Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election Results Corrupt, Notes Show

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      “Leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials.WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times.The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes taken by Mr. Donoghue.“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response in notes he took memorializing the call.Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the conversation he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom he called a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”The notes connect Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress with his campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to help undermine, or even nullify, the election results.The lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Jordan ultimately voted to overturn the election results in key states, but has downplayed his role in the president’s pressure campaign. Mr. Perry continues to assert Mr. Trump won, but has not been tied directly to the White House effort to keep him in office. And Mr. Johnson, whom Mr. Trump recently endorsed as he weighs whether to seek a third term, maintains that it is reasonable to have questions about the integrity of the election, though he has recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.The Justice Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.Typically the Justice Department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private conversations between a president and his cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.But handing over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also told Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and other former officials this week that they could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary committees.Richard P. Donoghue, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, pushed back on Mr. Trump’s allegations of election fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesThe department reasoned that congressional investigators were examining potential wrongdoing by a sitting president, an extraordinary circumstance, according to letters sent to the former officials. Because executive privilege is meant to benefit the country, rather than the president as an individual, invoking it over Mr. Trump’s efforts to push his personal agenda would be inappropriate, the department concluded.“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement.Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus on overturning the election results. At one point, Mr. Trump alleged voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted elections.” Mr. Donoghue pushed back.“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Mr. Donoghue said, adding that the department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Mr. Trump, according to the notes.The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063 percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it did not find evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes.Mr. Trump, undeterred, brushed off the department’s findings. “Ok fine — but what about the others?” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes describing the president’s remarks. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Donoghue to travel to Fulton County to verify signatures on ballots.The people “saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt,” Mr. Trump told the officials, adding that they needed to act. “Not much time left.”At another point, Mr. Donoghue said that the department could quickly verify or disprove the assertion that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there are voters.“Should be able to check on that quickly, but understand that the DOJ can’t and won’t snap it’s fingers and change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes.The officials also told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no evidence to support a lawsuit regarding the election results. “We are not in a position based on the evidence. We can only act on the actual evidence developed,” they said.Mr. Trump castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.”“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document.In a moment of foreshadowing, Mr. Trump said, “people tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in,” referring to the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, who had also encouraged department officials to intervene in the election. “People want me to replace D.O.J. leadership.”“You should have the leadership you want,” Mr. Donoghue replied. But it “won’t change the dept’s position.”Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Rosen did not know that Mr. Perry had introduced Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump. Exactly one week later, they would be forced to fight Mr. Clark for their jobs in an Oval Office showdown.During the call, Mr. Trump also told the Justice Department officials to “figure out what to do” with Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. “People will criticize the D.O.J. if he’s not investigated for real,” he told them, violating longstanding guidelines against the White House interfering in criminal investigations or other law enforcement actions.Two days after the phone call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Donoghue took notes of a meeting between Justice Department officials; Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin to discuss a conspiracy theory known as Italygate, which asserts without evidence that people in Italy used military technology to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.The Justice Department officials told the White House that they had assigned someone to look into the matter, according to the notes and a person briefed on the meeting. They did not mention that the department was looking into the theory in order to debunk it, the person said.Nicholas Fandos More

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      Arizona Vote Review Being Financed by Trump Supporters

