When is November Midterm Elections Number One? Forrest K. Lehman’s Record Requests in Winnebago County, Wis.,

“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” Forrest K. Lehman is the county’s director of elections and registration. “It should be number one.”

The most pressing problem is the amount of requests for election records, from scribbled down ballots to pictures of the envelopes and applications.

The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. It is a little overwhelming.

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. The election deniers gave instructions for filing records requests at a seminar.

Election workers have an important part to play in giving information to the public, according to Mr. Lindell. He said that supporters had sent him digital recreations of every voter’s ballot choices in more than a thousand election jurisdictions. According to Mr. Lindell, the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide.

Jay Bookman: How Voter Fraud Wasn’t the Reason for Georgia’s High-Turnout Early-Voter Registration Scenario

The editor has made a note. Jay Bookman is an award winning political columnist who has written for several newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Georgia recorder is where he now writes regularly. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. His own views are expressed here. CNN has more opinion.

Voters continue to turn out in record numbers here in Georgia, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. In a bitterly fought campaign season like this one, it’s natural to ask what it means.

It is hard to say how to predict outcomes. In the Trump era, high turnout is not necessarily the advantage that it used to be for Democrats, and we don’t know how much of the early-voter surge represents newly motivated voters or are merely voters who would have cast their ballots anyway through some other means. High-profile candidates in the Senate and governor’s races are no doubt driving voters to the polls, and with so many wild-card factors in play this year – from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to inflation to changes in state election law – it’s impossible to know what the 2022 electorate is going to look like.

It’s difficult for pollsters to decide on a topic. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. In a tumultuous year like this one, with so many variables, that’s a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters’ work product.

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. In Raffensperger’s words, “we had safe, secure, honest elections,” a conclusion shared by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, federal officials in former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, and state and federal judges. And if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes, what was?

When you sell people on a false narrative then encourage them to take action by changing state law, that is what happens. If voting isn’t being suppressed so far, confidence in voting surely has been.

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.

That last point is critical. With the help of changes that were implemented in Senate Bill 202, Republicans say it was necessary to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.

Led by Mr. Trump, Republican candidates and right-wing media figures have stoked fears about “election integrity.” They brought up the idea of making it hard to cheat in elections because there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

And it’s the consequences of that bad-faith narrative that ought to worry us. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.

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 don’t think it’s true.

In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. 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.

Conservatives are trying to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on flimsy grounds, and they’re growing frustrated that their 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 stuff in order.

The Trump Era in Arizona: Sensitivity to the State of the Art, Not to the Future. A Response to Washington, DC, President Barack Obama on Wednesday

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 said they are determined to defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election deniers – including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem – and will not allow their state’s voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up to monitor ballot drop boxes late last month – some of them armed, masked and wearing camouflage.

President Biden warned Americans from Washington, DC, on Wednesday that democracy is at stake, in the same manner that he warned Arizonans not to forget about the presidential election in two years, which is likely to be a pivotal battleground.

The Republican nominees for secretary of state and governor took aim at Arizona’s elections management. Lake and Finchem have said the same thing about the election being stolen.

After a surge of posts immediately after problems were reported Tuesday and early Wednesday, the researchers found discussions surrounding tabulation machines and printers in Maricopa had tapered off. 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.

“What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez spoke. She noted that “a lot of Trumpers” are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her Glendale, Arizona, neighborhood. What is the reason for people to show up at the election sites with guns on their hips? Are their intimidation tactics going to work?

Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales Rates the Race for the Next Toss-Up: Why Barack Obama Came to the Grand Canyon State

The poll shows her in a dead heat race with Lake. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race a Toss-up.

The state was on edge when Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Mark Kelly, who is in a close race. 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, who has not been invited to speak in top swing states, had to make his argument from the other side of the country as he argued that the fate of democracy is at stake.

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 the 2020 election was fair and honest, and that he is no longer a member of the Republican Party. “That’s more like the American Nazi Party and I can’t put up with that – the lie.”

Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, swooped into the state in the final days of the election, warning that the very fate of the nation’s democracy was on the ballot. Voters in the Grand Canyon State also spurned the bid of GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, a strident election denier backed by Trump, to become Arizona’s top elections official. Adrian Fontes will be the next Secretary of State in Arizona, according to CNN.

There were complaints filed by voters to the Secretary of State’s Office after some activists took pictures of them with their license plates, apparently based on debunked conspiracy theories about people who stuffed ballot boxes in 2020. A federal judge ruled in one of the cases that members of a group known as Clean Elections USA couldn’t openly carry guns or wear body armor around 250 feet from drop boxes.

Last week a judge issued a restraining order against the right-wing group, Clean Elections USA, that organized the drop box operation in Mesa, banning its members from openly carrying weapons within 250 feet of the drop box and from videotaping, following or photographing voters within 75 feet.

The Case of Arizona Voting Rights: A CNN Analysis of the 2000 Mules-Focused Voting Harassment Campaign

A CNN poll conducted on Wednesday, which was released on Wednesday, showed that 34% of Republicans believe Biden did not win the election.

In a state like Arizona where the Republican Party is controlled by Trump’s supporters, it’s even more apparent that the governor and senator are censured for lack of loyalty to the former president.

People came to see Obama on Wednesday night so they could feel hopeful about democratic process, says a registered Democrat from Arizona.

She said that the election needed to be heard from someone who she was confident in, so that she could be hopeful. “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people waiting. I want to think that people want to believe in something better and that we can have morals and values that are not corrupted by people such as liars and con people.

There is an editor’s note. Eisen served as an ethics czar for the president and advised his White House on election law. Taylor Redd is a researcher focusing on national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion on the topic.

There were two voting rights cases that resulted in major victories this week which prevented overzealous attempts to harass early voters in Arizona and overwhelm election offices in Michigan.

The people taking part in such activities might be motivated by a conspiracy like the one portrayed in the film 2000 Mules, which may intimidate some voters. 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. In at least one documented instance, the individuals surveilling ballot drop boxes took photographs of a voter’s license plate number.

Why did the Flint lawsuit against the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Legislature filed a similar suit against the Michigan election in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday, November 22

The Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee lost their case against the election clerk and commission in the city of flint.

According to Michigan GOP, over ninety percent of inspectors for the Absentee Vote Counting Boards are Democrat. State law dictates that the party breakdown for workers needs to be as close to equal as possible.

Flint won the legal action on Wednesday on the question of “standing”: Under state statute, the grievance process is only available to the county chairs of major parties. The lawsuit circumvented that requirement.

Why did the GOP want to bring this suit here and now? We spoke to Michigan elections expert Aghogho Edevibe who told us that it is common across Michigan for predominantly Republican areas to have predominantly Republican poll workers, and vice versa with Democratic areas.

There were two cases outlined which were seen as abulwark 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.

The president wrote on social media that he wasn’t sure if the election in Pennsylvania was legit. “Here we go again!” he wrote. There was a rigged election.

What is Trump supposedly saying about his supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. The article did not clearly state what suspicion was raised about absentee-ballot data.

The election deniers were already declaring the vote rigged, no matter what the result was. Less than 40% of Republican voters said they were very confident in their community’s poll workers.

There are other Republicans that want to promote suspicion about the elections in Pennsylvania, which could determine which party controls the US Senate.

The Republican governor candidate said that the vote count could take days after the acting elections chief said it could take days.

Even some of the country’s most Republican states count absentee ballots (or, in some cases, specifically absentee ballots from members of the military and overseas citizens) that arrive days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. And some states, including some led by Republicans, give voters days after Election Day to fix issues with their signatures or to provide the proof of identity they didn’t have on Election Day.

But other prominent Republicans piled on. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted a link to an article about Chapman’s comments and added: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”

Cruz is incorrect in stating that the Democratic big cities have more votes to count than small rural counties.

To be sure, the counting is not done in many races, and it will be weeks before the entire country’s election results are officially certified. Some candidates and online commentators have used the Election Day glitch and the slow pace of vote counting to sow suspicion and exaggerate the amount of malfeasance in certain states.

