On a normal day in Sutherland Springs, Texas, all there is to fill the country air is the barks of local dogs and the hum of cars passing by. Indeed, locals say – with a hint of pride – you can drive through this town of several hundred without even noticing you did.

But Sunday was not a normal day here. Instead, a lone, black-clad gunman shattered the town’s tranquility with a hail of bullets that left at least 26 dead and 20 wounded in the First Baptist Church. Neighbors chased the gunman away and found him dead in his crashed car in the next county.

The tragedy in a close-knit, rural town that considers itself just outside of San Antonio’s commuting range was a reminder that in America, while a town may not have a single traffic light, it can still have a mass shooting.

“It’s a peaceful town. Everyone knows everyone,” says Rita Serna, who grew up in Sutherland Springs and sang her first solo in the First Baptist Church.

“It’s sad, disturbing, unbelievable,” she adds, “but possible in today’s times.”

As many Texans proudly point out, church life permeates much of Texas culture. And while it has more than 200 megachurches and dozens of evangelical colleges and universities, churches like First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs still define the daily rhythms of life in many rural Texas communities, local pastors say.

“It’s the kind of little church my dad pastored when I was growing up as a kid,” says the Rev. Bob Roberts, a Texas native who now pastors the 3,000-member NorthWood Church, an evangelical congregation in Keller. “These are the people who make Texas what it is – small towns, rural, hardworking people.”

At the end of the 11 a.m. worship service, officials say, Devin Patrick Kelley of New Braunfels opened fire on the congregation with a Ruger assault-style rifle, before being shot at by a local man and fleeing in his car. Pursued by locals, he crashed his car a few miles away and was found dead. Kelley’s in-laws attended the church, according to reports, and officials said Monday the shooting arose from a “domestic situation.”

A former member of the Air Force who was court-martialed in 2012 for assaulting his wife and child and later kicked out of the service, Kelley was not legally allowed to own a gun, according to both US and Texas law. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Monday he was denied a right to carry license, but reports say he purchased the Ruger at a San Antonio gun shop.

'Something in our culture'

The worst mass shooting in Texas history has left a gaping hole in this community about 35 miles east of San Antonio. Among the dead were eight people spanning three generations of a single family. The victims ranged in age from 18 months to 77, and the teenage daughter of the church’s pastor was among those killed.

Leslie Ward lost three family members in the shooting: her husband’s five and seven-year-old nieces Brooke Ward and Emily Garza, and their mother, Joann Ward. His five-year-old nephew, Ryland Ward was wounded, but in a stable condition as of Sunday night, the Dallas Morning News reported.

“Words can’t describe it,” Ms. Ward says on Sunday night, pacing in front of her house a block away from the church, waiting for news from the hospital.

“I feel angry. I feel sad,” she adds. “I would never think this would happen here, in a small community.”

The shooting is also the deadliest at a place of prayer and worship in modern US history, and one of a series in recent years targeting churches and temples. In September, a man shot and killed one woman and injured seven others at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ, outside of Nashville.

In 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire in the basement of Mother Emanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine black church members. In 2012, a gunman shot down six worshipers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis.

“I think there’s going to be some serious questioning, some serious soul searching after this,” says Pastor Roberts. “This was one of us. It’s one thing when someone gets killed while hunting. When somebody can come in with a Ruger AR-15, you just can’t say, too bad, that’s the way things go, there’s nothing to be done.

“This wasn’t some city slicker who went down to a little country town – he was born in that part of Texas,” he continues. “So there’s something in our culture that’s really out of control. It’s gone bad. We’re producing our own bad apples, we can’t blame it on ISIS.”

Sutherland Springs is so small it doesn’t have its own high school. The town center is a post office, a Dollar General (new this year), a gas station, and the First Baptist Church. Cattle graze in surrounding fields, and metallic, submarine-shaped propane tanks dot grassy lawns. Signs for a yard sale still dotted the town on Sunday. Far away from the metropolises of Dallas and Houston, the gas station sells hats for the Junction Eagles high school football team. There are no traffic lights, only stop signs and a yellow blinking light strung over Highway 87.

“You’re just outside [the range] of people buying places out in the rural areas and commuting into San Antonio,” says Tim Williams, a pastor with the South Texas Children’s Home Ministries.

“People are living out here, moving out here, trying to get away from some of the big city stuff,” he adds. “Now the big city stuff’s come to them.”

He has spent much of his 27-year career working in the rural towns between San Antonio and Victoria, including Sutherland Springs.

“The central institution of a town like this is the school, and then it goes to the churches.... Not everyone is involved in [each] church, but everyone from other churches would know who’s in that church,” he adds. “It will be a whole lot more personal.”

'We will not be changed by one man'

As night fell over the town on Sunday – the narrow streets lit up by red and blue police lights – locals vowed to move forward.

“We’re not going to let this beat this town,” says Frances Garza, standing outside a police cordon, a block away from the church. She has lived in Sutherland Springs for 30 years.

“I’m hoping we still go back to what we were: a small town,” she adds.

Indeed, local mourners were not alone at a vigil for the victims held outside the post office on Sunday night. Residents from the surrounding network of towns – including Stockdale, La Vernia, Floresville, and Poth – flocked here to hold candles and sing together in a slow, somber murmur that occasionally strengthened with the chorus.

“Who are we going to be tomorrow? We are going to be the people of Texas, the people of Sutherland Springs, the people of the First Baptist Church,” said Pastor Stephen A. Curry of the La Vernia United Methodist Church, during the vigil.

“We are going to show compassion where compassion needs to be shown,” he added. “We will not be changed by one man.”

After the vigil, Katie Metcalf – a stay-at-home mom who lives a mile away, on the Sutherland Springs-La Vernia border – stared silently across the road toward the small blue and white sign of the First Baptist Church. She drives past it almost every morning, she says, and would have been here on Sunday as well – on the way to the Dollar General – but turned around after her family said they wanted to go somewhere for food.

