More stories

  • in

    Voting Machines in Arizona Recount Should Be Replaced, Election Official Says

    The Democratic secretary of state said she had “grave concerns regarding the security and integrity” of the machines that were examined to appease ardent backers of Donald J. Trump.Arizona’s top elections official on Thursday urged the state’s most populous county to replace hundreds of voting machines that have been examined as part of a Republican-backed review of the state’s November election.The request added fuel to charges by impartial election observers and voting rights advocates that the review, ordered in December by the Republicans who control the State Senate, had become a political sham.In a letter to officials of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, the elections official, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, said it was unclear whether companies hired to conduct the review had sufficiently safeguarded the equipment from tampering during their review of votes.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, recommended that the county replace its 385 voting machines and nine vote tabulators because “the lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them.”The advisory, in a letter to the county’s board of supervisors, did not contend that the machines had been breached. But Ms. Hobbs wrote that she had “grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised.”She added that she had first consulted experts at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the national authority for election security issues.A spokeswoman for the county elections department said county officials “will not use any of the returned tabulation equipment unless the county, state and vendor are confident that there is no malicious hardware or software installed on the devices.”If the county decides to scrap the machines, it is unclear who would be responsible for paying to replace them. The State Senate agreed to indemnify the county against financial losses resulting from the audit.Republicans in the State Senate who ordered the review of the election said they wanted to reassure ardent backers of former President Donald J. Trump who refused to accept his narrow loss in Arizona. The review focused on Maricopa County, which produced two-thirds of the vote statewide.Mr. Trump has asserted that the audit would confirm his claims that his election loss was because of fraud, a charge that virtually every election expert rejects. With no formal electoral authority, the review could not change the results in Arizona.The audit was bombarded with charges of partisan bias after the State Senate hired a firm to manage the review whose top executive had spread baseless charges that Mr. Trump’s loss in the state was a result of fraud. The criticism has only mounted after nonpartisan election observers and journalists documented repeated lapses in the review’s process for recounting ballots. More

