Candidate Denial Doesn’t Matter: The Case of Kari Lake, a Democratic Party Leader and the Exclusive Sen. Mark Kelly

According to a survey done by CNN, a majority of Republicans do not believe that Biden won the election.

It is possible that a lot of Republicans running for office think the same. But could any of of those candidates end up running states where elections tend to be close? For the most part, the answer is no. A good number of election deniers running for governor are from states that Donald Trump won.

The party’s nominee for governor is Kari Lake. Lake has become a favorite of the Trumpist wing of the party thanks to her smooth camera presence (she was a local TV anchor for years). Lake is the female version of the former president, even though she’s more strategic and on message than Trump ever was.

Three polls that were close to the margin of error, show the point well. A CBS News/YouGov poll had Lake and Hobbs tied at 49%. Fox had a poll that put Hobbs at 44% to Lake’s 43%. Lake was at 45% and the college had Hobbs at 45%.

Lake is doing better in her US Senate race than Masters, a candidate endorsed by Donald Trump, as evidenced by her superior political skills. But Masters is running against an incumbent, Sen. Mark Kelly, who is a prodigious fundraiser and runs skillful campaigns aimed directly at Arizona’s independents, a third of the electorate, and disaffected Republicans. Masters is within shouting distance of Kelly.

In fact, 2020 election denial has been a hallmark of losing gubernatorial campaigns in swing or blue states. Blue-state Republicans Dan Cox in Maryland and Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts are getting blown out by their opponents in the polls, even though the current and departing governors of their respective states are Republicans.

Voters in the Grand Canyon State think the 2020 election was fraudulent, and so they might be tempted to think that Lake has a chance. That does not appear to be the case. An August Fox poll found that only 28% of voters were not at all confident that votes in the 2020 election were cast legitimately and counted fairly.

The poll shows that 6% of voters do not think the election in Arizona will be run fairly and accurately. The majority of people are confident that it will be.

Lake won the primary despite her political chops, not because of them. If she wins the general election, it will likely be due to the lousy job Biden has done as President and the lackadaisical Hobbs campaign, again not because of Lake’s political chops.

Secretaries of state will be up for election in 27 states. Fourteen of those seats have been held by Republicans.

It’s also the case that Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson voted against certifying the 2020 election and is a slight favorite to win another term against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Likewise, Nevada’s Adam Laxalt has raised questions about the 2020 election and played a leading role in post-election legal efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in the state. He is in a race with a democrat.

If the Trump ticket wins, Greenberg said, “It means that the state of Arizona has lost its mind. And this is no longer a safe place to live. If Mark Finchem wins and says, ‘Well, I don’t care what the people voted. What does the point be when you are going to do this? We have lost our democracy.

Similarly, in Arizona, Blake Masters won the Republican nomination for Senate with the help of Mr. Trump’s endorsement, which arrived months after Mr. Masters recorded a social media video in which he looked directly into the camera to tell viewers, “I think Trump won in 2020.” At the time, Mr. Trump made clear he was snubbing another Republican candidate who the former president believed had not done enough to support the lie that the election was rigged.

But at a debate last week with Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, Mr. Masters agreed that Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected. He said that Mr. Biden probably won due to the suppression of negative news about Hunter Biden on social media.

Three days after the debate, Mr. Masters mingled with attendees before a Trump rally in Mesa, Ariz. In a brief interview, Mr. Masters said he stood with his position on election fraud.

Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinions on it.

A MAGA-like conspiracy at the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia: Am I really glad to be your next governor?

Lake is running not so much for Arizona governor as against American democracy. She would not commit to accepting a loss next month. Rather than calling politicians like her “election deniers,” she and others of her ilk — especially if they win in November — might well be called “democracy killers.” Her serial lies about the 2020 election ranged from kiss-up to Trump at the least harmful to the most dangerous.

And in a precursor of what we might expect on election night, Lake claimed in the run-up to her August primary election that the vote was being rigged — again presenting no evidence.

Perhaps most alarming of all is that despite all of this, polls show Lake and her Democratic opponent Hobbs virtually tied, with three weeks remaining until Election Day.

“Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs tweeted after the race was called Monday night. Thank you, Arizona. I’m so excited to be your next governor.

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.

Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at a meeting earlier this year, “We hang our political hats at the door when we arrive and do the people’s work.” “There ain’t no room for politics in elections.”

But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. Johnson, a believer in election-conspiracy theories, published a post to the social media account of “fellow insurrectionists” proclaiming that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.

He called for banning voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting and he posted a photo with the MyPillow founder.

Among other actions since taking office, Johnson has voted not to renew the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion Voting Systems – a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. As chairman, Johnson will have charge of the county board’s certification of the November midterm results – and his actions and continuing claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent have raised concerns over how he and the Republican-controlled board will handle the upcoming election.

Johnson is far from the only MAGA conspiracist inside the election process in a key battleground state. 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.

It’s not unusual for people to question the fairness of an election if it’s intentional or not, says Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant.

According to Dexter wimbas, a Democrat on the election board with Johnson, it’s inconceivable that anyone on the board does not believe in fair elections. “That just makes no sense to me.”

The move leaves the county primarily relying on its elections supervisor and trained staff to fix any mechanical or software problems that might arise in this November’s election.

Georgia’s secretary of state, meanwhile, is investigating a proposal considered by Johnson and the GOP-controlled board to hire an outside tech firm to copy data from election servers and other equipment.

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.

Election fraud in coffee county, Georgia: A case study of Sullivan-Strickler, an attorney for the Lake Township Elections, and the state attorney general

An attorney for SullivanStrickler, which is also embroiled in an investigation into a voting system breach in Coffee County, Georgia, said the company is “continuing to cooperate with law enforcement” as it investigates election integrity matters.

The attorney representing the elections board told CNN that Johnson and two of his subordinates are going to have to testify before a grand jury. CNN reports that a grand jury is looking into the issue of whether the 2020 election results in that state should be changed.

“It’s a scary situation,” said William Perry, head of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs. “And that’s why we’ve called for the attorney general to investigate, because somebody has got to go in and make sure laws that we know of aren’t being broken.”

In a survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice, more than half of local elections officials said they worried that incoming colleagues might believe there was fraud in 2020. Still, roughly one in five said they plan to leave before the 2024 election – with a third of those citing political attacks.

The hiring of many new election officials was the result of that exodus. Some, through inexperience, have made mistakes that could feed further distrust – or, as one Michigan clerk found, unintentionally enable conspiracists.

The Lake Township Clerk gave away a tabulator and a laptop computer to an investigator who claimed to be conducting an audit of the election. Winkelmann told investigators she knew she wasn’t supposed to turn over a tabulator, but that she did because “they were doing some type of audit.” According to a police report from February, she believes that election fraud is occurring in 2020 though it is not in her township. CNN did not hear any comment from Winkelmann.

She told CNN that she was terrified. I didn’t believe them from the beginning. I was told the county clerk agreed to the audit after they contacted her.

The video, obtained by CNN, shows Keller asking if the men are from the state.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html

The 2007 Michigan Counting Attack on Scott and the Unelected Bureaucratic Office: A View from an Insider’s View of the Election Deniers

Authorities eventually determined that the plot to access the tabulator traced back to a woman named Tera Jackson, who claimed to be in touch with then-Trump attorney Powell and to have evidence of fraud tied to data stored on a satellite owned by the Vatican. Jackson pleaded guilty in February to a reduced charge of disturbing the peace in connection with the incident. No one else was charged.

“It was just a stupid, bungled thing. Keller said that he was too scared to do anything. “I was just so new to being a clerk, and I really questioned it, but I was also intimidated.”

The election conspiracists in Michigan have gained access to at least five other vote-counting machines, called tabulators, and in some cases also the software used to operate them.

Scott was stripped of election duties in Adams Township last year due to spreading election misinformation and refusal to allow routine maintenance to be performed on voting machines. According to an email from the chief deputy clerk of the county, Hillsdale County took over running Adams Township’s elections in October 2021.

