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.

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.

A Colorado county clerk who espouses Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election was indicted in March for tampering with voting equipment. Tina Peters is alleged to have given an unauthorized person access to voting-machine data and leaked passwords in an effort to promote Trump’s bogus claims that the presidential election was stolen from him. But Peters was far from deterred: She is now challenging the Democratic secretary of state and running to become Colorado’s chief elections official.

Peters, who faces her first test in Tuesday’s Republican primary, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to election deniers running in Colorado this year. Further down the ballot, Republicans who echo the same conspiracy theories are now seeking positions as county clerks across the state, a Bolts survey of local elections shows. 

If they are successful, these candidates would gain power over critical offices that run elections in Colorado. They are part of a movement of election deniers attempting to seize election offices nationwide. Some have already secured the Republican nomination in high-profile statewide elections, from Pennsylvania governor to Nevada secretary of state. 

The thousands of local officials who run elections at the local and county levels have become a crucial though less visible battleground given their authority over registration, counting, canvassing, and other processes. And no state is more emblematic of this battle than Colorado, given Peters’s willingness to use her platform as clerk to combat the 2020 results and her attempt to now seek higher office. 

Whether similar efforts to interfere with election procedures occur after the 2022 midterms could come down to what voters decide this year in some of Colorado’s most populous counties. At least one Republican who questions the result of the 2020 elections is already certain to be in the general election for clerk in suburban Adams County. Other clerk candidates who are aligned with the Big Lie, the set of debunked claims that the 2020 election was marred with widespread fraud, face contested primaries on Tuesday in El Paso County and in Peters’s Mesa County.

Cameron Hill, associate director of Common Cause Colorado, a non-partisan democracy watchdog group, finds the situation in Colorado alarming.

“County clerks have a huge role to play in ensuring free and fair elections,” Hill told Bolts. “Instilling confidence in our elections for their constituents is as important of a job as overseeing the elections processes. It is concerning to see folks that are embracing the ‘Big Lie’ running for offices that are going to oversee elections.”

Some Republican election officials in Colorado are willing to publicly reject the premises of the Big Lie. In December 2020, three county clerks and a member of Congress, all Republicans, held a public meeting broadcast on conservative social media site CaucusRoom to explain Colorado’s election system and affirm the state’s 2020 election results. Weld County’s Carly Koppes, one of the three clerks, told Bolts she continues to defend the integrity of Colorado’s election system, even though she has gotten a lot of conservative backlash.

“The conversations have definitely evolved,” Koppes said. “Before November 2020, it was mostly just about voter education and reassuring people. But we saw a pretty drastic shift after the election; conversations have gotten a lot more aggressive. I have my small group of people who I know I’m just never going to convince.”

Koppes is running for re-election unopposed this year. But in other counties, Big Lie proponents decided to run for local office.

Bolts reached out to all Republicans running for county clerk in the 19 Colorado counties with at least 30,000 inhabitants, accounting for 90 percent of the state’s population. Most did not respond. But Bolts identified at least three candidates who are running for election administrator while casting doubts on the results of 2020.

Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in El Paso county. Home to Colorado Springs and more than 700,000 residents, this is a conservative county that twice voted for Trump. Incumbent Chuck Broerman is one of the Republican clerks who participated in the 2020 public forum to defend the legitimacy of the election, but he is retiring this year. 

One of the Republicans seeking to replace him, Peter Lupia, is running on a platform of suspicion of the entire voting system in line with the major points of the Big Lie conspiracy.

“Our election processes, procedures, and systems are in a state of dysfunction and disrepair,” Lupia claims on his campaign website. He takes particular issue with the voting machines owned and operated by Dominion, which many 2020 election conspiracies have latched onto as a major source of fraud, by supposedly being vulnerable to outside hacking via the internet, malfunctioning to delete votes, or misattributing them. A federal review of Dominion voting machines after the election debunked those claims and found no evidence that any of the company’s systems deleted votes or otherwise compromised election results. Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against Fox News and several members of Trump’s campaign for spreading false conspiracies about the voting machines. 