The Detroit Politics: Is a Republican Candidate the 2020 Election Winner Disguise? The Case of Joe Fetterman

Pre-emptive doubt was cast on the possible outcome because of the health challenges of the Democratic candidate in the Senate race.

After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, some right-wing personalities insisted the election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate. Tucker Carlson, on Fox last week, argued that a Fetterman win would be transparently absurd for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking.

There would be nothing to worry about Fetterman winning in a state that Biden won by 80,000 votes. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The city of Detroit, like other Democratic-dominated cities with large Black populations, has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories from Trump and others. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.

A lawsuit was filed by the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, who wants a court to stop the use of Detroit absentee ballots if they are not received in person. If that request were granted, thousands of legally cast votes by Detroit residents would be rejected because they were sent by mail.

The lawyer for Karamo softened the request during closing arguments, according to The Detroit News. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

Some Republican candidates have implied that Democrats may cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do the Democrats have a surprise up their sleeves?

The false claim of the election being stolen was removed from Masters’ website after he won the primary. During the debate Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote count or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. In that debate and on the trail, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.

But the broad view belies signs of strain: A court ordered armed activists to stop patrolling drop boxes in Arizona. Tens of thousands of voter registrations are being challenged in Georgia. Voting rights groups have trained volunteers in de-escalation methods. Voters have been videotaped by groups hunting for fraud as they drop off their ballots.

It is election officials who say they are on edge because of the possibility of confusion that may follow Election Day.

The Trump Era of Electronic Voting Machines: A Case Study of a Kansas City Sheriff’s Office in Maricopa, Arizona

“I’ve felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back repeatedly so much that I don’t have anything but scar tissue,” said Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., home to Phoenix.

On Friday night, the RNC and the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted a statement criticizing the county’s process, and demanding that it require “around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing” until all of the votes are counted, along with “regular, accurate public updates.” The groups said they would take legal action if necessary.

Much of the current litigation focuses on the processes of cast and counted votes as opposed to the debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud that led to the court efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The most significant lawsuit is a GOP-backed one in Pennsylvania, where they targeted eared ballots with missing dates on the container envelopes. Last week, the state Supreme Court ordered those ballots to be kept out of the count, but deadlocked on the underlying legal question about their validity, leaving it unresolved. Over the weekend, election officials in Pennsylvania began releasing the names of thousands of voters who were at risk of having their mail ballot rejected because of missing or incorrect dates.

A Republican lawsuit in Wisconsin succeeded in blocking the state’s guidance about filling or correctting missing information from Absentee Ballot certifications.

More than 100 lawsuits have already been filed — compared with 70 at this point two years ago — a surge of litigation from both parties and their allies. On the Republican side, dozens of lawyers and firms that sought to overturn the 2020 election are again working for parties and candidates this cycle.

Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, often pushing for leniency in counting absentee ballots and challenging local Republican officials’ plans to hand-count ballots — a nod to newfound, widespread suspicion of electronic voting machines on the right.

In Nevada and Arizona, disputes have erupted over efforts by Republican-led counties to take on what critics say is the cumbersome task of hand counting the general election ballots. Some Republican officials in these states have pledged to end use of electronic vote-tallying machines after expressing distrust of them.

In Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, election skeptics have been monitoring the absentee ballot processing, asking questions rooted in conspiracy theories about hacking voting machines.

In Maricopa County, where the first “Stop the Steal” protest was held outside the county Elections Department office the day after the 2020 election, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stationed themselves outside a ballot drop box in Mesa, the Phoenix suburb.

“I have never been more intimidated in my life trying to vote and standing only three feet from the box,” the complaint said, according to records released by the secretary of state. The voter continued: “Do I need to worry about my family being killed now if the results are not what they wanted?”

Republican candidates and party officials have also encouraged their voters to cast ballots in person on Election Day, reflecting two years of legal arguments and talk claiming that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting in 2020 to illegitimately win the election. When candidates at a rally headlined by Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, on Thursday night called on the crowd to vote in person, they were met with cheers.

