Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Trump and the Republican Party's Cruel Logic

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      Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.After more than a decade in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided fruitful targets for an audience fearful of cultural change, conservative media has struggled to turn the older white president who goes to Mass every Sunday into a compelling villain. Yet the apocalypse remains nigh, threatened by the presence of those Americans they consider unworthy of the name.On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”Under such an ideology, depriving certain Americans of their fundamental rights is not wrong but praiseworthy, because such people are usurpers.*The origin of this politics can arguably be found in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Radical Republicans sought to build a multiracial democracy from the ashes of the Confederacy. That effort was destroyed when white Southerners severed emancipated Black Americans from the franchise, eliminating the need to win their votes or respect their rights. The founders had embedded protections for slavery in the Constitution, but it was only after the abolition war, during what the historian Eric Foner calls the Second Founding, that nonracial citizenship became possible.The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”In order to wield power as they wanted, without having to appeal to Black men for their votes, the Democratic Party and its paramilitary allies adopted a theory of liberty and democracy premised on exclusion. Such a politics must constantly maintain the ramparts between the despised and the elevated. This requires fresh acts of cruelty not only to remind everyone of their proper place but also to sustain the sense of impending doom that justifies these acts.As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, years after the end of Reconstruction, Southern Democrats engaged in “intensive propaganda of white supremacy, Negrophobia and race chauvinism” to purge Black men from politics forever, shattering emerging alliances between white and Black workers. This was ruthless opportunism, but it also forged a community defined by the color line and destroyed one that might have transcended it.The Radical Republicans believed the ballot would be the ultimate defense against white supremacy. The reverse was also true: Severed from that defense, Black voters were disarmed. Without Black votes at stake, the party of Lincoln was no longer motivated to defend Black rights.*Contemporary Republicans are far less violent and racist than the Democrats of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. But they have nevertheless adopted the same political logic, that the victories of the rival party are illegitimate, wrought by fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s rise to power began with a lyrical tribute to all that red and blue states had in common and that Mr. Trump’s began with him saying Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.Their conviction in this illegitimacy is intimately tied to the Democratic Party’s reliance on Black votes. As Mr. Trump announced in November, “Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily — cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.” The Republican Party maintains this conviction despite Mr. Trump’s meaningful gains among voters of color in 2020.Even as Republicans seek to engineer state and local election rules in their favor, they accuse the Democrats of attempting to rig elections by ensuring the ballot is protected. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who encouraged the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, tells brazen falsehoods proclaiming that voting rights measures will “register millions of illegal aliens to vote” and describes them as “Jim Crow 2.0.”But there are no Democratic proposals to disenfranchise Republicans. There are no plans to deny gun owners the ballot, to disenfranchise white men without a college education, to consolidate rural precincts to make them unreachable. This is not because Democrats or liberals are inherently less cruel. It is because parties reliant on diverse coalitions to wield power will seek to win votes rather than suppress them.These kinds of falsehoods cannot be contested on factual grounds because they represent ideological beliefs about who is American and who is not and therefore who can legitimately wield power. The current Democratic administration is as illegitimate to much of the Republican base as the Reconstruction governments were to Morgan.*This brand of white identity politics can be defeated. In the 1930s, a coalition of labor unions, urban liberals and Northern Black voters turned the Democratic Party from one of the nation’s oldest white supremacist political institutions — an incubator of terrorists and bandits, united by stunning acts of racist cruelty against Black Americans in the South — into the party of civil rights. This did not happen because Democratic Party leaders picked up tomes on racial justice, embraced jargon favored by liberal academics or were struck by divine light. It happened because an increasingly diverse constituency, one they were reliant on to wield power, forced them to.That realignment shattered the one-party system of the Jim Crow South and ushered in America’s fragile experiment in multiracial democracy since 1965. The lesson is that politicians change when their means of holding power change and even the most authoritarian political organization can become devoted to democracy if forced to.With their fragile governing trifecta, Democrats have a brief chance to make structural changes that would even the playing field and help push Republicans to reach beyond their hard-core base to wield power, like adding states to the union, repairing the holes the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts blew in the Voting Rights Act, preventing state governments from subverting election results and ending partisan control over redistricting. Legislation like the PRO Act would spur unionization and the cross-racial working-class solidarity that comes with it. Such reforms would make Republican efforts to restrict the electorate less appealing and effective and pressure the party to cease its radicalization against democracy.We know this can work because of the lessons of not only history but also the present: In states like Maryland and Massachusetts, where the politics of cruelty toward the usual targets of Trumpist vitriol would be self-sabotaging, Republican politicians choose a different path.The ultimate significance of the Trump era in American history is still being written. If Democrats fail to act in the face of Republican efforts to insulate their power from voters, they will find themselves attempting to compete for an unrepresentative slice of the electorate, leaving the vulnerable constituencies on whom they currently rely without effective representation and democratic means of self-defense that the ballot provides.As long as Republicans are able to maintain a system in which they can rely on the politics of white identity, as the Democratic Party once did, their politics will revolve around cruelty, rooted in attempts to legislate their opponents out of existence or to use the state to crush communities associated with them. Americans will always have strong disagreements about matters such as the role of the state, the correct approach to immigration and the place of religion in public life. But the only way to diminish the politics of cruelty is to make them less rewarding.Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America.”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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      In Arizona, G.O.P. Lawmakers Strip Power From a Democrat

