Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Vermont Governor Phil Scott Agrees to Expand Voting Rights

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      Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill on Monday requiring that all registered voters receive mail-in ballots. His decision contrasted with Republican-led efforts to restrict voting rights in several states.Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont signed legislation on Monday that requires all registered voters in the state to receive mail-in ballots, an expansion of voting rights that counters a movement among Republicans in other states to restrict them.Mr. Scott, a Republican, signed the bill nearly four weeks after the Vermont General Assembly approved the legislation, which also allows voters to fix, or “cure,” a ballot that was deemed defective if it was filled out or mailed incorrectly.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Scott said he had signed the bill “because I believe making sure voting is easy and accessible, and increasing voter participation, is important.”He added that he would push lawmakers to expand the provision beyond statewide general elections, “which already have the highest voter turnout.”“For greater consistency and to expand access further,” he said, “I am asking the General Assembly to extend the provisions of this bill to primary elections, local elections and school budget votes when they return to session in January.”Last year, during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Vermont officials agreed to send out mail-in ballots to voters so they could cast their votes safely.The measure was extremely popular. More than 75 percent of registered voters cast ballots early or by mail, according to the office of Jim Condos, Vermont’s secretary of state. Voter turnout was high, with more than 73 percent of the state’s 506,000 registered voters casting ballots in November, according to the state’s election results.Among registered voters in Vermont, 68 percent wanted to keep the policy of giving every registered voter a mail-in ballot while 29 percent opposed it, according to a poll conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies, a survey group. Seventy-eight percent of residents also supported giving voters a chance to fix, or “cure,” ballots with small errors.Gov. Phil Scott’s decision to sign the Vermont bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights.Wilson Ring/Associated PressVermont’s Senate approved the measure in March. The legislation passed in the General Assembly with bipartisan support, in a 119-to-30 vote, though some Republican lawmakers had resisted the push for mail-in ballots, arguing that they could allow for voter fraud.Independent studies and government reviews have found that voter fraud is extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.“We should be proud of our brave state,” Mr. Condos, a Democrat, said in a statement last month. Though he did not name states where lawmakers have worked to restrict voting rights — Florida, Georgia and Texas among them — Mr. Condos contrasted those Republican-led efforts with the measure in Vermont, where the Republican governor had expressed support for a bipartisan bill.“While others are working to make it harder to vote, in Vermont we are working to remove barriers to the ballot box for all eligible voters, while strengthening the security and integrity of the voting process,” Mr. Condos said.Mr. Condos, who noted that mail-in ballots had been available to American voters since before the Civil War, said in his statement that ballots would be mailed only to active registered voters and would not be forwarded to people who had changed their addresses.Ballots must include a signed affidavit from voters identifying themselves, and each envelope will contain voter data such as a unique identification number and a bar code, Mr. Condos said.The law will give municipalities the option to send mail-in ballots for local races and allow voters to cast their ballots at drive-in polling places, said State Senator Cheryl Hooker, a Democrat, who was a sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.Becca Balint, the president pro tempore of the State Senate, said in a statement that the approval of the bill “stands in stark contrast to legislatures across the country who continue voter suppression efforts, targeting practices like mail-in voting that have correlated with higher turnout among people of color.”Ms. Balint, a Democrat, said Mr. Scott’s signature “represents bipartisan agreement that our democracy, and our state, are strengthened when we make elections more accessible to all.”Both chambers of Vermont’s General Assembly are controlled by Democrats, and Mr. Scott has said he voted for President Biden in the 2020 presidential election. After casting his ballot in November, Mr. Scott told reporters that it was the first time in his life that he had voted for a Democrat. Mr. Biden won 66 percent of the vote in Vermont.Mr. Scott’s decision to sign the bill bucked a trend of Republican leaders who have supported bills restricting voting rights. Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor but which former President Donald J. Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, is the only state with a Republican-controlled legislature that has significantly expanded voting rights.“Amid a scourge of anti-voter bills being proposed and signed into law in the states, it’s encouraging to see Vermont moving in the opposite direction,” Josh Silver, chief executive of RepresentUs, a bipartisan voting rights advocacy group, said in a statement.Mr. Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost and his monthslong campaign to delegitimize the results have gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system and led to baseless claims about the integrity of the election.In their public comments, lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in the electoral system to justify pushing for bills that restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times.States such as Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa have already passed laws restricting the ability of voters to cast ballots. In Texas, Democrats stalled legislation that has been viewed by many voting rights groups as perhaps the harshest of all.Christine Hauser More

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      Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections

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      The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, a company hired by the Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate to review the state’s 2020 election results, moving supplies last month at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.Courtney Pedroza for The New York Times“I would not have voted to certify Jan. 6, not without more questions,” said Sam Peters, a Nevada Republican who is campaigning for a Las Vegas-area House seat. He said he was not sure that Mr. Biden had legitimately won Nevada, even though the president did so by more than 33,000 votes.It’s unclear how long the reluctance to accept unfavorable electoral outcomes will remain a central focus of the party, and to what degree Republicans might support widespread election challenges up and down the ballot in the future.But Republicans’ unwavering fealty to the voter fraud myth underscores an emerging dynamic of party politics: To build a campaign in the modern G.O.P., most candidates must embrace — or at least not openly deny — conspiracy theories and election lies, and they must commit to a mission of imposing greater voting restrictions and making it easier to challenge or even overturn an election’s results. The prevalence of such candidates in the nascent stages of the party primaries highlights how Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace far-flung falsehoods has elevated fringe ideas to the mainstream of his party.Over a year before the midterm elections, many of the fledgling primary races remain in flux, with scores of potential candidates still weighing bids. The Census Bureau’s delays in producing detailed population data have pushed the redistricting process back until at least September, which has impeded the recruitment of candidates for both parties.The result is that Republicans who have jumped into campaigns early tend to be those most loyal to Mr. Trump and the party base. Several among this new class of Republicans are likely to win their races, helped by historical trends favoring the party out of the White House, and a head start on fund-raising and meeting potential voters.Victories by these Republicans would expand the number of congressional lawmakers who have supported overturning the 2020 results, raising new doubts about whether Americans can still count on the routine, nonpartisan certification of free and fair elections.