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      Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections

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      Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.Campaigning at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., Mr. Evers said that Wisconsin’s race for governor next year would be “about our democracy.”Lianne Milton for The New York TimesLast week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.) It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview. He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania who defended the results of the 2020 election in the state, is expected to announce his campaign for governor as soon as this month.Susan Walsh/Associated PressJames Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment. Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election in Michigan, where Republican election officials tried to stall the certification of the results of the state’s 2020 presidential race.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Whitmer, who has faced threats of an insurrection in her statehouse and a kidnapping plot, is now fighting a Republican attempt to work around her expected veto of a host of proposed voting restrictions.“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.Mr. Evers vetoed them all.“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.” More

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      Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns’, Report Says

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      The party’s struggles in communities that saw declines in manufacturing and union jobs, and health care, could more than offset its gains in metropolitan areas.WASHINGTON — The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”Mr. Martin wrote the report in conjunction with Mike Lux and David Wilhelm, fellow Democratic strategists who, like him, also have roots in the region and worked together on President Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign.For all the arresting data, vivid graphs and deepening red maps presented, Mr. Martin offers little guidance on how to reverse the trends. He does, however, offer a warning, one that Midwestern Democrats have been issuing since Mr. Trump’s victory five years ago.“If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” writes Mr. Martin.Surveying ten states — the Great Lakes region as well as Missouri and Iowa — Mr. Martin laid out a set of stark figures.Comparing Barack Obama’s re-election to President Biden’s election last year, he notes that Democrats gained about 1.55 million votes in the big cities and suburbs of the region surveyed. In the same period, they lost about 557,000 votes in heavily rural counties.But in midsize and small counties, Democrats lost over 2.63 million votes between the two elections. Dubbing these communities “factory towns,” Mr. Martin separates them by midsize counties anchored around cities with a population of 35,000 or more and smaller counties that lean on manufacturing but do not have such sizable cities.Taken together, the changes illustrate the degree to which Mr. Obama relied upon the votes of working-class white voters to propel his re-election — and how much Mr. Biden leaned on suburbanites to offset his losses in working-class communities that had once been a pillar of the Democratic coalition.What alarms Mr. Martin, and many Democratic officials, is whether the party can sustain those gains in metropolitan areas. It’s uncertain, as he puts it, “if moderate suburban Republicans will continue to vote for Democrats when Trump is not on the ballot.”Democratic gains up and down the ballot in fast-growing Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia garnered significant attention last year. Yet Mr. Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency and Democrats couldn’t have flipped the Senate without victories in 2020 across the Great Lakes region.However, those wins proved more difficult than many pre-election polls concluded because of the G.O.P.’s continued strength in manufacturing communities. And, the report noted, these communities made up a significant portion of the region’s vote share. In Wisconsin, midsize and small manufacturing counties make up 58 percent of the statewide vote. In Michigan, half of the voting population is in these communities.This is where the decline in manufacturing has been most damaging to Democrats. The ten states included in the survey have lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs since the beginning of this century.In the small to midsize “factory town” counties in those states, where support for the Republican presidential nominee grew between 2012 and 2020, the losses were acute: More than 70 percent suffered declines in manufacturing jobs.The elimination of those jobs also led to declines in health care, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.In the counties that suffered manufacturing losses and health care declines, Republicans surged between 2012 and 2020. Nearly half of the party’s gains in these states came in communities where there were both manufacturing cuts and worsening health care.Republicans also prospered in communities hit hard by the decline in manufacturing that were predominantly white. With fewer well-paying industry jobs, the power of local unions declined as well, silencing what was always the beating heart of Democratic political organizing in these areas. In 154 such counties, Democrats suffered a net loss of over 613,000 votes between the elections in 2016 and 2020.Perhaps most striking was the decline in union membership across the region.Nine of the 10 states included in the survey have accounted for 93 percent of the loss of union members nationwide in the last two decades. And just in the last 10 years, these states have lost 10 percent of their union membership — an average that is three times greater than nationally. More

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      Wisconsin Republican Defends Legitimacy of 2020 Election Investigation

