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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. How will state election maps change by November?

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

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

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

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

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

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

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

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

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

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

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

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

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

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

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

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

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

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

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

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

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

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

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Texas

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

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

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

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

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

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

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

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

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

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

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

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louisiana’s voting machines are from 2006—old enough that when they falter, Hanna says, it’s often impossible to locate replacement parts. That’s a common frustration: aging voting equipment poses a projected multi-billion-dollar concern in the United States, amid a general national crisis of underfunding for local election administration. 

“The state is scrambling to make sure they have enough machines for everyone, but we can’t get them anymore,” Hanna, a Republican, told Bolts. “We’re just hanging on.”

Hers is the kind of local election office that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he sought to help in 2020, when he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated some $350 million to a previously obscure nonprofit organization called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which helps maintain and improve local election procedures and ballot access around the country. The COVID-19 pandemic had just set in, and election administrators, who in many cases already had limited budgets and inadequate staffing, were facing dramatic new challenges: outfitting poll workers with personal protective equipment, establishing drive-through voting, and preparing for much more mail-in voting than usual, to name a few.

An NPR analysis done soon after the election found officials applied for and accepted some amount of CTCL money in more than 2,500 different local jurisdictions, covering every U.S. state except Louisiana, Delaware, and Wyoming. The money was used for a variety of purposes, including ballot processing equipment and improved pay for election workers.

Those early-pandemic days of emergency voting procedures ended long ago, but the CTCL donations set off a wave of political uproar around election funding that is still rippling through state governments, including in Louisiana—even though none of the money even reached election offices there. 

Now, after three years and several legislative attempts in Louisiana to kick private money out of elections offices, the state will become the first in the nation to vote on the matter directly. In the Oct. 14 election, Louisianans will see a proposed constitutional amendment, placed on the ballot by the GOP-controlled legislature, that would ban private or foreign money from being used for the purpose of conducting elections.

This proposed ban, Amendment 1, would if passed make Louisiana the 26th state to adopt such restrictions, all directly inspired by what conservatives have demonized as “Zuckerbucks” spent on elections during the onset of the pandemic. The billionaire’s donations have drawn particular ire from conservatives convinced that CTCL boosted Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, and the partisan outrage is clearly reflected in state policies: 23 of the 25 states that already adopted such restrictions voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or have Republican legislative trifectas, or both. 

Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state, Kyle Ardoin, initially urged local election offices to apply for CTCL grants. But soon after, Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now a candidate in Louisiana’s November gubernatorial election, sent parish clerks a letter warning that it would be illegal to accept the money and ordering them to stop seeking it. (Landry’s warning was incorrect; state law at the time said nothing about how local offices could raise money for elections.)

Clerks across Louisiana were suddenly blocked from large sums of money that could have helped with the myriad challenges they faced in running smooth elections on dated equipment during a pandemic. Hanna’s parish, for one, was set to receive $114,000 before Landry stepped in, according to the Louisiana Clerks of Court Association.

Louisiana might have already joined other states with a law banning the donations if not for its Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, who is term-limited and will exit office in January. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, he vetoed anti-“Zuckerbucks” bills passed by the legislature, condemning what he termed an “unnecessary political ploy.” Statehouse Republicans circumvented the governor this year by referring their proposal directly to the ballot; with supermajorities in each chamber, they sent the ballot measure to voters without ever needing Edwards’ sign-off.

Peter Robins-Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Louisiana Progress and an advocate for voting rights, has little doubt that Amendment 1 will pass, even as no polling on the issue has been publicly released to date. Robins-Brown said he finds it troubling, though, that state Republicans have been so bullish on this policy for several years running, without taking seriously the broader concerns that Zuckerburg’s money was supposed to help alleviate.

“If you’re going to do this,” he told Bolts, “you also need to make sure that election administration is fully funded, and that’s where I think there’s the element of potential bad faith here: you’re going after this one piece of the larger puzzle without addressing the underlying problem, which is underfunding of election administration.”

Louisiana’s election funding problems go beyond the outdated voting machines. Hanna said local elections officials like her struggle to recruit and pay election workers, and Debbie Hudnall, executive director of the Louisiana Clerks of Court Association, added that some clerks can’t staff up adequately during elections.

“Finding citizens who want to spend those hours working the polls—sometimes that’s been difficult,” Hudnall, herself an elected parish clerk from 1980-2007, told Bolts. “Back when I was a clerk of court, people felt it was a civic duty to go work the elections. It’s harder now.”