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman, is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump. Mr. Richardson said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMr. Peters already has a list of questions he would ask before voting to certify the 2024 election results, should he be in Congress then.“I’ll want to know that the elections have been transparent and that the states that have certified their elections did not have significant issues and questions that still haven’t been answered,” he said in a recent interview. “I want to know that the states have certified them properly.”Mr. Trump and his allies remain relentlessly focused on the false claims about the election. Steve Bannon, the on-and-off Trump adviser, said in an interview late last month with NBC News that challenging the results of the 2020 election was a “litmus test” for Republican candidates running in 2022 primary races. The former president has been pushing reviews of last year’s results, like a widely criticized Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona, and he continued his effort in a speech in North Carolina last weekend.Some party strategists fear that the denials of the election outcome could hurt candidates who progress to the general election in the crucial swing districts Republicans must win to take control of Congress.Polling shows a significant disconnect between Republicans and independent voters. A recent survey from Quinnipiac University found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate, an opinion shared by just 28 percent of independent voters.“It’s one of those things that is in the water with these very online, very loud and very active primary voters,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist and veteran of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns. “It’s a problem and it’s dangerous for the party to continue to flirt with this conspiracy theory, but I don’t think Republicans are really paying a price for it.”The election-skeptical Republicans span safe districts and battlegrounds. Derrick Van Orden, running for a second time in a Democratic-held district in western Wisconsin that Mr. Trump carried in 2020, published an op-ed article defending his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally near the Capitol, saying he had gone to “stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”A “Stop the Steal” demonstrator outside the Capitol on Jan. 3 as members of the new Congress were sworn in. Three days later, rioting Trump supporters broke into the building.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMany Republicans are simply trying to deflect the question of Mr. Biden’s legitimacy with pledges to crack down on voter fraud, rebuild “election integrity” and support more voting restrictions.In December, State Senator Jen Kiggans of Virginia, campaigning for a competitive U.S. House seat based around Norfolk, issued a nearly 900-word statement on Facebook detailing her commitment to restoring “voter confidence” but making no mention of Mr. Biden or whether she disputed the 2020 results. (Her primary opponent, Jarome Bell, said during an interview with Mr. Bannon that people involved in election fraud should be sentenced “to death.”)“I agree with you 100% that it is right to question the electoral process and to hold those accountable who are responsible for ensuring our elections are conducted fairly with the utmost integrity,” Ms. Kiggans wrote in her statement.Even Republican candidates who acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimate winner say potential fraud needs to be addressed. Mary Ann Hanusa, a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is running for Congress in Iowa, said she would have voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, but she added that because of the coronavirus, changes to voting practices in several states “were made outside of law and when you do that, it really opens up the door to fraud.”Senate primaries so far seem to be competitions to decide which candidates can cast themselves as the strongest allies of Mr. Trump and his quixotic quest to overturn the election results.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who spoke at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, is seeking a promotion to the Senate. Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, whom Mr. Trump endorsed during his speech on Saturday night, introduced his Senate campaign with a video promising to “make sure our elections are fair” — a barely coded reference to Mr. Trump’s claims.In Ohio, a super PAC called the USA Freedom Fund is attacking official and prospective candidates for being insufficiently loyal to the former president and “America First” principles, while backing Josh Mandel, the Republican former Ohio state treasurer.“I am the only candidate in Ohio who gets up wherever he speaks around the state and has the guts to say this election was stolen from Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Mandel said last month on a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.Perhaps no 2022 House candidate embodies the new Republican ethos more than Loren Culp, a former one-man police department from rural Republic, Wash., who made his name by refusing to enforce a new state gun law in 2018. He spent weeks refusing to concede the governor’s race last year, and he sued state officials before dropping his lawsuit in January under pressure from the state attorney general.In an interview last week, Mr. Culp said he believed fraud had cost him the election, despite his loss by more than half a million votes to Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.Now Mr. Culp is running to unseat Representative Dan Newhouse, a four-term Republican from a conservative and largely rural central Washington district who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January. Mr. Culp said that he had a better chance of winning a House election than a statewide one because, he argued, Washington’s all-mail election system makes fraud too easy to perpetuate in the Seattle area.Loren Culp, right, Republicans’ nominee for governor of Washington last year, at a rally in Mount Vernon in August. He spent weeks refusing to concede the race and sued state officials.Elaine Thompson/Associated Press“I don’t believe that a real conservative will win a statewide race in Washington until we go back to in-person voting,” Mr. Culp said, echoing the skepticism of mail voting that Mr. Trump pushed for months leading into November. “Congressional districts are smaller geographical areas with less people dealing with the ballots. So it’s a whole lot easier to keep tabs on things.”Republican candidates’ 2020 skepticism comes as the party’s base voters, moving in near-lockstep with Mr. Trump and influential voices in the conservative media, have told pollsters that they, too, believe Mr. Biden was not the legitimate winner. G.O.P. candidates say it does not take much for their constituents to raise questions about the election to them.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman who is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, said his events were regularly delayed because voters inundated him with questions about the election.“When I go to give a speech, it takes 10 to 15 minutes before I can start, because the election is the first thing anybody wants to talk about,” Mr. Richardson, who said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election, said in a recent interview. “I go ahead and let them get it out of their system and then I can get started.”“There’s definitely a reason to doubt,” he added. “There’s doubt out there.”And then there is Audra Johnson, who became briefly famous in 2019 after wearing a “Make America Great Again” wedding dress created by Andre Soriano, a conservative fashion designer.Ms. Johnson is now running against Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, a Republican who supported impeachment. She believes Mr. Trump was the rightful winner last year and said that, if elected, she would work to audit voting machines, enact a national voter identification law and create more “transparency” in election results.“It’s coming down to the point where anybody can vote in our elections,” she said. “That’s not how the system is supposed to be set up.” More

