Election Records Requests for Mike Lindell, the Pillow Salesman, and Supremum about the 2020 Voting Vote, a County Clerk’s Perspective

The November elections are a third or fourth thing on my radar. the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. “It should be number one.”

There are a lot of requests to get election records, from the photo of the ballot to the application for the election.

The county clerk in a Wisconsin county said she had 120 requests for records in a couple of weeks. It gets hard to get a lot of other things done when you get those types of requests. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.

Election workers give out information to the public is an important part of their job, Mr. Lindell said. He had received digital recreations of every voter’s ballot choices from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. The records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide according to Mr. Lindell.

The California Clerk-Recorder Elect: How a Member of the Nevada Association of Election Officials has Responded to Deniers and Critics

The CNN opinion series “America’s Future Starts Now” has people sharing how they have been affected by the country’s biggest issues and experts offering their proposed solutions. The authors have their own views in these commentaries. CNN has more opinion.

After the presidential election was disrupted by violence, suspicions and fear have crept into the mechanics of American democracy. As another Election Day nears, intimidation has crept up to levels not seen for decades, while self-appointed watchdogs search for fraud and monitor the vote.

But election denial has spread even to places Mr. Trump won handily. 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.

And these elections deniers made me a particular target of their frustrations. They falsely accused me of violating state campaign finance laws, of partaking in unspecified acts of corruption and of lying about my work experience. A mailer was given out in which I was subjected to racist bile. At one point, I needed to get a restraining order against someone who was threatening me.

That said, I remain firmly committed to restoring Americans’ faith in US democracy, and so this year I left a 32-year career in government and joined the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE), a cross-partisan organization made up of current and former election officials and law enforcement officers with the shared goal of protecting election officials and workers.

Stakeholders from both sides of the aisle need to put country before party in order to keep elections free and fair. If you think that’s impossible, just let an election official show you how it’s done.

Natalie Adona is the clerk-recorder elect, a non-partisan office, in Nevada County, California. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Adona is a member of several boards and committees, including an advisory board member for the Election Official Legal Defense Network, an editorial board member for the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice, and a participant in the Issue. One “Faces of Democracy” campaign.

When Voting by Post-Constitutional Mail Ink Runs Out: Political Violence During a Campaign to End the 2016 Philadelphia Siege

Many Democrats chose to vote by mail. As a result, when the in-person results came in on election night, Trump was winning Pennsylvania and several other battleground states. Trump declared victory early Wednesday. As mail-in votes were counted, his margin began to close. Each time they tried to stop the count, they were unsuccessful.

By week’s end, Biden would take the lead and demonstrations in and around Philadelphia would become violent. The exercise concluded that, even though the initial vote count is mostly complete, there is no end in sight as weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny loom.

The top officials in the room expressed serious concern during this scenario. As extreme as this scenario sounded, it also felt entirely plausible.

A few days after the election, I left the convention center where the votes were still being counted to get some air. I was followed outside, verbally attacked and videotaped by a member of Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign. It was all very familiar to women in politics when I received a plethora of attacks after the video of me was posted on the dark corners of the internet.

Two plain-clothesPhiladelphia police officers were assigned to follow me throughout the day when one of the threats turned out to be credible. I avoided engaging in basic daily activities, such as getting my hair done, because I did not want to have to explain to my hairdresser who my escorts were.

The Washington Post. It Was an Invasive Weed Attempt to Make Sense of Michigan Election Results, Not the Behaviour of My Mother or Barber Shop

Election day has always been a significant event in my life. My mother was the local committee person in our neighborhood. She was a single mom, so I followed the polls on Election Day. Back then, our polling place was a barber shop, where I would spend hours spinning on a leather barber’s chair taking it all in.

Not all Americans have a mother or barber shop like mine. Investing in our teachers and schools would help teach civics education and impart on young people the importance of democratic ideals.

The chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners is a Democrat who is also a member of the bipartisan board in charge of elections and voter registration.

The Russian attempt to influence our politics and social media began after a hand recount of the Michigan election results in the fall of 2016 and has been going on ever since.

Some questioned our election process because of it. The process, which began as seed, had grown into an Invasive Weed four years after it began.