During a speech at a county assembly meeting on March 19, Lupia called for ending El Paso’s contract with Dominion in favor of hand-counting ballots, to resounding applause from the audience. “As the 2020 elections proved,” Lupia said, “having machines involved did nothing but slow down the process and destroy accuracy.”

Lupia proposes other drastic changes to the county’s voting system, including removing ballot drop boxes, eliminating mail-in voting, and requiring voters to appear in person with photo ID at the polls. The retiring incumbent, Broerman, has promoted the use of drop boxes, even as they have become a flashpoint on the right, and his office is encouraging voters to use them.

Lupia’s primary opponent Steve Schleiker told Bolts he is concerned by these proposals. Schleiker, who has worked in the county assessor’s office for more than 20 years, says he understands the cynicism he hears from some voters about whether their vote matters, but believes this comes from not understanding an election system that does work. Schleiker accepts the results of the 2020 election as legitimate, and is running on a platform of increasing transparency and voter education to restore voter faith.

The winner of the Republican primary in El Paso will face Democrat Lisa Wilkes in November.

Beyond the efficacy of Lupia’s proposals, Schleiker also points out that many are simply illegal. 

“It’s disingenuous to tell people you can do this stuff when you actually can’t because there are statutes in place that say you cannot run your own election the way you want,” Schleiker said. “I do understand the concern that folks are sharing in regards to election security and election integrity, but for me, we need to follow the rule of law.” 

Lupia’s calls to prevent people from voting by mail and to physically remove ballot drop boxes would violate established Colorado state law. Others were made impossible by a new law that further hems in the powers of county clerks. The Internal Election Security Measures Act, which was just adopted in May in response to the security breach in Mesa County, requires employees of the clerk’s office to complete special certification. Among other data security measures, the new law requires counties with 1,000 registered voters or more to use electronic vote tabulating machines, like the ones produced by Dominion. 

The new law also states that if a county canvass board refuses to certify election results by a certain deadline, the secretary of state’s office can step in to review the votes and certify the election. (County clerks sit on their local canvass board.)

Asked about the legality of his proposals, a representative from Lupia’s campaign responded with an emailed statement saying he “would pursue and support repeal of legislation” that requires every Colorado voter to be sent a mail in ballot, and said that Lupia “will only abide by rightful laws and statutes that do not violate the US Constitution or Colorado Constitution, and will operate within federal and state elections laws that do not violate the Constitutions or conflict with each other.”

Still, the investigations into Trump’s pressure on local election officials showcase the profound threats to future elections running smoothly. Even when they are ultimately thwarted, local officials who sow confusion can introduce delays and hiccups into the process and erode confidence in elections.

Earlier this year, county commissioners in Rio Blanco, a small county of about 6,500, voted to defund maintenance and licensing fees for Dominion voting machines, which would force election officials to hand-count ballots instead. The policy hasn’t yet been implemented, but by not operating electronic machines, the county could run afoul of Colorado’s election laws. Rio Blanco County Clerk Boots Campbell did not agree with the decision, telling the Montrose Press that she still planned on using the Dominion machines for the upcoming elections.

Even if the acts Peters is alleged to have committed were illegal, they showcase the unique and direct access that county clerks have to ballots, voting equipment, and election technology.

The Republican primary to replace Peters in Mesa County on Tuesday could bring into power a new clerk who is aligned with her views—but it could also shift the office into the hands of a Republican who has distanced herself from them.

Julie Fisher, a candidate who was hired by Peters to work in the motor vehicles department, which is also run by clerks, has echoed some of Peters’ suspicions about the 2020 election. She told Colorado Newsline earlier this month that she “[doesn’t] have enough facts to make a decision (about the election).” She added, “The fact that our government has come out and said it’s the cleanest election ever, I say ‘liar, liar.’” 