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      A review of 2020 election ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county, billed as strictly nonpartisan when Republicans in the Arizona State Senate ordered it late last year, has been financed almost entirely by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, according to a statement released late Wednesday by the private firm overseeing the review.The firm, Cyber Ninjas, said that it had collected more than $5.7 million from five pro-Trump organizations for the widely disparaged review, in addition to $150,000 that the State Senate had allotted for the project. An Arizona county court had ordered the sources of the audit’s funding released after Republicans in the Senate resisted making them public.The review of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and roughly 80 percent of the state’s population, has covered only votes last November for president and for the state’s two seats in the United States Senate, all of which were won by Democrats. The president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, said this week that results of the audit should be released next month.Ms. Fann and other senators said the recount, whose findings have no authority to change the winners of any race, was needed to reassure supporters of Mr. Trump that the vote was fairly conducted. But the effort has come under growing attack in the wake of disclosures that the chief executive of Cyber Ninjas and other purported experts involved in the review had ties to the “stop the steal” movement spawned by Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.Election experts have called the recount amateurish and error-ridden, and ridiculed its efforts to verify allegations by conspiracy theorists that fake ballots could be identified by traces of bamboo fibers or invisible watermarks. One Republican senator withdrew his backing of the effort in May, calling it an embarrassment, and a second senator accused Ms. Fann last week of mismanaging the process, and said its results could not be trusted.It had been apparent since the review began in April that supporters of Mr. Trump were both donating money to the effort and recruiting volunteers to work on it. But the sources and size of the donations had not been disclosed until Wednesday.According to the Cyber Ninjas statement, the largest donation, $3.25 million, was made by a newly created group, America Project, led by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the Overstock.com website and a prominent proponent of false claims that the November election was rigged.Mr. Byrne resigned his post at Overstock in 2019 after it was disclosed that he had an intimate relationship with Maria Butina, a gun-rights activist who was jailed in 2018 as an unregistered foreign agent for Russia and later deported. He later said he had contributed $500,000 to the Arizona review, and produced a film featuring the Cyber Ninjas chief executive, Doug Logan, that alleged that the November election was fraudulent.The statement said that another pro-Trump group, America’s Future, contributed $976,514 to the review. An additional $605,000 came from Voices and Votes, a group organized by Christina Bobb, an anchor for the pro-Trump television network One America News, who solicited donations for the review while covering it. More

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      Justice Department Warns States on Voting Laws and Election Audits

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      The department said that auditors could face criminal or civil penalties if they flouted elections laws.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday sent another warning shot to Republican state legislatures that have initiated private audits of voting tabulations broadly viewed as efforts to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election.The department warned that auditors could face criminal and civil penalties if they destroy any records related to the election or intimidate voters in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and federal laws prohibiting voter intimidation.The admonishment came in election-related guidance documents issued as part of the department’s larger plan to protect access to the polls, announced by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in June. Another document released on Wednesday outlined federal laws on how ballots are cast and said that the department could scrutinize states that revert to prepandemic voting procedures, which may not have allowed as many people to vote early or by mail.The warning was the Justice Department’s latest effort to alert state lawmakers that their audits could run afoul of federal law. Department officials cautioned the Republican-led Arizona State Senate in May that its audit and recount of the November election in Maricopa County, widely seen as a partisan exercise to fuel grievances over Donald J. Trump’s election loss, may be in violation of the Civil Rights Act.Last month, the Justice Department also sued Georgia over its recently passed, sweeping voting law, accusing the state’s Republican-led legislature of intentionally trying to violate the rights of Black voters in crafting the legislation.The lawsuit, particularly its attempt to prove lawmakers’ intent, was the Biden administration’s most aggressive effort yet to expand or preserve voter protections. But it comes as Senate Republicans have stymied efforts to pass federal voter protection laws and the Justice Department has acknowledged that Supreme Court rulings have limited its own ability to prevent discriminatory voting laws from being enacted in states.While the department can sue over state voting laws it deems discriminatory or over audits that violate federal statutes, multiple election cycles will play out before those cases are resolved in the courts.The Arizona audit is led by a private contractor called Cyber Ninjas whose owner, Doug Logan, has shared conspiracy theories that voting machines were rigged and that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.A county judge in Arizona recently ruled that the state’s Republican senators must make public information about Cyber Ninjas and other private companies hired to conduct the Maricopa County audit, rejecting their request to keep the documents secret.“It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny,” Judge Michael W. Kemp of Maricopa County Superior Court wrote in the ruling.While the Justice Department did not name the Arizona audit in its guidance documents, it said that it was concerned that some jurisdictions conducting audits could imperil the existence of election records.“This risk is exacerbated if the election records are given to private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling such records and who are unfamiliar with the obligations imposed by federal law,” the department said in one document.A Justice Department official speaking to reporters declined to say whether any audits had been found to have violated the Civil Rights Act. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity and did not provide a justification for doing so.The department’s guidance also sought to dispel the false notion that the election was marked by rampant fraud, noting that state and federal officials have called it “the most secure in American history.”The guidance mirrored a statement by Mr. Garland last month that states have justified their postelection audits with voter fraud assertions “that have been refuted by the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them.”Mr. Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed that the election was fraudulently stolen from him, ignoring assertions by his own appointed officials that there was no widespread voter fraud.Nevertheless, Arizona, Georgia and other states have used the specter of election fraud to pass legislation that restricts access to the polls and hire private auditing companies to perform recounts that have helped sow doubts about the veracity of the election results.Mr. Garland said in May that the Justice Department would double the enforcement staff that handles voting issues in part to scrutinize these new laws and audits. At the time, the staff numbered around a dozen people, according to people familiar with it.The department official confirmed on Wednesday that the staff size had doubled, but would not specify its total. More