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      The State Legislature shifted legal authority from the secretary of state to a Republican attorney general, and enacted election measures it said would stop fraud.WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled State Legislature in Arizona voted Thursday to revoke the Democratic secretary of state’s legal authority in election-related lawsuits, handing that power instead to the Republican attorney general.The move added more discord to the politics of a state already roiled by the widely derided move by Senate Republicans to commission a private firm to recount the vote six months after the November election. And it was the latest in a long series of moves in recent years by Republicans to strip elected Democrats of money and power in states under G.O.P. control.The measure was part of a grab bag of proposals inserted into major budget legislation, including several actions that appeared to address conspiracy theories alleging manipulated elections that some Republicans lawmakers have promoted. One of the items allotted $500,000 for a study of whether social media sites tried to interfere in state elections by promoting Democrats or censoring Republicans.The State House approved the legislation late Thursday. It now goes to Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, who has the power to accept or reject individual parts of the measure.Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Mark Brnovich have sparred before over election lawsuits, with Mr. Brnovich arguing that Ms. Hobbs would not adequately defend the state against suits, some of them filed by Democrats, that seek to broaden access to the ballot. Ms. Hobbs has denied the charge.The bill approved on Thursday gives Mr. Brnovich’s office exclusive control of such lawsuits, but only through Jan. 2, 2023 — when the winners of the next elections for both offices would be about to take power. The aim is to ensure that the authority given to Mr. Brnovich would not transfer to any Democrat who won the next race for attorney general.Attorney General Mark Brnovich of Arizona would gain new powers under the legislation.Bob Christie/Associated PressOn Friday, Ms. Hobbs called the move “egregious,” saying Republicans were “weaponizing the process to take retribution against my office.”The move against Ms. Hobbs continues a Republican strategy of weakening elected Democrats’ authority that dates at least to 2016, when the G.O.P.-controlled legislature in North Carolina stripped the state’s executive branch of political appointments and control of state and county election boards just before Roy Cooper, a Democrat, took over as governor.Lawmakers said then that Democrats had behaved similarly in the past, citing a Democratic governor’s decision in 1976 to oust 169 policymakers hired by Republicans. But similar tactics have since been employed to weaken new Democratic governors in Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan. Democrats in many states with Republican-controlled legislatures have fought efforts to curb their governors’ emergency powers to deal with the pandemic.Most recently, Georgia Republicans have been in the forefront of G.O.P. attempts nationwide to exert more control over local election officials. In both Georgia and Kansas, legislators even voted to defang the offices of Republican secretaries of state who had defended the security and fairness of elections.Most other election provisions in the Arizona budget legislation are billed as safeguards against fraud, almost none of which has been found in the past election. One orders a review of voter registration databases in counties with more than a million residents — that is, the counties that are home to the Democrat-leaning cities of Phoenix and Tucson.A new Election Integrity Fund would dole money to county election officials to toughen security and to finance hand counts of ballots after elections. That would appear to open the door to more fraud investigations like the Republican-ordered review of November election ballots in Maricopa County, which was carried by President Biden and Arizona’s two Democratic senators.That effort has been mocked by experts for its high-resolution examination of ballots for evidence of fakery, including bamboo fibers and watermarks that, according to a QAnon conspiracy theory, are visible only under ultraviolet light.Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election were examined by contractors working for the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt York, via Associated PressBut the legislation requires all future ballots to contain at least three anti-fraud countermeasures like holograms, watermarks, ultraviolet-visible numbers or intricate engravings and special inks.It also appropriates $500,000 to determine whether social media and search engine algorithms are biased for or against “one or more candidates of a political party” and whether candidates’ access to them has been restricted. The legislation suggests that such actions could amount to in-kind contributions to candidates or parties that were not reported under Arizona law.Republican legislators cast the anti-fraud clauses as common-sense steps to make elections safer. State Senator Sonny Borrelli, who proposed the changes to ballots, said many of the countermeasures were already used to make it hard to produce counterfeit currency.“Shouldn’t your ballot have the same protections?” he said.The bill drew immediate criticism from voting-rights advocates, who called its provisions the stuff of conspiracy theories. “This is legislating based on the big lie,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of one group, Progress Arizona. “And it’s a really dangerous way to approach making law.”County election officials said they were skeptical about whether the ballot countermeasures were either needed or practical. Aside from the cost, it is unclear whether there are enough printing companies that are able to produce such ballots to allow for competitive bidding on printing contracts, said Leslie Hoffman, the recorder in Yavapai County, whose main city is Prescott.The ballots also would require new equipment to verify their authenticity before being tabulated, and it is unclear whether existing tabulators would even accept them, said Jennifer Marson, the executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties.“This gives the impression that everyone’s ready to go and all we have to do is opt in” to the new countermeasures, she said. “And everything is not ready to go.” More

