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      Michigan Officials Push to Investigate Matthew DePerno in 2020 Election Scheme

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      In early 2021, with the turmoil of a bitterly contested presidential contest still fresh, several election clerks in Michigan received strange phone calls.The person on the other end was a Republican state representative who told them their election equipment was needed for an investigation, according to documents from the Michigan attorney general’s office.They obliged. Soon, the machines were being picked apart in hotels and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, outside Detroit, by conservative activists hunting for what they believed was proof of fraud, the documents said. Weeks later, after the equipment was returned in handoffs in highway car-pool lots and shopping malls, the clerks found that it had been tampered with, and in some cases, damaged.The revelations of possible meddling with voting machines have set off a political tsunami in Michigan, one of the most critical battleground states in the country.The documents detail deception of election officials and a breach of voting equipment that stand out as extraordinary even among the volumes of public reporting on brazen attempts by former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters to scrutinize and undermine the 2020 results.But one of the most politically striking elements of the case is the identity of one of the people implicated in the scheme by the office of the attorney general: Matthew DePerno, who is now the presumptive Republican nominee for that very post.Mr. DePerno, a lawyer who rose to prominence challenging the 2020 results in Antrim County and has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, is vying to unseat Dana Nessel, a Democrat who is Michigan’s top law enforcement official and who fought attempts to undermine the state’s election.Now, evidence provided by her office places Mr. DePerno at one of the “tests” of voting equipment and suggests that he was a key orchestrator of “a conspiracy” to gain improper access to machines in three counties, Roscommon and Missaukee in Northern Michigan and Barry, a rural area southeast of Grand Rapids. The tampering resulted in physical damage, but the attorney general’s office indicated that there was no evidence that there was “any software or firmware manipulation” of the equipment.Even before the new accusations, the prospective race between Ms. Nessel and Mr. DePerno was one of the most closely watched contests for attorney general in the country.During his campaign, Mr. DePerno has continued to falsely claim that mail voting is rife with fraud and that voting records were deleted or destroyed after the election, and he has pledged to “prosecute the people who corrupted the 2020 election.” He has also said he would begin inquiries of Ms. Nessel, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, all Democrats.His candidacy has worried election experts, Democrats and even many Republicans, who fear that he could use his powers to carry out investigations based on fraudulent claims or engage in other forms of meddling in elections.Mr. DePerno has pledged to carry out inquiries of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Ms. Nessel and Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, all Democrats.Jake May/The Flint Journal, via Associated PressYet because Mr. DePerno is the likely Republican nominee — he clinched the state party’s endorsement this year and is expected to be formally nominated later this month — any investigation by Ms. Nessel is politically fraught and risks a conflict of interest. With that in mind, her office on Friday requested that a special prosecutor be appointed to continue the investigation and pursue potential criminal charges.The allegations against Mr. DePerno and eight others — including Daire Rendon, a Republican state representative, and Dar Leaf, the sheriff of Barry County — were detailed in a letter sent on Friday from the deputy attorney general to Ms. Benson, and in a petition from Ms. Nessel’s office requesting the special prosecutor. The Detroit News first reported the letter, and Politico first reported the petition. Reuters first reported Mr. DePerno’s alleged involvement. More

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      Missouri Enacts Strict New Voter Rules and Will Switch to Caucuses

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      Missouri overhauled its election rules on Wednesday, enacting a voter identification law similar to one the state’s highest court blocked two years ago and doing away with its presidential primary in favor of a caucus system.The new law, which Gov. Michael L. Parson signed at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, requires voters to present a photo ID when casting a regular or absentee ballot. Those without such documentation will be required to fill out a provisional ballot that would be segregated until they provide photo identification or their signature is matched to the one kept on file by election officials.The voter identification rule was the latest instituted in a Republican-controlled state, and reflected the party’s continued mistrust of common voting practices, including the use of voting machines. It requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots statewide starting in 2023, with limited exceptions for certain touch-screen systems until the end of next year.Among the other changes is a prohibition against the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — a practice that many Republicans criticized during the 2020 presidential election — and replacing Missouri’s presidential primary, held in recent years in March, with a series of caucuses.The proposal advanced in the spring from the Legislature, where its Republican sponsors have continued to cite unsubstantiated and nonspecific voter fraud claims — just as former President Donald J. Trump has done — as the impetus for the voter ID law.The law will take effect on Aug. 28, in time for the November election but not until after Missouri holds its primaries on Aug. 2.Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2016 that led to a previous set of voter ID rules, but the state Supreme Court gutted those rules in 2020. The rules had stipulated that voters without the required ID had to fill out an affidavit or use provisional ballots until their identity could be validated.The president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch this month to expect legal challenges to the new law, which the group said could disenfranchise voters of color and those who are young or older.While paper ballots are already overwhelmingly used in Missouri, Republicans have sought to scale back the use of electronic voting equipment nationwide, spreading falsehoods that the devices were rigged during the 2020 presidential election.The new law repealed provisions enacted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic that permitted mail and absentee voting in the 2020 general election, but Republicans compromised with Democrats to allow two weeks of no-excuse in-person absentee balloting. However, those ballots must be submitted at a local election office. Military and overseas voters will still be permitted to mail their ballots.The law also makes it illegal for local election authorities to accept private donations in most circumstances. More

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      The Election Conspiracy Theories Driving Tina Peters to Run in Colorado

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      The county clerk has been consumed by election conspiracy theories, lionized by a movement and indicted in a bizarre scheme. Will Republicans nominate her to run elections in Colorado?GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election — game day for vote-counting bureaucrats — Tina Peters was so proud of her operation at the Mesa County clerk’s office that she invited a film crew in to show it off. There’s no chance of mishap here, she boasted.“The Russians can’t hack into and start casting votes for someone,” she said, as a few in the office chuckled.By May 2021, it was Ms. Peters, not the Russians, who had helped engineer an audacious breach of voting machines, according to an indictment charging her with seven felonies. Ms. Peters arranged to copy sensitive election software from county voting machines in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to court records. Prosecutors said she committed identity theft and criminal impersonation, and violated the duties of her office in the process. Ms. Peters has pleaded not guilty.The strange tale of Tina Peters — a once-ordinary public servant consumed by conspiracy theories and catapulted to minor stardom by believers — will take its next twist on Tuesday, when voters decide whether to make the indicted public official the Republican nominee for secretary of state, the top election official in Colorado. Polls are sparse in the primary race, but Ms. Peters is considered a contender.Ms. Peters did not just stumble into the world of election conspiracy theories. A review of public statements and interviews with people involved in her case showed she was repeatedly assisted by a loose network of election deniers, some of whom worked alongside Donald J. Trump’s legal team to try to subvert the presidential election in 2020. They are still working to undermine confidence in elections today.That network’s involvement is just one of several bizarre plot points in Ms. Peters’s case. The Mesa County breach involved a former surfer who was dressed as a computer “nerd” and made a FaceTime call during the operation, reporting by The New York Times shows. Afterward, the crew shared their loot — images of voting machine data — at a conference streamed online, advertising the effort to thousands. On Friday, Ms. Peters told The Times that her congresswoman, Representative Lauren Boebert, “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging.”A press officer for Ms. Boebert, a Republican, called the claim false.Through it all, Ms. Peters has parlayed the episode into a national political profile on the right, speaking at events across the country where she is celebrated as a hero. Influential election deniers have come to her aid: Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who supports a stable of lawyers and researchers promoting bogus theories, says he has funneled as much as $200,000 to Ms. Peters’s legal defense. Others, including Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock executive, have run ads attacking her primary opponent.Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, praying with other attendees of an election-related event in Grand Junction, Colo., on Friday.Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesIn a statement to The Times, Ms. Peters declined to answer specific questions about the episode, citing pending litigation. In September, before Ms. Peters was indicted, her lawyer acknowledged that she had allowed “one non-employee” to copy hard drives, but argued that there was no rule or regulation against it, something the secretary of state’s office disputes.In public appearances since, Ms. Peters has said she made the copies because she worried the voting machine company was going to delete computer systems that recorded the 2020 election and wanted to preserve records. She has been less forthcoming about how the material ended up online.“The people want to know HOW our elections have been turned over to machines with no oversight, transparency or real security in any meaningful way,” Ms. Peters said in the statement.Materials released in the Mesa County breach have been used to fuel the churn of misinformation about President Biden’s victory. Election experts say the episode also highlights a growing vulnerability in election security: the insider threat.Since the Mesa County breach was made public, there have been more than a half-dozen reports of local election officials taking similar actions. Election conspiracy theory promoters claim there are more out there.Experts say the danger is that the very people trusted to carry out elections could release confidential information and undermine security measures.It’s a “new and, frankly, more discouraging” threat, said Christopher Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security from 2018 to 2020. “Institutionally, we’ve lost a bit of a North Star in terms of how elections are conducted.”Ballots in the WindTina Peters’s 2018 election to clerk and recorder of Mesa County, a Republican stronghold amid the canyons of western Colorado, was her first foray into public office. A former flight attendant who ran a construction company with her ex-husband, Ms. Peters