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      U.S. Declines to Defend Trump Ally in Lawsuit Over Jan. 6 Riot

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      The move could mean that the Justice Department is also unlikely to defend former President Donald J. Trump in the case.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department declined on Tuesday to defend a congressional ally of former President Donald J. Trump in a lawsuit accusing them both of inciting supporters at a rally in the hours before the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.Law enforcement officials determined that Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, was acting outside the scope of his duties in an incendiary speech just before the attack, according to a court filing. Mr. Brooks had asked the department to certify that he was acting as a government employee during the rally; had it agreed to defend him, he would have been dismissed from the lawsuit and the United States substituted as a defendant.“The record indicates that Brooks’s appearance at the Jan. 6 rally was campaign activity, and it is no part of the business of the United States to pick sides among candidates in federal elections,” the Justice Department wrote.“Members of Congress are subject to a host of restrictions that carefully distinguish between their official functions, on the one hand, and campaign functions, on the other.”The Justice Department’s decision shows it is likely to also decline to provide legal protection for Mr. Trump in the lawsuit. Legal experts have closely watched the case because the Biden Justice Department has continued to fight for granting immunity to Mr. Trump in a 2019 defamation lawsuit where he denied allegations that he raped the writer E. Jean Carroll and said she accused him to get attention.Such a substitution provides broad protections for government officials and is generally reserved for government employees sued over actions that stem from their work. In the Carroll case, the department cited other defamation lawsuits as precedent.The Brooks decision also ran counter to the Justice Department’s longstanding broad view of actions taken in the scope of a federal employee’s employment, which has served to make it harder to use the courts to hold government employees accountable for wrongdoing.Mr. Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Lawyers for the House also said on Tuesday that they declined to defend Mr. Brooks in the lawsuit. Given that it “does not challenge any institutional action of the House,” a House lawyer wrote in a court filing, “it is not appropriate for it to participate in the litigation.”The Justice Department and House filed their briefs on Tuesday, the deadline set by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit, filed in March by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Brooks of inciting a riot and conspiring to prevent a person from holding office or performing official duties.Mr. Swalwell accused Mr. Brooks, Mr. Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and his onetime personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani of playing a key role in inciting the Jan 6. attack during a rally near the White House in the hours before the storming of the Capitol.Citing excerpts from their speeches, Mr. Swalwell accused the men of violating federal law by conspiring to prevent an elected official from holding office or from performing official duties, arguing that their speeches led Mr. Trump’s supporters to believe they were acting on orders to attack the Capitol.Mr. Swalwell alleged that their speeches encouraged Mr. Trump’s supporters to unlawfully force members of Congress from their chambers and destroy parts of the Capitol to keep lawmakers from performing their duties.During the rally, Mr. Brooks told attendees that the United States was “at risk unlike it has been in decades, and perhaps centuries.” He said that their ancestors “sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives” for the country.“Are you willing to do the same?” he asked the crowd. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?”Mr. Swalwell said defendants in his lawsuit had incited the mob and had continued to stoke false beliefs that the election was stolen.“As a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and in direct response to the defendants’ express calls for violence at the rally, a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol,” Mr. Swalwell said in his complaint. “Many participants in the attack have since revealed that they were acting on what they believed to be former President Trump’s orders in service of their country.”In June, Mr. Brooks asked that the Justice Department defend him in the case. He cited the Westfall Act, which essentially substitutes the Justice Department as the defendant when federal employees are sued for actions deemed within the scope of their employment, according to a court document.He described his speech on Jan. 6 as part of his job, saying that his duties include delivering speeches, making pronouncements on policy and persuading lawmakers.The Justice Department rejected that assertion.“Inciting or conspiring to foment a violent attack on the United States Congress is not within the scope of employment of a representative — or any federal employee — and thus is not the sort of conduct for which the United States is properly substituted as a defendant under the Westfall Act,” the department wrote. “Brooks does not argue otherwise. Instead, he denies the complaint’s allegations that he conspired to incite the attack on the Capitol.”Mr. Trump has not sought to have the government substitute for him as a defendant in the lawsuit under the Westfall Act. But he has argued in court filings that the statements he made on Jan. 6 are covered by broad immunity, that he could not be sued for making them and that the lawsuit violated his free speech rights.Should a judge deny Mr. Trump’s claims, he could ask the Justice Department to intervene on his behalf. But its decision in Mr. Brooks’s case lowered the chances that it would comply. More

