A Board Chairman’s Meeting in Winnebago, Wis., during a May 13 Elections Rehears Revisited

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

Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot 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. She said that getting a lot of other things done was hard when you get those types of requests. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

A number of election officials believed that supporter submissions had been encouraged by the pillow salesman who was thought to have conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote. Election deniers gave instructions on how to file records requests during a seminar in August.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. He added that local supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, commonly called cast vote records, from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.

The meeting of the Board of Elections may seem like any other meeting of bureaucrats being chaired by a no-nonsense chair.

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

But Johnson does not seem to be able to leave his stated beliefs at the door. Johnson wrote a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and claimed that Joe Biden was an illegitimate president.

He has called for the banning of voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting on social media, he also posted a photo with a MyPillow founder.

CNN tried multiple times to interview Johnson. He accused locals and the media of lying about the board’s intentions in a February 7 post, denied that the board vote to end Sunday voting was racially motivated, and accused the former county elections supervisor of mismanagement. He said the board would work to ensure that “every single voter who wants to vote, and is eligible to vote, is given equal protection of their right.”

Some of these MAGA influencers tour the country. David says that voting machines are vulnerable. He ends his presentation with an appeal for audience members to do more than consume content. He said in Michigan that you have to get in the ring. “You can’t fight this on social media.”

There are safeguards for the electoral process offered by election regulations, long-standing rules on auditing and testing machines and other layers of oversight.

Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant, said that actions of insiders that cast doubts on the fairness of that process could have an impact on whether people perceive an election to be real or fake.

“It is inconceivable that we will have anybody on the election board that does not believe in fair elections,” Dexter Wimbish, a Democrat who sits on the election board with Johnson, told CNN. “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.

Johnson wrote a letter to board members and the election supervisor on August 17, 2021 about moving forward with that effort.

Investigating a Spalding County Elections Auditing a Voting System in Coffee County, Georgia, with an Attorney for Sullivan Strickler

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.

An attorney representing the Spalding County elections board told CNN Wednesday that a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, intends to subpoena Johnson and two other Spalding County officials. As CNN has reported, that grand jury is looking into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state.

William Perry is the 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. A fifth of them said they will leave before the election, while a third of them cited political attacks.

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

The clerk of Cross Village Township in northern Michigan, Diana Keller, was attacked by two men who claimed to have come from the Department of Defense to perform a forensic audit of her vote tabulator.

“I was actually terrified,” she told CNN. I did not trust them from the beginning. But I was told they’d contacted … the county clerk, and that she had said, ‘yes’ to the audit, which makes no sense.”

In a video of the incident obtained by CNN, and previously reported by the Traverse City Record-Eagle, Keller is seen asking whether the men are “from the state or anything?”

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

Keeping the Tabulator Away: Sensitive Citizens Are Outraged by Election-Conspiracists who Fly Under the Radar

The plan to access the tabulator was traced back to Tera Jackson, who claimed to be in touch with Powell and had evidence of fraud tied to a satellite owned by the Vatican. Jackson pleaded guilty to a reduced charge for disturbing the peace in connection with the incident. No one else was charged.

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

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

The Adams Township Clerk, Stephanie Scott, was stripped of his election duties last year after spreading election misinformation, and refusing to allow routine maintenance to be performed on voting machines. According to an email from the chief deputy clerk of the county, that has forced them to run the elections in Adams Township since October 2021.

Scott is spreading misinformation about the Hart Inter-Civic election management system being connected to the internet or having voter-specific data. In August, in an email obtained by CNN, Scott told other clerks in the state to “uphold election integrity” by ignoring a directive about voting data from the Michigan Bureau of Elections, which she called “the unelected bureaucratic office.”

Scott’s attorney, Stefanie Lambert, said her client refused to comply with a directive she contends violated the law. Lambert reiterated the baseless claim that the state’s elections are not secure.

There are many checks and balances to make sure township clerks and other election workers do their job well, according to Byrum. But, she said, the concern is that some who hold false election-conspiracy beliefs may act on them in a way that undermines public confidence.

“There are opportunities for election deniers to attack our elections system if they fly under the radar,” Byrum said. Those who try to undermine the election will be caught, but at the cost of voter confidence.

“They’re very surprised and disappointed,” he said. The media source and politicians on the Republican side are the main reason for it.

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

An Observation of Nevada Election Commissioner Mark Merlino After Biden’s 2020 Primary: Why Nevada Republicans Don’t Hand-Count Electronic Voting Machines

For example, in Nye County, Nevada, which sprawls over an 18,000 square-mile area between Las Vegas and Reno, veteran GOP clerk Sandra “Sam” Merlino called it quits in August, after 22 years at the job.

The final straw was when the county Commissioners decided to count the future general election balloted by hand because of their suspicion of voting machines.

Mark Kampf insists that Nye County voters don’t trust electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure, despite the fact that Donald Trump won in 2020.

Nye County will be among the first in the nation to use electronic machines only for a preliminary tally this November, before reverting to hand-counting paper ballots. Frank Carbone said that the commission wants to do away with the machines completely in the future.