“We pass this church every day, every other day,” she says. “It’s just a tragedy that you don’t think’s going to happen.”

“These families, through this pain they’re just going to grow in ways that they probably never knew,” she adds, “and this community will too.”

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, speaks during a campaign event at the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce in Tysons, Va.

Sen. Tim Scott storms the stage, the final – and most animated – speaker at a rally for Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, Ed Gillespie.

“Ed is my brother from another mother!” jokes Senator Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the US Senate. The crowd of 150 people laughs. “I’m glad that’s funny even in Virginia,” Scott adds ruefully.  

It was a poignant moment in the final days of a contest marked by brutal ads on racially charged topics – crime, illegal immigration, the future of Confederate monuments – following the violent rally three months ago not far away in Charlottesville.

Mr. Gillespie’s Democratic opponent, the soft-spoken Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, has taken hits for not disavowing forcefully enough an ad by a Latino group showing a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and Gillespie sticker trying to mow down minority children.

But it is the Gillespie campaign’s no-holds-barred ads attacking Lieutenant Governor Northam that represent the real test of Tuesday’s election: Can a Republican who embodies establishment politics win a major battleground state in the Trump era by adding a measure of populist-nationalism to his message?

“Ed Gillespie has had to run this split-personality campaign,” says Quentin Kidd, director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. “He’s had to run as Donald Trump and Corey Stewart on immigration, crime, and monuments – but he’s also tried to run as Mitt Romney and George H.W. Bush on the economy.” 

Mr. Stewart is the Trump acolyte who almost beat Gillespie in the Republican primary.

The Virginia race has taken on outsize national meaning for both parties. For the Democrats, a victory by Northam would be a welcome salve at a time of bitter internal divisions over the 2016 presidential loss – and a new round of finger-pointing stemming from former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile’s explosive new book.

For Republicans, the stakes are just as large. If Gillespie wins, or even loses narrowly, he will have shown how a mainstream Republican can be competitive by selectively playing the “Trump card" in an electoral battleground. Democrat Hillary Clinton won increasingly diverse Virginia by five points in last year’s presidential race, her only victory in the South.

A 'happy warrior' on the stump

Gillespie hasn’t gone “full Trump.” He doesn’t mention Trump at campaign events, and didn’t ask Trump to campaign for him. He doesn’t discuss racially charged issues, unless asked. On a makeshift stage Saturday night in a hangar at Chesterfield County Airport, just south of Richmond, Gillespie is ever the happy warrior, talking poll data and economic growth.

“I have 20 specific, detailed policy proposals,” enthuses Gillespie, a former top aide to President George W. Bush, former national and Virginia Republican party chairman, and founder of a major lobbying firm.

But across Virginia, Gillespie campaign efforts to stir up the Trump base are on vivid display, with TV ads and mailers blasting Northam on sanctuary cities, Latino gangs, Confederate monuments, and national anthem protests by NFL players.

Among the crowd gathered to support Gillespie on this final weekend before the vote, these hot-button issues resonate – including within some minority communities.

“Ed understands public safety and illegal immigration,” says Venkat Venigalla, an Indian immigrant who works in information technology. “He has promised to keep the Indian community safe.”

Northam was slow to respond to Gillespie’s attacks, and has struggled to clearly articulate his views. As a state legislator, Northam opposed legislation to ban sanctuary cities – of which there are none in Virginia – but last week said he would sign legislation banning them. 

Then there’s the issue of Confederate statues. Gillespie, originally from New Jersey, favors keeping the monuments up, but Northam – a native Virginian whose family history intersects with the Civil War and slavery – has taken evolving positions. Initially he called for their removal, but now he says it should be a local decision.

At a farmer’s market Saturday in Democrat-dominant Northern Virginia, Northam’s press secretary was confronted by an older white woman demanding to know the lieutenant governor’s position on Confederate monuments. When given the response, she stormed off. “That’s [expletive],” she said. “And I’m a Democrat.”

Moments later, this reporter asked Northam himself the same question: What should happen to Confederate monuments? He offered a qualified solution – and showed that he does not speak in sound bites.

“If there are monuments that are divisive and that promote hatred and bigotry, then I believe personally that they need to be in museums, with historical context, and I also believe that that should be dealt with in the localities in the different regions,” Northam said, after discussing the Aug. 12 tragedy in Charlottesville, when white supremacists marched to protect a Confederate statue, resulting in the death of one counterprotester.

The localities themselves should pay for the statues’ removal, he added. “Bottom line is, we live in a very diverse society, so we need to be inclusive, and we need to be sensitive to all people’s feelings,” says Northam, who is a pediatric neurologist and an Army veteran.

A September poll by the Wason Center shows 54 percent of Virginia's registered voters oppose removing monuments from public spaces.

The Trump effect

Northam, a moderate Democrat, faces the mirror image of Gillespie’s challenge: Northam defeated a more progressive candidate, former Rep. Tom Perriello, in the primary, and needs to energize Mr. Perriello’s supporters to turn out.

Northam, at least, has a ready-made foil, with Trump in the White House. For the past 40 years, the party that wins the White House has always lost the Virginia governor’s race a year later – until 2013, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe won.

Trump’s election has also spurred an outpouring of Democrats seeking office in Virginia – including women and people of color – and the party is poised to gain seats, but not the majority, in the state House of Delegates. A Democratic campaign manager in a delegate race suggests a “reverse coattail” effect, in which excitement for his candidate could spur turnout for Northam.

Still, Gillespie seems to have benefited from all the racially charged issues dominating the Virginia contest in the final weeks, as polls have tightened.

“To some degree, I think those issues have played better for Gillespie, when thinking about the problems with his base,” says Geoffrey Skelley, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Northam has faced criticism for focusing too much on the white vote, in a state that’s 20 percent African American and has a growing Latino and Asian population. At its heart, the Virginia governor’s race is New South versus Old  South – with the Democratic stronghold of northern Virginia growing in proportion to more Republican rural and downstate areas.