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      The Battle Over State Voting Rights Is About the Future of Texas

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      The current skirmish is the latest in a tug of war being waged between the state’s increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas.HOUSTON — The flight of Texas Democrats to Washington, a last-ditch effort this week to stop Republicans from passing new statewide voting rules, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a broad national fight over access to the ballot.But it is something more than that in Texas. The battle over voting rights is also the latest in a tug of war over the future of what it means to be Texan, one being waged between the state’s rapidly diversifying and increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas, which wield overwhelming power in the State Capitol.The tension grew during the coronavirus pandemic, when cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin clashed with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over mask mandates and business restrictions. But it had already been increasing for years, with each political session marked by Republican state officials rolling back progressive changes made in cities led by Democrats.The most direct new restrictions sought by Texas Republicans, who have maintained control of the state for nearly two decades, are a reaction to local polling innovations, notably in Houston, the state’s largest city, and surrounding Harris County.The county introduced drive-through voting for the first time in November, when people were concerned that traditional polling places would spread the coronavirus, and it proved popular, accounting for more than 130,000 votes. Access also expanded at eight polling sites that held a day of 24-hour voting.Officials believed that drive-through polling, which has been used in three subsequent municipal and state elections in Harris County, would soon expand to other areas. “In a place like Houston and Texas that loves cars so much, why shouldn’t we offer drive-through voting?” said Christopher Hollins, who served as interim election chief in the county last year and oversaw the expansion of voting options during the presidential election.Turnout increased in Harris County as it did throughout the state, and out of more than 11 million votes cast, President Biden got within about 600,000 votes of winning Texas — the closest a Democrat has come in decades.Now Texas cities are ground zero in the fight over whether to expand access to the vote, as state Democrats did during the pandemic, or curtail it, as Republicans are seeking to do with a measure that would ban 24-hour and drive-through polling.Drive-through voting was offered in Harris County, which includes Houston, last fall.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesThe conflict is a national one, heightened by former President Donald J. Trump’s false insistence that he lost in 2020 because of voter fraud. On Wednesday, Democratic members of the Texas House met with senators in Washington and urged the passage of bills aimed at expanding and safeguarding voter access.The group fled Austin on chartered planes this week, just days into a 30-day special legislative session, to delay passage of the state’s voting measure. They vowed to stay out of Texas until early August, when the session expires.But in Texas, the fight over voting is only the latest skirmish in the deepening chasm between progressive and conservative versions of the state.“Harris County is being attacked already at a base level because it is one of the most diverse counties in the country,” Mr. Hollins said. “This certainly predates the pandemic.”Elected officials in Texas cities have found themselves forced to govern with the knowledge that many of the things they do in their backyard will be undone the next time lawmakers meet in the Capitol, which they do every other year.“I see a lot of our job as to do 50 good things a year, knowing that the Legislature will only have time, while it’s in session, to undo half of it,” said Greg Casar, a progressive Democratic councilman in Austin.“Each marquee issue over the last three sessions has been the state wanting to attack local governments,” he added, listing efforts to protect immigrants, transgender Texans and workers that each faced stiff resistance at the state level.Texas House Democrats at an airport outside Washington after fleeing Texas in an effort to block a voting restrictions bill.