Voting Rights, Registration and Requirements

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      Mark Meadows’s 2020 Vote Is Under Investigation in North Carolina

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      Records show that Mr. Meadows cast an absentee ballot from the address of a remote mobile home, but reports have cast doubt on whether he lived there.North Carolina officials said on Thursday that they planned to investigate whether Mark Meadows, who as former President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff helped amplify false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, cast a legal vote in that year’s presidential race.The North Carolina Department of Justice has asked the State Bureau of Investigation to examine whether Mr. Meadows broke the law when he registered to vote, and voted from, a remote mobile home where he did not live, said Nazneen Ahmed, a spokeswoman for Josh Stein, the state attorney general, who is a Democrat.“We have asked the S.B.I. to investigate and at the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review their findings,” Ms. Ahmed said.Law enforcement officials in Macon County, a rural community in the mountains of western North Carolina, first became aware of questions surrounding Mr. Meadows’s voter registration last week after The New Yorker revealed that he had voted from a home where he did not live, the local district attorney, Ashley Welch, wrote in a letter to the state Justice Department.“Until being contacted by the media, I was unaware of any allegations of voter fraud surrounding Mark Meadows,” she wrote.Mr. Meadows did not respond to messages Thursday evening. He has not yet offered any public explanation for his 2020 voter registration.The letter and the state investigation were first reported on Thursday by WRAL, a television station in Raleigh, N.C.North Carolina voter registration records show that Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote at a three-bedroom mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., six weeks before the 2020 election. He voted absentee by mail from that address, according to the state records.The former owner of the Scaly Mountain home told The New Yorker that she did not believe Mr. Meadows had ever visited the residence. A neighbor told the magazine Ms. Meadows had stayed there only one or two nights.Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.In 2021, he also 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.In her letter, Ms. Welch asked state officials to investigate Mr. Meadows because she had a conflict of interest. Mr. Meadows, Ms. Welch said, contributed to her 2014 campaign and appeared in political advertisements for her. At the time, Mr. Meadows was a member of Congress representing eastern North Carolina.“It is in the best interest of justice and the best interest of the people of North Carolina that the Attorney General’s office handles the prosecution of this case,” Ms. Welch wrote. More

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      Republicans Push to Crackdown on Voter Fraud

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      Election fraud is exceedingly rare and often accidental. Still, G.O.P. lawmakers and prosecutors are promoting tough new enforcement efforts.The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.It is a new phase of the Republican campaign to tighten voting laws that started after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. The effort, which resulted in a wave of new state laws last year, has now shifted to courthouses, raising concern among voting rights activists that fear of prosecution could keep some voters from casting ballots.“As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we’re seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.It’s nearly impossible to assess whether the talk of getting tough on voter crime is resulting in an increase in prosecutions. There is no nationwide data on how many people were charged with voter fraud in 2020 or in previous elections, and state data is often incomplete. The state numbers that are available show there were very few examples of potential cases in 2020 and few prosecutions.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 in the state from the 2020 election.In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”The political incentives to draw attention to the enforcement of voting laws are clear. A Monmouth University poll in January found that 62 percent of Republicans and just 19 percent of Democrats believed voter fraud was a major problem.That may mean the odds of being charged with voter fraud can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor.In Fond du Lac County, Wis., District Attorney Eric Toney was in office for nine years without prosecuting a voter fraud case. But after he started his campaign for attorney general in 2021, Mr. Toney, a Republican, received a letter from a Wisconsin man who had acquired copies of millions of ballots in an attempt to conduct