Voting Rights, Registration and Requirements

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Unsettling Warning in France’s Election

      by

      A record number of abstentions, and a strictly binary choice for voters — many of whom said they were picking the lesser of two evils — are trouble signs even within a mature democracy.You should know at least two crucial facts about the French presidential election, whose final round was held last Sunday.The first is that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate known for her warm relationship with Vladimir Putin and her hostility toward the European Union and immigrants, lost the election — but with the best showing that her party has ever had, carrying 41.5 percent of the second-round vote.The second is that Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president from the center-right En Marche party, won the election — but with the lowest share of registered voters of any candidate since 1969, because of historically low turnout and high numbers of votes that were cast blank or spoiled in a show of protest.Of those two facts, the first has garnered the most attention. But the second may be more important.Vote, or hostage negotiation?In the first round of the presidential election, Macron came in first, but with nowhere close to a majority. He got barely more than a quarter of the total votes, with 27.85 percent. Le Pen came next with 23.15 percent, and the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, got 21.95 percent. The rest of the votes were divided between smaller parties.That’s actually pretty common: Today, in many mature democracies, it’s uncommon for any party or ideological faction to get more than about a third of the votes. In the German federal election last year, the center-left party came first, but with only 25.7 percent of the vote — strikingly similar to the numbers for Macron in the first round. In multiparty parliamentary systems, that results in coalition governments in which two or more parties work together — take Germany, again, where a three-party coalition now governs.Ms. Le Pen had a strong showing in both rounds of the 2022 French presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut in direct presidential systems, the winner takes all. And for many voters, that means that elections are less a matter of who they want to support than of who they most want to oppose.So when Le Pen made the second round runoff of the French election, the contest took on the tenor of a hostage negotiation. Macron argued that Le Pen was an existential threat to France, and called for all other candidates’ supporters to unite behind him in order to prevent her from winning the presidency. Mélenchon, the leftist candidate, made a similar plea to his supporters. “We know who we will never vote for,” he said on April 10. “We must not give a single vote for Madame Le Pen.”In the end, enough voters aligned behind Macron to keep the far right out of the presidency. And it seems that many heeded the calls to hold their noses and vote for Macron, despite their aversion to him, in order to protect the country from the far right: According to one poll, about 45 percent of those who voted for him did so only to oppose Le Pen.But the same poll found that the opposite was also true: About 45 percent of Le Pen voters were more interested in opposing Macron than in supporting the far right. Other data bears that out: The overseas French territories Martinique and Guadeloupe supported Mélenchon in the first round, but then gave a majority to Le Pen in the second.Others withdrew entirely. Abstentions and blank ballots hit record highs in this election — a notable development in France, where turnout has historically been around 80 percent.A warning from historyExperts who study France’s history of revolutions and democratic collapse see signs of danger in a system that pushes a wide spectrum of voters into a binary choice between what some see as the lesser of two evils.So how do you tell the difference between normal political anger that can work itself out through a series of elections without leading to serious instability, and something dangerous enough to require structural change to the system itself?A woman voting at a polling station in Saint Denis, in the suburbs of Paris. The election saw a high level of voter abstentions.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“That’s the question of French history, right?” Terrence Peterson, a political historian at Florida International University, told me. “Historians have been asking that question about France for a long time, given its history of repeated revolutions.”He saw particular cause for concern in the rising levels of abstentions. “When voters express that they feel disenfranchised, if a majority of them do, then that’s a clear sign” of serious trouble, he said.Some in France have begun to call for an overhaul of the Constitution to make the system more representative. Mélenchon has called for a new Constitution to be drafted via a people’s constituent assembly. In an editorial last week in the French newspaper Le Monde, Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, argued that the lack of proportional representation had brought the far right “to the gates of power” in France.Camille Robcis, a Columbia University historian who studies 20th-century French politics and institutions, said that she was not surprised to hear such calls. “You have a kind of disconnect between the representatives and the popular vote, the electorate,” she said. “The result is that these disenchanted, disenfranchised voters are moving to the extremes.”How am I doing?I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Charges Dropped Against Pamela Moses, Who Was Jailed Over Voter Fraud