  • in

    Fox News Files to Dismiss Dominion's Lawsuit Over 2020 Election Coverage

    Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.Jonah E. Bromwich More

  • in

    ‘We Can’t Indulge These Insane Lies’: Arizona G.O.P. Split on Vote Audit

    Top local Republicans are hitting back at Donald J. Trump and fellow party members in the State Senate over a review of Arizona ballots.For weeks, election professionals and Democrats have consistently called the Republican-backed review of November voting results in Arizona a fatally flawed exercise, marred by its partisan cast of characters and sometimes bizarre methodology.Now, after a week in which leaders of the review suggested they had found evidence of illegal behavior, top Republicans in the state’s largest county have escalated their own attacks on the effort, with the county’s top election official calling former President Donald J. Trump “unhinged” for his online comments falsely accusing the county of deleting an elections database.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” the official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Mr. Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.It is not the first time Republicans in county government have been at odds with the Republicans in the Legislature over the review of the vote. But Mr. Richer is among various Republicans in Maricopa County sounding like they have run out of patience.The five elected supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, plan to meet on Monday afternoon to issue a broadside against what Republican sponsors in the State Senate have billed as an election audit, which targets the 2.1 million votes cast in November in metropolitan Phoenix and outlying areas. The planned meeting follows a weekend barrage of posts on Twitter, with the hashtag #RealAuditorsDont, in which the supervisors assailed the integrity of the review.Those posts followed a letter from the leader of the audit, State Senator Karen Fann, implying that the county had removed “the main database for all election-related data” from election equipment that had been subpoenaed for review. Mr. Trump later published the letter on his website, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities.The supervisors’ Twitter rebuke was scathing. Real auditors don’t “release false ‘conclusions’ without understanding what they are looking at,” one post said, ridiculing the allegation of a deleted database. Nor do real auditors “hire known conspiracy theorists,” a reference to the firm hired to manage the review, whose chief executive has promoted theories that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s loss in Arizona.The Arizona Senate president, Karen Fann, has defended the ballot review. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressJack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, issued a statement calling the suggestion that files were deleted “outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate,” which ordered the audit. In an interview, he said the meeting on Monday would refute claims in the letter from Ms. Fann, the Senate president.“Basically, every one of our five supervisors said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Mr. Sellers said in an interview on Sunday. “What they’re suggesting is not just criticism. They’re saying we broke the law. And we certainly did not.”The real target of the accusations, he said in the interview, “are the professionals who run the elections, people who followed the rules and who did an incredible job in the middle of a pandemic.“A lot of the questions being asked right now have been answered,” he said of those challenging the November results. “But the people asking them don’t like the answers, so they keep on asking.”At issue is the Maricopa County vote. But Ms. Fann’s letter raises the prospect that an exercise dismissed by serious observers as transparently partisan and flawed could become a potent weapon in the continuing effort by Mr. Trump and his followers to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in Arizona, and perhaps elsewhere.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.One poll by High Ground, a Phoenix firm well known for its political surveys, concluded this spring that 78 percent of Arizona Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s false claims that President Biden did not win the November election. A recent Monmouth University poll found that almost two-thirds of Republicans nationally believe that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. More than six in 10 Americans overall believe that he did.Beyond the dispute over supposedly deleted files, Ms. Fann is also pressing the county and the manufacturer of its voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, to release passwords for vote tabulating machines and county-operated internet routers.Dominion, which has been fighting a series of election-fraud conspiracy theories promoted by Trump supporters and pro-Trump news outlets, has said it will cooperate with federally certified election auditors. But it has spurned the firms hired to conduct the Arizona vote review, whose track record in election audits is scant at best.Maricopa County officials have refused to turn over router passwords, which the auditors say they need to determine whether voting machines were connected to the internet and subject to hacking. County officials say past audits have settled that question. The county sheriff, Paul Penzone, called the demand for passwords “mind-numbingly reckless,” saying it would compromise law enforcement operations unrelated to the election.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe election review was born in December as an effort by Republican senators to placate voters who had embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that Mr. Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state was a fraud. Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s votes were cast, was chosen in part because Republicans refused to believe that Mr. Biden had scored a 45,000-vote victory in a county that once was solid G.O.P. territory.What once seemed an effort to mollify angry supporters of Mr. Trump, however, has become engulfed in acrimony as Ms. Fann and other senators have steered the review in a decidedly partisan direction, hiring as its manager a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had previously suggested that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s Arizona loss.An accounting of the review’s finances remains cloudy, but far-right supporters, including the ardently pro-Trump cable news outlet One America News, have raised funds on its behalf. Nonpartisan election experts and the Justice Department have cited troubling indicators that the review is open to manipulation and ignores the most basic security guidelines.Most Arizona Republican officials who have spoken publicly have doggedly supported the review. But State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from a suburban Phoenix district evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, made headlines last week after saying that the conduct of the review made him embarrassed to serve in the State Senate.Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said he hoped the supervisors’ effort to refute the review’s claims on Monday would be the end of the affair.“It’s clearer by the day: The people hired by the Senate are in way over their heads,” his statement said. “This is not funny; it’s dangerous.” More

