Voters in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and most of Arizona’s population, elected Heap last week to be their next county recorder. He defeated Democrat Tim Stringham by about four percentage points—a relative blowout for the nation’s most populous swing county, where the last two recorder elections were decided by 0.3 points and 1.1 points, respectively.

Maricopa County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about voter fraud since the 2020 election, and the outgoing recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, suffered death threats for rebuffing these unfounded allegations. Heap, who defeated Richer in the GOP primary in July, has fanned those conspiracy theories and refused to recognize as legitimate the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As a state representative, Heap backed legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and to encourage hand-counting of ballots. He ran this year with the backing of a corps of prominent far-right politicians like Kari Lake, who have spent recent years sowing distrust in the state’s election results. Echoing their lie that election administration in Arizona is conducive to fraud, he vowed to pursue major changes from the recorder’s office.

“The voters are sick of our elections making us a national laughingstock,” he told the crowd at an Arizona rally for Trump in September. “The voters are sick of being mocked and condescended to when they ask sincere questions about our election system. And, most of all, voters are sick of hearing from their neighbors, ‘Why should I even vote if I can’t trust the system?’”

Heap now assumes office at the same time Trump retakes the White House, having signaled his intent to use federal law to restrict voter registration and ballot access. Heap’s promises to “clean the voter rolls” or to have all votes be counted by Election Day could test how far Trump allies can stretch this playbook in local election offices. 

But Heap will face many constraints in implementing his agenda. The recorder’s office can’t just wipe people off of voter rolls, as state law explicitly forbids that. It can’t ensure election results are known by the end of Election Day, mainly because the office doesn’t even control ballot tabulation in the county. And if Heap doubts the results of any future election, he cannot thwart certification because that, too, is outside of his office’s purview. The secretary of state’s office, in Democratic hands until at least 2026, looms as another check since it issues regulations guiding how elections must be run.

Plus, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees many election administration duties, moved just last month to take away some more power from the office Heap will inherit. 

The degree of pushback this board would give him remains to be seen. Two like-minded Republicans won supervisor elections on Tuesday, bringing the body closer to his politics. 

One is Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021; she will replace a Republican who faced threats for defending the local system. The other, Mark Stewart, has also questioned past election results. He successfully challenged Republican incumbent Jack Sellers, who got flack from conservatives for certifying election results.

After losing to Stewart in the July primary, Sellers endorsed the Democratic nominee over Stewart, because, he told Phoenix radio station KJZZ, “the future of democracy is on the ballot.” But Stewart prevailed by about four percentage points last week. 

Still, election experts in Arizona told Bolts that, even as they’ll vigilantly monitor the effects of Heap’s policies on voting rights and access, they’re cautiously hopeful that sufficient backstops exist to hold him in check if he attempts drastic measures.

“I’m a little bit worried, but I try to be optimistic that things will be OK,” said Helen Purcell, who served as the recorder in Maricopa County from 1989 to 2017. “Mr. Heap has limited abilities in what he can and cannot do as far as influencing the process. So I’ll try to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he will abide by our state laws and federal laws.”

Purcell, a Republican, is one in a string of elections officials in Maricopa County who have fought back against election deniers since 2020. Her successor in office, Democrat Adrian Fontes, is now Arizona’s secretary of state and has placed himself on the frontlines of that fight. The recorder after Fontes was Richer, who became a national figure for frequently refuting his own party’s false claims of voter fraud.

Richer this fall teamed up with the county’s GOP-run board of supervisors to restrict the powers of the recorder’s office going forward. Under the terms of an agreement they reached on Oct. 23, the supervisors will now manage the processing of early ballots, a job the county recorder previously had. The supervisors will also take control of the recorder’s IT staff and its $5 million budget.

This shift in responsibility continued a trend that has reduced the recorder’s role in elections over the last decade. When Purcell was in office, the recorder had purview over most everything to do with elections. But Republican supervisors snatched some power once Fontes, the Democrat, came into office. From that point, the recorder was left in charge of voter registration and early voting, while the supervisors handled Election Day voting, the creation of the ballots, and the tabulation of the ballots. The board will retain these roles going forward. 

As county recorder, Heap will control voter registration and the handling of early ballot requests. He’ll also control signature verification on early ballots and the process of curing early ballots that are tentatively rejected because of an error such as a mismatched or missing voter signature. 

Purcell worries that Heap could use his authority to target certain voters. “My concern is with voter registration and how he’ll instruct staff to deal with that,” she told Bolts. 

She stressed that outside organizations facilitate a lot of voter registrations. “I wonder whether he’ll take a cautious view about those groups, which could have the possibility of curtailing certain people being able to vote,” she said.

Arizona already has strict laws when it comes to how people register to vote, as it requires proof of citizenship, unlike most states. Alex Gulotta, state director of the Arizona arm of All Voting is Local, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, worries about residents who’ll encounter issues like an error on their registration forms, or a mismatched signature on their mail ballot. 

He warns that these voters will be adversely affected if Heap does not make a point to provide easy access to outside groups and to actively reach out to voters affected by an error. 

“I have no doubt that if someone wanted to create an office that was harsher and less caring of voters, they could do that,” Gulotta told Bolts. “People rely on the recorder’s office every day to fix little things that are broken. If it’s not accessible and they don’t fix things adequately, such that there are hours-long wait times, it can really have a negative impact.”

Throughout his campaign, Heap has failed to produce concrete evidence that Maricopa County elections are mismanaged. There has been no finding of fraud or other systemic voting issues in Maricopa County; a post-2020 audit of the county elections turned up nothing. When the local PBS station pressed Heap for evidence to back up his claims, Heap provided none and rather pointed simply to the fact that he’s heard from constituents who perceive problems.

Heap did not reply to a request for comment for this article.

A majority of Maricopa County supervisors seem unlikely to be receptive to major election overhauls. Republicans have controlled this board without interruption since the 1960s, and on Tuesday they kept that streak going; as of publication, the GOP has won three of the five seats on the board and Democrats have won one. The fifth seat is too close to call.

But while incoming supervisors Stewart and Lesko are election deniers, the third Republican supervisor, Thomas Galvin, has defended the county’s election system, and he beat an election denier in the July primary. Kate Brophy McGee, the Republican leading in the unresolved race—by just 359 votes as of Tuesday morning—also has a reputation for being relatively moderate. 

Stringham, Heap’s defeated Democratic opponent, hopes that these officials can provide a backstop that would prevent Heap from upending elections, but he cautioned that it would be difficult for Republican officials to withstand pressure from the rest of their party. 

“Thomas Galvin is absolutely not an election denier, and I don’t think that Kate Brophy McGee is either,” Stringham told Bolts. “But the problem with Republican politics is that if you don’t go along with it, you’re out, so I don’t think you can look at that board and go, ‘It’s OK; there’s three non-election deniers.” He added, “I think there are four Republicans and one Democrat, and the Republican Party math is that you’ll go along with it.” 

Still, Stringham predicted that even Heap may suffer blowback from his party’s base, as Richer did, if the GOP ends up losing Arizona’s elections in 2026 or 2028 and again falsely alleges fraud. 

“He can’t really deliver on this crap, but he can get blamed for it,” Stringham said.

Purcell and Gulotta also worry that local guardrails may not be sufficient to keep up morale among election workers. Arizona has already seen very high turnover in election administration since 2020.

“In any institution, the attitude of the leader impacts the way people behave and whether or not people want to work in the office,” Gulotta said. 

Heap will not be the only election denier to assume leadership over an elections office in Arizona. Republican Recorder David Stevens cruised to re-election in Cochise County, which has made national news for illegally seeking hand-counts of election results. Stevens partnered with his county’s supervisors in that effort. 

In Yuma County, Republican David Lara, who is an outspoken election denier, unseated a non-election denier Republican in the primary and then won overwhelmingly last week. Lara has often lied about Arizona elections and has floated punishing voter fraud with the death penalty. His purported investigation into election tampering claims helped inspire “2,000 Mules,” the debunked movie that alleges the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Yuma County, unlike Maricopa County, places virtually all election-related duties in the office of the recorder, meaning that Lara’s control over how his office runs elections is likely to have far fewer checks than Heap’s will.

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State University, is familiar with voter suppression in Arizona, as an advocate for the voting rights of Native people. Her legal clinic sued Apache County last week for turning away or otherwise discouraging participation by Native voters—the latest reminder, she said, of why it matters to have local elections offices that prioritize voter access. Following last week’s results, she told Bolts she looks warily toward future cycles: “People need to perform their ministerial functions they’ve been put in place to do. There should be guardrails in place to protect that, but if you start doing things that are disenfranchising your own voters, people are going to be pretty upset.”

Ferguson-Bohnee also noted that the conservative claims that Arizona elections are rigged suddenly quieted once Trump carried the state last week. 

“They’re not claiming any voter fraud because of the way the election turned out,” she said.

The post Trump Allies Gain Power Over Elections in Arizona’s Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.

Twelve states are deciding in November who will run their elections going forward. 

That role is directly on the ballot in seven states; in five others, voters will elect a governor or lawmakers who’ll then get to appoint their elections chief. 

In most of these states, this elections chief is the secretary of state; but in a few, there is another office that has that authority—for instance, in Utah, it’s the lieutenant governor.

Today Bolts is publishing a new guide that walks you through these elections in all 12 states.

In some of these states, including Missouri, Oregon, and Vermont, a candidate is once again running who has clearly embraced false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They’ve proposed taking drastic actions such as ending mail-in voting.

In other states, such as New Hampshire or Utah, the office is unlikely to fall into the hands of an election denier. But even these races can be critical to the shape of democracy. Secretaries of state or the equivalent official often design voter outreach programs, or set policies that can make voter registration easy or difficult. They can also champion new election legislation or maneuver to stall ballot initiatives. 

The exact roles that states attribute to their chief elections officials differ from state to state—for instance, some have a hand in election certification and others do not. To clarify this landscape, Bolts has published two databases. The first details, state by state, which offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2024 elections below.

Delaware (via the governor’s race)

In Delaware, voters do not elect a secretary of state; instead, the governor appoints a state election commissioner. And voters this fall are choosing a new governor between New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, a Democrat who is the heavy frontrunner in this blue state, and House Minority Leader Michael Ramone, a Republican. 

The two candidates have taken very different stances toward election reforms. As a legislator, Ramone fought Democratic efforts to expand the availability of mail voting, while Meyer supported those changes. Meyer also says he would promote voting among some groups who are traditionally marginalized, vowing in response to an ACLU questionnaire to seek automatic registration of people exiting incarceration, and by expanding ballot access in local jails.

Maine (via legislative races)

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, became a national figure in late 2023 when she took Trump’s name off of the state’s ballot, citing his support for an insurrection. (The U.S. Supreme Court later put Trump back on the ballot.) Whether the office changes hands next year depends on Maine’s legislative races: Lawmakers select a secretary of state every two years. 

If Democrats retain the legislature, they could keep Bellows in office; Bellows told Bolts that she will seek another term. But the GOP has an outside shot at flipping the legislature in November. The last time they did that, in 2010, they replaced the Democratic secretary of state with a Republican. Democrats took back control of the legislature, and the secretary of state’s office, in 2012.

Missouri (via the race for secretary of state)

The secretary of state’s office in Missouri could fall into the hands of an ultraconservative Republican who has unambiguously embraced Trump’s lies about fraud and who vows that this would guide his tenure. “We have to ensure that none of the electoral fraud that took place in 2020 and stole the election from President Trump happens here,” Denny Hoskins, a state senator, told local media after winning a crowded GOP primary last month.

Hoskins, who is the front-runner in November in this staunch red state, has designs for major changes to election administration. He wants to hand count ballots and effectively eliminate absentee voting in an effort, his website says, to “root out election fraud and protect our elections from Chinese/Russian interference.”

He now faces Barbara Phifer, a Democratic state representative who broadly opposes his plans. She is also emphasizing her support for direct democracy, warning against GOP proposals to make it harder to pass citizen-initiated ballot initiatives. Hoskins championed such an effort this year, saying he was worried about the progressive push for an abortion rights measure.

