A County Clerk’s Perspective on Election Records Requests: Mike Lindell and the Pillow Salesman in Winnebago, Wis.

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

The Executive Director of the National Association of State Election Directors, Amy Cohen, said that the onslaught of records requests had hit red and blue counties alike. She said that election officials don’t wake up on Election Day and decide to hold an election. It takes weeks of preparation to run an 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. “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.”

While a number of election officials noted that the request from a variety of sources had come from a number of different sources, they noted that one of them was the pillow salesman and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. He said that local supporters had sent him replicas of the ballot choices of every voter from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Although election experts reject claims that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, Mr. Lindell said the records give support to his theory.

Jay Bookman: Early Voting in Georgia: How We Are Going to Be and What Will We Do Next Year (and Where Do We Stand)?

Editor’s Note: A political columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman is a Georgia native who has written for other newspapers around the country. He now writes regularly for the Georgia Recorder. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

In Georgia, early voting totals are approaching those from a presidential election year as voters continue to turn out in record numbers. In a campaign season like this one, where the stakes are very high, the question is natural: what does it mean?

In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. In the Trump era we don’t know how much of the early voter surge is actually motivated voters or if it is merely voters who would have cast their ballots 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’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. This year has so many variables that it is a caution to the rest of us about putting too much faith in the work of pollsters.

The stump speech included a constant reminding of Georgia Republicans trying to prohibit counties from opening for in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving because of their determination that doing so was in violation of state law. The judge agreed to allow for the Saturday voting, after Mr. Warnock and Democrats sued.

When you sell people false narratives, then rewrite state law to encourage them to take action, it leads to that. Confidence in voting has been high, if voting is not being suppressed so far.

The Democratic Party has built a voter protection apparatus to help people overcome bureaucratic hurdles to get on the ballot.

That last point is critical. The changes that were made to the way voters cast their ballot, which included making it more difficult to get an appointment with a judge, were necessary to fight voter fraud. The reason for that makes no sense.

In an increasingly diverse and Democratic county, voting integrity activists have challenged the eligibility of more than 40,000 registered voters putting an incredible burden on the small elections staff. The challenges were voted down in a party line vote, with both Democrats and Republicans voting against them.

It is the consequences of a bad-faith narrative that should worry us. In 2020, we saw Trump transform the electoral system from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcome as illegitimate altogether, as he took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that was fostered over decades.

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. It now says that “There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge.” The new law also requires local election boards to hold a hearing on such challenges within 10 business days.

Conservatives in the state are frustrated that challenges to eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on flimsy grounds keep failing.

The person told the elections board that they are doing their job. Do you want your county to be in order or do you want your things in order?

Voting rights and civil rights groups in Ohio and Pennsylvania have trained volunteers in methods of de-escalator and set up hotlines to handle issues. In Ohio, for example, a coalition specifically enlisted religious leaders from multiple denominations for the task.

And election officials say they are prepared for the chaos of misinformation and fights that may happen as a result of Election Day.

Counting Early Votes in Maricopa, Ariz., and Cochise, Nev.: a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union

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

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

Though early voting has been relatively smooth, officials and experts are prepared for disruptions after the polls have closed, when activists and lawyers will challenge ballots and losing candidates will file lawsuits if they cast doubt on the integrity of the process.

It’s easy to see the potential hot spots. Thousands of ballots have been tossed out in Pennsylvania because they didn’t have proper signatures or dates. The Supreme Court ruled they should not be counted because of a lawsuit. But the court also ordered election officials to segregate and preserve them, setting the stage for a future legal fight.

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

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

In Nye County, Nev., one such plan to count early ballots by hand has been halted by a lawsuit from the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. In Cochise County, an effort is going through the courts.

Election skeptics have been asking about hacking voting machines in Clark County, Nevada, that’s home to Las Vegas.

In Mesa, a suburb in the Phoenix area, there are armed volunteers wearing tactical gear who are standing outside a ballot drop box.

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

A complaint released by the secretary of state says that he was intimidated in his attempt to vote, and standing only three feet from the box. The voter asked if he needed to be worried about his family being killed if the results are not what he wanted.

Republican candidates and party officials have advocated for their voters to cast a ballot in person on Election Day, which is more than two years after they argued that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting to 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.

Black, a homemaker from Phoenix, used to mail in her ballot for years. 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 risks.

In some states, Republicans may shy away from casting mail ballots because they think it will affect the vote in favor of the GOP on Election Day. Two years ago, Mr. Trump claimed that Democrats rigged the results.

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

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/07/us/election-midterm-news/biden-tries-to-shore-up-support-for-hochul-in-the-homestretch

Infuriated at the polls: a challenge facing Georgia’s new voting law and an example from a case study in Forsyth County, Ga

The health officer resigned, the chief executive quit and the health board denounced the state’s vaccine mandates in the face of public protest.

A forecast for a lot of snow on Sunday could make it difficult for some people to make it to the polls, which is something the clerk and election officials in her county have dealt with before.

In a state with a long history of intimidation at the polls, some community leaders expressed their fear amid rising threats of political violence.

In Georgia, the Bishop of More than 150 A.M.E. churches admits he is nervous about Election Day because he does not know what will happen. I see people dressed in these outfits in Arizona and it can be intimidating.

New voting law in Georgia has led to the challenge of more than 60,000 voter’s registration. 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 reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The strong turnout in the state and efforts of the church and voting rights organizations helped, according to Bishop Jackson.

Reply to the Democratic Complaints on the 2021 Georgia Electoral Runoff: “Are We Here to Stay, but We Aren’t”

Runoffs, Ms. Cannon said, “are not to the benefit of working families.” She added, “It’s very difficult to, within four weeks of taking time off to vote, have to do that again.”

Since the law was passed in 2021, Georgia Democrats have criticized the new barriers to voting that it set in place. During the runoff, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, spared no opportunity to highlight the law and characterize it as the latest in a decades-long push to minimize the influence of Black voters and anyone who opposed Republican control.

“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome hardship is not enough to make up for the fact that hardship was put there in the beginning.

In Georgia, the Senate races were held in early 2021, instead of four years later, because the voting law was changed after the general election. In that year the federal judge ordered a nine-week race, but the state elections have always been four weeks long.

Many Democrats want the party to be more aggressive in expanding voting access in the wake of the failure of the Senate to advance a broad voting rights package.

Adam Pritzker, a cousin of the governor and co- founder of the States Project, an organization that pumped more than $60 million into state legislative races this year, warned against what he stated was the party’s reflexive complacency. “Democrats never cease to amaze me,” he said. They are waving a white flag in states but then they want to take the foot off the gas pedal. It just seems a little bit dangerous to think that way.”

A lot of discussion took place at the Democratic Governors Association’s annual winter gathering in New Orleans about defending and expanding voting access, as well as other issues, especially since Mr. Walz was one of many Democrats who gathered there in early December.

Republicans have tried for decades to increase voting restrictions. Those efforts were amplified after the 2020 election, when several Republican-led states passed new laws with measures that included requiring voters to show photo identification, stripping control from local election boards and curtailing some early voting.

The effect of these voting laws remains unclear. The turnout in Georgia was strong even though mail voting plunged under the new requirements.

The most popular Democratic plan on voting access is to join the 20 states that have already enacted or approved automatic voter registration, a system that adds anyone whose information is on file with a government agency — such as a department of motor vehicles or a social services bureau — to the voter rolls unless they opt out. The state that had the highest percentage of voter turnout in the country last month was Oregon, which was the first to use the practice.