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      In California, a campaign to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom qualifies for the ballot.

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      The 1.6 million voters who signed a petition for the Republican-led recall effort have 30 business days to ask to have their names removed if they so choose.Fueled by partisan fury and a backlash against pandemic shutdowns, a Republican-led campaign to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has officially qualified for the ballot, setting the stage for the second recall election in the state’s history, officials said on Monday.In a widely expected filing, the California secretary of state’s office found that recall organizers had collected 1,626,042 signatures on their petition, more than the roughly 1.5 million required to ask voters to remove Mr. Newsom from office.The announcement sets in motion a series of procedural steps that will culminate in a special election. No election date has been scheduled, but it is expected to be sometime in November. Between now and then, the state will review the cost of the election, and voters who signed the petition will have 30 business days to ask to have their names removed if they so choose.State officials say, however, that those hurdles are unlikely to prevent a vote, even though only a year or so will remain before Mr. Newsom, who was elected in 2018, comes up for re-election.Several Republican candidates have already announced challenges to Mr. Newsom, including Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender activist; Kevin Faulconer, a former mayor of San Diego; and John Cox, a Republican businessman who lost to Mr. Newsom in 2018.More are expected to follow, although Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, is widely expected to prevail in the deep-blue state. In recent polls, a majority of California voters have said they were disinclined to remove him from office, and his approval ratings have improved as the coronavirus crisis has waned. Mr. Newsom’s backers have characterized the recall effort as a futile bid by extremists to make Republicans relevant in the state.Launched early in Mr. Newsom’s administration by conservative activists who took issue with his stance on immigration, the campaign gained traction late last year as the state struggled to contain the spread of the coronavirus.But the drive did not gather real momentum until early November, when its organizers, arguing that the pandemic had impaired their ability to circulate petitions, persuaded a judge to extend the signature-gathering deadline. That evening, Mr. Newsom attended a birthday dinner for a lobbyist friend at an exclusive wine country restaurant after exhorting Californians to stay at home to curb the spread of the coronavirus.On the night of the dinner, only 55,588 people had signed the petitions. One month later, there were nearly 500,000 signatures.Recall attempts are common in California, but few make it onto the ballot. The last governor to face one was Gray Davis, who was ousted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003. More

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      Texas Republicans Targeting Voting Access Find Their Bull’s-Eye: Cities

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      In Houston, election officials found creative ways to help a struggling and diverse work force vote in a pandemic. Record turnout resulted. Now the G.O.P. is targeting those very measures.HOUSTON — Voting in the 2020 election presented Zoe Douglas with a difficult choice: As a therapist meeting with patients over Zoom late into the evening, she just wasn’t able to wrap up before polls closed during early voting.Then Harris County introduced 24-hour voting for a single day. At 11 p.m. on the Thursday before the election, Ms. Douglas joined fast-food workers, nurses, construction workers, night owls and other late-shift workers at NRG Arena, one of eight 24-hour voting sites in the county, where more than 10,000 people cast their ballots in a single night.“I can distinctly remember people still in their uniforms — you could tell they just got off of work, or maybe they’re going to work; a very diverse mix,” said Ms. Douglas, 27, a Houston native.Twenty-four-hour voting was one of a host of options Harris County introduced to help residents cast ballots, along with drive-through voting and proactively mailing out ballot applications. The new alternatives, tailored to a diverse work force struggling amid a pandemic in Texas’ largest county, helped increase turnout by nearly 10 percent compared with 2016; nearly 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots, and a task force found that there was no evidence of any fraud.A voter in a car used a drive-through voting station at NRG Arena in Houston to cast a ballot in the presidential election.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesYet Republicans are pushing measures through the State Legislature that would take aim at the very process that produced such a large turnout. Two omnibus bills, including one that the House is likely to take up in the coming week, are seeking to roll back virtually every expansion the county put in place for 2020.The bills would make Texas one of the hardest states in the country to cast a ballot in. And they are a prime example of a Republican-led effort to roll back voting access in Democrat-rich cities and populous regions like Atlanta and Arizona’s Maricopa County, while having far less of an impact on voting in rural areas that tend to lean Republican.Bills in several states are, in effect, creating a two-pronged approach to urban and rural areas that raises questions about the disparate treatment of cities and the large number of voters of color who live in them and is helping fuel