Montana (via the race for secretary of state)

Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican who is running for reelection, wants to make it harder for Montanans to vote. In 2021, her first year on the job, she strongly backed efforts by GOP lawmakers to toughen voter ID laws, end same-day registration, and make it more difficult to obtain an absentee ballot. Those policies were struck down earlier this year by the state’s liberal-leaning supreme court, and Jacobsen is now trying to get the conservative U.S. Supreme Court to revive them on appeal. 

Jacobsen has also used her authority to stall ballot initiatives, recently blocking some signatures on petitions for measures to strengthen abortion rights and bring about election reforms. 

Her Democratic opponent this November, Jesse James Mullen, says he is “appalled” by Jacobsen’s “efforts to disenfranchise Montanans.” Mullen, who owns a chain of local newspapers in Montana, opposes the GOP’s 2021 voting laws Jacobsen backed and criticizes Republicans for using false threats of voter fraud in Montana to justify new restrictions. Mullen will be an underdog in this red-leaning state that Trump is expected to decisively carry.

New Hampshire (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in New Hampshire is selected by lawmakers every two years, right after the state holds legislative elections. In the most recent such vote, in late 2022, Republican David Scanlan prevailed over a Democratic alternative. He benefited from the fact that the GOP narrowly controlled the state legislature but also got dozens of crossover votes from Democrats. That puts into question whether Democrats would oust Scanlan even if they take control of the legislature in November: In 2018, the most recent cycle in which Democrats won control of the legislature, just enough Democrats joined Republicans to reelect a secretary of state who had been supporting Republican restrictions on voter access.

Since becoming secretary of state in 2022, Scanlan has backed his party’s newest restrictions, including the proposal to require proof of citizenship when people want to register to vote.

North Carolina (via the governor’s race and/or legislative races)

While North Carolina is electing a secretary of state this year, this office has nothing to do with election administration. (For aficionados of secretary of state races, let the record reflect that longtime Democratic incumbent Elaine Marshall is seeking an eighth term against Republican Chad Brown, a county commissioner.) 

Instead, it’s the gubernatorial and legislative races that’ll determine who controls the appointed offices that oversee elections: the state board of elections, and the director of elections. 

But even then, it’s not clear who will have what power come 2025. Last year, in an ongoing effort to shrink the powers of their Democratic governor, North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers used their veto-proof majority to pass a new law stripping the governor of his influence over appointments and shifting more authority to the legislature. This was widely seen as a way to strip Democrats of their majority on the board and change the current director of elections, Karen Brinson Bell, who has questioned why the GOP is passing so many changes to election laws and has frustrated some conservatives who would like to see the state pursue fraud investigations more aggressively. 

The new law is currently caught up in court, however. The stakes of the battle over appointment powers are high: Democrats and Republicans have been clashing on a wide range of voting issues in the state, including same-day voter registration and voter ID laws.

Oregon (via the race for secretary of state)

Oregon has frequently led the way in expanding ballot access, including by pioneering universal mail voting and automatic voter registration. Democrat Tobias Read, currently state treasurer, says he is running for secretary of state this year to uphold that tradition. “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he told Bolts earlier this year, ahead of his primary victory.

Read’s Republican opponent, state Senator Dennis Linthicum, could hardly be more different, as Bolts reported in May. He is proposing to ban mail voting, despite the fact that most of the state votes by mail. He joined far-right lawmakers nationwide in 2020 to call for an audit of the 2020 presidential election based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. And he has not committed to certifying election results, the role of a secretary of state.

Read is favored to win this race; Oregonians haven’t elected any Republican to statewide office since 2016. That would leave Linthicum without an office. He was barred from seeking another term in the state Senate because he participated in a prolonged GOP statehouse walkout in 2023.

Tennessee (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in Tennessee is not directly elected. Instead, the legislature chooses a secretary of state, who then names a state coordinator of elections—and that’s the person who state law designates as Tennessee’s chief elections official.

Republicans are massively favored to retain both chambers of the state legislature, making it very unlikely that election administration will take a different route. Secretary of State Tre Hargett has been in office since 2009, and he easily secured a new four-year term in 2021.

Mark Goins, the elections coordinator appointed by Hargett back in 2009, acted last year to drastically shut down people’s ability to regain their right to vote after a felony conviction, imposing new financial fees to even apply, and making success an extremely tall order. Hargett and Goins have backed restrictions on voter registration and mail voting, and have opposed Democratic proposals to boost turnout.

Vermont (via the race for secretary of state)

In a rematch of the 2022 race, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, faces H. Brooke Paige, a perennial Republican candidate who has fully embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The Big Lie does not sell in blue Vermont: Copeland Hanzas won the 2022 election 61 percent to 33 percent. There’s no indication that 2024 will be any different. 

“It is highly worrisome to hear people echoing false claims and misinformation about the safety and security of our elections,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts two years ago. “It is a fundamental threat to our democracy, in that the purpose of these claims is to discourage people from participating in elections.” 

Copeland Hanzas has supported efforts by some Vermont municipalities to expand the franchise locally. Bolts has reported, for instance, on the organizing that led several cities to allow noncitizen residents to participate in local elections on Town Hall days. “We heard from these communities about why they thought it was important to be able to welcome people into the democratic franchise at the local level,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts on why she helped authorize those reforms while in the legislature.

Utah (via the race for lieutenant governor)

Utahns abolished their secretary of state’s office in 1976, transferring the authority to oversee elections to the lieutenant governor instead.

Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, is running for reelection this year. She barely survived the GOP primary against a conservative activist who had helped organized a ballot measure to restrict mail voting and voter access. During her first term, Henderson refused to leave a bipartisan election organization that’s come under conservative fire, saying she wouldn’t bow to “radical election deniers.”

In Utah’s general elections, lieutenant governors appear on a ticket with their running-mate as part of the governor’s race, so Henderson’s fate is tied to the race between Governor Spencer Cox and Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee Brian King, who is running on a ticket with Rebekah Cummings, a librarian at the University of Utah. In this staunchly red state, it’ll be an uphill climb for Democrats to land a statewide win.

Washington (via the race for secretary of state)

In 2022, a Democrat won the secretary of state’s office for the first time in a half-century. But that was in a special election, and Steve Hobbs now has to run for a full term against Republican Dale Whitaker, the former executive director of a conservative organization. 

Whitaker, who associated himself with “America First grassroots patriots” at his state party’s convention, has taken issue with some of the state’s election rules. He has made public comments against the availability of mail voting, despite running in a state where voters trust and widely use mail ballots. “I will fight for same-day in-person voting with paper ballots,” he said in April. Hobbs supports the mail voting system. Whitaker has also taken issue with Hobbs’ decision, as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed last year, to agree to a consent decree that removes a requirement that Washington residents wait 30 days to register to vote when they move to a new address. Whitaker, who said a “reasonable registration deadline” is important, did not reply to a request for comment on whether he supports the state’s same-day voter registration rules.

Hobbs received 48 percent in the August all-party primary, which is generally predictive of the November results, with another Democrat taking 10 percent. Whitaker received 37 percent, leaving him an underdog in November. 

West Virginia (via the race for secretary of state)

West Virginia’s outgoing secretary of state, Republican Mac Warner, says the CIA robbed Trump of victory in 2020 and attended a “Stop the Steal” rally late that year. He unsuccessfully ran for governor this year. The favorite to replace him as secretary of state? His brother Kris Warner, who also refuses to call the 2020 results legitimate.

Kris Warner is currently the director of the state’s Economic Development Authority. As he runs to become West Virginia’s next top elections official, he’s promising to purge voter rolls and figures to fit neatly within a state Republican Party that has deeply embraced election denial.

His Democratic opponent, local attorney Thornton Cooper, has said he was motivated to run because he views the Warner brothers as particular threats to democracy. But it’s become very difficult for Democrats to win in West Virginia, and Cooper doesn’t seem to be trying much. He has no functioning campaign website as of publication and, according to the state’s data, he has spent under $2,000 on this race.

What about the remaining states?

Of the 38 states that aren’t on this list, the vast majority will hold elections for secretary of state, or an equivalent office, in 2026. (Check out Bolts’ national primer from 2022 for more on how many of these states’ elections unfolded last time around.) But before that, the next milestone looms in 2025: New Jersey and Virginia will host wide open governor’s races, and the two winners will get to select their state’s secretaries of state.

The post Your Guide to All 12 States Choosing Their Next Elections Chief in November appeared first on Bolts.

Democrat Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the elections head in Arizona’s Pima County, says she drove to work in silence on Wednesday morning, after her counterpart in Maricopa County, Republican Stephen Richer, lost his primary to a far-right challenger.

“Are you allowed to print expletives?” she told Bolts.

Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, is the nation’s most populous swing county—and it’s lately seen a torrent of right-wing activism pushing false claims about recent elections. Richer, who came into office in 2021, relentlessly defended how elections are run in the county, taking it upon himself to constantly debunk unfounded claims—pushed by everyone from Arizona politicians to Elon Musk—that fraud is rampant and results are rigged. 

He faced persistent harassment and criticism from fellow Republicans for this stance, and even got death threats; one local Republican, who chaired Arizona’s delegation at last month’s Republican National Convention, said she wanted to “lynch” Richer. 

He was ousted on Tuesday in the GOP primary by state representative Justin Heap, who drew support from some of the country’s most vocal election deniers, and whose campaign was led by an indicted 2020 “fake elector” for Donald Trump. Heap beat Richer by about seven percentage points and moves on to face Democrat Timothy Stringham in the general election. 

“This November, we will end the laughingstock elections that have plagued our county, state and nation,” Heap posted on the social media platform X after his win.

Arizona’s elections infrastructure has largely held up since 2020 amid a barrage of Trumpian lawsuits and extensive organizing by conservatives who falsely say that state elections are stolen from them. But the Arizona primaries underscored the potency in Republican politics of the false narrative that elections can’t be trusted—and that something drastic has to be done about it.

Heap’s was one in a string of big GOP primary wins on Tuesday for candidates who have baselessly cast doubt on elections. 

Republicans Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, and Mark Finchem, all of whom lost statewide races in 2022 and then refused to concede, won congressional and legislative primaries. A rare Republican senator who had opposed new restrictions on voting in the state’s most recent session lost his reelection bid. Wendy Rogers, another senator who is a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, beat back a more moderate challenger. In Yuma County, just west of Maricopa County, a county recorder who has resisted election conspiracies lost to a staunch election denier.

And in Maricopa County, primary results left the local elections system several steps closer to falling in the hands of Republicans who have echoed Trumpian lies.

Jack Sellers, the Republican chair of the county board, the body that certifies local election results, lost by a large margin to Mark Stewart, a Chandler city councilor who has refused to say if he’d have certified the results of recent elections. Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021,, won the GOP primary for an open seat on the board.

Some of these candidates are likely to coast in November because they’re running in conservative areas. The general elections will be highly competitive for others. 

Maricopa County Democrats have a strong chance of flipping the recorder’s office by defeating Heap; they are also likely to target Stewart in a competitive district within Maricopa County. 

These contests won’t affect how elections are run this fall, since none of the winners will be seated until next year. But they’ll shape who will run, count, and certify elections in this state starting next year, at least through the 2026 midterm election and the 2028 presidential election.

U.S. states vary widely in their respective approaches to election administration. Even within Arizona there is variance. Maricopa County’s approach is to split the job between the county recorder and its county board: The recorder oversees voter registration and mail voting, while the elected board of supervisors oversees voting on Election Day and vote tabulation, then certifies the results of the election.

In these roles, Richer and the county supervisors found themselves on the frontlines against election deniers. The supervisors indulged conspiracy theorists after 2020 by ordering an audit that turned up nothing. But they then partnered with Richer to reject these allegations, standing unanimously by him in certifying the results of the 2022 midterm elections, over much Republican outcry. 

“This is a war between good and evil, and you all are on the side of evil,” a right-wing organizer told the board during the certification meeting, which was marked by other angry outbursts. 

All five seats on the board are up for election this year. Lesko and Stewart’s victories in the county’s first and fourth districts mark gains for the far right, but candidates aligned with election deniers failed to win Republican primaries in the second and third districts; their biggest failure of the night came when Supervisor Thomas Galvin survived against a Lake-endorsed challenger, Michelle Ugenti-Rita. An election denier also secured the GOP nomination in the fifth district, but that area is staunchly Democratic. 