But Democrats are adamant that they’re not taking minority voters for granted. On Saturday, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez campaigned with Justin Fairfax, the black Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, at a Latino grocery store in Woodbridge, about 25 miles from Washington.

Some of the shoppers didn’t speak English, but Mr. Perez – the son of Dominican immigrants, and fluent in Spanish – was undaunted, engaging shoppers himself and pitching in as interpreter for Mr. Fairfax. This reporter spoke with the shoppers afterwards to get their reactions, and discovered that many are not citizens and therefore not eligible to vote.

When asked about this, Perez said he asked them to share information about Northam and Fairfax with friends and relatives who can vote. And someday, he said, they too may be voting Americans.

“We are investing in the future,” said Perez.

The sudden resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has plunged Lebanon into political uncertainty and raised fears that this tiny Mediterranean country is going to be dragged into the center of the burgeoning and at times violent regional confrontation between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran.

Saudi Arabia, reacting to the increasing influence the Islamic Republic wields in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, has in recent months steadily escalated its hostile rhetoric toward Iran.

And in announcing his shock resignation Saturday in Riyadh, to which he appeared to have been summoned, Mr. Hariri lashed out at Iran and its powerful Lebanese ally Hezbollah in an uncharacteristically public fashion.

His resignation seems to signal that a bullish Saudi Arabia, buoyed by the Trump administration’s anti-Iran stance, is no longer willing to allow its Lebanese ally to compromise with Hezbollah, an arrangement which over the past 12 months has brought some rare stability to Lebanon.

It is difficult to see what gains Saudi Arabia can leverage out of Hariri’s resignation that would put the Shiite organization Hezbollah, a key battlefield supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the dominant political and military force in Lebanon, in a bind.

But the move, which would appear to sacrifice Hariri’s political standing, creates potential political and economic difficulties that could shatter Lebanon’s hard-won stability of the past year, a precious commodity in a country that has been buffeted by political and sectarian strife for decades.

“This does not reflect well on Hariri. It does not look like the first, second, and third orders of effect have been thought through,” says Randa Slim, a Hezbollah expert and director of a conflict resolution program at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “What will Hariri and Saudi Arabia do next? A resignation will not force Hezbollah to change its posture in Lebanon, Syria and regionally.… What concessions does he want to exact from Hezbollah and their Lebanese allies on matters dealing with domestic affairs?”

Hariri headed to Riyadh on Friday for an unscheduled visit, having been in the Saudi capital only three days earlier. The next morning, he announced his resignation in a live broadcast on the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya network.

Assassination plot?

Despite all the compromises he had made, he said, he feared there was a plot to assassinate him, a fate that befell his father, Rafik, who was killed in a massive explosion in downtown Beirut in February 2005.

“We live in an atmosphere that prevailed before the assassination of martyr Premier Rafik Hariri, and I sensed what is being woven in secret to target my life,” he said.

Al-Arabiya subsequently reported that an attempt had been made to target Hariri’s motorcade in Beirut. The claim has been met with general bewilderment and skepticism in Beirut. The Lebanese police and army both issued statements saying they were unaware of an assassination plot against Hariri.

Looking uncomfortable and reading from a sheet of paper, Hariri said Iran “sows sedition, devastation, and destruction in any place it settles” and its hand would be “cut” in the region. Hezbollah, he added, “has unfortunately managed to impose a fait accompli in Lebanon by the force of its weapons, which it alleges is a resistance weapon [against Israel]. This weapon is directed against our Syrian and Yemeni brothers, in addition to the Lebanese.”

Hariri’s allies in Lebanon and members of his Future Movement parliamentary block were as stunned as everyone else at the surprise development, having had no forewarning. But analysts say that the Saudis had tired of Hariri turning the other cheek to Hezbollah.

“The Saudis are not satisfied politically with the status quo in Lebanon,” says Imad Salamey, associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. “Given the fact that Hezbollah is participating in government … and at the same time it is able to defy the Saudi agenda by its continuous and various interventions in the region ... the Saudis feel that Hariri was providing Hezbollah legitimacy despite, from the Saudi view, Hezbollah’s arrogance and … the continuous expansion of Iran in the region.”

What Lebanon loses

The resignation has shattered a shaky consensus over the past year that had seen Lebanon regain a semblance of political normality. A two-and-a-half-year deadlock over the Lebanese presidency ended in October 2016 when Hariri finally agreed to nominate Hezbollah’s candidate, Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian (as all Lebanese presidents are required to be). In return, Hariri won the premiership and a government was formed within a month.

Since then, the government and parliament were able to adopt a new electoral law for parliamentary polls scheduled for May 2018, which will be the first since 2009. A state budget was agreed upon, the first for 12 years, and legislation was passed that revived long-stalled moves to explore for oil and gas in Lebanon’s offshore waters.

In July and August, separate offensives by Hezbollah and the Lebanese army drove out several hundred militants belonging to the Islamic State and other groups from a pocket of northeast Lebanon, which has allowed the state to bring stability back to an area that had been lawless since 2014.

Hariri took some flak from his support base within the Sunni community for his cooperation with Hezbollah, which holds two seats in the government. Although Hariri is politically opposed to Hezbollah, he repeatedly stated that his actions were for the benefit of stability in Lebanon and that confronting the powerful Shiite group would only cause strife. And that is what makes his surprise, and fiery-worded, resignation Saturday all the more surprising.

A senior source in Hariri’s Future Movement justifies the resignation by saying that Hezbollah had never shown the same willingness to compromise as shown by the prime minister, the alleged assassination plot being the final straw. The source cites Hezbollah’s interventions in Syria and Iraq and its efforts to normalize relations with Mr. Assad’s regime, against Hariri’s wishes, and criticism of Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia.