opposition from corporations that are based in or have work forces in those places.In Texas, Republicans have taken the rare tack of outlining restrictions that would apply only to counties with population of more than one million, targeting the booming and increasingly diverse metropolitan areas of Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. The Republican focus on diverse urban areas, voting activists say, evokes the state’s history of racially discriminatory voting laws — including poll taxes and “white primary” laws during the Jim Crow era — that essentially excluded Black voters from the electoral process.Most of Harris County’s early voters were white, according to a study by the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group. But the majority of those who used drive-through or 24-hour voting — the early voting methods the Republican bills would prohibit — were people of color, the group found. “It’s clear they are trying to make it harder for people to vote who face everyday circumstances, especially things like poverty and other situations,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat and the former interim clerk of Harris County, who oversaw and implemented many of the policies during the November election. “With 24-hour voting, there wasn’t even claims or a legal challenge during the election.”The effort to further restrict voting in Texas is taking place against the backdrop of an increasingly tense showdown between legislators and Texas-based corporations, with Republicans in the House proposing financial retribution for companies that have spoken out.American Airlines and Dell Technologies both voiced strong opposition to the bill, and AT&T issued a statement supporting “voting laws that make it easier for more Americans to vote,” though it did not specifically mention Texas.American Airlines also dispatched Jack McCain, the son of former Senator John McCain, to lobby Republicans in Austin to roll back some of the more stringent restrictions.Republicans in the State Legislature appear unbowed. In amendments filed to the state budget this week, House Republicans proposed that “an entity that publicly threatened any adverse reaction” related to “election integrity” would not be eligible for some state funds.While those amendments will need to be voted on, and may not even rise to the floor for a vote, placing them on the record is seen by lobbyists and operatives in Austin as a thinly veiled warning to businesses to stay quiet on the voting bills.The Perryman Group, an economic research and analysis firm based in Waco, said in a recent study that implementing controversial voting measures could lead to conferences or events being pulled from the state, and prompt businesses or workers to shun it. The group estimated that restrictive new laws would lead to a huge decrease in business activity in the state by 2025 and cost tens of thousands of jobs. Among the restrictions in two omnibus bills in the Texas Legislature are a ban on 24-hour voting, a ban on drive-through voting and harsh criminal penalties for local election officials who provide assistance to voters. There are also new limits on voting machine distribution that could lead to a reduction in numbers of precincts and a ban on encouraging absentee voting.The bills also include a measure that would make it much more difficult to remove a poll watcher for improper conduct. Partisan poll watchers, who are trained and authorized to observe the election on behalf of a candidate or party, have occasionally crossed the line into voter intimidation or other types of misbehavior; Harris County elections officials said they had received several complaints about Republican poll watchers last year.Mr. Hollins, the former Harris County clerk, said Republicans recognized that “Black and brown and poor and young people’’ use the flexible voting options more than others. “They’re scared of that,” he said.While Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia and Arizona are passing new voting laws after Democratic victories in November, Texas is pushing new restrictions despite having backed former President Donald J. Trump by more than 600,000 votes. The effort reflects the dual realities confronting Republicans in the State Legislature: a base eager for changes to voting following Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss and a booming population that is growing more diverse. Bryan Hughes sponsored the bill in the State Senate that seeks to add voting restrictions.Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated PressSenator Bryan Hughes, a Republican from northeastern Texas who sponsored the State Senate bill, defended it as part of a long effort to strengthen “election security” in Texas.“I realize there’s a big national debate now, and maybe we’re getting sucked into that, but this is not something new to Texas,” Mr. Hughes said in an interview. He said that lawmakers were seeking to roll back mail voting access because that process was more prone to fraud. He offered no proof, and numerous studies have shown that voter fraud in the United States is exceptionally rare.Mr. Hughes said that the proposed ban on drive-through voting stemmed from the difficulty of getting access for partisan poll watchers at the locations and that 24-hour voting was problematic because it was difficult to find poll watchers for overnight shifts.But many voters in Harris County, whose population of 4.7 million ranks third in the country and is bigger than 25 states’, see a different motive.Kristie Osi-Shackelford, a costume designer from Houston who was working temporary jobs during the pandemic to help support her family, used 24-hour voting because it offered her the flexibility she needed as she juggled work and raising her three children. She said that it had taken her less than 10 minutes.