A Telephone Interview with Mike Lindell, a Republican Election Official, and a U.S. Election Official: The Number One Record Requested by Lehman

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

Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said the barrage of records requests had hit red and blue counties alike. She doesn’t think election officials wake up on Election Day and decide to hold an election. “Running an election takes weeks of preparation.”

Sue Ertmer, the county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., said she got 120 requests for records in just a couple of weeks. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that the pillow seller known as Mike Lindell had encouraged his supporters to submit them. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.

The job of election workers is important, Mr. Lindell said in the telephone interview. More than a thousand election jurisdictions sent digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter to him, known as cast vote records. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.

Putting America First: The Case Against Corrupt Practice by a Non-Partisan Clerk-Recorder Elect in 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 these commentaries are not bound by what they say. 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.”

November 3, 2020 was quiet and calm as I helped run the voting process in Nevada County, California. Most voters in this purple county cast their votes by mail. Those who voted in person cast their votes in a respectful and orderly fashion.

These elections deniers were angry and made me a target. 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 people sent me a mailer that contained racist hate speech. It got so bad at one point that I had to get a restraining order against one individual who threatened me.

I am committed to my job and to protecting democracy even though the risks have increased. Since the 2020 election my office has worked closely with partners to improve communications, bolster security, and increase staff training opportunities.

Stakeholders from both sides of the aisle must put country before party to keep our 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. Adona is also an advisory board member for the Election Official Legal Defense Network, an editorial board member for the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice, a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Task Force and a participant in the Issue One “Faces of Democracy” campaign.

The Philadelphian Voting Truth Roundup: How I Metastasized During The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Campaign and Was Threated To Death

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

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

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

A few days after the election, I made the mistake of leaving the bubble of the convention center where the votes were still being counted to get some air. A member of the Trump campaign videotaped me being followed and attacked outside. The experience of being made fun of by some on the internet, in addition to threats of death, is all too familiar to women in politics.

Two plain-clothes Philadelphia police officers were assigned to follow me wherever I went because of one of the threats. I didn’t want to have to explain to my hairdresser who my escort was so I avoided getting my hair done.

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

Election Day and the Philadelphian City Commissioners: My Fears About Electing a Presidential Candidate and Changing an Absentee Voter File

Election Day has always played a significant role in my life. The local committee person was my mother. I followed the polls on Election Day since she was a single mom. 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.

But not every American has a mother – or barber shop – like mine. We need to invest in our teachers and schools, so they can better teach civics education and impart on young people just how precious democratic ideals truly are.

Lisa Deeley, a Democrat, is the chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, a three-member bipartisan board of elected officials in charge of elections and voter registration for the city of Philadelphia.

Much of it dates back to 2016, when a hand recount of the election results in Michigan was requested (then halted), and the Russian attempt to interfere in our politics and social media – ripe with disinformation and misinformation about the presidential election – began to play a larger role in electoral politics.

It led to some doubt about the election process. Four years later, doubts about this process had grown into weeds that were choking the profession.

The November 2020 election only reinforced my worst fears. I oversaw the most challenging election in my career and all of the attention was on Michigan. On election night my team and I made a mistake in re-submitting an Absentee voter file, and we fixed it on the morning after the election.

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

Why do we need an attorney general to fight Matthew DePerno if we want to prosecute him? A question for Attorney General Dana Nessel

Election officials and law enforcement can follow the five-step process developed by the committee. It states that election officials and law enforcement should meet, share their 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 is the former appointed city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan, and 2020 Oakland county clerk Republican candidate. She currently serves as a senior election expert with The Elections Group.

DePerno — who has pushed former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud — has slammed the probe, which is now led by a special prosecutor. But it leaves him running to lead the agency that could indict him.

Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel faces a choice in her reelection fight against DePerno. Is it possible to continue on with the other potential defendants and not Matthew DePerno? she said in an interview. It was impossible to extricate him because he was so entwined with everything that had happened.

Nessel does not want to debate De Perno, partly due to the investigation. She thinks the ethical standards from the American Bar Association would stop her from discussing it.

Beyond that, Nessel, who’s also the first openly LGBTQ person to serve in statewide office, accuses DePerno of consistently making homophobic and bigoted remarks.

“All of those things we’re not talking about because the media wants to ask questions about what Dana Nessel is doing to me — and usually not in a negative way like in terms of how bad that is for her,” he said backstage at a recent rally with Trump.