his own review of the 2020 election. The letter cited five Fond du Lac County voters whose registrations listed their home addresses at a UPS Store, a violation of a state law that requires voters to register where they live.Mr. Toney charged all five with felony voter fraud.A report the Wisconsin Election Commission released last week said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to.Scott Olson/Getty Images“We get tips from community members of people breaking the law through the year, and we take them seriously, especially if it’s an election law violation,” Mr. Toney said in an interview. “Law enforcement takes it seriously. I take it seriously as a district attorney.”One of the voters charged, Jamie Wells, told investigators that the UPS Store was her “home base.” She said she lived in a mobile home and split time between a nearby campground and Louisiana. Ms. Wells did not respond to phone or email messages. If convicted, she stands to serve up to three and a half years in prison — though she would most likely receive a much shorter sentence.In La Crosse County, Wis., District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a Democrat, received a similar referral: 23 people registered to vote with addresses from a local UPS Store, and 16 of them voted in 2020. But Mr. Gruenke said he had concluded that there was no attempt at fraud. Instead of felony charges, the local clerk sent the voters a letter giving them 30 days to change their registrations to an address where they lived.“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.”Mr. Toney linked his decision to his views about the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which the Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., won by more than 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast.While he had never challenged Mr. Biden’s win, he said he believed that “there is no dispute that Wisconsin election laws weren’t followed and fraud occurred.”“I support identifying any fraud or election laws not followed to ensure it never happens again, because elections are the cornerstone of our democracy,” Mr. Toney said.(Ms. Wells, one of the voters Mr. Toney has charged, also said she believed something was amiss in the 2020 election. “They took it away from Trump,” she told investigators.)Mr. DeSantis in Florida is perhaps the best-known politician who is promoting efforts to bolster criminal enforcement of voting-related laws. The governor, who is up for re-election in November, made the new police agency a top legislative priority. .The unit, called the Office of Election Crimes and Security, takes on work already done by the secretary of state’s office, but reports directly to the governor.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Why Stacey Abrams Is Rejecting Her Democratic Stardom

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      On the campaign trail for Georgia governor, she is talking more about Medicaid expansion than voting rights, betting that a hyperlocal strategy and the state’s leftward tilt can lift her to victory.CUTHBERT, Ga. — As Stacey Abrams began her second campaign for Georgia governor with a speech this week about Medicaid expansion in front of a shuttered rural hospital, the crowd of about 50 peppered her with questions on issues like paving new roads.But Sandra Willis, the mayor pro tem of this town of roughly 3,500 people, had a broader point to make. “Once you get elected, you won’t forget us, will you?” she asked.The question reflected Ms. Abrams’s status as a national Democratic celebrity, who was widely credited with helping to deliver Georgia for her party in the 2020 elections and has made her name synonymous with the fight for voting rights.But she has shown little desire to put ballot access at the center of her bid. Her first days on the campaign trail have been spent largely in small, rural towns like Cuthbert, where she is more interested in discussing Medicaid expansion and aid to small businesses than the flagship issue that helped catapult her to national fame.Ms. Abrams’s strategy amounts to a major bet that her campaign can survive a bleak election year for Democrats by capitalizing on Georgia’s fast-changing demographics and winning over on-the-fence voters who want their governor to largely stay above the fray of national political battles.“I am a Georgian first,” she said in an interview. “And my job is to spend especially these first few months anchoring the conversation about Georgia.”In Cuthbert, where Ms. Abrams was pressed on Monday by Ms. Willis on her commitment to Georgia’s small communities, she reminded onlookers that this was not her first visit to town — and she promised it would not be her last. The town sits in Randolph County, one of a handful of rural, predominantly Black counties that were crucial to Democrats’ victories in Georgia in the last cycle. Upward of 96 percent of Black voters who cast ballots here in the 2020 presidential election voted in the 2021 Senate runoff elections.Randolph has also been held up as an example of the state’s neglect of its low-income, rural residents: The county’s only hospital shut down in October 2020.