“I’m sure there are people who may not have gotten to vote in the last couple of elections, but they had the opportunity at night, and it’s kind of sad that the powers that be feel like that has to be taken away in order to, quote unquote, protect election integrity,” Ms. Osi-Shackelford said. “And I struggled to find words, because it’s so irritating, and I’m tired. I’m tired of hearing the same stuff and seeing the same stuff so blatantly over and over again for years.”Brittany Hyman, 35, was eight months pregnant as Election Day was drawing near and was also raising a 4-year-old. Fearful of Covid-19 but also of the sheer logistics of navigating a line at the polls, Ms. Hyman voted at one of the drive-through locations.“Being able to drive-through vote was a savior for me,” Ms. Hyman said. She added that because she had been pregnant, she probably wouldn’t have risked waiting in a long line to vote.Brittany Hyman, who was pregnant as Election Day approached, used drive-through voting.Mark Felix for The New York TimesHarris County’s drive-through voting, which more than 127,000 voters took advantage of in the general election, drew immediate attention from state Republicans, who sued Mr. Hollins and the county in an attempt to ban the practice and discard any votes cast in the drive-through process. The Texas Supreme Court ruled against the Republicans in late October.Other provisions in the G.O.P. bill, while not aimed as directly at Harris County, will most likely still have the biggest impact in the state’s biggest county. One proposal, which calls for a uniform number of voting machines to be deployed in each precinct, could hamper the ability to deploy extra machines in densely populated areas.This month, in a further escalation of public pressure on legislators, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston, a Democrat, gathered more than a dozen speakers, including business executives, civil rights activists and former athletes, for a 90-minute news conference denouncing the bill.“What is happening here in Texas is a warning shot to the rest of the country,” said Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County judge and a Democrat who has pushed for continued expansion of voting access in the county. “First Georgia, then Texas, then it’s more and more states, and soon enough we will have taken the largest step back since Jim Crow. And it’s on all of us to stop that.” More

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      Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections

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      Not content with limiting voting rights, they are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger’s successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.Even those who have not been stripped of power have been censured by Republican Party organizations, including not just Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but also Barbara Cegavske, the Republican secretary of state of Nevada who ran a fair election and rejected spurious arguments that the election was stolen. The message that these actions send to politicians is that if you want a future in state Republican politics, you had better be willing to manipulate election results or lie about election fraud.Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but also to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Law Forward and the States United Democracy Center, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.Combating efforts that can undermine the fair administration of elections and vote counting is especially tricky. Unlike issues of voter suppression, which are easy to explain to the public (what do you mean you can’t give water to voters waiting in long lines?!?), the risks of unfair election administration are inchoate. They may materialize or they may not, depending on how close an election is and whether Mr. Trump himself or another person running for office is willing to break democratic norms and insist on an unfair vote count.So what can be done? To begin with, every jurisdiction in the United States should be voting with systems that produce a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a disputed election. Having physical, tangible evidence of voters’ choices, rather than just records on electronic voting machines, is essential to both guard against actual manipulation and protect voter confidence in a fair vote count. Such a provision is already contained in H.R. 1, the mammoth Democrat-sponsored voting bill.Next, businesses and civic leaders must speak out not just against voter suppression but also at efforts at election subversion. The message needs to be that fair elections require not just voter access to the polls but also procedures to ensure that the means of conducting the election are fair, auditable and verifiable by representatives of both political parties and nongovernmental organizations.Congress must also fix the rules for counting Electoral College votes, so that spurious objections to the vote counts like the ones we saw on Jan. 6 from senators and representatives, including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, are harder to make. It should take much more than a pairing of a single senator and a single representative to raise an objection, and there must be quick means to reject frivolous objections to votes fairly cast and counted in the states.Congress can also require states to impose basic safeguards in the counting of votes in federal elections. This is not part of the H.R. 1 election reform bill, but it should be, and Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress wide berth to override state laws in this area.Finally, we need a national effort to support those who will count votes fairly. Already we are seeing a flood of competent election administrators retiring from their often-thankless