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      With Florida Bill, Republicans Continue Unrelenting Push to Restrict Voting

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      Republican lawmakers are marching ahead to overhaul voting systems in states where they control the government, frustrating Democrats and even some G.O.P. election officials. Next up: Texas.The pleas from Florida election officials were direct and dire: Passing the state’s new voting bill would be a “grave security risk,” “unnecessary” and a “travesty.”The restrictions imposed by the new law, they warned, would make it harder to vote and hurt confidence in the balloting process.But their objections were brushed aside on Thursday night as the Legislature gave final passage to a bill that would limit voting by mail, curtail the use of drop boxes and prohibit actions to help people waiting in line to vote, among other restrictions, while imposing penalties on those who do not follow the rules. It was perhaps the clearest sign yet that Republicans are determined to march forward across state capitols to establish new restrictions on voting.The Republican effort puts added pressure on Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws, including a sweeping overhaul known as the For the People Act. But in Washington, just as in state capitols across the country, Republicans have remained united and steadfast against the Democratic efforts.Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and forbid the distribution of food and water to voters waiting in line. Iowa has also imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day.Next up is Texas, where Republicans in the legislature are trampling protestations from corporate titans like Dell Technologies and American Airlines and moving on a vast election bill that would be among the most severe in the nation. It would impose new restrictions on early voting, ban drive-through voting, threaten election officials with harsher penalties and greatly empower partisan poll watchers. The main bill passed a key committee in a late-night session on Thursday, and could head to a full floor vote in the House as early as next week.Bills to restrict voting have also been moving through Republican-led legislatures in Arizona and Michigan.Throughout the process, Republican legislators have been largely unmoved by opposition to new voting laws by Fortune 500 companies, major American sports leagues, Black faith leaders and elections administrators. Nor has the lack of popular support for many of the bills deterred them. Even as some of the more strident initial proposals have been watered down, there has rarely been a pause, even for a moment, in the drive to pass new legislation on voting.“I don’t think anybody was concerned about it,” Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said of outside criticism.Tightening his state’s election laws, Mr. Gruters has said, is a top priority not just of Republican lawmakers but also of the party’s base. Though he characterized Florida’s election system as a national “gold standard” and said he wasn’t aware of any fraud in the 2020 election, Mr. Gruters said in a phone interview on Friday that his state’s voting could always be improved.“It’s just like when the Tampa Bay Bucs won the Super Bowl — they’re still making improvements and signing new players,” he said.Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said tightening voting laws was a top priority for lawmakers and the party’s base.Wilfredo Lee/Associated PressA representative for Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Friday that he “is supportive” of the Florida bill, and he is widely expected to sign it. But state election officials were still protesting the measure on Friday morning, barely 12 hours after it had passed.The group representing Florida election supervisors issued a statement lamenting the new limits on voting by mail, saying the changes would make it “harder” to cast a mail ballot. “After days of debate, our hope is that the initial and unnecessary call for election reform will not detract from the confidence that was well-earned in 2020,” Craig Latimer, the head of the group, said in the statement.The unrelenting push by Republicans to roll back voting access has left Democrats exasperated. In an emotional floor speech before the final vote in Florida on Thursday night, State Representative Angela Nixon of Tampa both pleaded with her colleagues to vote against the bill and chastised those supporting it.“It’s very frustrating, and it’s super hard to be in this chamber, and to be cool with people and cordial with people who are making policies that are detrimental to our communities,” said Ms. Nixon, her voice shaking at times.The fixation on voting laws reflects how central the issue has become to the Republican Party, driven by a base that still adheres to former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Pledges to ensure voting integrity have become common in political ads and stump speeches, and opposition to the federal voting rights bills in Congress is universal among Republican members.A number of Republicans running for office in 2022 have begun campaigns with messaging that pushes the false narrative that the nation’s voting systems are flawed. They include Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, who on Wednesday announced a Senate bid with a three-minute video in which he called for fair and secure elections, adopting Republicans’ rationale for revamping the voting laws.In a political era in which partisan primaries are often the only challenge a candidate faces, the party’s base has become a chief driver of legislative action. A CNN poll released on Friday found that while 97 percent of Democrats believed President Biden “legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency,” 70 percent of Republicans surveyed said he did not.And polling from Quinnipiac University in April found that a vast majority of Republicans — 78 percent — were opposed to expanding vote by mail, and 84 percent believed that voter fraud was a greater threat than voter suppression. (Numerous audits, court cases and