NYT with the subhed: “Prominent conservatives, including the president, sounded familiar alarms about voter suppression and other efforts to manipulate the vote on Election Day, without presenting evidence.”
From the body:
The reflex to declare interference shows how much the conduct of elections continues to animate Republican politics — at least in races where the party’s candidates could be headed to defeat.
Before the polls even opened on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called a vote in California to redraw congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections, as Texas and other Republican-controlled states have done, “a GIANT SCAM.”
“The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Mr. Trump declared without citing anything to support the claim. He suggested that Republicans were somehow “shut out” of mail-in voting, warning that a “serious legal and criminal review” was on the way. Mr. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, but it was not clear what he meant by a review.
There is little evidence that significant voter fraud is, or has been, a problem in California. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, lists only a single case in 2024 in its “election fraud map” and only 69 cases since 1982.
he White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the state’s practice of allowing everyone to vote by mail was “ripe for fraud.”
Asked at the White House for evidence, she cited, “fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections.” A White House official, when asked by email for examples, repeated many of the claims about potential, though not real, fraud, and cited a Department of Justice lawsuit against the state saying it reported finding more than two million duplicate registrations, while seven counties did not report duplicates. The lawsuit does not claim any of the duplicates resulted in duplicate votes.
Ms. Leavitt said preparations for an executive order on elections were underway but did not detail what review Mr. Trump referred to. The Justice Department sent election observers to five counties in California, but by midday there were no immediate reports of problems with voting. Polls have suggested that the redistricting measure, called Proposition 50, is likely to pass.…