jobs, some after facing threats of violence during the 2020 vote count. Local election administrators need political cover and the equivalent of combat pay, along with adequate budget resources to run fair elections. It took hundreds of millions of dollars in private philanthropy to hold a successful election in 2020; that need for charity should not be repeated.If someone running for secretary of state endorses the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, they should be uniformly condemned. Support should go to those who promote election integrity, regardless of party, and who put in place fair and transparent procedures. Ultimately, we need to move toward a more nonpartisan administration of elections and create incentives for loyalty to the integrity of the democratic process, not to a political party.We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion. That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now. It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”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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      New York's Ranked-Choice Voting: What To Know

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      When voters select their party’s nominee for mayor of New York City, they will find themselves filling out a different type of ballot. The city is using ranked-choice voting for primary elections this year, and the first major test comes on June 22.What is ranked-choice voting?Instead of casting a single vote for a single candidate, voters in a ranked-choice system select a set number of candidates in order of preference. In New York’s mayoral primary, voters will be allowed to choose up to five.Learn more about how ranked-choice voting works and try it out. More

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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Four: ‘Let Them Pull the Red Wagon’

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSSFrom the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.In this episode: With the Bladen Improvement PAC’s reputation suffering in light of years of cheating accusations, resentment is stirring within its ranks and a prominent member turns against the leadership. Nevertheless, Horace Munn, president of the PAC, joins with his closest allies to make a bold move by supporting a political upset at the center of the county.A forest road through Bladen Lakes State Forest.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More

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      As Republicans Push Voting Laws, They Disagree on Strategy

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      Trump-friendly state lawmakers trying to enact new voting laws are facing pockets of opposition from fellow Republicans who argue that some measures go too far or would hurt the party’s own voters.John Kavanagh, a Republican state representative in Arizona, recently ran through a list of what he called “bad election bills that were introduced by Republicans.”One would have allowed the Legislature to overturn the results of a presidential election even after they had been certified. Another would have required that early ballots be dropped off only at drop boxes that are attended. A third would have repealed the state’s hugely popular permanent early voting list, which allows voters to receive a ballot in the mail for every election.All three measures were also stopped by Republicans in Arizona, even as the party pushes other bills that would enact tighter regulations on early voting in the state — just a few months after President Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1996 to carry the Southwestern battleground.This G.O.P. resistance to certain voting legislation reflects an awkward and delicate dance within the party: As state lawmakers loyal to former President Donald J. Trump try to please him and his supporters by enacting new voting limits across the country, they are facing pockets of opposition from other Republicans who argue that some of the bills go too far or would hurt their own voters.These Republicans see themselves as moderating forces on bad bills. And they are instead proposing less stringent measures that they say will improve the efficiency and security of early voting now that so many more people are using it because of changes brought about by the coronavirus pandemic. They acknowledge, however, that their timing is bad. Pushing for any bill that includes new requirements for voting after an election that went more smoothly than many expected raises an inevitable question: Why now, if not to try to thwart Democrats?The number of Republicans willing to speak out is modest compared with the many Trump-friendly lawmakers in G.O.P.-controlled state capitols who continue to validate the former president’s false claims of fraud by proposing harsh new voting measures. And even when other lawmakers in the party are successful in softening or stopping these, the outcome often remains new restrictions on voting — however small or subtle — that Democrats say are unnecessary and that are likely to disproportionately affect Black, Latino and poor voters.But there is a difference between the public perception of these new laws and bills and the reality, Republicans say. Many of the most restrictive provisions have never made it past the bill-drafting phase or a legislative committee, halted by Republican leaders who say it is counterproductive to limit forms of voting that are convenient and that people in both parties prefer. (Republicans in states like Arizona have amassed such power in state legislatures in no small part because for many years their own voters embraced voting by mail.) And some Republicans have criticized as anti-democratic efforts to empower state legislators to reject the will of voters.The Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix. A Republican bill to allow the state’s Legislature to overturn certified presidential election results was never assigned to a committee.