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      Giuliani Law License Suspension: Read the Document

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      all ballots cast in the presidential audit.9 The hand audit, which relied exclusively on the

      printed text on the ballot-marking device, or bubbled-in the choice of the absentee

      ballot, confirmed the results of the election with a zero percent risk limit. Respondent’s

      statement that the vote count was inaccurate, without referencing the hand audits, was

      misleading. By law, this audit was required to take place following the election and be

      completed no later than December 31, 2020 (Ga Ann § 21-2-498). Respondent’s

      statements were made while the hand audit was proceeding and after it concluded. We

      understand that Dominion has sued respondent for defamation in connection with his

      claims about their voting machines (Complaint, US Dominion, Inc. v Giuliani, 1:21-cv-

      00213, US District Court, District of Columbia [Washington], January 25, 2021).

      Consequently, we do not reach the issue of whether respondent’s claims about the

      Dominion voting machines were false, nor do we need to.

      statements about the results of the Georgia election count are false. Respondent

      provides no basis in this record for disputing the hand count audit. Respondent made

      these statements at least on December 3, 2020 when appearing before the Georgia

      Legislature’s Senate Judiciary Committee, during a December 6, 2020 episode of the

      radio show Uncovering the Truth, during a December 22, 2020 episode of his radio

      show Chat with the Mayor, he alluded to it in a December 27, 2020 episode of

      9 In this motion, because the AGC only relies on the audit referred to in the Georgia Secretary of State’s January 6, 2021 letter to Congress, we only consider this one audit. Georgia’s election results were, however, actually audited three times, and no evidence of widespread fraud was discovered (Daniel Funke, Fact check: No evidence of fraud in Georgia election results (June 1, 2021), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/01/fact-check-georgia- audit-hasnt-found-30-000-fake-ballots/5253184001/ [last accessed June 12, 2021]).

