to keep the race focused on their candidate and on claims that Democrats have veered too far left became engulfed by news coverage of the former president praising Mr. Youngkin at a political rally last week.Mr. Trump remains overwhelmingly popular within the Republican party.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesSome Republicans said they feared they were watching a preview of the awkward and unpleasant dilemma their candidates would face for the foreseeable future, as Mr. Trump remains the most popular figure in their party, determining what candidates say and how voters think.“Here is where Trump is so destructive,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress who lost her seat in suburban Virginia in 2018. That year, voters in swing districts across the country turned against centrist incumbents like her in a repudiation of Mr. Trump.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More

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      YouTube’s stronger election misinformation policies had a spillover effect on Twitter and Facebook, researchers say.

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      Share of Election-Related Posts on Social Platforms Linking to Videos Making Claims of Fraud
      Source: Center for Social Media and Politics at New York UniversityBy The New York TimesYouTube’s stricter policies against election misinformation was followed by sharp drops in the prevalence of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter, according to new research released on Thursday, underscoring the video service’s power across social media.Researchers at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found a significant rise in election fraud YouTube videos shared on Twitter immediately after the Nov. 3 election. In November, those videos consistently accounted for about one-third of all election-related video shares on Twitter. The top YouTube channels about election fraud that were shared on Twitter that month came from sources that had promoted election misinformation in the past, such as Project Veritas, Right Side Broadcasting Network and One America News Network.But the proportion of election fraud claims shared on Twitter dropped sharply after Dec. 8. That was the day YouTube said it would remove videos that promoted the unfounded theory that widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the presidential election. By Dec. 21, the proportion of election fraud content from YouTube that was shared on Twitter had dropped below 20 percent for the first time since the election.The proportion fell further after Jan. 7, when YouTube announced that any channels that violated its election misinformation policy would receive a “strike,” and that channels that received three strikes in a 90-day period would be permanently removed. By Inauguration Day, the proportion was around 5 percent.The trend was replicated on Facebook. A postelection surge in sharing videos containing fraud theories peaked at about 18 percent of all videos on Facebook just before Dec. 8. After YouTube introduced its stricter policies, the proportion fell sharply for much of the month, before rising slightly before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The proportion dropped again, to 4 percent by Inauguration Day, after the new policies were put in place on Jan. 7.To reach their findings, researchers collected a random sampling of 10 percent of all tweets each day. They then isolated tweets that linked to YouTube videos. They did the same for YouTube links on Facebook, using a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, CrowdTangle.From this large data set, the researchers filtered for YouTube videos about the election broadly, as well as about election fraud using a set of keywords like “Stop the Steal” and “Sharpiegate.” This allowed the researchers to get a sense of the volume of YouTube videos about election fraud over time, and how that volume shifted in late 2020 and early 2021.Misinformation on major social networks has proliferated in recent years. YouTube in particular has lagged behind other platforms in cracking down on different types of misinformation, often announcing stricter policies several weeks or months after Facebook and Twitter. In recent weeks, however, YouTube has toughened its policies, such as banning all antivaccine misinformation and suspending the accounts of prominent antivaccine activists, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that YouTube was the only major online platform with a presidential election integrity policy. “We also raised up authoritative content for election-related search queries and reduced the spread of harmful election-related misinformation,” she said.Megan Brown, a research scientist at the N.Y.U. Center for Social Media and Politics, said it was possible that after YouTube banned the content, people could no longer share the videos that promoted election fraud. It is also possible that interest in the election fraud theories dropped considerably after states certified their election results.But the bottom line, Ms. Brown said, is that “we know these platforms are deeply interconnected.” YouTube, she pointed out, has been identified as one of the most-shared domains across other platforms, including in both of Facebook’s recently released content reports and N.Y.U.’s own research.“It’s a huge part of the information ecosystem,” Ms. Brown said, “so when YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.” More

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      Election Workers in Georgia Are Fired for Shredding Voter Registration Forms