reports have found no significant fraud in the 2020 election.)Republicans have been largely dismissive of the business community’s objections to new voting restrictions, part of a longer-running split between the parties and local chambers of commerce that began when corporations vocally opposed laws enacted by Republican-run states in the 2010s that sought to protect businesses from having to recognize same-sex marriage.An array of corporations also denounced the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and said they would not donate to Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the election results. That threat didn’t sway most lawmakers from their fealty to Mr. Trump, and in the weeks since the attack, some companies have pulled back from that pledge.Indeed, some Republicans have turned public opposition from major businesses and outside entities into a political weapon; rather than seek to appease businesses, lawmakers have instead taunted them, castigating corporate activism and daring businesses to act.“Major League Baseball caved to fear and lies from liberal activists,” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia announced the day after the decision by Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta. Free and fair elections, he said, “are worth the threats.” He added, “They are worth the boycotts, as well as the lawsuits. I want to be clear: I will not be backing down from this fight.’’Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said he would continue to defend the state’s new voting restrictions after Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta this year.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressLt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas was just as firm. “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” he said after American Airlines released a statement denouncing one of the voting bills in the state. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Republicans not in thrall to Mr. Trump see the standoff with businesses as an ominous sign. “We say the party has gone full Trump, but what we mean is the party has gone full populist and nationalist,” said Michael Wood, an anti-Trump Republican running in Saturday’s 23-candidate special election to Congress in the Dallas suburbs. “We’ve turned away from our roots as a pro-business party, a pro-small business party, and that, if we don’t correct course, is going to be really bad for America.”Yet Republicans are also seizing on a potential political opportunity. The aftermath of the 2020 election, and Mr. Trump’s insistence that the vote was rigged, provided the party with the first major public support from its partisans to pursue new voting legislation, after the Supreme Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act in 2013.Indeed, many of the laws being proposed and passed by Republicans would most likely have been challenged by the Justice Department under what was known as the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the act.“We saw something like this in 2010 after Obama got elected,” said Myrna Pérez, the director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But we had more of a pushback and were able to block or blunt many of those laws. Now there’s not the kind of guardrails that we had in the past, and voters are suffering because of it.”Michael Wood, left, a Republican congressional candidate in Texas, criticized his party for going “full populist and nationalist.”LM Otero/Associated PressMr. Wood, the Texas Republican running in Saturday’s special election, worries that this could drive away supporters.“It’s keeping Republicans from talking honestly to themselves about why we’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the vote in Texas,” he said. “We can either have that conversation, or keep screaming about quote unquote ‘election integrity’ and watch the state become progressively more Democratic.”That debate could well be decided soon when the Texas Legislature takes up its own voting bill.Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting. More

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      Why Iowa Has Become Such a Heartbreaker for Democrats

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      BURLINGTON, Iowa — Tom Courtney and Terry Davis are former factory workers in Des Moines County along the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa, two men of similar age who skipped college but thrived in a community where blue-collar jobs used to be an engine of upward mobility.In 2008, Mr. Courtney’s daughter Shawna married Mr. Davis’s son Shannon. They celebrated at a rehearsal dinner at the Drake, a steak restaurant on the riverfront in Burlington. The two men are grandparents to Shawna’s daughters from her first marriage, and they occasionally met on the sidelines of Little League games.But as economic decline and social malaise overtook Des Moines County, and Donald J. Trump was embraced by many as an answer, the two men moved in opposite directions. Today they rarely speak. Mr. Davis has become the chairman of the county Republican Party. Mr. Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. He faced an opponent recruited by Mr. Davis.“This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” Mr. Davis said.Mr. Courtney, who expected a close race, was stunned by the depth of his loss on election night. “As I looked around the state, there were lots of people like me,” he said.