Bobbie Gross, Fisher’s primary opponent, told Bolts she saw no evidence “that would overturn the 2020 election results.” She says there are improvements to be made, like cleaning up voter rolls, but believes that security measures already in place are sufficient. Fisher did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment. 

The primary winner will face Democrat Jeffrey Waldon in a staunchly red county.

A third Republican who doubts the 2020 election results is running unopposed in the primary in Adams County, a suburban area north of Denver: Karen Hoopes, who currently works for the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment, is already sure to face Democratic incumbent Josh Zygielbaum in November. Asked whether she agrees with Trump that he won in 2020, Hoopes told Bolts that it was a “perplexing question” that had “never been fully adjudicated in the courts.” 

Hoopes insisted that elections are not “airtight” and claimed there have been “many convictions” for voter fraud in the state. According to data compiled by The Heritage Foundation, Colorado saw one conviction for voter fraud in 2021 and none in 2020. 

Republican candidates who are seeking to become clerks in Arapahoe, Jefferson, Douglas, Larimer, Montrose, Delta, Broomfield, and Pueblo counties did not respond to requests for comment. 

Regardless of change with local policies regarding election procedures, this heated rhetoric around election integrity could have a less-measurable, but equally important impact on whether people decide to go to the polls at all. 

“We make it convenient and secure to vote in Colorado,” says Cameron Hill of Common Cause. “But the disinformation and the continuous parroting of debunked, disproven conspiracy theories that are attempting to erode folks’ confidence in our election system—that’s what concerns me.”

The post Election Deniers Are Running to Take Over Colorado Election Offices appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Adona chose to run to be her county’s chief election official this year, after her boss decided to retire. What followed was an ugly campaign that drew attention from the Los Angeles Times after a mailer called Adona, who is Asian American, a “carpetbagger.” Adona has been furiously targeted by the local right since anti-mask protesters refused to wear a mask in the elections office in January, and a website sprang up to attack her.

One of Adona’s two opponents was the founder of a local group of election auditors; he claimed that the 2020 election was invalid and demanded an end to mail voting. The other, endorsed by local Republicans, called for new measures to address a supposed lack of election security, such as involving sheriff’s deputies in transporting mail ballots.

When the dust cleared last week, Adona won by an overwhelming margin. As of publication, she has secured nearly 70 percent of the vote against her two rivals, who received just above 30 percent combined.

Nevada County sticks out in California’s staunchly conservative northeast as a lightly blue area that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and opposed Gavin Newsom’s recall last year. Still, Adona won by a considerably larger margin than the 14 percentage points by which Biden carried the county over Trump in 2020, or the 8 percentage points by which the recall election lost. 

Bolts talked to Adona about her reaction to her win and the political climate around voting procedures, and about what she would tell other election officials who face harassment. A self-proclaimed “elections junkie,” Adona recently received an award from the Election Verification Network, a national nonprofit, and contributed to a journal on election administration. She worked at the Democracy Fund, a foundation that works on buttressing democratic procedures, before joining Nevada County’s elections office.

Adona also addressed how election administrators can better help people register and vote; Nevada County has one of California’s highest turnout rates, though thousands remain unregistered, and the community’s spread-out nature carries challenges of its own. “Sending everyone a ballot is a great way to reach people,” Adona said, praising California’s recent reforms.

—

After a difficult campaign, what is your reaction to your victory?

Obviously, I’m happy with the result. I think that in Nevada County, we have a large diversity of opinions out here, but I think for the most part, people want to see government employees with experience, they want their elected officials to act professionally, and they believe in hard work and fair play. And I think that’s what I represent. 

Your opponents lobbed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which is something we’re seeing elsewhere in the country. How did that issue play out during your campaign?