The November 2020 election only made my fears worse. I had just overseen the administration of the most challenging election of my career, and all eyes were on Michigan. We made a mistake when attempting to re-submit an Absentee voter file on election night and made a fix the morning after the election.

A leading national figure falsely claimed that 2,000 votes for one presidential candidate had gone to another, pushing my colleagues and I into the national spotlight.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/opinions/us-election-workers-voting-threats-roundup/index.html

The Eagles and Rattlers: Two Boys in Oklahoma’s Robbers Cave State Park, Incidently Came together on a Bus

Election officials and law enforcement can follow the process developed by the committee to be prepared for elections. It states that election officials and law enforcement should discuss situational knowledge, agree on a vision of order and safety for election spaces, and practice their responses in the event of a protest at the polls.

It is my hope that more election officials follow our guidelines, so that public servants can once again do their jobs without fearing for their lives.

Tina Barton is the former appointed city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan, and 2020 Oakland county clerk Republican candidate. She is a senior election expert with The Elections Group.

Polls show that Americans believe democracy is in danger, but we have a choice. We can either cower before the challenge, or we can act to support, defend and strengthen our experiment in democracy.

Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought two highly similar groups of 11- to 12-year-old boys to Oklahoma’s Robbers Cave State Park in 1954. His intention was to study how hostilities arise between groups.

The boys arrived on separate buses and camped in different areas. One group decided to call themselves the Eagles; the other, the Rattlers. The groups fell into conflict when they met. First, there was verbal sparring and then physical confrontation.

Sherif changed the terms of the experiment. He didn’t have the boys express their feelings in a polite way at the campfire. Sherif gave both groups a problem to solve. The camp had a water supply that was jammed. If the boys wanted water, they would have to work together to fix the jam.

The boys collaborated on several problems. They stopped calling each other names after the hostilities stopped. Several even asked if they could ride home together on the same bus.

The American Dream: Desegregating, Working, Serving, Solving, Serving and Serving in the Post-World War II Era

Since the mid-1970s, Americans have been self-segregating. We live in neighborhoods, go to churches, read news and join clubs that are increasingly politically homogenous. We get married within our chosen party. We’re Rattlers and Eagles, and the consequences are the same as 55 years ago.

What can we do? Mandatory national service. For a year or two we would join others in tossing a salad of classes, race, religion, party and way of life together to work on a problem facing the country. Not talk – do.

It can be done through military service or a new version of the Peace Corps. The Eagles and Rattlers would have to work together in order for the United States to be a better place.

Studies of World War II show that working together reduces the tensions between groups that are not hostile to one another. White troops who fought alongside Black soldiers held less racial animus post-war. The same was true with White merchant marines who served with Black sailors.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/american-democracy-broken-solutions-roundup/index.html

The Justice Problem and Vets: Revisiting Justice for the United States Supreme Court and the U.S. Constitution Using Veterans Activists

Most Americans do not support the Supreme Court’s decision to overturning access to reproductive rights, and they do not think the court protects the right to vote.

It makes sense that this would erode trust. But it’s not just that some of these decisions call the rule of law into question – it’s that it appears our judiciary isn’t really listening to how the law is lived for each and every one of us.

And that contrast is made all the more stark when the courts are compared to the communities directly impacted by their decisions. The majority of federaI judges are White and male. They’re making decisions for communities they have often never been a part of – and that can have huge and irreparable implications, particularly for women and people of color.

There is a critical moment at hand. The Supreme Court is hearing cases that deal with affirmative action, voting rights, and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer people. We need a diverse judiciary – across all levels of the federal government – that gives the public confidence that the judges who hold our fates in their hands are seeking to fully understand the parties before them and are intent on reaching more fair-minded and informed decisions.

President Joe Biden is committed to judicial diversity. His appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, was a monumental milestone. According to a report in July, more than 70% of Biden’s judicial nominees are Black, Hispanic or Asian American.

This fall, we’re calling on the Senate to confirm all of Biden’s nominees – not just for the sake of the courts, but for the urgent and long overdue sake of restoring the public’s trust.

The military – including its veterans – is one of the most trusted institutions in our society, and it is our hope that when Americans see their veterans conspicuously serving in their polling stations, it will increase their faith in their electoral system and its outcomes. Additionally, veterans are trained to deescalate moments of tension and may be best suited to address any potential threats at the polls.