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesThe latest Republican voting proposal to fall flat because of intraparty resistance was a “wet signature” requirement in Florida, which was set to be dropped from a bill that advanced out of a State Senate committee on Tuesday. The rule, which would have mandated a signature written by hand rather than a digital signature, was cut in part over concerns about its potential effect on older voters.In Arizona, Mr. Kavanagh, a committee chairman in the state House of Representatives, noted that Republicans’ bill to allow the Legislature to overturn certified presidential election results had never even been assigned to a committee.Neither was the proposed measure to repeal the permanent early voting list, which is how more than three million voters in Arizona get their ballots.Mr. Kavanagh said the list was “tremendously popular with Democrats, Republicans and independents,” and therefore made no sense to do away with.Most proposals like these — inspired by a misinformation campaign from Mr. Trump and allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani, who pressured Republican lawmakers to interfere with their state’s certification process — are dead, not just in Florida and Arizona but also in other states like Georgia, where Republicans set off a national uproar over voting rights. “But that part never got written, or was rarely covered in the newspapers,” Mr. Kavanagh said.This year in Florida, lawmakers introduced legislation to ban drop boxes, limit who can collect ballots for other voters and restrict access to people in voting lines, among other provisions. The proposals were met with swift and forceful opposition from county elections supervisors, perhaps none whose opinion carried more weight than D. Alan Hays of Lake County. Mr. Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”“In my role as supervisor of elections, I’m focusing on policy,” he said in an interview. “I don’t pay any attention to party. If it’s a good idea, we should give it every opportunity to succeed. And if it’s a bad idea, we should do everything we can to stop it from being implemented.”He and other supervisors worked phones and emails to explain to lawmakers the nuances of how elections are run and why some of their provisions would be impractical. This month, after the controversy over Georgia’s new voting law, the Florida House softened its version of the voting bill; the proposal that ultimately passed out of the State Senate committee on Tuesday did not include some of the most stringent original provisions, like a ban on drop boxes (the availability of which it still limits).“To their credit, the legislators have shown great appreciation and respect for our opinions,” Mr. Hays said.Republicans who want to see changes to election law that would have far less of an impact on how votes are cast say that some of the proposals introduced by pro-Trump lawmakers are not helping. And these bills are muddying the waters, they say, in areas of the law like ballot security, where there used to be more bipartisan agreement.Poll workers sorting absentee ballots in Decatur, Ga., after the state’s Senate runoff elections early this year. Some top Republican election officials in Georgia, including Gabriel Sterling, have voiced opposition to parts of the state’s new voting law.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesSome Republicans say that in less polarized times, these measures wouldn’t be attracting nearly as much controversy because even divisive issues like requiring a form of identification to vote had some bipartisan support.A 2005 bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker, the former secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, recommended requiring identification for all voters, but allowed for a flexible interpretation of what that could be, like a utility bill. That report also stated what independent elections experts say is still true: that absentee ballots remain the most susceptible to fraud, though fraud is exceptionally rare. In the very few instances that fraud has been caught and prosecuted, as in North Carolina in 2018, it often involves absentee ballots.Most Republicans argue that measures are needed to safeguard and streamline absentee voting, especially because it was so prevalent last year during the pandemic — and popular with voters. In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official who bucked his party and Mr. Trump in December by denouncing claims of voter fraud as false and dangerous, said he didn’t agree with everything in the state’s new law. He took particular issue with the provisions that seem intended to punish his boss, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican who also pushed back against Mr. Trump’s voter fraud lies, by stripping him of his voting power as a member of the State Election Board.Mr. Sterling speaking to reporters in Atlanta in November. He said that over all, he believed Georgia’s new voting law was “a boring bill.”Megan Varner/Getty ImagesBut Mr. Sterling said he believed that over all, “It is a boring bill,” adding: “It is not the end of the world.”He argued that “there was going to be a cleanup bill” to address voting given that record numbers of people voted early and by mail for the first time, creating considerable strain on local elections officials. And he pointed to local elections jurisdictions that were overextended with large numbers of signatures to match on absentee ballots.On the one hand, he said, the government can hire staff members and pay them $10 an hour to compare signatures. On the other hand, he said that requiring an I.D. number like the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or a driver’s license number, as Georgia now does, seemed more efficient. “You’re saying, ‘Does the number match?’” he said. “‘Does it not match?’ It’s a very simple thing.”He blamed Republicans for trying to placate Mr. Trump’s supporters by introducing bills they knew would never pass — and which, in some cases, lawmakers didn’t fully believe were good policy. They just knew it was good base politics, he said.“Essentially the leadership of the House and the Senate said to their members, ‘Introduce whatever you have to so your people are OK,’” Mr. Sterling said.That was a mistake, Mr. Sterling added, but not necessarily surprising. “There’s a lot of voters who believe the lie, and we are a representative democracy.”Patricia Mazzei More