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      Arizona 2020 Election Review: Risks for Republicans and Democracy

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      Experts call it a circus. Polls say it will hurt the G.O.P. in 2022. But Republicans are on board in Arizona and elsewhere, despite warnings of lasting damage to the political system.SURPRISE, Ariz. — Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line.“There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded purchases into his vehicle outside a Home Depot. “I don’t think there was any fraud. My opinion of this is that it’s a big lie.”Mr. Goins is flesh-and-blood evidence of what political analysts here are all but shouting: The Republican State Senate’s autopsy of the 2020 vote, broadly seen as a shambolic, partisan effort to nurse grievances about Donald J. Trump’s loss here in November, risks driving away some of the very people the party needs to win statewide elections in 2022.That Arizona Republicans are ignoring that message — and that Republicans in other states are now trying to mount their own Arizona-style audits — raises worrisome questions not just about their strategy, but about its impact on an American democracy facing fundamental threats.Now in its seventh week, the review of 2.1 million votes in Arizona’s most populous county has ballooned not just into a national political spectacle, but also a political wind sock for the Republican Party — an early test of how its renewed subservience to Mr. Trump would play with voters.The returns to date are not encouraging for the party. A late-May poll of 400 Arizonans by the respected consulting firm HighGround Inc. found that more than 55 percent of respondents opposed the vote review, most of them strongly. Fewer than 41 percent approved of it. By about 45 to 33 percent, respondents said they were less likely — much less, most said — to vote for a Republican candidate who supported the review.Workers recounting 2020 general election ballots in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe review itself, troubled by procedural blunders and defections, has largely sacrificed any claim to impartiality. The Pennsylvania computer forensics firm that was conducting the hand recount of ballots quit without a clear explanation this month, adding further chaos to a count that election authorities and other critics say has been making up its rules as it went along.“If they were voting on it again today, they would have withheld doing this, because it’s been nothing but a headache,” Jim Kolbe, a Republican congressman from southeast Arizona from 1985 to 2003, said of the Republican state senators who are backing the review. “It’s a black mark on Arizona’s reputation.”Instead, the Republicans in the Arizona Senate have doubled down. And as the review’s notoriety has grown, pro-Trump Republicans in other states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have begun to promote their own plans to investigate the November vote, even though — as in Arizona — elections in those states have been certified as accurate and free from any fraud that could have affected the outcome.The sudden interest in exhuming the November election is explained by another number from the poll in Arizona: While only about 41 percent of all 400 respondents said they supported the Maricopa audit, almost 77 percent of Republican respondents did.Among the Trump supporters who dominate the Republican Party, skepticism about the election results, fueled almost entirely by Mr. Trump’s lies, remains unshaken, and catering to it is politically profitable. Leslie S. Minkus, 77, is a business consultant in Chandler, another Republican stronghold just southeast of Phoenix. His wife, Phyllis, serves on the local Republican legislative district committee. “The majority of voters here in Arizona know that this election was stolen,” he said in an interview. “It’s pretty obvious that our alleged president is not more popular than previous presidents, and still wound up getting a majority of the vote.”Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Goodyear, Ariz., last year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOpposition to the review by Democrats and some Republicans — including the Republican-run county board of supervisors and the Republican who is the chief county election officer — only shows that they have something to hide, Mr. Minkus added. And as for previous checks of ballots and voting equipment that showed no sign of fraud, he said, “I don’t think anybody would agree that the audits done in the past were independent.”In conversations with a range of Phoenix-area residents, many who supported the review were more equivocal than Mr. Minkus. “I think there was fraud going on. I mean, every election, there’s fraud,” said Eric M. Fauls, a 56-year-old California expatriate who moved to a golfing community in Surprise three years ago. “California — it was really bad — but I mean, California is never going to go Republican. With a swing state, it’s really important, so I think it’s worth doing an audit.”Still, he said, “I don’t know if there’s enough evidence either way to make it legitimate.”Most of the review’s critics, on the other hand, left little doubt of their feelings. “It’s a threat to our democracy. I think there’s no doubt about that,” said Dan Harlan, a defense-industry employee who changed his lifelong Republican registration to Democrat last year so he could help pick Mr. Trump’s opponent. “This audit is being conducted because the Republican Party refuses to look at long-term demographics and realize they can no longer be the party of the white male. And they’re doing everything they can to maintain power.“It’s not about democracy; it’s about winning,” he said. “And when any organization becomes more concerned with maintaining itself, losing its core values is no longer important.”Jane Davis, an 89-year-old retired nurse, was a Republican for 40 years before she re-registered as an independent and voted last year for Mr. Biden. The State Senate Republicans have backed an audit, she said, “to cause problems.”“I think it’s ridiculous, and I object to their spending any taxpayer money” on the review, she said.Protesters last month outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where ballots from the 2020 general election were being recounted. Courtney Pedroza/Getty ImagesChuck Coughlin, the Phoenix pollster who conducted the Arizona survey, said people like the Minkuses were in firm control of the state Republican Party in no small part because they are the ones who vote. Four in five Republican primary-election voters, he said, are 50 or older.By itself, that white-hot core is not large enough to wield power in statewide elections, Mr. Coughlin said. But it is plenty large enough to advance Mr. Trump’s narrative of a corrupt elite that is stealing power from the nation’s true patriots, particularly when it is stoked by politicians.“Historically on these big issues, you have a lively public discussion and then it goes away; the issue moves on to something else,” he said. “But this is an issue that we’re dwelling on because it’s to Trump’s advantage that the party continues to dwell on it — on his loss, and his victimhood and his identity.