Preparing American Elections for 2019: The Role of Election Workers in the War on Right-wing Electorate Disruption
If there is one group of Americans who understands the risks facing US democracy, it’s election workers who are on the frontlines of managing American elections. Since 2020,reality has changed for many of these government officials who have traditionally been low risk in this kind of public service.
One figure who’s working to recruit right-wing activists to serve as poll workers and watchers is Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who tried to help former President Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election.
And in Michigan’s Kent County, a Republican serving as a poll worker for the first time was recently charged with two felonies after allegedly tampering with an election computer during that state’s August primaries.
“There are opportunities for election deniers to attack our elections system if they fly under the radar,” Byrum said. “Those election deniers who intentionally work to undermine the election will be caught, but at the expense of voter confidence.”
The committee has developed a process that can be followed by election officials and law enforcement to prepare for elections. It states that election officials and law enforcement should meet, share their situational knowledge, agree on a vision for establishing order and safety around election spaces, plan for a variety of possible disturbance scenarios and practice their responses ahead of each election.
In Bartow County, Ga., a predominantly conservative county in the northwestern corner of the state, Joseph Kirk is an election supervisor and he said he trusts his team when it comes to recruiting potential poll workers. Instead, he relies on informative training and the code of conduct to ensure poll workers understand their roles and responsibilities.
What’s on your radar? Requests for voter records from Winnebago County, Wis., during midterm election season, and what they have to do
“If they violate our code of conduct we will take the appropriate action,” he said. “I think it’s important for the community to know that we take that code of conduct seriously and hold ourselves to that standard.”
Kirk and his team also ensure tasks are completed in teams of two, a critical rule that Levine, of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, favors. This includes everything from opening equipment to checking voters in, using peer-to-peer accountability as a system of checks and balances.
Some people in the electorate want to be more involved in the process of selecting election officials, according to Craig Latimer, who runs elections in the county.
“We know there are people who are doubters who want to be poll workers,” Latimer told NPR. “Quite frankly, I don’t have a problem with that. I’d like for them to come in and see what the real process is.”
The worst-case scenario, Levine said, would be Americans losing faith in the electoral process as a result of poll worker concerns and isolated incidents. He said that the best way for the public to help would be to show up on Election Day.
“I think it’s critical that people are making sure that they’re participating in the process,” Levine told NPR. “And I do think that the higher the turnout, the less likelihood that bad actors can successfully meddle in American elections.”
“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. “It should be number one.”
They did not stop there again. Many of my colleagues and I believe that some of the records requests are intended to stymies our operations and that they came from election deniers. Our county has received lots of requests for the same documents that look to be copied and pasted from the same template. In a small office like mine, these requests divert significant amounts of my time and resources that could be otherwise spent on planning the next election.
Sue Ertmer, the county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., received over 100 requests for records in just a few weeks. It gets harder to get other things done when you get those types of requests. “It’s a little overwhelming.”
The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials said that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and peddler of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, encouraged supporters to submit them. The election deniers gave instructions on how to file records requests at the seminar.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. He added that local supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, commonly called cast vote records, from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.
The Case for a Fair and Free Voting Process: Natalie Adona, Clerk-Recorder Elect, Nevada County, California
Editor’s Note: This roundup is part of the CNN Opinion series “America’s Future Starts Now,” in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation and experts offer their proposed solutions. The views expressed in these commentaries are the authors’ own. Read more opinion at CNN.
In January, I gave a speech and this is the beginning. It was clear to me then – when I served as the city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan – that a shift in public perception of our elections and election officials was well underway.
November 3, 2020, was a strangely quiet and calm Election Day in Nevada County, California, where I help run the voting process. Most voters in this purple county had already cast their ballots by mail. And those who did come to vote in-person cast their ballots in an orderly and respectful fashion.
They made me a target of their frustration. They falsely accused me of violating state campaign finance laws, of partaking in unspecified acts of corruption and of lying about my work experience. Some even subjected me to racist vitriol in a mailer that was distributed countywide. At one point I had a restraining order against someone who was threatening me.
Despite these newfound risks, I remain committed to my job and to my role in protecting democracy. And in the years and months since the 2020 election, my office has worked tirelessly with local, state and federal partners to improve communications, strengthen security protocols, mitigate threats and increase staff training opportunities.
