Election Deniers Are All You Need, But What Do They Need to Know Now? A County Clerk’s Perspective on Electoral Manipulation

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

They did not stop at that point. I believe that a lot of the public records requests that election deniers have sent are intended to stymies our operations. Many of the documents that have been received in our county seem to be copied and pasted from the same template. In a small office like mine, these requests divert significant amounts of my time and resources that could be otherwise spent on planning the next election.

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. It gets harder to get other things done when you get those types of requests. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials 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.

It was important for the elections workers to give information to the public, Mr. Linnell said in the interview. 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.

America’s Future Starts Now: How Election Officials Affect Americans’ Faith in the American Voting System. Natalie Adona, Clerk, Recorder, Nevada County, California

Editor’s Note: This roundup is part of the CNN Opinion series “America’s Future Starts Now,” in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation and experts offer their proposed solutions. The authors of the commentaries have their own views. Read more opinion at CNN.

“Probably the biggest risk,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, is “further erosion of trust in the election, and political leaders using that distrust, if they are unhappy with election results, to challenge them and further undermine confidence in the American electoral system.”

In Nevada County, California, I run the voting process on Election Day and it was quiet and calm. Most voters in the purple county went to the polls by mail. And those who did come to vote in-person cast their ballots in an orderly and respectful fashion.

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. Some even subjected me to racist vitriol in a mailer that was distributed countywide. It got so bad at one point that I had to get a restraining order against one individual who threatened 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 must put country before party to keep our elections free and fair. If you don’t believe it’s possible, let an election official show you how to do it.

Natalie Adona is the clerk-recorder in Nevada County, California. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Adona is a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Task Force, and is an Advisory Board Member for the Election Official Legal Defense Network. One campaign about democracy.

The Philadelphian electoral worker’s first death threat in a campaign aimed at reducing the public opinion of the U.S. election

Donald Trump winning the election but still being close to call is the final scenario called “contested election results”. In this example, Trump would then declare victory – despite the hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that remained to be counted.

Biden was expected to take the lead and demonstrations would become violent around Philadelphia. The exercise finished, “Even though the initial vote count is largely complete, there is no end in sight as weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny loom.”

I watched the top officials express their concern during this scenario. This scenario felt plausible as far as the sounds were concerned.

Wanting to set the record straight, I posted a video on Twitter to explain what had really happened – an innocent mistake, swiftly fixed, rather than some form of intentional voter fraud. In doing so, I unleashed a wave of hate, and soon my first death threat. The voicemail contained phrases like, “We will [expletive] take you out!”, “[Expletive] your family! [Expletive] your life!” We will surround you when you don’t expect it.

Philadelphia police officers were assigned to follow me everywhere I went after one of the threats turned out to be a lie. 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.

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

Is Voting in Michigan Really Enough? An Invasion That Grows into an Invasive Envasion that Chooses the Election Process

Election Day has always played a significant role in my life. My mother worked as a local committee person. Since she was a single mom, wherever she went, I followed – including the polls on Election Day. Our polling place back then was the barber shop, where I would spend hours spinning on a leather chair taking everything in.

Not every American has a barber shop like mine. It is important that we invest in our teachers and schools to teach civics education and impart democratic ideals to young people.

The chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners is a Democrat, and the city has a bipartisan board of elected officials that handles elections and voter registration.

The Russian attempt to meddle in our political and social media activities began after a hand recount in Michigan was requested, and the election results in Wisconsin were thrown out due to voter intimidation.

It caused some to doubt the election process. Doubt in this process, which began as a seed, has grown into an invader that chokes the profession four years later.

Less than two weeks before election day, a Republican nominee for Michigan Secretary of State filed a lawsuit in order to stop the use of DetroitAbsentee ballots if they were not obtained at a clerk’s office. If the request is given, thousands of votes cast legally by Detroit residents could be rejected in a state that has the right to request such ballots by mail.

One of the national figures held a press conference in Michigan and made a false claim, pushing me and my colleagues into the national spotlight.