  • in

    Newsmax Apologizes for False Claims of Vote-Rigging by a Dominion Employee

    The right-wing news site said it had found “no evidence” for pro-Trump conspiracy theories about Eric Coomer, who was Dominion’s director of product strategy and security.The conservative news outlet Newsmax formally apologized on Friday for spreading baseless allegations that an employee of Dominion Voting Systems had rigged voting machines in an effort to sink President Donald J. Trump’s bid for re-election last year.In a statement posted on its website, Newsmax acknowledged that it had found “no evidence” for the conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others that the employee, Eric Coomer, had manipulated Dominion voting machines, voting software and the final vote counts in the election.“On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family,” the statement said.Mr. Coomer, director of product strategy and security for Dominion, sued Newsmax and several pro-Trump figures in December, after he had been roundly vilified in the right-wing media sphere. In his lawsuit, which also names the Trump campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani and the One America News Network, Mr. Coomer claimed that he had suffered harm to his reputation, emotional distress, anxiety and lost earnings as false accusations spread throughout the pro-Trump world that he was plotting to rig the election.Among the accusations was a claim that Mr. Coomer had said on a phone call with antifa activists that he would ensure a victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the lawsuit said. In fact, Mr. Coomer did not participate in an “antifa conference call” and did not take any action to subvert the presidential election, the lawsuit said.Nevertheless, hashtags calling for Mr. Coomer to be arrested and exposed trended on social media, the lawsuit said. Mr. Trump’s son Eric posted a photo of Mr. Coomer on Twitter, alongside the false claim that Mr. Coomer had said he would ensure a Biden victory. Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, said at a news conference that Mr. Coomer was a “vicious, vicious man” who was “close to antifa,” the lawsuit said.And Sidney Powell, who was also one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, replied, “Yes, it’s true,” on Newsmax when she was asked if Mr. Coomer had said, “Don’t worry about President Trump, I already made sure that he’s going to lose the election,” according to the lawsuit.As a result, Mr. Coomer received an onslaught of offensive messages, harassment and death threats, according to the lawsuit, which names Ms. Powell as a defendant.“These fabrications and attacks against me have upended my life, forced me to flee my home, and caused my family and loved ones to fear for my safety, and I fear for theirs,” Mr. Coomer wrote in an opinion column published in The Denver Post in December.In its statement on Friday, Newsmax said it wanted to “clarify” its coverage of Mr. Coomer.“There are several facts that our viewers should be aware of,” the statement said. “Newsmax has found no evidence that Dr. Coomer interfered with Dominion voting machines or voting software in any way, nor that Dr. Coomer ever claimed to have done so. Nor has Newsmax found any evidence that Dr. Coomer ever participated in any conversation with members of ‘antifa,’ nor that he was directly involved with any partisan political organization.”Mr. Coomer’s lawyer, Steve Skarnulis, said he could not comment on the statement, “as the terms of settlement are strictly confidential.”Newsmax said it does not comment on litigation.“Our statement on the website is consistent with our previous statements that we have not seen any evidence of software manipulation in the 2020 election,” a Newsmax spokesman said.In December, Newsmax posted a statement renouncing a number of false claims about Dominion and Smartmatic, another election technology company that had become the focus of conspiracy theories. The statement came after Smartmatic said it had sent Newsmax legal notices and letters demanding retractions for publishing “false and defamatory statements.”Newsmax’s statement acknowledged that “no evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.”In February, a Newsmax host, Bob Sellers, cut off Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a vociferous Trump supporter, when he began attacking Dominion on air. As Mr. Lindell continued to talk, Mr. Sellers read a prepared statement saying the election results had been certified in every state.“Newsmax accepts the results as legal and final,” Mr. Sellers said. “The courts have also supported that view.”Mr. Coomer’s lawsuit, which had been filed in Colorado, is separate from a number of lawsuits that Dominion Voting Systems has filed against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Lindell. More