What I have said, time and again, is that we run free and fair elections. I operate on facts, and the facts are that we had a smooth election and 2020, we had a smooth election during the gubernatorial recall, and again here for the 2022 primary. There are some people who try to stress test the system, and we catch them but voter fraud is so rare that it’s not going to overturn the outcome of any one election. I am an administrator, and out of all of my years working, I have not seen anything on a scale so large that it would cause me to worry about the election result. So I do invite members of the public, especially those who are skeptical, to come into our office to observe, ask us questions, and really learn how the process works.

One of your opponents demanded an audit of election results, and also attacked the reliability of mail voting. What is your response?

I think that, unfortunately, there are some people who’ve been fed a diet of myths and misinformation about the way elections work. I can say definitively that we audit our elections, and we do so under the law. From what I’ve understood, the type of audit that some of these folks are requesting is the same kind that occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, and under California law, that is not a legal type of audit. We need to follow all of the procedures that are set forth by law, and one of those things is to only have authorized persons accessing voting equipment, any unauthorized access would decertify our equipment and probably result in penalties for election officials. I am not interested in creating liability for us. We follow the rules, we follow the procedures, we do accuracy testing ahead of every election, we do a post-election audit, we use only ballot paper that is certified by the state for use in California. We do it right. 

What was your reaction to the personal attacks that you also faced during the campaign?

It was hurtful, obviously, but it didn’t surprise me. It didn’t surprise me, one because there was an incident involving mask-wearing that occurred at my office that resulted in a restraining order against one of our citizens. And so I sort of expected that there would be some pushback on my candidacy. 

I think the other part of it is that there does seem to be a trend toward trying to intimidate or harass people who have demonstrated experience, and of the candidates who ran for my office, I was the only one with demonstrable experience. 

There have been many reports of harassment and intimidation against  election officials around the country. Have you had conversations about this with officials elsewhere? 

Oh, I’ve talked about it with my peers quite a bit. There was a wave of retirements after the 2020 election because I think it was really hard. In some cases, there were people who were going to retire anyway, and I think after many years of public service, one would think that you deserved to have a nice retirement. But there were others who maybe retired a little bit sooner than they wanted to because the environment just got too tough. And I respect that there are some people who choose not to speak publicly about that, but I’m pretty confident that fatigue from all of the threats, harassment and intimidation plays a huge factor for some people. 

Having just won this election with a towering majority, what would you tell other officials who may be sensing intimidation? 

What I would say to my peers is, one, you have an entire community who is on your side. So I think it’s comforting in a way to know that there are peers who understand what you’re going through. And what I’d also say is, the truth will be on our side; and I feel very fortunate that the truth was on my side because I was the one with experience, and I seem to have prevailed.

Nevada County has among the highest rates of voter turnout in California, far above the state’s average. What lessons do you draw from this?

If I had the magic formula for high turnout, then I would definitely package that up and sell it for a price. But I think that, for Nevada County, yeah, age is definitely one factor. I also think that Nevada County is highly educated and affluent. Statistically, the older you are, and if you own property, the more likely you are to vote. 

There’s also a strong culture of voting by mail here. Nevada County opted into the Voters Choice Act in 2018, an opt-in way of administering elections where you send everyone a ballot, establish vote centers and dropboxes, and permit voting for a long period. I think that sending everyone a ballot is a great way to reach people. 

So I would say to other counties, one great way to get people voting is to send them a ballot. And in California, we now have a requirement that all counties need to mail active registered voters a ballot, regardless of whether they’re part of the Voters Choice Act or not. [Editor’s note: California permanently adopted universal mail-in voting, meaning that every registered voter in the state will now be sent a ballot, last fall.]

Inversely, what are challenges for ballot access in a less dense, more spread out area like Nevada County?

I think that we have challenges that aren’t entirely dissimilar to more populated areas. We have a community of young people who, I think, aren’t used to voting, maybe don’t know so much about elections. So I think there’s an ongoing challenge to get at everyone. We do have a community college in Nevada County, and think that it’d be great to engage with young people even more. 