Neither that problem nor the issues of aging infrastructure and general underfunding of elections are unique to Louisiana or the primarily red states that have taken up bans on outside funding of elections. But “Zuckerbucks” critics have noted that the donated money disproportionately aided election administrators in states that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

While CTCL says it distributed grants to election administrators in 47 states, the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, found that the grant money benefitted Biden states that year almost twice as much as it did Trump states—$217 million to $114 million. In per-capita funding, the group found, Georgia—a critical battleground in the last presidential election—was by far the highest state beneficiary, and the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan all ranked among the top seven in per-capita funding from the group. All sided with Biden in 2020.

CTCL has said that it disbursed money based only on applications received, in a process that states opted into. The organization also defended itself against allegations of Democratic bias, stating in 2021, “There were no partisan questions in the grant applications. CTCL COVID-19 Response grant funding decisions were not made on a partisan basis, and as demonstrated by the jurisdictions across the political spectrum that received money, partisan considerations played no role in the availability or awarding of funding.”

Conservatives backing Louisiana’s Amendment 1 have not only rejected the nonprofit’s defense, but roped their outrage over “Zuckerbucks” into a broader, conspiracy-fueled Trumpist narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. In a letter to the editors of The Advocate, Louisiana Republican Party Chair Louis Gurvich said that the money “was used by Democrat political machines across the country for highly partisan get-out-the-vote efforts such as vote harvesting, ballot drop-off boxes, etc.”

The campaign to pass Amendment 1 counts among its supporters the Election Transparency Initiative, which is chaired by former Trump appointee Ken Cuccinelli and which opposes policies that have been shown to increase democratic participation, including same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration.

But even as they put the question in front of voters, the conservatives who pushed for Amendment 1 don’t appear to be harnessing much grassroots passion; to the contrary, Hanna told Bolts, the “Zuckerbucks” controversy is something average voters rarely raise with local officials like her. There is no organized campaign for or against the measure, and state campaign finance data show no one has spent any money formally opposing or supporting it.

In the absence of much public discourse on the matter, voters will be left with a question that Louisiana voting rights advocates worry is so facially simple—a referendum on private interests influencing election procedures—as to totally belie the far-right, anti-democratic movement in the background.

Robins-Brown says that without context, many people of varying political stripes will likely be persuaded by the argument that a private or foreign interest shouldn’t be sending Louisiana money to perform basic governmental operations. 

“This thing that had its genesis around conspiracy theories in the midst of COVID did sort of morph into an idea that is viable. I’m not saying I’m fully on board and that I’ll vote yes, but I think there’s a solid point here,” he said.

Ashley Shelton, a progressive organizer who founded and leads Louisiana’s Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, told Bolts her organization does plan to campaign against Amendment 1. She said Amendment 1’s backers have exposed their hypocrisy by slamming “Zuckerbucks” without turning scrutiny to the myriad other ways that outside money influences policy and thus state governmental function. 

In 2021, for example, the same Louisiana state legislature that had just passed an anti-“Zuckerbucks” bill also passed a spending bill allowing itself to receive and spend money obtained via private donations. The irony was not lost on Edwards, who, in a letter accompanying his veto of the former bill, questioned how “the Legislature is somehow immune from the improper influence of grants and donations that … would end up corrupting local election officials.” 

Said Shelton,“They’re worried about Zuckerburg but nobody is talking about these other agendas that are also supported by private money that isn’t Zuckerburg.”

Shelton said she can only conclude, then, that Amendment 1 is meant to evoke fear and to continue choking efforts to streamline ballot access and boost turnout. She notes that the measure seeks to ban “foreign” money in election administration—a response to a fictitious threat, she said, but a useful way to gin up voter outrage. 

“I’ve been doing election work in the state of Louisiana for a very long time, and I have not been and am not worried about the engagement of a foreign government,” she said. “This is worse than a solution in search of a problem. This is all about election administration and creating more limitations and barriers to voting.”

The post Louisiana First in the Nation to Vote on Banning Private Elections Funding appeared first on Bolts.

As the administrator of the Wisconsin Election Commission, Meagan Wolfe is the nonpartisan manager of the office that advises and aids Wisconsin’s 72 county clerks and nearly 2,000 local election officials. 

Wolfe is widely respected by local clerks and election experts from both parties. But she has become a target for right-wing conspiracy theorists touting false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, and Republican lawmakers who want to appease their base have turned her into a convenient scapegoat.