made her top campaign issue the reopening of local Division of Motor Vehicles satellite offices, a promise she fulfilled quickly.But she had more trouble with election administration. Three months after the 2019 election, more than 500 ballots were found uncounted in a drop box outside the county election office. In the 2020 presidential primary, completed ballots were found blowing in the wind near the clerk’s office, according to The Daily Sentinel, the newspaper in Grand Junction. By July 2020, residents had begun a recall effort to remove her from office, but they failed to obtain enough signatures.Ms. Peters reading results from the 2020 presidential primary in March of that year.McKenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, via Associated PressThe general election in Mesa County in 2020 went off smoothly, with no complaints of fraud or other delays. Yet the conspiracy theories spouted by Mr. Trump quickly took hold in this deeply red county, and county commissioners were soon inundated with calls from constituents questioning the results.Ms. Peters eventually rejected requests to hand-count the ballots in her own county, where Mr. Trump won 62 percent of the vote, but she began to express doubts about the national results. She connected with a local group, organized by Ms. Boebert’s former campaign manager, that met regularly to swap theories. In April 2021, the group hosted Douglas Frank, a high school math and science teacher in Ohio whose debunked theories have been influential with election conspiracists.After seeing Mr. Frank’s presentation, Ms. Peters invited him to attend an upcoming “trusted build” of the county election equipment, according to court records. The process is essentially a software update — performed in a secure location by officials from the secretary of state’s office and employees of Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine manufacturer — that election skeptics have come to believe erases critical election data. It does not.Mr. Frank did not accept the offer, but another member of the election denier network did attend, according to court records and interviews. Conan Hayes was a former pro surfer who had worked with Mr. Trump’s legal team as it challenged the 2020 results. In 2021, Mr. Byrne paid him around $200,000 to continue his work for a year, according to Mr. Byrne.According to an account from Mr. Byrne, and confirmed by Mr. Hayes, he attended the trusted build on May 25, 2021. Mr. Hayes called Mr. Byrne from inside the Mesa County election offices, speaking in a hushed voice and explaining that he’d been invited to make backup copies of machines by a government official who thought that a cover-up was underway, Mr. Byrne said. When the two spoke over FaceTime, Mr. Byrne saw Mr. Hayes was dressed like a computer “nerd” and wearing someone else’s identification tag, Mr. Byrne said.Ms. Peters had introduced a contractor at the event and identified him as Gerald Wood, a local I.T. consultant, according to court records. The real Mr. Wood, however, told investigators he was not there that day, or two days earlier, when his badge was used to enter a secure area.Conan Hayes competing at Teahupoo, Tahiti, in 2003.Aaron Chang/Getty ImagesMr. Hayes has not been charged and is not named in the indictment, though a judge’s order did identify him as later receiving a package in the mail from Ms. Peters.In a brief phone interview, Mr. Hayes said Mr. Byrne’s account was accurate. “Patrick is pretty clear on things,” he said.‘I’ve Seen Things I Can’t Unsee’Ms. Peters didn’t speak in detail about the incident, though she alluded to acting on her worries about the election in a meeting with a county commissioner over the summer.“She talked about these white-hat guys, and she talked about having brought someone in to look at the computers, and that she now believed there was some compromise to the machines,” recalled Janet Rowland, a Republican and county commissioner in Mesa County. “And that was when she used the phrase, I think even twice at that one meeting, ‘I’ve seen things I can’t unsee.’”After Ms. Peters became a subject of investigation, supporters gathered at the Mesa County courthouse in Grand Junction, Colo., in late 2021.McKenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, via Associated PressIn early August, passwords to the Mesa County election equipment appeared on a QAnon figure’s Telegram channel and then a right-wing website, leading to an investigation by the secretary of state.Days later, Mesa County’s breach found an even bigger spotlight at a “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota organized by Mr. Lindell. After one of Mr. Lindell’s other wild claims, which Mr. Hayes had also worked on, fizzled, he changed the conversation: Ms. Peters appeared onstage to tell her story and the Mesa County conspiracy was born.The Next Conspiracy TheoryAs part of Ms. Peters’s legal defense, information copied in Mesa County was soon packaged into a series of three reports purporting to show corruption in the election system. They were pumped through the online forums and promoted at in-person meetings. Mesa County soon overtook other discredited theories, such as the fictions about improprieties in Antrim County, Mich., that Mr. Trump eagerly promoted.In fact, some of the same figures were involved in crafting both conspiracy theories. Mr. Hayes had helped to obtain the Antrim County information. And a cybersecurity firm, Allied Security Operations Group, that wrote the debunked Antrim analysis also produced the Mesa County reports for Ms. Peters’s legal team, according to the firm’s leader. There is no evidence the group was involved in the Mesa County breach.Mr. Byrne calls the reports “the Rosetta Stone for us to prove the whole thing.” But experts say they reveal no problems at all. Two of the three reports don’t even suggest issues with election results and, instead, draw false conclusions about the vulnerability of elections machines by misinterpreting certain laws and procedures, said Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, who has studied the reports closely.A third report claims to show anomalies in two Mesa County elections. But the issues were caused by human error and there was no evidence that any vote counts were improper, according to the Mesa County District Attorney’s office, which did an extensive investigation.The CampaignIn February, Ms. Peters decided to try to turn her celebrity into political power, announcing a bid for secretary of state.She made appearances on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast and linked up with a group of far-right candidates for secretary of state across the country. She secured a speaking slot at a rally held by Mr. Trump in Wyoming.In March, Ms. Peters was indicted on 10 criminal counts related to the effort to copy voting equipment software, including attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, identity theft and first-degree official misconduct.Ms. Peters at an event in Grand Junction on Friday night called “Election vs. Selection: Answers and Actions.”Daniel Brenner for The New York Times​​On the campaign trail, Ms. Peters says the charges are politically motivated. She has claimed the investigation is part of a “globalist takeover” and casts herself as a martyr for a cause.