This means that candidates who have openly signaled a willingness to stall election certification are unlikely to claim an outright majority on the board this fall.

Still, a scenario in which multiple supervisors vote to reject certification, and give voice to baseless allegations of fraud in an official setting, may give new ammunition to lawsuits by election deniers—and calls for new legislation by their statehouse allies.

Elections experts in Arizona believe that sufficient backstops exist—in state law, in the judiciary, and in key statewide offices held by Democrats—to prevent local officials from single-handedly undoing legitimate election results in the future. 

But Trump-aligned lawyers in the past have theorized that they’d be able to weaponize any chaos created by local officials during the process of counting and certifying presidential results, encouraging their allies to foster a “cloud of confusion.” 

“When you’re talking about literally millions of people, tabulating their results, accounting for them, tracking them, in a very ridiculously short period of time, that is a complicated piece of machinery,” said Jim Barton, a Democratic elections attorney based in Arizona. “When you have people who don’t know what they’re doing making rules about it and interfering with it, it can throw sand in the gears of this finely tuned system.”

Arizona has experienced such gear-grinding. Officials in some counties have pushed for hand counting of ballots, a priority for conservatives who say without evidence that voting machines are unreliable and easily rigged. These officials have also sought to delay election certification in some cases. 

Election experts also say they’re anxious about the ability of local leaders to make voting harder or more confusing. Recorders cannot unilaterally remove existing voting options, or just boot eligible voters from the rolls. But they run and staff various voter services, oversee public outreach and education, handle public records requests, and determine how—or whether—to assist people who need help to register or to obtain a ballot.

If he becomes the chief elections official In Maricopa County, Heap has promised to “clean the voter rolls,” alleging that Richer has failed to properly regulate voter registration. There is no evidence that Richer’s office has allowed ballot access to ineligible people.

Heap has dodged questions about whether he thinks the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections are accurate. In the statehouse, he’s part of the far-right Freedom Caucus, which has championed major changes to election laws. He supported legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and encourage hand-counting of ballots.

Heap has said he was recruited to run for the position by state Senator Jake Hoffman, who is facing felony charges for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Hoffman served as chief strategist during this campaign, Heap said.

The general election between Heap and Stringham, a Democrat who vows to defend voting rights, is likely to be very competitive in this swing county. Richer in 2020 won with a margin of just 0.3 percent against Democrat Adrian Fontes, who then went on to carry the county two years later on his way to becoming Arizona’s secretary of state.

Beyond Fontes’ race, Republicans generally and unexpectedly struggled in Arizona’s most high-profile races in 2022, a result that was widely attributed to the fact that their ticket was almost entirely led by candidates who prioritized election conspiracies. 

Hoping to recreate that cycle’s dynamic, Stringham on Tuesday night wasted no time appealing to GOP voters who don’t believe in Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections. 

“For all of my Republican friends who are hoping and waiting for the days of the old Republican Party to return – it isn’t,” he posted on X. “If you voted for Stephen Richer, I imagine you did so because of his honesty in the face of lies over the last four years. I’m asking you to continue to vote for the honest candidate.”

In Yuma, the other Arizona county where an incumbent Republican recorder faced a far-right challenger, the general election contest remains uncertain as of publication.

Challenger David Lara held an edge of just 77 votes over incumbent Richard Colwell out of the more than 10,000 counted as of Thursday evening.

While no Democrat appeared on the ballot, Emilia Cortez ran a write-in campaign. If the county confirms that enough voters wrote in her name, she would face Lara or Colwell in November. (Update: Lara prevailed in the final count, and Cortez gathered enough signatures to move to the general election.)

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Unlike in Maricopa County, the Yuma County recorder oversees all aspects of the elections system, so a takeover by Lara could trip up local elections and certification even more directly.

On her Wednesday commute, Cázares-Kelly, the Pima County recorder, considered what would happen if Arizona’s elections infrastructure, already under deep pressure, takes a turn to the right.

“I’m thinking about all of the wonderful people who work in elections, of my colleagues and the state elections officers who are so knowledgeable, who have decades of experience in elections and a very high level of personal accountability and passion for the work,” she said. “I’m wondering how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and I am deeply disappointed.”

“These conspiracy theories are very concerning, and clouding our ability to serve the public,” Cázares-Kelly added. “We have a duty to our voters in protecting the right to vote.”

Editor’s note: The article was updated with the final results in the recorder primary in Yuma County.

The post In Nation’s Largest Swing County, Election Deniers Move Closer to Taking Over Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note (Aug. 9, 2024): Dar Leaf prevailed in the on Aug. 6 primary.

On a sunny afternoon in July, a crowd of roughly 100 gathered to listen to their local sheriff campaign for re-election in southwestern Michigan. A self-described “constitutional sheriff” with longstanding ties to militia groups, Dar Leaf has made a national name for himself in far-right circles with his fruitless investigation to uncover evidence for Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.

But that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss at his rally. Having come under intense scrutiny in the last three years for his election investigation and militia affiliations, Leaf spoke to his supporters about his office’s more mundane work—upgraded vehicles and new training—and urged them to ignore the attacks he’s faced.

“Our eyes are forward, that’s why God put ‘em in front of our head,” he said to laughter and applause. “We’ve got to keep moving towards that finish line.”

Still, it’s his relentless effort to uncover voter fraud and his associations with far-right groups that has come to define him as he seeks to defeat three rivals in next week’s Republican primary.

Taking up Trump’s unfounded grievances, Leaf sent deputies to interrogate local election officials and tried to seize voting machines, which he claimed flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden. His activities fit in a broader network of far-right sheriffs who responded to Trump’s lies by wanting to police elections, and who may soon double down if the former president challenges the results of November’s elections.

Leaf’s skepticism about elections and convictions about the excesses of the federal government fit in comfortably in Barry County, a deeply red and rural county just north of Kalamazoo that voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 by a two to one margin.

But some Republicans want to turn the page. Two of his intraparty challengers in the Aug. 6 primary have highlighted his investigation into the 2020 election as a key point of contrast.

“The sheriff has propagated these lies,” says Joel Ibbotson, one of his three opponents. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.”

A years-long investigation

When Trump falsely alleged a Democratic party plot to steal the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud, he found a sympathetic audience in Barry County and its sheriff.

With the guidance of Stefanie Lambert, an election-denying lawyer who now faces felony charges for allegedly improperly breaching Michigan voting machines, Leaf launched an investigation into how the election unfolded in his county. He sent deputies to question local elections clerks, who saw his hunt as a form of intimidation. He repeatedly requested authorization to seize voting machines, but was denied by federal and state courts.

Throughout the investigation, Leaf presented no evidence of irregularities, let alone of a plot to steal the election. He maintains that the investigation is ongoing, and told Bolts and The Guardian that he couldn’t elaborate on its status.

Scott Price, a local pastor who supports Leaf’s re-election campaign, said Leaf is giving voice to widespread concerns about election integrity. “We’re grateful that we have somebody that has the courage and and literally is willing to stand and take the heat for something that other people are saying didn’t even happen,” said Price.

But some within Leaf’s own party resisted the investigation.

Julie Nakfoor Pratt, the county’s Republican prosecutor, rejected Leaf’s inquiry into the 2020 election and denounced it as a waste of resources. In a lengthy statement before the county board of supervisors on Oct. 25, 2022, Nakfoor Pratt explained why she could not act on Leaf’s allegations, pointing to the importance of probable cause and exhaustive detective work in prosecuting cases. She recounted her office’s investigation into a grisly homicide case as an example of the kind of rigor necessary in investigative policing.

Without evidence, she said, a case couldn’t be prosecuted. “I will not put my signature on something if it’s not there,” said Nakfoor Pratt.

When his office approached her with a search warrant for voting equipment, “there was no probable cause,” Nakfoor Pratt said. “It wasn’t insufficient: there was none.” 

Earlier this year, Lambert, the lawyer, shared troves of private documents with Leaf that she claimed were signs of a conspiracy. She had obtained them during discovery while representing Patrick Byrne, a Trump ally, in a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which some conservatives have falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election. The documents show Serbian Dominion employees troubleshooting technical questions, but in a letter to U.S. representative Jim Jordan, Leaf wrote that they revealed something more nefarious.

“Serbian employees planned and conspired with premeditation to delete United States election data,” wrote Leaf, echoing a similar claim that Lambert made on the social media platform X.

A constitutional sheriff 

Since long before the 2020 election, Leaf has been involved with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an ultraconservative group that promotes the belief that sheriffs have the ultimate authority to interpret and enforce the constitution within their county. This philosophy came into focus for him during the Covid-19 pandemic when, angered by lockdown orders intended to mitigate the spread of the virus, Leaf refused to enforce social distancing rules.

In an interview, Leaf said he first learned about the constitutional sheriffs in 2010, when Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and the founder of CSPOA, reached out.

“I think they were just calling sheriffs up, especially new sheriffs,” said Leaf, who was intrigued enough by their movement to attend a conference in Las Vegas. What he heard there, he said, “was a big wake-up call.”

Most important, Leaf said, was what he learned about Printz v United States, a supreme court case brought by Mack and Jay Printz, a Montana sheriff who argued that a provision of a federal gun violence prevention bill that required law enforcement agencies to conduct background checks was unconstitutional. They won. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not compel state agencies to enact such a measure.

“The case proved that local officials have the right, the power and the duty to stand against the far reaching inclusions by our own Federal Government,” Mack later wrote in his book.

The ideas behind the constitutional sheriffs movement are shared by a startling number of sheriffs.

Still, actual membership in CSPOA appears low. One study, produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, identified 69 sheriffs who publicly endorsed the CSPOA or claimed membership in the organization. A national CSPOA conference in Las Vegas this year drew around 100 attendees, among them Jan. 6 defendants, conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers—but few actual sheriffs.

Leaf was in Vegas, though, telling attendees excitedly, “I’m getting goose-bumpy here.”

“You can’t get away from his name” 

Since assuming the office of sheriff two decades ago, Leaf has developed a passionate following in Barry County.

“Dar is the most well-known person in the community,” said Barry county resident Olivia Bennett, who described Leaf as a family friend. “You just can’t get away from his name.” Bennett’s father served in Leaf’s “posse”, a word he uses to describe a group of citizens who don’t work for the sheriff’s office but assist him in his duties.

“My dad would come home and say different things, like, ‘If terrorists come, they’re going to come from these small towns first,’ and I just thought it was stuff my dad said,” Bennett said. “When later, I heard Dar speaking about it, I realized, ‘Oh no, my dad got these beliefs from Dar himself.’”

“Dar really does make people feel scared and make it sound like he’s the only one who can really protect you,” Bennett added.

Leaf has long flexed his beliefs that sheriffs are guardians of order. “We’re not here to intimidate people,” he told local media in 2014. “This is still a badge, it’s not a swastika. We have to prepare for the worst. We have to prepare for things you don’t like talking about.”

Since joining the CSPOA, Leaf has strived to introduce his community to the group’s lofty ideas about sheriffs’ unique role in upholding the constitution. Leaf hosts bi-monthly study groups focusing on Christian faith and common law and leads a course on militias, titled Awaken the Sleeping Militia Clause, promising attendees willing to pay the $175 entry fee that they’ll “learn a militiaman’s duty” and earn a certificate of completion.

In one meeting, whose recording Bolts and the Guardian reviewed, Leaf expounds on Michigan’s new red flag law, which allows police to take firearms away from individuals who a judge has determined pose a threat to themselves or others. He describes it as illegitimate, implying that he has the authority to make that determination within his county.

“No, my people did not consent to that,” said Leaf. “It’s a jurisdictional thing.” 

During a separate meeting this spring, Leaf updated members on the CSPOA’s April conference in Las Vegas. He said he was especially pleased to hear from Richard Fleming, a doctor who pleaded guilty in 2009 to felony charges of mail and healthcare fraud and has made a name of himself since then as a proponent of the unsubstantiated theory that Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon.

Fleming’s claims, Leaf said, “are pretty much being ignored by the cabal that’s trying to take over the world.”