      by

      Pamela Moses, who was sentenced in January to six years in a case that outraged voting rights supporters, will not face a new trial, a district attorney said.A Tennessee prosecutor dropped all criminal charges on Friday against Pamela Moses, a Memphis woman with a previous felony conviction who was sentenced to six years and one day in prison in January after she tried to restore her right to vote in 2019.The voter fraud conviction from her trial was thrown out in February after a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction had improperly withheld evidence that was later uncovered by The Guardian. Ms. Moses had been set to appear in court on Monday to find out whether prosecutors would pursue a retrial.But Ms. Moses will no longer face a second trial “in the interest of judicial economy,” Amy Weirich, the district attorney of Shelby County, said in a statement. Ms. Moses spent 82 days in custody on this case, “which is sufficient,” Ms. Weirich said. Ms. Moses is also permanently barred from registering to vote or voting in Tennessee. Ms. Weirich declined to comment further on the case.The sentencing of Ms. Moses, who is Black, had spurred outrage among voting rights supporters who said that the case highlighted racial disparities in the criminal prosecution of voting fraud cases and opaque voting restoration rights laws that sow confusion and leave many people with felony convictions unsure of their rights.In the summer of 2019, Ms. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist, decided she wanted to run for mayor of Memphis, or at the very least vote in the upcoming election.She knew that she couldn’t do either while she was on probation for prior felony convictions, including a 2015 conviction for tampering with evidence. But she believed her probation was over, according to her lawyer, Bede Anyanwu. Overall, Ms. Moses had 16 prior criminal convictions, including misdemeanor counts from 2015 of perjury, stalking and theft under $500, according to the district attorney’s office. In September 2019, a judge told Ms. Moses that she was still on probation. But when she went to the probation office to confirm, a probation officer told her she was actually done with her felony probation, records show. The probation officer signed off on her certificate of restoration to vote and Ms. Moses then submitted it to election officials.A day later, the Department of Correction sent a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission informing it that the probation officer had made a mistake and that Ms. Moses could not vote because she was in fact still on probation.Video from a January hearing shows Ms. Moses telling Judge W. Mark Ward of the Shelby County Criminal Court, “All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me.”Judge Ward responded, “You tricked the probation department into giving you a document saying that you were off probation.”Ms. Moses was charged with perjury on a registration form and consenting to a false entry on official election documents. The first charge was dropped, but she was convicted of the second charge in November and sentenced in January. Ultimately, Ms. Moses’ felony conviction in 2015 for tampering made her permanently ineligible to vote under Tennessee law regardless of her probation status.“The case should not have been prosecuted right from the beginning because there was no trickery,” Mr. Anyanwu said. Ms. Moses declined to comment on Saturday.In recent years, Republican officials have moved to crack down on voter fraud, despite the fact that the crime remains a very rare and often accidental occurrence. Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud.Still, legislators in some states have stiffened penalties for voting-related crimes, and district attorneys and state attorneys general have pursued aggressive felony prosecutions in cases that might have been deemed legitimate mistakes.Voting rights advocates interpret these actions as a voter suppression tactic.“These prosecutions are intended to scare people who have prior convictions from even trying to register to vote,” said Blair Bowie, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., who has been assisting Ms. Moses and Mr. Anyanwu with the case since October.These prosecutions also unfairly blame individuals for failing to navigate a voter restoration process that is unclear, she said, adding that state officials are responsible for putting adequate procedures in place for that process.Ms. Bowie is representing the Tennessee N.A.A.C.P. in a lawsuit against Gov. Bill Lee and other officials that accuses them of failing to establish clearer procedures for individuals with felony convictions, “leading to a rights restoration process that is unequal, inaccessible, opaque and inaccurate.”Nearly 80 percent of the disenfranchised people in the state have completed probation and parole and are potentially eligible to restore their voting rights, but fewer than 5 percent of potentially eligible Tennesseans have been able to acquire a completed certificate of restoration of voting rights and have tried to register to vote, according to the lawsuit.Voting rights advocates say that the case also highlights the racial disparity in the prosecution of voter fraud cases.“What we see consistently is honest mistakes made by returning citizens are penalized to the max, and true bad intentions are not being penalized to the same extent,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “And usually in those cases the defendants are white.”In October, Donald Kirk Hartle, a white Republican voter, was charged with two counts of voter fraud in Las Vegas after he forged his dead wife’s signature to vote with her ballot. He was sentenced in November to one year of probation, The Associated Press reported.Edward Snodgrass, a white Republican official in Ohio, forged his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot in 2020 and was charged with illegal voting, NBC News reported. As part of a plea agreement, he served three days in jail last year, The Delaware Gazette reported.Ms. Moses is still pursuing the restoration of her civil rights, which include voting rights, through a lawsuit in Shelby County Circuit Court, according to Ms. Bowie. That lawsuit presents a constitutional challenge to the state statute that permanently bars people convicted of tampering with evidence from voting in Tennessee. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Fear for Democracy. Why Aren’t They Running on It in 2022?