“I’m here to help,” Ms. Abrams said in her Monday speech in front of the closed hospital. Listing the names of seven counties surrounding Randolph, she promised to be a “governor for all of Georgia, especially southwest Georgia.”Georgia’s population continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, trends that have historically benefited Democrats.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s focus on state and hyperlocal issues reflects an understanding that to win Georgia, any Democrat must capture votes in all corners of the state. That also means knowing the issues closest to voters in every corner.“Everything either happens in Atlanta, or outside of Atlanta in the suburbs,” said Bobby Jenkins, the mayor of Cuthbert and a Democrat. “But as the election in November showed, you’ve got a lot of Democrats, a lot of people in these rural areas, and you cannot overlook them. There aren’t many in this county. But when you band all of these counties together in southwest Georgia, then you can create some impact.”Ms. Abrams has also used visits like the one to Cuthbert and a later meet-and-greet in the central Georgia town of Warner Robins to criticize Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who beat her in the same race in 2018, over what she called his weakening of the state’s public health infrastructure during the pandemic and his underinvestment in rural communities.“If we do not have a governor who sees and focuses on how Georgia can mitigate these harms, how Georgia can bolster opportunity, then the national environment is less relevant, because the deepest pain comes from closer to home,” Ms. Abrams said in the interview.Still, that national environment remains unfriendly to Democrats. Less than eight months before the November midterm elections, the party is staring down a record number of House retirements, a failure to pass the bulk of President Biden’s agenda and a pessimistic electorate that is driving his low approval ratings.Yet Democrats see reasons for hope in Georgia. The state continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, in a boon to the network of organizations that helped turn out the voters who flipped Georgia blue in 2020. Many of those groups remain well-staffed and well-funded. And while Ms. Abrams is running unopposed in the Democratic primary, Mr. Kemp faces four challengers, including a Trump-backed candidate, former Senator David Perdue.All of this is why, while Ms. Abrams’s public image has expanded, she has not deviated much from the campaign strategy she employed in 2018. During her first run for governor, she visited all 159 of Georgia’s counties and aimed for surges in turnout in deep-blue metro Atlanta counties even as she sought to turn out new voters in rural areas that Democrats had historically ceded to Republicans. Several of her 2022 campaign staff members formed her 2018 brain trust.Voting rights activists in the state — many of whom say their relationship with Ms. Abrams and her campaign remains warm — hesitate to question Ms. Abrams’s reduced focus on ballot access, especially since it is so early in the campaign and her strategy could yet shift.“She has a certain star, national spotlight quality that you rarely see with Southern candidates,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter in Georgia. She expressed confidence that Ms. Abrams’s candidacy would “continue to keep the voting rights issue from dying.”In 2021, after Georgia Republicans passed a major law of voting restrictions, Ms. Abrams spoke out against the measure to legislators in Congress.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesStudent supporters danced onstage after a rally for Ms. Abrams in Atlanta on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s organizing for voting rights has its roots in her years as the minority leader in the Georgia Statehouse. She founded the voter enfranchisement group New Georgia Project in 2013 to turn out more young and infrequent voters — a strategy she pitched to national Democrats ahead of the 2020 election amid efforts to persuade white moderate voters.Then, a year ago, after Georgia’s Republican-led legislature passed a sweeping bill of voting restrictions, ballot access again became a central issue for national Democrats. Amid the party’s uproar about the bill and others like it, Ms. Abrams focused on the policy implications of the legislation over the political. During testimony to Republican senators in Washington shortly after the law’s passage, she laid out a laundry list of criticisms of the measure, denouncing its limits on drop boxes and a reduction in election precincts that could deter working people from voting.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 5Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      Mark Meadows Spread Trump’s Voter Fraud Claims. Now His Voting Record Is Under Scrutiny.