We also have a growing community of Spanish-speaking voters who could probably get more information from our office in Spanish, and perhaps, more engagement from our office for the Spanish-speaking community. 

We also have a very large unincorporated area; and everyone’s sort of spread out, so there’s a big chunk of our voters who may not have access to things like one of our drop boxes, they may have to rely on the US Postal Service to return their ballots. The good thing is that we have way more drop boxes than what is statutorily required of us. 

As of early 2020, about 14 percent of eligible voters were not registered to vote at all in Nevada County. How will you continue making sure that more people are registered? California adopted an automatic voter registration process but there are calls to improve it; are there ways to strengthen it?

California has automatic voter registration via DMV transaction, and there is an opportunity for the voter to opt out if they do not wish to be registered. You know, I think that the automatic registration program is sometimes confusing to voters: They’re not quite sure still how it works. So I think one of the things that we tried to do in our office is to let people know that voter registration is part of every DMV transaction, regardless of whether the voter wants that to be the case or not. I think the easiest thing, that I have no control over, is making sure that the interaction between the voter and the DMV results in clear directions for the voter on how registration plays a role in that transaction.

People retain the right to vote when detained in the local jail, but we often see major issues of access in this space. How do you ensure those eligible voters can cast ballots? 

We work with the jail facility, and we make sure to provide voter registration cards and information about elections. So if you are registered, and if your registration is updated, you receive your ballot while you are in custody at the jail. The inmate has to work with the facility in order to get that ballot, and then figure out a way to return it, but like I said we send everyone a ballot by mail. 

I think that, obviously, voter education is made tougher if you are incarcerated, so we do try to send materials and informational guides to people who are currently housed at the jail, and I think it’s up to them whether or not they want to participate. But you know, I do think that there’s probably a misconception that because you are incarcerated that you just don’t have the right to vote; there’s also the issue of someone who doesn’t realize that even though they’re on parole, they have a right to vote. There’s a lot I would like to be able to communicate to folks. . 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “The Truth Was On My Side”: Election Official Beats Back Fraud Conspiracies appeared first on Bolts.

Kurt Lockhart says the actions taken by Houston’s elections officials prompted him to run for the same job at home in Austin this year. Lockhart, one of two candidates in next month’s Democratic primary for Travis County Clerk, which oversees elections in the state’s left-leaning capital city, argues the office should have done more in 2020 to help voters. 

“I was really inspired to run because of what happened in Harris County and the innovative things they did, like 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting, that frankly we should have done here in Travis County,” Lockhart told Bolts. “I think we missed out on that opportunity to enfranchise more folks.” 

Local elections offices have become a hotly-disputed battleground in the longstanding fight over voting rights in Texas. After fighting to uphold restrictions on mail ballots and suing to block expanded voting options ahead of the 2020 election, last year Republicans passed Senate Bill 1, a sweeping new set of voting restrictions. Among other provisions, SB 1 bans local elections officials from implementing drive-thru or around-the-clock voting. It also threatens local officials and elections administrators with a felony if they encourage eligible voters to cast mail ballots, with a mandatory minimum punishment of six months imprisonment.

Republicans followed up their success with a special legislative session where they churned out new gerrymandered maps that safeguard their legislative majorities for years to come by continuing to dilute the political power of the state’s fast-growing Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. 

Advocates for voting rights say local elections officials in Texas still have a critical role to play in the face of new barriers to voting. 

“Because of gerrymandering, it’s going to be challenging to get to legislative majorities for visions we have on the progressive side about how we can run elections better—things like automatic voter registration, online voter registration, allowing student IDs for voter ID and mandatory campus polling locations,” said Alex Birnel, advocacy director with the progressive group MOVE Texas, which has pushed to boost voter participation in a state with historically low turnout. 

“The other option is to go local and explore where there is still room in the election code,” he added. 