DePerno promised the crowd that as their attorney general he would fight to clean up the state.

The Nessel era of Michigan’s Attorney General Voting Machines: The Case Against Drag Queens in Classrooms, Revisited

Culture war issues have become more involved in the campaign. Nessel made an offhand joke about how drag queens make schools better while speaking at a conference.

“She said she wants to put a drag queen in every classroom,” he said, before asking the crowd, “Do you think we need drag queens in every classroom?” When the crowd responded “no,” DePerno answered, “No, people. Not just no, but hell no.

The mandate was just, don’t be crazy, because Republicans had the ball in their court. And I feel like that’s the trap people have fallen into,” said former state Rep. Aaron Miller.

He says Nessel 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

Ben Johnson and the State of the Art: The Importance of Deperno’s Incrimination and Implications for Election Propagation

It’s uncertain what will happen if DePerno wins and gets indicted and convicted. If an officeholder’s conviction is an “infamous crime,” the attorney general position becomes vacant. 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.

Parties can change very quickly, he said. “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.”

Pop into a meeting of the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia, and it may appear like any other eye-glazing gathering of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair.

“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.”

If Johnson’s stated beliefs are left at the door, they don’t appear to be easy to follow. Johnson’s social media post proclaimed Joe Biden was an illegitimate president and he is an election-conspiracy believer.

He has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting, as well as echoed debunked claims aboutballot traffickers, and posted a photo with the founder of MyPillow.

Johnson has voted not to renew the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion Voting Systems, which is a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. Johnson will be in charge of the certification of the results of the November election when he becomes chairman, and his actions and continued claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent have raised concerns over how he and the board will handle the upcoming election.

Commission Investigations of a 2016 Malicious Massachusetts Against Trump Using a Forensic Image of the Spalding County Elections System

Rules on auditing and testing of machines, election regulations, and other layers of oversight offer safeguards for the electoral process.

However, actions by insiders that cast doubt on the fairness of that process – intentionally or not – “could have an impact on whether people perceive the outcome of an election to be real or fake, which is what we continue to see from 2020,” said Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant who previously worked for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Dexter Wimbish, a Democrat who is on the election board with Johnson, said that they will not have anyone on it who does not believe in fair elections. “That just makes no sense to me.”

The elections supervisor and trained staff will most likely fix any problems that may arise from this November’s election as a result of the move.

Georgia Ethics Watchdogs filed a complaint against Johnson, as the election board chairman, because they were concerned he was letting his technology firm do work on election equipment.

Emails show that Johnson was involved in the attempt to get forensic images of the election system by the SullivanStrickler firm.

“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.

An attorney for SullivanStrickler said that they are continuing to work with law enforcement on election integrity matters.

A grand jury in Georgia plans to subpoena Johnson and two other officials from the Spalding County elections board, an attorney told CNN Wednesday. CNN reports that a grand jury is looking at efforts to change the results of the 2020 election.

“It’s a scary situation,” said William Perry, head of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs. To make sure laws that we know are not being broken, we have called for the attorney general to investigate.

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 last three years, 45 of 100 election directors left North Carolina, while 30 of them left Texas.

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.

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

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

Counting Election Misinformation in Michigan: Sensitive Attorney Tera Jackson, Assistant Secretary of State Stephanie Scott, Election Secretary Stephanie Peters, and Election Security Consultant Tina Peters

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

“It was just a stupid, bungled thing. Keller said that he was too scared to do anything. I was intimidated because I was so new to being a clerk.

In some cases, election conspiracists in Michigan have been able to get access to the software used on the tabulators.

Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott was stripped of election duties last year by the secretary of state’s office, after spreading election misinformation and refusing to allow routine maintenance to be performed on voting machines. The chief deputy clerk of the county said in an email that the county had to take over the running of the elections in Adams Township.

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

Scott refused to obey the directive that his attorney claimed he violated the law. The baseless claims that the state’s elections are not secure were made again by Lambert.

There is more than one person drawing state oversight. Citing incorrect ballots sent out in the June primary and a recent misprint, Griswold also appointed a supervisor to oversee the upcoming elections in Pueblo County, which would otherwise be run by Clerk Bo Ortiz, a Democrat. And Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters – a Republican secretary of state candidate who lost the June primary – has been prohibited from overseeing the upcoming election. She faces a criminal trial, set for March 2023, for allegedly allowing unauthorized people to breach her county’s election system, to reveal what she believed was fraud in the 2020 election. She has not been charged with a crime.

