It’s telling that, in an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake invoked untrue “facts” in defense of her efforts to undermine confidence in her state’s elections.
As she did the week prior, she told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that three-quarters of a million votes in Arizona’s largest county should have been thrown out because they “violated chain of custody requirements” — an argument that is both false and bizarre: because someone moving ballots from a drop box to a counting facility didn’t sign a form, thousands of votes should be tossed? When Karl pressed her on this, she insisted that it was a “fact” that this had happened, when it didn’t.
That tracing Lake’s efforts to overhaul voting in her newly blue state back upstream leads to misinformation about voting isn’t a surprise. The GOP’s long acceptance of false claims about voter fraud — an acceptance rooted in part on blocking expansions of voting access to Democratic-voting constituencies — tilled the soil for Donald Trump’s enthusiastic, multiyear effort to shred confidence in American elections. Republicans in particular, but not exclusively, now have little confidence in elections and, relatedly, in democracy itself, thanks in part to constant misinformation about election security.
But there’s an unrecognized aspect of the effort. The system tolerated claims of widespread fraud for years in part because the effects were limited in scope or abstract. America’s elections are a mishmash of local administrators and tools, varying state laws and differing political outcomes. It’s imperfect both in general and at the local level, but it is distributed in a way that people could retain confidence in their own elections even if they were skeptical of them broadly — or, say, in heavily Black cities like Philadelphia, far from where they lived.
In the Trump era, doubt rooted in false claims of fraud has infected those local systems. By design. A rickety process dependent on old bureaucracy and volunteers has come under attack from both the outside and the inside, both nationally and at the county level. As the midterm elections loom, we see increasing reports of an effort to overwhelm elections systems and break confidence in their reported results with an obvious desired outcome: Seizing power whatever those results say.
There have been multiple recent stories about one aspect of this often uncoordinated effort. Elections administrators in multiple states — Nevada, Georgia and Virginia among them — are simply resigning rather than suffer the abuse that now comes with the job. (Earlier this month, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening poll workers.) The common theme? Republican activists and, often, officials pressuring them as a function of false claims about rampant fraud.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Michella Huff, the elections administrator for Surry County, N.C. Huff told me that she had been threatened by the chairman of the Republican Party in the county as he sought access to voting machines, under the mistaken belief that he (and those he was working with, like Mike Lindell ally Douglas Frank) could prove the machines facilitated fraud. Trump won Surry County by a 3-to-1 margin in 2020, but Huff believed that the county’s politics made the attack more likely: It was, she said, a “soft target” for conspiracy theorists since the party had more leverage over the elections. See also: Otero County, N.M., where Trump-loyal officials sponsored a failed “audit” of the vote and even attempted to block election results this year out of nonsensical “fraud” concerns.
At the same time, there’s what might be described as a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack underway on local elections systems. In computing terms, a DDOS attack renders a website unusable by flooding it with requests for information. The electoral analogue is the concerted effort to systematize challenges to election operations and to increase the cost of casting ballots.
There are a number of groups that have recruited Trump-sympathetic volunteers to “watch” the polls and vote-counting. Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who eagerly joined Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has been training volunteers to staff polling places with an eye toward catching “fraud” — an effort supported by the Republican Party.
The practical effect of that was seen in South Carolina this summer, as the New York Times reported. Supporters of a pro-Trump candidate went to various polling places, raising unfounded complaints about the process or the available tools. Those claims were also posted online, which is how things work now: False or unsupportable assertions are posted on official-looking websites where they bolster a sense of wrongdoing, even if they don’t actually demonstrate any.
It is not new that candidates or political parties send people to polling places to observe what’s happening. But those individuals, like those tasked with observing vote-counting, are trained. They’re instructed on what is and isn’t normal and when it is and isn’t appropriate to raise a challenge with an official at a polling-place. Ginning up an ad hoc group of poll watchers is something very different — as is tasking people with going to the polls under the assumption that illegality is underway.
Politico obtained a recording of a training run by Mitchell earlier this year. In it, she suggested that one central aspect of the effort was to oppose the left’s efforts to make voting more widespread. Democrats were trying to register more people from groups and areas where voting rates have traditionally been low, Mitchell said, and “we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Overwhelming polling places and elections systems with complaints or baseless claims of impropriety has a practical effect: It is the fuel for post-election efforts to undermine the results. On Sunday, Rolling Stone reported that Trump and his allies have been strategizing about how to elevate questions about the results in close races this year, following his own failed playbook from 2020.
“[T]hey’ve gamed out scenarios for how to aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night,” the magazine’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report. “If there’s any hint of doubt about the winners, the teams plan to wage aggressive court campaigns and launch a media blitz.” And, of course, there will be plenty of “doubt” about the winners because there is an existing structure in place to generate that doubt. (Not that doubt can’t be invented after the fact, as we’ve seen in the past two years.)
Why might it work now when it didn’t in 2020? In part because 2020 helped test the weak spots in the system. And, in part, because the effort is more determined and more deliberate than simply Trump complaining about his loss.
“We are 100 times more prepared now,” former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon told the Times. “We’re going to adjudicate every battle. That’s the difference.”
Again, though, the formal effort convened by Trump or Bannon or Mitchell sits alongside a fervent grass-roots effort to uproot purported fraud. The Washington Post reported last week that voters using drop boxes in Arizona had been confronted by self-appointed poll watchers deceived by rhetoric like the debunked film “2000 Mules” to believe that rampant ballot-stuffing occurs. No, Georgia was compelled to remind people, you can’t simply challenge the right of someone else to vote.
The aftermath of the midterm election will no doubt see a flurry of nonsensical claims about “fraud” and illegality from a thousand directions, claims that can be elevated by any campaign within shouting distance of victory to pressure efforts at certifying the outcome.
This is deliberate. Sow doubt about elections. Overwhelm elections with observers both in polling places and elsewhere. Gin up claims of illegality and fraud everywhere. Apply those claims as needed to try to change the outcome of elections. The system — an ad hoc system operating for decades on good-faith participation — wasn’t built for this sort of attack.
In his interview with Lake, Karl also asked her if she would accept the results in her race, no matter what happened.
“I will accept the results of this election if we have a fair, honest, and transparent election,” she replied. “Absolutely, 100 percent.”
That’s how it works, of course. If she or any number of other Republicans lose, the election was therefore not fair and honest, as scads of “evidence” collected by observers can attest. The formality of “voting” over, the real fight for power begins.