      In view of the hand counts conducted in Georgia, we find that respondent’s

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      Justice Dept. to Sue Georgia Over Voting Law

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      The Justice Department is suing Georgia over a sweeping voting law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature, a congressional official said on Friday, a major step by the Biden administration to confront state-level ballot restrictions enacted since the 2020 election.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was expected to announce the lawsuit later Friday morning.The lawsuit is among the highest-profile enforcement actions to be brought under the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted a key provision that allowed the Justice Department to stop states from passing laws viewed as facilitating voter discrimination.The lawsuit shows that the Justice Department under the Biden administration intends to use the remaining tools at its disposal to aggressively fight state actions that it sees as potentially disenfranchising minority voters.Mr. Garland said earlier this month that the department would deploy all of its available tools to combat voter discrimination.The lawsuit comes days after congressional Republicans blocked the most ambitious federal voting rights legislation in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ efforts to preserve voting rights. President Biden and Democratic leaders pledged to continue working to steer federal voting rights legislation into law.The Justice Department lawsuit is expected to accuse the Georgia law of effectively discriminating against nonwhite voters and seeks to show that Georgia lawmakers intended to do so.The Georgia law ushered in a raft of new restrictions to voting access and dramatically altered the balance of power over election administration. The law followed an election that saw Georgia, a once reliably red state, turn blue for the first time in nearly 40 years in the presidential race, followed by two quick successive Senate seats flipping from Republican to Democratic.Georgia was the epicenter of former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong effort to overturn the election results. He seized on numerous false conspiracy theories about the Georgia election, and continued to claim that it was rife with fraud despite three separate recounts and audits — including one conducted entirely by hand — reaffirming the results.Critics were quick to cry that the law was rooted in the former president’s falsehoods and was seeking to undo the Democratic wave in Georgia, taking aim at the state’s no excuse absentee voting provision, which had been passed by Republicans in 2005 but became the preferred method of voting for Democrats in the 2020 election amid the pandemic. More

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      Pence, Diverging From Trump, Says He Was ‘Proud’ to Certify Election

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      In a speech, former Vice President Mike Pence went the furthest he has gone yet in distancing himself from Donald Trump and the Capitol riot. But he still praised the former president and his agenda.Former Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday night made his most forceful attempt yet to separate himself from his former boss, Donald J. Trump, on the issue of certifying the 2020 election results.Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Mr. Pence defended the constitutionally mandated role he played in certifying the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump loyalists — some chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capitol while the president did nothing for hours to stop them.“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” Mr. Pence said, noting that as vice president, he had no constitutional authority to reject or return electoral votes submitted to Congress by the states. “The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”It was the furthest that Mr. Pence, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024, has gone yet in defending his role that day or distancing himself from Mr. Trump, to whom he ingratiated himself during their four years together in office.In the speeches Mr. Pence has delivered since leaving the White House, he has gone out of his way to praise Mr. Trump and his agenda, even reiterating some of the former president’s grievance-fueled messaging that latches onto the country’s culture wars.On Thursday night, Mr. Pence argued that “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education, was effectively “state-sanctioned racism.”And he spent much of his speech reciting what he said were Mr. Trump’s accomplishments on many issues, including free trade, border security and relations with China. “President Trump changed the national consensus on China,” he said.Mr. Pence also compared Mr. Trump to former President Ronald Reagan.“He too disrupted the status quo,” Mr. Pence said. “He challenged the establishment. He invigorated our movement and set a bold new course for America.”But so far, Mr. Pence has only tiptoed around the issue of how to remain the loyal soldier while distancing himself from the events of Jan. 6.Speaking at the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner in Manchester, N.H., this month, Mr. Pence admitted that he and Mr. Trump might never see “see eye to eye” about the Capitol riot, stopping short of criticizing one view over another.On Thursday night, he declined to state firmly that he and Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election, a reality that the former president has continued to deny.“I understand the disappointment many feel about the last election,” Mr. Pence said. “I can relate. I was on the ballot. But there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes in this moment. If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”Whether Mr. Pence will succeed in having it both ways — being viewed as an ally and a critic of Mr. Trump — remains to be seen. Polls show that a majority of Republican voters believe that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election and buy into his baseless claims about voter fraud.Mr. Pence is also testing the patience of a man who still looms over the political landscape and the Republican Party. While Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have spoken several times since leaving office, Mr. Trump has showed flashes of frustration with his former loyal No. 2.In private and at a Republican National Committee donors event at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida, shortly after a book deal for Mr. Pence was announced, the former president has mocked Mr. Pence for certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory, according to people familiar with the discussions as well as a detailed description of the remarks that evening. More

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      Tácticas trumpianas amenazan la democracia en Perú