      by

      Republicans are far more energized about the issues of elections and voting, powered by a former president and many base voters who believe the 2020 contest was illegitimate.One party is running on democracy and elections in 2022, and it’s not the Democrats.Despite a broad consensus on the left that the country’s most revered institutions are in trouble, with President Biden and other leaders warning gravely that protecting voting rights and fair elections is of paramount importance, the vast majority of Democratic candidates are veering away from those issues on the campaign trail.Instead, they are focusing on bread-and-butter economic topics like inflation and gas prices. Continuing to win elections must come first, the thinking goes — and polls and focus groups show that the issue of voting rights is far down the list of voters’ most urgent concerns.“You cannot buy a lot of groceries with voting rights,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Texas state representative who organized Democrats’ flight from the state in July in a failed effort to block a Republican election bill. “Last summer there was nothing more important than voting rights, but the universe has shifted, and it’s become a conversation about our economy and inflation and the cost of goods.”But as that conversation has shifted, Democrats have largely ceded the political turf on the structure of American democracy to Republicans. Riding a lasting wave of anger over the 2020 election, many G.O.P. candidates have put what they call “election integrity” front and center, even as they attack Mr. Biden and Democrats over the rising cost of living.Many Republican candidates have falsely argued in debates, social media posts and TV ads that the 2020 race was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, views that are shared by large numbers of the party’s voters. Mr. Trump’s allies have continued to try to decertify the 2020 results, and he has made questioning the last election a litmus test for winning his endorsement, which is coveted in Republican primaries.“It’s critical that we keep the heat on in terms of exposing what was a stolen election,” Peter Navarro, a former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last month.There is no evidence of meaningful fraud in the 2020 election, a finding consistent from the initial days after the vote through an array of reviews in the nearly 18 months since. Republicans ranging from William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, to state officials from Wisconsin to Wyoming have acknowledged that Mr. Biden was the rightful winner.The parties’ wide gap in energy on elections and voting — which comes during a midterm year when Republicans are ascendant — worries some Democrats, especially Black Democrats who have been dismayed by the party’s inability to pass federal voting protections while in power.“If people don’t see that Democrats are defending our right to vote, then people may not be enthused about coming out to vote,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities in Milwaukee.Partly in response to their base and to Mr. Trump, Republican state lawmakers have pressed vigorously to remake the country’s election systems, passing 34 laws restricting voting access in 19 states last year.Republican candidates are promising more: Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, who is up for re-election, is running an ad saying the election was stolen and highlighting voting restrictions she signed into law. Her leading challenger, Lindy Blanchard, has attacked Ms. Ivey for at one point saying Mr. Biden won fairly.“The Republican base and all Republicans care about not just voter integrity but voter security,” said Corry Bliss, an adviser to several Republican candidates. “If you need identification to buy NyQuil, you should need identification to vote in our elections.”“You cannot buy a lot of groceries with voting rights,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Texas state representative who organized Democrats’ flight from the state in July in a failed effort to block a Republican election bill.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesOn the Democratic side, a small handful of candidates running for office at any level of government have run television ads pledging to work to expand voting rights, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.In both parties, candidates are following their voters.Democrats have told pollsters, focus groups and organizers knocking on their doors that they are most worried about inflation. Despite macroeconomic data that Democrats paint as rosy, Americans broadly do not feel good about the economy. That includes Republicans, but they are also impassioned about electoral issues: Polls show that nearly three-quarters believe Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate.Incumbent Democrats and the White House are trying to make a case that Mr. Biden is overseeing a drop in the unemployment rate accompanied by an increase in wages, a difficult strategy since inflation overshadows both of those trends and Democrats are the party in charge. An NBC poll last month found that voters were far more likely to blame Mr. Biden for inflation than for the pandemic or corporate price increases.Representative Pete Aguilar of California, who serves both on the Jan. 6 Committee and in the House Democratic leadership, said that while “we hope that everybody starts with the base level of, ‘protect democracy, support a peaceful transfer of power,’” he and other party leaders wanted candidates “talking about issues that matter, and that is economic.”Some Democrats have tried to make voting rights a leading issue in the United States. When the Texas legislators fled Austin for Washington last summer, they tried shaming Senate Democrats into passing a sweeping federal expansion of voting rights. In January, as Mr. Biden pushed for the same goal, he gave a soaring speech in Atlanta comparing today’s Republicans to George Wallace and Bull Connor, villains of the civil rights era.Neither effort worked.Now voting rights has virtually disappeared as a top issue for both voters and candidates. In an AARP poll of likely voters aged 50 and older that was released this month, voting rights was ninth on a list of the most important issues facing the country, just behind immigration and ahead of racism. Katie Hobbs, who as Arizona’s secretary of state defended President Biden’s 2020 victory in her state, said voters and fellow Democrats were tired of talking about voting rights.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThe party’s highest-profile defenders of voting rights are also training their attention elsewhere. Stacey Abrams, the leading Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, is focusing far less on voting rights than she once did in her speeches, eschewing her flagship issue to spend more time addressing topics like Medicaid expansion and aid to small businesses. And in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state who defended Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory there, said voters and fellow Democrats would rather talk about anything else.“The Democratic lawmakers I talk to are tired of this fight,” Ms. Hobbs said. “They’re focused on addressing real issues that affect people’s daily lives rather than relitigating the 2020 election.”Democratic strategists are also advising their clients to move on from talking about expanding voting rights.“Democrats have to choose between a legislative agenda that advances voting rights with the need to educate communities of color about the new laws in their states,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who represents a host of clients running for House seats.Few Democrats have aired television ads pledging to expand voting access since the Senate effort faltered in January. Two Democratic congresswomen in Georgia who are facing off in a primary, Representatives Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux, are both on the air highlighting their support for the failed federal voting legislation.The candidate making the most concrete promises of expanding voting access is Neville Blakemore, who is running to be the clerk of Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      David Price Sees Echoes of 1994 Republican Revolution in 2022 Midterms