Lockdowns and militias

As Covid-19 spread across the country in March 2020, Leaf vowed to strike back against stay-at-home orders that he viewed as an example of governmental overreach.

During that period, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer briefly prohibited the use of motor boats, permitting only kayaking and canoeing as a form of outdoor recreation. The order, which Whitmer later walked back, infuriated many residents of Barry County.

Leaf said he would not enforce the order. “The sheriff came out and said, ‘I don’t care if your boat has a motor on it or not. If you’re getting in a heated argument with your wife, go on the lake and go fishing, if that’s what it takes to cool off,’” said Ibbotson, who used to be an outspoken supporter of the sheriff and is now running as one of his primary challengers.

Leaf took part in a rally against Michigan’s stay-at-home orders, and called them tantamount to an “unlawful arrest.” Also at the event were members of a militia called the Wolverine Watchmen, a group that was later implicated in a plot to kidnap Whitmer.

When William and Michael Null, two brothers from Barry County who attended the event, were accused of taking part in the kidnapping plot, Leaf defended them. The group, he suggested, could have been planning to “arrest” the governor. “In Michigan, if it’s a felony, you can make a felony arrest,” he told a local news outlet. The Null brothers were later acquitted, during a trial that showcased how deeply involved FBI informants and agents had been in pushing the militia members’ rhetoric toward a kidnapping plot.

When asked about the controversy and about concerns that he may be too closely connected to militias, Leaf smiled and looked a little bewildered.

“Of course,” Leaf said. “There should be militias connected with every sheriff.”

Pushback from Republicans

Leaf’s growing embrace of far-right politics has ruffled residents, including some of his former supporters.

“When he had mentioned that the Null brothers were perhaps just trying to do a citizens’ arrest on the governor, that was the final straw for me,” said Ibbotson, who decided to challenge him in the Republican primary.

Ibbotson, who owns a logistics company, said he wants the office to drop the election issue. Election administration, he said, should be in the hands of the county and township clerks.

“My goal through this, even if I lose, is to make it unpopular to talk about election integrity, in the sense that the sheriff has propagated these lies,” said Ibbotson. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.” Ibbotson, who says he has hired formerly incarcerated drivers to work in his business, added that he wants to work on reducing recidivism.

Leaf’s second challenger, Richelle Spencer, is a sergeant in the Barry County sheriff’s office, who has worked as a narcotics detective and in the K9 unit. She says she decided to run for sheriff despite her aversion to politics. She told Bolts and The Guardian that the unending election investigation and Leaf’s involvement in the CSPOA has sowed divisions.

“Everybody is ready for something different in the sheriff’s office—we’re ready for some stability, I can tell you that,” said Spencer.

“He goes away and does these speaking engagements and when he’s doing that, he’s not available to us,” she added, “and he’s not aware of what’s going on in his own community.”

A third challenger, Mark Noteboom, a deputy in the sheriff’s office, had a direct hand in Leaf’s investigation. He declined to share specifics about the investigation, but told Bolts and The Guardian that he felt “the clerks in Barry County did absolutely nothing wrong. They did everything they were supposed to do, and they did it the right way.” Noteboom added that as sheriff he would focus on improving conditions in the county jail and other local issues.

At the CSPOA event in March, Leaf addressed the gathering on the topic of his investigation in Barry County and the status of election integrity nationwide. His police work, Leaf said, had been hampered by Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat who has been investigating Lambert and others for allegedly improperly seizing and tampering with voting machines. Deputies in his office didn’t want to touch the case. 

“That was the first major stumbling block,” said Leaf. Local crime had also pulled him away from the investigation. “We had a missing person and we took quite a while, a lot of manpower, to go find. I had to put my light-duty deputy off to go find this missing person.”

There were so many leads, the investigation had become so expansive, and the end wasn’t even in sight more than two years after Leaf initiated the investigation. Still, he said, he has not given up. It was on him and other sympathetic minds to keep up with the search.

“Keep chuggin’,” he advised the room. “Keep charging the castle!”

The post He Kept Investigating the 2020 Election. Now This Michigan Sheriff Faces Voters Himself. appeared first on Bolts.

New Hampshire Republicans have passed legislation that would create a new barrier to register to vote—and the big question is whether Republican Governor Chris Sununu will allow it to become law.

In late May, the GOP-controlled New Hampshire legislature adopted a bill that would require people to present their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers proving their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, with no exceptions. That would be a major departure from longstanding New Hampshire law that allows people to sign sworn affidavits as a substitute if they don’t have proof of citizenship when they register to vote. 

Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote. Less than half of Americans have a passport, and a new study by the Brennan Center found that nine percent of Americans don’t have any proof of citizenship readily available. The current law in New Hampshire allows people to sign a sworn affidavit attesting that they’re telling the truth about their citizenship and residency. Roughly 6,000 people used affidavits in the 2016 election cycle.

The attorney general’s office then follows up after the election to verify those claims. Republicans point to the fact that after the 2016 election cycle, the AG’s office was unable to verify whether 230 of those affidavits were true statements. But that doesn’t mean those registrations contained false information—it just means the AG’s office couldn’t run down the paperwork. The office couldn’t provide any examples of them bringing charges against people for lying on their affidavits in years when asked by NHPR.

The bill would make New Hampshire the only state in the country to require people to bring documentation to prove their citizenship in order to be able to register to vote. 

Republican proponents in the legislature insist it’s a guard against voter fraud, but Democrats as well as many nonpartisan election administrators are worried this new stringent standard will compromise the rights of many eligible voters.

Nashua City Clerk Dan Healey, a registered Republican who is president of the nonpartisan New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, warns that the new requirements would disenfranchise voters for no good reason. For Granite Staters who were born in other states and find out last-minute that they need a copy of their birth certificate to register, there’s no way that they will be able to get it in time. 

“We’re very concerned with denying eligible voters the right to vote on election day, because there’s really no cure in place for them to then be able to vote. And I see it as a huge problem, and I think we’re going to get a lot of complaints,” he told Bolts. “As far as I can see, it’s unnecessary…they’re trying to cure something that’s really not a problem.”

He said making the bill a law would be “a pretty big change for our poll workers” and leave election officials scrambling to train them and implement the new requirements. 

Healey sent a letter to Sununu on behalf of the organization in late May asking him to veto what they called a “troubling” bill. But he told Bolts that he had heard nothing back from the governor’s office.

In March, as the bill began making its way through the statehouse, Sununu initially expressed skepticism about its necessity.

“Our system works really well right now,” he told WMUR. “The affidavit, ballot, and process, that seems to work pretty darn well, I haven’t got any negative feedback just yet. So generally I’d just say our system works very well, so I’m not looking to change it.”

But he’s been radio silent about the effort ever since. He hasn’t said a word in public about the bill since March, and his office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Sununu is a sometimes-independent-minded governor who aggressively backed Nikki Haley over former President Donald Trump in the 2024 primaries. He’s since said he’ll vote for Trump over President Biden, but has remained critical of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and pushed back against Trump’s lies about the voting system. Just days ago, he said on CNN that state officials who certified the 2020 election “got it right” and that Biden won fair and square.

In the past, Sununu has signed restrictions on voter access that he’d previously criticized. 

The bill was sponsored by state Representative Bob Lynn, a former chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court who was nominated to the court by Sununu. During an April committee hearing on the bill, he admitted that he didn’t think New Hampshire faced a widespread problem with noncitizens voting, but argued that the bill was still necessary.

“Do I think there’s a huge issue of voter fraud in New Hampshire? No, I don’t, because I think if there was, we would know it,” Lynn said. “But the idea that it’s sort of de minimis, that there really is no voter fraud, or almost no voter fraud—I think we really don’t know the answer to that question, because voter fraud is very difficult to identify and prove.”

New Hampshire Republicans’ push is part of a national GOP effort to require proof of citizenship to register and vote, driven by lies from Trump and his allies that noncitizens are voting in droves.

Trump falsely claimed this was the reason he lost the popular vote in 2016, and launched a voting integrity panel that failed to turn up any evidence of this claim. He’s returned to this theme in recent months. 

At Trump’s behest, Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced legislation in early May to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Kennedy introduced a companion bill on the Senate side.

Similar laws have been tried before—and did more harm than good. Kansas Republicans passed a proof-of-citizenship voting law in 2013. It was blocked by a federal judge a few years later, but not before 30,000 people were prevented from registering to vote in the three years it was in place, according to the Associated Press.

The New Hampshire bill is also part of a nationwide wave of similar proposals. 

Republicans in Arizona have already adopted a law requiring voters to prove their citizenship, but people there can still vote in federal elections without fulfilling the proof requirement due to a federal consent decree. 

A dozen other states have seen similar legislation introduced, including in Louisiana, where Republicans recently sent a bill to the governor that would require voting registration applicants to prove their citizenship, and in Wisconsin, where state legislative Republicans passed a bill in 2023 that would have required use of the DMV’s citizenship data to verify voters’ citizenship. Democratic Governor Tony Evers vetoed it last December. 

It’s already a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections, and studies and surveys from various academics and voting rights groups have found that the actual cases of noncitizens voting are extremely few and far between.

A second bill is currently working its way through New Hampshire’s legislature that would similarly ban affidavits for registering and voting but attempts to offer a partial solution to the problem it creates. Details aren’t yet finalized, but this bill would create a hotline for election officials to call the attorney general’s office and DMV to try to verify citizenship if people forgot to bring their documentation. That bill is expected to be finalized and voted on late this week, though it’s not yet known exactly how this bill would interact with the one already passed and awaiting signature—or whether Sununu might decide to veto one but let the other become law.

At a hearing last week on the second measure, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, signaled support for these types of efforts.

“I don’t think that it is voter suppression or too much to ask voters to be able to give that confidence that they’re qualified to vote,” he said.

But even he warned that implementing measures like these in time for the state’s September primaries could be tough. “I agree that what is being asked is a significant new program, and it will require effort on the part of local election officials to be trained on this new process so that they understand it,” he said.

The new requirements in both bills could be particularly disruptive in New Hampshire because the state allows same-day voter registration. That’s a convenience most voters welcome, but it could be effectively made moot if the new bill means many people who show up on election day expecting to be able to register and vote would be left with almost no time to scramble to get their documents in order. 

“New Hampshire has a large percentage of voters who register same-day, and I think that they would all be in jeopardy,” said Olivia Zink, the executive director of the New Hampshire voting rights group Open Democracy.

The post New Hampshire Republicans Try to Require Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

The moderator of an April candidate forum hosted by the City Club of Central Oregon wanted to know: Could the Republicans running for secretary of state confirm that, if elected, they’d certify the results of Oregon elections, even when their preferred candidates lose?

That would depend, candidate Dennis Linthicum responded. He’d first want to check with citizen activists.

“No detective will ever find a body in the backyard if he doesn’t look,” said Linthicum, who is currently a state senator representing a district in south central Oregon. “So, at some point, the public is the best lookers we have. They’re out there, they’re investigating. You’ve got people doing the math. You’ve got people chasing ballots and understanding how ballot harvesting has been harming the public.”

At no point in the forum did Linthicum provide evidence of widespread voter fraud in Oregon—there isn’t any—but that has never stopped him. He is part of a nationwide network of conservative officials and cultural influencers who have stoked election-related conspiracies for years now. Three years ago, he joined lawmakers from around the country in calling for an audit of the 2020 presidential election in all 50 states based on unspecified “fraud and irregularities.” 

Linthicum last week easily captured the GOP nomination to be secretary of state, Oregon’s top elections official. The office oversees voter registration and voting procedures, and is also charged with certifying election results.

In November, he’ll face Democrat Tobias Read, currently Oregon’s treasurer, who won his own contested primary last week. (The sitting secretary of state is not running.) Read is the clear favorite in this blue-leaning state, which hasn’t elected a Republican in any statewide race since the secretary of state election in 2016.

Mirroring many of the conspiracy theories pushed by allies of Donald Trump since his loss in the 2020 presidential race, Linthicum traces his unfounded claims to mail voting. He’s running on a platform of eliminating vote by mail, and forcing people to only vote in-person.