Five Steps to Prevent Election Disturbance: An Elections Committee for Physicists and Law Enforcement Officials (Elections Group Working Group)

The committee has developed a five-step process that election officials and law enforcement can follow to better prepare for elections. It says that election officials and law enforcement should meet, share situational knowledge, agree on a vision for establishing order and safety around election spaces, plan for a variety of possible disturbance scenarios and practice their responses ahead of each election.

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 was appointed the city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan. She works as a senior election expert for The Elections Group.

Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him on social media. His opinions are not those of the commentary. There is more opinion on CNN.

Why should Ms. Lake stand up for democracy? And why does she have to apologize for all she says about Trump, vaccine mandates, gender equality, and abortion

Dangerously, Lake has also called for imprisoning her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs — Arizona’s secretary of state — for unspecified alleged election offenses. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that Hobbs has committed any crimes. Apparently standing up for democracy is crime enough for Lake.

Lake has promoted baseless conspiracy theories that software used by Dominion Voting Systems altered the election results. In August 2021, she doubled down on her unfounded assertion that Trump won Arizona and that official election results were “wildly inaccurate.”

Lake has also called for the imprisonment of journalists she claims have lied about the election. She has been opposed to vaccine mandates and has stated at a conservative summit that women are inferior. She believes that God didn’t create us to be equal to men.

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

The race for governor in Arizona is a statistical tie, with the candidate leading by around 31,000 votes as of Saturday morning. 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.

What Did Trump Say About Mr. DePerno Tell Us About His Pro-Dem and What He He Has Done Recently About His Black-Hole Elector?

It’s not his first brush with controversy. DePerno has falsely said some voting machines were rigged. He’s being accused of using baseless claims to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nessel said things he’s said and done shouldn’t disqualify him. “And I think it’s just a matter of people learning about him — not just Democrats but independents and Republicans. The more you know about Matthew DePerno, the less likely you are to cast your ballot for him.”

Nessel refused to debate DePerno, citing the investigation. She doesn’t thinkEthical standards from the American Bar Association would allow her to discuss it.

Nessel is the first openly bisexual person to serve in a statewide office.

At a recent rally with Trump, he said that they weren’t talking about anything because the media wanted to ask questions about what Dana Nessel was doing to him and not in a negative way.

“As your next Attorney General, I will fight to clean up this state as crime has skyrocketed,” DePerno told the crowd.

She’s a cat and a fish: why the Michigan legislature shouldn’t have drag queens in every classroom, or why she doesn’t

Culture war issues have become more important in the campaign. According to reports, Nessel made a joke about how drag queens were fun and that they would make schools better.

He then asked the crowd if they think drag queens should be in every classroom. When the crowd asked if it was okay, DePerno said no, people. Not just no — hell no.”

“Republicans basically had the ball in their court and the mandate was just, don’t be crazy. “That’s the trap people have fallen into”, said Miller, a former state Rep.

He says Nessel, who narrowly won in 2018, should have been vulnerable. She’s made her own headlines for stances like refusing to enforce Michigan’s anti-abortion law and for occasionally going off script.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/18/1129521692/matthew-deperno-dana-nessel-michigan-attorney-general-voting-machines

What if Sheriff Joe DePerno is Indicted and Conjected After He Wins? The MyPillow Chairman, Ben Johnson, discusses his campaign against defamation

What would happen if DePerno is indicted and convicted after he wins? Michigan election law says the attorney general position becomes vacant upon the officeholder’s conviction of an “infamous crime.” While that’s not spelled out in statute, the Detroit Free Press has noted that it’s been historically interpreted as a crime punishable by a sentence in state prison.

Some have wondered about the long-term effect candidates with a track record of denying election results — like DePerno — will have on the Republican Party.

He said that theParties can adapt quickly. “You can throw out the people you formerly were supporting and get in new people and people can suddenly pretend they didn’t know who they were yesterday.”

Johnson was appointed chairman of Spalding County’s election board last year, after Georgia’s GOP-led legislature passed a law that changed rules for board membership. That subsequently flipped control of the five-member county board into Republican hands.