      by

      David Price sees echoes of the 1994 Republican Revolution in the 2022 midterms — and Republicans undoing the progress on voting rights that he witnessed as an aide in the 1960s.As a young congressional aide, David Price witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from the Senate gallery. He remembers the dramatic moment when Senator Clair Engle of California, dying of a brain tumor and left unable to speak, was wheeled in to cast a decisive vote.Price watched the South drift away from Democrats in the years afterward, and he has stuck around long enough to see his party win slices of it back as the region’s demographics have shifted.He spent much of that time as a professor of political science at Duke University, and then as an improbable member of the very institution he studied — even writing a book on “The Congressional Experience.”Now 81 and in the twilight of his career, Price is retiring from Congress after more than 30 years representing his North Carolina district, which includes the Research Triangle. He is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in Washington and an especially keen observer of how the place has changed.And he does not like what he sees.Over his time in office, Price has grown alarmed at how Congress has become nastier and more partisan — a trend he traces to former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, whose “more aggressive and more militant approach” to politics, as Price put it, fundamentally transformed the institution.“I’m appalled at the direction the Republican Party has taken,” Price said in an interview in his House office. “And I don’t, for a moment, think that the polarization is symmetrical. It’s asymmetrical.”Many of today’s hardball political tactics were pioneered in North Carolina, a state characterized by bitter battles over the very rules of democracy.In 2016, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina turned heads when he declared that the state “could no longer be classified as a democracy.” The State Supreme Court has often stepped in as an arbiter between the two parties — most recently when it threw out maps that were heavily gerrymandered by the G.O.P.-led Legislature.Price first ran for office after trying and failing, as a political strategist, to oust Jesse Helms, the deeply conservative, pro-segregation North Carolina senator. Price took some satisfaction in the fact that the Senate recently confirmed the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.In today’s politics, Price sees ominous echoes of the 1994 campaign, when the mood of the country shifted sharply against President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party.“My town meetings became very turbulent,” he said, recalling how his campaign had to request police protection.Price became a temporary victim of Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in 1994, losing his seat in that year’s red wave. He made a comeback two years later, and would serve in the House for the next 26 years.Behind the scenesCerebral and reserved, Price prefers to work carefully and quietly on a few priorities at a time. He does not clamor for MSNBC hits or post viral videos of his speeches from the House floor.“I’ve never been a tweeter,” he said, somewhat ruefully.Instead, Price has exerted a significant, behind-the-scenes influence over causes like promoting democracy abroad and pushing changes to federal campaign finance laws. You know that tagline at the end of political ads — the one where candidates say they approved this message? That was his idea.“He’s got his fingerprints all over a lot of things,” said Thomas Mills, a North Carolina political strategist and blogger.Price hasn’t lost the youthful idealism that brought him to that Senate gallery in 1964. “You’re not going to find me taking cheap shots at government,” he said.But he agonizes about how dysfunctional Congress has become, to the point where compromise is growing impossible. “Some degree of bipartisan cooperation is essential if we’re going to run our government,” he said dryly.Price, left, at a 2008 rally in support of Senator Barack Obama, second from right, in Greenville, N.C.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressHe warned that some Republicans want to roll back the civil rights agenda that brought him into politics in the 1960s — to the point where, he said, the U.S. is in “real danger” of entering a new Jim Crow era.In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, freeing states with a history of racial discrimination from requirements that they clear any material changes to their voting laws with the Justice Department.The ruling immediately set off a wave of laws in Republican-led states that restricted voting rights. In 2016, a federal judge said that G.O.P. lawmakers in North Carolina had written the state’s voter I.D. law with “almost surgical precision” to discriminate against Black voters.“The evidence just couldn’t be clearer that months after preclearance was gone, it was ‘Katie, bar the door,’” Price said.If you can’t join them …The only reliable way to defeat such efforts is for Democrats to win elections, Price argues.Last year’s infighting over the Build Back Better Act, a mammoth piece of legislation that was rejected by two Democratic senators, didn’t help.“We can never make a binary choice between turning out our base and appealing to swing voters,” he said. “We will not succeed if we don’t figure out how to do both.”Part of the Democratic Party’s problem, he said, is the discomfort many on the left feel about promoting the party’s successes when there’s always more work to do.“I often think about how Trump did this,” Price said. “He just bragged about his achievements, however illusory.”Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trial Alleging Voter Suppression in 2018 Abrams-Kemp Georgia Race Begins