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      “Solo quiero encontrar 11.780 votos”.Fue la frase que el expresidente Donald Trump le dijo al funcionario electoral de más alto rango en Georgia mucho después de que se hiciera claro que había perdido la reelección. Todo lo que hizo Trump para darle la vuelta a las elecciones estadounidenses de 2020 fracasó. Por desgracia, sus tácticas, como subrayó hace poco Anne Applebaum en The Atlantic, les sirven de inspiración a los políticos antidemocráticos de todo el mundo. Y en ningún lugar es más evidente que en Perú.El 6 de junio, Perú celebró las elecciones presidenciales de segunda vuelta más polarizadas en 30 años. Se enfrentaron en la contienda Keiko Fujimori, hija del antiguo dictador Alberto Fujimori, y Pedro Castillo, un maestro provincial y líder sindical de izquierda. Al partido de Fujimori, Fuerza Popular, desde hace tiempo se le ha relacionado con prácticas corruptas y autoritarias, y el partido de Castillo, Perú Libre, es abiertamente marxista. Ambos candidatos tienen credenciales democráticas dudosas.Fujimori planteó su campaña como una lucha contra el comunismo basada en advertencias a los electores de que Castillo convertiría a Perú en otra Venezuela (una estrategia que convenció a muchos votantes de clase media en Lima y otras ciudades costeras). Por su parte, Castillo resonó con los electores pobres de las áreas rurales que se sienten ignorados por la élite política concentrada en Lima y profundamente decepcionados por el statu quo.Con el 100 por ciento de los votos contados, los resultados muestran que Castillo ganó por un margen minúsculo de unos 44.000 votos del total aproximado de 19 millones. El problema es que Fujimori se ha negado a aceptar la derrota, argumentando, sin fundamento alguno, que las elecciones fueron un fraude. Las autoridades electorales de Perú no han encontrado ninguna prueba de fraude y no existen motivos para dudar de su independencia. Los observadores internacionales y expertos electorales también concluyeron que las elecciones fueron limpias. A pesar de ello, el bando de Fujimori ha impulsado un movimiento equiparable a un intento de golpe electoral, que tiene a la democracia de Perú al borde del abismo.En vez de encontrar votos a su favor, como intentó hacer Trump, Fujimori ha tratado de hacer desaparecer los votos de su contrincante. Un equipo de abogados enviados a la caza de irregularidades en los bastiones rurales de Castillo identificaron 802 registros electorales, cada uno de entre 200 y 300 votos, que quieren anular con base en pequeñas irregularidades técnicas. En total, Fujimori pretende eliminar más de 200.000 votos de su rival en sus bastiones, sustentándose en criterios dudosos sin aplicación en el resto del país.Las acusaciones rayan en lo ridículo. Si existiera fraude sistémico, se habría descubierto el día de las elecciones. Habría requerido organización y coordinación, y no hay pruebas de que haya sido así. Las mesas de votación en Perú cuentan con vigilancia de agentes de policía y funcionarios electorales, observadores internacionales y, crucialmente, miles de ciudadanos y representantes de los partidos, que habrían hecho circular cualquier prueba de fraude en las redes sociales.Estas razones no han bastado para detener a Fujimori. Acusaciones infundadas de fraude han inundado las redes sociales y se repiten sin cesar en los canales de televisión, cuya abrumadora mayoría está a su favor. Los partidarios de Fujimori incluso han acosado a las autoridades electorales con manifestaciones frente a sus oficinas. Muchos incluso quieren que se anulen las elecciones.La estrategia es clara: Fujimori ha lanzado una campaña de desinformación estilo Trump con el propósito de deslegitimar las elecciones y crear una atmósfera de temor e incertidumbre. En un clima cada vez más polarizado, estas tácticas podrían generar actos violentos e incluso hacer necesaria una intervención militar.Los