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      The Wisconsin Republican leading the state’s partisan inquiry into the 2020 election results on Monday warned election clerks that they would face subpoenas if they did not cooperate and defended the investigation’s legitimacy by declaring that he was not seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.“We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation, argued in a video posted on YouTube. The inquiry, he said, “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”The video from Mr. Gableman comes after he and Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders have faced increasing criticism from both their party’s far right and from Democrats. The right has accused Mr. Gableman of not doing enough to push lies about the 2020 election propagated by former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats have painted the $680,000 inquiry into the election as a waste of state resources and a distraction from other needed business. Mr. Gableman was assigned to look into Mr. Trump’s false claims that the state’s election was stolen from him by Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, nearly three months ago. The five-minute video released on Monday was the first extensive public statement Mr. Gableman has made outlining the scope and aim of his investigation.The Republicans’ continuing effort to re-examine the 2020 results in Wisconsin comes as Trump allies elsewhere have gone to great lengths to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory. Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results. Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”Mr. Gableman added that he did not plan to release information to the public on a regular time frame but would do so when he found it appropriate.“My job as special counsel is to gather all relevant information and, while I will draw my own conclusions, my goal is to put everything I know and everything I learn before you, the citizen, so that you can make up your own mind,” he said.The chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, said the Gableman video was evidence that state Republicans were at odds with one another over how far the election investigation should go.“Robin Vos and his far-right ‘investigator’ Michael Gableman are clearly upset that the most extreme fringe doesn’t think they’re going far enough to entertain conspiracy theories,” Mr. Wikler said. “They’re wasting taxpayer funds to serve the political interests of a small group of Republican insiders who want to erode the freedom to vote. It’s a sham, a waste of time and money, and it’s damaging our democracy.” More

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      Dear Leader: A Near-Perfect Letter From a Trump Sycophant, Annotated

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      State Senate President Chris Kapenga of Wisconsin.Scott Bauer/Associated PressFormer President Donald Trump recently accused three Wisconsin Republican leaders of “working hard to cover up election corruption” as he continued pushing lies about the November presidential vote. Mr. Trump delights in turning his fire on members of his party who he feels are being insufficiently servile. Many promptly prostrate themselves; a few shrug it off.Then there is State Senate President Chris Kapenga of Wisconsin, one of the Republicans singled out by Mr. Trump. He responded to the former president with a letter that approaches North Korean-style levels of Dear Leader obsequiousness.It is tempting to dismiss Mr. Kapenga’s missive as a desperate plea for Mr. Trump to stop picking on him — which it is. But it also provides a valuable master class in the art of Trump sycophancy. The text of the letter below has been annotated for instructional purposes.Mr. President,One of the most frustrating things to watch during your presidency was the continued attacks on you from fake news outlets with no accountability to truth.It is helpful early on to slip in a common Trumpian term like “fake news” or “Deep State” or “alternative facts.” This makes clear that you are operating in the same alternative reality as Mr. Trump.I can’t imagine the frustration you and your family felt. Unfortunately, in our positions of public service, we have to accept the reality that often “truth” in the media is no longer based on facts but simply what one feels like saying.Media bashing is a requirement when soliciting Mr. Trump. If you’re not willing to go there, don’t even bother.This leads me to your recent press release stating that I am responsible for holding up a forensic audit of the Wisconsin elections. This could not be further from the truth.The segue here from sucking up to gentle criticism is a smidge bumpy. And keep in mind that “truth” is a malleable concept for Mr. Trump.Let me first say that very few people have the honor of being named publicly by a United States president.Now you’re back on track: Having raised your concern, it is best to immediately backpedal and layer on more flattery. Plowing ahead with the details of your complaint without proper fertilizing risks getting Mr. Trump’s dander up.I never imagined mine would be mentioned, much less in this light, from a President that I have publicly supported, and still support.The genius of this sentence is that it sounds as though you’re expressing gratitude, even as you are expressing dismay.I feel I need to respond even though you will likely never hear of it, as the power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin.Bonus points for going with a deity from Norse mythology. Mr. Trump clearly has a soft spot for the region, to the point that he expressed a desire for more Norwegian immigrants and even eyed buying Greenland from Denmark.Nevertheless, I need to correct your false claim against me.Oof. Another misstep: “False” is such a harsh, judgmental word. Would have been safer to go with “inaccurate” or, better still, “imprecise.”I never received a call from you or any of your sources asking about the election audit. If you had, I would have told you that long before your press release I called the auditor in charge of the election audit that is taking place in Wisconsin and requested a forensic component to the audit.Suggesting that Mr. Trump has behaved in any way other than perfectly is always dicey. What saves you here is immediately following up with reassurances that you, in fact, behaved exactly as he wanted.Prior to owning several businesses, I was an auditor, so I understand the importance of this being done to determine what took place in the last election. This will help guide us as legislators to put fixes in place for any issues found, and more importantly, to ensure the integrity of elections moving forward.Deft, fast pivot to expressing solidarity with Mr. Trump’s contention that there were serious voting “issues” requiring legislative “fixes.”I made specific requests on procedures and locations, both of which I have not, nor will not, disclose. If I am not satisfied with the procedures performed, I will request additional work be done. If anyone illegally attempts to hinder information from being obtained, I will use my subpoena powers to get it.Always good to throw in a bit of tough-guy posturing about how none of the libs or Deep State plotters can stand in the way of your mission.This leads me back to your press release. It is false, and I don’t appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth. This is what both of us have fought against.It is unclear what anyone is fighting against here, but clarity should never be an impediment to flattery.Being cut from similar cloth in our backgrounds, and knowing that reparation must always be of more value than the wrong done, I have two requests.Curiously, Wikipedia identifies Mr. Kapenga as an accountant and business owner who has been in state politics for more than a decade. This would appear to make him as similar to the high-flying reality TV star and New York real estate scion as corduroy culottes are to cheetah-skin hot pants.First, I ask that you issue a press release in similar fashion that corrects the information and also encourages people to support what I have requested in the audit.Smart to sweeten your real ask by pairing it with something that Mr. Trump wants.Second, you owe me a round of golf at the club of your choice.Valiant attempt to lighten the mood while also playing to Mr. Trump’s vanity regarding the family business. Plus, offering him the chance to beat you at golf is smart, even if it requires you to throw the round.I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency.Bold move to appeal to Mr. Trump’s humanity.In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law.This bit of toadyism may feel like it’s going too far, but, with Mr. Trump, too far is never enough. And it never hurts to take a shot at the feds.I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible.Always remember that the throbbing heart of Trumpism is owning the libs.I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you.Nice dismount! Emphasizes that you have internalized Trumpian values and will live by them even if the former president does not heed your imploration.Thank you for doing great things as our president.Always close with straight-up bootlicking. Don’t try to be fancy — or subtle.Respectfully,Chris KapengaWisconsin Senate President More