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      The office was already under fire from Trump supporters, who passed sweeping legislation that could lead to a takeover by the Republican-controlled State Legislature.The elections office in Georgia’s heavily Democratic Fulton County said on Monday that two workers had been fired for shredding voter registration forms, most likely adding fuel to a Republican-led investigation of the office that critics call politically motivated.The workers, at the Fulton County Board of Elections, were dismissed on Friday after other employees saw them destroying registration forms awaiting processing before local elections in November, the county elections director, Richard Barron, said.Both the county district attorney and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s chief elections official, were asked to conduct inquiries into the matter, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission, Robb Pitts, said in a statement.But it was Mr. Raffensperger who first revealed the allegations of shredded registration forms, issuing a blistering news release demanding that the Justice Department investigate “incompetence and malfeasance” in the agency. “After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” he said.His declaration only underscored the political implications of the document-shredding charges, which would almost certainly have been less freighted in any other election office. Fulton County officials did not say how many forms were shredded, but Mr. Raffensperger put the total at about 300 in a county with 800,000 voters on the rolls.While the charges of wrongdoing surfaced on Friday, it was unclear when the actual destruction of registration forms might have occurred.Mr. Raffensperger, who won national attention for rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s request to “find” enough ballots to overturn President Biden’s narrow win in the state, faces a difficult primary race next spring against a rival endorsed by Mr. Trump. The Fulton County elections office, meanwhile, has become the object of fury by Trump supporters who baselessly claim that Mr. Biden’s win in the state was illegitimate.Some supporters are suing to conduct yet another review of the presidential vote in Fulton County, which includes a broad swath of metropolitan Atlanta and where 73 percent of voters favored Mr. Biden. The statewide Georgia vote has been counted three times with zero evidence of fraud.The Republican-dominated State Legislature approved legislation this spring that gives it effective control of the State Election Board, and empowers the board to investigate legislators’ complaints about local election bodies. Fulton County was quickly selected for an inquiry that eventually could replace the elections board with a temporary superintendent who would have sweeping powers to oversee the vote.Voting rights advocates and Democrats statewide have cast the inquiry as a first step toward a pro-Trump takeover of election machinery in the county most crucial to Democratic hopes in future elections.“I don’t think there’s another state in the union that has a State Election Board with the power to turn a nonpartisan elections office into a partisan arm of the secretary of state’s office,” Mr. Barron, the Fulton County elections director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The county’s performance in elections has been mixed. Primary elections last year were plagued by long lines, and county elections have long been the subject of complaints. A report by a state-appointed monitor concluded that elections there were “sloppy” but it found no evidence of “dishonesty, fraud or intentional malfeasance.”The elections board has cited recent improvements, such as revised training manuals and newly hired election managers, as evidence that it is addressing complaints. But the disclosure on Monday gives critics new ammunition at a time when the coming November election, for Atlanta’s mayor and City Council, is being seen as a test of the board’s competence.Mary Norwood, a Fulton resident who narrowly lost two races for Atlanta mayor, has been a longstanding critic of the board. She said she favored an inquiry into the shredding allegations.“If you have two employees who are terminated by the elections director, that certainly prompts an investigation and analysis,” she said. “It’s critical that we get this right.” More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The “Perfect Villain” for Voting Conspiracists’

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      Hans Buetow and Listen and follow ‘The Daily’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOver the past decade, Eric Coomer has helped make Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States.He was accustomed to working long days during the postelection certification process, but November 2020 was different.President Trump was demanding recounts. His allies had spent months stoking fears of election fraud. And then, on Nov. 8, Sidney Powell, a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, appeared on Fox News and claimed, without evidence, that Dominion had an algorithm that switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden.This is the story of how the 2020 election upended Mr. Coomer’s life.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with “The Daily,” write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Perez, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Margaret Willison and Kate Winslett. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner. More

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      New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election

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      A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his unfounded claims of election fraud.On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.The report draws on documents, emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta. It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.The interim report, released publicly on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark. Of particular note was a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter. He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter. Mr. Clark also revealed during that meeting that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.The report raised fresh questions about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election. Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims. Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud. That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a never-Trumper, and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there. During the Jan. 3 fight in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign. Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office. Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign that was waged between Dec. 14, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced his resignation, and Jan. 6, when throngs of Mr. Trump’s supporters fought to block certification of the election.The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections

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      Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.Campaigning at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., Mr. Evers said that Wisconsin’s race for governor next year would be “about our democracy.”Lianne Milton for The New York TimesLast week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.) It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview. He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania who defended the results of the 2020 election in the state, is expected to announce his campaign for governor as soon as this month.Susan Walsh/Associated PressJames Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment. Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election in Michigan, where Republican election officials tried to stall the certification of the results of the state’s 2020 presidential race.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Whitmer, who has faced threats of an insurrection in her statehouse and a kidnapping plot, is now fighting a Republican attempt to work around her expected veto of a host of proposed voting restrictions.“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.Mr. Evers vetoed them all.“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.” More