“There’s a giant chain of custody problem that’s associated with mail-in ballots,” he said at the April forum. “Balloting by ID, in a local precinct, where it can be managed by locals within the community, is the appropriate way to go.”

This change would end a system that Oregon pioneered a quarter-century ago, and one that has both boosted turnout in the state and inspired a policy shift in many other parts of the country. ​​Oregon first allowed mail ballots in 1987, and in the 1990s it became the first state to adopt universal mail voting, meaning that every registered voter got a ballot in the mail. Today, most states allow any eligible voter to vote by mail. Eight states have universal mail voting. 

Read, the Democrat, told Bolts he’ll work to protect the system if elected. “Oregonians are rightly proud of our long tradition of vote-by-mail elections,” he said. “I will look to strengthen it by making it more transparent and accessible, and protect it from cynical efforts to undermine our elections.”

Bolts reported in April that Read was running on incremental changes that would make it easier for people to vote. For example, he wants to set up a system that would send voters digital notifications of the status of their mail ballot so that they can follow it and feel confident it counted.

Voting by mail has grown to be very popular in Oregon, to the point that only a slim minority of people there vote in person anymore. Paul Gronke, who has been conducting public opinion research on this topic for nearly a decade, told Bolts that prior to Trump, voting by mail was “really overwhelmingly supported” in Oregon, among Republicans and Democrats alike.

“There were really very few questions,” said Gronke, a professor at Reed College and director of the Portland-based Elections & Voting Information Center. “Everybody loved it because we’d really adapted to it.”

But many conservatives soured on mail voting starting in 2020, and circulated widely debunked conspiracies that it enabled mass fraud. GOP-run states adopted new restrictions on mail voting and ballot drop boxes, which are used to collect mail ballots. No state has outright banned mail voting nor has any state with universal mail voting rolled that back, including conservative Utah. 

The unfounded claims about mail voting have resonated in parts of Oregon—the May 21 primary saw some protesters gather in Bend to demand an end to mail voting, for instance—even if the state was not competitive in 2020. 

Linthicum has had a hand in that. Alongside some conservative allies, the lawmaker filed a lawsuit in 2022 looking to strike down Oregon’s vote-by-mail system. 

The lawsuit alleged that mail voting is so unsafe and opaque that its availability violates citizens’ civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. It asked the courts to end mail voting altogether in Oregon, even as it contained no proof about issues with mail voting in Oregon. Relying largely on the debunked conspiracist documentary 2,000 Mules, it argued that “organized criminal” officials may be covering up fraud, and that the public cannot know “whether our elections are indeed safe.”

That suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to take up the case.

Linthicum has still repeated his claims against mail voting on the campaign trail. “Today, people, not necessarily citizens, can vote using a centralized non-transparent black box using mail-in ballots with nothing but a signature to validate the authenticity of the vote,” he wrote in a campaign newsletter in January. (Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections everywhere, and studies show these laws are not broken at any significant scale, but Republican politicians have increasingly spread false information on the issue.) 

Linthicum did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

As secretary of state, he would be limited in his ability to force the reforms he envisions. 

The daily tasks of Oregon election administration are handled by county-level officials. The secretary of state acts largely as a coordinator, and has no unilateral power to make significant changes to the election system. That work mainly falls to the state legislature, and if he wins in November, Linthicum would very likely have to contend with a statehouse controlled by Democrats, who strongly support mail voting. (Oregon voters are also electing the entire state House, and half of the state Senate, this fall. Democratic governor Tina Kotek, who won by just three percentage points in 2022, is not up for election until 2026.) 

The secretary of state may be involved in future litigation around mail voting. The office was named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by Linthicum and others in 2022, and the state defended the system’s constitutionality. The secretary of state’s responsibility to certify election results may also prompt some chaos if Linthicum wins, given his hints that he could look to stall the process. 

In other contexts in which election deniers have refused to certify elections, courts have stepped in, and here, too, Oregon’s liberal supreme court looms as a backstop. But Trump allies have theorized that creating a “cloud of confusion” around results can gain them an advantage.

Election observers also commonly warn that individuals gaining a platform to spread false narratives about election integrity has an insidious effect on people’s confidence in democracy. 

“The challenge our system faces in the U.S. is not the reality of election fraud, or weakened election integrity, but the belief that voters have,” said Gronke, the professor and researcher. 

He added, of Linthicum, “Having someone with the bully pulpit like that can exacerbate that level of distrust.” 

While calling on conservative activists to help prove election fraud, Linthicum has also directly embedded himself within that corps. He was the only sitting elected official to put their name on the lawsuit against vote-by-mail, joining a group of plaintiffs that included advocates with the conservative citizen organization Free Oregon and the Election Integrity Committee of the state Republican Party. 

Linthicum has found other allies within the halls of power in some of his endeavors. Two Oregon lawmakers, state Senator Kim Thatcher and state Representative Lily Morgan, joined him in signing the 2021 letter demanding an audit of all states’ presidential results. 

Linthicum’s opposition to his state’s government has led him to champion the efforts of some in rural Oregon counties to secede from the state. He filed legislation seeking to force the state to open discussion on a far-fetched plan to join eastern Oregon with Idaho. Thirteen counties have approved advisory local measures to signal support for secession, including Klamath County, where Linthicum lives. 

Linthicum’s bid for higher office comes after a tense 2023 legislative session that saw him and nine other Republican state senators stage an extended statehouse walkout in protest of Democratic legislation on abortion, gun rights, and transgender health care. Voters in 2022 had passed a ballot measure to punish absenteeism among lawmakers, and the state supreme court confirmed in March that Linthicum was barred from seeking reelection as a result. 

Democrats have used their authority in Salem over the last decade to pass a string of reforms to make democracy more inclusive, extending beyond just mail voting. Perhaps most significantly, the state was the first in the country to adopt an automatic voter registration program for eligible voters, and is now among a handful of states pushing the federal government to let that program grow even further. 

Read, who is now running to keep Democrats in control of the secretary of state’s office, says he wants to build on that work, proposing tweaks but no big overhaul, Bolts reported last month.

“Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” Read said.

Phil Keisling, who helped champion the creation of universal mail voting as secretary of state in the 1990s, noted that this issue has long been partisan. Initially, he told Bolts, it was Oregon Republicans who pushed to codify universal mail voting in state law, and Democrats, including Keisling at first, who resisted the idea. “Heck, I voted against it. I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. By the mid-90s, he was sold, but, he added, “I was spending most of my time trying to convince Democrats this wasn’t a nefarious Republican plot.”

Keisling, who now advocates for this reform nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, said that the program over time became very normalized in Oregon. Of Linthicum’s call to eliminate mail voting, he said, “I think it’s an issue the majority of Oregonians are going to pretty soundly reject.”

“If you ask most in the state what they think of mail voting,” he said, “their response will be, ‘Don’t you dare take it away, we love it.’”

The post The Republican Nominee to Lead Oregon Elections Wants to Stop All Mail Voting appeared first on Bolts.

But Ramos, who directs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that promotes good government, says he may not volunteer in the future if voters approve Question 2, a constitutional amendment on the state’s April 2 ballot. “This thing gets passed, and I’d be very afraid to do that again,” he told Bolts.

The measure would require that only “an election official designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections or referendums.” It can easily read as an innocuous codification of existing statute, and it has generated no campaign spending on either side of the issue since Republican lawmakers chose to place it on the ballot late last year.

Among advocates for voting rights and for well-resourced election administration, however, this under-the-radar proposal is alarming. A slew of lawyers, elections experts, and nonprofit leaders tell Bolts Question 2 is written so vaguely as to invite lawsuits over what constitutes a “task” and what, exactly, it means to help “conduct” an election. 

They fear this confusion will have a chilling effect on the many non-governmental groups and volunteers who assist in election administration. If it passes, the measure is set to go into effect this year, ahead of November’s presidential election in which Wisconsin is again considered a critical swing state.

Victoria Bassetti, an expert on election law who has been involved in Wisconsin politics for three decades, believes this amendment would call into question the legality of any number of actions that these volunteers and outside organizations routinely perform in aid of the nearly 2,000 county and municipal clerks who run Wisconsin’s elections. 

“It adds pretty substantial burdens and legal doubts onto the shoulders of hardworking local election administrators, who, faced with this new provision, are going to see help that they previously relied upon fade away, are going to face substantial litigation risks, and are going to be unable to call upon expert advice and help from a variety of fields, including IT, security, and ballot design,” said Bassetti, a senior advisor at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ballot access. 

“I do feel like people are treating it like an afterthought, but Question 2 is a big deal,” said Eileen Newcomer, who leads voter education efforts for the League of Women Voters in Wisconsin, “and the way that this question is phrased does lead to a lot of uncertainty about how it would be enforced.”

This measure appears alongside Question 1, a related constitutional amendment that would ban election offices in the state from accepting or spending money donated by outside, non-governmental groups. Both measures are part of the continued fallout of the 2020 presidential election, and the conspiracies about widespread election fraud that have characterized Republican politics—especially in Wisconsin—ever since. Democratic state lawmakers unanimously opposed placing Questions 1 and 2 on the ballot, arguing that the state should better finance elections before restricting outside aid.

Question 1 responds to a controversy that emerged in the fall of 2020, when a previously low-profile nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed about $350 million, donated by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, to local elections offices around the country to assist in election administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These local offices, many underfunded and understaffed already, were scrambling at the time to outfit poll workers with personal protective equipment, establish drive-through voting, and process record levels of mail-in ballots.

Republicans were and still are outraged at the influx of cash, and have argued consistently that the donors intended to benefit liberal areas and boost turnout by Democrats, despite a lack of evidence of such favoritism or interference. Three and a half years on, this country’s response to the donation has been resounding: 27 states, most of which went for Donald Trump in 2020, have adopted bans on private funding for election administration. It would now hardly be groundbreaking if Wisconsin passes a ban of its own and becomes the 28th. (Wisconsin would have already joined this list, but for a veto by Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2021.)

While Question 1 confronts outside money, Question 2 would affect the outside labor that goes into making elections run smoothly. 

Among many examples of people who could arguably run afoul of the law if Question 2 passes, elections experts told Bolts, are representatives of voting-machine companies who commonly help troubleshoot during elections. And what about outside organizations who perform routine data analysis for local elections offices? Newcomer said that such work helps clerks decide how to spend limited resources—where to establish polling places, how to disperse staff, and so on.

Said Sam Liebert, a former clerk in three different small Wisconsin communities, “Some of these clerks are in towns and villages of 100 or 200 people, and they run elections out of living rooms and kitchens, and they have their 8-year-old daughters helping lick envelopes to send out absentee ballots. Where does this stop?”

Liebert, who now directs the Wisconsin branch of the national nonprofit advocacy group All Voting is Local, was leading elections in a town of about 12,000 people outside of Milwaukee during the 2020 cycle, and he said he relied on the assistance of folks who, under Question 2, could be seen as lacking the legal authorization to do that work in the future.

About 3,000 people in his town had requested absentee ballots that year for the November general election, and Liebert said he and his small staff could not alone have gotten the ballots sent out on time. He called in help from the town’s Parks and Recreation director and foreman, he said, and from technicians who are normally tasked with cleaning and maintaining park bathrooms and infrastructure. “We had an assembly line, getting ballots into envelopes and mail machines and getting them stamped,” Liebert said.

Wisconsin law already vests in local elections officials the power and responsibility to hire and train poll workers, and to discharge them if they break the law. Republicans who control the state legislature want to build upon this and turn the policy into a constitutional provision that could only be undone with another statewide vote.

But the law also has specific rules for who does and doesn’t qualify to be a poll worker; state statute lays out residency requirements and commands that workers undergo training before assisting in elections.

Should Question 2 pass, experts told Bolts, local clerks would have to be careful in deciding whom to call upon for help, and in making sure to remember to swear in as a poll worker anyone who performs a “task” of election administration—lest they slip up and find themselves lead characters in lawsuits. 

But it won’t be enough, Bassetti said, for clerks to simply err on the side of caution by administering an oath of office whenever they fear they’re in a gray area. She said many would not meet the standards set by state statute, listing a wide range of workers she fears would be affected: “the IT consultant who’s there to help you troubleshoot, the security person who’s there to help you, the friendly school person who wants to help you organize things, or the ballot-design person helping you fit 17 things onto one sheet of paper,” among others.