“Iowans have changed.”For decades, this state was a reliable wind vane of American politics. In six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, its voters never deviated by more than one percentage point from the national results.Then in 2016, Mr. Trump pulled Iowa more sharply to the right than any state in the country. The trend continued in 2020, when he ran up wider margins against President Biden than he had against Hillary Clinton in most Iowa counties.Some Democrats believe there are pathways to winning back the working-class voters the party has lost here and in places like it. They point to Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the subject of tense negotiations in Washington, which would bring a surge of spending on roads, bridges, child care and clean energy. In Iowa, there are more structurally deficient bridges than any state in the country. Yet, few local Democrats have such high hopes for a political realignment. “There is no short-term elixir,” said Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist in the state.Tom Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in Iowa in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. Soon after the polls closed, he knew he had no chance. “Iowans have changed,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe 2020 carnage for Iowa Democrats was wide and deep. The party lost a Senate race, gave up two congressional seats and lost half a dozen seats in the state legislature. Unified Republican rule in state government has led Gov. Kim Reynolds to sign permissive gun laws and new restrictions on voting this year, and lawmakers are moving to add a constitutional ban on abortion.Many Democrats now believe that Iowa is all but lost to the party, and that it is time to let go, a view driving a fierce debate over whether to drop the state’s presidential caucuses from their leadoff role in 2024 and beyond. Iowa is small and unrepresentative, more than 90 percent white, and the 2020 election showed that Democrats’ future is in the Sun Belt, with its racially diverse electorate and college-educated suburbanites.Other party strategists are quick to note that Mr. Biden barely won his two Sun Belt pickup states last year, Georgia and Arizona, and that the party can’t afford to bleed more of its traditional voters while making only tenuous inroads with a new constituency.What’s the matter with Iowa, and by extension much of the northern Midwest, for Democrats? Many officials say the party’s cataclysmic losses stem from the erosion in quality of life in rural places like Des Moines County and small cities like Burlington, which are a microcosm for a hollowing out that has led to sweeping political realignments in parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.Schools have closed, rural hospitals are cutting all but bare-bones care, and young people with college degrees have fled for opportunities in Des Moines or Chicago. Employers have backfilled jobs with immigrants, often after weakening unions and cutting pay.“There’s just a discontent, an unhappiness here seeing communities shrink,” said Patty Judge, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Iowa. “That makes people very vulnerable to a quick fix. Donald Trump offered that: ‘Let’s make America great again, you’ve lost your voice, let’s have a voice again.’ People have bought into that.”Angela Pforts at her shop in Burlington, Barber and Style. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney, who is one of eight children of a farm couple he called “strong Roosevelt Democrats,” said that most of his nieces and nephews were “Trumpers,” which confounds him. “They’re not millionaires, most of the family works for wages,” he said. “I don’t understand them.”Mr. Davis’s 95-year-old father is a Democrat. He told his son he always votes for who he thinks will do the best job. “I said, ‘Dad, have you ever voted for a Republican?’” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said, ‘Hell no!’”According to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency, 1,700 jobs were shed statewide in 2019 outside Iowa’s major cities. It was the third loss in four years, the agency said, “and highlights a trend that is not uncommon in most of the country.”On top of economic factors, other forces forged the Trump coalition in Iowa, as they did elsewhere in places dominated by the white working class: a resentment of immigrants and people of color, and a narrowing of information sources that has pushed conservatives to radio and social media channels where lies and conspiracy theories flourish.A postal carrier in downtown Burlington. There are embers of a downtown revival, but most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘Those were my voters’On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Courtney, 73, steered his white S.U.V. around Burlington, a riverfront city with a population of 25,600, which is down by 3.5 percent since 2010. A slender figure with a mustache, silver hair and a soft-pitched voice, Mr. Courtney joined the Air Force out of high school and returned home to work at a Case backhoe plant in Burlington. He rose to become the leader of the union bargaining team before he retired and was elected to the State Senate in 2002.“When I worked there and was bargaining chair, we had 2,300 rank-and-file members,” he said as he drove near the Case plant beside the pewter-colored Mississippi. Today the shop floor is down to 350 workers.“Those were my voters,” he said, passing a nearly empty employee parking lot and a shuttered bar that was once crowded at shift changes. “The last five or six years I worked there, it was nothing to make $70,000 a year. Cars and boats — everybody had all that kind of stuff.” Today, starting wages are about $17 an hour. Burlington rose as a railroad and manufacturing center, and the stone mansions of its 19th-century barons still stand on a bluff above the river. The population peaked around 1970. Although there are embers of a downtown renewal, including a yoga studio and a brew pub, Jefferson Street, the main thoroughfare, was largely deserted on a recent weekday. Most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns that are themselves losing their economic cores.The visitor’s entrance at the Case factory in Burlington, Iowa. Case’s backhoe plant used to have more than 3,000 employees. Now it has about 350.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney harks back to a golden era for local Democrats. Des Moines County — not to be confused with the state’s capital city — voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 10 straight elections before 2016, when Mr. Trump flipped it. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Courtney, who was the majority whip in the State Senate, escorted Mr. Biden, then embarking on his second bid for the presidency, to an interview with editors of The Hawk Eye. In the middle of it, Mr. Courtney’s cellphone buzzed: It was Bill Clinton, pestering him to endorse the former president’s wife. (Mr. Courtney remained neutral.)Mr. Courtney grew up in the rural town of Wapello, 25 miles north of Burlington. He recalled how in 2018 he knocked on doors there for Democrats. “I’d go into neighborhoods that when I was a kid were nice middle-income neighborhoods with nice homes,” he said. “Now today there’s old cars in the yards, there’s trash everywhere. People come to the doors who are obviously poor. Those are Trump people. We’re not reaching those people.”He could not think of a single new factory that opened in Burlington during the Trump years. To Democrats, the fact that Iowans did not punish Mr. Trump in November for failing to bring a renewal of blue-collar jobs speaks to the power of perception over reality.“It’s just this constant slide and they don’t feel like anybody’s doing anything for them, but they believe that Trump was trying,” said Mr. Link, the Democratic strategist. “More than anything, Trump resonated with them in that he was indignant and angry about the status quo, and angry about elites. They’re not getting that same perception from Democrats.”High school students hanging out in the parking lot of the abandoned Shopko in Burlington. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesRepublicans on the riseIn many ways, Mr. Davis, 72, is the obverse of Mr. Courtney. Although he, too, started as a blue-collar worker, an electrician for railroads, Mr. Davis climbed the ranks of management. By the early 2000s he was the superintendent of a Burlington Northern locomotive plant. When the railroad shut down the operation, idling hundreds of union workers in Burlington, Mr. Davis helped with the downsizing. He took early retirement.Mr. Davis had promised his own driving tour of Burlington, but instead sat in his double-cab pickup with a reporter for two hours in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods. He wore khaki work pants and a black golf pullover. He spoke in a forceful, folksy voice.Once a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton, Mr. Davis said he became a Republican because he disagreed with Democrats on abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as what he called handouts to the undeserving.He recalled chatting at a railroad reunion with one of his former electricians who had taken a job at Case. The man told him that he, and many other union workers at the plant, had voted for Mr. Trump.Mr. Davis recalled him saying: “We pay 140 bucks a month to the union, every one of us does. They take that money and give it to a political party that gives it to people that don’t work. The more we thought about it, we thought, ‘I ain’t doing that anymore.’”The electrician added, “You’d be surprised how many of those people voted for Trump.”Terry Davis, the chair of the Des Moines County Republican Party. “This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesLike Mr. Courtney, Mr. Davis expressed some puzzlement about why Mr. Trump had done so well despite not delivering on his promise to bring back blue-collar jobs. “It’s kind of hard to figure,” he said. Mr. Davis was born in Missouri and worked in Kansas City before being transferred to Burlington. He agreed that the quality of life in town was lackluster. “My wife — don’t take this wrong — she’s not going to buy clothes here,’’ he said. “We go to the Quad Cities or Iowa City or Chicago or St. Louis to shop and mainly to kind of get out of town.”He readily acknowledged that Mr. Biden had won the presidency. But he also said that most Republicans in Des Moines County probably believed Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election.Democrats say that conservative talk radio, even more than Fox News, has spread conspiracy theories and disinformation to Republican voters. In places like Des Moines County, people now must drive far to see a dentist or buy a pair of shoes, and all of those hours in their cars have increased the influence of right-wing radio.“People are driving all the time, they’ve got their radios on all the time,” Mr. Courtney said. He mentioned a local station, KBUR, “which used to be a nice friendly station.” It was known for a show “to auction things off” and another that was a call-in “question and answer thing,” Mr. Courtney said. Now it broadcasts Sean Hannity for hours each afternoon.Mr. Courtney passed a shuttered middle school. “It’s just hard for me to believe that 15 years ago, we had three big thriving middle schools,” he said, “and today we’re down to nothing like that.”“Folks have left town,” he added.The now-closed Siemens factory in Burlington.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘There was a racism card’But Mr. Courtney acknowledged another reason, too: white flight to schools in West Burlington. “People will tell you it’s not, but there’s no question it is,” he said. Burlington’s population is 8.2 percent Black. Public school enrollment is 19 percent Black.Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Mr. Trump flipped it. It is one of 31 Obama-Trump pivot counties in Iowa, which has more of them than any other state in the country. A study by sociologists at Iowa State University in 2019 concluded that the state’s hard pivot from Mr. Obama was not because of “economic distress.” It pointed instead to Mr. Trump’s “nativist narrative about ‘taking back America.’”The study found that the counties that gyrated most sharply away from Mr. Obama were almost entirely white.Mr. Courtney does not dispute that racism drove part of that swing, and he has his own theory of why some of the same voters had earlier backed Mr. Obama.“I think they wanted to say they voted for a Black man,” he said. After two terms with Mr. Obama in office, however, Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on Mexicans, Muslims and other racial and religious minorities gave people permission to indulge inner grievances, Mr. Courtney said. “There was a racism card that came out and people said, ‘I’m sick of this Black guy, I want to go back to a white guy,’” he said. “I hesitate to say that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’’Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Donald J. Trump flipped it in 2016.