“Hezbollah never ceased to attack Lebanon’s interests in having good relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE [United Arab Emirates], Kuwait and the region; never ceased to put Lebanon in harm’s way by putting it at odds with the international community, with the Americans, with Lebanon’s friends; never ceased for one second,” says the source, requesting anonymity in order to speak frankly.

Hezbollah responds

Sunday evening, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah called for “calm and patience” while apparently absolving Hariri of blame for the resignation, pinning it squarely on Saudi Arabia instead.

“We will not comment on the political content [of Hariri’s resignation speech], which was very tough and included many dangerous points, but we will not comment because we believe it was a Saudi text and a Saudi statement,” Mr. Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

The non-combative tone of Nasrallah’s speech may help ease worries of street clashes between rival supporters of Hezbollah and Hariri and suggests that the Iran-backed party does not seek an escalation over the crisis.

“Hezbollah doesn’t intend to become more confrontational with the Saudis than it already is,” says Ali Rizk, a Lebanese political analyst close to Hezbollah. “They have more than one thing to keep them preoccupied – you have Yemen, you have Syria, you have the Israeli threats … so I don’t think they want to deteriorate the local internal situation.”

But in what some in the region interpreted as a response to Hariri’s resignation and his harsh rhetoric against Iran, a ballistic missile was launched toward Riyadh Saturday evening from Houthi rebel territory in Yemen. The missile was intercepted by a Saudi anti-missile system close to the city’s King Khaled airport, causing alarm but no casualties.

Saudi Arabia initially blamed Iran for the attack, prompting the Iranian Foreign Ministry to describe the Saudi accusation as “unjust, irresponsible, destructive, and provocative.” Monday the Saudis went a step further, saying Hezbollah operatives in Yemen had fired the missile in collusion with the Iranians.

Hezbollah's 'war'

As part of the heightened Saudi rhetoric of late, Thamer al-Sabhan, the Saudi minister for Gulf Affairs who has been particularly vocal in lambasting Iran and Hezbollah via Twitter, criticized the Lebanese government on October 29 for its “silence” on what he called Hezbollah’s “war” against Saudi Arabia. The next day, he doubled down on his rhetoric, saying that Hezbollah must be toppled and that the “coming developments will definitely be astonishing.”

On Oct. 31, Hariri travelled to Riyadh, where he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Mr. Sabhan. Although details of the meetings were not revealed, Hariri returned to Beirut amid reports that he had persuaded the Saudi leadership to grant him more flexibility in dealing with Hezbollah.

On Friday, Hariri met in Beirut with Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s senior adviser on international affairs. Mr. Velayati noted his “good, positive and constructive” conversation with the Lebanese premier, adding “Iranian-Lebanese relations are always constructive and Iran always supports and protects Lebanese independence, force, and government.” Perhaps that comment stung the Saudi leadership, because within hours, Hariri was back in Riyadh on an unscheduled visit, and the next morning he delivered his shock resignation.

On Monday, Sabhan released another, ominous, tweet, saying “Lebanon, after the resignation, will never be as it was before.”

“We will not allow it – in any form – to be a platform for terrorism against our countries,” he wrote, “and it’s in the hands of [Lebanese] leaders to allow for a state of terrorism or peace.”

Larry Marano/WireImage/Getty Images

Broward County's supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, (l), participates in an event encouraging early voting, Nov. 3, 2012, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Dr. Snipes, who faces a lawsuit alleging she does not adequately maintain the county's voter registration list, says her office complies with all state and federal statutes.

Richard Gabbay says he wasn’t trying to suppress anyone’s vote. He simply wanted to organize fellow Republicans for the upcoming 2016 presidential election in Florida’s Broward County.

To help in his political organizing, he obtained a list of all registered voters in his precinct. But when he started to compare the names and addresses of his actual neighbors against the names and addresses listed on the official voting roll, he found major discrepancies.

Ultimately, Mr. Gabbay identified 629 voters who he believed were no longer eligible to vote. They included seven individuals who had passed away and 570 who appeared to have moved away.

In all, his list comprised 14 percent of all registered voters in his precinct.

Gabbay and other critics charge that Broward County is failing to keep its voter rolls current and accurate. They say the county’s list of 1.2 million registered voters is grossly inflated with deceased or otherwise ineligible voters.

“If you send out absentee ballots and these people are still on the rolls, you have a perfect storm to enable somebody else to use that address and that voter’s ID.… It makes it possible,” Gabbay told the Monitor in an interview. “I am not alleging fraud, but it is fraud enabling.”

Broward County, a heavily Democratic county in a key swing state, has become the latest flashpoint in a growing national debate over how best to maintain voter registration rolls. It's a debate that pits the desire to prevent election fraud against the need to preserve individual voting rights.

It comes after an array of unsubstantiated comments by President Trump suggesting he would have won the popular vote in the 2016 general election but for millions of noncitizens who he said cast illegal ballots for Hillary Clinton.

It also comes amid multiple investigations into alleged Russian meddling in US elections, including attempts to hack into voter registration databases.

Last spring, the president established an Election Integrity Commission to investigate voting system vulnerabilities. Among issues on the commission’s agenda are whether voter registration lists are inflated with noncitizens and other ineligible registrants.

A federal judge in Miami is currently examining whether Brenda Snipes, Broward County’s supervisor of elections, is adequately maintaining the registration list in her county. A lawsuit filed by a conservative election integrity group, the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), charges that Dr. Snipes has embraced a lenient approach to list maintenance that violates guidelines set in federal law.

Snipes and her lawyers insist Broward’s elections office follows state and federal statutes and is operating well within legal requirements.

“Our staff is trained in what they should do, and we stay current on what the statutes require,” she says in an interview, adding, “It is not like we are way out in left field creating our own procedures or our own laws.”

A question of honor?

Snipes is not alone in facing litigation. Similar lawsuits have been filed against election officials in Texas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. In each of those states, conservative watchdog groups are asking judges to order supervisors to take more aggressive action to remove ineligible voters from their rolls.