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

But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. Johnson has authored a post on social media that proclaimed that Joe Biden was an illegitimate president.

On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell.

Johnson’s conspiracy-laden beliefs have shown up in his work on the board. Johnson lied at a board meeting last year when he said that a judge had ruled that the voting machines were illegal in Georgia. He was part of a group that led the board in not renewing the maintenance contract with the company, citing concerns about the cost of the deal and whether the company could respond quickly to any election-day issues. Dominion is pursuing defamation suits against Fox News, One America News, Lindell and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, among others, over baseless claims that its machines enabled vote fraud.

Is Donald Dexter Really Trying to Fix the 2020 Election? Investigating a Voting System Violation Campaign in Coffee County, Georgia

Rules on auditing and testing machines and the election regulations offer safeguards for the electoral process.

If people perception of the outcome of an election to be real or fake because of actions of insiders that cast doubt on the fairness of that process, this is what we could see from 2020.

Dexter was the Democrat who sits on the election board and told CNN it’s impossible for any of them to not believe in fair elections. “That just makes no sense to me.”

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

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

The emails show that Johnson was part of the plan to hire the SullivanStrickler firm to get forensic images of the election system.

“Unless anyone else has any concerns we need to move forward quickly,” Johnson wrote to board members and the county election supervisor about that effort on August 17, 2021.

The SullivanStrickle company is involved in an investigation into a voting system violation in Coffee County, Georgia.

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. Efforts to reverse the 2020 election results in a state are under investigation by a grand jury, according to CNN.

The head of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs said it was a scary situation. It is necessary for the attorney general to investigate to make sure the laws that we know are not being broken.

Over the past two years, the relentless, baseless MAGA campaign to claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump has led to so much harassment of election officials – even in places where Trump won easily – that many have quit. In the past three years, 45 of 100 election directors in North Carolina have left, while Texas has seen a 30% turnover rate.

Barely two months after she was elected clerk of Cross Village Township, in northern Michigan, Diana Keller was confronted by two men, one toting a handgun, claiming they’d come from the Department of Defense to do a forensic audit of her township’s vote tabulator.

She told CNN that she was terrified. “I didn’t trust them from the start. I was told the clerk had agreed 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

A New Election-Conspiracist and a Concerned Examiner of a Michigan Candidate’s Corrupt Practice

According to authorities, the plot to get access to the tabulator was traced back to a woman named Tera Jackson and that she had evidence of fraud that was tied to data stored on a Vatican-owned satellite. Jackson was convicted of a reduced charge of disturbing the peace in connection with the incident. No one else was charged.

It wasn’t a smart thing. Keller said that he was too scared to do anything. I was intimidated by being a clerk, but I was so new to it.

Election conspiracists have gained access to five more vote-counting machines, called tabulators, and sometimes the software used to operate them, in Michigan.

The Adams Township Clerk was stripped of her election duties last year after spreading election misinformation and refusing to allow routine maintenance on voting machines. That has forced Hillsdale County to take over running Adams Township’s elections since October 2021, Abe Dane, chief deputy clerk of the county, told CNN in an email.

Scott “continues to regularly spread disinformation … falsely claiming that our Hart InterCivic election management system and tabulators are connected to the internet or contain voter-specific data,” Dane said. The Michigan Bureau of Elections told other clerks to ignore a directive about voting data in August, according to an email obtained by CNN.

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.

The Ingham County clerk told CNN that there were many checks and balances to ensure that township clerks and other election workers did their jobs well. 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.

The Michigan Secretary of State is worried about the potential for confusion in the certification process if an election denier succeeds, and also has concerns about how the voting changes could be implemented.

He said they were very surprised and disappointed. “Likely, it’s a result of the media sources and politicians they listen to, mainly on the Republican side, promoting this disinformation.”

Innocuous Elections: Jim Hindle, Treasurer of a Nevadan County Clerk’s Office, in Nye County, Nevada

In Nye County, Nevada, an 18,000 square- mile area which is split between Las Vegas and Reno, a GOP clerk resigned in August after 22 years on the job.