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThat view is something more than a hunch on the part of Democrats. Before the previous legislative session, in 2019, the speaker of the Texas House at the time shared an animus toward cities in a private conversation with a Republican lawmaker and a conservative activist.“My goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” the speaker, Dennis Bonnen, a Republican who represented a district just south of Houston, said in a conversation that was secretly recorded.His comments about cities reflect a commonplace view among some Republicans in Texas, even if they are not always as pointedly expressed. Republican operatives and officials described the dynamic as one of concern over the progressive turn in the state’s cities, a change in culture and politics that has accelerated rapidly over the past decade.And the changes have begun spreading into the suburbs. Populous counties outside of Houston and Austin that once reliably voted Republican have swung in recent years toward the Democrats, said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.“With the bluing of the major urban counties and the blushing of many of the major suburbs, what has allowed the G.O.P. to continue to win statewide has been its increasing dominance in the state’s rural counties,” Dr. Jones said.Most states have similar divisions between blue cities and red rural areas. But in Texas, the divisions have taken hold only relatively recently — Houston voted for a Republican, George W. Bush, for president in 2004 — adding to the alarm among Republicans and anticipation among Democrats that the state could soon be up for grabs.In the meantime, said Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic state representative from Laredo, cities are being punished by the Republican majority in the Capitol for daring to extend voting opportunities, particularly in places where it benefited low-income communities of color and disabled people.“They are trying to thin out the crowd,” Mr. Raymond said of the Republicans in the state. “And that’s just wrong.”Republicans have disputed such characterizations. They have said their efforts to pass the voting bill are a way to instill confidence in future elections and to make uniform the rules that govern Texas elections.“It increases transparency and ensures the voting rules are the same in every county across the state,” the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said in a statement after the State Senate passed its version of the voting measure on Tuesday.Signage in Austin ahead of the presidential election.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe Senate bill, and one before the House, includes provisions to ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; limit third-party collection of ballots; increase criminal penalties on election workers for violating regulations; grant more freedom of movement to partisan poll watchers; and require large counties — which include the state’s largest cities — to make available a livestream video during vote counting.Democratic lawmakers have described the changes as a means of voter suppression in a state with a long history of such tactics.But without enough votes to block the bills, more than 50 Democrats, representing the state’s largest cities and suburbs, opted to leave the state in order to deny Republicans the quorum necessary for the House of Representatives to conduct its business. Mr. Abbott has threatened to arrest Democrats to bring them back to the State Capitol, though his jurisdiction to do so stops at the state line.“Everything that the Democratic cities do, particularly if it’s progressive, they attack it and they say cities can’t do that,” Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat representing Austin, said on Wednesday as he rushed between meetings in Washington. “Which is ironic because they were the party of local control.”Like other Democrats, he vowed to remain outside Texas until Aug. 7, when the 30-day special session ends.Back in Austin, Mayes Middleton, a Republican representing Galveston, awaited the Democrats’ return and bemoaned their flight as hypocritical.“The Democrats say that the state should not dictate how counties run their election laws, but at the same time, they’re in Washington trying to have the federal government dictate how Texas should run its elections,” Mr. Middleton said. “We’ve got to let Texas run Texas.”Edgar Sandoval More