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      Wisconsin G.O.P. Wrestles With Just How Much to Indulge Trump

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      The former president set off infighting among state Republicans by saying they were not working hard enough to challenge the 2020 results, accusing them of covering up “election corruption.”Wisconsin Republicans were already going to great lengths to challenge the 2020 election results. They ordered a monthslong government audit of votes in the state. They made a pilgrimage to Arizona to observe the G.O.P. review of votes there. They hired former police officers to investigate Wisconsin’s election and its results.But for Donald J. Trump, it wasn’t enough.In a blistering statement last week on the eve of the state party’s convention, the former president accused top Republican state lawmakers of “working hard to cover up election corruption” and “actively trying to prevent a Forensic Audit of the election results.”Wisconsin Republicans were alarmed and confused. Some circulated a resolution at the convention calling for the resignation of the top Republican in the State Assembly, Speaker Robin Vos, who in turn announced the appointment of a hard-line conservative former State Supreme Court justice to oversee the investigation. The Republican State Senate president released a two-page letter addressed to Mr. Trump that said his claims about Republicans were false — but that made sure to clarify in fawning language the state party’s allegiance to the former president.“The power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin,” the Senate president, Chris Kapenga, wrote, adding that he was wearing “Trump socks” and a “Trump-Pence mask” while boarding a commercial flight.It was all a vivid illustration of Mr. Trump’s domineering grip on the Republican Party, and of his success in enlisting officials up and down its hierarchy in his extraordinary assault on the legitimacy of the last presidential election. Nearly eight months after Election Day, Republicans are reviewing results in at least three states — Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia — and are trying to do so in others, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.They are likely to have little material success, since the results have long been certified and President Biden has been in office for months. But the effort to challenge state election results has raised doubts about the routine certification of future voting outcomes. It is also likely to have a far-reaching intangible impact on the acceptance of election results in a country where a significant majority of Republicans tell pollsters they believe the current president’s victory was illegitimate.In Wisconsin, Republicans have followed the lead of other G.O.P.-controlled states in passing a raft of new voting restrictions, though they are certain to be vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. But Mr. Trump’s demands to the state party to do more to indulge his election falsehoods have frustrated leading Republicans while exposing the Devil’s bargain that many G.O.P. lawmakers have made with him: Acceding to his ultimatums is never sufficient.“The legislative approach they’re taking to fix these problems with our voting systems is good,” said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority, a conservative grass-roots training organization. “But it was good for the base three months ago, and there’s shiny new things happening like the Arizona audit and the grass-roots moves on.”The competing narratives collided last weekend at the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s state convention, a typically sleepy off-year gathering that was instead dominated by Mr. Trump’s accusation that Republican leaders themselves were complicit in election wrongdoing.Wisconsin G.O.P. leaders expressed shock. In his otherwise ingratiating two-page letter, Mr. Kapenga, the State Senate president, pushed back forcefully on Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Vos, the Assembly speaker, who last month hired two former police officers to investigate the 2020 results, announced on Saturday that he had also hired Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who in November suggested that the election had been “stolen” from Mr. Trump, to oversee the inquiry.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Vos expressed his loyalty to Mr. Trump but argued that the former president is not a permanent fixture in Republican politics. He said Mr. Trump’s statement had come after seeing an incorrect report in the news media or receiving “bad information from his staff.”“I supported 95 percent of what Donald Trump did as president, right, which is as high as anybody could ever ask for because nobody’s perfect,” Mr. Vos said. “I’m not going to say the conservative movement lives or dies on whether or not Donald Trump is in the White House.”Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, spoke at a rally in support of former President Donald J. Trump after the election in November.Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via USA Today NetworkIn a separate interview on Monday, Mr. Gableman declined to directly respond to questions about whether he believed Mr. Trump or President Biden was the rightful winner in Wisconsin, which Mr. Biden won by 20,682 votes out of about 3.3 million cast. Instead he, echoing other Republicans’ justification of their inquiries into the 2020 election, said the aim was to assuage doubts about how it was conducted — even though such doubts continue to be stoked by Mr. Trump and his allies.