The elections must be free and fair if both sides of the aisle put country before party. If you think that is impossible, let the official show you how to do it.
Natalie Adona is the clerk-recorder elect, a non-partisan office, in Nevada County, California. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks. Adona is an advisory board member of the Election Official Legal Defense Network, an editorial board member for the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice, a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Task Force and a participant in the Issue. There is a campaign called “Faces of Democracy”.
In late September 2020, the Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management called the who’s who of Philadelphia government to the Emergency Operations Center for a more than three-hour tabletop exercise on the 2020 presidential election. The worst case scenarios presented by a facilitator helped everyone to work on addressing problems that arose in the meeting.
Many Democrats chose to vote by mail. As a result, when the in-person results came in on election night, Trump was winning Pennsylvania and several other battleground states. Trump declared victory early Wednesday. But his margin over Biden started to close as mail-in ballots were counted. Trump and his legal team then tried every avenue to stop the count but were unsuccessful each time.
By week’s end, Biden would take the lead and demonstrations in and around Philadelphia would become violent. After the initial vote count is largely completed, there is no end in sight as weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny loom.
During this somewhat prophetic scenario, I watched the top officials in the room express serious concern. As extreme as this scenario sounded, it also felt entirely plausible.
I didn’t fully comprehend how much of a risk this would pose to me at the time. When I ran for city commissioner, I began every speech by explaining that the commissioners run Philadelphia’s elections. This had typically been a low-profile office that served a critical democratic function but carried a relatively low profile and security risk.
A few days after the election, I made the mistake of leaving the bubble of the convention center where the votes were still being counted to get some air. A member of Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign videotaped my attack, followed me outside and said he would kill me. After a video of me appeared on the internet, I received a lot of attacks for my appearance, as well as some mocking my weight, and some threatening my life, just like it is to women in politics.
One of the threats turned out to be credible, and I had two plain-clothes Philadelphia police officers assigned to follow me wherever I went – including the bathroom. I avoided engaging in basic daily activities, such as getting my hair done, because I did not want to have to explain to my hairdresser who my escorts were.
Election Day 1996: When I Was In the Spot: The Philadelphia Election Commission as a Public Works Official and the Russian Attempt to Attack the People
Election Day has always been a significant day in my life. My mother was the local committee person in our neighborhood. I always followed the polls on Election Day since she was a single mom. I used to work at a barber shop where I spinning on a chair taking everything in from the polling place.
I don’t have a barber shop like my mother. They need to invest in our schools so that they can teach civics education and young people how precious democratic ideals are.
The three-member board of elected officials in charge of elections and voter registration in the city of Philadelphia is chaired by Lisa Deeley, a Democrat.
When the Michigan election results were stopped due to an election law violation, and when the Russian attempt to interfere in our politics and social media was made public, a lot of it took place in the years since.
Not surprisingly, it led some to doubt our very election process. The process began as a seed, but by the next year, it was becoming a weed that was suffocating the profession.
The November election only made my fears worse. The attention of the nation was on Michigan after I oversaw the administration of the most challenging election of my career. Unfortunately, my team and I made an error in resubmitting an absentee voter file on election night – a mistake we quickly caught and corrected the morning after the election.
However, several days later, a leading national figure held a press conference in Michigan and misrepresented what had happened, falsely claiming that 2,000 votes for one presidential candidate had gone to another – thus pushing my colleagues and I into the national spotlight.
I was one of many election officials that were made to be enemies of the people. And the ongoing attacks against officials like me have, unsurprisingly, led to large numbers of resignations – and the loss of many years of election experience and knowledge with it. The people who are responsible for democracy have continued to decline in confidence.
My hope is that more election officials follow our guidelines so that public servants can once again do their jobs without fearing for their lives.
The Colorado Department of State accidentally sent voter registration notices to 30,000 non-citizens who were not citizens: How quote marks turned a story about a clerical error into one about voter f
Tina Barton was appointed the city clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan. She is a senior election expert with The Elections Group.