Birnel points to the success of innovations spearheaded in 2020 by Harris County election officials. “These sorts of small policy tweaks are super consequential in diversifying the electorate,” Birnel told Bolts. He points to stories of “welders being able to vote without cutting into their work schedule, moms being able to vote without having to worry about wrangling their kids out of the back seat of the van.” Even though SB 1 narrowed options for election administrators, Birnel hopes that sympathetic local officials will keep innovating and working with voter outreach groups to help boost turnout.

Dyana Limon-Mercado, the other Democrat running for Travis County Clerk, says local elections officials in Texas must push back against state barriers while expanding access to the ballot. “Our local elected officials are having to fight against state officials to guarantee people’s constitutional right to vote in an easy and accessible way,” she told Bolts. “The fight for voting rights is as critical as ever at this moment.” 

Lockhart echoes her assessment. “Senate Bill 1 may ban great ideas like 24-hour voting, but there’s no law banning an elections information app to send folks updates about upcoming elections,” he said. “There’s no law banning us from adding additional languages to our election materials, there’s nothing banning us from increasing our social media presence for community outreach,” he said. “There’s still so much that can be done.” 

Both Limon-Mercado and Lockhart have vowed to expand voting options, including by extending polling to 10 p.m., the new legal limit set by SB 1. Whoever wins could also face pressure to address barriers to voting imposed by mass incarceration. As pretrial detention has ballooned, people who are eligible to vote but stuck in jail during an election period are often unable to cast a ballot. After facing years of organizing, Harris County officials were the first in the state to put a polling place in the local jail last year.

Lockhart commits to pushing for a similar polling place at Travis County jail if elected. “As County Clerk, my job will be to expand access to ensure that every eligible voter can exercise their right to vote simply, safely, and securely,” he told Bolts. “That means making sure the Travis County Jail has a polling location available for eligible voters in every election.” Asked about a voting location at the jail, Limon-Mercado replied, “I am definitely open to talking to our county sheriff to find a way for that to happen, I am definitely in support of it.” 

The winner of the March 1 primary between Limon-Mercado and Lockhart will be heavily favored in the general election, and will probably be responsible for administering the 2024 elections in Texas’ most Democratic county.

Like much of the rest of the country, elections in Texas are run by a dizzying patchwork of offices that take different forms across counties. In some counties, such as Travis, voters directly elect clerks who administer elections in addition to other responsibilities, such as overseeing misdemeanor court records, while an elected tax collector-assessor handles voter registration. Elsewhere in the state, county commissioners have created independent election administrators who are appointed by a board of local officials, rather than elected themselves. Last year, Harris County abandoned the clerk model in favor of setting up an appointed election administrator, who has since joined civil rights groups and the U.S. Justice Department in suing to stop parts of SB 1, including the provision that criminalizes officials who promote mail voting.

Harris County commissioners pointed to the racist roots of the old system to justify the change. Tax collectors were given control of voter registration during a time when poll taxes were used to suppress Black voters. 

Birnel says Texas counties should also shift toward unified and appointed election administrators, calling the old model “a residue of Jim Crow.” Elected clerks who directly oversee elections may be more vulnerable to the kind of polarizing political swings that have turned some election offices into bright red targets for conservative activists pushing Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. 

Travis County splits election administration between its county clerk and its tax assessor-collector, who oversees voter registration. The sitting tax assessor-collector, Bruce Elfant, is a Democrat last elected in 2020 who is appreciated by voting rights advocates for helping ease voter registration in Travis County, where nearly all eligible voters registered ahead of the 2020 election.

Lockhart says that, if elected, he’d lobby for Travis County officials to follow the same path as Harris County and create a unified and appointed office; Limon-Mercado hasn’t committed either way. 

Limon-Mercado frames the clerk’s office as part of a larger fight for political change in Texas. She recalls feeling so distraught by her first government job fresh out of college, a court clerk inside a detention center in downtown Austin, that she quit and turned to the state legislature, where she interned with a lawmaker who helped pass criminal justice reforms. She eventually went on to other jobs at the intersection of politics and policy—including working for a disability rights group and most recently as executive director for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. 