If they are allowed to fly under the radar, election deniers can attack our elections system. The election deniers who try to undermine the election will be caught, but at the expense of voter confidence.

“They’re very surprised and disappointed,” he said. The media sources and politicians they listen to promote this kind of misinformation on the Republican side.

Counting Election Ballots by Hand: A Case Study of Nye County, Nevada, with the Nevada Clerk and Treasurer, Jim Hindle

There is an 18,000 square mile area between Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, where the veteran GOP clerk called time on her career in August.

The final straw: County commissioners – based on meritless suspicions of voting machines – voted to have the 2022 general election ballots counted by hand.

Her replacement, interim clerk Mark Kampf, insists that Trump won in 2020, and that voters in Nye County no longer trust electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure.

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, the Nye County Commission Chairman has said the commission hopes to do away with machines in the future.

GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske is fighting back against misinformation, saying the voting machines in her state have been reliable and accurate and can connect to the internet. Ballots can be easily verified by paper record, as noted by Cegavske.

One plan to count early ballots in Nye County, Nevada, by hand was stopped by a lawsuit filed by the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. In Cochise County, Ariz., a similar effort is being litigated in court.

The clerk and treasurer of Storey County, Jim Hindle, was elected in June. Six Nevada Republicans signed a fake certificate saying they will give Trump the state’s electoral votes even though Biden won Nevada.

After losing the June GOP primary, Doreyne “Dore” Nevin resigned from her position as vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party. In August, the then-clerk wrote in an email to CNN that he ran not because he was a politician but because he loved his job.

The COLPS Investigation of the 2021 Summer Scattered by a Corrupt Prosecutor in Elbert County, Colorado

Schroeder testified that he copied the drives in the summer of 2021, with help from conspiracy peddlers linked to Lindell. 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.

Schroeder “provided those copies to individuals not authorized to possess these components,” according to Griswold’s office, which launched an investigation into Schroeder, and then sued him.

Lake did not agree to accept the results of her race. She told Dana Bash that she would accept the result of the election.

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

Democrat Voting Down-Ballot Goldstein: The 2016 Even-Year Minnesota Legislature Has More Votes than Trump Voted Up-Balllot Candidates

Editor’s Note: Gaby Goldstein is the co-founder of Sister District, a nonprofit group whose mission is to build progressive power in state legislatures. Mallory Roman, a social psychologist and political researcher, is the director of research at Sister District. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. Read more opinion on CNN.

It won’t be possible for Democrats to get good vibes heading into the elections. Democrats should be focused on the state legislative ballot roll-off.

We compared the numbers of votes cast for up-ballot candidates and state legislative party mates in even-year elections from 2012 to 2020 to see if there was a difference.

But the partisan trend only intensified. As expected, instances of roll-off decreased in contested races. It decreased more for Republicans than it did for Democrats.

The real-world consequence of our findings can be seen in the 2020 election results. Let the Minnesota Senate be taken. Republicans still hold the state senate majority, even though Joe Biden received more votes than Donald Trump. Ballot roll-off may have contributed to the results.

Minnesota state Senate Democrats in contested races received 110,297 fewer votes than Biden statewide, and state Senate Republicans in contested races received over 42,000 more votes than Trump. More than 95,300 voters who voted for president in these districts did not cast a vote for state Senate at all. And 2,620 of them did not cast a vote for the two Minnesota Senate seats that decided the chamber’s majority.

Democrats failed to win the majority in the Senate by less than 2,000 votes. It is possible for the difference down ballot to be a tiny margin of roll-off.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/opinions/democrats-elections-down-ballot-goldstein-roman/index.html

What Will the Early Voterout in Georgia Look Like? A Political Perspective on State Legislation and the 2022 Democratic Electorate

Long term, it involves investing in civic education, year-round community organizing and narrative-building about why increasing the political power of progressive states will result in better outcomes for everyone.

In the short term, Democrats need to explain to the public how important state legislature are to our civil rights and democracy.

Editor’s Note: Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. The Georgia recorder is where he writes regularly. You can follow him on the social networking site. The views he gives are his own. CNN has more opinion.

Early voting totals in Georgia are close to those for a presidential election year as voters continue to turn out in record numbers. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season like this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?