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      Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

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      You don’t hear his name as much. But as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, the former president rules.His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast. You can see it in Republican reluctance to back a bipartisan inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in the widespread denunciation of party members who refused to overturn election results and who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and in poll data showing continuing repudiation among loyal Republicans of the 2020 election results.Trump’s centrality guarantees that large numbers of resentful, truth-denying, conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white voters will continue to find aid and comfort in the Republican Party.Ed Rogers, a top political aide in the Reagan White House who describes himself as “a committed Republican,” responded by email to my query about the degree of Trump’s command: “Trump is the most powerful person in the Republican Party — his endorsement can make the difference in a lot of primaries and sometimes in a general election.”Trump, Rogers continued, “would win the Republican nomination for president if the race were today. He looks unstoppable in the G.O.P. I don’t know who could challenge him.” Anyone opposing Trump for the nomination “would be mocked, mimicked and generally harassed for months. Who needs that?”Rogers captured his party’s current predicament: “For the G.O.P., Trump is like a fire, too close and you get burned, too far away and you are out in the cold.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump appointee as ambassador to the United Nations recently proved Rogers’s point.After the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Haley was sharply critical of Trump, telling Tim Alberta of Politico:We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.Haley went on:Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.But Haley, ambitious herself to be president, quickly backtracked. And just last week, at a news conference on April 12 in Orangeburg, S.C., she was asked if she would support Trump if he ran in 2024. “Yes,” she said, before pointedly adding, “I would not run if President Trump ran.”A key pillar of Trump’s strength is his success in turning the Republican Party into the explicit defender of white hegemony.As my news side colleague Peter Baker wrote in September 2020:After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.Not in generations, Baker continued, “has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America.”The result, as William Saletan of State wrote earlier in April this year, is that “three months after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party still won’t fully renounce it.”In recent weeks, Saletan continued:Republican lawmakers have belittled the attack, defended the mob that precipitated it (Sen. Ron Johnson called them “people that love this country”), voted against a resolution condemning it, or accused liberals of overreacting to it. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, speakers blamed a “rigged election” for provoking the rioters. But the sickness goes deeper. The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.The depth of party loyalty to Trump and to the men and women who have his back has even found expression in the flow of campaign contributions.As Luke Broadwater, Catie Edmondson and Rachel Shorey of The Times reported on April 17:Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first term Georgia Representative, perhaps the most extreme of Trump’s allies, has raised $3.2 million, they wrote, “more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.”What are the sources of Trump’s continued ability to not only maintain the loyalty of millions of voters, but to keep them persuaded of the conspiratorial notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged?There is an ongoing debate among scholars and political analysts regarding the bond between Trump and his loyalists, his preternatural ability to mobilize white resentment into grievance-based social-movement action. Where does it come from?Before we delve into competing interpretations, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, a professor of psychology at Clark University, makes a crucial point:The psychology of collective victimhood among groups that were objectively targeted and harmed by collective violence and historical oppression is quite different from the psychology of grievance or imagined victimhood among dominant group members, who are driven by a sense of status loss and entitlement as well as resentment of minority groups that are viewed as a threat.Because of this difference, Vollhardt wrote by email, she would not use the word ‘victims’ to described Trump supporters: “I would perhaps simply say ‘grievances’ or ‘imagined victimhood’ to refer to the kinds of ideas that have fueled Trump’s and other