In some states, Republicans may be skeptical about mail ballots, which may lead to a “red mirage” where Republican voters vote first on Election Day, with Democratic voters coming in later. Mr. Trump wrongly suggested that Democrats rigged the results two years ago.

Even places where Trump won have been affected by election denial. In Northern California’s mostly rural Shasta County, where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020, tensions over elections and other issues have been rising for months. Local activists have demanded a halt to early voting, pushed to count ballots by hand and sought to require voter ID at polling places — none of which are legal in the state.

Uneasy about Election Day: Revisiting Georgia’s A.M.E. churches in the midst of growing public protests

In the face of public protest, the county’s CEO resigned, the health officer left and the health board denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

A forecast for 10 to 12 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent many voters from casting their ballot, according to the election day clerk in Shasta County.

In Georgia, a state with a long history of intimidation and tension at the polls, some community leaders expressed similar unease, amid rising threats of political violence.

Bishop Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia, admitted that he was uneasy about Election Day. There are people in Arizona dressed up, and it can be intimidating.

More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. Some Georgians have been thrown off the rolls as a result of the challenges. A homeless woman in Georgia was not allowed to vote after her registration was removed during a Republican challenge. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported her dilemma.

But Bishop Jackson was also buoyed by surging turnout in the state, and pointed to efforts of his church and many other voting rights organizations to ensure voters were prepared for the midterms.

Deniers on the midterm secretaries of state: The role of the White House in ensuring the 2020 midterms and the 2020 presidential election

Several Republican primary candidates who do not believe in the legitimacy of the presidential election want to run in the secretary of state contests, which has drawn national attention and millions of dollars in political spending this year.

In all, voters in 27 states will choose secretaries of state in the midterms. Fourteen of those seats currently are held by Republicans and 13 by Democrats.

Voting rights advocates were alarmed at the presence of election deniers on general election ballots in key battlegrounds due to the important role these offices would play in affirming the outcome of future elections, including a potential race between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Georgia features one of the country’s best-known election chiefs, Republican Brad Raffensperger who refused to help Trump in the Peach State. (That campaign by Trump and his allies is the subject of a special grand jury investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.)

Michigan: The race pits the incumbent, Democrat Jocelyn Benson – a leading national voice countering election denial – against Republican Kristina Karamo, who has made false claims about the 2020 election and who was behind the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Karamo signed on to an unsuccessful Supreme Court lawsuit that challenged Biden’s victory in four states, after she said that Donald Trump had won the election.

He said the victory in Arizona might have been enough of a shot across the bow to stop some activists, but emphasized that the most serious attacks on elections didn’t emerge until weeks and 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.

Some of the cases have been brought by the same fringe legal groups that sought to bolster former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 electoral loss.

This week’s elections could be affected by the court fights over the midterms, as well as the balance of power in Washington. They also could set the ground rules for the 2024 presidential election, as the parties and outside groups test their strategies for when Trump – whose lies about a stolen 2020 election have shaped the current legal environment – could be on the ballot again.

David Becker, a former attorney with the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation, said he was worried that the number of mail Ballots could exceed the margins in some of the races. “It’s better to resolve those disputes before you know the results and the margins. Once the margins are clear, that could create a political axe to grind.”

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement after the state Supreme Court ruling that it was a “massive victory for Pennsylvania voters and the rule of law” and a “milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”

Loperfido sees the potential that their allegations could lead to post-election challenges, brought through the state’s administrative process for challenging ballots, alleging the ballots are invalid because the signatures don’t match.

The Republican National Committee has been engaged in a drive to find new poll workers. And national and state GOP parties have gone to court to demand proof they are being hired. The fights have focused on the poll workers and what records Republicans can find about their identities, while other lawsuits focused on the policies for poll watchers.

A judge last week ordered officials in Virginia to appoint more Republicans to top election spots in individual precincts, following legal action by the state and county GOP.