Scott “continues to regularly spread disinformation … falsely claiming that our Hart InterCivic election management system and tabulators are connected to the internet or contain voter-specific data,” Dane said. 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 disobeyed a directive, according to his lawyer, Stefanie Lambert. He reiterated the baseless claim that the state elections do not have the security of the federal ones.

Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, told CNN that there are “many checks and balances” to ensure that township clerks and other elections workers do their jobs appropriately. She mentioned that the concern was that some who hold false election-conspiracy beliefs could act on them in a way that undermines public confidence.

If election deniers fly under the radar, there’s a chance they will attack our elections system. “Those election deniers who intentionally work to undermine the election will be caught, but at the expense of voter confidence.”

He said they were very surprised and disappointed. The media sources and politicians are the cause of this, mainly on the Republican side.

Sam Hindle, The ACLU, and Jim Kampf: The Nevada GOP Shouldn’t Give Up on a Candidate That Never Voted

In Nye County, Nevada, a GOP clerk named Sam is no longer working after 22 years at the job.

County Commissioners voted to have the general election ballot counted by hand due to suspicions of voting machines.

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 will become the first in the country to switch to hand-count paper ballots and use electronic machines for a preliminary tally this November. Frank Carbone said the commission hopes to do away with the machines in the future.

Nevada election officials, including GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, have fought back against misinformation, saying their electronic voting machines have been reliable and accurate, haven’t been hacked, don’t have modems and can’t connect to the internet. Cegavske has also noted that ballots can be readily verified by paper record.

On October 17, the ACLU filed an emergency request to Nevada’s Supreme Court challenging Kampf’s 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. Kampf did not return multiple calls from CNN.

Jim Hindle was elected Clerk and Treasurer in June in a rural county 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.

Doreayne Nevin left her position as vice chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party early after being defeated by Hindle in the June GOP primary. 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.

The Assassination of Kenneth Schroeder and the Loss of the Lindell Conjecture: Laws in the Office of the Secretary of State

Schroeder testified that he copied the drives in the summer of 2021, with help from conspiracy peddlers linked to Lindell. According to the Secretary of State’s office, Schroedersigned an affidavit saying that he made a forensic image of the election server and saved it to a secure hard drive in the elections office.

It has been said that every machine of the company has a wireless device in it, which is a widely discredited conspiracy.

Schroeder provided the copies to individuals that were not authorized to possess them, and then sued them, according to the office.

Voting is now underway. Colorado mailed out ballots for the November election on Monday. Key battleground states such as Michigan and Arizona are receiving mail in ballots. But if the midterm on November 8 is anything like the 2020 election, officials may find that their challenges are just beginning.

The most significant risk is that political leaders use their distrust of the election results to undermine confidence in the American people.

Editor’s Note: Robert Robb writes about politics and public policy at robertrobb.substack.com. He was an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic for 23 years. To reach him, Follow him on TWITTER or call him at 888-492-0. The views he has are of his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

For example, Kenneth Khachigian, chief speechwriter for former President Ronald Reagan, wrote a panegyric about her for The Wall Street Journal, which went so far as to compare her to the Gipper. As Reagan implored, Khachigian gushed, Lake is “raising a banner of bold colors, no pale pastels.”

Arizona Primaries are Purple: The Current Governor Doug Ducey Isn’t a Rising Star, but He Has a Reason to Fail

Arizona is a purple state. Democrats did not win a single statewide election in the four election cycles before Trump became President. After two years of Donald Trump in office, Democrats won 4 of 9 statewide races. Trump lost Arizona in his bid for reelection two years later.

There is an election with a Republican leaning. Economic conditions and a general sense that President Joe Biden and his administration aren’t up to the job are this election season’s backdrop.

How the current Republican governor, Doug Ducey, performed in his election for an open seat is a useful point of reference. In the first election for Arizona’s governor in 2004, Ducey won easily by a margin of about half a percentage point. Running for reelection in 2018, Ducey increased his spread — 56% to 42%.

The current status of the races shows that more about the differences in candidate quality between Kelly and Hobbs than the differences in campaign quality between Lake and Masters.

The hyperbole surrounding her being a rising star would have some substance if that were to happen. Right now it seems, at best, grossly premature — and not based on anything she has actually achieved politically.