She says election administration and voting rights are a cornerstone for all those issues she cares about. “We can’t change the policies unless we have the elected officials, and we can’t have the elected officials if we don’t have fair access to the ballot,” she told Bolts. 

The post Voting Rights Advocates Search for Openings to “Go Local” in Texas appeared first on Bolts.

Trump’s remarks came in January, just as the country entered a midterm year that may be decisive for its democracy. Hundreds of local offices that are responsible for running elections will be on the ballot all over the country. Longtime Trump allies, chief among them Steve Bannon, have spread his Big Lie that voter fraud swung the 2020 election against him, and they are striving to take over these offices. In Pennsylvania, they recruited candidates in 2021 to run for “election judge,” a hyper-local and typically uncontested position, with some success.

Pennsylvania may be one of the country’s core swing states, but chances are you haven’t heard of its “election judges.” Even if you closely follow American politics, you likely do not know how their powers compare to those of the state’s county boards of elections, nor when and how any of those officials are selected. For people who hope to protect the election system from the Big Lie, this labyrinth of relevant offices can be a nightmare to navigate.

But what other choice do they have? The bulk of election administration in the United States takes place at the local level, across thousands of counties and municipalities, as Trump and Bannon’s forces well know. Sleepy offices like county clerk or county auditor determine much of what goes into running elections—determining the number and location of polling places, appointing precinct officials, designing ballots, scheduling early voting options, and overseeing voter registration. 

These local officials can ease access to the ballot, and Houston’s clerk drew widespread attention for such reforms in 2020. But they can also mar the election process via policies that close down polling locations, purge eligible residents from the rolls, or fuel long lines. More recently, local officials who subscribe to Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud are trying to flex their control over the election system. The county auditor and recorder in Colorado’s Mesa County, for instance, is facing an investigation after she allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to access sensitive election equipment in an attempt to prove that Dominion Voting Systems manipulated the 2020 election results.

These local administrators also have clout in state or federal policymaking. They are often members of statewide associations that lobby legislatures. The Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, for example, pushed Florida to adopt an online voter registration portal. But in West Virginia, home of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, the County Clerks Association opposed the For the People Act.

Outside of those broad schematics, though, there is little that can be said with any consistency. Every state structures its system differently. Election administration can also vary wildly from county to county within a state, including in places that are at the center of the national discourse on voting like Georgia and Texas. To make matters more confusing, election administration is frequently split between different institutions even within a county. It pulls in officials like sheriffs and tax-assessors, whose formal titles do not reveal their responsibility for running elections.

This information is difficult to come by, to say the least. Many states provide little if any centralized information about their systems or relevant offices, and it’s even harder to track down when administrators are selected or elected. Even if this was all readily available, the sheer number of election administrators make them a challenge to follow.

This decentralized election administration has a major benefit: It helps prevent any sort of widespread hacking. With so many offices in so many municipalities, it would be functionally impossible to rig a large-scale election. But this dynamic also creates layers of inequity. Depending on where they live, voters within the same state may face different rules. Their local administrators might undertake voter registration campaigns with different levels of enthusiasm, or apply different standards to how liberally to toss out mail-in ballots.

It also creates more opportunities for malicious actors to take control of the electoral process with effects that ripple out beyond their jurisdiction. A well-financed group’s concerted efforts to win such offices can remain largely under-the-radar, as in Pennsylvania in 2021. Voting rights activists seeking to expand access to the polls may comparatively struggle to organize inside opaque election systems that usually draw little public attention.

Today Bolts is publishing an original database that compiles, state by state, the local institutions that are responsible for administering elections at the county and municipal level.