      by

      A trial is underway to determine whether Georgia’s handling of the 2018 election for governor was discriminatory, in a case brought by Stacey Abrams’s voting rights group.The 2018 race for governor in Georgia ended in a bitter dispute between Brian Kemp, a Republican who was serving as secretary of state at the time, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic challenger who accused the state of voter suppression.The election, won by Kemp, was plagued by long lines, especially in communities of color where wait times occasionally exceeded two hours. And Kemp’s office put 53,000 voter registrations on hold under the state’s “exact match” rule, which requires that voters’ registration information exactly match what is on file with the state’s Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration. Many of those 53,000 were Black voters, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in 2018.After the election, Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued the state, claiming its election practices were illegal and discriminatory.Now, more than three years after the suit was filed, the trial began on Monday in Atlanta — the first federal voting rights trial in Georgia in over a decade. Abrams is now in the middle of a second campaign for governor, a rematch with Kemp.After Judge Steve C. Jones tossed parts of the original lawsuit last year, Fair Fight opened its case challenging three specific tenets of the Georgia election system. These tenets, the group says, make it harder for people to vote, especially Black voters.“Through the three practices at issue in this case — exact match, affirmative mismanagement of the voter rolls and failure to train on absentee ballot cancellations — these defendants have erected a series of roadblocks — roadblocks that propose unjustifiable burdens on eligible voters in violation of both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act,” Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a lawyer for Fair Fight and the other plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.The office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state and the defendant in the case, has said repeatedly that the state has already beaten back most of the claims in court, and accused Fair Fight of playing politics.“They ran this litigation like a campaign,” Joshua B. Belinfante, a lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. He continued: “What the evidence will show is what the plaintiffs allege is part of a campaign is not what is happening on the ground in Georgia elections.”Echoes from the pastFair Fight and other groups have challenged Georgia’s election laws on both constitutional grounds and under a provision of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2. The trial represents one of the first marquee challenges using this provision after the Supreme Court weakened its protections for voting rights last year.In her opening remarks, Lawrence-Hardy spoke of John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon who died in 2020. And she drew comparisons between the current legal battle and the state’s history of suppressing voters. Georgia was one of the states that were put under special federal oversight by the Voting Rights Act when it was signed in 1965 because of the history of discrimination at the polls in those states.“The methods may be different than in the past, but the state’s creation of barriers to voting in Georgia have the same impact, particularly for people of color and immigrants who meet all eligibility requirements to vote in Georgia’s elections,” Lawrence-Hardy said. She added that when the state first proposed the exact-match identification policy in 2009, Georgia was still under federal oversight and the Justice Department rejected the initial proposal.The trial, which is expected to last roughly a month, will feature dozens of voters who claim that their right to vote was foiled by the state’s rules and regulations, with anecdotes from both the 2018 and the 2020 elections. Election workers will also testify.“You’ll hear how these election workers, who come from all political persuasions and demographic roots, operate under extraordinarily trying circumstances,” Belinfante, the lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. “And you’ll hear how at the end of the day they just want to get it right.”But the trial will not focus on the state’s controversial new voting law that was passed last year and that added numerous new restrictions on voting. The lawsuit was filed before that law was introduced and passed.A window of opportunityThough Raffensperger is on the defense, the trial also presents a political opportunity for the sitting secretary of state, who is seeking re-election. After he rebuffed Donald Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough votes to subvert the election in Georgia, Raffensperger became a key target of Trump, who has endorsed a well-funded challenger in Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who has publicly claimed that Trump won the election in Georgia.Raffensperger has not backed down from saying Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election in Georgia, a stance that has put him at odds with a segment of the Republican base who will be deciding his fate in the May 24 primary.But the trial has allowed Raffensperger the opportunity to attack Abrams and embrace issues that help endear him to the Republican base, such as noncitizen voting. Republicans have focused on noncitizens voting in their hunt for widespread voter fraud (there is no evidence of swaths of noncitizens voting, nor of widespread fraud) and also to justify new policies. Lawyers for Fair Fight contend that part of the “exact match” process could result in citizens being prevented from voting, including newly naturalized citizens.“I want to make sure it is citizen-only voting here in the state of Georgia,” Raffensperger said in a brief news conference before the trial began on Monday. “We are defending this basic protection of the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has accused Fair Fight of playing politics with the lawsuit. Dustin Chambers/ReutersWhat to read President Biden announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would lift summertime regulations on E15, an ethanol-gasoline blend, the latest sign that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the White House to embrace fossil fuels.U.S.-backed news outlets and Ukrainian activists’ efforts to deliver news to Russians are starting to show signs of working, sowing doubt in the Kremlin’s accounts of the invasion.North Carolina dropped Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, from its voter rolls, as officials investigate whether he fraudulently cast a ballot in the state in 2020.in the moment Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas used the migrant drop-off as a fund-raising opportunity. Joel Martinez/The Monitor, via Associated PressTexas sends a bus to … Fox News The arrival of a busload of migrants sent to Washington by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas made for quite the event.Not so much on the ground, but on cable news, on Twitter and in fund-raising emails.In response to the Biden administration’s plans to end a Trump-era pandemic policy that turned away most unauthorized migrants at the border, Abbott pledged to put immigrants on charter buses and send them to Washington. This morning, the first bus arrived near Union Station, with Fox News camera crews ready to record the moment.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Mark Meadows Is Taken Off North Carolina Voter Roll Amid Fraud Inquiry