One rich irony is that the boomlet was premature. The more she is touted as a rising star, the more her standing with Trump is likely to fade.

In Trumps view of the political universe, there is only one star: Trump. He turns on those in the MAGA movement who develop a political stature independent of him.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/opinions/kari-lake-arizona-governor-trump-hype-robb/index.html

She is afraid of Trump, but she does know what she wants to do if the election is stolen: The case against Trump and the Lake boomlet in Arizona

She may be in for a DeSantis treatment if the Lake boomlet continues and if it gives some justification in what she accomplishes.

The voters who poured into a Phoenix high school to hear from former President Barack Obama were looking to send a message of defiance Wednesday night.

They will not allow activists to intimidate their state’s voters, and are determined to beat former President Donald Trump’s hand-pick slate of election deniers.

If you do need one more reason to vote, please consider the fact that our democracy is on the ballot. And nowhere is that clearer than here in Arizona,” Obama told the crowd Wednesday, later adding that “democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona” if election deniers fill all the top state offices.

After a surge of posts after Tuesday’s problems were reported, the researchers found that discussions of tabulation machines and printers had stopped. That’s different from 2020, when false claims that ballots marked with Sharpie pens would be invalidated in Maricopa County gathered steam in the days after voting ended, and took about a day longer to taper off.

Joann Rodriguez, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said it was scary that “radical Republicans” in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries in part by echoing Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.

I wonder what they are campaigning on, aside from the fact that the election was stolen? Rodriguez said something. She noted that a number of Trumpers are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her neighborhood. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – for what reason? Do they think that their intimidation tactics will work?

A former social worker who worked with domestic violence victims before becoming a state lawmaker, she ran a rather low-key campaign and limited her access to reporters and supporters. She made democracy and abortion rights her central focus, portraying Lake as an “extreme” and “dangerous” figure who could jeopardize the sanctity of the 2024 presidential election by refusing to certify the results.

The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. The fact that the top statewide contests may be decided on a razor’s edge is something that brought Obama to the Grand Canyon State as he seeks to fire up the Democratic base and make sure young voters and Latino voters turn out in the upcoming election.

Biden had to make his argument from the other side of the country because Obama didn’t invite him to campaign in top swing states.

The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results brought a registered republican to the obama rally. He said in an interview that he was not voting for Democrats in the election, he was voting against the Trump ticket.

Greenberg characterized the 2020 election as fair and honest, and said he was no longer a member of the Republican Party. It’s like the American Nazi Party, it’s a lie and I cannot put up with it.

Clean Elections USA: a litmus test of election denialism, and why she’ll vote for president Donald Trump in 2020 if she’s elected

Voters filed complaints to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office after some activists were taking pictures of voters and their license plates – apparently inspired by debunked conspiracy theories about so-called “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes in 2020. 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.

Since the ruling the group’s members aren’t allowed to shout at voters who drop off their ballot and they cannot take photos or film voters at the drop boxes. The Justice Department had weighed in on the case that was brought by the League of Women Voters. The DOJ did not formally take sides, but in a legal brief, federal prosecutors said the right-wing group’s “vigilante ballot security efforts” were likely illegal and “raise serious concerns of voter intimidation.”

That dynamic is even more pronounced in a state like Arizona where Trump acolytes control the Republican Party and have censured figures like outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for what they said was insufficient loyalty to the former president.

Michelle Gonzales, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said she believes that people came to see Obama Wednesday night “so they could feel hopeful” about the democratic process amid all the noise.

She said that it was important to hear from someone who we were confident in to help us feel hopeful about the election. “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people waiting. I just want to believe that people want to believe in something better – that they have morals and values that we all should have as human beings and not elect these liars and con people.”

The biggest thing she shares in common with Trump is that election denialism sits at the core of her messaging. She’s called the election “stolen” and says she wouldn’t have certified the result of the state if she’d been governor.

Arizona is a litmus test for election denialism, because it’s something that voters are willing to accept in their candidates. Does this appeal to these candidates to voters?