Gates said they were very responsive and had bent over backwards. “And for some reason, there’s certain people out there – and I hate to admit it but Arizona Republican Party [Chair] Kelli Ward is one of them — who’s more interested in creating concern, distractions and disruptions in this election process.”

“We are filing, and mostly winning, these lawsuits because counties in various states are violating the law, plain and simple,” the RNC said in a statement to CNN. Every decisive victory is a victory for transparency.

Albert, of Common Cause, said that the demands around the country that more Republican workers be hired could be a precursor for attempts after the election to attempt to toss out ballots from election sites in dispute.

Western battleground states have become the sites of disputes over the technology that is used for voting, where outlandish theories about fraud in the 2020 election have manifested in pushes to conduct aspects of the midterm elections by hand.

Cochise County, home to roughly 125,000 Arizonans, was planning to audit all of its ballots by hand in the wake of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

On Friday, Masters made a similar argument to Lake, calling the counting process in Maricopa County – the largest county in Arizona and home to Phoenix – “incompetent,” pointing to a problem with printers that led to some ballots not being properly tabulated on Tuesday, even though election officials said that issue was remedied within hours on Election Day.

The Nye County government still hopes to have a hand counting done again if the secretary of state signs off on the new plan, according to Arnold Knightly. Nye and Cochise are both planning on using electronic counting machines in the election.

If the parallel counts were to proceed, they could set the stage for dueling results, which could further hurt trust in the election among voters and the county officials who will certify the results.

Defending the Censorship of Voting Fraud in the Arizona Legislature, as Revised by the Michigan Fair Elections Campaign

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. There is a huge team of lawyers that are prepared to take action.

Regardless of the results on Tuesday, voices pushing conspiracy theories will not be stopped soon. On Wednesday morning, the organizer of a coalition of election deniers in Michigan urged the group to redouble its forces despite the fact that Democrats swept nearly every major race in the state.

“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. There was a group’s next online meeting on Thursday.

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

Further down the ballot is Mr. Hamadeh, who also railed against the news media and is locked in a seesawing race for attorney general against 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.

On Twitter, Ms. Lake and Mr. Masters have projected victory. Ms. Lake stated that she was very confident that she would be the next governor of Arizona. Mr. Hamadeh, after taking a small lead in his uncalled race, posted a photo on Twitter of himself at a rally and seemed to claim victory, writing, “I want to thank the people of Arizona for entrusting me with this great responsibility.” He has since lost ground and is slightly trailing.

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 fired back, writing, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”

Both Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes have called on supporters to respect the vote-counting process. The pattern and cadence of incoming votes are what we anticipated, Ms. Hobbs wrote on social media.

A new Arizona law calls for a recount if the margin of victory in the electoral contest is less than 0.25 percent.

Tammy Patrick was a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, and worked for a decade as a Maricopa County election official. Maricopa is home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters.

Patrick says the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona haven’t changed a lot since her time there. She says voter behavior and political realities have consequences.

Voters might have also heard messaging about voting on Election Day being a better option, Patrick says, and decided to turn in the mail ballot they already had instead of waiting in a line.

Regardless, election officials now have to process and tabulate all those ballots. That means signature verification and ballots being checked by bipartisan teams.

Patrick believes a machine called an “extraction” could speed up this process. Many Florida counties use an in house device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens it, making it easier to remove the ballot.

Arizona and Florida have the same deadlines and rules for mail ballots, though there are some differences in the regulations and procedures. Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right that are upset with Arizona’s elections management.

Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Friday that the county expected to be largely finished with the remaining mail-in votes by Saturday. Gloria said that the ballots are being inspected at the counting board.

The Arizona Governor’s Race: Majority Leader Mark Kelly in the White House after Mark Kelly’s Democratic Primary Wins Friday Night

Arizona is being scrutinized chiefly because of the political importance of key races there as well as how close vote margins are in the state. She reckons that the media thinks it is taking much longer because they feel less comfortable calling the race.

