Within the lead-up to the November midterm elections, groups which have allied themselves with former President Donald Trump and Republicans have encouraged people to stake out polling sites — with the specific goal of constructing a case to challenge election outcomes, introducing a latest facet to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Early voting locations in Arizona have already been the sites of some high-profile incidents of alleged or potential voter intimidation. In a single incident, two armed people in tactical gear and affiliated with the group Clean Elections USA were seen at a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. After two nonprofit groups filed suit last week against Clean Elections USA, alleging voter intimidation, a federal judge ruled that the group’s tactics didn’t amount to a “true threat” and that activists were allowed to collect on the ballot boxes.
Arizona has been the location of several alleged instances of voter intimidation, but similar incidents are happening elsewhere — including in swing states like Pennsylvania, as Mary McCord, executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff Thursday.
Axios reported earlier this week that members of extremist groups just like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are being encouraged to enroll as volunteers in local election offices, putting individuals who want to disrupt elections alongside the volunteer force that may be a critical a part of the election process. And groups like True the Vote and One More Mission — which have the financial and logistical support of some well-known Trump insiders — are mobilizing volunteers.
These activities are contributing to an environment across the upcoming election so volatile that the Department of Justice addressed it publicly at a news conference last week. Attorney General Merrick Garland there said that “the Justice Department has an obligation to ensure a free and fair vote by everyone who’s qualified to vote and won’t permit voters to be intimidated” across the midterm elections.
Whether 1000’s of individuals shall be spurred to extreme actions this 12 months based on a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen, the midterms are rigged, and Donald Trump is the rightful president of america is unclear, perhaps even doubtful. But even the potential of violence could have a deterrent effect on voters.
“It creates the conditions whereby, across the country, it could deter people from voting, and cause people to be nervous because they don’t know what could occur in their very own areas, so I feel the results are much wider than what’s happening in a specific county in Arizona,” Rick Hasen, a law professor on the University of California, Los Angeles and the director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project, told Vox.
“It harkens back to a time when some voters, equivalent to African-American voters within the South, faced threats and intimidation after they tried to go and solid a ballot.”
A few of the ‘Stop the Steal’ players are at work within the midterms
Elections are sometimes a difficult time in democracies, within the sense that they represent a contest for power and resources, Lilliana Mason, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, told Vox.
“The period around elections becomes rather more volatile after we’re all competing over what we expect of as our own status in society,” she said. “But there’s also the added complication of mainly the whole Republican Party pushing this narrative that no election may be legitimate if Democrats win, so it’s not only a standing competition, which already creates the potential for violence — it’s a stolen status competition.”
It’s value remembering that the riot on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was the violent culmination of the “Stop the Steal” campaign. That campaign was a concerted and coordinated effort on the a part of Trump loyalists including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Michael Flynn, and Cleta Mitchell to sow doubt across the legitimacy of the 2020 election, first by spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud with no basis in actual fact. Then after the elections themselves, Trump and his supporters filed lawsuits (which were dismissed) and demanded audits (which didn’t change the outcomes of the election).
A few of those self same actors are involved in the present poll watching efforts. As the Day by day Beast’s Will Sommer reported, a gaggle called One More Mission is attempting to recruit military veterans and law enforcement to function poll watchers. The group is funded by the America Project, which is headed by Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com chief Patrick Byrne, and Flynn’s brother Joseph. Since his transient time within the White House, Michael Flynn has turn into amongst essentially the most recognizable proponents of right-wing conspiracy theories, and Byrne wrote a complete book about his election fraud theories.
Eastman, for his part, is encouraging people to make use of observations from their activity at election sites to file legal challenges in elections that Democrats win, as Politico reported this week.
“Document what you’ve seen, raise the challenge. And [note] which of the judges on that election board decline to simply accept your challenge. Get all of it written down,” Eastman told a gaggle of volunteers organized through Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network to look at or work at polling sites or challenge elections after the midterms. “That then becomes the idea for an affidavit in a court challenge after the very fact.”