It is not easy to say whether or not outcomes will be predicted. We don’t know if the surge in early voter turnout is a sign of new voters or if it’s just old voters who would have cast their ballot anyway. High-profile candidates in the Senate and governor’s races are no doubt driving voters to the polls, and with so many wild-card factors in play this year – from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to inflation to changes in state election law – it’s impossible to know what the 2022 electorate is going to look like.

That uncertainty is a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they will vote is where things get complicated. It is important to remember that there are so many variables that it is important to put too much credence in pollsters work product.

Republicans in Georgia are ready to claim victory on at least one issue. The high turnout is evidence that the “Election Integrity Act” that they passed last year wasn’t an effort to suppress voter turnout.

When people are sold on a false narrative, then state law changes to encourage them to action, that is what happens. Confidence in voting has been present since voting isn’t being suppressed so far.

A well-funded voter protection apparatus has been built by Democrats to help people overcome bureaucratic hurdles in order to vote.

The last point is crucial. The Republicans said that the changes made in Senate Bill 202 to make it harder to cast a ballot were necessary to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.

There is no basis for the suggestion there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. Masters comment accomplishes the effect of many Trump’s pre-Election Day tales of Republican voters being distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

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

Trump is still making that argument to this day, telling supporters at rallies this fall that “I don’t believe we’ll have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.”

In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. The new wording said that there wasn’t a limit on the number of people who could challenge their qualifications. Local election boards are required by the law to hear such challenges within 10 business days.

Around the state, conservatives are attempting to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on extremely flimsy grounds and are growing frustrated that those challenges keep failing.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. Do you want to get your county in order or do you want things to be in order?

Democratic Candidates Aren’t Running on the Warp: Rep. Mark Finchem and Senator Kirillov vs. President Donald Trump

The voters who attended a Phoenix high school to hear Barack Obama speak were hoping to send a message of defiance.

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.

It’s important that you think about the fact that democracy is on the ballot, if you need one more reason to vote. The president told the crowd that democracy might not survive in Arizona, if election deniers fill all the top state offices.

Arizona: In Arizona – where election conspiracy theories have flourished ever since Biden won this traditionally red state by fewer than 11,000 votes two years ago – Republican voters picked state Rep. Mark Finchem as their standard-bearer. Finchem, who has described himself as a member of the far-right Oath Keeper’s group, scored Trump’s endorsement back in September 2021. The results of the 2020 election in some of the state’s largest counties were thrown out by the GOP lawmaker because he concluded that Biden had won more votes than Trump.

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

They are running on, aside from Trump’s talking points about the election being stolen. Rodriguez said. She noted that “a lot of Trumpers” are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her Glendale, Arizona, neighborhood. Why are they walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at election sites, and showing up at ballot boxes? Do they think their tactics will work?

The 2020 Democratic Primary: When Did Secretary of State Sarah Hobbs Stand for Democracy? Why Did Barack Obama Arrive to Arizona? What Came from the Outskirts?

Hobbs touted her record as secretary of state Wednesday night. She said that when she certified the 2020 election, she stood for democracy, and still does today in the race for governor.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed her in a dead heat race with Lake. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race a Toss-up.

The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. The fact that the top statewide contests may or may not be decided on a razor’s edge, is what brought him to the Grand Canyon State, as he tries to fire up the Democratic base and make sure that young voters and Latino voters turn out in the 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.

The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what brought Keith Greenberg, a registered Republican from Maricopa County, to Obama’s rally. He says he will not vote for Democrats in this election because 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. The lie of that is more like the American Nazi Party.

Arizona is then, as Obama said, something of a pure litmus test: Is election denialism something that voters are, at minimum, willing to accept in their candidates? Or is it something that appeals these candidates to voters?

There have already been lawsuits in federal court filed by voters who were intimidated by the aggressive patrols at ballot drop boxes late last month.

A judge issued a restraining order against a right-wing group that organized a drop box operation in Mesa, banning its members from carrying weapons within 250 feet of the drop box and videographers within 75 feet of voters.

When did you hear about Donald Trump and the Democratic nominees? A CNN investigation into the polarization that Trump has become insensitive to the outcome of the 2020 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.

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

She said that people came to see Obama so that they could feel a bit more positive about the democratic process.