Nevada election officials, including the Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, insist that their voting machines are reliable and accurate and can connect to the internet. Cegavske has stated that ballots can be easily verified by paper record.

The Nevada Supreme Court was requested to review the hand-count plan. The group asked the court to rule by October 21, four days before county officials plan to start hand-counting mail-in ballots. CNN didn’t get a return of several calls.

In June, Jim Hindle was elected clerk and treasurer in Storey County, which is located outside of Reno. Even though Biden won Nevada, six Republicans in the state signed a false pledge to give the electoral votes to Trump.

Hindle, who is vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party, replaces Doreayne “Dore” Nevin, who left her post early after losing the June GOP primary to Hindle. The email was obtained by CNN and stated that he runs not because he’s a politician, but because he loves his job.

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

Towards an Efficient Election Watcher: The Effect of a National Movement to Stop Worrying about Election Fraud and Election Integrity

The clerk in the county that is to host the election was blocked from doing so by the secretary of state. State officials stopped him from being involved in his county’s primary election in June after discovering he had copied two election-systems hard drives. While that violated the state’s election regulations, Schroeder has tried to justify his actions with the misleading claim that voting machines contain “wireless devices” that can be hacked through the internet.

He told CNN, “Every one of our Dominion machines have a wireless device in them and we have no way to verify that hasn’t been utilized” – a widely debunked conspiracy.

According to Griswold’s office, Schroeder gave those copies to people who weren’t authorized to have them.

Since 2020, election disinformation has never really stopped circulating, whether on social media, candidate fundraising efforts, or elsewhere. A lot of candidates this fall, including the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona, have adopted Trump’s approach and are refusing to say if they’ll accept the results if they lose.

Voting is now underway. Colorado mailed out ballots for the November election on Monday. Key battleground states like Arizona and Michigan are receiving mail-in ballots. The election on November 8 may show that the challenges are just beginning.

Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center stated that the biggest risk was erosion of trust in the election and political leaders using that distrust to challenge them and undermine confidence in the American.

So, like a growing number of Americans who support former President Donald Trump, he’s taken training classes put on by conservative groups on how to be a poll watcher in the 2022 midterm elections. He will be able to see himself.

It comes as part of a nationwide movement led by MAGA influencers who have circulated false information about election fraud, with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon the most prominent.

Bannon hosts many guests who are working to build an army of conservative poll workers, such as Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help overturn the 2020 election. “We deploy people to be poll watchers all over the country,” Mitchell said.

This is having a real effect. Child, a real estate professional, was talking to CNN outside the Delaware County Conservatives training in suburban Philadelphia. A few people showed up, but theOrganizer had to look for more chairs because she had so many people show up.

Child raised a few debunked claims of election fraud. When CNN showed him proof the claims were false, he accepted it – he was even friendly about it. He couldn’t help but feel that something had gone wrong. He thought elections should go back to paper ballots and a single day of voting.

Why do we need paper ballots? A county council member’s perspective on the alleged fraud in 2020 election deniers and how to stop them

He explained that he went to the seminar a second time to understand the issue better, because he was spinning at the end of the presentation.

“I would vote, you know, every time and … hit the buttons and go home,” he said. “And the seminar basically showed us what happens after your vote. And that’s that was an eye opener.”

He said that he remembered vividly the paper in the touch-writer, which was not regular copy paper.

People come to the county council meetings with the suggestion of using paper ballots. And I’m like, ‘We do use paper ballots. Do you understand we use paper ballots?” Christine Reuther is a member of the Delaware County Council. “The votes are cast on a paper ballot, and then they are scanned, and the results of that vote are tabulated on the scanner. You can vote on a paper ballot, and that paper ballot is used to maintain a record of the voter’s vote.

At a county council meeting, it was clear officials were frustrated by the several citizens who used the public comment period to make false claims about election fraud. It makes sense that Delaware County has fought many lawsuits against 2020 election deniers. It won all of them. But the county told CNN it had cost $250,000. Reuther said she was worried about how much more time and money this movement would drain with the midterms and the 2024 election.

Pennsylvania may have some of the most closely watched races nationally, with a US Senate seat and the governorship hanging in the balance. Delaware County was once a Republican stronghold, but has steadily become more Democratic over the last decade. The county council went Democratic for the first time in last year’s election.

Carl Belis: Are You Going to Vote Across the Nation? Be prepared now. What is it like to be stupid like on January 6?

“Those things are fairy tales,” Carl Belis, who has been a poll worker in several elections, told CNN of public comments claiming the voting machines were vulnerable to fraud.

Belis wasn’t worried about working in this election in Delaware County. Police would be called if someone tried to disrupt the voting. “Across the nation? I think there will be some problems. Which is why I say to people, ‘Be prepared now. Don’t be stupid like on January 6.

Child says he just wants the rules followed. And if Democrats win, he will carry on with his life. “What, am I going to start a revolt? No,” he said. “Have to accept it. What else are you gonna do?”