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      The former Trump aide listed a mobile home in rural North Carolina as his residence at the same time that he was running operations at the White House.Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff who helped former President Donald J. Trump spread false claims of voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is facing questions about his own voting record, following a report that he registered to vote from a North Carolina mobile home where he did not live.There’s no indication that Mr. Meadows, a former congressman from North Carolina, ever resided — or even spent the night — at the rural mountain home, according to The New Yorker, which first reported on the residence that Mr. Meadows listed on his 2020 voter registration.While it’s not unusual for politicians to maintain residency in their home states, even as they spend most of their time in Washington, Mr. Meadows’s arrangement stood out for its timing and details. Mr. Meadows claimed the modest mobile home with a rusted roof as his residence at the same time that he was running day-to-day operations at the White House and was frequently warning of the possibility of voter fraud.Neither Mr. Meadows nor his wife, Debra, responded to calls or messages Tuesday. Mr. Meadows’s spokesman, Ben Williamson, also did not respond to calls or messages.North Carolina voter registration records show that Mr. Meadows and his wife registered to vote at the three-bedroom mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., six weeks before the 2020 election. Records show that he voted absentee by mail from that address and that Ms. Meadows voted early, in person.Mr. Meadows’s exact connection to the home is unclear. He never owned it. On a voter registration application submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, Mr. Meadows stated that he intended to move in the following day.North Carolina law requires that a voter live at their address for 30 days before the election in which they are voting. It is a felony to file a fraudulent voter registration application, though prosecutions are rare and typically do not lead to jail sentences.Only a registered voter from Macon County, which includes Scaly Mountain along the Georgia border, can file a challenge to Mr. Meadows’s voter registration. Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said Tuesday that there have been no voter challenges filed against Mr. Meadows.Before and after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows was among the foremost amplifiers of Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud. During an August 2020 interview on CNN, he warned of fraud in voting by mail and said people are able to register to vote in multiple places at once, leading to fraud.“Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m re-registering,’” Mr. Meadows said.Voters are not required to notify a state’s election officials about a move. Mr. Meadows, in fact, is currently registered in both North Carolina and Virginia.Virginia voter registration forms obtained by The New York Times show that nearly a year after registering at the mountain mobile home, on Sept. 13 and Sept. 15, 2021, Mr. Meadows and Ms. Meadows registered to vote at a condominium in the Old Town neighborhood of suburban Alexandria, Va. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows purchased the unit in July 2017.Both Mr. Meadows and Ms. Meadows voted early in person in Virginia’s heated election for governor in 2021, Virginia election records show. In that contest, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican elected governor of Virginia in 12 years.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows served as a revolving door between Mr. Trump and an array of lawyers, supporters and conspiracy theorists who aimed to overturn the election results to keep Mr. Trump in the White House. He introduced Mr. Trump to Mark Martin, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice who told the then-president, falsely, that Vice President Mike Pence could stop the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.In January 2021, Mr. Meadows facilitated the call between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “to find 11,780 votes” to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, several members of his White House inner circle, including Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Steve Bannon, an on-again-off-again adviser, were registered to vote in two states. There was no evidence that any of them voted twice in the same election.At the time he registered to vote in Scaly Mountain, Mr. Meadows was said to be considering running for the Senate seat to be vacated after the 2022 election by Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina. Shortly after the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows said he would not run for the Senate.The owner of the home when Mr. Meadows registered there told The New Yorker that Ms. Meadows reserved it for two months sometime in the past few years, but stayed at the home for just one or two nights. Mr. Meadows never visited, the former homeowner, who asked that her name not be used, told the magazine.The former homeowner did not respond to messages. The current owner, who bought the property in 2021, also did not respond to messages.A neighbor, Tammy Talley, told the magazine that she is a friend of the couple’s and that Ms. Meadows and her adult children stayed at the home on at least one occasion. A message left at Ms. Talley’s home was not returned Tuesday.Two weeks after Mr. Meadows registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain address, his wife submitted an absentee ballot request on his behalf. Mr. Meadows’s absentee ballot request was first reported by WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.Before he registered to vote at the Scaly Mountain home, Mr. Meadows had voted in 2018 from a home in Transylvania County, N.C., and in 2016 from Asheville, N.C., according to North Carolina records.Kitty Bennett More

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      Ballot Rejections in Texas Spike After New Voting Law