A clerical mistake by Colorado election officials weeks ahead of the November election has taken on a conspiratorial spin, researchers found via Twitter data.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s office, which oversees the state’s elections, accidentally mailed about 30,000 postcards to non-citizens who were not eligible to vote containing instructions for how to register. Some of the people who received the postcards are living outside of the country.
The University of Washington and the Election Integrity Partnership monitored social media engagement with the story but found no change over the weekend.
But tweets casting doubt on whether or not the mailings were really an accident started almost immediately, says Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
The online focus on wrongdoing comes as Republicans allied with former president Donald Trump have used debunked conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election, intimidate election workers and make repeated false claims that Democrats are registering people living in the country illegally to swing elections in their favor.
On Sunday, a conservative social media personality with about 20,000 followers tweeted “Colorado accidentally sent voter registration notices to 30,000 residents who are not citizens” without further comment, an accurate statement. Many of the responses have quotation marks around them.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1128968745/how-quotation-marks-turned-a-story-about-a-clerical-error-into-one-about-voter-f
Comment on “How quotation marks turned a story about a computerical error into one about voter f” by A.C. Caulfield
“As it goes into bigger audiences, you start to see claims that are more explicit than those of the beginning, and that seems to coincide with the fact that it’s getting bigger.” Caufield says.
Red State, a conservative website with 300,000 followers, included a quotation mark in its story headline about a mistake. The writer claimed that the incident suggested bigger issues with Colorado’s voter registration system.
The story picked up more steam after conservative media personalities took to the internet and shared the AP story.
By Tuesday, five days after the first story was published, former president Donald Trump posted a story about the mistake on his website, Truth Social. That story also used a headline with quotation marks around the word “accidental” even as the body of the story included a quote emphasizing that there are policies “in place to make sure mistakes don’t result in disaster.”
“We have over 3,000 counties in the U.S…in terms of just a numbers game, you’re going to see errors made [in election administration]” Caulfield says. Most of the errors will be low impact because we’ve come up with systems and processes and checks.
Colorado Secretary of State said in her statement that the incident was likely to become fodder for actors who were interested in casting doubts on elections. She said “we wanted to communicate quickly and openly with Coloradans about the situation.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1128968745/how-quotation-marks-turned-a-story-about-a-clerical-error-into-one-about-voter-f
The Case for a Chain of Custody in the Early Voting Dropbox of Maricopa County, Texas: The Secretary of State’s Office Revisited
He says that when people start to speculate and theorize without background information, the conversations are more productive. Things go off the rails quite a bit.
The location was at the Juvenile Justice Court drop box in Mesa, within Maricopa County. The secretary of state’s office talked to the voter, informed Maricopa County, and referred the report to the DOJ and Arizona attorney general for further investigation.
A voter reports being followed by a group of people when they attempt to drop their ballot off at an early voting drop box on Monday.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer held a news conference last week and told reporters that people had been recording voters dropping off their ballots at the Mesa drop box. But this new complaint is an escalation from those initial reports.
“Although Harris County’s voting programs in 2020 were lauded by voting rights advocates, GOP state leaders have worked to shut down many of them,” Evbagharu said. “We are working with the Texas Democratic Party and have reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice to express our concerns about what appears to be a calculated assault by Republican leaders on Harris County elections.”
The teams are needed, the office of the secretary of state said, due to their findings in an audit of the 2020 presidential election in Harris County.
Maricopa County was the site of repeated “audits” after the 2020 election – including the sham partisan review conducted by the now-defunct firm known as Cyber Ninjas. Both political parties are now girding for another potential battle over the election results in a state Biden won by less than 10,500 votes. The top of the ticket are setting that tone.
The forensic audit division sent a letter to the elections administrator in Harris County that said that there were mobile ballot boxes that lacked proper chain ofcustody from the 2020 general election.
The chair of the Harris County Democrats said that the Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton were working overtime to destroy voter confidence and sow doubt in the election process. He stated that the letter from the secretary of state’s office is like an attack on drive-through voting which expanded voting access during the COVID epidemic.
The statement from the secretary of state was that the suggestions from the three officials were false and a distortion of the law to try to fool voters, the press and the Department.
“We send them to many other counties, large and small, every single year,” Taylor said. If 15 registered voters or more request election inspectors to be present in their county, this is a common practice that the office has every year to make sure there are no disagreements in large elections.