Is there a hope of a fair and transparent result in one of the swing states of the next election, if Lake and Finchem take control of the election machinery?

In a number of states this year, voters are being presented with a stark choice: Do they want someone to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election in their state?

In a different political universe, that might seem outlandish, considering hand-count audits of paper ballots and court challenges found the 2020 election to have been one of the most accurate and accessible in American history.

“Democracy’s fate hinges on whether or not the winners accept defeat and recognize their losses as losses,” said a political science professor. “If you have a worldview where every loss amounts to the other side cheating … that just generally presents a challenge for the viability of democracy.”

A comedian’s nightmare: secretaries of state election in Michigan are to watch to make sure there’s a drag queen in every school

A community college professor who claimed she witnessed election fraud in Detroit in the last presidential race is facing a reelection challenge from one of her students.

In a state that went for Joe Biden in 2020 by more than 150,000 votes, Michigan Republicans still decided to double down with their base voters in choosing candidates for secretary of state and attorney general.

The GOP’s attorney general candidate, Matthew DePerno, was endorsed by the former President Donald Trump.

DePerno is under investigation for an alleged plot to seize and reprogram voting machines, while Karamo has come under scrutiny for her past comments that included an opposition to teaching evolution in schools.

While both candidates garnered the majority support of party loyalists at a spring nominating convention, even then more mainstream Republicans worried about the candidates’ viability in a general election in a purple state.

Beau La Fave, who was a Republican candidate for secretary of state, said in September that every ad would state that Qanon Karamo was too crazy for us.

Dana Nessel is the current Attorney General and who refused to enforce Michigan’s anti-abortion law. Nessel was elected as the first openly gay person to statewide office in Michigan, and Republicans have been attacking her with culture war tropes. She made a joke at a press conference in the summer that there should be a drag queen in every school.

After losing her initial bid for the office, she was first elected in the year 2018? She is the author of a book on the role of secretaries of state in American democracy.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/05/1133565326/secretary-of-state-election-denier-races-to-watch

Why Does “Sharpie Gate” Bloom? The Case of the Arizona Democratic Attorney General and a Newly-Informed Voting Theorist

Shortly after voting ended in that election, one of the more famous vote-counting conspiracies, dubbed “SharpieGate,” bloomed in Maricopa County, Ariz.

Former President Barack Obama rallied on behalf of the Democrats in the state on Wednesday night in Phoenix, warning that “democracy as we know it may not survive” if Republicans sweep those offices.

Mr. Hamadeh, a Republican candidate for attorney general, railed against the news media, which is why he is in a close race with Kris Mayes, a Democrat. And in the race for secretary of state, Mr. Finchem, a Trump-backed conspiracy theorist who has identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers militia group in the past, is trailing Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and the former recorder of the state’s largest county, Maricopa.

In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Finchem said he did not go inside the Capitol that day but also continued to claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

In the governor’s race, election denier Kari Lake, who has already filed a dismissed lawsuit that was premised in voting misinformation, is facing the current secretary of state, Katie Hobbs.

The Silver State may be the most under-the-radar state when it comes to election denial, but a movement in rural counties toward ballot hand-counts shows that voting misinformation is taking hold here as well.

Polls also show the race for chief voting official to be neck and neck, despite a substantial fundraising lead for the non-election denying candidate, Democrat Cisco Aguilar.

He says his first priority would be to lobby the state legislature in Nevada to make it a felony to harass or intimidate election workers.

How Did We Lose Our Election? Attorney General Kelli Ward, the Attorney General, and the Commissioner of State for Election Reform, Patrice Johnson,

President Trump and I lost our election because of a rigged election, Marchant said. “I’ve been working since Nov. 4, 2020, to expose what happened, and what I found out is horrifying.”

Marchant, Karamo and Finchem all say they want to significantly curtail early voting, and Marchant has been a leading proponent of the local movement back toward hand-counting ballots, even though that counting style has been found time and again to be less accurate and more resource-intensive.

Millions of dollars in political spending have been spent this year on secretary of state contests as several Republican nominees doubt the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

One of the best election chiefs in the country is Brad Raffensperger, and he refused Trump’s request to ” find” votes to overturn his loss in Georgia. A special grand jury in Georgia is investigating the campaign by Trump and his allies.