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      Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, about 30 percent of absentee ballots were rejected in the state’s most populous counties. In 2020, the statewide rejection rate was less than 1 percent.Local election officials in Texas have rejected thousands of absentee ballots based on requirements set by the state’s new election law, an alarming jump that risks potentially preventing some Texans from voting in Tuesday’s primary election.The state’s Republican and Democratic primaries will be the first elections held since the Republican-led Texas Legislature overhauled the state’s election laws. Election officials in the most populous counties have rejected roughly 30 percent of the absentee ballots they have received — more than 15,000 ballots — as of Wednesday, according to a review of election data by The New York Times. The ballots were rejected largely because voters either did not include their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, or the numbers they put down did not match what officials had on file. The new identification requirements were put in place by the voting law passed last year, known as Senate Bill 1. The rate of rejection represents a significant increase from past elections, including in 2020, when the statewide rejection rate was less than 1 percent for the general election, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. In 2020, officials rejected 8,304 ballots in Texas out of nearly a million votes statewide. This year, that statewide number has already been surpassed in two counties alone: Harris County and Dallas County rejected more than 8,600 ballots as of Wednesday.The Times tallied absentee ballot rejections in 10 of the 13 counties with more than 400,000 residents. Bexar County, home to San Antonio, had not started its ballot review process as of Wednesday, and Tarrant County and Denton County, near Dallas, had been delayed by an ice storm. The total of rejected ballots could still change. Voters have until Election Day to submit their ballots and up to six days to fix ballot defects, depending on the circumstances of the rejections. In Williamson County outside Austin, for example, officials initially rejected 514 absentee ballots, but 167 of those had been corrected and counted as of Tuesday. The rise in rejections in Texas is the earliest sign that the spate of new election laws passed across the country last year after the 2020 election are having an effect. In the battleground states of Florida and Georgia, Republican legislatures passed sweeping new voting laws with identification requirements for the absentee ballot process that are similar to those in the Texas law. Florida and Georgia will hold their primaries later this year.A Guide to the Texas PrimaryThe 2022 midterm elections begin with the state’s primary on March 1.Governor’s Race: Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward shift will face a test in November. His likely challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is haunted by his 2020 presidential bid.Switching Parties: Democrats have long held local offices in a small West Texas town. Then top officials decided to leave the party.Politics of Abortion: The fight over abortion rights is changing the political fabric of South Texas, long a Democratic stronghold.Effect of New Voting Law: The law, which Republicans said would make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat,” has led to a jump in rejections of absentee ballot applications.Voters throughout Texas have been flooding voter protection hotlines, seeking guidance or expressing dismay that their absentee ballots had been rejected and returned after years of voting absentee without any problems.At the headquarters of the Dallas County Democratic Party, voters have called in with various issues regarding their ballots. The party has been scrambling to help voters as Tuesday’s Election Day deadline nears, including using text messages to send out information on new requirements to more than 30,000 voters in the county.“The calls have been pretty much constant since the last week in January, with confusion about the application process and then frustration about the rejections,” said Kristy Noble, the chairwoman of the Dallas County Democratic Party.Complications over absentee ballots have a more limited impact in Texas than in many other states, however. Texas only allows voters who are over 65 or who have a verified excuse to vote by mail. Though more than a million Texans voted by mail in the 2020 general election, that number is expected to fall this year as turnout regularly dips in the midterms.But with voting by mail limited to elderly and disabled voters, the concern that initially rejected ballots will disenfranchise voters has grown. Guillermina Nevárez lives at home in the Maverick County border region with her husband, Alfonso Nevárez Sr., and her 98-year-old mother, who is disabled and recovering from a recent surgery.In all three of their ballots, they missed the field to include their identification information, presuming that since their ballot application had been accepted they were free to cast their ballot.“We didn’t look at the fine print,” said Ms. Nevárez, who is also the mother of a former Democratic state representative. “And there’s so much of it, the fine print.”She corrected the three ballots and sent them back by mail. She is hoping that the information is correct — because of her mother’s condition, they cannot go in person to fix any issues.“It is very upsetting,” Ms. Nevárez said.The Texas law also bans methods of voting introduced in the 2020 election because of the pandemic, including drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, and it erects new barriers for those looking to help voters who need assistance, such as with translations.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the law in September. The move came after record turnout in the state: 11.3 million people voted in the 2020 election, including more than nine million who cast their ballots early.