Pop into a meeting of the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia, and it may appear like any other eye-glazing gathering of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair.
“We hang our political hats at the door when we come in and do the people’s work,” Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at one meeting earlier this year. “There ain’t no room for politics in elections.”
There is no way that Johnson’s stated beliefs can be easily left at the door. An election-conspiracy believer, Johnson has authored a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and proclaimed that Joe Biden “is an illegitimate president.”
On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell.
CNN had asked Johnson many times, but he declined. But in a February 7 Twitter post responding to various allegations, he accused locals and the media of lying about the intentions and motives of the board; denied that the board’s vote to end Sunday voting was racially motivated; and accused the former county elections supervisor of mishandling the 2020 election. He said the board would work to ensure that “every single voter who wants to vote, and is eligible to vote, is given equal protection of their right.”
In a key battleground state, Johnson is not the only anti-Semite in the election process. In Colorado, Michigan, Nevada and elsewhere, elections officials already have seen MAGA-leaning insiders allow election equipment to be breached, spread baseless fears about voting machine and election security, or take other actions that could stoke voter distrust.
To be sure, election regulations, long-standing rules on auditing and testing of machines, and other layers of oversight offer safeguards for the electoral process.
However, actions by insiders that cast doubt on the fairness of that process – intentionally or not – “could have an impact on whether people perceive the outcome of an election to be real or fake, which is what we continue to see from 2020,” said Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant who previously worked for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Dexter is a democrat on the election board and told CNN that it’s no wonder they have anyone don’t believe in fair elections. “That just makes no sense to me.”
The county will rely on its elections supervisor and staff to fix any mechanical and software problems that might arise in this November’s election after the move.
Georgia Ethics Watchdogs complained to the Attorney General of Georgia about Johnson, the chairman of the election board, allowing his IT company to do work on equipment used in an election, at least one time in October 2021.
While the election board ultimately dropped that plan, emails show Johnson was involved in the effort to hire the firm SullivanStrickler to obtain forensic images of the county’s election system.
“Unless anyone else has any concerns we need to move forward quickly,” Johnson wrote to board members and the county election supervisor about that effort on August 17, 2021.
Investigating Spalding County Election Integrity Matters: A CNN Investigative Report on an Unnamed Counter allegedly Using a Voting Machine
An attorney for SullivanStrickler said the company is still cooperating with law enforcement as it investigates election integrity matters.
An attorney representing the Spalding County elections board told CNN Wednesday that a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, intends to subpoena Johnson and two other Spalding County officials. According to CNN, the grand jury is looking into attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Georgia Ethics Watchdogs said it was a scary situation. Somebody has to investigate and make sure that the laws that we know aren’t being broken.
According to a political scientist at Reed College, many election officials are reporting high levels of stress and burnout. Some have experienced abuse and harassment from their neighbors, even if they are not related.
Lake Township Clerk Korinda Winkelmann told state authorities investigating voting machine breaches that she turned over a tabulator and a laptop computer that served as a poll book to an unnamed person who claimed to be an investigator conducting an audit of the election. During her interview with investigators, Winkelmann said she knew she wasn’t supposed to give the tabulator to them, but decided to because they were doing an audit. According to a police report, she said she thought there was election fraud in 2020, but it wasn’t in her township. Winkelmann declined comment to CNN.
She told CNN that she was terrified. I didn’t know what to think from the beginning. But I was told they’d contacted … the county clerk, and that she had said, ‘yes’ to the audit, which makes no sense.”
In a video of the incident obtained by CNN, and previously reported by the Traverse City Record-Eagle, Keller is seen asking whether the men are “from the state or anything?”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
Sheriff David Mahoney, the Secretary of State, and the Hart InterCivic Bureau of Elections: a woman who claimed to have evidence of election fraud
There was a plot to access the tabulator that was traced to a woman named Tera Jackson, who claimed to have evidence of fraud tied to data held by the Vatican on a satellite. Jackson pleaded guilty in February to a reduced charge stemming from the incident. No one else was charged.
It was silly and bungled. But I was too scared to do anything,” Keller said. I was intimidated by being new to being a clerk and I questioned it a lot.