He said the victory in Arizona might not have been enough to stop activists, but that the most serious attacks didn’t emerge until months after the 2020 election, when lawyers for Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to reverse the outcome. Mr. Danjuma said that they were ready for more lawsuits.

Indeed, Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, vowed to pursue such actions. “We have been preparing for this for over a year,” she said in a tweet on Thursday. We have a huge team of lawyers ready to take action.

“We can choose to curl up on the ledge and succumb, or we can dust ourselves off and restart the arduous climb up the steep slopes” of election integrity, wrote Patrice Johnson, the organizer of Michigan Fair Elections in a blog post. The group was going to meet online on Thursday.

One of Michigan Fair Elections’ preferred candidates, Kristina Karamo, running for secretary of state, has not conceded despite losing by 14 percentage points and on Thursday afternoon sent out a list of supposed electoral “violations,” saying there was more to come.

After the election results were calculated, Republican candidates for governor and state attorney general conceded their races.

Concessions by candidates who spread unfounded theories of voting fraud are critical to ensure the stability of the election system, elections experts say. They say public outreach can help put out fires.

In an email to supporters on Thursday, the Masters campaign said it had seen “troubling” issues during the election and asked for contributions: “We’re expecting a contested road forward and legal battles to come.”

On Twitter, Mr. Finchem jokingly asked his followers to “make sure” Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes weren’t “in the back room with ballots in Pima or Maricopa.” Mr. Fontes replied, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”

Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes called for people to respect the vote- counting process. “Despite what my election-denying opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected,” Ms. Hobbs wrote on Twitter.

The final results could take even longer since the new Arizona law calls for an automatic recount if the top two candidates lost the election by less than 1% of the total votes cast.

For months, election officials worried that activists would cause problems in the polls because they thought the election system was broken. The system was not disrupted by the scattered episodes during the vote.

They pointed to better and more frequent communication by elections officials, and transparency measures such as live cams at ballot boxes and in counting rooms. Some speculated that polling and right-wing media reports promising a Republican blowout in races across the country may have discouraged some right-wing activists from provocations at polling places.

“It was remarkably smooth,” said Damon Circosta, the chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “You can tell by my giddiness I was not expecting that.”

Stop Counting! Election Defenders, a Network to Protect Democracy, has a Case: Tiffany Flowers, Maryland, on Election Day

Dozens of races are still undecided and counting could continue into next week in a few places. Two states in particular, Nevada and Arizona, feature several election-denying candidates in tight races and elections lawyers say they are gearing up for legal challenges aiming to once again put the soundness of the system on trial.

Protect Democracy, an elections integrity group, still has concerns, according to a lawyer for the group. Last month he helped the group file successful legal challenges to self-appointed vigilantes who patrolled ballot drop boxes in Maricopa County, at times carrying long guns and wearing body armor.

“They obviously created a little bit of turbulence,” Mr. Sherman said. It is like running a treadmill on an incline. Mr. Sherman said he would rather have an easy run and not be able to know what the election result will be.

Polling may have helped to cool the ardor of election deniers, according to a Democratic strategist in Charlotte. Under that logic, he said, attempts to undermine faith in the results would only have discouraged Republican voters.

One coalition, called Election Defenders, organized dozens of sessions to train people posted at polling places to help prevent voter intimidation. It was overwhelmed with more than 2,000 people who completed online training to intervene in tense situations, diffuse confrontations with armed activists, and keep things calm, all of which it had its goal of recruiting 1,250 volunteers for.

Tiffany Flowers said that more people signed up than they had a place to put them. She said she worked 20 hours on Tuesday monitoring social media and checking in with partners around the country.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Ms. Flowers’s hometown and the nature of her involvement in election protection efforts on Election Day. Ms. Flowers is from Baltimore and she worked from her home on Election Day.

“I think more Americans would like to see everyone who was eligible to vote be able to vote fairly, free and with dignity,” Ms. Flowers said.