“I feel legitimately bad for these people that they’re so wounded that they are willing to take their party and a heretofore vibrant democracy down with it.”Indeed, some elections experts say that’s why the politics of the “audit,” as extravagantly flawed as it is, may be more complex than meets the eye. If it is about winning elections and building a majority, it looks like a political loser. If it’s about permanent grievance and undermining faith in the democratic system for political gain, maybe not.Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate president, and other Republicans have insisted that their election review is not intended to contest Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but to address voters’ concerns that the election had been stolen. In practice, those experts say, the review keeps the stolen-election narrative front and center in the state’s politics, slowly eroding faith in representative government.Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate last year. She said the purpose of the review was to address concerns of Trump voters that the election had been stolen. Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press“The problem is that Americans have a real lack of trust in institutions these days,” said William Mishler, a longtime expert on democratic institutions at the University of Arizona. And even many who regard the Arizona election review as a discredited, amateur exercise “fear the mischief that’s likely to come out of this in the form of some further undermining of confidence in the election outcome.”Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime student of the American political system, said the Arizona election review highlighted a seismic shift in the rules of American democracy. In years past, political parties were forces for moderation, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible. Now, he said, one of the two major parties was taking precisely the opposite tack.“We’ve had crazies in public life before,” he said. “We’ve had demagogues speaking out and sometimes winning high office. The difference this time is that they’re being encouraged rather than constrained by party and election officials.” Without some check on radicalism, he said, “our whole system breaks down.”Mr. Mishler concurred. “What worries me is not that there’s a minority of crazies in the party,” he said of the Republicans. “It’s that there’s a majority of the crazies.”That said, election inquiries only count votes. Mr. Mishler, Mr. Mann and Mr. Kolbe, the former representative, all said that a more imminent threat to democracy was what they called an effort by some Republicans to disregard votes entirely. They cited changes in state laws that could make challenging or nullifying election results easier, and a burst of candidacies by stolen-election advocates for crucial election posts such as secretary of state offices.Arizona is among the latter. The race to replace Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who s week that she was running for governor, already has attracted one Republican legislator who is an election conspiracy theorist and another who is perhaps the legislature’s leading supporter of restrictions on the right to vote.“These are perilous times,” Mr. Mann said. “Arizona is just demonstrating it.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      Sweet Cherries, Bitter Politics: Two Farm Stands and the Nation’s Divides

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      Opposing views of mask requirements have rippled across a Michigan County, even influencing where people buy their fruit.ELK RAPIDS, Mich. — The two farm stands lie just 12 miles apart along Route 31, a straight, flat road running through a bucolic wonderland of cherry orchards and crystalline lakes in northwestern Michigan.Yet when one stand instituted a no mask, no service rule last July and the other went to court to combat the state’s mask mandate, they set in motion a split that still ripples across Antrim County.Linda McDonnell, a retiree who began summering in the area 20 years ago, used to pop into Friske Farm Market regularly to treat herself to a few doughnuts. She loved watching them emerge piping hot from the kitchen, and delighted in their soft, chewy interiors beneath a crunchy outer layer. Then Friske’s joined the outcry against masks.“Oh my God, I do miss them, but I will not go there because of the politics,” said Ms. McDonnell, 69, a former schoolteacher. “They will not get my business.”The family that owns Friske Farm Market sued Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last summer, arguing that wearing masks should have remained a personal choice.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesOn the other side, Randy Bishop eyes the King Orchards farm stand with similar rancor.The white-bearded Mr. Bishop, sometimes called the “Rush Limbaugh of Antrim County,” abandoned long-distance trucking during the 2009 recession and currently hosts a talk radio show. He will boycott King’s forever, he said, “along with other progressive, communist business owners in this county.”Differences that had always simmered beneath the surface were inflamed by the coronavirus pandemic and pushed many people in places like Antrim County into their tribal corners. Now the molten flow of anger over the presidential election and virus mitigation measures is hardening into enduring divisions over activities as simple as where people buy their fruit.“Political divisions have infiltrated other parts of people’s lives a lot more than they used to,” said Larry Peck, 68, a retired oil company executive. “Choosing where you go, choosing where you shop, choosing all the things that your life interacts with that used to be not political now are a lot more political.”Antrim County, population 23,324, is known for its chain of 14 long, narrow, sometimes turquoise lakes spilling into Lake Michigan. The abundant water tempers the climate and, combined with the low, cigar-shaped hills, creates ideal conditions to grow fruit.Cherries in particular dominate the landscape. Sweet cherries. Sour cherries. Cherry Tree Inn. Cherry Suites Assisted Living. They populate every menu. Pie, of course. Cherry and chicken sandwich wraps. Black letters on roadside signs spell out greetings like “Have a cherry day!”Cherries dominate the landscape in Antrim County. Sarah Rice for The New York TimesFriske’s and King’s are two of the most popular farm stands — both low, red, wooden barnlike structures with white trim. Friske’s, which bills itself as “Not Your Average Fruit Stand,” features the Orchard Cafe, a bakery and a store stuffed with curios as well as everything needed to make pie. King’s is more homespun, with apples displayed in wooden baskets; customers are encouraged to pick their own fruit from the orchards.Last summer, the Friske family sued Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, arguing that wearing masks should have remained a personal choice. When the State Supreme Court nullified a series of the governor’s Covid-related executive orders in October, it effectively tossed out her mask mandate and made the lawsuit moot. Michigan’s health department issued a mask directive, which the Friske Farm Market defied until the state threatened to revoke its business license.The Friskes turned to Facebook to explain their position in videos that attracted both zealous supporters and harsh critics. An area newspaper profiling the ruckus dredged up the archconservative political past of Richard Friske, who died in 2002; he bought the family orchards some 60 years ago after serving in Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe.Jon R. Friske, 23, a member of the third generation to run the farm, said the family anticipated being attacked for making masks voluntary. More online warriors fired nasty broadsides than regular customers, he insisted.“It is cancel culture, that is all it is — they did not agree with what we were doing so they desperately tried to muddy our reputation and discredit us,” he said. “They come after us in the comments and call us ‘Grandma killers.’ Whatever they want to throw at us frankly leaves no room for personal responsibility and personal accountability, and that is not what America is all about.”By comparison, King Orchards made masks obligatory after Ms. Whitmer issued her executive order in July. The farm stand constructed a hand sanitizer station in the gravel parking lot and distributed free masks.Juliette King McAvoy behind plastic at the cash registers at King Orchards. The Republican-led State Senate blocked her from joining the Michigan Cherry Committee.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesMonths later, the Biden campaign released a commercial about the negative effects of climate change on fruit farming that featured three generations of the King family in their orchards. (John King, the patriarch, moved to the area from downstate in 1980 to take up farming and bought the Route 31 farm stand in 2001.)“For us it wasn’t about the party line or our personal politics, it was about being an advocate for mitigating climate change,” said Juliette King McAvoy, Mr. King’s daughter. Still, the Republican-controlled State Senate took the unusual step in April of blocking her appointment to the Michigan Cherry Committee.Area regulars chose sides, arguing endlessly over freedom versus public health. Both fruit stands claimed that they gained customers, even if some stormed away, while the need to eat at home drove a sales boom. Last month, King Orchards dropped its mandatory mask policy after the state did.But matters did not end with the masks.Vocal residents had also taken sides in a nagging battle over the results of the presidential vote in Antrim County. A human error in programming some of the Dominion voting machines in the county resulted in several thousand votes for Donald J. Trump being attributed to Mr. Biden.Although the mistake was caught immediately and corrected, it prompted one of the longest-running lawsuits over the results, with Mr. Trump cheering from the sideline.While court proceedings unrolled in the background, vaccines became the next yardstick for measuring which friends to keep and which businesses to frequent as daily life inched away from the pandemic.“Our core values were not aligning at all,” Joyce Brodsky said about her unvaccinated neighbor.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesJoyce Brodsky, 69, a painter and retired art teacher, spent the pandemic at home, occasionally passing time with a neighbor, a former auto salesman, who also stayed isolated in his lakeside house, festooned with a large Trump sign.She tried to not let it irk her, telling herself that many Trump banners on barns in the area were even larger. When her neighbor attempted to rattle her by talking about politics, she steered the conversations to his photo collages or other subjects, and she felt like the two of them were secure inside their Covid-free bubble.They took regular bike rides together until he returned from a trip to Florida, when she asked whether he had been vaccinated. He would never get vaccinated, he told her, suggesting that she had no right to ask.“Our core values were not aligning at all,” said Ms. Brodsky, who stopped the bike rides at that point. “Why would you not follow the science?”At Friske’s, plenty of pickup trucks in the parking lot still sport Trump-Pence bumper stickers, and the doughnuts lure regulars for breakfast. “We got fat,” joked Brenda Coseo, 62, after she and her husband, Chris, moved into their summer home in January and for part of the spring to escape the high coronavirus numbers in San Diego, where they usually live.Red, white and blue apparel at Friske Farm Market.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesThey liked Friske’s for being more relaxed about the pandemic rules, and decried the fact that so many local restaurants took a hard financial hit because of lockdowns. “It just seemed pretty unwarranted,” said Mr. Coseo, 63. “I am not the one counting dead people from Covid, but still.”Not everyone in the neighborhood agreed. On Route 31 just south of Friske’s, Kim Cook, 53, had opened Grace: A Gallery in an old church with a distinctive bell tower to sell the work of some 60 area artists.“I never went in there after I found out that they were not requiring masks,” said Ms. Cook, who once worked at Friske’s. Her own mask requirement, however, prompted abuse from several customers, including a woman who lunged at her, so she closed the gallery.Antrim County is the kind of place where it takes decades to be considered a local. The auto executives, assembly workers, teachers and others who eventually retire to their second homes from downstate Michigan remain outsiders. Residents who survive off the short summer tourist season call visitors “fudgies” because they frequent the fudge shops, and the retirees “perma-fudgies.”The pandemic brought a new breed: younger tech-savvy entrepreneurs from as far away as California who could work from home. They arrived with families and paid for houses in cash, fueling resentments.Antrim County is known for its chain of 14 narrow, sometimes turquoise lakes spilling into Lake Michigan.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesIn this county, Republicans have long controlled virtually every elected office. Still, a local judge, a former Republican politician, dismissed the case alleging fraud in the presidential election on May 18, saying that the requested state audit had been conducted.Yet the fighting continues. The county commissioners, meeting on Zoom, spend hours listening to angry residents. At a recent meeting, one resident decried the fact that the commissioners were getting sucked into false allegations that made the county a “laughingstock.” Another said it was a proven fact that the county’s voting machines could be programmed to flip ballots.The local resident who sued and his lawyer are widely expected to appeal. Supporters organized a $20-per-head fund-raiser on Saturday. The speakers included Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, who continues to sell the false claim that Mr. Trump won the election.The venue for the fund-raiser? Friske Farm Market. More

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      Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims

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      Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation.Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time.In the days before Christmas, as Mr. Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.Mr. Meadows also joined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote.Yet the newly unearthed messages show how Mr. Meadows’s private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish, and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Mr. Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Mr. Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss.“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”A spokesman for Mr. Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Mr. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.The requests by Mr. Meadows reflect Mr. Trump’s belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Mr. Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Mr. Trump also urged Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Trump continued to push Mr. Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.None of the emails show Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, agreeing to open investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.Ting Shen for The New York TimesThroughout those weeks, Mr. Rosen privately told Mr. Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William P. Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Meadows’s outreach to Mr. Rosen was audacious in part because it violated longstanding guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.“The Justice Department’s enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president. That’s the key idea that gave rise to these policies,” said W. Neil Eggleston, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. “If the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Nevertheless, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.On Jan. 1, Mr. Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Mr. Trump’s favor.Mr. Meadows had previously forwarded Mr. Rosen an email about possible fraud in Georgia that had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign. Two days after that email was sent to Mr. Rosen, Ms. Mitchell participated in the Jan. 2 phone call, during which she and Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to reconsider his findings that there had not been widespread voter fraud and that Mr. Biden had won. During the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him the votes necessary to declare victory in Georgia.Mr. Meadows also sent Mr. Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesman for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.And in his request that the Justice Department investigate the Italy conspiracy theory, Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link to a video of Brad Johnson, a former C.I.A. employee who had been pushing the theory in videos and statements that he posted online. After receiving the video, Mr. Rosen said in an email to another Justice Department official that he had been asked to set up a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the F.B.I., had refused, and had then been asked to reconsider.The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.Mr. Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.He is also negotiating with the Justice Department about what he can disclose to Congress and to the inspector general given his obligation to protect the department’s interests and not interfere with current investigations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Rosen said last month during a hearing before the oversight committee that he could not answer several questions because the department did not permit him to discuss issues covered by executive privilege.Mr. Durbin opened his inquiry in response to a Times article documenting how Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who had found favor with Mr. Trump, had pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded election fraud claims. The effort almost ended in Mr. Rosen’s ouster.Last month, Mr. Durbin asked the National Archives for any communications involving White House officials, and between the White House and any person at the Justice Department, concerning efforts to subvert the election, according to a letter obtained by The Times. He also asked for records related to meetings between White House and department employees.The National Archives stores correspondence and documents generated by past administrations. More

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      At Once Diminished and Dominating, Trump Prepares for His Next Act

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      The former president speaks on Saturday to the North Carolina Republican convention, as he resumes political speeches and rallies.WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, commutes to New York City from his New Jersey golf club to work out of his office in Trump Tower at least once a week, slipping in and out of Manhattan without attracting much attention.The place isn’t as he left it. Many of his longtime employees are gone. So are most of the family members who once worked there with him and some of the fixtures of the place, like his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who have since turned on him. Mr. Trump works there, mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.His political operation has also dwindled to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016. Most of them go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.But as he heads to the North Carolina Republican convention on Saturday night, in what is billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches, Mr. Trump is both a diminished figure and an oversized presence in American life, with a remarkable — and many say dangerous — hold on his party.Even without his favored megaphones and the trappings of office, Mr. Trump looms over the political landscape, animated by the lie that he won the 2020 election and his own fury over his defeat. And unlike others with a grievance, he has been able to impose his anger and preferred version of reality on a substantial slice of the American electorate — with the potential to influence the nation’s politics and weaken faith in its elections for years to come.Still blocked from Twitter and Facebook, he has struggled to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office and promote the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Some party leaders, like the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, are pretending he doesn’t exist anymore, while being deferential when Mr. Trump cannot be ignored.Others, like Senator Rick Scott of Florida, have tried to curry favor by presenting Mr. Trump with made-up awards to flatter his ego and keep him engaged in helping Senate Republicans recapture a majority in 2022.Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said Mr. Trump had defied the model of ex-presidents who lose an election and tend to fade away, and the experience of Richard M. Nixon, who was treated like a pariah in the way Mr. Trump has managed to avoid.As for being simultaneously big and small, Mr. Beschloss said: “He’s big if the metric is that politicians are afraid of him, which is one metric of power in Washington. Many Republican leaders are terrified of him and abasing themselves in front of him.”Jason Miller, an adviser to the former president, agreed on Mr. Trump’s control over the party.“There are two types of Republicans inside the Beltway,” Mr. Miller said. “Those who realize President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and those who are in denial.”Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far. Lawmakers who have challenged his dominance of the party, like Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who implored her colleagues to reject him after the Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol, have been booted from Republican leadership.From his strange dual perch of irrelevance and dominance, Mr. Trump has been narrowly focused on three things — his repeated, false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and his support for efforts to try to overturn the results; the state and local investigations into the practices of the Trump Organization; and the state of his business.Mr. Trump, who White House officials said watched with pleasure as his supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College vote, has told several people he believes he could be “reinstated” to the White House this August, according to three people familiar with his remarks. He has been echoing a theory promulgated by supporters like Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, and Sidney Powell, the lawyer being sued for defamation by election machine companies for spreading conspiracy theories about the safety of their ballots.President Biden’s victory, with more than 80 million votes, was certified by Congress once the Jan. 6 riot was contained. There is no legal mechanism for reinstating a president, and the efforts by Republicans in the Arizona Senate to recount the votes in the state’s largest county have been derided as fake and inept by local Republican officials, who say the result is a partisan circus that is eroding confidence in elections.Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has zeroed in on the Arizona effort and a lawsuit in Georgia to insist that not only will he be restored to office, but that Republicans will also retake the majority in the Senate through those same efforts, according to the people familiar with what he has been saying.Mr. Trump’s supporters demonstrated outside the Dallas County elections office in Dallas in November.