A 20-year veteran of the US Marine Corps, Joe Plenzler was in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a judge in Maryland. We the Veterans and co-creater of Vet the Vote, is trying to recruit 100,000 veterans and their family members to be poll workers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/american-democracy-broken-solutions-roundup/index.html

The America’s Democracy Broken: The Case for Non-Partisanal Voting in the Pedestrian Scenarios of Elections

Someone will almost certainly end up bleeding if you lower a pinata packed with treats into a chaotic children’s birthday party.

As politics seeps into every single part of life, the stakes of our elections become untenably high. Reducing the size and scope of the government is required to unstuff the pinata.

That means eliminating giveaways to corporations and other favored groups, as well as strengthening protections for economic and civil liberties in order to dramatically expand the sphere of privacy. With less power over others at stake, the temptation to cheat (or accuse the other side of cheating) is reduced.

There is no silver bullet for the problems confronting our democracy, but it is crucial to begin by recognizing that the political arena is intended to be a venue for disagreement and contention. We have forgotten how to disagree constructively, which is why our political system feels so out of place. Our two major parties spend too much time talking about each other and not enough time talking to each other.

Today, our congressional (and state) representatives are nominated in low-turnout party primaries, in which the most highly motivated, partisan voters predominate. Increasingly, the nominees that emerge from that process – particularly in Republican primaries – are the most uncompromising.

RCV with open primaries are an alternative to ranked choice voting. The first step is a non- partisan blanket primary that decides who gets to run in the election. Pragmatic representatives couldn’t be knocked out at this stage because they would win enough votes from party moderates and independent voters to finish among the top four or five.

Some states are moving in the same direction. As a result of a 2020 voter initiative, Alaska is using the “top four” RCV system this year for its executive, legislative and US House and Senate elections, and Nevada is voting this November on an initiative to adopt “top five” RCV voting for its future elections.

In this way, voters would be freed to vote for moderates and independents without fearing that they would be electing the candidate they most dislike. And pragmatism and flexibility would be encouraged because the process would tend to choose the most broadly appealing candidate.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/american-democracy-broken-solutions-roundup/index.html

Enabling Election Day Registration to Increase Voter Participation and Rebuild Trust in the United States, with a Contribution from Deborah Cleaver

A Bass University Fellow is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and the Mosbacher SeniorFellow in Global Democracy is also at the FSIN.

Voting is bigger than any one election – midterm, presidential, municipal, state-wide or otherwise. It is an endeavor that is more related to words such as I vote and we vote than to words such as your vote or my vote. Voting needs collective exercise so that voting continues year after year.

Complying with registration deadlines weeks before an election causes the voter registration problem. These deadlines could be eliminated entirely if all states adopted same-day registration (or Election Day registration). Especially in states with strict voter ID requirements, such as Indiana, it’s a straightforward process to implement – and one which could enfranchise exponentially more voters than are disenfranchised by these ID laws. It’s also been shown to radically increase voter turnout and overall confidence in election results.

These simple and practical solutions must be made available to all eligible voters nationwide – both to increase voter participation and to rebuild their trust in our democracy.

The founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, a nonprofit which builds technology to simplify political engagement, increases voter turnout and strengthens American democracy, is a woman named Deborah Cleaver.

The Wonderful Life of Richard Powers: How to Move a Viewer Through a Strange Place, Where to Live and Where to Find Them

Every story is different, but there is one thing in common and that is the fact that America thrived even in the face of adversity. And it certainly can again.

That said, this isn’t the Weimar Republic in 1929, and there is still hope for American democracy. Freedom has a cost and it requires constant vigilance, so it begins by acknowledging that. In an era in which we are distracted by transactional opportunities – and not transformative ones – we lose sight of that fact.

We need to decide where we want to live. Think of the film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The larger question of that film is whether we want to live in Bedford Falls, a largely welcoming and friendly town, or Potterville, a dark and hateful place. Most Americans would choose the latter.

The only way we can get to the Falls is through a story, conversation and connection. The novelist Richard Powers says, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. There is only one way for that to happen: a good story.