During debate over the measures in November in the state Senate, Republican Senator Eric Wimberger argued this step was made necessary by foul play in Green Bay in 2020. Faced with extraordinary demands to execute an election amid a raging pandemic, the Green Bay city council created an ad hoc elections committee, which agreed to take $1.6 million from the Center for Civic and Tech Life, and also invited the guidance of several outside experts who helped the city plan for and hold its general election that year.

Green Bay’s clerk, however, clashed with that outside aid and wound up resigning, arguing she’d been marginalized by city leaders who favored outside expertise over her own.

The election was carried out without any reported irregularities. In a report issued in April of 2021, Green Bay’s city attorney absolved the city of any wrongdoing in the administration of the 2020 election, and furthermore found that the outside aid was much-needed. The report details intense challenges in Green Bay leading up to the election, with city officials overwhelmed and ill-equipped. “There was no way for the City to react to the changes brought on by the pandemic without the infusion of funding,” the report stated.

Three years after that report, the Green Bay episode remains the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, and is a primary motivator for Question 2 supporters in the legislature. Wimberger, who represents Green Bay, alleged from the Senate floor that in 2020 “activists orchestrated the fall election and acted as a city clerk would act, though paid by [the Center for Civic and Tech Life], including managing staff and having access to ballots.” He went on to suggest that the outside aid made Wisconsin’s 2020 election results untrustworthy. “Whether the actual ballots were altered or advantages went to one side remains unclear,” he said. “Suspicions remain.”

During that same Senate debate, Democratic legislators argued that Wisconsin Republicans were putting the state in an impossible position by both declining to substantially increase funding for local elections and limiting the ability of local administrators to seek help.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Democratic Senator Mark Spreitzer said. “You can either provide public funding for elections, or you can let clerks go out and find the resources they need to cover the gap. But you can’t choose neither.”

Advocates told Bolts the vagueness of Question 2 in particular could prove to be a feature, not a bug, for Republicans: by creating new avenues to prosecute people in election administration, they create opportunities to sow distrust and chaos.

“This only plays into the narrative that our system is broken, by making it more broken,” Liebert said. 

That narrative has taken hold in prominent corners of Wisconsin politics. For one, court documents recently showed, lawyers in Wisconsin were central to Donald Trump’s effort to create a “cloud of confusion” in attempting to overturn election results in 2020. Since then, some law enforcement officials in Wisconsin have tried to use the powers of their office to investigate the elections, as Bolts has reported.

And election deniers continue to have sway in Wisconsin. A fake elector for Trump sits on the state’s election commission; another, Bill Feehan, is running for office in LaCrosse County in April. Trump supporters are also now trying to force a recall of Robin Vos, the staunchly conservative sitting Republican speaker of the Wisconsin House, over concerns Vos hadn’t done enough to help them decertify the state’s 2020 results. 

David Canon, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin, joined several others interviewed for this story in predicting that the exact boundaries set by Question 2 will have to be clarified in court, should the amendment pass. He identified several types of routine elections work that could feature in lawsuits challenging election results.

For example, Canon said, “What about helping disabled voters? Under state law a disabled person can have someone take them to the polling place and be with them when they vote. I think there will be a lot of people in the gray area who will have to be sorted out by subsequent litigation.” 

This would all be avoided, of course, if Question 2 fails—but Wisconsin politicos told Bolts they’d be shocked by that outcome. In the absence of organized opposition, many of them said, the amendment should appeal to a wide swath of voters who take its language at face value and may miss the intentions of the measure’s authors. 

“You have some folks that were pushing both of these constitutional amendments that are looking to try and sow seeds of doubt on our elections,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, by folks who’ve been pushing to poke and prod, and who’ll poke and prod some more now.”

The post Ballot Measure May Scare Away the People Who Help Run Wisconsin Elections appeared first on Bolts.

After court rulings in December struck down several states’ electoral maps, from Michigan to New York, what districts will millions of people even vote in later this year? How prepared will local election offices be after suffering harassment for years? Will the Voting Rights Act (VRA) still stand as a tool for civil rights litigation in the wake of an ominous ruling that came in late 2023? Who will even be running elections in North Carolina and Wisconsin, two swing states that are experiencing an intense power struggle?

Our team at Bolts has identified a dozen key questions that will shape voting rights and democracy this year. This is born less of a desire to be comprehensive than to offer a preliminary roadmap for our own coverage.

That’s because, while some questions that matter to 2024 will come down to federal decisions—likely starting with decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on Donald Trump’s prosecutions and presence on the ballot, and on the VRA’s fate—a lot will hinge on the policies and politics of state and local governments: your county clerk in charge of organizing Election Day, your county board that decides where to put ballot drop boxes, your lawmakers tweaking the rules of ballot initiatives, your secretary of state wielding the power to certify results. (Be sure to explore our state-by-state resources on who runs our elections and who counts our elections.) 

These are the officials we will be tracking throughout the year to help us clarify the local landscape of voting rights and access to democracy during a critical election year. 

1. How will federal courts affect voting rights and the 2024 election?

A maelstrom of major legal cases on voting rights and the 2024 election are currently working their way through the legal system, and many are heading straight toward the nation’s highest court.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS is set to hear several cases that will affect one presidential candidate: Donald Trump. The first is whether Trump will be allowed to appear on the ballot in several states. Colorado’s state supreme court disqualified him from the primary ballot in late December, ruling he was ineligible due to the Fourteenth Amendment because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6. (Maine’s secretary of state came to a similar conclusion one week later.) Trump has appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices have not yet announced whether and when they will hear the cases; their ruling is likely to also shape how other states do, amid the former president’s protests that his removal would unduly disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court could also decide at least five other cases that touch Trump, including the shape of his Atlanta trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.

Also keep an eye on: SCOTUS may decide any major litigation that emerges in the aftermath of the November elections. But it’s also set to consider plenty of non-Trump voting rights cases this year, including several that may further gut the VRA. One devastating blow for the landmark civil rights law may come from a case out of Arkansas, where a federal appeals court ruled that private groups and individuals cannot bring VRA challenges. If the Supreme Court upholds this ruling, legal experts say it would make the law largely unenforceable. As the VRA continues to be weakened, some states have adopted state-level voting rights acts to reinforce its principles; debate may resume in Michigan and New Jersey this year over such legislation.

Federal appeals courts have also recently rejected other VRA claims, including in a case in which civil rights groups in Georgia challenged the state’s election system for its public utility commission as racially discriminatory. If the high court upholds the ruling, it would have major implications for the statewide elected utility commission in neighboring Alabama as well.

2. How will state election maps change by November?

Nearly four years after the decennial census that kicks off redistricting, election maps across the country remain in flux, and major legal and political battles are set to unfold this year. At stake is not just who will have power in each state, but also whether people get to vote under fair maps.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans enjoy large legislative majorities that are effectively election-proof thanks to their gerrymandered maps, but 2023 began to unravel their hold on power. Liberals flipped the state’s supreme court in April after a heated campaign during which Janet Protasiewicz, the winning candidate, called the legislative maps “rigged.” And in late December, the court issued a 4-3 ruling, with liberals in the majority, striking down the legislative maps.

But there’s still a long way to go before voters can get fairer maps in November. The court set up a process to draw new remedial maps, but left the door open for lawmakers to try first. The state’s GOP speaker has largely backed off his earlier threats to impeach Protasiewicz but still has not ruled it out. And Democratic groups must decide whether they’ll also sue over the congressional map and whether to do so in state court.

Also keep an eye on: A federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a new congressional map by late January to stop diluting the power of Black voters, but lawmakers may stall. Michigan needs to redraw its legislative maps after another federal ruling found that 13 districts violated the Voting Rights Act. New York is also in the midst of a fresh round of congressional redistricting after Democrats won a court battle in December, though it remains to be seen whether the process ends up producing minor tweaks or an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. And from Texas to Florida, there’s still active litigation in many states alleging that maps are unlawful. 

3. How well will local election officials and offices be prepared to handle the election?

The country’s elections workforce has been decimated in the past few years, amid a deluge of threats and harassment stemming from coordinated efforts by some Republicans to attack and undermine local and state administrators, as well as funding challenges. The capacity of these local offices will now be seriously tested in 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

Nevada has suffered acutely since 2020 from election-worker brain-drain. Not a week into 2024, these woes have already deepened: Jamie Rodriguez, the elections chief in Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Rodriguez’s predecessor, Deanna Spikula, herself stepped down in 2022 after some residents smeared her as a “traitor” and threatened her office. In an interview with Bolts last year, Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, warned of where he sees this all heading: “If we don’t take care of the human component,” he said, “these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Also keep an eye on: Election officials have similarly resigned en masse in recent years in many states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, leading many to worry about the amount of experience lost. And while election workers are crucial, so is election infrastructure. Aging voting equipment presents a projected multi-billion-dollar problem. Look to Louisiana, for example, to see why this is worth worrying about: That state’s voting machines are nearly 20 years old. They break down often and, when they do, elections administrators struggle to obtain the parts to fix them. One local elections chief told Bolts her office is “barely hanging on”— a statement many of her counterparts around the country have echoed.

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

It’s tough enough for election offices to prepare for the 2024 cycle amid all the personal overhaul they’ve experienced since 2024. But in some of the nation’s most important battleground states, election rules and administrators are in limbo going into this critical year. 

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe became a target for right-wing conspiracists in the wake of the 2020 election, and GOP lawmakers resolved to oust her last year. After a complicated set of maneuvers, Senate Republicans voted to remove her from the position in September, but a judge later ruled that vote had no legal effect for now. Wolfe has not stepped down from her position even though her term has technically expired. This political and legal imbroglio has created huge uncertainty over who will actually administer Wisconsin’s elections this year. Adding to the limbo: Wisconsinites in April will elect some of the local officials who will then run the state’s August and November elections. 

Also keep an eye on: North Carolina Republicans were primed to oust the director of the state’s State Elections Board, Karen Brinson Bell, thanks to a new law they passed last year. The law changed the structure of the board so that it no longer has a Democratic majority, instead creating an even split between parties, and it entrusted the GOP legislature with resolving ties; this would likely set up Republicans to oust Bell and usher in new leadership. But a state court in late November blocked the law in a preliminary ruling, a legal dispute set to resolve this year. 

5. What happens if any election officials try to stall or halt certification?

After losing the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump asked state and local officials to stall or stop the election’s certification, hoping to overturn state results and convince his congressional allies to accept his slates of fake electors. If Trump loses the presidential race again this fall and repeats that strategy, would he find allies who are willing to disrupt the process and have the authority to stop it? Be sure to bookmark our nationwide resource on who counts elections since answering this difficult question requires a keen understanding of the mechanisms of power in every state, which Bolts will track throughout 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

The recent revelation by the Detroit News that Trump personally pressured members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers in 2020 was no surprise given what was already known of his actions that year. But it was a reminder of the critical role these local bodies play in Michigan: Boards of canvassers are divided equally between parties, which leaves Democrats particularly vulnerable to shenanigans in a populous stronghold like Wayne. 

Since 2020, the Michigan GOP has replaced their local election officials with people who have defended subverting elections. Republicans on the statewide board of canvassers have also shown they’re willing to go along with such maneuvers. Still, Michigan has new legal standards clarifying that canvassers lack the discretion to reject valid results; in 2022, Democrats defended their majority on the state supreme court, the body that would be called on to enforce such standards.

Also keep an eye on: Election deniers lost most of their bids to take power in swing states in 2022, but there are plenty of other spots to watch. Officials with a history of delaying election certification won reelection last year in Pennsylvania, though Democrats solidified their hold on the state’s supreme court. Trump allies will run local election offices in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia, heightening the potential for havoc. And a fake Trump elector from 2020 has a seat on the Wisconsin Election Commission, the body that runs elections in a key battleground state.

6. How easy will it be for voters to vote by mail?

If you want to vote by mail in this year’s elections, will you need to provide an excuse to get an absentee ballot? Will you have easy access to a drop box to drop off your ballot? What are the odds your mail ballot gets tossed on a technicality? That all depends on your state, the bills your lawmakers are crafting, and may even hinge on the decisions of your local government. 