Democrat Katie Hobbs leads Republican Kari Lake by about 31,000 votes in the Arizona governor’s race as of Saturday morning, following the reporting of roughly 80,000 ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous. And as if Friday evening, Republican Adam Laxalt is holding onto a slim lead of just more than 800 votes over Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

The win by Kelly, who was elected in 2020 to fill the term of the late GOP Sen. John McCain, capped a string of victories for Democrats on Friday night as ballots continued to be painstakingly tallied in the West. Kelly was defeated by Masters, who was backed by Donald Trump, in the belief that the voters of a Trump campaign would reject him because they felt he was an extremists.

With Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s victory on Friday night, Democrats are just one seat away from keeping control of the US Senate as all eyes turn to neighboring Nevada, where the competitive Senate race is increasingly trending in Democrats’ direction.

Control of the House, meanwhile, remains up in the air, with 21 races still uncalled. CNN projections show that Republicans have won more than 200 seats so far, which would put them in charge of the House. Many of the uncalled House races are in California.

Control of the US House still hangs in the balance. But it is clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be by a far more slender margin than GOP leaders had hoped. That unexpected outcome has already produced recriminations and second-guessing of Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had hoped to be emerging from these contests with a clear mandate to become the next House majority leader.

Counting Mail-in Ballots in Pima County, Arizona: a High-Redshift CNN Report from Clark County

According to CNN, roughly 24,000 more mail-in ballots are needed in Clark County to be counted, along with about 15,000 provisional and cured ballots.

Political organizations, especially Democratic-leaning unions, that spent months urging people to vote in Nevada’s key Senate race are now turning their focus toward “curing” flawed mail-in ballots in the still-uncalled contest.

In Pima County, the second largest county in Arizona, election officials expect to have over 88,000 ballots left to count at the end of Friday.

Gates thinks that if they keep counting around 60,000 to 80,000 ballots a day, they will be done by early next week.

Hargove said that she hopes by Monday that Pima County will have the majority of the remaining votes counted. She had previously said that all the votes would be counted by Monday. She said that it would no longer be the case due to the large amount of votes received earlier in the day.

Jeremy Gates and the re-election process in Cochise County. Rep. Scott Perry meets with the House Freedom Caucus

When asked on CNN about specific accusations from the Republican National Committee, Gates said he would prefer that they communicate those concerns to him directly. I am a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. He said to raise the issues with us and talk to us about them.

He said the suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on in the county is offensive to the good elections workers.

“Over the past couple of decades, on average it takes 10 to 12 days to complete the count. That isn’t due to anything that Maricopa County has decided to do. The count is accurate because we follow the law of Arizona, and it was set up so that way.

The state appeals court made clear in a vote that they wouldn’t reverse a court order that barred the full hand count in time for the elections. But a lawyer for Cochise County The recorder believes the county still has a chance to conduct a hand audit that goes beyond the usual procedures.

CNN reported on Friday that Trump is blaming McConnell for the failures of several candidates in the general election and is trying to gain support for a GOP revolt against McConnell next week.

If Republicans win the House, McCarthy’s task of becoming speaker is more complicated than McConnell’s because he needs 218 votes to win the gavel – not just a majority of Republicans.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry met with McCarthy in his office Friday. He said afterward that the meeting “went well” but wouldn’t say if McCarthy has his – or the Freedom Caucus’ – support for speaker.

Reconciliation in Nevada: A Democratic Senate Revisited after the Super-Circumstantial Covid-19 Pandemic

The string of Democratic wins Friday night marked a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that had appeared to be in serious trouble heading into Tuesday’s elections. With President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and an unfavorable economic climate, along with high gas prices that are pinching the budgets of families all across the country, Kelly and Cortez Masto were in a tough spot.

The Supreme Court decision in June to overturn abortion rights angered many voters across the country, but that is just one of many different crosscurrents affecting voter behavior. Republicans were hamstrung by Trump giving rise to far-right candidates who were too extreme to appeal to the voters who decide elections. In the end, many independent voters and moderates appear to have rejected candidates they viewed as too extreme or too closely aligned with Trump – and Democrats turned out in droves to protect their incumbent candidates.