“Like a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, I am unsure of who the winner of the November 2020 presidential race in Wisconsin was when it is considered in the light of only those ballots that should lawfully have been counted,” Mr. Gableman said. “My hope is that this investigatory process will significantly reduce cause for such similar doubts in the future.”Few Republicans in the country swung harder and faster for Mr. Trump than those in Wisconsin. In the 2016 presidential primary, Scott Walker, the state’s governor at the time — whose own campaign ended after 71 days with a warning against nominating Mr. Trump — organized the party’s entire political and local media apparatus behind Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in what amounted to a last-ditch effort to stop Mr. Trump.Mr. Cruz won the state, the last one he’d carry before ending his campaign a month later. Most, but not all, Wisconsin Republicans quickly got on board with Mr. Trump. Paul D. Ryan, then the House speaker, dragged his feet on endorsing Mr. Trump. Charlie Sykes, at the time the most influential conservative talk radio host in the state, never did, and quit his job to become a Never-Trump commentator.Now, as they have in Georgia and Arizona, Mr. Trump’s false claims that he won Wisconsin’s presidential contest threaten to split Republicans. At the party convention on Saturday, Mr. Trump delivered a prerecorded message reiterating the lie that he won the state — though he didn’t mention any of the legislative leaders he had criticized the night before.“We had actually great results in Wisconsin,” Mr. Trump said. “As you know, in 2016 we won, and as you also know, in 2020 we won, but that hasn’t been so adjudged yet.”Mr. Kapenga’s letter to Mr. Trump was a telling distillation of the delicate way Republicans try to navigate the former president’s whims, combining ego-stroking and gentle pushback. He lightly scolded Mr. Trump for broadcasting misinformation, saying, “It is false, and I don’t appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth,” before softening it with a request to play golf with Mr. Trump “at the club of your choice.”The letter concludes: “I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency. In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law. I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible. I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you. Thank you for doing great things as our President.”Mr. Vos and Mr. Kapenga have advanced legislation to make absentee voting harder and forbid the mass collecting of early votes that the city clerk in Madison, the liberal state capital, engaged in last fall. But they have so far resisted, while not ruling out, calls to subpoena large numbers of 2020 votes and embark on an Arizona-style audit.“I want to see what Arizona actually discovers,” Mr. Vos said. “What’s legal in Arizona might be illegal here.”Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, hired three former police officers last month to investigate the 2020 election results.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the convention Mr. Vos faced a resolution, which was handily defeated, that called for his resignation for not sufficiently defending Mr. Trump’s false election claims. Still, there were few voices condemning Mr. Trump.Yet one former state assemblyman, Adam Jarchow, defended Wisconsin Republican leaders in a rare statement from a Republican attacking the former president.“This is dumb and insane,” Mr. Jarchow, who has been a stalwart Trump supporter, said in a text message statement. “Trump is outside of his mind if he thinks any of those three would do what he is accusing them of.”He added: “If Trump thinks this is helpful, it’s not. It does what he did in — Georgia — which cost us the damn Senate.”Wisconsin Democrats, desperate to re-elect Mr. Evers next year and eager to win the seat held by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, have few ways to impede the G.O.P. investigation. Mark Spreitzer, the ranking Democrat on the State Assembly’s elections committee, said that in the absence of allegations that 2020 ballots were tampered with, there was little space for the investigation to conclude in a way that would satisfy Mr. Trump and his loyalists. (Unlike in Arizona, the false arguments that Mr. Trump won Wisconsin rest on the idea that some ballots were improperly collected, not that the ballots themselves were compromised.)“It’s been clear since the beginning that there isn’t much of a sense of direction among the Republicans,” Mr. Spreitzer said. “It’s not clear to me that they know how to tie a bow on this at the end. There isn’t going to be a smoking gun. How do you close this out?.”Some local Wisconsin Republicans are not waiting for the state investigations and are trying to take matters into their own hands. In rural Clark County, where Mr. Trump won 67 percent of the vote, the Republican Party chairwoman took out an advertisement this week in a weekly newspaper, The Shopper, seeking to raise $1,000 for a manual recount of the 15,000 ballots cast there in November. She encouraged other county parties to do the same.“The only way to vindicate the results,” wrote Rose LaBarbera, the G.O.P. chairwoman, “is to count the votes again.” More