On the other side, liberal advocacy and voting rights groups have filed lawsuits of their own, seeking to halt more aggressive list maintenance procedures by election officials in Georgia, Indiana, Virginia, and Ohio.

Early next year, the Ohio case will be argued at the US Supreme Court, with the justices examining whether voter roll maintenance procedures used in that state comply with federal standards.

At the heart of the legal battles over list maintenance are two competing goals enshrined in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

In passing the law, Congress sought to make it easier for people to register to vote. But lawmakers also sought to uphold the integrity of the election process by requiring officials to maintain “accurate and current” voter registration lists. The law says officials must undertake “reasonable” efforts to remove ineligible voters from the list.

Election officials can use a number of techniques to weed out deceased voters, noncitizens, and dormant registrants. There are interstate databases that identify voters registered in more than one state. The Social Security Administration maintains an index of deceased persons. And the Department of Homeland Security operates a database of newly naturalized US citizens.

But many supervisors choose not to use such tools. They view their role as helping people to vote rather than serving as election cops trying to sniff-out ineligible registrants.

Snipes says her office operates under the honor system.

“When a person comes in to register, we don’t ask them to give us proof of citizenship. We don’t ask them to show us that they don’t have a felony conviction,” she says.

“In other words, whatever they put on that document is what we accept as the truth based on the honor of the person who writes it.”

Snipes says it is up to state election officials in Tallahassee to weed out ineligible voters. “We don’t necessarily have a tool that allows us to check a person’s citizenship, or whether or not they are registered in another state, or whether or not they are a convicted felon,” she says. “That is done, since 2006, by the [state] Division of Elections.”

Snipes says her office sends out mailings twice a year asking inactive voters to update their registrations. In addition, she says her office follows up on registration information received from the local community. But generally it is up to the state to perform the lion’s share of list maintenance work, she says.

Mary Garber of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition has been tracking elections in the state for nearly 20 years. She says election supervisors are caught in a no-win situation.

“One of the problems is the state really doesn’t take much responsibility for the accuracy of the registration list. They kind of say, ‘Oh well, that is the county’s problem,’ ” Ms. Garber says. “And the county doesn’t have the resources to be chasing all these people down.”

To Garber, the debate over list maintenance boils down to priorities. “Which is worse, a few people voting who shouldn’t,” she says, “or whether in order to catch those people, you are going to exclude people who legitimately should have been able to vote?”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

A challenge in Ohio

Years ago, some states automatically removed registrants from the voter rolls if they failed to vote often enough. That practice was prohibited in 1993 with passage of the NVRA.

Instead, the law set outs out a two-step process. A voter may be removed from the registration list if she fails to respond to a mailing and if she shows no voter activity during a four-year grace period covering two federal election cycles.

In Ohio, election officials follow that same two-step procedure, but the removal process is triggered after a registrant has failed to vote during an initial two-year period.

In April 2016, two nonprofit organizations and an Ohio voter filed suit charging that Ohio’s three-step, six-year removal process violates the NVRA by purging registered voters from the rolls because of their failure to vote during the initial two-year period.

Lawyers for the state respond that since Ohio’s process also requires that a mailing is sent to registrants before they are removed, the Ohio process does not violate the NVRA because it does not rely solely on non-voting.

Democrats and Republicans view the issue of voter list maintenance in starkly different terms.

Republicans see inflated voting rolls as an invitation to election fraud. Democrats insist that such fraud is rare and that aggressive efforts to purge people from the voting rolls may suppress turnout, particularly among low-income voters and minorities who are seen as more likely to vote for Democrats.

The Ohio case first arose in the courts in the run-up to the 2016 election. The plaintiffs argued that since 2011 as many as 1.2 million eligible voters may have been illegally removed from the state’s registration rolls under Ohio’s three-step list maintenance process.

In an attempt to address that possibility, a judge ordered the state to count all ballots cast in the 2016 election by any Ohio voters who had been removed from the rolls since 2011. During the 2016 election, 7,515 voters cast provisional ballots under that ruling, suggesting that at least that many voters would have been disenfranchised under the Ohio removal protocol.

The disenfranchisement of Larry Harmon

The potential disenfranchising effect of the Ohio list maintenance process is clearly apparent in the experience of Larry Harmon, one of the plaintiffs in the Ohio case.

Mr. Harmon is a US Navy veteran and long-time registered voter who lived at the same address in Ohio for 16 years.

He voted in the 2008 presidential election but did not vote in 2009 or 2010. In June 2011, he was mailed a notice from Ohio election officials asking that he verify his eligibility to vote. Harmon doesn’t recall ever receiving that notice. He then went four more years without casting a ballot and was removed from the voter roll in September 2015.

No additional notice was sent to him. Harmon first learned that his voter registration had been cancelled in November 2015 when he tried to cast a ballot in a state-wide referendum.

In a close election, this kind of list maintenance process might disenfranchise enough voters to determine the outcome, analysts say.

How the Supreme Court decides the Ohio case – and what is said in its decision – will give fresh momentum to one side or the other in ongoing legal battles over voter roll maintenance across the country.

The issue in Broward County

In addition to Gabbay’s investigation in Broward County, there have been a number of other attempts in recent years to try to identify the extent that the county’s voting rolls may be inflated.

In 2011, the then Republican chairman in Broward, Richard DeNapoli, examined a sample of 2,100 people who died in the county that year. He found that twelve months later, 481 of them were still listed as active registered voters.

“I wanted to come up with a method that would prove there were dead people on the rolls,” he says. “And we did.”

Mr. DeNapoli compared the Social Security death data with Broward’s voting rolls, matching names and dates of birth.

He turned his findings over to Snipes. A month later, she used the information to remove those deceased voters from the rolls. But, according to DeNapoli, she did nothing to change any of her office’s policies for discovering and weeding out registrants who passed away.

“Here we are five years later talking about this, and she is still not using the Social Security Death Index,” he says. “If we can find this out, she has far greater resources than us to make sure the rolls are accurate.”

One voter, two votes?