The one bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor – tossing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. After unemployment in Nevada had peaked at over 30% during the Covid-19 pandemic, Lombardo reminded voters of their struggles. The state’s economic recovery was hampered by Sisolak’s policy of being too restrictive.

A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”

We can reconcile the ballots against check-ins to ensure that they match the results from specific locations. This is done with political party observers present and is a practice that has been in place for decades,” the spokesperson said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/politics/mark-kelly-blake-masters-arizona-senate-results/index.html

When the GOP Wonked: After Kelly and Thiel, the Winner tended to Reject the Candidate on Immigration Denialism

Gates said that if they want to take their issues to court, they have every right to do that.

Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds facing Democrats – even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won – because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a Navy veteran and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from the conservative tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, who worked for him. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, and in a campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

But Masters seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told CNN’s Lah he didn’t believe moderates were bothered by his comments about the 2020 election, insisting that voters were far more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border.

Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal that was advanced by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. Rape, incest and the life of the mother are exceptions to the bill.

Rejoinder to Finchem’s “Hanging Chad” in South Carolina, and to the Flares of Voting in Arizona

Up to the moment of polls closing, election administrators were still getting calls with claims about flaws in the voting equipment, while poll monitors in some parts of the country were asking questions about the machinery. People tried to disrupt voting or prevent voters from casting their votes. Republican candidates and election deniers seized on the technical issues in multiple countries. The confidence of some members of the public will be further damaged by such misinformation.

The relative calm so far had election officials breathing a sigh of relief, even as they remained concerned about specious legal challenges and misinformation that could erupt in the coming weeks. The tactics they think reinforced a system that was affected by baseless accusations of fraud and widespread distrust after Donald J. Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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 enthusiasm that I wasn’t expecting that.

Dozens of races are still undecided and counting could continue into next week in a few places. Attorneys who work for the elections are looking forward to legal challenges in light of the many election-denying candidates in Nevada and Arizona.

On Thursday, Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, disparaged the election system in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, and compared one part of the process to the notorious hanging chads of the 2000 election in Florida.

The Johnson County, Kan., election chief came up with a solution after receiving calls and email from voters who wanted their ballots to be counted by hand rather than on machines. The district that had the most voters in Kansas would give voters a chance to place their ballot in a sealed red bag and receive assurances that it would be counted.

Sherman said that they created a little bit of turbulence. “It’s like running a treadmill always on incline.” Mr. Sherman said he’d like “an easy run and you don’t have that when you have constant election denial.”

According to Douglas Wilson of a Democratic strategist in Charlotte, N.C., polling showing a large Republican wave may have helped cool the ardor of election deniers. 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. More than 2,000 people who completed online training on how to intervene in tense situations, confusion, de-escalate confrontations with potentially armed activists, and keep things calm, were overwhelmed by its goal of 1,250 volunteers.

“We had the good problem of more people signing up than we had a place to put them,” said Tiffany Flowers, a lead organizer of the campaign. She said she was working on social media for 20 hours on Tuesday.

The hometown of Ms. flowers and her involvement in election protection efforts on Election Day were incorrect. Ms. Flowers is from Baltimore, not Atlanta, and worked remotely on Election Day, rather than visiting polling places in person.

“I strongly believe that there are more Americans who wanted to see everyone who was eligible to vote be able to vote fairly, freely and with dignity,” Ms. Flowers said.

“Stop the count!” Stop the count!” The people were banging on the windows that stood between them and the people trying to tally votes. Social media was flooded with stories about ballots being taken under the cover of night.

The First Real Test of Election Law: The Last Days of the 2021 Capitol Reaction and the Next Day the American People Could not Stop The Steal

On the Wednesday after voting finished, Republican candidates for governor and state attorney general, who had denied the 2020 election results, conceded their races.

At that moment, she realized the nation’s election workers were about to pass their first real test since Donald Trump began attacking democracy.

“I got choked up a little bit because to me that was like the affirmation that we did it,” Benson said. We had a smooth election. There were people who were ready to pounce. But it didn’t work.