  • in

    Half a Year After Trump’s Defeat, Arizona Republicans Are Recounting the Vote

    An audit of the vote in Arizona’s most populous county was meant to mollify angry Trump voters. But it is being criticized as a partisan exercise more than a fact-finding one.PHOENIX — It seemed so simple back in December.Responding to angry voters who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, Arizona Republicans promised a detailed review of the vote that showed Mr. Trump to have been the first Republican presidential nominee to lose the state since 1996. “We hold an audit,” State Senator Eddie Farnsworth said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “And then we can put this to rest.”But when a parade of flatbed trucks last week hauled boxes of voting equipment and 78 pallets containing the 2.1 million ballots of Arizona’s largest county to a decrepit local coliseum, it kicked off a seat-of-the-pants audit process that seemed more likely to amplify Republican grievances than to put them to rest.Almost half a year after the election Mr. Trump lost, the promised audit has become a snipe hunt for skulduggery that has spanned a court battle, death threats and calls to arrest the elected leadership of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.The head of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm that Republican senators hired to oversee the audit, has embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories of election theft and has suggested, contrary to available evidence, that Mr. Trump actually won Arizona by 200,000 votes. The pro-Trump cable channel One America News Network has started a fund-raiser to finance the venture and has been named one of the nonpartisan observers that will keep the audit on the straight and narrow.In fact, three previous reviews showed no sign of significant fraud or any reason to doubt President Biden’s victory. But the senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide.Critics in both parties charge that an effort that began as a way to placate angry Trump voters has become a political embarrassment and another blow to the once-inviolable democratic norm that losers and winners alike honor the results of elections.“You know the dog that caught the car?” said Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the Republican-dominated Maricopa Board of Supervisors. “The dog doesn’t know what to do with it.”After a brief pause on Friday ordered by a state court judge, the audit continues without clarity on who will do the counting, what it will cost and who will pay for the process, which is expected to last into mid-May. The One America network is livestreaming it, and Mr. Trump is cheering from the sidelines.In an email statement on Saturday, he praised the “brave American Patriots” behind the effort and demanded that Gov. Doug Ducey, a frequent target of his displeasure, dispatch the state police or National Guard for their protection.Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, a Democrat, was less enthused.“My concern grows deeper by the hour,” she said in an email on Friday. “It is clear that no one involved in this process knows what they are doing, and they are making it up as they go along.”The Senate president, Karen Fann, said in December that the audit had no hidden agenda and could not change the settled election results in Arizona, regardless of what it showed.“A lot of our constituents have a lot of questions about how the voting, the electoral system works, the security of it, the validity of it,” she said, and so the senators needed experts to examine voting processes and determine “what else could we do to verify the votes were correct and accurate.”Officials unloaded election equipment at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the state fairgrounds in Phoenix on Wednesday.Matt York/Associated PressOther state legislatures have looked into bogus claims of election fraud. But the Arizona audit, driven in part by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, is in a league of its own. Experts say it underscores the sharp rightward shift of the Legislature and the state Republican Party even as the state edges toward the political center.“I get why they’re doing it, because half of the G.O.P. believes there was widespread fraud,” said Mike Noble, a Phoenix pollster who got his start in Republican politics. “The only problem is, a majority of the electorate doesn’t believe there was widespread fraud.“The longer they push this,” he said, “the more they’re alienating people in the middle.”In Arizona, the state party is headed by Kelli Ward, a former state senator who has rejected Mr. Biden’s victory and supports the audit. Under her leadership, the party in January censured Mr. Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain for being insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump.The 16 Republicans in the State Senate reflect the party’s lurch to the right. November’s elections ousted the Senate’s two most moderate Republicans, replacing one with a Democrat and another with a Republican who claims lifetime membership in the Oath Keepers, the extremist group that helped lead the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.Another self-proclaimed Oath Keeper, State Representative Mark Finchem, proposed in January to give the Legislature the power to reject presidential election results and choose new electors by a majority vote. (The proposal went nowhere). Mr. Finchem since has become a vocal backer of the audit.“The people in the Legislature are more prone to believe in the conspiracy theories and are more prone to espouse them” than in the past, said Barrett Marson, a Phoenix campaign consultant and a former Republican spokesman for the Arizona State House.Kelli Ward, the staunchly conservative chair of the Arizona Republican Party, is a strong supporter of the Maricopa County audit. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressMs. Fann, Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for interviews.The Senate’s rightward drift is simply explained, political analysts say. Most of the 30 Senate districts are so uncompetitive that the Democratic and Republican primaries effectively choose who will serve as senators. Because most voters sit out primary elections, the ones who do show up — for Republicans, that often means far-right Trump supporters — are the key to getting elected.Responding to stolen-election claims, through tougher voting laws or inquiries, is by far those voters’ top issue, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican campaign strategist in Phoenix.“They’re representing their constituency,” he said. “The whole process was built to produce this.” The senators warmed to the notion of a Maricopa County audit from the first mention of it in early December.Before long, they sent subpoenas to the county seeking the 2.1 million ballots, access to 385 voting machines and other equipment like check-in poll books, voting machine passwords and personal details on everyone who voted. The supervisors resisted, calling the election fraud-free, and said they wanted a court ruling on the subpoenas’ legality.The reaction was immediate: The four Republicans and one Democrat on the Board of Supervisors were deluged with thousands of telephone calls and emails from Trump supporters, many from out of state, some promising violence.“All five supervisors were receiving death threats,” said Mr. Gallardo, the Democratic supervisor. Two police officers were posted outside his home.Though three previous checks showed no sign of cheating, Arizona senators now plan to recount — by hand — all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, two-thirds of the entire vote statewide. Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinHoping to head off a dispute, the supervisors hired two federally approved firms to conduct a forensic audit of the county’s voting machines. The audit concluded that the equipment had performed flawlessly.Ms. Fann, who in the past had been seen as a moderate conservative, said the Senate wanted a stricter review. Senators said they had hired “an independent, qualified forensic auditing firm” for the task.Then it developed that their selection, Allied Security Operations Group, had asserted that Arizona voting machines had been hacked in an “insidious and egregious ploy” to elect Mr. Biden.The senators backtracked, but Jack Sellers, the chairman of the Maricopa County supervisors, charged in a Facebook post that they had chosen “a debunked conspiracy theorist” for the audit.Tempers flared, and all 16 Republican senators proposed to hold the supervisors in contempt, potentially sending them to jail.But that fell apart after Senator Paul Boyer, a Phoenix Republican, backed out after deciding he could not jail the supervisors for disobeying a subpoena they considered illegal.As he stood on the Senate floor explaining his stance, his cellphone began buzzing with furious texts and emails. Some were threatening; some mentioned his wife’s workplace and their toddler son.“It was like, ‘You’d better watch your back — we’re coming for you,’” Mr. Boyer said. The family spent days in hiding before returning home with a 24-hour police guard.Just two weeks later, on Feb. 27, a county court ruled the Senate subpoenas legal.Workers tabulating ballot results at the Maricopa County recorder’s office in Phoenix on Nov. 5.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Senate, seemingly caught unawares, initially refused to accept delivery of the subpoenaed material for lack of a secure place to store it. Officials rented a local coliseum, but the county sheriff’s office refused to provide security, calling the job outside its scope. The second firm hired to analyze the audit results, Cyber Ninjas, says it is an industry leader. But The Arizona Republic soon reported that the company’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had posted a litany of stolen-election conspiracy theories on a Twitter account that he had deleted in January.Among them was a retweeted post suggesting that Dominion Voting Systems, a favorite target of the right, had robbed Mr. Trump of 200,000 votes in Arizona. Dominion says Cyber Ninjas is “led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters who have helped spread the “Big Lie” of a rigged election.Mr. Logan, at a news conference last week said the company was committed to a fair, transparent process. “It’s really, really important to us that we have integrity in the way we do this count and in the results that come out of it,” he told reporters. Ms. Fann has said that the firm and others it will oversee are “well qualified and well experienced.”But unease about the audit has continued to mushroom. Ms. Hobbs, the secretary of state, asked the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to investigate the Senate’s handling of the procedure, citing a lack of transparency about security of ballots. She noted that some of the Legislature’s furthest-right firebrands have had free access to the coliseum even as it remained unclear whether reporters and impartial election experts would be allowed to observe the proceedings.He declined.Greg Burton, the executive editor of The Arizona Republic, said in a statement on Friday that “Senate leaders have throttled legitimate press access and handed Arizona’s votes to conspiracy theorists.”Amid the growing uproar, the Republican senators who have approved and stood behind the audit since its beginning have largely been silent about concerns over its integrity.Alain Delaquérière and Susan Beachy contributed research. More