Eastman is under investigation by the Justice Department for his part in attempting to overturn the 2020 elections.
Volunteers do work as poll watchers at some polling places, they usually can observe the method and report any irregularities, Hasen told Vox. “Often they volunteer with a political party, they usually’re there to look at and be sure that each one the foundations are being followed and that is mostly a positive thing, because that helps to guarantee that everybody’s following the foundations and provides a number of more sets of eyes that may confirm within the event of that there are some claims of any sorts of irregularities,” he said.
That’s not what’s happening with efforts like Clean Elections USA, One Last Mission, and Truth the Vote, though. “What’s happening now looks rather more like vigilantism,” Hasen told Vox. “There’s no reason to be staking out drop boxes in tactical gear with weapons. That’s something that’s not less than prone to cause fear and intimidation amongst voters. That’s not something that normally happens.”
Protecting the election process is critical
Because the midterms catch up with, experts are vocally concerned about intimidation on the polls, predicated on a misunderstanding concerning the election process and what’s normal or acceptable when voting.
McCord told PBS that her organization has received reports of “people organising cameras to videotape people as they’re attempting to drop their ballots in ballot boxes,” in addition to “people questioning voters or suggesting that what they’re doing by voting is illegitimate, particularly in the event that they’re perhaps depositing of a ballot of an elderly member of the family or friend.” That sort of behavior can “intimidate people into pondering they’re doing something unsuitable, so that they won’t show up,” McCord said.
For the reason that 2020 contest, election employees have described a barrage of threats and intimidation, causing many to depart their jobs. Wandrea “Shaye” Moss testified before the January 6 committee earlier this 12 months about how she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, each of whom were election employees in Fulton County, Georgia, had their lives upended following Trump and Giuliani’s false claims that they were committing election fraud. Moss and her mother are Black, and Moss’s testimony included the racist threats and violent intimidation she and her family had experienced.
The Recent York Times also reported last 12 months on election officials leaving their jobs — some attributable to the unusual reasons like retirement or being voted out of office, but many because they were burnt out from managing the 2020 elections within the midst of a pandemic, and since they feared for his or her safety or jobs given the vitriol across the 2020 elections.
As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, many high level electoral officials in Pennsylvania have left their jobs attributable to stress and the political environment, and officials in 10 of 17 Nevada counties have retired, left their post, or selected not to hunt re-election after 2020, in response to a Reuters investigation.
That leaves a dearth of experienced election officials who’ve run these contests before, know what to anticipate, and might assess irregularities, Hasen told Vox.
“First, you’re losing individuals with the sort of experience, knowledge, expertise, respect locally, but in addition they’re sometimes being replaced with people who find themselves coming in with a partisan axe to grind, or who’ve embraced false claims that the last election was stolen,” he said. “That creates an entire latest set of problems when they fight to run an election the following time.”
While most individuals — voters, volunteers, and election employees — are operating in good faith and upholding the principle of free and fair elections, that approach isn’t necessarily a given.
“Democracy requires truth and reality, and particularly what we’ve been seeing from folks like Trump is an intentional muddling of truth and reality, an intentional creation of [an environment of] ‘I don’t know what’s happening, no person really knows what’s happening, and so subsequently, anything could possibly be true,’ encouraging people to ‘just hearken to what my leader tells me,’” Mason said. “That’s not democracy, that’s actually autocracy, that’s authoritarianism — listening to the leader over anything that is definitely real.”
That intentional confusion and doubt around what Mason said is “legitimate” — what’s normal, correct, and legal — so far as the electoral process is anxious has already damaged confidence within the system. That was the purpose.
However the midterm elections are a critical moment to forcefully and clearly take care of intimidation and disinformation, Hasen told Vox.
“If there are acts of intimidation that aren’t adequately handled, I feel that’s going to embolden people for 2024,” he said. “Now’s the possibility, when there’s not a presidential election on the ballot, to be sure we’re doing things right and fairly and nipping this sort of stuff within the bud, since it’s only going to worsen come 2024.”