Election conspiracists in Michigan have managed to gain access to at least five other vote-counting machines, called tabulators, and in some cases also to the software used to operate them.
The secretary of state stripped Scott of his election duties after she spread election misinformation and refused to allow routine maintenance on voting machines. That has forced Hillsdale County to take over running Adams Township’s elections since October 2021, Abe Dane, chief deputy clerk of the county, told CNN in an email.
Scott perpetuates the myth that our Hart InterCivic election management system is connected to the internet or contains voter-specific data. In August, in an email obtained by CNN, Scott told other clerks in the state to “uphold election integrity” by ignoring a directive about voting data from the Michigan Bureau of Elections, which she called “the unelected bureaucratic office.”
Scott’s attorney, Stefanie Lambert, said her client refused to comply with a directive she contends violated the law. Lambert reiterated the baseless claim that the state’s elections are not secure.
According to David Mahoney, the number of sheriffs who are against such ideas is less than 2% of all sheriffs. He said in his 41-year law enforcement career in Dane County, Wisconsin, he never investigated election fraud – because such responsibilities fall to county clerks or state election officials, not sheriffs.
Democratic Democrat Sen. Mark Kampf’s Theorem on Voting Machines: An Inappropriate Election in Nye County, Nevada
“They’re very surprised and disappointed,” he said. The media sources and the politicians they listen to are usually on the Republican side.
In Nye County, Nevada, a veteran GOP clerk, who had been there for 22 years, decided to quit in August.
The final straw: County commissioners – based on meritless suspicions of voting machines – voted to have the 2022 general election ballots counted by hand.
Her replacement, interim clerk Mark Kampf, insists that Trump won in 2020, and that voters in Nye County no longer trust electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure.
Nye County would be one of the first in the country to use hand-counting paper ballots instead of electronic machines in this November’s election. Frank Carbone, chairman of the Nye County Commission, said the commission hopes to remove the machines completely in the future.
Nevada election officials including the GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske say their voting machines have been reliable, accurate and connected to the internet. ballots can be verified easily by paper record, as noted by Cegavske.
On October 17 the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency request to challenge the hand-count plan. The group asked the court to rule by October 21, four days before county officials plan to start hand-counting mail-in ballots. CNN did not get a reply from Kampf.
Jim Hindle was elected clerk in June in Storey County, a county of 4,000 people outside of Reno. Hindle is one of six Nevada Republicans who signed a false certificate pledging to give the state’s electoral votes to Trump, even though Biden won Nevada.
The vice chair of Nevada Republican Party, Doreayne “Dore” Nevin, had to leave her post early after being defeated in the GOP’s June primary by Lance Hindle. In an August email obtained by CNN, then-clerk Nevin wrote, “It breaks my heart because I do love my job and that’s why I ran not because I’m a politician like Jim.” Hindle declined to answer questions from CNN.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html
Distancing himself from the Secretary of State through the internet: The case for Dallas Schroeder (R-Arkansas)
Dallas Schroeder, a clerk in the county, was unable to preside over the November election because of the objection from the secretary of state. In June, he was stopped from presiding over the primary election due to the state finding that he had copied data from two election-systems hard drives. While that violated the state’s election regulations, Schroeder has tried to justify his actions with the misleading claim that voting machines contain “wireless devices” that can be hacked through the internet.
He told CNN that every machine of the company has a wireless device in it and there is no way to know if it has been used.
Schroeder “provided those copies to individuals not authorized to possess these components,” according to Griswold’s office, which launched an investigation into Schroeder, and then sued him.
Election truth has never really stopped circulating, whether on social media or candidate efforts. Some candidates this fall – such as Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona – have adopted Trump’s 2020 approach and refuse to say they’ll accept the election results if they lose.
Voting is about to start. Colorado mailed out ballots for the November election on Monday. Mail-in ballots are already being used in some key battleground states. But if the midterm on November 8 is anything like the 2020 election, officials may find that their challenges are just beginning.
“If political leaders are unhappy with the election results and use that distrust to challenge them and further undermine confidence in the American, that’s probably the biggest risk,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center.