I’m in the business of trying to tell good stories. I hope that with each film I make, I move viewers. If the story lands inside of them, there’s a chance for transformation because they can interpret the film in a different way.

Multi-Party Democracy: Ken Burns, Liza Donnelly, and the Working Families Party. Part 2: Fusion and the American Democracy Broken Solutions Roundup

Ken Burns is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has been making films for PBS for more than 40 years. A six hour series about the United States’ responses to the Holocaust has been released by him.

LizaDonnelly is a writer and a cartoon artist for The New Yorker. Her history, “Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Women Cartoonists,” was published in 2022.

There’s just one modest step that could help us move toward that ideal of multi-party democracy: States should allow parties to nominate anyone who is eligible for the office, even if they have already been nominated by another party. If they agreed with them, new parties could emerge that might sometimes cross-endorse candidates from one of the major parties, or perhaps run their own candidates or stay out of a race altogether.

Some will seek to place particular issues on the agenda, such as universal basic income or marijuana legalization, even if they represent different parts of the political spectrum. They would bargain and form coalitions where they agreed – and differ where they didn’t – creating some of the dynamics of a parliamentary democracy.

They wouldn’t be spoilers unless they chose to be. If fusion were used, new parties could have an influence on the two major parties if they were not already big enough. The Working Families Party works in some states with a tradition of fusion, like New York and Connecticut.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/american-democracy-broken-solutions-roundup/index.html

Helping Congress improves the health of our democracy – An example of how Florida Democrats failed to pass a pair of fair districts amendments

Through this process, Floridians have proposed whether to expand enfranchisement by restoring voting rights to persons who complete felony sentences, protect natural resources and ensure fairness in our political districts. These amendments, which all passed, have helped improve the lives of everyday Floridians and protect core facets of our democracy.

An example of this is easy to show. In 2010, more than 60% of Floridians voted for a pair of “fair districts” amendments. The amendments require our legislature to give minority voting power and draw nonpartisan lines to protect it, and prevent diminishing voting strength for minorities.

In 2012, the state legislature blatantly ignored these requirements and passed partisan, gerrymandered maps. After the League of Women Voters of Florida and others sued and won, the Florida Supreme Court upheld these amendments in 2015 and fair maps were enacted.

Congress can only change this at the national level. Congress is designed as an arena for productive disagreement, where members who represent the diversity of the American polity can make accommodations and come to agreements on behalf of their disparate constituents. Congress builds common ground when it works well.

It would be an understatement to say that Congress does not do this today. It’s hard to see a way we could improve the health of our democracy without helping Congress function better. It could mean encouraging people to run for Congress by trying out electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting. And it could mean reforming the work of the institution to make traditional legislative negotiation more appealing to the ambitious men and women who run for Congress – for instance by re-empowering the committees.

More specifically, committees in both chambers could be given some direct control of floor time, as happens in some state legislatures, so that the work the committees do wouldn’t feel like a dead end. The Congress could change the rules so that all members can be involved in legislating with real-world consequences if they eliminate the boundary between authorizing bills and appropriating bills.

There is no shortage of ideas to move power from party leaders to rank-and-file legislators, but there is a lack of will. Reform of the electoral and congressional system is essential to the future of our democracy. And we should want our politics to be a little less exciting anyway.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/american-democracy-broken-solutions-roundup/index.html

The Rise and Fall of Crime: The Victims of the Cold War? Yuval Levin discusses the case of police violence in the United States

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy.

Simply put, how can we, Slovaks, accept advice or criticism from Americans, when they seem to be struggling with the same problems – and yet have a democracy that is over 200 years older than ours?

If the US wants to regain trust abroad, it needs to act like one and lead by example. In the case of police violence, the US can come up with solutions.

President Joe Biden has taken positive first steps by signing an executive order advancing accountability in the police force and criminal justice system. Congress should pass a bill with specific training, instruction and incentives for law enforcement facing this issue.

Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, scholar and president of the Mellon Foundation – the largest funder of arts, culture and humanities in the nation. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Taking the Right to Vote: A History-Lessons for the Advancement of Black Voting in the U.S.