Older and deceased voters aren’t the only focus of the voter roll debate in Broward.

Another study found there were 7,635 registered voters in Broward County who were also registered voters in New York State. The study, conducted by William Skinner and Kirk Wolak, also discovered that 169 of those registered voters appear to have cast ballots in both places – a Florida election in March 2016 and a New York election in April 2016.

Mr. Skinner, a retired lawyer, says he sent repeated correspondence to the elections office but received no information about a possible investigation.

“They have a procedure in Florida to deal with it, but nobody wants to deal with it,” he says.

“Nobody is holding their feet to the fire, nobody knows what the law is, and the public is asleep on this,” Skinner says.

“If we are going to have a system people will believe in, we have to have a clean system that everyone agrees is clean,” he says.

In its litigation in Broward County, lawyers for the ACRU are hoping that a pending ruling by the federal judge in their case will help establish an enforceable national standard for voter roll maintenance.

In a five-day trial last summer, ACRU lawyers charged that the county’s voter list maintenance procedures were ineffective or nonexistent.

They say they are not trying to get eligible voters kicked off the rolls. Their goal is not disenfranchisement but reasonable enforcement, they say.

In defending her approach to voter roll maintenance, Snipes says the process of removing someone from the voter rolls is significantly more difficult and time-consuming than her critics understand.

Each registrant must be checked individually and the information verified through official documents, she said during the trial in July.

In her testimony, Snipes acknowledged that she has encountered cases of suspected voter fraud in Broward. The most recent case, she said, was a person accused of voting twice. It was referred to the state attorney’s office for possible prosecution.

But she said she also has encountered cases of suspected fraud that turned out not to be fraud. In 2012, state officials sent election supervisors a list of registered voters suspected of being noncitizens. Snipes said the first person on her list was a military veteran who had become a US citizen. She said he was alarmed that officials were challenging his right to vote.

'Willful blindness'

In his closing argument in the Broward case, a lawyer for the ACRU, J. Christian Adams, said Snipes and members of her office were engaging in “willful blindness to problems going back years.”

Adams, who is also a member of Mr. Trump’s Election Integrity Commission, said Broward’s election department was doing the “bare minimum” to maintain the county’s voter roll. Florida law provides many other tools that officials could use to keep the registration list clean, but Snipes and her staff choose to ignore those tools, he said.

Snipes’ lawyer, Burnadette Norris-Weeks, rejected claims that the elections office was disengaged and ineffective.

“We comply with Florida statutes in every respect,” she told the judge. “The office has gone above and beyond.”

She added: “At every step of the way they want Your Honor to believe there is chaos in the supervisor of elections office, and there is not.”

Ms. Norris-Weeks said the lawsuit was part of a larger effort by conservative groups to reshape election law. “We are not going to be bullied,” she said.

Lawyers with the Service Employees International Union and Demos, a liberal advocacy group, intervened in the Broward case in defense of Snipes and her approach to voter list maintenance.

Kali Bracey, a Washington lawyer, told the judge that there is no evidence that a high registration rate is a problem.

“The record shows that the defendant does substantial list maintenance and is using more tools than Florida law requires,” she said. Snipes does not use all the tools potentially available for list maintenance, but that isn’t required, Ms. Bracey said.

“The plaintiffs’ goal is to obtain an overly broad ruling to scare counties into removing voters who should be on the rolls,” the lawyer said in her closing argument.

Gabbay, the Republican organizer, is eagerly awaiting a decision in the Broward case. He says his research was undertaken out of a sense of public service rather than for any partisan advantage.

“It was just for the purpose of clearing up the voter rolls in my community,” he says. “It was done with the idea that if you clean up the voter rolls it makes it easier for Dr. Snipes and it makes it easier for me.”

When he presented his work to the elections office in October 2015, officials stalled for months before taking action.

Snipes eventually removed about 200 individuals from the voter rolls in early 2016. Then, three months after the November 2016 election, Snipes removed 379 more names from the voter rolls in Gabbay’s precinct.

To Gabbay and other Republicans, waiting until after the election looks like a partisan tactic that leaves open the door to fraud.

“She was just doing what she felt was good enough,” Gabbay says. “Had I not contacted her, who knows if any of those people would have been taken off [the voter rolls].”

Part 1: Could Henny Nelson, age 131, help Russia rig an election?

Part 3: How 'paper' can protect US elections from foreign invaders

Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters

Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf attends a news conference at the Presidential Palace in Monrovia, Liberia on Oct. 12, 2017. As Ms. Johnson prepares to step down, many Liberian women are wondering what happened to the promises that their 'Ma Ellen' made when she was first elected 12 years ago.

Update: This story was updated at 12:10 p.m., Nov. 6., after Liberia’s Supreme Court halted the runoff election.

Beside a busy strip of road near the downtown of Liberia’s capital city, a tall mural tells the story of the country’s recent history – or at least, someone’s version of it.

“MA ELLEN,” it says in the familiar language Liberians often use to describe their president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. “THANKS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND FOR THE PEACE.”

Below the words are a portrait of President Sirleaf, her face creased by smile lines, and a series of idyllic scenes – a lush university campus, a tidy hospital, a bridge flanked by palm trees.

To many who have watched Sirleaf’s career from afar, this is a neat summary of her legacy. Since she became the first woman elected president of an African country in 2005, Sirleaf’s accomplishments have been, in many ways, soaring.

She presided over a dozen years of peace – no small feat given the more than a dozen years of war that preceded them. Her administration built roads and schools and clinics, and convinced the international community to write off nearly $5 billion of Liberia’s wartime debt. There is a Nobel Peace Prize on her mantle. Bono has called her a hero. 

But for Liberians, who will soon elect her successor, Ma Ellen’s legacy is far less settled. Here, in the informal debating halls of the country’s taxis, markets, and bars, the glittering accomplishments that have earned Sirleaf international acclaim are tallied alongside an equally long list of perceived failures: Her administration pledged to fight corruption, then turned out as nepotistic as its predecessors. She presided over a dramatic economic downturn. She didn’t do enough to stop the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history.