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesHe has pressed conservative commentators and writers to echo his claims that the election was rigged. His focus has intensified in recent weeks, coinciding with the empaneling of a special grand jury by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, into his businesses.Frustrated by the lack of coverage, he has expressed his anger in news releases that still refer to him as the “45th President of the United States.”“Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife,” he said in a statement on Friday after Facebook announced it would keep its ban against him in place for at least two years. “It will be all business!”Last week, he shut down his blog after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant, according to a person familiar with his thinking.Some of his aides are not eager to engage with him on his conspiracy theories and would like to see him press a forward-looking agenda that could help Republicans in 2022. People in his circle joke that the most senior adviser to the former leader of the free world is Christina Bobb, a correspondent with the far-right, eternally pro-Trump One America News Network, whom he consults regularly for information about the Arizona election audit.It remains to be seen what he says about the 2020 election during his appearance in North Carolina.Mr. Trump was eager to take back the microphone on Saturday night in Greenville, where aides said he planned to attack Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as well as the Biden administration.“Joe Biden wants American taxpayers to pay reparations,” Mr. Trump was expected to say, according to an aide involved in drafting the speech. “I want the Chinese to pay American taxpayers reparations.”Mr. Trump’s first post-presidential rally is scheduled for later in June, followed by more appearances both for himself, paid for by his super PAC, and on behalf of House Republicans who support his agenda, advisers said.He has been so eager for an audience that he is even billed as a speaker who will appear live, via Jumbotron, at a rally in New Richmond, Wis., where the other headliners are Diamond and Silk, the MAGA movement social media stars, and Dinesh D’Souza, who received a presidential pardon from Mr. Trump for a felony conviction of making illegal campaign contributions.Despite the modest nature of some of the events he is interested in attaching his name to, even some his biggest detractors are loath to write him off.“I wish I was more confident it was ridiculous,” said Bill Kristol, a prominent “Never Trump” conservative. “It’s missing the forest through the trees to fail to see how strong he is.”Contractors packing boxes containing ballot tallies during the much-criticized Arizona Senate’s review of the vote in state’s largest county.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesBoth of his 2020 campaign managers, Bill Stepien and Brad Parscale, are on Mr. Trump’s payroll and still involved in his world. But Mr. Trump is episodically enraged with most members of his team.This time around, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who oversaw his 2020 campaign operation, has mostly dropped out, telling the small circle of advisers around the ex-president that he wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship with Mr. Trump, where he is just a son-in-law. Donald Trump Jr. has stepped in as the most politically involved family member in his father’s life.Susie Wiles, the veteran Florida political consultant whom the former president and everyone in his orbit credit with winning the critical state in 2016 and again in 2020, oversees Mr. Trump’s fund-raising operation from Florida, shepherding the weekly conference call of the skeletal team that still runs the post-presidential operation.In the evenings, Mr. Trump has attended fund-raisers at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course, both for his own political action committee and for Republican candidates.But he has been eager to get back to holding rallies, announcing states where he planned to travel to before his team had finalized any venues or dates.“If you’re a one-term president, you usually go quietly into the night,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “He sees himself as leading the revolution, and he’s doing it from the back of a golf cart.” More

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      Is America’s Democracy Slipping Away?

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      On Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was revving up the rioters who would attempt an insurrection at the Capitol, just a short distance away, he said to them: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” More

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      Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It

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      The bill, which includes some of the strictest voting measures in the country, would head to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott if it passes. He is expected to sign it into law.The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill on Sunday that would impose a raft of new voting restrictions in the state, moving a step closer to the expected full passage of what would be among the most far-reaching laws in Republicans’ nationwide drive to overhaul elections systems and limit voting.The bill, which passed the State Senate early Sunday, would tighten what are already some of the country’s strictest voting laws, and it would specifically target balloting methods that were employed for the first time last year by Harris County, home to Houston. In addition to banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, which were used by nearly 140,000 voters in Harris County during the 2020 election, the bill would prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, regardless of whether they had requested them; ban using tents, garages, mobile units or any temporary structure as a polling location; further limit who could vote absentee; and add new identification requirements for voting by mail. Partisan poll watchers would also have more access and autonomy under the bill’s provisions, and election officials could be more harshly punished if they make mistakes or otherwise run afoul of election codes and laws. The bill, which was hashed out in a closed-door panel of lawmakers over the past week as the spring legislative session neared its conclusion on Monday, was rushed to the State Senate floor late Saturday in a legislative power play orchestrated by Republican lawmakers and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Suspending rules that require a bill to be public for 24 hours before a final vote, they set off hours of debate before the Senate passed the bill just after 6 a.m. on Sunday by an 18-to-13 vote. Democrats denounced the dark-of-night legislative maneuver on a measure that Senator Borris L. Miles, a Democrat from Houston, said people in his largely Black and Latino district called “Jim Crow 2.0.”“They do ask me, every time I’m in the neighborhood, is this 2021 or is this 1961?” Mr. Miles said on the Senate floor. “And why are we allowing people to roll back the hands of time?”The House, which did not move to suspend the 24-hour rule, is set to convene at 1 p.m. local time, and will debate the bill before voting on it. No further changes to the legislation can be made. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is widely expected to sign the bill. Texas is one of several Republican-led states — including Iowa, Georgia and Florida — that have moved since the 2020 presidential contest to pass new laws governing elections and restricting voting. The impetus is both Republicans’ desire to appease their base, much of which continues to believe former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, and the party’s worries about a changing electorate that could threaten the G.O.P.’s longtime grip on power in places like Texas, the second-biggest state in the country.In a statement on Saturday, President Biden called the proposed law, along with similar measures in Georgia and Florida, “an assault on democracy” that disproportionately targeted “Black and Brown Americans.” He called on lawmakers to address the issue by passing Democratic voting bills that are pending in Congress. “It’s wrong and un-American,” Mr. Biden said. “In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”Republican state lawmakers have often cited voters’ worries about election fraud — fears stoked by Mr. Trump, other Republicans and the conservative media — to justify new voting restrictions, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in recent American elections.And in their election push, Republicans have powered past the objections of Democrats, voting rights groups and major corporations. Companies like American Airlines, Dell Technologies and Microsoft spoke out against the Texas legislation soon after the bill was introduced, but the pressure has been largely ineffective so far.The final 67-page bill, known as S.B. 7, proved to be an amalgamation of two omnibus voting bills that had worked their way through the state’s Legislature. It included many of the provisions originally introduced by Republicans, but lawmakers dropped some of the most stringent ones, like a regulation on the allocation of voting machines that would have led to the closure of polling places in communities of color and a measure that would have permitted partisan poll watchers to record the voting process on video. Still, the bill includes a provision that could make overturning an election easier. Texas election law had stated that reversing the results of an election because of fraud accusations required proving that illicit votes had actually resulted in a wrongful victory. If the bill passes, the number of fraudulent votes required to do so would simply need to be equal to the winning vote differential; it would not matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast. Democrats and voting rights groups were quick to condemn the bill.“S.B. 7 is a ruthless piece of legislation,” said Sarah Labowitz, the policy and advocacy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “It targets voters of color and voters with disabilities, in a state that’s already the most difficult place to vote in the country.”But Republicans celebrated the proposed law and bristled at the criticism from Mr. Biden and others. “As the White House and national Democrats work together to minimize election integrity, the Texas Legislature continues to fight for accessible and secure elections,” State Senator Bryan Hughes, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement. “In Texas, we do not bend to headlines, corporate virtue signaling, or suppression of election integrity, even if it comes from the president of the United States.”The bill took its final form after a contentious, monthslong debate; back-room negotiations; procedural errors by legislators; and extended, passionate debate by Democrats, who have tried to stall the bill’s passage through political and legislative maneuvers.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has said that an election overhaul is a priority, is widely expected to sign the bill.Eric Gay/Associated PressVoting rights groups have long pointed to Texas as one of the hardest states in the country for voters to cast ballots. One recent study by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas last in an index measuring the difficulty of voting. The report cited a host of factors, including Texas’ in-person voter registration deadline 30 days before Election Day, a drastic reduction of polling stations in some parts of the state, strict voter identification laws, a limited and onerous absentee voting process, and a lack of early voting options.In the preamble to the new bill, the authors appear to pre-emptively defend the legislation from criticism, stating that “reforms to the election laws of this state made by this Act are not intended to impair the right of free suffrage guaranteed to the people of Texas by the United States and Texas Constitutions, but are enacted solely to prevent fraud in the electoral process and ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.”In March, Keith Ingram, the director of elections in the Texas secretary of state’s office, testified that last year’s election in the state had been “smooth and secure.” He added, “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county elections officials.”A day before the Texas bill emerged, a new report pointed to the vast sweep of Republicans’ nationwide effort to restrict voting.As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new 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a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In last year’s election, while Republicans won Texas easily — Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 630,000 votes and the party maintained control of both chambers of the Legislature — turnout soared in cities and densely populated suburbs, which are growing increasingly Democratic. In Harris County, one of the biggest counties in the country, turnout jumped by nearly 10 percent.Republicans’ initial version of the bill put those densely populated counties squarely in the cross hairs, seeking to ban measures put in place during the 2020 election that helped turnout hit record numbers. The initial bill banned drive-through voting, a new method used by 127,000 voters in Harris County, as well as 24-hour voting, which was held for a single day in the county and was used by roughly 10,000 voters.While those provisions were left out of an earlier version of the bill as it made its way through the Legislature, they were reinstated in the final version of the bill, though the bill does allow for early voting to begin as early as 6 a.m. and continue until as late as 9 p.m. on weekdays. It also maintains at least two weekend days of early voting. More than any other state, Texas has also gone to great lengths to grant more autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers. The observers have been a cornerstone of American voting for years, viewed as a watchdog for election officials, but their role has grown increasingly contentious, especially in Texas. Republican poll watchers have been egged on in particular by Mr. Trump, who implored them to go to major cities across the country and hunt for nonexistent voter fraud.Across Texas during the 2020 election, there was an increase in anecdotal complaints of aggressive poll watchers, often on the Republican side, harassing both voters of color and election officials.The new bill would make it a crime to refuse to admit the observers to voting sites or to block their ability to fully watch the process. It says poll watchers must be able to “sit or stand [conveniently] near enough to see and hear the election officers.”It would also make it easier for partisan poll watchers to successfully pursue legal action if they argue that they were wrongfully refused or obstructed.In addition, the bill would limit who can vote absentee by mail in Texas, which does not have universal, no-excuse absentee voting. The bill states that those with a disability may vote absentee, but a voter with “an illness, injury or disability that does not prevent the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day” may not do so.Amid the new restrictions are multiple provisions that provide greater transparency into election administration. Counties must now provide video surveillance of ballot-counting facilities, and they must eventually make those videos available to the public. Discussions with voting equipment vendors must also be available to the public.During the debate before Sunday’s vote in the State Senate, Senator Royce West, a Democrat from Dallas, raised concerns that a provision barring voting before 1 p.m. on Sundays would limit “souls to the polls” organizing efforts that are popular with Black churches. Mr. Hughes said that clause was intended to allow poll workers to go to church.Mr. West noted that a separate bill passed by the Legislature will allow the sale of beer and wine starting at 10 a.m., two hours earlier than current law permits.“We’re going to be able to buy beer at 10 o’clock in the morning, but we can’t vote until one o’clock,” Mr. West said.Austin Ramzy and Anna Schaverien contributed reporting. More