right-wing White Americans’ rhetoric and appeals.”This distinction is explicit in “Resentment and Redemption: On the Mobilization of Dominant Group Victimhood,” by Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin, both at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in a chapter of “The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood.”Reicher and Ulusahin contend that “dominant group victimhood” emerges when groups experience a feelingof actual or potential loss of dominance, a sense of resentment at this loss which is bound up with issues of entitlement — the undeserving are taking what we deserve — and hence provides a moral dimension to restitutive actions, and finally the prospect of redemption — of restoring the rightful order of things — through action.These feelings of “undeserved” displacement, the authors write, “are not unmediated perceptions of reality. Rather, they are narratives offered by leaders with the aim of mobilizing people around the leader as representative and savior of the group.”To conclude, the two authors write,Our argument is not simply about victimhood as it applies to “objectively” privileged groups. It is ultimately about the toxicity of a particular construction of victimhood: One which transforms eliminationist violence into the restitution of a rightful moral order. For it is when we believe ourselves to be acting for the moral good that the most appalling acts can be committed.Other scholars point to the political manipulation of the emotions of shame and humiliation.In their March 2021 article “Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narratives,” Alexandra Homolar and Georg Löfflmann, both member of the politics and international studies department at the University of Warwick in Britain, make the case that Trump is a master of “populist humiliation discourse.”In this political and rhetorical strategy,The country of the present is described as a fundamentally weakened nation, systematically disadvantaged through “bad deals” negotiated by the establishment and exploited by allies and enemies alike. Treasured pasts of national greatness are represented through romanticized images that reduce the present to a demeaning experience.Members of the target audience, Homolar and Löfflmann continue, “are constructed as an idealized community of shared origin and destiny, the ‘pure people,’ who have been betrayed and humiliated because what is represented as their way of life and righteous place in the world has been lost.”In September 2016, Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of Trump voters was an open invitation to Trump’s counterattack:You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.In a Sept. 12, 2016 speech in Baltimore, Trump shot back:Hillary Clinton made these comments at one of her high-dollar fund-raisers in Wall Street. She and her wealthy donors all had a good laugh. They were laughing at the very people who pave the roads she drives on, paint the buildings she speaks in, and keep the lights on in her auditorium.In a direct play on the humiliation theme, Trump declared:She spoke with contempt for the people who thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families. She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her to rule over.In a separate article, “The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security,” Homolar and Ronny Scholz, a project manager at the University of Warwick’s center for applied linguistics, argued that Trump’s “leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose.” These stories serve a twofold purpose, instilling “insecurity among the American public” while simultaneously transforming “their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality.’ ”The authors studied Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches to identify the words he used most often, and then grouped them “together with the words with which they predominantly co-occur.” They demonstrate that the word clusters Trump habitually deployed “surrounding ‘American’ and ‘country’ centrally featured the interrelated themes of crime and violence, killing jobs, and poverty, as well as illegal immigration and drugs, Islamic terrorism, trade and infrastructure.”At the heart of what the authors call “Trump-speak” is apolitics of reassurance, which relies upon a threefold rhetorical strategy: it tells audiences what is wrong with the current state of affairs; it identifies the political agents that are responsible for putting individuals and the country in a state of loss and crisis; and it offers an abstract pathway through which people can restore past greatness by opting for a high-risk outsider candidate.Once an audience is under Trump’s spell, Homolar and Scholz write:Rational arguments or detailed policy proposals pale in comparison with the emotive pull and self-affirmation of an us-versus-them crisis narrative, which creates a cognitive feedback loop between individuals’ ontological insecurity, their preferences for restorative policy, and strongmen candidate options. In short, “Trumpspeak” relies on creating the very ontological insecurity that it promises to eradicate for political gain.The authors describe “ontological security” as “having a sense of presence in the world, describing such a person as a ‘real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person,’ ” citing R.D. Laing, the author of “The Divided Self.” Being ontologically secure, they continue, “allows us to ‘encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological’ with a firm sense of both our own and others’ reality and identity. However, ontological security only prevails in the absence of anxiety and danger.”Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Louisville, argue that Trump appeals to voters experiencing what they call “egocentric victimhood” as opposed to those who see themselves as “systemic” victims.In their January 2021 paper, “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics,” Armaly and Enders argue that:A systemic victim looks externally to understand her individual victimhood. Egocentric victimhood, on the other hand, is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the ‘oppressor,’ nor the attribution of blame, are very specific. Both expressions of victimhood require some level of entitlement, but egocentric victims feel particularly strongly that they, personally, have a harder go at life than others.There were substantial differences between the way these two groups voted, according to Armaly and Enders:Those exhibiting higher levels of egocentric victimhood are more likely to have voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. However, those who exhibit systemic victimhood are less supportive and were less likely to vote for Trump.The same pattern emerged in the case of racial resentment and support for or opposition to government aid to African-Americans, for building a wall on the Mexican border and for political correctness: egocentric victims, the authors report, tilted strongly in a conservative direction, systemic victims in a liberal direction.In an effort to better understand how competing left and right strategies differ, I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple, a series of questions. The first was:How would you describe the differences between the mobilizing strategies of the civil rights movement and Trump’s appeals to discontented whites? Arceneaux’s answer:The civil rights movement was about mobilizing an oppressed minority to fight for their rights, against the likelihood of state-sanctioned violence, while Trump’s appeals are about harnessing the power of the state to maintain white dominance. Trump’s appeals to discontented whites are reactionary in nature. They promise to go back to a time when whites were unquestionably at the top of the social hierarchy. These appeals are about keying into anger and fear, as opposed to hope, and they are about moving backward and not forward.What role has the sense of victimhood played in the delusional character of so many Trump supporters who continue to believe the election was stolen? Arceneaux again:Their sense of victimhood motivates the very idea that some evil force could be so powerful that it can successfully collude to steal an election. It fits the narrative that everyone is out to get them.Looking toward the elections of 2022 and 2024, Trump not only remains at the heart of the Republican Party, he embodies the party’s predicament: candidates running for House and Senate need him to turn out the party’s populist base, but his presence at the top of the ticket could put Congress and the White House out of reach.Still, Arceneaux argues that without Trump, “I do believe that the Republicans will struggle to turn out non-college educated whites at the same rate.”Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, observes that turning out working class voters in 2024 will most likely not be enough for Trump to win: “There are a large number of Republican voters (around 40 percent), who were either reluctant Trump voters or non-supportive voters, who make a Trump win in the general election look very undoable.”Ed Rogers, the Republican lobbyist I mentioned at the beginning of this column, argues that if Trump runs in 2024 — despite the clout he wields today — he is liable to take the party down to defeat:I don’t think Trump can win a two person race in a general election. He can’t get a majority. He pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2016 and he got beat bad by an uninspiring candidate in 2020. 2024 is a long way away but I don’t know what might happen to make Trump have broader appeal or more advantages than he did in 2020.Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant who is a harsh critic of Trump, emailed me to say that “Trump is the Republican Party” and as a result:We are in uncharted waters. For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending.What is driving the Republican Party? Stevens’s answer is that is the threat of a nonwhite majority:The coordinated effort to reduce voter access for those who are nonwhite is because Republicans know they are racing the demographic clock. The degree to which they are successful will determine if a Republican has a shot to win. It’s all about white grievance.Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, described what may be Trump’s most lasting imprint on his party:Many prospective presidential candidates, including Josh Hawley, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, “seem to me to be embracing the growing nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-diversity fire Trump lit.”In the 28 years since the 1992 election, Begala continued by email, there has been “more diminution in white voting power than in the previous 208 years” dating back to the nation’s first presidential election.For the Republican Party, Begala wrote, “as white power diminishes, white supremacy intensifies.”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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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Three: The Ballad of the Nursing Home Ballots

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFrom the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.In this episode, Zoe delves into one of the most serious allegations against the Bladen Improvement PAC: an accusation about stealing votes from vulnerable people that goes back 10 years. In trying to figure out if there is any truth in this particularly persistent rumor, Zoe comes to understand how and why election cheating allegations are so sticky.Camp Clearwater Campground in Bladen County.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More