What Do Early Voter Advances Mean for the Georgian Elections? Editor’s Note: Early Voting in the Trump Era is Hard to Predict
The note is Editor’s Note. Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He writes regularly for the Georgia Recorder. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. The views are of his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
The number of voters who have cast their ballots in early voting in Georgia is approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season like this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?
It’s difficult to say what outcomes will be. High voter turnout doesn’t help Democrats in the Trump era even though it used to, and we don’t know how much the early-voter surge means to voters who wouldn’t normally cast a ballot. With many factors at play this year, it’s hard to know what will sway voters to the polls.
The uncertainty is a problem for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. With so many variables in a tumultuous year it is a caution to not put too much credence in pollsters work.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for it, had already conceded that voter fraud played no role in recent election outcomes. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice and state and federal judges all agreed that we had safe, secure, honest elections. And if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes, what was?
That’s what happens when you sell people on a false narrative, then rewrite state law to encourage taking action on that false narrative. If voting is being allowed, then it must be because of confidence in voting.
Democrats have built an effective, well-funded voter-protection apparatus to help people overcome whatever bureaucratic hurdles are placed between them and the ballot box.
It’s critical that the last point is important. The changes to the law made it harder to vote, and the reduction of drop boxes in urban areas, were made by Republicans to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.
All the same, election denial and voter intimidation efforts are well-organized across the United States. It is critically important to continue to monitor legal developments leading up to the midterm election to preserve a tradition all Americans should be proud of: free, fair, secure and accurate elections.
The consequences of that bad-faith narrative ought to worry us. The electoral system was used as an excuse to suppress voting by Trump in 2020 because he was distrustful of the system and wanted to treat election outcomes as illegitimate.
Trump is still making that argument to this day, telling supporters at rallies this fall that “I don’t believe we’ll have a fair election again. I do not believe it.
Georgia Republicans added a clarifying statement to a section of state law regarding how a voter can challenge the eligibility of other voters to vote. It now says that “There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge.” The new law also requires local election boards to hold a hearing on such challenges within 10 business days.
Around the state, conservatives are attempting to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on extremely flimsy grounds and are growing frustrated that those challenges keep failing.
“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. “Get your county in order or get your things in order.”
The Justice Department filing dovetailed with some of the arguments put forward by the League of Women Voters, specifically claiming there aren’t constitutional protections for election vigilantism.
Some voters feel intimidated by the people taking part in such activities because they are motivated by the fake-2000 Mules conspiracy depicted in the film. Indeed, Arizona voters submitted sworn statements to the court that the ballot box surveillance had a chilling effect on their inclination to vote by absentee ballot. The people taking the photographs of the voters license plate number were surveilling the ballot drop boxes.
The League of Women Voters is still pressing for a court order to specifically ban, among other things, armed vigilantes from congregating near the drop boxes. A hearing is slated for Tuesday.
In a related case brought by separate groups, a federal judge declined to issue a court order prohibiting the right-wing activists from gathering near drop boxes or photographing voters near drop boxes. District Judge Michael Liburdi, who is overseeing both cases, said there were legitimate concerns about the conduct but there wasn’t enough evidence at this stage to restrict anyone’s First Amendment rights.
The Justice Department said that a person’s refusal to pay taxes does not make her protected speech, even though she wants to express disapproval of the IRS.
The Justice Department stated in a filing on Monday that the right to assembly of the First Amendment does not allow people to coercing voters.
Last week, Attorney General Garland spoke out against voter intimidation during the election.
A group of voters gathered at a high school to hear former President Barack Obama speak.
They said they will not allow their voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up in their states, and that they will defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election denials.
As President Joe Biden warned Americans from Washington, DC, on Wednesday night that democracy is at stake, it’s here in Arizona that democratic institutions look most fragile ahead of next week’s midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election, in which Arizona is likely to be a pivotal battleground.
Rodriguez said that it was scary that Republicans in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters because of President Donald Trump’s statements about the election.
What are they working on, aside from Trump’s talking points? Rodriguez said. She noted that “a lot of Trumpers” are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her Glendale, Arizona, neighborhood. They are showing up at the election sites with guns on their hips, and walking around with them. Do they believe that their intimidation tactics are going to work?