rumores sobre un posible golpe no son mera especulación. El pasado 16 de junio, cientos de oficiales militares retirados les enviaron a las fuerzas armadas de Perú una carta en la que declaraban, sin pruebas, que las elecciones fueron fraudulentas y exigían que los militares se abstuvieran de reconocer a Castillo como presidente.Darle la vuelta a las elecciones sería un error garrafal. Si al candidato que representa a los votantes que han sido marginalizados desde hace mucho tiempo se le niega ilícitamente la victoria, podrían desatarse manifestaciones sociales generalizadas, lo que conduciría a una crisis de gobernabilidad similar a la que sufren las naciones vecinas, Chile y Colombia. En esas circunstancias, la única opción para que Fujimori (o cualquier otra persona) lograra gobernar sería represión.¿Por qué ocurre todo esto? La campaña de Fujimori cuenta con el respaldo de prácticamente toda la clase dominante de Lima, desde líderes empresariales y medios de comunicación importantes hasta gran parte de la clase media. Estos grupos temen que Castillo lleve a Perú por un rumbo similar al de Venezuela. No obstante, Castillo también les inspira miedo porque no es uno de ellos. En un país marcado por una enorme desigualdad social, racial y regional, Castillo es un advenedizo cuyo ascenso, para muchos peruanos privilegiados, resulta amenazante.Algunos de los temores de la élite son comprensibles. Durante la década de 1980, políticas económicas estatalistas fallidas combinadas con una brutal insurgencia maoísta sumieron a Perú en un estado de hiperinflación y violencia espantosa. Algunos de los aliados de Castillo, de hecho, son izquierdistas radicales, y su programa económico original era improvisado y excéntrico.Luka Gonzales/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSin embargo, estos temores también son exagerados. Es difícil considerar a Castillo como un hombre fuerte. No tiene ni la experiencia necesaria ni una base partidista firme, y su popularidad no llega en absoluto a los niveles de la de Hugo Chávez en Venezuela, Evo Morales en Bolivia o la de otros populistas que se convirtieron en autócratas. Su partido solo ostenta 37 de los 130 escaños del nuevo Congreso, que en su mayoría corresponden a políticos de centroderecha. Castillo cuenta con pocos aliados en el poder judicial y las fuerzas armadas, y una poderosa élite empresarial y gran parte de los medios de comunicación se oponen a sus posturas. Frente a tanta oposición, casi es seguro que cualquier estrategia radical fracasaría.El temor en torno a Castillo va más allá de lo razonable. Ha transformado a contendientes legítimos de Castillo en peligrosos opositores de la democracia.Es hora de parar en seco esta locura. En vez de sacrificar a la democracia en el altar del antizquierdismo, las élites de Perú deberían aprovechar los mecanismos democráticos para moderar o bloquear las propuestas más extremas de Castillo. Dada la debilidad de Castillo, no debería ser difícil.Por su parte, Castillo debe reconocer que no resultó electo debido a sus ideas radicales, sino a pesar de ellas. Los peruanos lo consideraron el menor de dos males. Para gobernar, debe construir puentes con las fuerzas centristas y de la centroizquierda. Si no lo hace, su presidencia (y la democracia de Perú) estará en peligro.El gobierno de Joe Biden conoce bien los peligros de las acciones con miras a anular el resultado legítimo de unas elecciones. Por esta razón, destacó hace poco que las elecciones fueron un “modelo para la democracia en la región”. La comunidad internacional no debería quedarse callada ante el paulatino golpe que va tomando forma en Perú. Las democracias amenazadas necesitan nuestro apoyo.Steven Levitsky es profesor de gobierno en Harvard y coautor de How Democracies Die. Alberto Vergara es profesor de la Universidad del Pacífico, en Lima, y coeditor de Politics after Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru. More

