Fears are rising that the vote count in November’s presidential election could be disrupted as a result of the proliferation of Donald Trump’s lies about stolen elections and rampant voter fraud in the key swing states where the race for the White House will be decided.
A new survey of eight vital swing states reveals that at least 239 election deniers who have signed up to Trump’s “election integrity” conspiracy theories – including the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him – are actively engaged in electoral battles this year. The deniers are standing for congressional or state seats, holding Republican leadership positions, and overseeing elections on state and county election boards.
The report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group focusing on special interests distorting US democracy, reveals the extent of denial in the eight critical states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It shows that corrosive efforts to damage public confidence in elections have proliferated there despite the drubbing the election denial movement received in the 2022 midterms.
Among the deniers identified by CMD are: 50 Republicans running for Congress; six vying for state executive offices; 81 leaders of local Republican organizations; and 102 current members of state and county election boards. They have all backed attempts to delegitimize elections even to the point, in some cases, of participating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.
“What was striking to us about our research is how much election denialism and the voter fraud lie have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states,” said CMD’s executive director Arn Pearson.
The danger inherent in the spread of election denial in the battleground states is amplified by the harrowingly close state of the presidential race. The latest New York Times – Siena College poll puts Trump and his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, essentially neck-and-neck in seven states (the poll does not include New Mexico).
With the margin of victory expected to be razor thin in at least some of these states, there are likely to be opportunities for bad actors to wreak havoc during the vote count. Meanwhile, Trump continues to pour fuel on the fire with his inflammatory remarks, repeating the lie that he won in 2020 during Tuesday’s presidential debate.
CMD’s most disturbing finding is that there are more than 100 election deniers currently sitting on election boards that can influence the way the vote is counted and certified. The boards span 61 counties across all eight swing states.
Deniers wield majority power on the election boards in 14 of those counties. Six are concentrated in just one state – Pennsylvania, the swing state which perhaps more than any other is seen by both campaigns as the path to the White House.
“With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous,” Pearson said.
The most likely way in which election boards could disrupt vote counts is to refuse to certify results in an attempt to delay or subvert a narrow Harris victory. Two Republican members of the Wayne county board of canvassers that covers Detroit, Michigan, briefly refused to certify results in 2020.
By 2022, the practice of refusing to certify had snowballed to election boards in five of the eight swing states. The fear is that similar attempts to destabilize the smooth processing of the vote count will be even more prevalent after election day on 5 November.
“The nightmare scenario is that they’ll hold up certification. They’ll force state officers to go to court to compel them to certify the results while they spread disinformation about widespread voter fraud and non-citizen voting,” Pearson said.
He added: “The big threat is that this will create a similar, or even more heightened atmosphere of the sort that led to the January 6 insurrection.”
In Georgia the peril is particularly acute, as it is the only swing state where deniers have a grip on the statewide election board. At a recent rally in Atlanta, Trump praised the three election deniers who hold the majority on Georgia’s state election board by name, lauding Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston and Janelle King as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.
Among the innovations that the trio have introduced are new rules that allow them to put vote certification on hold while they carry out “investigations” into unspecified irregularities. Marc Elias, a leading election lawyer who now advises the Harris campaign, called the rules “somewhere between insidious and insane”.
Elias told the New Yorker Radio Hour that this was the equivalent in a football game of giving “the scoreboard operator the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether a touchdown was scored”.
Deniers wielding power on local election boards have the potential to disrupt federal elections in November, including the presidential contest, by blocking certification of county results. In Cochise county, a Republican stronghold in the south of Arizona, two election supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, are due to stand trial next month charged with criminal offenses relating to their delaying the certification of the 2022 election outcomes; both have pleaded not guilty.
Rick Hasen, an authority on election law at UCLA law school, said that the new research highlighted how election denial had become an article of faith on the right. “To show you are a loyal Trumpist Republican, you have to claim the last election was stolen.”
Hasen added that though there was potential for chaos and delays in the vote count as a result of the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the electoral system was now better prepared. The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act has clarified the process of certifying electoral college votes in the presidential race, making it more difficult for trouble to be sowed either at the state level or in Congress.
“Trump is laying the groundwork to contest the election and deligitimize a Democratic victory, but it’s going to be harder for him to mess with the rules this time,” Hasen said.
Pennsylvania is suffering most from the scourge of election denial, numerically speaking, with 49 election deniers in influential positions. That includes 29 election administration officials.
The importance of the state, which offers a rich crop of 19 electoral college votes out of the 270 needed to win, is underlined by the fact that 10 of the past 12 presidents prevailed in Pennsylvania. Biden took it by 80,555 votes – a margin of 1.2% over Trump.
Ten deniers are running to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, including David McCormick, who has been echoing Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in his campaign for a US Senate seat, and the incumbent House member Scott Perry who was so deeply involved in the conspiracy to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020 that he sought a presidential pardon from Trump.
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