After all, Obama fought. He left. He was the American Nazi Party and he wasn’t: a federal judge bans body armor from clean elections USA
Hobbs touted her record as secretary of state Wednesday night. She said she stood for democracy when she refused to give in to insurrectionists who surrounded her home after certifying the 2020 election.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed her in a dead heat race with Lake. Nathan L. Gonzalez rates the race as a toss-up.
As Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the election, the state was worried about Mark Kelly, who is currently in a close race with Masters. The fact that those top statewide contests may be decided on a razor’s edge is what brought Obama to the Grand Canyon State as he seeks to fire up the Democratic base and make sure that young voters and Latino voters – who will be critical to victory in Arizona – turn out in a midterm election year.
Biden had to make his argument from the other side of the country because he didn’t have an invitation to campaign in some swing states.
The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what brought Keith Greenberg, a registered Republican from Maricopa County, to Obama’s rally. He said in an interview that he wasn’t voting for Democrats in this election, he is voting against the Trump ticket.
Greenberg said that the 2020 election was fair and honest, and that he was a part of the Republican Party. “That’s more like the American Nazi Party and I can’t put up with that – the lie.”
Greenberg said that if the Trump ticket won, the state of Arizona had lost its mind. This is no longer a safe place to live. If Mark would win, he would say that he didn’t care what the people voted. What is the point of this if I am going to do it? We’ve lost our democracy.”
Voters complained to the Secretary of State after some activists took pictures of them and their licenses because they thought that the so-called “mules” who stuffed election boxes in 2020 were real. A federal judge issued a ruling in one of the cases on Tuesday barring members of a group known as Clean Elections USA – whose leader has falsely asserted the 2020 election was rigged – from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor within 250 feet of drop boxes.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html
How law enforcement officials can help corrupt democrats: A case study of Berks county, Arizona, in light of CNN’s “Election fraud”
A CNN poll conducted on Wednesday showed that 34% of Republicans don’t think Biden won the election, and the other 34% believe Trump won the election.
In Arizona, the Republicans control the party, and have been censured for not being loyal to the former president.
People came to see Obama so they could feel hopeful about the democratic process, says a registered Democrat who lives in a county that is a Republican stronghold.
“With everything, all the rhetoric going on, I think it’s important to really hear from someone – that we trust and we believe in – that we can be hopeful about this election,” she said. “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people waiting. I want to believe that people want to believe in something better, that we are all responsible for our morals and values, and not be deceived by such people.
Holly Manbeck, a lifelong resident that has driven her mother to drop her ballot, said she had heard about a lot of fraud going on in the election. Man Beck wondered about the priority of assigning Deputies to drop box duty. She told CNN that she didn’t want her streets to be unsafe because police are monitoring a box.
To some in Berks County, the deputies are only trying to ensure a fair and clean election. Some people say their presence and questions can intimidate voters and cause conspiracy theories.
Some of them are aligned with so-called “constitutional sheriffs” groups that claim their members have the right to ignore or block federal or state laws they deem unconstitutional and to intervene in elections. While they make up a tiny minority of sheriffs across the US, these law-enforcement officials could play a vital role in efforts to cast doubt on elections and make it easier for partisan officials to overrule voters’ choices this fall and in 2024.
Sheriff Lamb also has allied with Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which claims about 250 members. Mack’s group has called on sheriffs to investigate “election fraud” and wrongly asserts that, “The law enforcement powers held by the sheriff supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.”
Mack’s group has held events around the country, and Lamb has done other outreach to recruit sheriffs to their ideas. Lamb told participants at the True the Vote event that he thought that electoral fraud in the 2020 election was something that must not happen again.
The group also asks “patriots” to report suspected vote fraud to a hotline it operates in conjunction with the Texas-based election-conspiracy group True the Vote.
True the Vote is well known for backing a thoroughly-debunked disinformation film, “2000 Mules,” that baselessly claimed to uncover widespread drop-box ballot fraud in 2020. The leaders of TruetheVote were jailed Monday by a Texas federal judge for refusing to give evidence in a defamation case that they are accused of plagiarizing. The Arizona Attorney General requested the federal authorities to investigate the use of false claims in the Truethe Vote’s efforts to raise money.