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      Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterConservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process.Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire.Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast.The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say.But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.“It is either a witting or unwitting effort to handcuff democratic self-governance,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Research.The efforts also come at the same moment that Republican legislatures around the country are pushing new restrictions to restrict voting access. Unable to point to evidence of significant fraud, Republican lawmakers have frequently said that new restrictions are needed to restore confidence in elections.In New Hampshire, activists have tried to co-opt an audit in the 15,000 person town of Windham to try and resolve a legitimate discrepancy in vote totals for a state representative race. They unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials there to drop experienced auditors in favor of Jovan Pulitzer, a conspiracy theorist reportedly involved in the Arizona recount who has become a kind of celebrity among those who believe the election was stolen. Even though the experienced auditors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, activists have continued to float baseless theories of wrongdoing in a Telegram channel following audits.“Nothing today is showing evidence of fraud. Nothing today is showing evidence of digital manipulation of the machines,” Harri Hursti, an election expert and one of the auditors, said this week, according to WMUR. “It’s amazing how much disinformation and dishonest reporting has been spreading.”Activists are also pressuring officials in Cheboygan county, Michigan to let an attorney affiliated with Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who brought baseless lawsuits after the election, conduct an audit of election equipment. The chair of the board of commissioners told the Detroit News he could not recall a more contentious issue debated before the board in more than two decades.The Michigan efforts prompted a letter from the state’s top election official, who warned the clerks in Cheboygan and Antrim county – another hotbed of conspiracy theories – that boards didn’t have authority to order audits and not to turn over election equipment to unaccredited outside firms, the Washington Post reported. Michigan conducted more than 250 audits after the 2020 race that affirmed the results.Dominion voting systems, which sold equipment to the state, also warned that counties may not be able to use machines in future elections if they turned them over to uncertified auditors.“We have every reason to want transparency,” Jocelyn Benson, the state’s top election official, said in an interview. “But that’s not what this is. This is about an effort, as has been proved time and time again by the actions of these individuals, in Arizona and elsewhere, this is an effort to actually spread falsehoods and misinformation under the guise of transparency.”San Luis Obispo county in the central coast of California has been another target for calls for an audit. During a meeting earlier this month, officials played hours of recorded messages calling for an audit, including one asking whether Tommy Gong, the county’s clerk and recorder, was a member of the communist party.Activists are also targeting Fulton county, Georgia, another place that was at the center of Trump’s baseless election attacks last year. Earlier in May, a local judge said that an group led by Garland Favorito, who has reportedly pushed conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the JFK assassination, could inspect absentee ballots, though in a key break from the Arizona review, the judge made it clear that the actual ballots would have to remain in county officials’ custody. Georgia has already manually recounted all of the ballots in the state, which confirmed Joe Biden’s win over Trump last year.Even in Arizona, the crown jewel of the audit movement, activists may have plans to do even more auditing after the current review of 2.1m ballots wraps up. Republicans are finalizing a plan to use untested software to analyze images of ballots, the Arizona Republic reported Friday.“Rarely do the losers believe the they have lost, but historically those who fell short graciously concede once all legal channels are exhausted,” said Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa county who now serves as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund.“The proliferation of these actions undermine and erode the very foundation of election integrity and our adversaries need only sit back and watch as we chip away at our democratic norms. We should be telling the American voter the truth – the election had integrity, real audits and recounts were done, court challenges heard.” More