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s most decentralized systems when it comes to mail voting procedures. As Bolts reported this fall, county officials there have a startling amount of discretion on how to deal with deficient ballots, whether to install drop boxes, and even whether to have armed law enforcement guarding them. Democratic wins in November’s local elections are likely to preserve the status quo in the most populous counties. But democracy advocates are pushing for better procedures on how voters can fix mistakes, and more robust requirements for drop boxes; they’ll be waging this battle both statewide and county by county throughout 2024.

Also keep an eye on: Since the 2020 presidential race saw an explosion of mail voting during the pandemic, many states have revised their rules—some to make it harder, others to expand its availability. The 2024 cycle will be the biggest test yet for how these laws impact turnout. For instance, Democrats in Michigan this year passed new laws that make it easier to vote by mail and set new requirements for drop boxes. Inversely, Georgia Republicans’ restrictions on mail voting, adopted in 2021, just survived their latest court challenge in October. In Mississippi, a new state law that criminalizes helping people with absentee voting is currently blocked by a federal court ruling. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Democrats are hoping that their new majority on the state supreme court enables voters to use ballot drop boxes, a practice the state disallowed in 2022.

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

By requiring citizens to register to vote, states have erected a barrier between voters and the act of voting. But some have pushed boundaries in recent years, finding ways of shifting the burden of registration onto the state or eliminating unnecessary deadlines or paperwork, with some proposals questioning whether we need registration at all. This will be another critical year to watch how states ease or curtail access to this fundamental right.

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

Almost half of states allow voters to register on the day of an election—a major convenience for any of the countless people in those states who may otherwise have missed a deadline. Liberal as it is, New Jersey is not among the states with this option, mainly because of opposition from its Democratic state Senate president. The state is weighing the policy afresh this year.

Also keep an eye on: Oregon and Colorado have been badgering the Biden administration for years to allow states to automatically register people to vote when they sign-up for Medicaid; if the feds acted on this,  hundreds of thousands of people would be registered to vote. Other states are considering new laws that would set up or expand automatic voter registration, including applying it to new state agencies, including Ohio, where organizers are pushing for a November initiative; and California, where proposed legislation would likely end up with more people on voter rolls; as well as Maryland and New Jersey, where progressives hope to copy Michigan’s recent first-in-the-nation move to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison.

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

Each state sets its own laws governing whether—and to what extent—people with previous felony convictions lose voting rights, and the national landscape on this front is ever-changing; 2023 alone saw landmark voting rights restoration in New Mexico and Minnesota, plus dramatic rollbacks in Virginia and Tennessee. The United States has long stood out among democracies worldwide for how aggressively it denies voting rights to people with criminal records, and that won’t change in 2024: an estimated 4 million citizens will be blocked from the ballot, but upcoming legal cases and political decisions could affect that number.

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

A panel of judges on the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court issued a shock decision last summer that struck down Mississippi’s extraordinarily harsh disenfranchisement rules, which strip hundreds of thousands of people of their voting rights for life. (An estimated 11 percent of the state’s adult population can’t vote, currently a national record.) But when the state appealed that panel ruling, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider it, voiding the prior decision and setting up a major legal showdown this year. If plaintiffs win again, it would bring about one of the most significant expansions of the franchise in a given state in recent history. But don’t bank on that, as voting rights advocates have been bracing for defeat.

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

Virginia Democrats have been sharply critical of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to reverse his predecessors’ policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Having just seized control of the legislature, they say they’ll now look to bypass Youngkin by referring to voters a constitutional amendment to remove rights restoration power from the governor’s office. That process would take multiple years to reach the ballot, though.

Also keep an eye on: Progressives in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon hope to go further and altogether eliminate felony disenfranchisement this session, enabling anyone to vote from prison. (This is already law in Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.). Inversely, Tennessee stepped up restrictions on rights restoration in 2023, and now requires people to pay new application fees; 2024 will be the new system’s first major test.

9. Will sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials step up policing and intimidation around elections?  

Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired right-wing officials across the country to launch special law enforcement units to root out and punish election crimes. They also fueled crackdowns in states where GOP officials had spread the myth of widespread voter fraud long before Trump, leading to a raft of laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing penalties around voting. Some GOP law enforcement officials have partnered with far-right election denier groups that are ramping up their own efforts to police voting ahead of Trump’s attempt at re-election. 

The stakes are clear in: Texas

Bolts reported last year that the elected sheriff and DA in Texas’ Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, were launching a new law enforcement task force to investigate and prosecute voter fraud. Phil Sorrells, the DA, ran with Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and won on promises to ratchet up policing of elections. The sheriff, Bill Waybourn, has become a right-wing celebrity for his fealty to Trump while also facing mounting criticism at home for a spike in deaths and other scandals at the county jail he oversees. 

Political pressure over baseless claims of fraud have already disrupted the running of elections in Fort Worth; Tarrant County’s widely respected elections chief stepped down last year after months of harassment from election deniers, which included racist attacks about his heritage. And election deniers have claimed without evidence that Waybourn’s close reelection win in 2020 suggests there was fraud. (Waybourn is up for reelection again this year.) That all sets the stage for even more allegations and investigations in a county with a long history of harsh and questionable prosecutions for voter fraud during a critical election year.

Also keep an eye on:  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 established the country’s first statewide agency dedicated solely to investigating election crimes, which quickly resulted in a series of arrests of people with prior felony convictions accused of voting illegally—many of whom have said the government had told them they could vote and whose prosecutions have since fizzled. Bolts has also reported how sheriffs in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin have bolstered election conspiracies and partnered with leading purveyors of election conspiracies to increase policing of elections. 

10. Where, and how, will the assault on direct democracy continue?

Many Republican-run states have curtailed the ballot initiative process in recent years, looking to limit citizens’ ability to put new issues on the ballot. After the GOP failed to derail an abortion rights initiative in Ohio in August, Bolts hosted a roundtable with democracy organizers who all said they expected the assault on direct democracy to continue unabated in 2024, fueled by conservative efforts to protect abortion bans and fight off redistricting reforms.

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

Reproductive rights advocates have turned to the only tool at their disposal in red states: directly asking voters to protect abortion rights. In Missouri, organizers have already had to fight off their attorney general’s effort to sabotage such a measure. In 2024, they’ll also have to contend with GOP proposals to change the rules and make it harder for voters to approve initiatives. One bill, filed by a GOP lawmaker for the 2024 session, would create a new requirement for initiatives to receive a majority in half of the state’s congressional districts in order to pass. Because the state’s map is gerrymandered to favor Republicans, this would force a progressive ballot initiative to carry at least one district that’s far more conservative than the state at large—a tall order for the abortion rights measure to meet. 

Also keep an eye on: Republicans are eying changes to state law in other states like Oklahoma to block abortion rights measures. In Arkansas, where the GOP passed a law last year that made it much more difficult to get a measure on the ballot, the coming year will test what space the law has left for organizing efforts. And democracy advocates in Idaho and Ohio expect Republicans to look for new maneuvers to restrict the initiative process.

11. What will happen to DAs and judges targeted for removal in southern states? 

Conservative officials in southern states have in recent years created, expanded, or ratcheted up the use of state powers to oust local DAs who make policies they disagree with—such as declining certain low-level charges or ruling out abortion prosecution. They have also targeted high-court judges over their decisions and statements.

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

Republican anger toward local prosecutors reached a fever pitch in Georgia last year with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ decision to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Bolts reported, Georgia Republicans established a new board with authority to oust DAs over their charging decisions, though the law has so far been tied up in court. Similarly, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered a near total criminal abortion ban in Texas, GOP lawmakers there pushed through legislation expanding powers to oust local DAs who said they would refuse to prosecute abortion and other cases, a law that may be turned against some local officials this year. 

Also keep an eye on: Florida, where the governor has broad power to remove and replace local elected officials, DeSantis has ousted two local prosecutors over the past two years, and voters will get to weigh in on who should occupy those offices for the first time since. Residents of St. Louis will also vote for the first time since the removal of their elected prosecutor by the Republicans in the Missouri state government. And Tennessee Republicans have stepped up efforts to sideline Memphis’ new Democratic DA. There are similar efforts to target judges, like the only Black woman justice on North Carolina’s supreme court, for removal. 

12. How will localities innovate to boost participation in democracy and local elections?  

Even as some places tried to make voting more difficult, 2023 also saw many states and cities experiment with new strategies to expand the franchise and encourage more participation in democracy. This year’s elections will see some of the first fruits of those efforts, as well as other places possibly following suit. 

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

Boston’s city council in December passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, a landmark win for progressives who’ve championed this issue locally for years, as Bolts reported in 2022. But the Massachusetts legislature would need to authorize Boston’s reform, which may come to a head this year. Boston’s move comes as other cities have adopted noncitizen voting. Last year, Burlington became the latest Vermont locality to allow noncitizen voting in local elections, giving more members of the state’s growing immigrant communities a say in things like school boards and municipal budgets. Washington, D.C. passed a similar ordinance last year, though a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the measure, a battle likely to continue into this year.

Also keep an eye on: Other innovations to increase participation are set to take effect this year, and will face their first tests. Michigan allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday,  while New York passed a law requiring high schools to distribute registration and pre-registration forms to students. Colorado and Nevada recently expanded voting access on Tribal lands. New York also just moved some local elections to even years to boost turnout, a reform that may inspire proposals in other states on an issue that is gaining steam around the nation.

Correction: The article has been corrected to reflect where Trump appealed his disqualification from the Maine ballot.

The post Twelve Questions Shaping Democracy and Voting Rights in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

Louisiana’s leading Republican candidates for secretary of state have largely rejected calls from election conspiracists to upend the state’s voting system, but they’re still courting GOP base voters who continue to believe Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election.

Some of the main contenders in next week’s election are playing rhetorical footsie with the hard right in the campaign to replace retiring Republican incumbent Kyle Ardoin, whose own efforts to appease election deniers weakened Louisiana’s voting system without saving his political career.

Whoever replaces him as the state’s next chief election administrator will have to deal with continued pressure from conspiracists while making decisions about everything from administering the 2024 presidential election to replacing Louisiana’s aging voting equipment. 

Louisiana uses touchscreen electronic voting machines that are almost two decades old and prone to error, and do not include a paper ballot printout, making results impossible to audit. State officials have been mulling how to replace the equipment for years now to address these concerns but their efforts have repeatedly stalled, and far-right conspiracists have jumped into the fray to push for a radical reboot of the election system.

Brandon Trosclair, the most hardline candidate in the race, wants to switch to hand-counting elections, mirroring an approach some far right politicians have pushed around the nation that experts warn would produce inaccurate counts.

Local political observers doubt Trosclair has a real shot at winning the race, and most of the front-running candidates strongly oppose his calls for such a dramatic overhaul while supporting plans to acquire new voting machines with a paper trail. 

But two of the top candidates, Ardoin’s lieutenant Nancy Landry and state Speaker Clay Schexnayder, have also hedged their responses to false concerns of widespread fraud in a seeming attempt to appeal to the Republican voters in the state who still believe the game is rigged, a sign that they could fall into the same appeasement trap that Ardoin did in office. On top of that, Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Attorney General who joined Texas’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election in four swing states won by President Biden, is favored to win Louisiana’s governorship this fall, which would hand him more power to pressure the eventual secretary of state on how to run elections.

Schexnayder, Trosclair, and Nancy Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry) are running in the Oct. 14 primary alongside five other candidates, including Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, the Republican who is most direct about rejecting election conspiracies. Democrats Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who received 41 percent of the vote in the 2019 runoff for secretary of state, and Arthur Morrell, a former court clerk in New Orleans, will be on the ballot as well.

The top two in the all-party primary will advance to a mid-November runoff regardless of party. 

Francis, Landry, and Schexnayder have raised the most money and are the only candidates currently running statewide TV ads, according to local Republicans tracking ad buys. With early voting already underway, at least one of those three Republicans is expected to advance to the runoff, where they would be favored since this is a deep red state. There’s a possibility that the Democratic candidates split their party’s vote and two Republicans advance.