  • in

    Four falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationFour falsehoods Giuliani spread about Dominion.Jan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETJan. 25, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETRudolph W. Giuliani worked for weeks after the November election in an attempt to subvert its outcome.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesDominion Voting Systems, one of the largest voting machine vendors in the United States, filed a defamation lawsuit against Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday, accusing him of spreading a litany of falsehoods about the company in his efforts on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the election.The lawsuit chronicles more than 50 inaccurate statements made by Mr. Giuliani in the weeks after the election, and issues a point-by-point rebuttal of each falsehood. Here are four of the most common false statements Mr. Giuliani made about Dominion Voting Systems.1. The Company’s OriginMr. Giuliani regularly stated, falsely, that Dominion “really is a Venezuelan company” and that it “depends completely on the software of Smartmatic,” a company “developed in about 2004, 2005 to help Chavez steal elections.”As Dominion writes in its lawsuit: “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez. It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary are in Denver.2. Programming VotesAnother often-repeated claim was that Dominion had programmed its machines to flip votes: “In other words when you pressed down Biden, you got Trump, and when you pressed down Trump you got Biden.”This has been proved false by numerous government and law enforcement officials, including former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said in December: “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 25, 2021, 6:32 p.m. ETJanet Yellen is confirmed as Treasury secretary.Grindr is fined $11.7 million under European privacy law.Biden’s Treasury will seek to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, an effort the Trump administration halted.Similarly, a joint statement by numerous government and elections officials and agencies, including the National Association of State Election Directors, the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”The hand recount in Georgia also affirmed that the machine recounts were accurate in that state.3. Antrim County, Mich.Mr. Giuliani zeroed in on Antrim County, Mich., falsely claiming that a “Dominion machine flipped 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden” there, and that machines in the county were “62 percent inaccurate,” had a “68 percent error rate” and had an “81.9 percent rejection rate.”Mr. Giuliani’s focus on Antrim County stems from human errors made by the county clerk on election night. According to the lawsuit, the clerk “mistakenly failed to update all of the voting machines’ tabulator memory cards.” But the suit says that “her mistakes were promptly caught as part of the normal canvass process before the election result was made official.” The Michigan secretary of state’s office also conducted a hand audit of all presidential votes in Antrim County that found the machines were accurate.4. A Problematic ExpertMr. Giuliani claimed that his accusations, particularly in Antrim County, were backed up by experts. But he largely relied on one man, Russell Ramsland Jr., a former Republican congressional candidate from Texas, who, according to the lawsuit filed by Dominion, had also publicly favored false conspiracy theories.Dominion spent more than five pages on Mr. Ramsland’s lack of credentials to properly examine equipment, noting that he had a “fundamental misunderstanding of election software.” The suit also quotes the former acting director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Voting System Testing and Certification program, saying the report produced by Mr. Ramsland “showed a ‘grave misunderstanding’ of Antrim County’s voting system and ‘a lack of knowledge of election technology and process.’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    Watch out for this misinformation when Congress meets to certify the election.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationWatch out for this misinformation when Congress meets to certify the election.Jan. 6, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ETJan. 6, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ETDavey Alba and An audit of election ballots in Atlanta in mid-November.Credit…Brynn Anderson/Associated PressAs Congress meets on Wednesday to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the November election, President Trump and his supporters continue to spread rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the vote.Here are six false voter fraud claims that may be repeated during the proceedings on Wednesday.No, ‘glitches’ in Dominion Voting Machines did not change vote tallies.Claim: Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software that local governments around the nation use to help run their elections, deleted votes for President Trump.Fact: There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, including the machines with Dominion software, according to the federal agency that oversees election security.Background: In the weeks after the election, President Trump and his supporters spread baseless claims about Dominion. The claims included theories that “software glitches” changed vote tallies in several states, including Michigan and Georgia. No such changes were ever found.Mr. Trump and his supporters subsequently claimed that Dominion had hidden evidence of voter fraud, both by destroying machines or removing parts within the machines. Mr. Trump repeated those claims during a call with Georgia’s secretary of state last weekend. Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, said Monday of the claims of election fraud in the state, “This is all easily, provably false.”No, politicians in Georgia did not prevent an analysis of absentee ballots.Claim: President Trump and his supporters have claimed that absentee ballots in Georgia were rife with fraud and that state officials have not fully investigated.Fact: Election officials have audited absentee ballots and found “no fraudulent absentee ballots.”Background: The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered law enforcement and election investigators to conduct an audit of more than 15,000 absentee ballot envelopes in Cobb County, based on a complaint that signatures were not adequately checked there. The audit found no fraud. Mr. Raffensperger has said that he also plans a statewide audit of each county’s signature-match policies and procedures.Georgia has already conducted two recounts, both by hand and machine, of all five million ballots cast in the state. No voting fraud was found.No, thousands of votes in Arizona were not changed to favor Biden.Claim: In an interview on the conservative cable channel Newsmax in December, the Arizona Republican chairwoman, Kelli Ward, said 200,000 ballots were digitally changed to give the victory to Mr. Biden, and Representative Paul Gosar amplified the falsehood on Twitter.Fact: Audits in Arizona have found no evidence of voter fraud, or changed vote tallies.Background: While early results in Arizona showed a close race, the final count revealed that Mr. Biden had won the state by more than 10,000 votes.Audits in Arizona’s four largest counties, which make up 86 percent of all votes in the state, turned up no evidence of systematic voter fraud.No, election workers didn’t stuff fraudulent ballots into suitcases.Claim: President Trump’s supporters have pointed to a video as proof that ballots were pulled from a “suitcase” at a vote-counting center in Atlanta.Fact: Election officials have said the surveillance video shows normal ballot processing. It is not unusual practice for poll workers to store ballots that still need to be counted on-site at the polling center.Background: As reported by The New York Times, late on Nov. 3, election workers in Fulton County, Ga., heard that they would be allowed to stop the vote-counting and retire for the evening. So they packed uncounted ballots into suitcases and prepared to lock up. When word came that they couldn’t leave yet, they dragged the suitcases back out and began counting the ballots again.But that scene of election workers taking out suitcases of ballots was selectively edited and pushed by allies of President Trump as one of the many false theories purportedly proving widespread election fraud. The conspiracists also named the election worker Ruby Freeman as a specific player in this false conspiracy event.No, there isn’t evidence that Pennsylvania election officials violated state law.Claim: President Trump’s campaign has claimed that Pennsylvania election officials improperly handled tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in violation of state election law.Fact: The Trump campaign’s legal efforts to disqualify votes in Pennsylvania have been unsupported by evidence.Background: The Trump campaign filed several claims in court seeking to invalidate Pennsylvania’s election results, and one ally of Mr. Trump, Senator Josh Hawley, has said he would challenge the results because he believed “some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.”But the Trump campaign has included no evidence that any vote had been cast illegally.In a hearing on Nov. 17, President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acknowledged he had no proof to back up his claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. “This is not a fraud case,” Mr. Giuliani said.Four days later, the judge overseeing the case dismissed the lawsuit. It was also shot down last month by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who said in a ruling, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”No, Pence does not have the power to change the election result.Claim: Vice President Mike Pence can reject state electors in the Electoral College.Fact: Federal law stipulates that the vice president’s role is to count Electoral College votes, not decide whether they are valid.Background: President Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed on Twitter that Mr. Pence has the power to reject electors when the Electoral College vote is certified.As president of the Senate, Mr. Pence is expected to preside over the pro forma certification of the Electoral College vote count in front of a joint session of Congress. The only electoral certifications available for Vice President Pence to preside over are the ones approved by each state.Ben Decker and Jacob Silver contributed research.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, But the Myth of Stolen Elections Lives On