      by

      The state is investigating whether Mr. Meadows cast a legal vote in 2020, after reports questioned if he lived at the address listed on his voter registration.Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, has been removed from the voter rolls in North Carolina as officials investigate whether he fraudulently registered to vote and cast a ballot in the state during the 2020 presidential election, according to a local election official.Mr. Meadows, who helped amplify former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was “administratively removed” from the poll book by the Macon County Board of Elections on Monday “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said in a statement.Mr. Meadows represented North Carolina in Congress until March 2020, when he went to work in the White House. Months later, Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote using the address of a modest, three-bedroom mobile home with a rusted roof in Scaly Mountain, N.C.On the voter registration application that Mr. Meadows submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, he stated that he intended to move into the home the following day.And in November, he voted absentee by mail from that address, according to state records.Last month, a report in The New Yorker cast doubt on whether Mr. Meadows had ever lived — or even spent the night — at the home.Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to telephone and text messages on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, declined to comment.In 2021, Mr. Meadows registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows bought the unit in July 2017.The inquiry into Mr. Meadows’s voting activity in North Carolina remains open, according to Anjanette Grube, public information officer for the state’s Bureau of Investigation.Though documented cases of voter fraud are rare, Mr. Meadows and other Republicans have seized on the concept in order to claim, without evidence, that the results of last presidential election are illegitimate.During an August 2020 interview on CNN, Mr. Meadows warned of fraud in voting by mail. “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with just people just moving around, let alone the people that die off?” he told the host, Jake Tapper.When Mr. Tapper said there was no evidence of widespread vote fraud, Mr. Meadows replied, “There’s no evidence that there’s not, either. That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”Reid J. Epstein More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      In Hungary, Viktor Orban Remakes an Election to His Liking