“I went to jail for you and I will continue to do it,” she told a group of election activists in Texas in April.Ms. Peters has declined to say who is paying her lawyers, but has directed people wanting to support her legal efforts to donate to the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, which Mr. Lindell says he uses for various lawsuits and projects.​​In the closing days of the campaign, Ms. Peters has received other assistance. A new super PAC in Colorado called Citizens for Election Integrity has spent roughly $100,000 on advertisements attacking Pam Anderson, one of Ms. Peters’s opponents for the Republican nomination, according to campaign finance disclosures.The group recently received a $100,000 donation from The America Project, a group founded by Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, another figure in the fight to overturn the 2020 election, and Mr. Byrne.Ryan Biller contributed reporting from Grand Junction, Colo. More

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      How Bolsonaro Is Using the Military to Challenge Brazil’s Election

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      Despite little evidence of past fraud, President Jair Bolsonaro has long raised doubts about Brazil’s electoral process. Now the military is expressing similar concerns.RIO DE JANEIRO — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has for months consistently trailed in the polls ahead of the country’s crucial presidential race. And for months, he has consistently questioned its voting systems, warning that if he loses October’s election, it will most likely be thanks to a stolen vote.Those claims were largely regarded as talk. But now, Mr. Bolsonaro has enlisted a new ally in his fight against the electoral process: the nation’s military.The leaders of Brazil’s armed forces have suddenly begun raising similar doubts about the integrity of the elections, despite little evidence of past fraud, ratcheting up already high tensions over the stability of Latin America’s largest democracy and rattling a nation that suffered under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.Military leaders have identified for election officials what they say are a number of vulnerabilities in the voting systems. They were given a spot on a transparency committee that election officials created to ease fears that Mr. Bolsonaro had stirred up about the vote. And Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who filled his cabinet with generals, has suggested that on Election Day, the military should conduct its own parallel count.Mr. Bolsonaro, who has spoken fondly about the dictatorship, has also sought to make clear that the military answers to him.Election officials “invited the armed forces to participate in the electoral process,” Mr. Bolsonaro said recently, referring to the transparency committee. “Did they forget that the supreme chief of the armed forces is named Jair Messias Bolsonaro?”Almir Garnier Santos, the commander of the Brazilian Navy, told reporters last month that he backed Mr. Bolsonaro’s view. “The president of the republic is my boss, he is my commander, he has the right to say whatever he wants,” Mr. Garnier Santos said.With just over four months until one of the most consequential votes in Latin America in years, a high-stakes clash is forming. On one side, the president, some military leaders and many right-wing voters argue that the election is open to fraud. On the other, politicians, judges, foreign diplomats and journalists are ringing the alarm that Mr. Bolsonaro is setting the stage for an attempted coup.Mr. Bolsonaro has added to the tension, saying that his concerns about the election’s integrity may lead him to dispute the outcome. “A new class of thieves has emerged who want to steal our freedom,” he said in a speech this month. “If necessary, we will go to war.”Activists held a banner that read, “Dictatorship never again,” in Portuguese, during a rally in March in Brasília to protest what organizers said was an increase in human rights violations under Mr. Bolsonaro. Eraldo Peres/Associated PressEdson Fachin, a Supreme Court judge and Brazil’s top election official, said in an interview that claims of an unsafe election were unfounded and dangerous. “These problems are artificially created by those who want to destroy the Brazilian democracy,” he said. “What is at stake in Brazil is not just an electronic voting machine. What is at stake is maintaining democracy.”Mr. Bolsonaro and the military say they are only trying to safeguard the vote. “For the love of God, no one is engaging in undemocratic acts,” Mr. Bolsonaro said recently. “A clean, transparent, safe election is a matter of national security. No one wants to have doubts when the election is over.”Brazil’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that “the Brazilian armed forces act in strict obedience to the law and the Constitution, and are directed to defend the homeland, guarantee the constitutional powers and, through any of these, of law and order.”Mr. Bolsonaro’s tactics appear to be adopted from former President Donald J. Trump’s playbook, and Mr. Trump and his allies have worked to support Mr. Bolsonaro’s fraud claims. The two men reflect a broader democratic backsliding unfolding across the world.The riot last year at the U.S. Capitol has shown that peaceful transfers of power are no longer guaranteed even in mature democracies. In Brazil, where democratic institutions are far younger, the military’s involvement in the