    @media (pointer: coarse) {
    .nytslm_outerContainer {
    overflow-x: scroll;
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
    }
    }

    .nytslm_outerContainer {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    /* Fixes IE */
    overflow-x: auto;
    box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
    padding: 10px 1.25em 10px;
    transition: all 250ms;
    -ms-overflow-style: none;
    /* IE 10+ */
    scrollbar-width: none;
    /* Firefox */
    background: white;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
    z-index: 1000;
    }

    @media (min-width: 1024px) {
    .nytslm_outerContainer {
    margin-bottom: 0px;
    padding: 13px 1.25em 10px;
    }
    }

    .nytslm::-webkit-scrollbar {
    display: none;
    /* Safari and Chrome */
    }

    .nytslm_innerContainer {
    margin: unset;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    }

    @media (min-width: 600px) {
    .nytslm_innerContainer {
    margin: auto;
    min-width: 600px;
    }
    }

    .nytslm_title {
    padding-right: 1em;
    border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
    }

    @media (min-width: 740px) {
    .nytslm_title {
    max-width: none;
    font-size: 1.0625rem;
    line-height: 1.25rem;
    }
    }

    .nytslm_spacer {
    width: 0;
    border-right: 1px solid #E2E2E2;
    height: 45px;
    margin: 0 1.4em;
    }

    .nytslm_list {
    font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
    display: flex;
    width: auto;
    list-style: none;
    padding-left: 1em;
    flex-shrink: 0;
    align-items: baseline;
    justify-content: center;
    }

    .nytslm_li {
    margin-right: 1.4em;
    flex-shrink: 0;
    font-size: 0.8125rem;
    line-height: 0.8125rem;
    font-weight: 600;
    padding: 1em 0;
    }

    #nytslm .nytslm_li a {
    color: #121212;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

    #nytslm .nytsmenu_li_current,
    #nytslm .nytslm_li a:hover,
    #nytslm .nytslm_li a:active,
    #nytslm .nytslm_li a:focus {
    color: #121212;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #121212;
    padding-bottom: 2px;
    }

    .nytslm_li_live_loud:after {
    content: ‘LIVE’
    }

    .nytslm_li_live_loud {
    background-color: #d0021b;
    color: white;
    border-radius: 3px;
    padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
    margin-right: 2px;
    display: inline-block;
    letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
    font-weight: 700;
    }

    .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud {
    border: 1px solid #d0021b;
    color: #d0021b;
    border-radius: 3px;
    padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
    margin-right: 2px;
    display: inline-block;
    letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
    font-weight: 700;
    }

    .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud:before {
    content: ‘Upcoming’
    }

    .nytslm_li_loud a:hover,
    .nytslm_li_loud a:active,
    .nytslm_li_loud a:focus {
    border-bottom: 2px solid;
    padding-bottom: 2px;
    }

    .nytslm_li_updated {
    color: #777;
    }

    #masthead-bar-one {
    display: none;
    }

    .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
    width: 80px;
    align-self: center;
    display: flex;
    }

    @media(min-width: 600px) {
    .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
    width: 100px;
    }
    }

    .nytslm_notification {
    border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
    font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
    padding-left: 1em;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_label {
    color: #D0021B;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    font-weight: 700;
    font-size: 0.6875rem;
    margin-bottom: 0.2em;
    letter-spacing: 0.02em;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_link {
    font-weight: 600;
    color: #121212;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_headline {
    font-size: 0.875rem;
    line-height: 1.0625rem;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_image_wrapper {
    position: relative;
    max-width: 75px;
    margin-left: 10px;
    flex-shrink: 0;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_image {
    max-width: 100%;
    }

    .nytslm_notification_image_live_bug {
    position: absolute;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    bottom: 7px;
    left: 2px;

    font-size: 0.5rem;
    background-color: #d0021b;
    color: white;
    border-radius: 3px;
    padding: 4px 4px 2px 4px;
    font-weight: 700;
    margin-right: 2px;
    letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
    }

    /* No hover state on in app */
    .Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
    .Hybrid .nytslm_li_loud a:hover {
    border-bottom: none;
    padding-bottom: 0;
    }

    .Hybrid #TOP_BANNER_REGION {
    display: none;
    }

    .nytslm_st0 {
    fill: #f4564a;
    }

    .nytslm_st1 {
    fill: #ffffff;
    }

    .nytslm_st2 {
    fill: #2b8ad8;
    }

    Electoral College Results

    Election Disinformation

    Full Results

    Biden Transition Updates

    “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
    return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
    if(reportData(),”0_control”!==getVariant()){// Remove menu bar items or previous notification
    var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
    // Do not update DOM if the content won’t change
    if(currentNotificationContents!==a.text&&window.localStorage.getItem(“stylnelecs”)!==a.timestamp)// Do not show if user has interacted with this link
    // if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
    {expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
    var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications&region=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
    window.stylnelecsHasLoaded=!0)})(),function(){try{if(navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)){var a=document.getElementsByClassName(“nytslm_title”)[0];a.style.pointerEvents=”none”}}catch(a){}}(); More