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      Michigan Republicans Debunk Voter Fraud Claims in Unsparing Report

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      The report, produced by a G.O.P.-led committee in the State Senate, exposes false claims made about the 2020 election by Trump allies in Michigan and other states.A committee led by Michigan Republicans on Wednesday published an extraordinary debunking of voter fraud claims in the state, delivering a comprehensive rebuke to a litany of accusations about improprieties in the 2020 election and its aftermath.The 55-page report, produced by a Michigan State Senate committee of three Republicans and one Democrat, is a systematic rebuttal to an array of false claims about the election from supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. The authors focus overwhelmingly on Michigan, but they also expose lies perpetuated about the vote-counting process in Georgia.The report is unsparing in its criticism of those who have promoted false theories about the election. It debunks claims from Trump allies including Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former president’s lawyer; and Mr. Trump himself.Yet while the report eviscerates claims about election fraud, its authors also use the allegations to urge their legislative colleagues to change Michigan’s voting laws to make absentee voting harder and limit the availability of drop boxes for absentee ballots, as Republicans have done in other swing states as they try to limit voting.“This committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” the authors wrote, before adding: “It is the opinion of this committee that the Legislature has a duty to make statutory improvements to our elections system.”Michigan Republicans, who control the state’s Legislature, have for weeks debated a series of new voting restrictions. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has said she will veto the legislation, but Michigan law allows citizens to circumvent the governor by collecting 340,047 signatures.Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that she hoped Republican lawmakers would use the report to “cease their attempts to deceive citizens with misinformation and abandon legislation based on the lies that undermine our democracy.”Here are some of the conclusions from the Michigan report that debunked Trump allies’ claims about the election:Referring to Antrim County in Northern Michigan — where local election officials briefly and inadvertently transposed voting numbers before correcting them, leading to false conspiracy theories about voting machines — the report suggests that Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, should “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” It adds that anyone who promoted the Antrim County theories as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election had left “all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.”The Voter Integrity Project, a right-wing group, has said that 289,866 “illegal votes” were cast in Michigan. The report’s authors called 40 people from the group’s list of supposed voters who received absentee ballots without requesting them and found just two who said they had been sent unrequested ballots. One was on the state’s permanent absentee voter list. The other voted absentee in the 2020 primary election and may have forgotten about checking a box then to request an absentee ballot in the general election.The report found that the chaos that unfolded after Election Day as votes were counted at the TCF Center in Detroit was the fault of Republican operatives who called on supporters to protest the count. “The Wayne County Republican Party and other, independent organizations, ought to issue a repudiation of the actions of certain individuals that created a panic and had untrained and unnumbered persons descend on the TCF Center,” the report states.Claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan and other states had been hacked to change results were false, the report said. The committee’s chairman, State Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican, called Georgia officials to investigate claims made by Jovan Pulitzer, who said he had access to manipulate vote counts. Mr. Pulitzer’s testimony “has been demonstrated to be untrue and a complete fabrication,” the report said. “He did not, at any time, have access to data or votes, let alone have the ability to manipulate the counts directly or by the introduction of malicious software to the tabulators. Nor could he spot fraudulent ballots from non-fraudulent ones.”Of Mr. Lindell’s wide-ranging claims of fraud and impropriety in vote-counting systems, the report states that “this narrative is ignorant of multiple levels of the actual election process,” before embarking on a lengthy debunking of his claims.While Mr. Trump claimed that more votes had been cast in Detroit than people who live there, the report found that turnout in the city was under 50 percent of eligible voters and about 37 percent of its population.No ballots were secretly “dumped” at the Detroit vote-counting center. “A widely circulated picture in media and online reports allegedly showed ballots secretly being delivered late at night but, in reality, it was a photo of a WXYZ-TV photographer hauling his equipment,” the report states. More