election is heightening fears.Mr. Garnier Santos told the Brazilian newspaper O Povo that “as a navy commander, I want Brazilians to be sure that their vote will count,” adding, “The more auditing, the better for Brazil.”A Brazilian federal police report detailed how two generals in Mr. Bolsonaro’s cabinet, including his national security adviser, had tried for years to help him uncover evidence of election fraud.And on Friday, Brazil’s defense minister, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, sent a 21-point missive to election officials, criticizing them as not taking the military’s points about election safety seriously. “The armed forces don’t feel properly acknowledged,” he said.So far, Mr. Bolsonaro’s comments have gone further. In April, he repeated a falsehood that officials count votes in a “secret room.” He then suggested that voting data should be fed to a room “where the armed forces also have a computer to count the votes.” The military has not publicly commented on this idea.Since the military’s support could be critical for a coup, a popular question in political circles has become: If Mr. Bolsonaro disputed the election, how would the 340,000 members of the armed forces react?Mr. Bolsonaro and President Donald J. Trump in 2020 at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. The men are close allies who have both questioned their country’s elections.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times“In the U.S., the military and the police respected the law, they defended the Constitution,” said Mauricio Santoro, a professor of international relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, referring to Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election. “I’m not sure the same thing will happen here.”Military officials and many politicians dispute any notion that the military would back a coup. “He would fall. He wouldn’t have any support,” said Maynard Santa Rosa, a Brazilian Army general for 49 years who served in Mr. Bolsonaro’s cabinet. “And I think he knows it.”Sérgio Etchegoyen, a retired army general close to the military’s current leaders, called concerns about a coup alarmist. “We might think it’s bad that the president questions the ballots,” he said. “But it’s much worse if every five minutes we think the democracy is at risk.”Some American officials are more concerned about the roughly half-million police officers across Brazil because they are generally less professional and more supportive of Mr. Bolsonaro than the military, according to a State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.Any claim of a stolen election could face a skeptical public unless the race tightens. A survey of 2,556 Brazilians in late May showed that 48 percent supported former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, compared with 27 percent for Mr. Bolsonaro. (If no candidate captures half of the vote, the top two finishers will go to a runoff on Oct. 30.)That same poll showed that 24 percent of respondents did not trust Brazil’s voting machines, up from 17 percent in March. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they believed the election was vulnerable to fraud, including 81 percent of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters.In the 37 years of Brazil’s modern democracy, no president has been as close to the military as Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army paratrooper.As a congressman, he hung portraits of the leaders of the military dictatorship in his office. As president, he has tripled the number of military personnel in civilian posts in the federal government to nearly 1,100. His vice president is also a former general.Last year, as he intensified his critiques of the electoral system, he dismissed the defense minister and the top three military commanders, installing loyalists in their places.The new defense minister quickly weighed in on the electoral process, backing Mr. Bolsonaro’s push to use printed ballots in addition to voting machines, which would make recounts easier. Brazil is one of the few countries to rely entirely on electronic voting machines — 577,125 of them.While Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies admit that they lack proof of past fraud, they point to a number of problems: some perceived irregularities in voting returns; a 2018 hack of the electoral court’s computers, which do not connect to the voting machines; and election officials’ general dismissal of concerns.An electronic voting machine at the headquarters of Brazil’s electoral court last month as analysts tested the system.Eraldo Peres/Associated PressDiego Aranha, a Brazilian computer scientist who has tried to hack the machines for research, said that the lack of paper backups makes it harder to verify results, but that the system overall was safe.Brazil’s Supreme Court ultimately rejected the use of printed ballots, citing privacy concerns.Last year, when election officials created the “election transparency commission,” they invited an admiral with a computer science degree to join. Brazil’s defense minister instead sent a general who directs the army cybercommand.The army representative sent four letters to election officials with detailed questions about the voting process, as well as some recommended changes.He asked about the machines’ tamper-proof seals, the computer code that underpins them and the biometric technology used to verify voters. Election officials said on Saturday that they would accept some of the small technical recommendations and study others for the next election but that other suggestions misunderstood the system.Amid the back-and-forth, the former head of the electoral court, Luís Roberto Barroso, told reporters that military leaders were “being guided to attack the Brazilian electoral process,” an assertion that Mr. Nogueira, the defense minister, called “irresponsible.” The electoral court also invited European officials to observe the election, but rescinded the invitation after the Bolsonaro administration objected. Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro’s political party is trying to have an outside company audit the voting systems before the election.Mr. Bolsonaro and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, the defense minister and the commander of the Brazilian Army, at a ceremony last August in Brasília.Andressa Anholete/Getty ImagesMr. Fachin, who now runs the electoral court, said Mr. Bolsonaro was welcome to conduct his own review but added that officials already test the machines. “This is more or less like picking the lock on an open door,” he said.The Biden administration has warned Mr. Bolsonaro to respect the democratic process. On Thursday, at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Biden met with Mr. Bolsonaro for the first time. Sitting next to Mr. Biden, Mr. Bolsonaro said he would eventually leave office in “a democratic way,” adding that October’s election must be “clean, reliable and auditable.”Scott Hamilton, the United States’ top diplomat in Rio de Janeiro until last year, wrote in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo that Mr. Bolsonaro’s “intent is clear and dangerous: undermine the public’s faith and set the stage for refusing to accept the results.”Mr. Bolsonaro insists that he is simply trying to ensure an accurate vote.“How do I want a coup if I’m already president?” he asked last month. “In Banana Republics, we see leaders conspiring to stay in power, co-opting parts of the government to defraud elections. Here it’s exactly the opposite.”André Spigariol More

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      Melissa Carone, an Election Denier Who Was Parodied by ‘S.N.L.,’ Is Disqualified

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      Melissa Carone was supposed to be a star witness for Rudolph W. Giuliani on his election denial tour, but she is perhaps better known as a caricature on “Saturday Night Live” — a mercurial purveyor of wild conspiracy theories about fraud and miscounted ballots whom Mr. Giuliani shushed in the middle of her testimony.Her next move was to run for the legislature in Michigan, joining a host of election deniers across the nation who have sought public office since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.But her plans were short-circuited on Tuesday, when the Michigan Department of State disqualified Ms. Carone, 35, a former election contractor, as a Republican primary candidate for a State Senate seat outside of Detroit.The office said that Ms. Carone, along with 10 other legislative candidates, had made false statements on an affidavit that candidates were required to submit to election administrators. On one of the forms that was signed by Ms. Carone, she had attested that she did not have any unpaid fines for election law violations and that all of her public campaign filings were up-to-date. The county clerk where Ms. Carone was running for office said on Wednesday that had not been the case.It was the second time in recent months that Ms. Carone had been disqualified as a candidate: The Macomb County Clerk & Register of Deeds barred her in March from the Aug. 2 primary for state representative.When she signed the affidavit, Ms. Carone had owed at least $125 in late fees for missing the deadline twice for quarterly campaign filings in 2021, according to a letter from the clerk that was obtained by The New York Times. She had also failed to file an annual statement for 2022 for her campaign and an amendment to a quarterly report last October, the letter said.Ms. Carone, who was played by the “Saturday Night Live” cast member Cecily Strong in the show’s cold open in December 2020, blamed the situation on a former campaign manager whom she said in an interview on Wednesday did not file the paperwork.She accused Republican election officials and the party’s leaders of conspiring to keep her off the ballot.“This is how our elected officials keep good candidates from getting elected,” Ms. Carone said. “I’m going to fight it. Even if I don’t end up on the ballot, my voice will be heard. I’m not going anywhere. I will still be exposing these establishment sellout RINOs in the Michigan G.O.P.”Anthony G. Forlini, a Republican who is the Macomb County clerk, said on Wednesday that his office had been following the law and that the disqualification of Ms. Carone was not politically motivated.“From our standpoint, she was kicked off the ballot because she basically perjured herself,” Mr. Forlini said.Mr. Forlini said that it is a felony in Michigan to make a false statement on affidavits like those signed by candidates.“We’re just sticking to the letter of the law,” he said. “She likes the drama, and she’s been feeding on it.”Mr. Forlini said that he could not speak to the specifics of Ms. Carone’s recent disqualification by the Michigan Department of State, a separate agency headed by Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is secretary of state.A spokeswoman for that agency said on Wednesday that she could not further discuss the nature of the false statements that led to Ms. Carone’s disqualification, which was announced in conjunction with the other candidates who were barred on Tuesday.A receipt filed with the secretary of state’s office showed that Ms. Carone had paid $125 in late fees with a check on March 24, three days after she signed the affidavit attesting that she did not owe anything.Gustavo Portela, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, rejected Ms. Carone’s assertions that there was a concerted effort to keep her off the primary ballot.“Terrible candidates seem to find it hard to take accountability for themselves so they pass the blame to others,” he said in an email on Wednesday.Ms. Carone claimed she was contracted by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that has been the target of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory about rigged voting machines. The company called her claims defamatory and sent her a cease and desist letter.During an election oversight hearing held by legislators in Michigan in December 2020, she testified that she had observed over 20 acts of fraud — not counting ballots found in rivers and under a rock — and that at least 30,000 ballots had been counted multiple times. A judge in Wayne County Circuit Court had already found Ms. Carone’s claims — made in an affidavit seeking to stop the certification of votes — were “not credible.”At times combative and glib, Ms. Carone’s performance was widely mocked, including by “Saturday Night Live.”“To be honest with you, I didn’t watch it for a really long time,” she said on Wednesday. “I think it’s funny. That kind of stuff doesn’t make me mad. I don’t care.” More

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      The fight over voting continues. Here’s the latest.