And for Liberian women, there’s one more.

“When she first ran [in 2005] she spoke a lot to us, and about us,” says Quita Paye, who sells dented water bottles full of neon-red palm oil in Monrovia’s Nancy Doe market. “So I was really surprised to see there was no change for women when she became president.”

Many Liberian women, indeed, speak of Sirleaf’s tenure in ways at once proud and wounded. She rewrote the script for what was possible for Liberian women, they say, but most women still don’t have a part in that story.  

“She was able to shatter the myth that women cannot be leaders,” says Korto Williams, country director for ActionAid Liberia and a leading feminist activist. And just having a woman in the Executive Mansion, she says, gave a gravity to the concerns of women’s rights activists that they had never had before. “Symbolically her presence was very important. But in terms of concrete actions to dismantle the oppression of women, there’s been much less of that.” 

Ryan Lenora Brown

Activists demonstrating against proposed changes to Liberia's anti-rape law pass a mural commemorating President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf near downtown Monrovia in October 2017. Many women's rights activists in Liberia feel the country's first female president has not done enough to support their interests during her 12 years in office.

Women waging peace

Indeed, in many ways, it wasn’t a female president who radically changed the shape of the world for Liberian women so much as the garish civil war that came before.

For more than a decade in the 1990s and early 2000s, much of Liberia all but emptied of men and boys, an entire generation abducted or recruited to fight the country’s brutal guerrilla conflict.

In Liberia’s lush green villages and rundown cities, in the walled estates of the wealthy and the poorest rural hamlets, that left only one option for who would run society: women.

Women took over households, but also family pocketbooks. At the time, the country had almost no functioning formal economy, but hundreds of thousands of women made their way as small-time traders, so-called market women, hustling bright pink kola nuts and jugs of palm oil and crumbling hunks of soap to whoever could still afford to buy. 

And when the war grew too interminable to bear, it was these same market women who brought it to an end. In 2003, the activist group Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace met with the country’s then-president, Charles Taylor, and cajoled him to attend peace talks with rebel leaders in Ghana. Some went to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where rebel leaders were staying, and convinced them to come too.

Where the men went, the women followed. For eight weeks, the women gathered daily outside the negotiations in Accra, Ghana’s capital, singing and praying. But as the talks dragged on and violence in Liberia continued, they took a more radical tact. Two hundred women surrounded the building, locking arms. When police tried to disperse them, they threatened to take off their clothes – meant to shame the men into submission. 

Three weeks later, Mr. Taylor resigned.

And suddenly the idea that a woman could lead Liberia didn’t seem so radical anymore.

“By the end of the war, women had realized they could be political beings, and some men had too,” says Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian political analyst who also worked for Sirleaf during her first term and recently co-authored with Ms. Williams an opinion piece on the legacy of her presidency. “It’s no coincidence that Sirleaf was able to ride this wave of renewed autonomy.”

'I'll fix this'

But Sirleaf was in some ways an unlikely figurehead for that new awakening. Harvard-educated, she had grown up among the country’s Americo-Liberian, or “Congo,” elite – descendants of the American slaves who had settled in Liberia in the 1820s and built a new plantation society, this time with themselves at the top. Though she herself wasn’t “Congo,” and spoke often of a grandmother who was a market woman, Sirleaf’s résumé was white-collar all the way down, with high-level stints at the World Bank, the United Nations, and Citibank.

Still, she endeared herself to Liberia’s women, many of whom were fed up with the way men had run their country into the ground.

Mary Flomo remembers the first time she saw Sirleaf during the presidential campaign in 2005, hiking up her dress and wading through the flooded market where Ms. Flomo worked as a trader. During the war, big chunks of the market’s tin ceiling had been stolen. Sections of the walls had collapsed. During the rainy season, the place flooded almost daily. 

“And she just walked right through the water and gathered us around and said, ‘I’ll fix this,’ ” Ms. Flomo recalls. “We were so proud of her.” 

In November 2005, women like Flomo went to polls for her in the hundreds of thousands. When the results came back, they’d done something that had eluded even many of the world’s most “developed” countries – they had elected a woman to their highest office.

“Liberian women endured the injustices during the years of our civil war, gang-raped at will, forced into domestic slavery – yet it was the women who labored, who advocated for peace throughout our region,” Sirleaf told the crowd of international notables gathered at her inauguration in January 2006. “My administration shall endeavor to give Liberian women prominence in all the affairs of the country.”

At first, that goal was evident. In Sirleaf’s early days in office, she appointed women to head crucial ministries like finance and justice. She put a woman at the helm of the national police force, and another atop the commission on refugees.

She also quickly pledged her support for the country’s new anti-rape law, which activists had passed through the country’s transitional parliament the year before her election.

During the war, rape had been a devastating and common weapon. For many Liberian women, simply laying down a punishment was a way of writing their struggles back into history.

Then, in 2008, Sirleaf announced the creation of a special court, dubbed Criminal Court E, to deal exclusively with sexual violence, so those cases could be fast-tracked through the backlogged criminal justice system.

Post-vote disappointments

But many activists grew restless. For all her campaign talk about women’s empowerment, they thought, it hardly seemed the focus of her administration. And many gestures stung of tokenism. 

Criminal Court E, for instance, had vanishingly few successful prosecutions, in large part because the country still had no system for collecting forensic evidence, and many police officers were too poorly trained and resourced to follow through on sexual assault cases.

Meanwhile, she appointed two of her sons and a stepson to high-level government posts and filled her cabinet largely with men – many of them unusually young and well connected, notes Ms. Pailey.

“What it comes down to is this: President Sirleaf is a politician, not a feminist,” says Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist and former ally who in 2011 shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Sirleaf and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman. “She needed votes to get elected, she needed international limelight for her political program, and it was women’s agenda that could give it to her.” 