We’ll go to the voting booth on November 8 and do more than decide on who to support. What we will do is undertake an act of stewardship, one sacred in its significance, of the right to vote itself.

We will do our part to uphold the right. so we can then pass it, torch-like, from one American generation to the next, and so we can exercise it on behalf of those in our current generation who cannot: those who are incarcerated, those who are not citizens, those who are too young, those who are too infirm.

My mother has a voter registration card that belonged to her grandfather. At the turn of the 20th century, he owned a small haberdashery business in Selma, Alabama, where he also had registered to vote. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, lynchings of Black men in the South occurred at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country. My maternal great-grandfather left for Washington, DC in 1906. The voter card was with him.

This unflinching commitment has since been passed to my own children, who are now old enough to vote themselves. They know how they came by this right. They, too, have learned the lessons that history teaches.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/opinions/democracy-black-vote-family-poem-alexander/index.html

Tubman’s Lantern: “I Go to Preparation a Place for You” (The Last Days of Emancipation Proclamation)

During her 13 trips south into Maryland for the purpose of guiding enslaved family members and friends north to freedom on the Underground Railroad, Tubman often carried a lantern. When she died in 1913, 50 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it was reported that her last words were these: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Our lanterns are what our votes are about. Reinforce them by burning them, treasure them, and so on. Raise them high, and then bear them forward. Let them be light for the future Americans who will come to bear them in turn, vote by vote.

What Does It Mean? Jay Bookman: Early Voting in Georgia and a Warning against Voter Fraud in the Era of Presidential Elections

There is a note in the editor. Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He now writes regularly for the Georgia Recorder. He can be followed on the social media site at:jaysbookman. His views are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Voters continue to turn out in record numbers here in Georgia, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched and bitterly fought campaign season, the question is natural: What does it mean?

In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. 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. It is impossible to know what factors will drive voters to the polls, with so many factors at play and a Senate and governor’s race with high-profile candidates.

That uncertainty is a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether or not they vote can be confusing and misleading. It is a caution that the rest of us should not put so much faith in the work of pollsters.

Governor Brian Kemp and the Secretary of State endorsed the bill and conceded that voter fraud did not play a part in recent election outcomes. The conclusion shared by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, federal officials in former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and state and federal judges was that we had safe, secure, honest elections. And if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes, what was?

The fear and anger apparently driving the voters of both parties to the polls this year may have ruined last year’s plan, despite its intended impact.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/27/opinions/georgia-early-voting-record-meaning-bookman/index.html

How Do We Continue to Challenge Other Voters to Cast Vote? The Case of Georgia’s Secretary of State and Republican Democrat Rep. Tom Kemp

The Democrats built an effective voter-protection apparatus that helps people overcome bureaucratic hurdles in order to vote.

That last point is critical. Republicans have said the changes implemented in Senate Bill 202 were necessary to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.

The rights to serve as cover for Voter suppression targeting minorities have been the reason why thevoting fraud industry has been such a bad-faith invention. Every Republican administration that has been in power in the last quarter of a century has attempted to find evidence of such fraud, and every investigation has failed abysmally. Kemp, who was Georgia’s secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, failed to detect fraud during his tenure. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to try to find it, and so far he, too, continues to come up empty.

And it’s the consequences of that bad-faith narrative that ought to worry us. The electoral system that the GOP had nurtured was transformed from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election results as illegitimate when Trump took over in 2020.

The president told supporters at his rallies that he didn’t think we’d have a fair election. I do not believe it.

Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law about how a voter 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.” Local election boards are required by law to hold a hearing on such challenges within 10 business days.

Conservatives are frustrated that their attempts to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on flimsy grounds continue to fail, as they are trying to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. “Get your county in order or get your things in order.”

The End of Democracy: What the Extreme MAGA Republicans are Trying to Tell us about America, What We Don’t Know and How We Can Help

Yet now extreme MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections, but elections being held now and into the future. The extreme MAGA element of the Republican Party, which is a minority of that party, as I said earlier, but it’s its driving force. It’s trying to succeed where they failed in 2020, to suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself. That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.

Instead of waiting until the election is over, they are starting early. They are beginning now. They have increased violence and intimidation of voters and election officials. It is thought that there are more than 300 election deniers on the ballot this year. We can’t ignore the impact this is having on our country. It’s damaging, it’s corrosive and it’s destructive.

