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cleta mitchell
Is the US Ready to Defend Democracy From Rogue Election Officials?
In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational and slapdash; now they are systematic, organized, and well funded.
Aug 19, 2024
How precisely will election deniers try to undermine the results in 2024? Will we see a rerun of 2020’s parade of falsehoods—rigged voting machines, USB drives masquerading as breath mints, and bamboo-laced ballots from China? Or will they premiere some new tricks this election season? One answer has come into sharper focus in recent weeks. Will our system be ready? That remains to be seen.
We all learned in 2020 that we do not have one election, or even 50 state elections. Decisions are made by hundreds of county boards and officials. Usually that is routine. Just after voting takes place, poll workers and local election officials begin a rigorous, multistep process to accurately determine the results. This is all “ministerial.” Two plus two equals four. We have a winner! The voters vote, the results are tabulated, you affirm the numbers, and you go home.
All of which points to Georgia, where alarms are ringing. Rogue officials there are already preparing the ground to ignore voters in November.
Election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!
You may remember former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally at Georgia State University on August 3. That was the speech in which he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and, for good measure, Kemp’s wife. What was noteworthy, though, was the fellow Republicans he praised. He lauded three newly appointed members of the state election board. “They’re on fire. They are doing a great job,” he declared.
Three days later we learned why he was so effusive. The state officials announced a new rule to require county officials across Georgia to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before they can certify results.
That is a permission slip for subversion. In May, a board member who oversees elections in Fulton County—home of Atlanta, the biggest Black-majority city in the state—refused to certify a primary result, and to press her case, she sued her own election board. It turned out she is an organizer for Cleta Mitchell, a participant in Trump’s notorious “I just want to find 11,780 votes” phone call to Raffensperger in January 2021.
Indeed, election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!
Even before the new Georgia rule went into effect, the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups went to court to support advocates working to protect the vote in Fulton County. We represent the Georgia NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Georgia.
That’s the thing: When a county official refuses to certify the votes because of... vibes, it’s not just antidemocratic. It’s unlawful. The Georgia Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that local officials don’t have a choice.
And for good reason. In the rough-and-tumble early years of our republic, elections were messy, and it was not uncommon for rogue local officials to interfere with certification to benefit their preferred candidate. Early American state courts and legislatures took notice. As my colleague Lauren Miller Karalunas explains in a widely cited law review article, they shaped election certification into a mandatory duty precisely so that officials like those in Fulton County couldn’t take election results into their own hands. In the prescient words of the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1909, allowing local certifying officials to reopen election returns and investigate the election itself “would afford temptation and great opportunity for the commission of fraud.”
In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational and slapdash. Now they are systematic, organized, and well funded. Trump already falsely claims that millions of noncitizens are preparing to vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) asserts that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But,” he admits, “it’s not been something that is easily provable.” The House passed legislation purportedly cracking down on the nonexistent plague of noncitizen voting. All of this creates an atmosphere of suspicion and panic—the very vibes that can be exploited by unscrupulous officials to delay certification and derail the vote.
At his Georgia State rally, Trump praised the election officials as “pit bulls” who sought “victory.” It will be up to courts to stand up for something other than “victory”—democracy, fairness, and the rule of law.
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Audio Reveals Top GOP Lawyer's 2024 Strategy: Make It Harder for College Students to Vote
"Instead of fighting for the people or actually earning the votes, Republicans' only plan is to try to 'combat' voting on college campuses," said Rep. Summer Lee.
Apr 21, 2023
A longtime Republican lawyer who aided former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election told GOP donors that the party should be working to roll back voting on college campuses and other initiatives aimed at expanding ballot access, according to audio obtained by progressive journalist Lauren Windsor.
"What are these college campus locations?" Cleta Mitchell, a top GOP attorney and fundraiser asked during a presentation at the Republican National Committee's donor retreat in Nashville last weekend.
"What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed," lamented Mitchell, an avid voter suppression campaigner who has represented Republican organizations, individual lawmakers, and right-wing groups such as the National Rifle Association.
According toThe Washington Post, which reviewed a copy of Mitchell's Nashville presentation, the GOP attorney's remarks "offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic."
"Mitchell focused on campus voting in five states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, and Wisconsin—all of which are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations," the Post reported Thursday. "Mitchell also targeted the preregistration of students, an apparent reference to the practice in some states of allowing 17-year-olds to register ahead of their 18th birthdays so they can vote as soon as they are eligible."
\u201cEXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to "combat" voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration.\u201d— Lauren Windsor (@Lauren Windsor) 1682005267
Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, noted in response to Mitchell's presentation that "Wisconsin has 320,000 college students."
"If the GOP had won the state Supreme Court race, they would've—as this speech makes clear—engineered a crackdown on student voter freedoms," Wikler wrote on Twitter. "Instead, thanks in part to student turnout, democracy lives on in Wisconsin."
"The Trump machine wants to disenfranchise students," Wikler added. "We're fighting them in WI. They've got their eye on our state, and NC and VA too."
Republican lawmakers in dozens of states across the country have introduced at least 150 bills aimed at restricting ballot access this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
"Two of the more radical proposals include a Texas bill that would allow presidential electors to disregard state election results and a Virginia bill that would empower a random selection of residents to void local election results," the group observed.
In her speech to Republican donors, Mitchell said GOP lawmakers should be using their dominance in state legislatures to "combat" voting by college students and measures such as same-day voter registration.
Mitchell pointed specifically to North Carolina, where Republicans now have veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers thanks to erstwhile Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham, who recently switched parties.
"Instead of fighting for the people or actually earning the votes, Republicans' only plan is to try to 'combat' voting on college campuses and prevent students and young people from participating in our democracy," Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) wrote Thursday. "They are SHAMELESSLY and DESPERATELY saying the quiet part out loud."
The New York Timesreported last month that Republicans, "alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box," have already been "trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students" in recent weeks.
"In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly... to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification," the newspaper reported. "But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters. Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia."
"Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future," the Times added.
The intensifying GOP campaign against youth voting comes after young people had a major impact on the 2022 midterms. As researchers noted in a recent analysis for the Brookings Institution, strong enthusiasm and turnout among young voters "enabled the Democrats to win almost every battleground statewide contest and increase their majority in the U.S. Senate."
"To the GOP: I hope you're afraid," tweeted Olivia Julianna, director of politics and government affairs at Gen-Z for Change. "I hope you wake up every morning haunted by the chants of young voters protesting your attacks on our rights. You should be afraid. Because you're going to lose power, one vote at a time."
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