      by

      BUDAPEST — During the dark winter of the 2020 coronavirus wave, the Hungarian government set up a website so anxious residents could sign up for the news on the pandemic. For months, the system sent out updates about the virus, testing and where to get vaccinated.But last month, long after the vaccination drive had peaked, the system blasted out a very different type of alert: an email claiming, falsely, that opponents of Prime Minister Viktor Orban were agitating to drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine.“This is cheating,” said Klara Dobrev, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament and one of those accused in the email. “Using public money for obviously party propaganda? This is obviously election fraud.”In more than a decade in power, Mr. Orban has not hesitated to use the levers of government power to erode democratic norms and cement one-party rule. He has rewritten the Constitution, remade the courts and used state-run and privately owned television stations — even school textbooks — to advance his agenda or push misinformation about his rivals.He has always justified his brand of what he calls “illiberal democracy” by pointing out that, like other European leaders, he has won free and fair elections. Now, though, as he stands on Sunday for re-election against an unexpectedly organized opposition, Mr. Orban is using the power of his office to shape the contours of the election more to his liking.Supporters of Mr. Orban’s government at a so-called peace march in Budapest, as Hungarians marked this month the anniversary of the country’s civic revolution and war of independence of 1848-1849. Ferenc Isza/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe has unleashed a fresh round of election law changes that benefit his party. He put an inflammatory but ultimately symbolic L.G.B.T. referendum up for a vote, a move that is likely to rally his most strident supporters. And he legalized the registration of voters outside of their home districts — a common practice, until now criminal, that is known as “voter tourism.”All of that is playing out in a media echo chamber, since Mr. Orban has cemented control of public television to the point where stories, photos and guests are handpicked to align with his talking points. Many of the largest independent news outlets have been taken over by Mr. Orban’s supporters.The situation is considered so extraordinary that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an intergovernmental organization, is sending observers to monitor the elections. It is only the second time in the European Union’s history that the group has started a full-scale monitoring operation on an E.U. member.“We are very, very far away from a fair electoral environment,” said Robert Laszlo an election analyst with Political Capital, an independent Hungarian policy center.Mr. Orban, a canny political survivor who relishes a fight, has given no indication he is worried about the election monitors or the outcome. “I can’t remember the last time the stars aligned so well, 19 days before an election,” he declared at a rally this month.L.G.B.T.Q. activists in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, as they announced plans in January for a pride parade in July.Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen The New York Times asked Mr. Orban’s office for a comment on the election law changes, Rajmund Fekete, the chief of staff for the spokesman, replied in an email that they did not plan to comment and would respond “with other means.” He would not elaborate.Hungary’s elections come at a challenging moment for democracy worldwide, as governments chip away at bedrock principles like academic freedom, free speech and judicial independence. Mr. Orban, who is seeking his fourth consecutive term and fifth overall, has become a hero among many American conservatives, who are also locked in their own fights over voting laws and access to the polls.When it comes to election fairness, Hungary now more closely resembles the Soviet era than the free elections that followed the fall of Communism, according to the Swedish nonprofit group V-Dem, which rates countries on a host of democratic indicators.“Election fraud doesn’t start at 7 a.m., when the polls are open,” Ms. Dobrev said. “Election fraud has been going on in Hungary for years.”Signing the PapersIn the tiny village of Kispalad, at the northeastern tip of Hungary along the border with Ukraine, the mayor summoned a local woman to the town hall to sign some papers. It was mid-2014, and the mayor, a member of Mr. Orban’s party, was locked in a tight re-election race.The woman, Jozsefne Sanko, was a seasonal cucumber-picker and would soon be out of work. If Ms. Sanko signed the papers, the mayor said, she’d be guaranteed public-assistance jobs for her and her family.Volunteer ballot counters listening to a presentation in Budapest. A grass-roots civic initiative has recruited more than 20,000 volunteer ballot counters to ensure a fair tally in upcoming elections in Hungary.Anna Szilagyi/Associated Press“There is no work around here,” her son Adam Sanko said in an interview. “So my mom signed the papers.”In signing, Ms. Sanko attested that 135 Ukrainians lived in her tiny home. That made them eligible to vote in Hungarian elections.The mayor’s offer was part of a common tactic in Hungary called voter tourism, which allows nonresidents to register using addresses in Hungary. On Election Day, they cross the border by car, bike or bus, then vote and return home.Until recently, voter tourism was a type of fraud. Ms. Sanko and the mayor received fines in 2020 after what she had done became a local scandal.But Mr. Orban has legalized the practice for the upcoming election. He is popular in these rural villages, but since the government refuses to make historical voter data public, it is impossible to know whether voter tourism has changed the outcome in any of these small districts.Mr. Sanko believes it can. In every election, he said voters arrive from out of the country with lists of names they are expected to vote for. “Now, this is totally legal,” he said.