And I want to be very clear, this is not about me, it’s about all of us. This is about what makes America great. Our democracy is very durable. For democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world, a way that determines who we are and what we do. Democracy is fundamental.

Democracy is the opposite of autocracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party. The lives of billions of people have been shaped by the battle between the many and the few, between the right of self-seeking and the greed of the few.

The Flint case: A case against Flint, Michigan, in a state that requires voters to be accompanied by at least 50 poll workers for every major political party

Editor’s Note: Norman Eisen, President Barack Obama’s ethics czar, was a political law expert that advised the White House on election law. Taylor Redd is interested in national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion.

These victories can provide some peace of mind to voters in Arizona, Michigan and across the nation. The courts enforce a law to protect voting rights, just as they did with challenges during the last election.

The people taking part in such activities sometimes are motivated by debunked conspiracies like the one depicted in the film “2000 Mules” – and their efforts appear to have intimidated 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.

The RNC and the Michigan Republican Party sued Flint, saying that their efforts to bring more Republican workers in its precincts weren’t enough. State statute requires boards of election to get an equal number of poll workers from each major political party, according to the suit.

Flint appeared to be cooperating with a Republican request to hire more GOP poll workers. The city hired about 50 more Republican poll workers after the Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee wrote a letter saying that they were interested in Republican candidates.

Even though the case was dismissed on a technical ground, it marked an important milestone. The judge, who made extremely short work of the case, appeared disinclined to indulge the suit. Flint is now complying with the law. Even the parties with standing will face difficult sledding if they file a suit in the future.

This case was brought at the last minute because there was no time to conduct a new day of election school for poll workers. The GOP targeted the city of flint because of it’s majority black and Democratic population. Political theatre for partisan purposes is inescapable.

It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. That test comes alongside the embrace of violent extremism by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party.

Voting rights and civil rights groups in Ohio and Pennsylvania have trained their volunteers in ways of de-escalating conflicts, setting up hotlines to respond to issues and stations them around polling places. In Ohio a coalition enlisted religious leaders from different religions for the task.

And election officials say they feel increasingly on edge, ready not just for the frenzy of Election Day but the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow.

Overcoming the 2020 Presidential Election: Lawyers and Organizers in Arizona, Nevada, and Nevada want to sue Cegavske for lack of voter information

“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.

The Arizona election office is beefing up security for Tuesday, just like other offices. The building was a target of right-wing protests in 2020 and has been fortified with a metal fence. Last month, an email to election officials promised to “find” their personal addresses and made reference to the violence of the French Revolution. Arizona’s secretary of state referred it to the F.B.I.

When polls have closed after early voting has ended, there are likely to be disruptions as people prepared to challenge the results of the election and lawyers prepare to file lawsuits, who cast doubts on the integrity of the process.

It’s not hard to see the potential hot spots. In Pennsylvania, thousands of ballots have been set aside because they do not include proper signatures or dates. The Supreme Court ruled last year that they shouldn’t be counted. The court ordered election officials to preserve them as part of the court’s order.

In a separate case, conservative activists say that they are asking for a court to segregate military ballots from the state’s count, after a Milwaukee election official successfully requested ballots in the names of fictitious military members and sent them to a state senator. The lawsuit is being brought by lawyers who were involved in the push to reverse the 2020 election and whom continue to promote conspiracy theories about Trump’s loss.

More than 100 lawsuits have already been filed, which is more than the 70 filed two years ago. 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.

A group of activists in Oregon brought an attempt to get a court order that would allow them to access county voting software, which they claimed was being manipulated by a criminal syndicate.

In neighboring Nevada – another state where Republicans hope to flip a Senate seat and control of the governors’ office – GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s office recently halted hand counting in rural Nye County. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada objected to the volunteers reading aloud the votes of the candidates because of the state law that precludes the early release of election results.

In Clark County, Nevada, election skeptics have been asking questions about hacking of voting machines, which they think are connected to the Absentee ballot processing.

In the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stood guard outside of a ballot drop box as a protest to stop the stealing of ballots in the 2020 election.

“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.