Fred Sherman, the election chief in Johnson County, Kan., came up with a solution after being bombarded with calls and email from voters demanding that their votes be counted by hand rather than on machines. Voters in the most populous district in Kansas would be given the option to get their ballot in a sealed red bag or in a marked white envelope and have it counted.

Nye County voters lack trust in electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure, according to the interim clerk who replaced her.

Kampf plans to make Nye County one of the first in the nation to switch to hand-counting paper ballots, using electronic machines only for a preliminary tally this November. Frank Carbone, chairman of the Nye County Commission, said the commission hopes to eliminate the machines in the future.

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

The American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency request to the Nevada Supreme Court that challenges the hand-count plan. Four days before the start of hand-counting mail-in ballots, a group asked the court to rule by October 21. CNN didn’t get a response from Kampf.

Then there’s Storey County, a rural county of about 4,000 voters outside of Reno, where Jim Hindle was elected clerk and treasurer in June. Even though Biden was the winner in Nevada, six Nevada Republicans decided to give the state’s 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. In an August email obtained by CNN, then-clerk Nevin wrote, “It breaks my heart because I do love my job and that’s why I ran not because I’m a politician like Jim.” Hindle declined to answer questions from CNN.

A Defiance Letter to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, J.D. Schroeder Against Cosmic Partisans

He said he copied the drives in the summer of 2021 with help from conspiracy peddlers. According to the office of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, Schroeder signed an affidavit stating that he made a “forensic image of everything on the election server” and “saved the image to a secure external hard drive that is kept under lock and key in the Elbert County elections office.”

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.

After launching an investigation into, and then suing, the man, the office said that he provided copies to people not authorized to possess them.

Voting is now underway. Voters in Colorado received their election ballots on Monday. Key battleground states such as Arizona and Michigan already are receiving mail-in ballots. If there is a midterm election this year, officials may find that they have more challenges to contend with.

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.

If Republicans win key offices in the state, said Obama, “democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona. That is not an overstatement. That is a fact.

What Do Democratic Senators Really Know about the Elections? Rep. Mark Finchem, a Republican Senator from the Grand Canyon State, is Voting Against Trump

In the governor’s race, election denier Lake is going against the current Secretary of State, who was once sued because of voting misinformation.

In Arizona, the state which has been the site of a number of election conspiracy theories, Republican voters decided to pick state Rep. Mark Finchem as their standard-bearer. Trump endorsement came in the fall of 2021. Finchem had described himself as a member of the far-right Oath Keeper’s group. The GOP lawmaker has pushed to toss out the results in some of the state’s biggest counties, including the state capitol of Phoenix, where a review of ballots ordered by Republicans in the state Senate concluded that Biden won more votes than Trump.

“It was scary that radical republicans in her state were capable of elevating candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries in part by following President Trump’s lies about the election.”

They are not talking about the election being stolen, what are they doing? Rodriguez said something. She said that many people in her neighborhood are still driving their trucks with Trump flags. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – for what reason? I mean, do they think that their intimidation tactics are going to work?”

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

Both Biden and Obama have been arguing that the fate of democracy is at stake, but Biden, who has not been invited to campaign in top swing states, had to make his argument from the opposite side of the country.

There have been concerns about the sanctity of the election results and that brought a registered Republican to the Obama rally. He said in an interview that he wasn’t voting for Democrats in this election, he is voting against the Trump ticket.

“The Republican Party today is not the Republican Party I’m a part of,” said Greenberg, who described the 2020 election as fair and honest. That is more like the American Nazi Party, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Obama said that Arizona is a pure litmus test for election denialism, because voters are at minimum willing to accept in their candidates. Or is it something that appeals these candidates to voters?

Some people were taking pictures of voters and their license plates, prompting some voters to complain to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. A federal judge issued a ruling in one of the cases on Tuesday barring members of a group known as Clean Elections USA – whose leader has falsely asserted the 2020 election was rigged – from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor within 250 feet of drop boxes.