A few years in, market women like Ms. Paye and Flomo were beginning to lose hope. Sure, their markets were cleaner now; they had electricity. Some even provided childcare – all Sirleaf initiatives. But the economy wasn’t improving as quickly as they had hoped. People were still too poor to buy most goods, and for market women, customers were everything.

Not all of that was Sirleaf’s fault. Many Liberians looked back fondly on Taylor’s war-time presidency, when strict price controls had kept staples cheap. And a massive outbreak of Ebola gutted Liberia’s still-fragile economy in 2014 (though many say the president’s slow and heavy-handed response also made the crisis worse). 

Some activists, meanwhile, noted with regret that although she regularly made time for meetings with up-and-coming African female politicians, she was a stranger to most Liberian women.

“Most women in this country didn’t get to know her story,” says MacDella Cooper, the only female candidate for president in this year’s election. (She was eliminated in the first round). Sure, Sirleaf had grown up privileged, but she had experienced the stinging sexism of Liberian society all the same. She left her husband in the early 1960s, for instance, after he regularly beat her. “But not many people know her struggle,” Ms. Cooper says. “She didn’t appeal to women in that way.” 

Still, to many of her critics, she would always be remembered not merely as a president who failed, but as a woman who failed.

“After this, any woman who says she wants to be president, I will not vote for her,” says Flomo, the market trader. “We have seen now that women are too soft to lead.” 

Voters turn the page

And as Liberia’s election season cranked up earlier this year, many of the candidates played on that backlash. “Our pa marry! Our pa marry!” chanted supporters of former soccer star George Weah at a rally for his campaign in early October, using Liberian English.

Translation: Our candidate is married, a family values man. Sirleaf, on the other hand, divorced in 1961 and hasn’t remarried.

And from the ruling Unity Party, Sirleaf’s own: “Our ma spoilt it, our pa will fix it.” Sirleaf, in other words, had messed up the country. But her vice president, Joseph Boakai, could be counted on to set things right. (Mr. Boakai recently joined a last-minute challenge to the election results, which contends, among other things, that Sirleaf interfered in voting by meeting privately with electoral officials shortly before election day. On Nov. 6, the Supreme Court halted preparations for the runoff vote, originally planned for Nov. 7, until the National Elections Commission investigates those allegations.)

But for activists, there were soon bigger concerns than sexist trash-talking. Less than a week before the first round of the election last month, Liberia’s senate quietly voted in favor of an amendment to the country’s anti-rape law, which would allow accused out on bail before their trials.

The timing felt calculated. By the time the law traveled through the House of Representatives and to the desk of the president, it was very likely that president wouldn’t be Ellen Johnson Sirleaf anymore. None of her would-be successors had shown much interest in protecting the law whose implementation was a signature accomplishment of her presidency. (In an interview with the Monitor and other foreign journalists, Mr. Boakai said he “couldn’t say” whether he would oppose the amendment or not. “We should not be hasty,” he explained.)

So on a bright blue morning the day before the election, a few hundred activists gathered in Monrovia and began marching down the city’s main drag, Tubman Boulevard, toward Congress. As they streamed past the mural of Sirleaf, they waved their own version of the country’s history in front of their president’s.

“Liberian women deserve better,” read one of their hand-painted signs.

“Over ten years later and we still have to fight about rape,” said a second. 

As another woman walked past the hopeful pictures of hydroelectric dams and vocational schools built by Sirleaf’s administration, she heaved an even blunter message skyward: “Why is this happening?” 

But as the women – and a few men – streamed past, men gathered on the sidewalks eyed them suspiciously.

“If someone says they were raped, there’s no investigation. They just throw him in jail,” muttered Abemego Bomwin.

“Police believe everything a woman says,” his friend Timothy Rodell agreed. “They never even ask a man for his side.” 

Further down the road, another man cupped his hands and shouted, “You wear short pants, you ask for this.” 

The activists didn’t reply.  

“As much as Sirleaf had her issues, there was something symbolic about having a woman president to keep us and our issues going,” says Naomi Tulay-Solanke, executive director of community health for ActionAid, who helped organize the march. “The small things we got, they were a foundation. But now we could lose it all.”

Tecee Boley contributed reporting.

AP Photo

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott attends a vigil held for the victims of a Nov. 5 fatal shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas.

 Just hours after the Nov. 5 mass shooting at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, about a hundred people held a vigil for the victims. Some mourned, some prayed, some held candles high. To one local resident, Mike Gonzales, the vigil’s purpose was both simple and grand: “to show the world that now, in the midst of darkness, there is light.”

His point reflects the idea that houses of worship play a larger role in society than merely a place for people to attend religious services. They are practical purveyors of hope, forgiveness, and love in everyday life. And when a sacred place, whether it be a church, temple, or mosque, is the scene of violence, those qualities of thought are evermore present and in demand. They allow people to displace the hate behind a killing rather than respond with hate.

Violence at houses of worship is done for various reasons, from bigotry to vendetta. The 2015 massacre of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, was a racist act. The 2012 killing of six at a Wisconsin Sikh temple was done out of religious prejudice. So far, preliminary evidence in the Texas killings suggests the motive might be revenge at the killer’s former in-laws who sometimes attended the church.

The FBI reports that only 3.8 percent of the mass killings in the United States between 2000 and 2013 took place at churches. Yet any violence at religious sites seems particularly out of place. Most churches choose to keep an open door with minimal security. They seek to be a welcoming community, a sanctuary from suffering and sin, and a prompter of prayer and humility.

“Evil attacks the weakest,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, after the 2016 killing of a Catholic priest in France. But, he added, evil is defeated by the truth and love of Christ Jesus.

For a community hit by violence at a house of worship, prayer vigils are often the start of a process of coming to terms with such acts and in finding peace. Some find solace in forgiving the killer. Others find peace in renewing the bonds of a sacred community. The point, as Mr. Gonzales said, is to show light in the midst of darkness.