“I was an absentee, mail-in voter for years,” said Janelle Black, a homemaker from Phoenix who attended the Lake rally. Since the 2020 election, which she thought was stolen, Ms. Black does not trust Ms. Hobbs to oversee the process. “I want to vote ‘day of,’” she said, “so it’s counted right there. I don’t want to take any chances.”

In some states, Republicans’ skepticism about mail ballots may help re-create a “red mirage,” where the votes cast on Election Day are reported first and heavily favor Republicans, while mail-in ballots, which lean Democratic, come in later. The trend suggests that Democrats rigged the results two years ago.

Uncertainty at the Voting Places of Shasta and Jackson: The State of Georgia in the Light of a New Voting Law

In the face of public protest, the county’s chief executive resigned, its health officer quit and the health board publicly denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

The clerk of voters in Shasta County is worried that there will be too many people at the polling place on Election Day due to the forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow.

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.

The bishop of more than 150 A.M.E churches in Georgia admitted that he was worried about Election Day. People dressed in these outfits 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. Even though most of the challenges have been thrown out, it has unsettled some Georgia voters, and tossed some off the rolls. Barbara Helm, a homeless woman in Forsyth County, Ga., was forced to vote on a provisional ballot because her registration had been removed during one of the mass challenges brought by Republican voters. 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.

The 2018 Midterm Elections Case: The Case for a New Post-Horizon Lawsuit, and How it Can Fail to Protect the Integrity of the Local Party

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.

The court fights over the midterms may play a pivotal role in determining the winners in this week’s elections and even, perhaps, 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 justice department attorney who leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, is concerned about the number of mail ballots exceeding the margins in some races. It is better to get those disagreements out of the way before you have a clear idea of the results. Once the margins are clear, that could create a political axe to grind.”

The state Supreme Court ruling was a big victory for the rule of law, and a milestone in the efforts of Republicans to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania.

In Michigan, the Republican candidate for secretary of state is seeking to have a large swath of snoozies thrown out because they didn’t request or return them in person.

Jeff Loperfido, a senior counsel at the civil rights group the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, pointed to a lawsuit where North Carolina Republicans failed to block state election board guidance barring the use of signature matching to verify absentee ballots.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, meanwhile, the poll worker litigation is two cases: one demanding more records one about poll workers hired and the county’s efforts to increase the number of Republicans working voting sites; and a second challenging county requirements for poll workers that the GOP alleges is impeding the hiring of Republicans to staff election sites.

The judge in Virginia ordered officials in the Prince William County to appoint more Republicans to top election spots after legal action by the state GOP.

The lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party has been contacted by CNN. More broadly, the RNC has defended the push in court as an effort to ensure that their party has robust representation in how Tuesday’s elections are run and the votes counted.

“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 win for transparency at the ballot box.”

According to Albert, there are a lot of calls for Republican workers to be hired and this could lead to an attempt to throw out ballots from election sites in dispute.

She said she’s worried that Republicans “are going to basically say, ‘If an election wasn’t run exactly perfect – if we didn’t have an even split of poll workers – then, all of those ballots don’t count,’ which is absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical. In the history of the world, an election has never run perfect.

In the western battleground states there are disputes over voting technology which have led to pushes to conduct some aspects of the elections by hand.

The election for governor, a US senator and the state elections chief are on the ballot in Cochise County, which has over 80,000 registered voters.

Cochise County Recorder David Stevens, one of the hand count’s proponents, did not respond to a CNN request for comment. The Arizona Republic says that during a court hearing, Stevens said he believed the county had the authority to proceed and that the count would involve about 40,000 ballots.

The hand counting could still happen if the Secretary of state signs off on a plan in which volunteers tally the results in silence, said Arnold Knightly. Nye and Cochise are both planning to use electronic machines in this election.

Critics of parallel counts say that if they were allowed to continue, they could set the stage for dueling results and make voters distrust the election more.

Getting Your Vote in a Fitness Gym: What Has Changed and What Hasn’t Changed? How Do We Live and What Have We Don’t?

Nobody really wants to live like that; nobody likes to think we could. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.

In a democratic republic, with real lives, it’s possible to set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym to make sure you have a valid vote, and to make sure the tabulator is working.