Who Runs Our Elections

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration#AK

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#AL

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#AR

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#AZ

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#CA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#CO

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#CT

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#DE

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#FL

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#GA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#IA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#HI

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#IL

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#ID

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#IN

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#KS

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#KY

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#LA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MD

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#ME

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MI

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/who-counts-our-elections#MO

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MN

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MS

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#MT

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NC

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#ND

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NE

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NH

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NJ

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NM

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NV

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#NY

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#OH

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#OK

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#OR

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#PA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#RI

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#SC

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#SD

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#TN

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#TX

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#UT

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#VA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#VT

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#WA

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/who-counts-our-elections#WV

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#WI

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#WY

https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/local-election-administration/#DC

Each state’s system is laid out in some detail—including the office, the method and timing of its selection or election, and its powers—within the limits of what is possible to convey in one database. In many states, the degree of internal inconsistency is such that a full accounting needs specialized databases specific to the state. And in almost every state, the process of tabulating, canvassing, and officially certifying the votes cast, is conducted in a separate process that may not always involve the same administrators but that has also come under conservative attack. Bolts will dig into these complexities in future work.

Take California, where election administration for most counties is in the hands of a clerk—who may or may not be elected, depending on the details of the county charter. In some places, however, a registrar of voters steps into the clerk’s shoes. In Wisconsin, county clerks and municipal clerks split responsibilities in overlapping jurisdictions—unless you live in Milwaukee. In Alabama, residents register to vote through a board of registrars appointed by the governor, auditor, and commissioner of agriculture, and they vote in precincts managed by officials selected by appointing boards that include the county sheriff, all while major parts of the voting process are also administered by county probate judges serving six-year terms.

In Texas, tax collector-assessors are responsible for voter registration by default, and county clerks are in charge of running elections. But counties can swap those roles, or else entirely strip these officials of their direct duties by instead creating county election administrators. And it doesn’t end there: In some instances the tax collector-assessor is also the sheriff, leaving voter registration in the hands of local law enforcement. While that particular arrangement is rare, sheriffs are powerful actors when it comes to elections nearly everywhere in the country: They effectively control whether hundreds of thousands of people detained in local jails will get to exercise their right to vote.

Many of these officials are elected directly by voters—to irregular, staggered terms that are sometimes not even constant within a state, let alone nationally. 

Florida’s supervisors of elections, for instance, will generally not be on the ballot until 2024, while in Nevada, a state that Trump lost only narrowly and that is now home to prominent Republicans pushing the Big Lie, county clerks are up this year. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, consistency goes out the window as clerks serve varying amounts of time in different municipalities.

In places where election administrators are not elected but rather appointed by other public officials, pressure has not quelled. It has turned some of those appointing institutions into local battlegrounds over the Big Lie because of the indirect control they exercise on the electoral process. 

State-level officials, who have significant responsibilities of their own in running elections, have walked into the breach as well. Republican legislatures have intervened to undermine local election administration. In Georgia, for example, the state legislature has authorized the Republican-dominated State Board of Elections to undertake a “performance review” of local election administrators—and to replace administrators they deem as ineffective. In Texas, Republican lawmakers have severely constrained the ability of local administrators to expand access to the ballot, as Bolts reports on today, a response to the innovative policies adopted by public officials in the state’s large urban counties during the 2020 presidential election. Colorado is witnessing the inverse dynamic between its state and local governments as the Democratic secretary of state is battling the Mesa County Clerk.

The new Bolts database attempts to add clarity to the powers, election, and selection process of these critical local offices. 

Bolts will publish additional state-specific databases in the future for those states where the distribution of roles and election calendar is especially convoluted. 

All of this complexity can sound overwhelming and difficult to sort through—and it is. Yet however tempting it is to look away, this bureaucratic tangle has real-world consequences. These offices, and the local elections that influence them, shape the hurdles people face in registering to vote and casting ballots. If Trump’s own warnings are to be heeded, they could in the future also determine whether the will of the people is heard and respected.

The post Trump’s Big Lie Forces Attention on the Labyrinth of Local Election Offices appeared first on Bolts.