Mack is currently a board member of the anti-government Oath Keepers, whose leader is currently being tried for seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.
There are messages being found receptive. At the Las Vegas event featuringCSPOA, the Sheriff from Virginia said after watching the film “2000 Mules” that he thinks the sheriffs should look into it.
Although Kansas election officials have said there is no evidence of widespread fraud, the Johnson County Sheriff has been investigating conspiracy claims for months. Hayden recently appeared to admit that he hadn’t found probable cause of any crimes, but he continues insisting that the 2020 election was rigged. I do not think the people that are running the elections know what is going on. He said in a video posted in September that they are being programmed by foreign entities to manipulate the vote.
In Michigan, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who launched his own fruitless probe of supposed election fraud, is now being investigated by a special prosecutor looking into an alleged criminal conspiracy to unlawfully obtain access to voting machines, as CNN has reported.
Law-enforcement officers are not allowed to be within 100 feet of a polling place during an election, in order to avoid being intimidated by police. Berks County had a ballot drop-box that was not located at a polling place and, according to Georgetown, it should be the equivalent.
“The … aggressive law enforcement presence at drop boxes, especially here, where they’re in secure locations, in government office buildings, is unnecessary,” said Marian Schneider, senior voting rights counsel for ACLU Pennsylvania. “And any time you have law enforcement directly engaging with voters, you have a greater risk of crossing the line to voter intimidation.”
Chapman sent a similar letter in May to the district attorney in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, after he assigned detectives to watch that county’s five drop boxes during the primary election, partly in person and partly via video feed. Jim Martin told the Morning Call he would send a report on his monitoring efforts to Chapman.
There is an editor’s note. Norman Eisen is a political law expert who advised the White House on election law when he served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar. Taylor Redd is a researcher focusing on national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. Read more opinion at CNN.
Efforts to intimidate early voters in Arizona and overwhelm election office in Michigan with frivolous challenges were curbed by major victories in voting rights cases this week.
Clean Elections USA founder Melody Jennings recruited individuals through her network of election deniers on Truth Social. The lawsuit said that armed individuals were watching the drop boxes. They carried weapons while surveilling them, according to the lawsuit, and focused their attention on Arizona’s Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county, where a third of the inhabitants are Hispanic or Latino. In response to news that people were carrying firearms, Jennings posted that she wouldn’t do it, and she preferred people in her group not do it.
Clean Elections USA was ordered by a judge to stop certain forms of voter espionage. They can’t go to within 75 feet of a ballot box, or shout at voters, even outside the perimeter. They are not allowed to carry guns or wear body armor in an expanded scope of 250 feet from drop boxes. Clean Elections USA was ordered to stop posting personal data about people they baselessly accuse of voter fraud.
The group was ordered to stop making false statements about Arizona voter fraud laws. The judge said that the group should post on its website and Truth Social page that it is not illegal to deposit multiple ballots in a ballot drop box. You can deposit ballot for a family member, household member or person that you care for. I ask you to abide by the rules by which I am asking you to adhere with a copy of Arizona law and a judge’s order. Jennings must also post similar language on the Truth Social page @TrumperMel through Election Day. A lawyer for Clean Elections USA and Jennings said the group was likely to appeal on First Amendment grounds.
Meanwhile, in another victory for voting rights, the Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee lost their case Wednesday against the city of Flint’s election clerk and commission.
The Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee received an update reflecting the new hires from the city and stating that they would contact the remaining individuals in order to get an equal number. They noted that the list the Republicans gave included duplicative names as well as people who were already working as election inspectors.
Even though the case was dismissed on a technical ground, it marked an important milestone. The judge made very little work of the case, so he was notinclined to indulge the suit. Flint is following the law. And even parties with standing will likely face tough sledding if they file a similar suit in the future.
Moreover, this case was brought at the last minute when, as Flint put it in their court papers, “there is no time or staff available to conduct another day of election school” for new poll workers. And by targeting Flint, the GOP was picking on a city with majority Democratic and Black populations. The inferences of politics for partisan purposes are inescapable.
With the two cases outlined here – as was the case in 2020 – the courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election. These cases suggest that rule of law is still functioning to protect our democracy against drop box intimidators, election deniers and their ilk.