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      in Elections

      After a Fraught Election, Peru’s Democracy is Hanging By a Thread

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      “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”That’s what former President Donald Trump told Georgia’s top elections official long after he had clearly lost re-election. Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 U.S. election failed. But his tactics, as Anne Applebaum recently observed in The Atlantic, have inspired anti-democratic politicians around the world. Nowhere is that more clear than in Peru.On June 6, Peru held its most polarized presidential runoff election in 30 years. The election pitted Keiko Fujimori, a daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori, against Pedro Castillo, a leftist provincial teacher and union leader. Ms. Fujimori, who leads her party, Fuerza Popular (Popular Force), has long been implicated in corrupt and authoritarian practices, and Mr. Castillo’s party, Perú Libre (Free Peru), is openly Marxist. Both candidates have dubious democratic credentials.Ms. Fujimori framed her campaign as a fight against communism, telling voters that Mr. Castillo would convert Peru into another Venezuela — a strategy that won over many middle-class voters in Lima and other coastal cities. Meanwhile, Mr. Castillo appealed to poor voters in rural areas who felt ignored by the Lima-centered political elite and were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.With 100 percent of votes counted, Mr. Castillo won by a razor-thin margin of about 44,000 votes out of nearly 19 million. But Ms. Fujimori has refused to accept defeat, baselessly claiming the election was fraudulent. Peru’s electoral authorities have found no evidence of fraud, and there is no reason to doubt their independence. International observers and election experts have also concluded that the election was clean. Nevertheless, the Fujimori camp has begun what amounts to an electoral coup attempt, pushing Peru’s democracy to the brink of collapse.Rather than find votes for herself, like Mr. Trump sought to do, Ms. Fujimori is trying to make her opponent’s votes disappear. A team of lawyers sent to hunt for irregularities in Mr. Castillo’s rural strongholds uncovered 802 election records each containing 200 to 300 votes, which they sought to have annulled based on minor technical irregularities. In total, Ms. Fujimori seeks to wipe out more than 200,000 of her rival’s votes in his strongholds based on dubious criteria not applied elsewhere in the country.The claims are preposterous. If there were systemic fraud, it would have been uncovered on Election Day. It would have required organization and coordination, of which no evidence has been found. Peruvian polling places are patrolled by electoral and law enforcement officials, international observers and, crucially, thousands of citizens and partisan representatives who would have circulated evidence of any fraud on social media.This hasn’t deterred Ms. Fujimori. Baseless claims of fraud have flooded social media and are ceaselessly repeated on television channels, which are overwhelmingly in her favor. Fujimori supporters are even harassing electoral authorities by organizing demonstrations outside their offices. Many are calling for the entire election to be annulled.The strategy is clear: Ms. Fujimori has initiated a Trump-like disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimizing the election and creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. In an increasingly polarized climate, these tactics could lead to violence and even military intervention.Talk of a coup is not mere speculation. Last Thursday, hundreds of retired military officers sent a letter to leaders of Peru’s armed forces declaring without evidence the election fraudulent and demanding that the military not recognize Mr. Castillo as president.Overturning the election would be a colossal mistake. If the candidate representing long-marginalized voters is illegitimately denied victory, it could set off widespread social protest, creating a governability crisis like those in neighboring Chile and Colombia. Under such circumstances, the only way Ms. Fujimori — or anyone else — could govern would be through repression.Why is this happening? Ms. Fujimori’s campaign is backed by nearly the entire Lima establishment, including business leaders and major media outlets, as well as much of the middle class. These groups fear that Mr. Castillo will take Peru down a path toward Venezuela. But they also fear Mr. Castillo because he is not one of them. In a country marked by vast social, racial and regional inequality, Mr. Castillo is an outsider whose ascent, for many privileged Peruvians, feels threatening.Some of the elite’s fears are understandable. During the 1980s, failed statist economic policies and a brutal Maoist insurgency plunged Peru into hyperinflation and terrible violence. Some of Mr. Castillo’s allies are indeed radical leftists, and his original economic program was improvised and outlandish.Luka Gonzales/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut these fears are also exaggerated. Mr. Castillo is hardly a strongman. He lacks experience or a solid party base, and he is nowhere near as popular as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales or other populists-turned-autocrats. His party holds only 37 of 130 seats in the new Congress, a majority of which are filled by right-of-center politicians. Mr. Castillo has few allies in the judiciary or the military, and he is opposed by a powerful business elite and much of the media. In the face of such opposition, a radical strategy would almost certainly fail.Fear of Mr. Castillo exceeds the bounds of reason. It has transformed legitimate opponents of Mr. Castillo into dangerous opponents of democracy.It is time to stop the insanity. Rather than sacrifice democracy on the altar of anti-leftism, Peru’s elites should use democratic politics to moderate or block Mr. Castillo’s more extreme proposals. Given Mr. Castillo’s weakness, it should not be difficult.For his part, Mr. Castillo must recognize that he was elected not because of his radical ideas but despite them. Peruvians considered him the lesser of two evils. To govern, he must build bridges to center-left and even centrist forces. If he does not, his presidency — and Peru’s democracy — will be imperiled.The Biden administration knows the danger of efforts to overturn a legitimate election result. For this reason, it recently praised the election as a “model for democracy in the region.” The international community should not remain silent in the face of Peru’s slow-moving coup. The world’s beleaguered democracies need our support.Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and co-author of “How Democracies Die.” Alberto Vergara is a professor at Universidad del Pacífico, in Lima, Peru, and co-editor of “Politics After Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru.”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