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas after signing Senate Bill 1 into law last year.LM Otero/Associated PressMr. Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Previously, the governor’s office has defended the law and blamed the high rejection rate of absentee ballot applications on local election officials. The Texas secretary of state’s office said that it has been trying to inform voters of the new changes to prevent anyone from having a ballot returned or rejected. “We have been working around the clock for the past month to get the word out through multiple channels,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the secretary of state, in an email. The state had already seen abnormally high rates of rejection for absentee ballot applications earlier this month, as voters struggled with the new identification requirements. Now, some voters who had to fix their applications are growing nervous that their ballots will not arrive in time ahead of the Tuesday primary. Others are resolving to just vote in person. Nancy Bryant, 67, lives in Dallas and has served as an election judge in previous elections. She filled out her application and was approved, so she sent in her ballot. This week, she learned her ballot was rejected and that county officials were going to mail it back to her for corrections. But with the primary fast approaching, Ms. Bryant had not received her ballot as of Friday, and she’s not sure if she’ll receive it in time to take it to a polling location on Election Day. Without her ballot, she may be forced to cast a provisional ballot. Either way, her wish to cast an absentee ballot has collided with the reality of the new Texas law, and the likelihood of voting in person.“If I don’t get it back in time, I’m going have to vote provisionally, which hurts me deeply,” Ms. Bryant said. “I am a dedicated voter.” More

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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Black Woman’s Bid to Regain Voting Rights Ends With a 6-Year Prison Sentence

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      Missteps by various officials put a Tennessee woman on a collision course with the law. Supporters say the sentence underscores racial disparities in voter fraud cases.A Black woman who was sentenced last week to six years and one day in prison for trying to register to vote in 2019 despite having a felony conviction says she was the victim of complicated voting laws in Tennessee that appeared to confuse even election officials.Prosecutors in Memphis said that accidentally or not, the woman, Pamela Moses, 44, broke the law. But Ms. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist, and her lawyer say election officials gave her advice that they later corrected while she was seeking to have her voting rights restored.Voting rights activists say Ms. Moses’ lengthy sentence underscores racial disparities in the criminal justice system when it comes to voting fraud cases — especially since white men who have been charged in more straightforward instances of voting fraud have received probation or just days of imprisonment.Ms. Moses’ collision course with the justice system began when she decided she wanted to run for mayor of Memphis in the summer of 2019.Local election officials told Ms. Moses then that she could not be on the ballot because of prior felony convictions, including a 2015 conviction for tampering with evidence. That felony conviction meant Ms. Moses would never be allowed to vote again, but officials did not tell her that at the time and advised her only to check her probation status, said Bede Anyanwu, her lawyer.Ms. Moses was confused because she thought her probation was over, Mr. Anyanwu said. She still wanted to run for mayor, or at the very least vote in the upcoming election, so she went to find answers.In September 2019, a judge told Ms. Moses that she was indeed still on probation. She remained skeptical and went to the probation office, where a probation officer told her she was actually done with her felony probation, records show. The probation officer signed off on her voting rights restoration form. Ms. Moses submitted the form to election officials.Problems came one day later. The probation officer had made a mistake, and the Department of Correction sent a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission informing it that Ms. Moses was “still under an active felony sentence” and could not vote, records show.Ms. Moses was then charged with perjury on a registration form and consenting to a false entry on official election documents. The former charge was dropped, because there was no false statement from Ms. Moses on the voting form, but she was convicted of the second charge in November and sentenced Jan. 31 to six years and one day in prison.“This is a vendetta-type prosecution,” Mr. Anyanwu said on Monday. He added that Judge W. Mark Ward of Criminal Court had “acted like a bully and slammed her” with a lengthy sentence.Video of the hearing shows Ms. Moses telling Judge Ward, “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.”Judge Ward said in an email that he could not comment because the case was pending.Ms. Moses is currently in jail and could not be reached for comment, but she told WREG, a Memphis TV news station, in December that she “relied on the election commission because those are the people who were supposed to know what you know you’re supposed to do.”“And I found out that they didn’t know,” she said.Judge Ward said in his sentencing order that Ms. Moses seemed “to have nothing but contempt for the law and acts as though she believes herself above the law.”