Because of the ruling, the group’s members are also now barred from speaking to or yelling at voters who drop off their ballots, and they may not photograph or film voters at the drop boxes. The League of Women Voters had brought the case, and the Justice Department weighed in on it. The DOJ did not formally take sides, but in a legal brief, federal prosecutors said the right-wing group’s “vigilante ballot security efforts” were likely illegal and “raise serious concerns of voter intimidation.”

The Rise and Fall of a Democratic Equality Czar: Michelle Gonzales explains why she and her husband Barack Obama missed the midterm election

The depth of the belief among Republicans about Trump’s election lies was underscored by a CNN poll conducted by SSRS that was released on Wednesday: 66% of Republicans said they don’t believe Biden legitimately won the election.

In Arizona, the Trump loyalists control the Republican Party and have censured leaders like the outgoing governor and senator for not being loyal to the president.

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

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

According to The Washington Post, 12 of the 13 Republican nominees for federal and state office in Arizona this year have questioned the results of the 2020 election.

The biggest thing she shares in common with Trump is that election denialism sits at the core of her messaging. She has said that if she’d been the governor, she would never have certified the result in the state.

And if the likes of Lake and Finchem are in control of the election machinery come 2024, is there any hope of a fair and transparent result in one of the likely swing states of the next election?

There was an editor’s note. The White House was advised by Norman Eisen on election law when he served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar. Redd studies national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion.

Some voters in Arizona, Michigan and across the nation may have peace of mind because of these victories. They have shown that courts will enforce the law to protect voting rights and the election system like they did 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 Michigan Republican Party and RNC had sued Flint because they didn’t think they could get more Republican poll workers to work there. A state statute requires boards of election to assign equal numbers of poll workers from each political party.

The Republican asked for more GOP poll workers and it looked as if they were being worked on by the city. In late October, the Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee had sent city election officials a letter with the names of interested Republicans candidates, and the city hired approximately 50 more Republican poll workers, bringing the number to 120 Republican poll workers out of the 682 total.

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. And even parties with standing will likely face tough sledding if they file a similar suit in the future.

Why did the GOP bother with this clearly non-meritorious suit? 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.

With the two cases outlined here – as was the case in 2020 – the courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election. These cases suggest that the rule of law is working to defend democracy against those who want to destroy it.

Voters in a number of states are facing a difficult choice: Do they want to vote for someone that will deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election?

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

“The fate of democracy really hinges on whether or not losers accept defeat and whether they recognize losses as losses,” said Amel Ahmed, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “If you have a worldview where every loss amounts to the other side cheating … that just generally presents a challenge for the viability of democracy.”

Jocelyn Benson vs. Kristina Karamo: The Case of the 2020 Michigan Supermajority Election

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.

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

Both Karamo and Matthew DePerno, who was endorsed by Trump, have filed lawsuits based on theories about mail voting.

DePerno is under investigation for an alleged plot to seize and tamper with voting machines, and Karamo has come under scrutiny for her connections to the QAnon movement and her past comments, including an opposition to teaching evolution in schools.

Mainstream Republicans worried about the candidates’ viability in a purple state when they gained the majority support of party loyalists at a spring nominating convention.

“Every ad from [now] through November is going to say ‘QAnon Karamo is too crazy for us,’ ” state Rep. Beau LaFave, a Republican who ran for secretary of state against Karamo, said at the time.

After losing her first attempt for the office in 2010, she was re-elected in 2018. She is the former dean of Wayne State University law school, and the author of a book about the role of secretaries of state in American democracy.

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

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

The Movement Back toward Ballot Hand-Counts: Reply to Trump, Marchant and Chapman on Jan. 6 During a Biden riot in Pennsylvania

The secretary of state race pits a former elections administrator, Adrian Fontes, against a far-right candidate, Mark Finchem, who is a self-proclaimed member of the far-right Oath Keepers and who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 when rioters disrupted the certification of Biden’s win.

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

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

There are polls showing the race for chief voting official to be neck and neck despite a substantial lead for the non- election denying candidate.