So far, that chatter has not incited the chaos many had feared would happen, as a result of mythos of election fraud that is a core belief for many Americans on the right.

“If they want to come back and fight another day, that’s their choice,” said Georgia Republican Secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday, after winning reelection.

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.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said it felt like the air had been taken out of the sails. That’s how it looks right now. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

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

Detecting voter intimidation using social media: An overview from Maricopa, Arizona, on Monday and April 22: Analysis of a Black Hole Election Investigation

“The scene was set that there would absolutely be fraud, and it was just a matter of needing to observe, collect and report the evidence,” said Cindy Otis, a disinformation expert and former CIA analyst.

“We had a lot more parameters and protections in place than we did in 2020,” said Benson. “That translated into a process that was ready to handle challenges and we were able to convince them that wouldn’t work, which deterred many from coming forward with attempts to intervene in the process.”

Election offices also leveraged social media strategies similar to those used by bad actors spreading false narratives. Local governments shared the social media templates they were created from the National Association of State Election Directors.

Amy Cohen said that they use the same language to emphasize that election officials are the most reliable place to get information about elections. The goal is to drive people back to the party they are with, which is election officials, not addressing a specific narrative or false information.

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.

Researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership, a research coalition that focuses on misinformation around elections, pulled tweets related to technical issues in Maricopa up until Monday and found that while the most retweeted accounts promoted false narratives, the county election websites were the most frequently included links in the online discussion. The websites were used to spread information.

In places like Arizona, where on election night police on horseback patrol the streets around the tabulation center, there was closer coordination between election agencies and law enforcement.

“It’s unfortunate, but at the same time it was reassuring to see the protection of election officials took so seriously,” said a former elections official during a briefing by the National Task Force on Election Crises.

“It turned out to be a lot of talk,” she said, crediting officials’ communication that voter intimidation is illegal. “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

What is wrong with “them” – Do we really need to know about the outcome of the November 2016 election? How did we lose our faith in the lie?

Dozens of protesters showing their support for Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake outside of the counting site in Mesa appeared to be the largest protest after the election.

There is a lack of faith in the ability of people to be swayed towards certain candidates by lies, based on what we see before us right now.

In addition, the landscape of social media has changed with the rise of alternative platforms popular with the right that advertise few limits on what users can post.

Trump has been banned from social networking sites, cutting off his ability to reach a large audience.

Trump posts only on his own social network. His following is smaller, with 4.5 million people, than it was in 2020, and he’s more limited in his reach.

For example, a Truth Social post he made on Election Day calling for protests in Detroit was copied and pasted onto Twitter, but has so far failed to gain traction or get widely shared.

Another challenge for those eager to cast doubt upon the results of the election is that they appear to be struggling to cohere around a narrative to advance conspiracy theories.

The party swept up important victories in Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second term, which was largely unaffected by the “red wave” predictions.

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

The fringe of false information and conspiracy theories: The case of New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District in a hotspot of election results

A person wrote on a website that “Any county that hasn’t finished counting is cheating, full stop.” What will happen if Kari Lake wins? That means we cheated then?” another replied.

While the fringe platforms have siphoned off some of the more notorious sources of false information and conspiracy theories, they’ve created an ecosystem that’s powerful in its own right.

“You have this content being delivered now in so many different ways,” disinformation expert Otis said. They’re getting it in different ways, from audio, newsletter, email, text, news apps and from political campaigns. It doesn’t have to be something that’s getting a lot of attention in the news, but it can still have a long-term impact.

So few candidates have decided to contest results, the clearest sign of the atmosphere this cycle is that they’re not interested in it.

The Secretary of State for New Mexico pointed to the 2nd Congressional District. Going into Election Day, she was worried that the House race could be a hotspot. It’s gone between the two major political parties in the past three elections, and barely a thousand votes separate the two candidates this year.

“For me, it’s nice to have a return to the way that our democracy is supposed to work, which is peaceful transition of power and acceptance of election results,” Oliver said. “And it makes me feel hopeful for the first time in quite a while.”