“Perhaps some time in custody will serve as a period of reflection that will give the defendant the insight she needs in order to be fully rehabilitated,” Judge Ward wrote. He added that he would consider placing her on probation after nine months.Amy Weirich, the Shelby County district attorney, did not respond to several calls and emails seeking an interview, but she said in a news release that Ms. Moses had 16 prior criminal convictions, including misdemeanor counts from 2015 of perjury, stalking and theft under $500.In the hearing, Ms. Moses said that she did not commit those crimes and pleaded guilty only to avoid jail time, according to the judge’s sentencing order. Mr. Anyanwu said she was also struggling financially at the time and could not afford to pay for a lawyer.Ms. Moses voted in at least six elections between 2015 and 2018, after she had been convicted of a felony, according to the sentencing orderBecause Ms. Moses was registered to vote before being convicted of a felony in 2015, a court clerk was supposed to notify election officials, who would remove her from voting rolls after the convictions.But that did not happen, according to a letter sent by the Shelby County Election Commission to Ms. Weirich, the district attorney, on Aug. 8, 2020. The letter shows that election officials acknowledged the error, writing that the conviction notice for Ms. Moses “was not sent to the election commission by the court.”Under Tennessee law, people convicted of certain felonies, including tampering with evidence, lose their voting rights forever, a measure that has drawn criticism from voting rights activists.“Instead of welcoming people in, we are perpetually shutting them out, making it harder to vote, and in this instance, criminalizing their efforts to become active and civically engaged members of our society,” Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said on Monday.Blair Bowie, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center who has been assisting Ms. Moses and Mr. Anyanwu with the case since October, said on Monday that Tennessee’s complex voting laws had a “disparate impact on Black people.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund echoed that sentiment, saying on Twitter that “there are two criminal justice systems in America.”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 Reno Gazette Journal 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. Nelson compared Ms. Moses’ case to the cases of Hervis Rogers of Houston, a 62-year-old Black man who was charged with voting illegally while he was still on parole and faced up to 40 years in prison, and Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Tarrant County, Texas, who was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal voting, despite insisting that she did not know she was ineligible to vote as a felon on probation.Mr. Anyanwu said Ms. Moses planned to appeal the judge’s sentencing.Judge Ward said in his order that Ms. Moses should have listened to the first judge who told her in 2019 that she was indeed still on probation.Mr. Anyanwu disagreed.“It was the probation department that gave the letter that she had expired her sentence, so she’ll be prosecuted for a mistake that was made by the state,” he said. More

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      Older Americans Fight to Make America Better

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      Neil Young and Joni Mitchell did more than go after Spotify for spreading Covid disinformation last week. They also, inadvertently, signaled what could turn out to be an extraordinarily important revival: of an older generation fully rejoining the fight for a working future.You could call it (with a wink!) codger power.We’ve seen this close up: over the last few months we’ve worked with others of our generation to start the group Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change. That’s no easy task. The baby boomers and the Silent Generation before them make up a huge share of the population — more nearly 75 million people, a larger population than France. And conventional wisdom (and a certain amount of data) holds that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps because they have more to protect.But as those musicians reminded us, these are no “normal” generations. We’re both in our 60s; in the 1960s and ’70s, our generation either bore witness to or participated in truly profound cultural, social and political transformations. Think of Neil Young singing “four dead in O-hi-o” in the weeks after Kent State, or Joni Mitchell singing “they paved paradise” after the first Earth Day. Perhaps we thought we’d won those fights. But now we emerge into older age with skills, resources, grandchildren — and a growing fear that we’re about to leave the world a worse place than we found it. So some of us are more than ready to turn things around.It’s not that there aren’t plenty of older Americans involved in the business of politics: We’ve perhaps never had more aged people in positions of power, with most of the highest offices in the nation occupied by septuagenarians and up, yet even with all their skills they can’t get anything done because of the country’s political divisions.But the daily business of politics — the inside game — is very different from the sort of political movements that helped change the world in the ’60s. Those we traditionally leave to the young, and indeed at the moment it’s young people who are making most of the difference, from the new civil rights movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter to the teenage ranks of the climate strikers. But we can’t assign tasks this large to high school students as extra homework; that’s neither fair nor practical.Instead, we need older people returning to the movement politics they helped invent. It’s true that the effort to embarrass Spotify over its contributions to the stupidification of our body politic hasn’t managed yet to make it change its policies yet. But the users of that streaming service skew young: slightly more than half are below the age of 35, and just under a fifth are 55 or older.Other important pressure points may play out differently. One of Third Act’s first campaigns, for instance, aims to take on the biggest banks in America for their continued funding of the fossil fuel industry even as the global temperature keeps climbing. Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo might want to take note, because (fairly or not) 70 percent of the country’s financial assets are in the hands of boomers and the Silent Generation, compared with just about 5 percent for millennials. More