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

Jim Marchant is a Republican who blames his loss in 2020 on election fraud but he hasn’t produced any evidence.

Marchant has been an advocate of the local movement back toward hand-counting ballots, even though it has been found that the counting method is not as accurate as it could be.

In 2020, Former President Donald Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims the election was stolen. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. “Here we go again!” He wrote a letter. “Rigged Election!”

Trump’s supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site which demonstrated no rigging. The article did not clearly explain how the suspicion was raised.

The Republicans in Pennsylvania are trying to spread suspicion about the mid-terms, which could decide which party controls the US Senate.

After Pennsylvania’s acting elections chief, Leigh Chapman, told NBC News last week it could take “days” to complete the vote count, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said on a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization Media Matters for America: “That’s an attempt to have the fix in.”

It isn’t. It takes time to count votes because the Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a bill that would allow counties to start processing mail-in ballots earlier than Election Day.

The city of Detroit, which is dominated by Democrats and has a large Black population, has been a target of false 2020 conspiracy theories. There is a Republican that is running for Michigan’s elections chief who is challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes.

Investigating the Campaign of President Donald Trump to 2020 Democratic Primary: Indirect Detection, Pre-Election Day, and the Murder of Secretaries of State

The Detroit News reported that Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

The Daily Beast reported Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told a similar story at an event in June.

There is no basis for the suggestion there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. Masters’ comments achieve the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day stories in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

Secretary of state contests — typically low-profile races that determine who helps administer elections in a state – have drawn national attention and millions of dollars in political spending this year as several Republican nominees who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election pursue the jobs.

In all, voters in 27 states will choose secretaries of state in the midterms. Republicans hold 14 of the seats and Democrats hold 13 of them.

Georgia features one of the country’s best-known election chiefs, who refused to find the votes that would overturn his loss in the Peach State. There is a special grand jury investigating the campaign by Trump and his allies.

But the incidents reported by officials this week were far less stark. Despite widespread accusations of fraud, Republican candidates so far have mostly accepted the results when they’ve lost — including some of the loudest promoters of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump’s calls for “Protest!” in response to relatively routine technical problems in Arizona and Michigan have so far been largely ignored.

The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party said that she would pursue these actions. She said on Thursday that they had been preparing for this for over a year. “We have a huge team of lawyers ready to take action if needed.”

The organizer of Michigan Fair Elections wrote in a post that there were two options to choose between: Curl up on the ledge and succumb or restart the climb up the steep slopes of election integrity. The meeting was scheduled for Thursday.

One of the preferred candidates in Michigan Fair Elections has not conceded even though she lost by 14 percentage points and on Thursday afternoon she sent out a list of alleged electoral “violations,” saying there was more to come.

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.

The Collapse of the Cosmic Microwave Background: Cortez Masto, Blake Masters and Mark Kelly: What Will he Do in Arizona?

On Twitter, Ms. Lake and Mr. Masters have projected victory. Ms. Lake told Fox News on Thursday that she had “absolute 100 percent confidence that I will be the next governor of Arizona.” After leading in a race that was not called, Mr. Hamadeh took to his social media accounts and wrote, “Thank the people of Arizona for entrusting me with this great responsibility.” He has since lost ground and is slightly trailing.

The Masters campaign said in an email that it had seen troubling issues during the election, and asked for help with legal battles.

Mr. Fiskem asked his followers to make sure that Mr. Fontes was not in the back room with a ballot. Mr. Fontes fired back, writing, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”

Both Mr. Fontes and Ms. Hobbs called on their fans to respect the voting process. Despite what my opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected.

The final results could take even longer to be determined, because a new Arizona law calls for an automatic recount in all electoral contests where the difference between the top two candidates was 0.5 percent or less of the total votes cast.

While those races remain in play, CNN projected Friday that Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will defeat Republican Blake Masters in Arizona, and Republican Joe Lombardo will knock off Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in Nevada.