“With everything, all the rhetoric going on, I think it’s important to really hear from someone – that we trust and we believe in – that we can be hopeful about this election,” she said. “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 when they are honest and moral when they are con people.

The Washington Post reported that 12 of the 13 Republican nominees for federal and state office in Arizona questioned the results of the 2020 election.

It also goes for the party’s candidate for governor,Kari Lake. Lake has become a favorite of the Trumpist wing of the party thanks to her smooth camera presence (she was a local TV anchor for years). She is even touted as the female version of the former president (although I would argue Lake is more strategic and more on message than Trump has ever been).

She and Trump both share the same belief that election denialism is at the core of their messaging. She has said that she would not have certified the result of the state’s election if she’d been governor.

Can you imagine if voters in one of the likely swing states in the next election will have a fair and transparent result?

Editor’s note: The White House was advised by Norman Eisen about election law when he was President Barack Obama’s ethics czar. Taylor Redd is a researcher focusing on national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. Read more opinion at CNN.

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

In the first of those cases, Clean Elections USA – an organiztion motivated by the falsehood that there was a “coordinated effort to stuff” ballot boxes in 2020 – was ordered by a district court judge on Tuesday to refrain from engaging in conduct around Arizona drop boxes that voters found to be intimidating.

The Michigan Republican Party and the RNC sued Flint, claiming that their avowed efforts to bring more Republican poll workers in its precincts were not sufficient. The suit cited a state statute requiring boards of election to “appoint an equal number, as nearly as possible” of poll workers from each major political party.

Flint appeared to be cooperating with a Republican request to hire more GOP poll workers. 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.

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

There is no time or staff available to conduct another day of election school for new poll workers, so this case was brought at the last minute. The GOP targeted the city because it was dominated by Democrats and blacks. The political theatre that is used for partisan purposes is inescapable.

The courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine an election, as the two cases outlined here show. Rule of law is protecting democracy against drop box intimidators, election deniers and their ilk, according to these cases.

Voters in a number of states are being presented with a stark choice, which one to support: someone who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election to oversee voting in their state, or someone else.

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

“Democracy’s fate is determined by two things,” said Amel Ahmad, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Democracy is often challenged by the fact that every loss amounts to the other side cheating.”

Secretary of State Election Denier Races: A Case Study of Joe Biden’s Michigan Democrat Against Karamo and DePerno

The woman who is running for reelection in this fall is faced with the person who made a false claim about election fraud in Detroit in the last presidential race.

In a state that went for Joe Biden in the upcoming elections, the Michigan Republicans decided to double down with their base voters and choose candidates for secretary of state and attorney general.

Both Matthew DePerno, the GOP’s attorney general nominee, as well as Karamo, who filed a lawsuit based on conspiracy theories about mail voting, were endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

DePerno and Karamo have come under scrutiny due to their past comments, which have included an opposition to teaching evolution in schools.

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

“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.

Benson was also first elected in 2018, after losing her initial bid for the office in 2010. She is the author of a book about the role of secretaries of state in American democracy, and the former dean of the law school.

The popular vote-counting conspiracy, dubbed “SharpieGate”, was started in the state of Arizona after the election.

If Republicans sweep the offices, democracy may not survive, warned Barack Obama in a speech in Phoenix on Wednesday night.

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

Demystifying Election Denial: The Case of Mark Finchem, the Secretary of State of the State, in Loss of the 2020 Election

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 withNPR earlier this year, Finchem said he did not go to the Capitol that day, but still claimed that the 2020 election was stolen.

Lake has already filed a dismissed lawsuit which was premised in voter misinformation, and now she is facing the current secretary of state.

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

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

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

Marchant and President Trump both lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election. I’ve worked since November 4, 2020, to expose what happened, and what I discovered is horrifying.

Marchant has been a leader in the local movement back to hand-counting ballots even if they are less accurate and more resource-intensive than the current style.

The 2020 Midterm Election was Rigged. Did Trump and his Allies Attempt to Defend the Insight? An Analysis of a News Article on Election Day Coverage in Michigan

Donald Trump and his allies spent months laying the groundwork for bogus claims of election tampering after the presidential election in 2020. Republicans have used similar rhetoric in the weeks leading up to the election in a couple of years.

Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. This time, we go again! He wrote. The election was rigged.

What is Trump supposed to have evidence for? An article on a right-wing news site which demonstrated no rigging. Rather, the article baselessly raised suspicion about absentee-ballot data the article did not clearly explain.

Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state which could determine 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 is not. It takes a lot of time because the Republican-controlled legislature is not going to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than Election Day.

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

Source: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-day-coverage-11-06-2022/index.html

Democratic Electoral Correspondence to a Republican Campaigner: Defending Voting Integrity and Preserving Voting Rights in the U.S.

The lawyer for Karamo softened the request during closing arguments, The Detroit News reported. Other prominent Republicans have stayed out of the lawsuit.

The DailyBeast reported that the Republican Senate Candidate in Arizona said at an event that if he beats incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes they will not be able to prove it is not true. He told a similar story at an event in June.

The order to stop patrolling the drop boxes in Arizona belies signs of strain. Tens of thousands of voter registrations are being challenged in Georgia. Voting rights groups teach volunteers to de-escalate the situation. Voters have been videotaped by groups hunting for fraud as they drop off their ballots.

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.

Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Phoenix, said he has felt stabbed in the back so much that he doesn’t have anything but scar tissue.

Like some other election offices, the Maricopa election office has beefed up its security in preparation for Tuesday. The building was fortified with a metal fence after being the target of right-wing protests in 2020. The email made reference to the French Revolution and promised to find election officials’ personal addresses. It was referred to the F.B.I. by the Arizona secretary of state.

When the polls have closed, activists are likely to challenge votes and lawsuits may be filed by losing candidates if they don’t believe in the integrity of the process.

It is easy 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 state Supreme Court recently ruled they should not be counted, in response to a Republican lawsuit. The court ordered the election officials to separate and preserve them, in case of a future lawsuit.

In Wisconsin, a Republican state lawmaker is suing to stop the state from counting military ballots, claiming there are security weaknesses in the system. The lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group that has backed the election denial movement.

More than 100 lawsuits have been filed so far this year, compared with 70 at this point two years ago. Dozens of lawyers and firms on the Republican side tried to overturn the 2020 election, but they are still working for candidates and parties this cycle.

Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, many pushing for leniency in counting Absentee Ballots and challenging Republican officials plans to hand-count them.

In Mesa, the Phoenix suburb, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stand guard outside a ballot drop box after the 2020 election, in the place where the first Stop the Steal protest was held.

“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. Do I need to worry about my family being killed if the results don’t go my way?

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. But Ms. Black said that since the 2020 election, which she believed was stolen, she did not trust Ms. Hobbs, who is both the secretary of state and a Democratic candidate for governor, 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 of mail ballots may help re-create a “Red mirage” where votes cast on Election Day are reported first and heavily favor Republicans while mail-in ballots, which lean Democratic, come in later. The trend was used by Mr. Trump to suggest that Democrats rigged the results.

The Illinois Attorney General’s Office in Shasta County, Georgia, Enjoyed by the A.M.E. Voting Law and the Proposed Georgia State Elections

The chief executive resigned, the health officer quit and the health board publicly denounced state vaccine mandates after the public protested.

A forecast for 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could cause problems for 180,000 voters in Shasta County, the county’s clerk and voter registration officer said.

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.

“I will admit I’m apprehensive about Election Day because you never know what some people will do,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. People dressed in these outfits are intimidating to me.

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. Her dilemma was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Despite the surge in turnout, Bishop Jackson was happy with the efforts of his church and other voting rights groups to make sure voters were prepared for the elections.

Bringing Out Fires in the 2016 Midterm Secretary of State Race: The Case Of Brad Raffensperger, the Arizona Democrat, and Michigan Fair Elections

Millions of dollars have been spent on political races this year, with several Republican candidates questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as the secretary of state contests draw national attention.

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

Georgia: The Georgia contest features one of the country’s best-known election chiefs – Republican Brad Raffensperger, who refused Trump’s request to “find” the votes needed to overturn his loss in the Peach State. That campaign by Trump and his allies is being investigated by a grand jury in Georgia.

The most serious attacks on elections did not emerge until after the 2020 election when lawyers for Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to reverse the result, as was the case in Arizona. “We’re poised to be ready for more lawsuits,” Mr. Danjuma said.

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

In a post on her website, the organizer of Michigan Fair Elections said they have two options when it comes to election integrity. On Thursday, the group was going to hold its next online meeting.

The preferred candidate for the secretary of state race, Kristina Karamo, has not conceded even though she lost by 14 percentage points and sent out a list of supposed electoral violations.

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