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      The conflict over sweeping new restrictions on voting, largely confined to statehouses and governors’ desks since 2020, is spilling over into the midterm elections.About two dozen states have tightened laws regulating matters like who is eligible to vote by mail, the placement of drop boxes for absentee ballots and identification requirements. Many of the politicians driving the clampdown can be found on the ballot themselves this year.Here are some of the latest developments.In Pennsylvania, the four leading Republican candidates for governor all said during a debate on Wednesday that they supported the repeal of no-excuse absentee voting in that state.In 2020, about 2.6 million people who were adapting to pandemic life voted by mail in Pennsylvania, more than a third of the total ballots cast. But Republicans, smarting over President Donald J. Trump’s election loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and promulgating baseless voter fraud claims, have since sought to curtail voting by mail. A state court in January struck down Pennsylvania’s landmark law expanding absentee voting, a ruling that is the subject of a pending appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.Lou Barletta, one of the four on the debate stage and a former congressman, asserted that no-excuse absentee voting was conducive to fraud.“Listen, we know dead people have been voting in Pennsylvania all of our lives,” Mr. Barletta said. “Now they don’t even have to leave the cemetery to vote. They can mail in their ballots.”Several states had already conducted elections primarily through mail-in voting before the pandemic, with there being little meaningful evidence of fraud. They include Colorado and Utah, a state controlled by Republicans.Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, officials in Westmoreland County, which includes the suburbs east of Pittsburgh, voted this week to scale back the number of drop boxes used for absentee ballots to just one. The vote was 2-to-1, with Republicans on the Board of Commissioners saying that the reduction from several drop boxes would save money. The lone Democrat said that the change would make it more difficult for people to send in their ballots.In Arizona, two Trump-endorsed Republican candidates — Kari Lake in the governor’s race and Mark Finchem for secretary of state — sued election officials this month to try to stop the use of electronic voting machines in the midterm elections. Helping to underwrite the lawsuit, along with similar efforts in other states, is Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.In Nevada, a push by Republicans to scale back universal mail-in voting while introducing a new voter ID requirement ran into a major setback on Monday when two different judges in Carson City invalidated those efforts.In Georgia, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, signed a bill on Wednesday empowering the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to pursue criminal inquiries into election fraud, an authority solely held by the secretary of state in the past. More

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      Trump’s Focus on 2020 Election Splits Michigan Republicans

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      The former president is trying to reshape the battleground state in his image. But his false claims about the 2020 election are driving a wedge between loyalists and those who are eager to move on.SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. — The shouting in the banquet hall erupted just minutes after the Macomb County Republican Party convention was called to order.In a room packed with about 500 people, Mark Forton, the county party chairman and a fierce ally of former President Donald J. Trump, began railing against the establishment Republicans in the audience. A plan was afoot to oust him and his executive team, he said.“They’re going to make an overthrow of the party, and you have a right to know what this county party has done in the last three years,” he said as his supporters booed and hollered and opponents pelted him with objections. Republicans in suits and cardigans on one side of the room shouted at die-hard Trump supporters in MAGA hats and Trump gear on the other.The night ended as Mr. Forton had predicted, with a 158-123 vote that removed him and his leadership team from their posts.The raucous scene in Macomb County exploded after months of infighting that roiled the Michigan Republican Party, pitting Trump loyalists like Mr. Forton, who continue to promote Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 presidential election, against a cohort of Republicans who are eager to move on. The splintering threatens to upend the upcoming Republican state convention, where county precinct chairs vote on nominees for secretary of state, attorney general and other statewide offices.Mr. Trump is all in on trying to sway those contests — and other races across the state, which he lost by 150,000 votes in 2020. The former president has endorsed 10 candidates for the State Legislature, including three who are challenging Republican incumbents, and has already picked his favorite candidate for speaker of the State House next year. Mr. Trump also has made numerous personal entreaties to shore up support for Matthew DePerno, who is running for attorney general, and Kristina Karamo, a candidate for secretary of state.Kristina Karamo, a candidate for Michigan secretary of state, belongs to a slate of “America First” candidates campaigning, in part, on distorted views of the 2020 election.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIn Michigan and other battleground states, Mr. Trump’s chosen candidates have become megaphones for his election claims — frustrating some Republicans who view a preoccupation with the 2020 election as a losing message in 2022.Republicans in Wisconsin and Arizona have encountered similar fractures over support for continued investigations into the 2020 election, and Mr. Trump’s attempts to play kingmaker in the Ohio Senate race is splintering Republicans there as well.The root of the rupture in Michigan can, in part, be traced to endorsements made by Meshawn Maddock, a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a Trump confidante. The Republican Party leadership has traditionally stayed out of statewide races, especially before the state convention. But Ms. Maddock endorsed Ms. Karamo and Mr. DePerno.