After state senate Republicans made clear earlier this summer that they were unlikely to confirm her for another four-year term, the commission’s Democrats moved to block a procedural step to allow that vote to happen at all. Now, to keep Wolfe in office past her term expiration on July 1, Democrats are banking on the courts to uphold the precedent of a controversial ruling that they had decried and Republicans cheered just a year ago.

This unprecedented and unpredictable situation is the result of Republicans’ yearslong attacks on the state’s election governance—and could undermine Wisconsin’s ability to run a smooth election in 2024, when it could well be the state to determine the next presidential election.

Wolfe’s employment status will likely be decided at the state supreme court—which is set to flip to a liberal majority on Aug. 1—adding another layer of uncertainty and practically ensuring that the process will drag on for months before any resolution.

Republicans’ barrage of partisan attacks on Wolfe and her office have already depleted staffers’ morale and could lead to a staff exodus that saps the office of crucial institutional knowledge ahead of what will be a supercharged presidential election in a crucial battleground state. Two sources told Bolts that the Wisconsin Election Commission’s head of information technology recently announced she was leaving—and they’re worried others may decide to depart as well.

“My fear is that the uncertainty around Meagan is going to create uncertainty around her staff and what their future could look like. Some of them have already been through a ton, just like all of us, with 2020. And maybe this might just be the last straw,” Milwaukee County Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall-Vogg told Bolts. “That really scares me.”

And there’s no good solution in the offing.

If Wolfe is forced out, the commission will have to scramble to find an adequate replacement for a highly specialized, incredibly difficult, and closely scrutinized job that few competent administrators would want given the partisan fury that it draws. But if the courts rule that Wolfe can stay in her job through the next election even though her term has expired, it gives Republicans an easy foil if they narrowly lose the state’s presidential election next year.

“Either way, we’re screwed,” warned Jay Heck, the executive director of the good-government group Common Cause’s Wisconsin chapter.

A Badgered State

The fight over Wolfe’s reappointment is just the latest dust-up in a long-running battle over election administration in Wisconsin. Republicans have been crying foul over the state’s election system for years, using their gerrymandered supermajorities in the state legislature to repeatedly change the rules and oust nonpartisan officials they thought were biased against them. That partisan sniping got supercharged during and after the 2020 election, when many embraced President Trump’s claims that the state’s election had been stolen from him in spite of numerous investigations that proved that was false.

This tension began building more than a decade ago. In 2007, following a bipartisan legislative campaign finance scandal, lawmakers of both parties teamed up to create a Government Accountability Board (GAB) composed of retired state judges to oversee the state’s elections. 

That board drew national praise from good-government groups for its nonpartisan setup, which—unlike many states where elected or appointed partisans run elections—helped inoculate it from the day’s politics. But Republicans became disenchanted, then furious, when the board approved an investigation into whether then-Governor Scott Walker, a Republican, illegally coordinated with outside groups during his 2012 recall election. That investigation dragged on for years before it was ended by a controversial decision by the conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2015. 

Walker and Republican lawmakers soon passed legislation to dissolve the board and replace it with the Wisconsin Election Commission. It was modeled in part on the Federal Election Commission, with three appointed Democrats, three appointed Republicans and a majority required to make any decisions—meaning that it was designed to deadlock on controversial issues.

The commission’s first administrator was a holdover from the GAB, and Republicans accused him of favoring Democrats, pushing him out of that role at the beginning of 2018 as part of a flurry of partisan power-grabs right before Walker left office after losing to Democrat Tony Evers.

Wolfe was, at the time, Republicans’ choice for an administrator they thought would treat them fairly. She had already spent years working for the state on elections at that point, first at GAB then WEC, and was promoted to interim administrator by a unanimous vote by the committee’s six members that spring. 

The GOP-run Senate unanimously confirmed her to a full four-year term a year later.

Since then Wolfe has earned accolades from local election clerks from across the political spectrum.

“I couldn’t tell you whether she’s a liberal or conservative in all the years I’ve worked with her,” former Wisconsin Republican Sen. Kathy Bernier, a former local election clerk who regularly worked with Wolfe during her time in the legislature, told Bolts.

Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiberg, a Republican, said Wolfe “puts everything and more” into the job. 

But Republican legislators were enraged that the commission, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, expanded voting procedures for the 2020 presidential election—and the commissioners and Wolfe soon became targets of conspiracy theories that they had intentionally rigged the election against Trump.