Pearson Cross, a political science professor and associate dean at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the leading Republicans’ message on widespread voter fraud has been “that they’re concerned about it, but it’s not an issue here.”

This attempt to walk a tightrope—defending their own state’s election system while nodding to more general worries about the 2020 elections—was also attempted by other state officials.

Ardoin, the outgoing secretary of state, spent years trying to appease the state’s far right who claimed that Louisiana’s elections were rife with fraud. Ardoin allowed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading proponent of disproven election fraud theories, to air his views at an official hearing of the Louisiana Voting Systems Commission. 

Ardoin also pulled his state out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state collaborative effort that monitors whether people illegally vote in multiple states. 

More than 30 states run by both Democrats and Republicans were part of ERIC with little controversy until it became a target on the far right when the Gateway Pundit website falsely claimed that it was secretly a “left-wing voter registration drive” bankrolled by liberal billionaire George Soros. Ardoin announced he would quit the program shortly thereafter, at an event hosted by a group of election-denying conservative activists in early 2022. Seven other GOP-controlled states have since followed suit, with Texas officially planning to withdraw later this month.

Every state that leaves ERIC not only limits its own ability to detect voter fraud but hurts the entire endeavor, because it relies on states communicating with each other to identify if a voter casts their ballot in multiple states.

But Ardoin’s actions were not enough for conspiracy theorists, and they continued to hound him throughout his tenure. He decided this spring not to run for reelection, triggering Louisiana’s first secretary of state race without an incumbent since 1987—and slammed them in a statement.

“I hope that Louisianans of all political persuasions will stand against the pervasive lies that have eroded trust in our elections by using conspiracies so far-fetched that they belong in a work of fiction,” Ardoin said. “The vast majority of Louisiana’s voters know that our elections are secure and accurate, and it is shameful and outright dangerous that a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods.”

Ardoin’s decision to quit ERIC hasn’t come up much at all on the campaign trail, but Francis, one of the leading Republican candidates, told Bolts he planned to rejoin the organization so long as new information didn’t come to light during his technical review. “I plan to go back to that unless something surfaces,”he said. 

It’s unclear where Landry and Schexnayder stand—neither has mentioned it on the campaign trail and their campaigns didn’t respond to questions from Bolts about the program. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican who defeated primary challenges from election deniers in May, told Bolts at the time that he wished public officials did not bow to such pressure. Referring to Louisiana, Adams said Ardoin “dropped out of ERIC and did the things that he thought he had to do to survive, and it didn’t work, he got run out of his race.”   

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” Adams said. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories.”

In Louisiana, the secretary of state candidate most invested in these conspiracy theories hasn’t gotten much traction.

As of Oct. 4, Trosclair’s campaign website included a countdown clock to the Nov. 18 runoff, not the October 14 all-candidate election. He’d raised less than $100,000 for the race as of early September campaign finance reports, and has made no ad buys.

“It’s very difficult if you have no money and are trying to sell a narrative that people in this state don’t believe and a system that they don’t want,” Schexnayder adviser Lionel Rainey III said about Trosclair.

One prominent local Republican is helping Trosclair. When Bolts reached out to Trosclair with an interview request, Lenar Whitney, a former state lawmaker and current national committeewoman for the Republican Party of Louisiana with a long history of circulating conspiracies, called back and said that she was working on his campaign. Trosclair never called back. 

Trosclair has made clear his lack of faith in the state’s elections in no uncertain terms. 

“Safe and secure? I don’t think so,” he said of Louisiana’s system at a candidate forum on Sept. 21. “I don’t trust it at all.”

But some of the other GOP candidates are also courting election deniers, even as they defend their own state’s system. 

Nancy Landry’s campaign announcement video criticized election procedures in other states like Arizona and Pennsylvania. And she has hedged when asked if Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. 

“I do think that President Biden is the legitimate president, but I do think there were some very troubling allegations of irregularities in many states,” she said at the same Sept. 21 forum, before adding that Louisiana has “safe, fair and accurate elections.”

“I understand people’s concerns and their lack of confidence in elections. I think most of it is based on what they’ve heard that happened in other states,” she said later. 

She has also echoed a conspiracy spread by the far right since the 2020 election, attacking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for donating funds to help struggling local election offices at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We must also continue efforts to prohibit private funding of elections from California leftists like Mark Zuckerberg,” she said in her announcement video. 

Louisiana did not receive any of the Zuckerberg funding in 2020 after Jeff Landry, the attorney general, stepped in to prohibit it. But Louisiana could be on its way to ban any future private elections funding if an amendment question put on the Oct. 14 ballot passes. 

Schexnayder won his speakership because of Democratic support and while his relationship with some legislative Democrats soured in recent years, he’s seen as more of a moderate than Landry. But he, too, has taken the tack that Louisiana’s elections are safe while stoking concerns about how other states and the feds handle elections, saying in an August TV interview that he wanted to ensure “we don’t have any overreach from the federal government to come in and manipulate elections.”

He has promised to create a board to “investigate all and any allegations made towards election irregularities”—a move that would mirror the creation of new investigative bodies in other red states, spurred by unfounded concerns of widespread fraud. 

Francis, a wealthy oilman and former state party chairman, has expressed significantly more skepticism of voting fraud theories than the other candidates.

“I voted for Trump. I’m very conservative,” he told Bolts. “I don’t agree that the election was stolen from him, because there’s no proof of that. I’ve been watching the news and all of the conspiracy theorists. Give me the proof that it was stolen.”

He still plans to give these theories air time, saying that as secretary of state he would organize a “technical conference” to test “all these accusations about the wrongdoing.” But he said he hopes that the conference might help convince them that “we have good solid elections.”

One reason that Louisians who are spreading lies about the 2020 election are so fired up is because Louisiana’s machines are leased from Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump and his allies have falsely claimed were involved in rigging the elections. 

For Trosclair and his allies, the solution is switching to an all-paper system with hand-marked and hand-counted ballots. That idea has been promoted by Trump allies like Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, but elections experts say it would be much more prone to error.

The leading candidates have distanced themselves from proposals for hand-counting: They say they want to replace the old machines with new ones that will provide a paper backup in case anything goes wrong with the count and to audit the system.

But they’ve also acknowledged that voting machines may be unpopular with the GOP base.

“Don’t boo me, but we do have Dominion machines,” Schexnayder joked at a recent event, before explaining that they were secure. He promised that the updated machines would follow a similar model, while also creating an auditable paper trail.

Landry and Francis have similarly said they’d acquire new machines with an auditable paper trail, as has Collins-Greenup.

At a recent candidate forum, Trosclair declared “If you live in Louisiana and you think our elections are just fine there are seven other candidates that are going to change very little or nothing about the process.”

He may be right—but his opponents’ rhetoric during the campaign shows how powerful his movement remains in Louisiana politics.

The post Election Conspiracies Loom Over Louisiana’s Secretary of State Race appeared first on Bolts.

Three years later, in June of 2023, Whipple clinched a goal that many election deniers have pursued: He took over the local office that runs elections. When the longtime Democratic auditor of Iowa’s Warren County retired before finishing her term, Whipple, a businessman, applied for the job and the all-GOP board of supervisors appointed him. In this role, Whipple was set to oversee voter registration, handle ballots, and process results during next year’s presidential race. 

Intent on stopping that from happening, local Democrats collected thousands of signatures in a brief two-week window and forced a special election for auditor. (In Iowa, local vacancies only trigger a special election if there’s such a petition drive.) Although the county located south of Des Moines has zoomed to the right over the last decade—from backing Barack Obama in 2008 to supporting Trump by 17 percentage points in 2020—Democrats still bet that Whipple was out-of-step with most voters there. 

“We’re living in this constant fear that we’re losing our democracy, and here was an actionable thing that you could respond to,” Jim Culbert, head of the local Democratic Party, told Bolts.

This organizing paid off, and voters on Tuesday resoundingly ousted Whipple. 

Democrat Kimberly Sheets, who already worked for the office as a deputy auditor, defeated him 67 to 33 percent. The special election’s margin marks a big turnaround from the county’s recent red lean. “The people of Warren County stood up for our democracy and said with one voice: we trust competence over conspiracies,” Sheets said in a statement after her win. 

Kedron Bardwell, a professor who teaches about conspiracy theories at Simpson College, in Warren County, found and helped expose Whipple’s social media posts after he was appointed in June. “I thought by posting those I was doing my part to inform voters and hopefully motivating some of them to do something about it,” he told Bolts. “I think the pushback was stronger than even I had thought.”

“I’m excited to see that Warren County voters were not willing to abide by these types of views that cast doubt on elections, that spread unfounded conspiracies about them, particularly when the responsibility of that role is so directly related to election security,” he added. “I’m hopeful that this is indicative of a trend that people will continue to push back against folks that try to lie about the last election.”

Whipple’s defeat is the latest in a string of losses for election deniers seeking to have a hand in election administration. They fell short in many secretary of state races in swing states in 2022, and voters in May recalled a local clerk in Michigan in June. But election deniers have also scored some important wins, including four secretary of state offices in red states last year. This spring, Republicans in Pennsylvania doubled down on election deniers running for re-election as county commissionners; a fake Trump elector is now coasting to a new term in the county that includes Pittsburgh. 

Whipple’s ouster in Iowa concludes a month that began with a somewhat similar election in Snohomish County, one of Washington state’s most populous counties. Robert Sutherland, a former Republican lawmaker, was running to take over local election administration. “Prepare for war,” he’d urged his followers on Facebook in late 2020, and even encouraged Trump to use military force to hold onto the presidency. He then used his position in the legislature to sponsor restrictive bills, network with election deniers nationwide, and demand an audit of state results. 

Unlike Iowa’s Warren County, Washington’s Snohomish County is reliably Democratic, and the odds of Sutherland winning the auditor’s election were low. Still, local observers told Bolts that they thought the conservative vote may be enough to carry Sutherland to the November general election, enabling him to spread his conspiracist message for three more months. 

But Sutherland was eliminated by coming in third in the Aug. 1 nonpartisan primary. 

One day after this Snohomish County primary, Trump was indicted by federal prosecutors for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Two weeks later, he was indicted as part of a separate investigation in Georgia for trying to overturn that state’s results. 

Warren County’s special election on Tuesday was the first test for Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies since these new criminal charges. 

Republicans still closed ranks around Whipple. The head of the local GOP said of Whipple that “he’s just got questions about the 2020 election.” U.S. Representative Marianette Miller-Meeks, who represents the county in Congress, went door-to-door to convince voters to support him.

Whipple himself responded to the local furor by deleting past social media posts. He walked back some of his false claims and called the attention to his 2020 statements a “fear tactic.” But the BBC also reported this month that he was continuing to fan rumors of suspicious activity by local poll workers. “It makes me think there’s smoke here,” he said. “So let me go investigate the fire.” (Bolts has extensively reported about the threats faced by local poll workers due to lies about their behavior.)

But the GOP did not succeed at activating the county’s recently reliable partisanship in favor of their candidates, and Democrats registered a rare win in this area. 

According to Bleeding Heartland, a website that covers Iowa politics, the turnout rate was three times higher than the previous record for a special election in Warren County. Preliminary evidence suggests that Democrats were especially energized to vote in the auditor race.

Culbert says the publicity around Whipple’s conspiracist statements mobilized his party’s base and also worried many independents. 

“There’s been a perception that Democrats can’t win in this county, period, and that led to an arrogance and laziness on the board of supervisors’ part to think that everything they did was fine because there could be no challenge to them,” he added, vowing that his party would work to build on Tuesday’s results next year when the board of supervisors will be on the ballot.

A much bigger test for the Big Lie is already looming, also in Iowa: In five months, Republicans in the state will launch the GOP’s presidential nomination fight, and Trump (who has never even conceded his loss in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, saying without evidence that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz “stole it”) is widely leading in the polls. A win in the caucuses would reinforce his status as the favorite to secure the Republican nomination to take on Biden in 2024. 

In Warren County at least, Whipple won’t be the one overseeing that potential rematch.

The post An Iowa County Just Stopped An Election Denier from Overseeing 2024 Election appeared first on Bolts.