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election denial
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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Watchdog Finds 35 'Rogue' Election Officials Still in Position to Deny Results in 2024
"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," an expert said of county official obstructionism in 2024. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past."
Aug 13, 2024
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, released a report on Monday showing that 35 county officials around the country who've previously tried to subvert election results are still in place to do so.
The 113-page report not only identifies "rogue" election officials who pose a risk of obstructing the certification process in order to help Republican nominee Donald Trump but also includes state-by-state and federal election law analysis meant to help thwart such obstructionism. CREW's state-level analysis covers eight key swing states.
CREW warned that county officials in the eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—have refused to certify results in elections of relatively little consequence as a test run for obstructing the consequential 2024 election, in case they dislike the results.
"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," Noah Bookbinder, CREW's president, said of the obstructionism on The Rachel Maddow Show Monday night. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past. So that's deeply, deeply concerning."
"The good news is it's clearly illegal in all of these states and there are steps that can be taken to effectively halt it," he said.
Since 2020, threats to election certification have only escalated, including in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
We broke down what can be done to protect the 2024 election in our new report: https://t.co/8tLK0D7aV3
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) August 13, 2024
The report makes it clear, as previous nonprofit research has done, that election certification is not optional or discretionary: it is a ministerial duty. The authors wrote:
It is not an opportunity for county officials to politically grandstand, lodge protest votes against election practices they dislike or investigate suspected voter fraud," the report says. "State laws provide robust mechanisms outside of the certification process—including recounts, audits, evidentiary hearings before state election boards, and election contests in court—to investigate suspected fraud and errors. These are the legally-designated avenues for resolving the rare cases where genuine problems arise in an election, not the certification process.
The authors also explained that certification is just one stage in a multi-step process and must be done in a timely fashion to avoid disruptions, which could feed conspiracy theories.
Many of the laws pertaining to the certification role of election officials date back to the turn of the 20th century, when they were passed in order to stop partisan election deniers of that era, the report says.
Democrats have been especially concerned about election obstructionism since 2020, when then-President Trump tried to subvert and discredit the presidential election results—making false claims about voter fraud—after his reelection bid failed. That effort culminated in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Congress was preparing to certify the results.
Many county officials around the country, presumably feeling they had license given Trump's rhetoric, also voted against or delayed certification in 2020, but their efforts were unsuccessful due to being outvoted or legally forced to certify.
However, Republicans intent on winning at all costs are more organized this year, and there's more emphasis on the county level, CREW warned.
"The legal ground game that was brought to bear against certifying the election in 2020 was junior varsity compared to what we are going to see this year," Joshua Matz, a lawyer on the board at CREW, toldThe Guardian. "There is now a much better organized, much more sophisticated, far better funded and far more intentional effort to thwart the smooth and steady certification of election results required by the law."
The CREW report includes information on each of the 35 rogue officials, including their names and their stated reasons for refusing to certify one or more elections; many of them are included on the list because they tried to obstruct elections in the past two years.
Some of the county officials who've refused to certify elections have given reasons that are "brazenly lawless," the report says. In North Carolina, two officials voted against certification as a form of protest, and in Arizona two officials voted to delay certification as a "political statement." In other cases, in Georgia and Pennsylvania, obstructionist officials have offered a "veneer" of legal justification, the report says.
Very few county officials have faced legal consequences for their efforts to subvert the election process.
The CREW authors argued that the federal government needs to be ready to step in to enforce the Voting Rights Act and other laws.
"Because the states administer elections, they are the first lines of defense against county-level certification subversion," the report says. "But the federal government also has a vital role in enforcing relevant federal statutes and constitutional provisions protecting the right to vote. Thus, if a state is unable or unwilling to take action against rogue county officials who threaten to disenfranchise voters in violation of federal law, the U.S. Department of Justice should intervene."
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We Have 147 Days to Prevent Another Capitol Insurrection
Before January 6, 2025, we need Americans across the country to demand that their lawmakers have the courage to certify the 2024 election results and reject the extreme Project 2025 agenda.
Aug 12, 2024
On January 6, 2021, we risked our lives to protect the American people’s duly-elected representatives from a violent mob that sought to overturn the results of a free and fair election. In doing so, we fought to defend American democracy itself. We could have never predicted the violence we would face that cold, January morning, but it was the mission we faced, and we rose to the occasion. We wish that we could say the same about the election deniers in Congress.
Despite the fact that thousands of MAGA rioters stormed the Capitol, assaulted over 140 police officers, and threatened the lives of congress members, 147 extreme MAGA Republicans still voted to overturn the 2020 election, including the Speaker of House Mike Johnson (R-La.). Today, we are 147 days away from January 6, 2025, when Congress will be tasked with certifying this year’s election results. Between now and then, we need Americans across the country to demand that their lawmakers have the courage to certify the 2024 election results and reject the extreme Project 2025 agenda so that the horrific tragedy of January 6, 2021 never happens again.
We have spent the last three years calling out those who voted to overturn the election because we know that another insurrection is possible. January 6 only happened because the former president and his lap dogs in Congress stoked insidious election lies among their followers. Elected officials like Speaker Johson were not merely responding to election deniers’ “concerns,” they were manufacturing them. By entertaining the Big Lie and developing fraudulent legal strategies to overturn the election, they gave permission to their supporters to attack American democracy. As a result, seven people, including several of our law enforcement colleagues, lost their lives.
On January 6, 2025, members of Congress will have to ask themselves: will they fulfill their duty to the American voters, protect the peaceful transfer of power, and disavow the Project 2025 agenda, or will they put their own political ambitions ahead of public service?
Two-thirds of Americans fear another January 6 because MAGA extremists haven’t changed their tune about the Big Lie. In fact, they’ve doubled down. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he said he “absolutely” would pardon the convicted January 6 rioters, demonstrates this. Unfortunately, they aren’t stopping there. House Republicans are laying the groundwork for another insurrection and pushing their extreme Project 2025 agenda forward.
Project 2025 moves us from the physical violence we faced on January 6 into a bureaucratic assault on the rule of law. It is nothing short of a takeover of the federal government that would threaten our freedom to vote and undermine the ability of federal agencies to protect much-needed election infrastructure. Project 2025 would fundamentally alter our government and weaken guardrails around presidential power—all for the benefit of corporations, wealthy donors, and the far-right fringe—to the detriment of everyday Americans like us. MAGA Republicans’ support for this extreme agenda clearly shows that their mission remains the same as it did four years ago.
Even though these extremists’ anti-democratic actions are no longer surprising, it is still hard for us to fathom that Republicans in Congress are still committed to the Big Lie and Project 2025 even after running away in fear from a violent mob that was targeting them and their colleagues while wielding bear mace, zip ties, and firearms. Clearly, they prioritize power and party politics over duty and service—values that the 140 police officers showed when defending the Capitol. But we don’t need to understand it, we need to stop it from happening again. We are calling out MAGA extremists’ election lies because we want to ensure that no one has to risk their life to ensure a free and fair election.
Several congressional leaders have already committed to defending and certifying this year’s election results regardless of the outcome. For the next 147 days we are calling on Congress to courageously stand up for our democracy. On January 6, 2025, members of Congress will have to ask themselves: will they fulfill their duty to the American voters, protect the peaceful transfer of power, and disavow the Project 2025 agenda, or will they put their own political ambitions ahead of public service?
The 140 police officers who saved their lives that day will be watching to see how they answer.
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