“Don’t count!” Let’s stop the count! People yelled when they banged on the windows of the people who were trying to tally votes. Social media teemed with false claims of ballots being wheeled in under the cover of night.

And it was at that moment, Benson says, she realized the nation’s election workers were on their way to passing their first real test since former President Donald Trump’s sustained attack on democracy.

“I got choked up a little bit because to me that was like the affirmation that we did it,” Benson said. “We ran a smooth election. People were prepared to pounce on anything. But it didn’t work.”

Many races are not counted and it will be weeks before the entire country’s election results are officially certified. The election day issues and slow vote counting in certain states have caused some candidates and online commentators to accuse each other of malfeasance.

But so far, that chatter has not yet incited the chaos that many had feared would ensue, stoked by a mythos of election fraud that has become a core belief for many Americans on the right.

Many candidates who lost conceded, even questioning the results of the 2020 election. And in the cases where Republican candidates have chosen not to concede — like Benson’s own opponent, who rose to prominence by claiming fraud in 2020 — their cries of malfeasance seem to have fallen flat this cycle.

If a candidate doesn’t come up short, they need to come back and fight in our system another day, or they will not be reelected.

Do we feel the climate is not going to turn back around in 2020? Commentary on the anti-defiliation of the U.S. Capitol protest

Even as election officials, civil society groups and researchers who study online narratives brace for a prolonged post-election period of risk and uncertainty, they are cautiously hopeful the country is not headed for a repeat of 2020, when just hours after polls closed hundreds of thousands of Americans rallied online under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” a movement that culminated in violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“It feels like the air has been taken out of the sails somehow,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, said last week. “That’s how it looks right now but I’m still in this ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ mode.”

The election deniers were declaring the vote rigged no matter what the result was. And less than 40% of GOP voters said before the midterms that they were very confident in their community’s poll workers.

Cindy Otis, who worked for the CIA, said that the scene was set for fraud and it was a matter of needing to observe and report the evidence.

“We had a lot more parameters and protections in place than we did in 2020,” said Benson. “That translated into a much smoother process that was ready to withstand challenges and I think deterred many from coming forward with attempts to intervene in the process, because we had successfully shown and convinced them that would have been a futile effort.”

Mainstream platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have all expanded policies intended to curb the spread of election falsehoods in recent years, from elevating credible information to labeling misleading posts to outright removing others and banning repeat offenders.

“They emphasize that election officials are the most reliable place to find election information over and over again and they use very similar language over and over again,” Cohen said. The idea is not to address a specific narrative or a specific piece of false information but to get people back to the party that can answer the question.

Less than an hour and a half after conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk started to claim on Twitter that the problems were actually an intentional effort to disenfranchise Republicans, Maricopa officials released a video explaining the problems and reassuring voters their ballots would be counted.

The researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership found that while most of the time false narratives were promoted by the most retweeted accounts, the county election websites were the most frequently included links in the online discussion. The websites were used for both spreading facts and speculation.

On election night in 2020, the streets outside of the Phoenix tabulation center were covered by police on horseback, as election agencies and law enforcement worked together to keep an eye on the voters.

“It’s an unfortunate sign of the times, but it was comforting to see the protection of election officials taken so seriously and that was what I wanted to see during the briefing on Wednesday,” stated the former elections official in Utah and Colorado.

Activists, groups monitoring for election fraud and even Trump called for protests and watch parties at ballot boxes, voting locations and counting centers. But large-scale gatherings failed to materialize, said Lindsay Schubiner of the Western States Center, a progressive organization that monitors extremist groups.

She credited officials’ communication that voter intimidation is illegal for turning out to be a lot of talk. “There’s a huge amount that can be done on a political level by defining what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

The Largest Post-election Protest of 2022: How Voting Have We Learned to Stop Mocking Election Results

Over the weekend, dozens of protesters showed up outside of Maricopa County’s counting site in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, in what appears to be the largest post-election protest of 2022.

“Based on what we see currently, there is a lack of clarity between the amount of resources available and how many people will willingly fall for false promises in order to support certain candidates,” she said.

The landscape of social media has changed because of the rise of alternative platforms that let users post as much or as little as they want.