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      Podcast Looks at Voting Fraud Claims in North Carolina

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      The podcast series “The Improvement Association” investigates the role that rumors and race play in a North Carolina county.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.By all accounts, election fraud is rare.But following the 2018 election, the small, rural community of Bladen County, N.C., made news when state officials threw out the results of a congressional race over suspicions of fraud.Two years earlier, in the same county, state officials received similar reports of vote rigging, although those turned out to be unfounded.Zoe Chace, a producer for the podcast “Serial” and the radio program “This American Life,” set out to understand how Bladen County became fertile ground for these allegations. The result of her reporting is “The Improvement Association,” a five-part podcast series produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times. The episodes explore the corrosive power of claims of election fraud and the role that race played in those claims in Bladen County.“Bladen County was consumed with rumors and accusations of election fraud long before the 2020 presidential election, and we wanted to understand how that happened and how it has affected people’s lives there,” Ms. Chace said.Ms. Chace first spent time in Bladen County while reporting a radio story for “This American Life.” In 2016, local Republicans had accused the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black Democratic enfranchisement group, of tampering with absentee ballots, but the claims were dismissed by officials.Several years earlier, the group had helped elect the county’s first Black sheriff using a novel tactic — encouraging Black voters to use absentee ballots. Although completely legal, the method fueled suspicions of cheating. In the years that followed, white residents began to regularly accuse the Bladen County Improvement Association of election tampering, although there was no evidence.Then, in a rare event, state officials threw out the 2018 election of Mark Harris, a Republican, to the congressional district that includes Bladen County, after local Republicans were accused of committing absentee-ballot fraud. McCrae Dowless, the political operative at the center of the scandal, has been charged with obstruction of justice and illegal possession of an absentee ballot. The case is in progress.After that case became public, a leader of the Bladen County Improvement Association reached out to Ms. Chace, offering to explain the local political landscape where these allegations had become common, and Ms. Chace returned to the community.She first looked at the claims against the association, interviewing poll workers, political boosters and officials from the North Carolina State Board of Elections. She also reviewed absentee ballot envelopes from nursing home residents that some claimed had been tampered with, and she pored over years of election fraud complaints and documents from the state board of elections. She couldn’t find anything to suggest that the group had cheated.“We were lucky because we got a lot of documents,” Ms. Chace said.Nancy Updike, the producer of the series, said they also studied the history of racism in election fraud allegations, which have been used to disenfranchise Black voters. Ms. Updike said that in U.S. elections, the idea of Black people casting votes has frequently led to claims from white people about voter fraud.“From Reconstruction until now, white Americans have repeatedly conjured the idea of Black Americans voting fraudulently in order to keep Black people from voting,” she said.Ms. Chace’s reporting also showed how damaging these allegations of fraud can be. For the Bladen County Improvement Association, the claims were difficult to shake and led to animosity and divisions within the organization. In the end, the years of unfounded allegations have eroded the group’s political power.“The charge of election fraud, untethered to any evidence, is a truly dangerous force at work in America right now,” Ms. Updike said. “And in this one place you can see how it tore up people’s lives as well as pulled at the fabric of this place.” More

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      The Voter Fraud Fraud

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      It was March 3, 2020, the day of the Democratic primary in Texas, and Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man, was intent on making his voice heard at the ballot box. He arrived at the polling place around 7 p.m. and joined the line. More

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      Texas Man Who Waited Hours to Vote Is Arrested on Charges of Illegal Voting