“I can’t remember the last time the stars aligned so well, 19 days before an election,” Mr. Orban declared at a rally this month.Anna Szilagyi/Associated PressVoter tourism also has something of a mail-in equivalent.Hungarian citizens can mail in their ballots, but only if they do not have a residence in the country. That overwhelmingly applies to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries like Romania and Serbia, a constituency whose votes Mr. Orban has courted for years.By contrast, roughly 100,000 Hungarian citizens live in the United Kingdom, a more left-leaning voting bloc that includes students and foreign workers. But voters in Britain must travel in person to London or Manchester to cast ballots. Mr. Orban’s government has rejected calls to open more polling places.A Supermajority in Name OnlyTo understand one of the ways Mr. Orban has reshaped democracy, consider this: When his political party, Fidesz, won the last two national elections, it received less than half the votes, yet still secured a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. The supermajority has allowed Mr. Orban to ram through changes to the Constitution as part of his illiberal agenda.The explanation lies in Hungary’s complex electoral system: The country is divided into 106 districts, each of which elects a member to Parliament, much like members of Congress are seated in the United States. But then another 93 seats are awarded to political parties based on a unique formula.Mr. Orban changed that formula for handing out seats in dramatic fashion to benefit Fidesz. Parties that win big in the district elections can get extra seats — a move that is expected to pad Fidesz’s winning margin in Parliament if it realizes big wins in gerrymandered districts.Peter Marki-Zay celebrating his victory in October to become the opposition candidate in a long-shot bid against Mr. Orban.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesHe has also made it harder for small parties to get any seats at all under the formula. But to counter him, Socialists, Greens, centrists, fiscal hawks and Christian conservatives have united behind the economist Peter Marki-Zay in a long shot bid to beat Mr. Orban, or at least shatter his supermajority since Mr. Marki-Zay has a six-party coalition behind him.Mr. Laszlo, the independent election analyst, estimates that because of the gerrymandered districts and new election rules, the opposition will need to win by as much as six percentage points to unseat Mr. Orban.“There’s a debate among the opposition on whether you should even take part in the election, whether you legitimize it by taking part in it,” said Gergely Karacsony, the mayor of Budapest and a leading opposition politician.Gerrymandering is just one problem for the opposition. Television time is another.Early on a Wednesday morning, less than three weeks before the election, the leader of the opposition party, Mr. Marki-Zay, was given his first and only appearance on Hungary’s largest public television station.“Thanks for allowing the entire opposition five minutes in the past four years to speak,” Mr. Marki-Zay said during his appearance. “That I could not come here until now is likely for the same reason that Viktor Orban is unwilling to partake in a live debate. It’s much easier to lie, defame and to conduct a smear campaign.”Asylum seekers crossing the border between Hungary and Serbia in 2015. Photos of women and children refugees were prohibited on public television, as they might undermine Mr. Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration stance.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesBecause Mr. Orban controls public television, and his allies dominate private media, voters are inundated with coverage that favors him. Opposition parties can’t pay for political advertising on television because it is illegal — even though the public channels regularly put out “public service” announcements that critics say are thinly veiled ads for Mr. Orban or his agenda.Stories that criticize Mr. Orban’s favorite targets — the billionaire George Soros or the European Union, for example — are welcome. Photos of women and children who are refugees, for example, were prohibited, as they might garner sympathy and undermine Mr. Orban’s hard-line anti-immigration stance.“There was an explicit order against this,” said Andras Rostovanyi, who was an editor with the state broadcaster M1 until the end of 2019.In one news meeting, a recording of which was obtained by Radio Free Europe, an editor is heard telling reporters that the station does not support Mr. Orban’s opponents, and anyone who objects to that policy can leave.Mr. Orban with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow last month.Pool photo by Mikhael KlimentyevThis control over the media has helped Mr. Orban shield from public view what might have been a vulnerability: his political ties to Moscow and his fondness for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.With Russian troops laying siege to civilians in nearby Ukraine, Mr. Orban might have faced pointed questions about his past support of Mr. Putin; instead, he has simply rewritten the narrative.One example is a pro-Orban website and Facebook page “Numbers and Facts,” which links to it. Both post the same content. Every day, they churn out headlines that cheer Mr. Orban. Their content argues that the West is to blame for the war, that Russia has legitimate territorial claims to parts of Ukraine, that Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a murderous dictator and that the Russian invasion was defensive.Such views might have lived and died among the Facebook page’s community of 85,000, but the pro-Orban television station PestiTV started a weekly news show late last year that it said was produced in collaboration “with the highly successful Numbers and Facts.”So the message that Mr. Orban is the voice of reason and his opponents are warmongers echoes across all media: from the fringes of Facebook and pro-Orban news outlets to public broadcasters and even Hungary’s vaccine alert system.A billboard for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party cautioned voters not to choose the “dangerous” opposition over images of Mr. Marki-Zay and the former socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, in Kisvarda, a town in eastern Hungary.Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPatrick Kingsley More