The clearest example is Trump, who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, cutting off his ability to reach a combined audience of over 100 million followers.

The president posts exclusively on his own social network. His following is less than four million people, and he has less reach than he did in 2020.

He posted a Truth Social post on Election Day calling for protests in Detroit but it did not gain much traction and was not widely shared.

Another challenge for those who want to cast doubt upon the election results is that they are having a hard time sharing their conspiracy theories with one another.

The Republicans fell short of the “red wave” that some were anticipating, but they did take several important victories, including in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis was given a second term by a 20-point margin.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

Elusive Politicians: “Any county that hasn’t finished counting is cheating, full stop” Revisiting New Mexico’s Secretary of State

A user commented on one website that “Any county that hasn’t finished counting is cheating, full stop.” What happens if Kari Lake wins? That means we cheated then?” Another replied.

The fringe platforms have created a powerfulecosystem, which has sucked off some of the more known sources of false information and conspiracy theories.

“You have this content being delivered now in so many different ways,” disinformation expert Otis said. “They’re getting it in audio and podcasts, in newsletters, in emails, in text messages, in apps, news apps and from political campaigns — they’re just getting hammered with it. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s going viral on a mainstream platform to have continued impact.”

New Mexico’s Secretary of State pointed out a congressional district. She was worried that the House race could be a problem. Each of the past three elections has seen the two major political parties switch hands with barely a thousand votes separating them this year.

Oliver said that it was nice to have a return to the normal behavior of democracy, accepting election results and peaceful transition of power. It makes me feel hopeful, for the first time in a while.

Kristie Hobbs vs. Kari Lake: A Democratic Candidate Whose Choices Matter: The Arizona Governor’s Race

Democrat Katie Hobbs will win Arizona’s governor’s race, CNN projects, defeating one of the most prominent defenders of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

During an appearance on the Charlie Kirk show Thursday, she stated that she hated that they were slow-rolling and dragging their feet. They don’t want to talk about what happened, which is that we won.

There is no evidence that the election officials were delaying the reporting of results. At a news conference Thursday, Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, called out Lake’s comments. “It is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours,” Gates, a Republican, said, gesturing to the election workers who were involved in tallying the ballots behind him through a glass window.

In the final part of the race, Ms. Lake made it clear that she would protect the future of elections and cast her own candidacy as essential to doing so. She said that supporting her amounted to choosing sanity over chaos.

All 15 counties in Arizona will send their election results to the Secretary of state’s office, just as they would any other election, according to the process that has been followed for years. The final results will be sign off on by the governor, the attorney general and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, according to Bones.

Following Trump over the Cliff: What will you do next? Following a Republican Consultant and Counting Voting in Maricopa County

A Republican consultant who worked for Masters spoke about following a man who had talked about following a long line of politicians. “It’s over. Now is the time that Kari Lake needs to graciously concede. This election tells us one thing: following Trump over the cliff will not win elections.”

She blasted restrictions like masking as unnecessary and harmful to children in her denunciations of the Democratic leaders handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. She welcomed comparisons to Trump all the way through the end of the campaign – professing at one event that she was delighted when one admirer called her “Trump in a dress.”

For her part, Ms. Lake attacked the news media and campaigned on culture-war issues, barnstorming the state with the other three top Republicans on the ticket and with right-wing supporters, including Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, and Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Ms. Hobbs finished with a substantial lead Tuesday night, and Ms. Lake failed to overtake her by Wednesday as her campaign and many Republican strategists had anticipated. Over the next few days, Ms. Lake escalated tensions as officials in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and is the state’s most populous and politically powerful county, tallied votes, including a record-breaking 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on Election Day.

On his Telegram channel, Mr. Trump claimed that there was an incredible theory, which he was pushing forward. They took the election away from the lake. It’s really bad out there!”

The Republican Party of Arizona and right-wing allies collected testimonials from the voters who said they had problems at the polls on Tuesday, most related to a printing problem that halted the counting of ballots. Republican election officials in Maricopa County have rejected any accusations of fraud or foul play and urged Ms. Lake to tone down her comments, insisting that the long process would ensure accuracy and that the election system was fair.