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Both candidates have been vocal supporters of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election. Mr. DePerno was one of the lawyers involved in Republican challenges in Antrim County, Mich., where a quickly corrected human error on election night spawned a barrage of conspiracy theories.Ms. Karamo belongs to a slate of “America First” secretary of state candidates running across the country and campaigning, in part, on distorted views of the 2020 election.Matthew DePerno, a candidate for Michigan attorney general, was involved in Republican challenges in a Michigan county where an election night error spawned conspiracy theories.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesBeyond her endorsements, Ms. Maddock has been working to help prepare convention delegates. Last month, Ms. Maddock attended a mock convention held by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and reiterated glowing praise from Mr. Trump for Ms. Karamo, Mr. DePerno and John Gibbs, the conservative challenger to Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican congressman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.“He was so fired up about Michigan,” Ms. Maddock said of conversations with Mr. Trump as she spoke during a question-and-answer session at the mock convention, according to audio of the event obtained by The New York Times. “This man cannot stop talking about Matt DePerno, Kristina Karamo, John Gibbs, who’s running against Peter Meijer.”In a statement, Mr. DePerno said he’s “proud that local and state party leaders have endorsed my campaign. Ms. Karamo’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Republican candidates facing Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo were taken aback by the endorsements and were outraged at the meddling by the state party leadership before the convention. Ms. Maddock, some candidates charged, appeared to be trying to tip the scales in favor of Trump-backed candidates.Beau LeFave, a Republican state legislator who is running for secretary of state, said that he had spoken to both Ms. Maddock and her husband, State Representative Matt Maddock, “multiple times” before jumping into his race. They told him they were both rooting for him “and that they’re going to stay out of it,” he said.“So it was quite a surprise to find out that they lied to me,” Mr. LeFave said.Ms. Maddock was not available for an interview, according to Gustavo Portela, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party. He said that co-chairs had endorsed candidates in the past but acknowledged that the dynamic this cycle was a bit unusual.The root of the rupture in Michigan can, in part, be traced to endorsements made by Meshawn Maddock, a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times“You’ve never had a co-chair who has been this close to a former president, who arguably has a lot of influence on the convention floor,” Mr. Portela said. He added that the party believes the contested races ahead of the convention were “a good thing” that “speaks to the frustration with the direction of our country, and more importantly, the direction of the state.”The state party has struggled with other conflicts. After more than a year of hearing specious claims about vote counts and election equipment, some activists began questioning why the party would use tabulation machines. A group called Unity 4 MRP started an online campaign to pressure the party to count paper ballots by hand rather use the major brands of voting machines.“Grassroots groups would sooner stare into the glowering, red eyes of Beelzebub than to allow a Dominion, ESS, or Hart tabulator to run its lecherous paws over their sacred ballots,” another group, Pure Integrity Michigan Elections, wrote in an email to supporters, according to The Detroit Free Press.Eventually, the party leadership announced a concession: an audit of the convention vote overseen by a former secretary of state. But that didn’t please everyone.“We have state committee members who fought hard to make sure that you do not have a hand count, and you need to ask why, and you need to be angry, and you need people figuring it out,” said J.D. Glaser, an activist who attended a rally of election skeptics in February. “This is our Republican Party. They’re working against you.”The Macomb County Republican Party convention was one of 83 county meetings held Monday to pick the delegates to the statewide Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention on April 23.In the weeks leading up to the event in the Detroit suburbs, Mr. Forton, a retired autoworker and longtime political activist, had rankled prominent Republican elected officials with his conspiracy-theory-laden assertions about the election and what he has described as “a cabal” of Democrats and Republicans who have been installed to control the country.Presiding over the convention, Mr. Forton argued that his wing of Trump supporters had revived the county party, replenished its coffers and helped usher in a wave of Republican victories in the state. He slammed what he viewed as the old-guard Republicans in the room, some of whom were preparing the way to vote him out of office as he spoke.“They have been wanting to take this county party back for a long time,” he said, adding that he and his supporters were “not going away.”Some on Mr. Forton’s side of the room were attending a convention for the first time, spurred to do so, they said, out of concern for the direction of the party and outrage over the lack of audits and investigations into the results of the 2020 presidential election.“What is happening here should be calm and exciting, but what you have is a Republican Party that does not think the same,” said Tamra Szacon, who earlier had led the prayer and was decked out in a cowboy hat and glittering American flag heels. “One of our biggest things is that we believe the election was stolen — a lot of people do.”On the other side of the room, Republicans said they were frustrated with the bickering. Natasha Hargitay, a 35-year-old single mother, said she had been to more than a dozen conventions and had never been to one so contentious. She described herself as “Switzerland,” neutral in the fight. Still, she had not been pleased with Mr. Forton’s comments.“I lost a lot of respect for him when he said, ‘We are the real Republicans,’” she said. “That means you are dividing the Republican Party.”After the commotion, Eric Castiglia, who was elected the county’s new chairman, pledged to welcome all Republicans into the fold. He said he believed the state convention, with its machine and hand count election, would provide an opportunity to show election skeptics that the process could be fair.“We have to start working on what we’re going to do with our values and not be a place where every candidate is a RINO, or not a Republican enough,” Mr. Castiglia said in an interview, using shorthand for “Republican in name only.”But Mr. Forton has no intention of moving on. On Thursday, he filed a petition to state party leaders appealing his ouster. More