The Nevada race was uncalled because Kelly’s win puts Democrats one seat away from controlling the Senate. If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats have at least 50 seats needed regardless of the outcome of the Georgia Senate runoff. Senate control will be determined by the Georgia run-off if Laxalt wins.

The Control of the House is still up in the air with 21 races not called. Democrats have won 203 seats so far, while Republicans have won 211 (218 seats are needed to control the House), according to CNN projections. Many of the uncalled House races are in California.

McCarthy, meanwhile, is facing new headwinds from the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, who are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and beginning to lay out a list of demands.

State and local laws govern mail-in voting in Cochise county, Arizona: a case study of the false Trump lies about the election

State law allows for mail-in ballots to be received in Nevada through Saturday, though the ballots need to have been postmarked by Election Day to be valid.

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 Cochise county, home to roughly 125,000+ Arizonans, there had been a plan to audit all of the votes by hand because of the Trump lies about the election.

Gates said he expects that if they continue counting at the same pace – around 60,000 to 80,000 ballots a day – the county should be done counting by “very early next week.”

The majority of the votes will be counted by Monday according to Hargove. She previously stated that the votes would be counted by Monday. She made the clarification on Friday night, explaining that the case would no longer be there because of the large amount of votes received earlier in the day.

Gates pushed back against allegations of misconduct from Masters, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Party of Arizona on Friday night, saying they were “offensive” to the election workers.

“The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa County is absolutely false and again, is offensive to these good elections workers,” he said.

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 made it clear they would take legal action if necessary.

“Over the past couple of decades, on average it takes 10 to 12 days to complete the count. That’s not because of anything Maricopa County has decided to do. The way Arizona law is set up means that we have to follow the law to make sure the count is accurate.

After enduring setbacks in court, officials inArizona are considering a scaled down version of their plan that could cause chaos and delay in certifying the state’s results.

On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. There is a lawyer for Cochise County. Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/12/politics/nevada-arizona-votes-midterms-what-to-know/index.html

Speaker Scott Perry Meets with the Right Political Leaders in the House Freedom Caucus: Bringing Up Propaganda around the Midterm Elections

According to CNN, a report, Trump is trying to gin up opposition to McConnell ahead of the Senate GOP leadership elections next week.

If Republicans win the House, McCarthy has a harder time getting 218 votes to become speaker because he needs more than 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.

For months, election officials have worried that activists convinced that the election system is corrupt and broken would cause significant problems in the midterms. But the scattered episodes during the vote did not disrupt the system.

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.

The Chairman of the North Carolina State Board ofElections said it was smooth. “You can tell by my giddiness I was not expecting that.”

Election Defenders: Bringing the Fourth Amendment to the First Amendment, and Defending Democratic Candidates with Body Arms. A Case Study of Election Deniers in Nevada and Arizona

Dozens of races are still undecided and counting could continue into next week in a few places. Several election-denying candidates in Nevada and Arizona, as well as elections lawyers who plan on using legal challenges to try to put the soundness of the system on trial, are in two states.

“There are definitely still things for us to be concerned about,” said Orion Danjuma, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, an elections integrity group. Last month he helped the group file successful legal challenges to self-appointed militiamen who patrolled ballot drop boxes in Arizona at times with guns and wearing body armor.

He said that they created a little bit of turbulence. “It’s like running a treadmill always on incline.” Mr. Sherman said he would prefer an easy run when there is constant election denial.

According to Douglas Wilson, a Democratic strategist in Charlotte, N.C., polling predicting a large Republican wave may have also worked to 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. Its goal was to recruit 1,250 volunteers, but instead was overwhelmed with more than 2,000 people who completed several hours of online training on how to intervene in tense situations, dispel confusion, de-escalate confrontations with potentially armed activists and, more than anything, keep things calm.

“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 worked for 20 hours on Tuesday, checking in with partners and monitoring social media.

An earlier article wrongly said that Ms. Flowers was involved in election protection efforts on Election Day. Ms. Flowers is from Baltimore and didn’t visit polling places in Atlanta on Election Day.

Ms. Flowers said that she believed there was more Americans who wanted to see everyone who was eligible to vote be able to vote.