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe road back in Iowa for Democrats is long and complicated. The state once prided itself on having more registered independents than Republicans or Democrats, but since 2018, in keeping with national trends toward polarization, independents now rank behind both major parties. Democrats have suffered a net loss of 120,000 registered voters compared with Republicans. Those votes alone are 10 percent of turnout in nonpresidential years.The party’s setbacks have reheated the debate over whether to cancel Iowa’s caucuses as the leadoff nominating contest. Many national Democratic officials argue that a larger and more diverse state should go before either Iowa or New Hampshire. Even some Iowa Democratic strategists have supported killing off the caucuses to focus on local issues and reduce the influence of the national progressive wing of the party.Mr. Courtney said the voters he knew didn’t care much about cultural issues that Democrats elsewhere dwell on, like gun control and immigration. “All they really want to know is where can they get a good job that pays the most money so that they can take care of their family, and we’re not touching on that,” he said.He has cautious hopes for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposal. “If we can put people to work making good money building that stuff, it could be like the W.P.A. back in the day,” said Mr. Courtney, whose parents worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.Even Mr. Davis, the G.O.P. chair, conceded that a robust infrastructure plan that brought jobs to Burlington would make it harder for Republicans to continue their winning streak.“It probably will be tough in four years if things are good,” he said. 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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Five: ‘Democrat, Republican, White, Black, Green’

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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: The Bladen Improvement PAC’s power is threatened when an unlikely candidate enters the race for county commissioner. People outside the PAC are starting to make clear that they have their own ideas about how to build Black political power in the county.A view along Hwy. 87 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

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      Campaign to Recall Gov. Gavin Newsom Qualifies for California 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.SACRAMENTO — 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, officials said on Monday, setting the stage for the second recall election in the state’s history.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 should culminate in a special election. No date has been scheduled, but it is expected to be sometime in November. Between now and then, the state will review the cost associated with sending the proposed recall to voters, and those 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 businessman who lost to Mr. Newsom in 2018.More are expected to follow, although Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, is widely expected to prevail. 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 Republican extremists to make their shrinking party relevant in the state.Started 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. Although California initially kept cases low, swiftly imposing a shelter-in-place order, infections soared as pandemic fatigue gradually provoked resistance.But the recall 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.The governor apologized after news of the episode leaked, calling it a “bad mistake” and saying that he “should have gotten up and left” as soon as he arrived at the restaurant. But the misstep was costly.On the night of the dinner, 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. Petitions for removal from office have been filed against every governor in the last 61 years.The only governor to be recalled, however, was Gray Davis, who was ousted in 2003 by Arnold Schwarzenegger as the state strained to rebound from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the dot-com bust, and rolling blackouts. After he took office, Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, faced his own barrage of attempted recalls.Mr. Newsom’s supporters have stressed the crossover between recall backers and supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, QAnon conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement. The recall’s chief proponent, Orrin Heatlie, a retired sheriff’s sergeant from Yolo County in the Sacramento area, had joked on Facebook about microchipping migrants. Mr. Heatlie has said that he published the comment to be provocative but that it was not meant to be taken literally.On Monday, the governor’s campaign warned that the pro-Trump and far-right activists behind the recall would seek to roll back the state’s progress in controlling the pandemic, protecting the environment and legislating gun control.Juan Rodriguez, the manager of Stop the Republican Recall, said in a statement that the move to remove the governor “threatens our values as Californians and seeks to undo the important progress we’ve made under Governor Newsom.”Proponents of the recall, however, framed it as a bipartisan referendum on the governor and the policies of a state whose leadership has been dominated in recent years by Democrats. Mr. Faulconer, who governed as a moderate in San Diego, called it a “historic opportunity to demand change” for Californians of all political parties.And Randy Economy, a spokesman for the recall effort, countered that if “California is at a crossroad,” it is because “people are frustrated at the destructive policies, divisive politics and manipulative tactics conducted by Gavin Newsom since the day he became governor.” More

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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