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      Hervis Rogers was ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential primary because he was still on parole, according to the state’s attorney general. He now faces four decades in prison.A 62-year-old Texas man who waited hours to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential primary was arrested this week on charges that he had voted illegally.The man, Hervis Earl Rogers of Houston, waited seven hours outside Texas Southern University to vote in the state’s presidential primary in March 2020. On Wednesday, he was arrested and charged with two counts of illegal voting, a felony. According to court documents, the charges stem from ballots that Mr. Rogers cast on March 3, 2020, and on Nov. 6, 2018, while he was still on parole and not legally permitted to vote.Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and one of the lawyers representing Mr. Rogers, said that Mr. Rogers thought that he could vote during the primary.“Mr. Rogers’s prosecution really shows the danger of overcriminalizing the election code and the process of participating in a democratic society,” he said. “In particular, it raises the danger that criminal statutes in the election code are being used to go after individuals who at worst have made an innocent mistake. That’s not what any laws should be doing.”Mr. Buser-Clancy said that the A.C.L.U. was conducting its own investigation into the charges.Texas election code states that a person convicted of a felony can register to vote and participate in elections only once his or her sentence — including parole — is fully completed. Texas’ election laws also stipulate that a person must knowingly vote illegally to be guilty of a crime.The Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice nonprofit, estimates that 5.2 million Americans remain disenfranchised because of felony convictions, a disproportionate number of them Black. According to a report the group released last year, over 6.2 percent of the adult African American population is disenfranchised, compared with 1.7 percent of the non-African American population. In Texas, 2.8 percent of voters cannot vote because of felony convictions.Experts say that disparities in sentencing can make felony voting laws inherently discriminatory against minorities and people with low incomes. And the process for former felons to return to the voter rolls can be confusing, with muddled and frequently changing rules, making it difficult for people trying to vote legally to know what to do.Mr. Rogers’s story ricocheted around social media after he was identified as the very last person in line to vote at his polling place. Houston Public Media reported at the time that Mr. Rogers arrived at the polls just before 7 p.m. and waited roughly six hours to vote, long after the polls had closed and many others had left the line.“It is insane, but it’s worth it,” Mr. Rogers told Houston Public Media while waiting in line.Mr. Rogers was being held at the Montgomery County Jail with bail set at $100,000. He could face upward of 40 years in prison — 20 years for each charge, according to Mr. Buser-Clancy, who added that Mr. Rogers’s past criminal record meant that the sentence could be even higher.“He’s facing the possibility of an extremely harsh sentence,” he said. “Second-degree felonies are normally reserved for aggravated assault, and to apply it to Mr. Rogers’s case, it just shows how unjust that is.”Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is under investigation for professional misconduct after he challenged President Biden’s win in court, brought the charges against Mr. Rogers. He has made it a mission of his office to prosecute voter-fraud cases, which are very rare in the United States and tend to be minor mistakes when they do happen.“Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law,” Mr. Paxton wrote on Twitter. “I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”Republicans in Texas and other battleground states have been pushing aggressively to restrict voting laws since former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Thursday, Republicans in the Texas Legislature presented plans to overhaul the state’s election apparatus for a second time this year. They outlined a raft of proposed new restrictions on voting access that would be among the most far-reaching election laws passed this year.For some, Mr. Rogers’s case evoked another recent prosecution in the state.In 2017, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release for a federal tax fraud felony. Her provisional ballot was not counted, and her case is pending before Texas’ highest criminal appellate court after Ms. Mason filed for an appeal.After she was convicted, Ms. Mason served 10 months in federal prison for violating her supervised release, but she has remained free on a $20,000 bond in her voting case, as she pursues her appeal in state court, her lawyer, Alison Grinter, said. If Ms. Mason loses her appeal, she will have to begin serving her five-year sentence, Ms. Grinter said.Mr. Rogers and Ms. Mason may meet in the coming weeks, Ms. Grinter said.“They share a bond that neither of them wanted at this point,” Ms. Grinter said. “She really feels for him, and knows what it feels like to be made political sport of like this.”On Friday, Ms. Mason expressed support for Mr. Rogers.“I wish this had never happened to you,” Ms. Mason wrote on Twitter. “I’m sorry that you’re going though this. Welcome to the fight.”Michael Levenson More