One specific policy changing nursing home voting practices became a central theme of the GOP conspiracy theory that the election was stolen. Wisconsin law mandates that voting deputies are supposed to visit nursing homes to help residents vote and make sure everything is on the up-and-up, but because most nursing homes banned all visitors during the peak of COVID-19, the commissioners waived that rule and encouraged absentee mail voting instead.

Racine County’s Republican sheriff claimed intentional voter fraud, alleging that a handful of nursing home residents who had been declared incompetent to vote by judges had cast ballots anyways. The county’s Republican district attorney declined to bring charges but many Wisconsin Republicans still accused the commissioners of willfully misinterpreting the law . 

President Trump soon added the allegations to his conspiracy fodder, falsely claiming that Wisconsin nursing homes had sent in “thousands and thousands and thousands of crooked votes” in campaign speeches.

Republicans even went after their own committee members, bullying GOP commissioner Dean Knudson into stepping down from the commission for, in their view, siding too often with Democrats. They replaced him with Wisconsin Elections Commission Chairman Don Millis. 

And they turned on Wolfe as well. Chris Kapenga, the Republican Senate President, demanded in late 2021 that Wolfe and all of the WEC’s commissioners resign.

Michael Gableman, the archconservative former state supreme court justice who was commissioned by Republican legislative leaders to investigate the 2020 election, and who repeatedly pushed false conspiracy theories as part of that process, called for the commission to be dismantled. And he singled Wolfe out for her appearance.

“Black dress, white pearls—I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show,” Gableman said during a 2022 radio interview, comparing Wolfe’s outfits to Hillary Clinton’s.

But Wolfe was not even a member of the commission. Her job was to carry out the decisions determined by its members, all while providing guidance to local officials, helping them overcome challenges, making suggestions and implementing the commissioners’ instructions as they tackle any policy decisions and legal interpretations themselves.

“All the complaints that I’ve heard about drop boxes, special voting deputies, all of that—none of those were Meagan’s decision,” Millis told Bolts. “My concern is that she has become a lightning rod for people who are angry with the decisions of the commission.”

Putsch and Shove

It became clear this spring that state Republicans wanted Wolfe gone by the end of her term in June. 

According to state law, the commission gets to select an administrator, but the Senate must then confirm them. Kapenga told the Associated Press in mid-June that “there’s no way” that the Senate would vote to give her another term. He promised he would “do everything I can keep her from being reappointed.” 

Wolfe responded in an open letter to Wisconsin’s election clerks in mid-June making the case for why she should get another term. 

“It’s clear that enough legislators have fallen prey to false information about my work and the work of this agency that my role here is at risk,” she wrote. “There is no substitute for my decade-plus of experience in helping run Wisconsin elections at the state level. It is a fact that if I am not selected for this role, Wisconsin would have a less experienced administrator at the helm.”

To help Wolfe stay in office, the three Democrats on the commission turned a recent supreme court precedent they strongly disagreed with to their advantage.

Last summer, the supreme court, which had a conservative majority at the time, ruled in a 4-3 decision that a Republican appointee who refused to leave office when his term ended could stay in the job indefinitely. The extraordinary ruling validated Republican efforts to stymie Evers, the Democratic governor who took office in 2019, and prevent him from installing new appointees at the head of the state’s agencies.

Democrats were furious at the time. But this summer they decided to test the precedent to let Wolfe stay in office by virtue of her prior term, rather than ask the GOP Senate to approve a new term. When the board met to vote to re-appoint Wolfe in late June, the three Democrats abstained from the vote. Even with all three Republicans voting for Wolfe, that left the commission without a majority, halting the nomination rather than sending it to the Senate.

“It’s a terrible decision. But it is a decision, right? Like, it’s the final answer on this,” Democratic commissioner Ann Jacobs told Bolts, referring to the 2022 state Supreme Court ruling. “So that appears very specifically to deal with the situation we found ourselves saying with the elections commission.”

Republicans slammed the Democratic commissioners for circumventing the normal process.

“It’s just highly hypocritical and that makes it harder to revive confidence in our elections,” Millis said.

Senate Republicans responded by essentially pretending the committee’s deadlock vote didn’t happen and voted to take up her reappointment when the chamber reconvenes in September. But their interpretation that the commission’s 3-0 vote with three abstentions meant that Wolfe’s reappointment had been approved for the Senate to review flies in the face of the law’s actual language, which requires a majority of the 6-member commission to approve, not simply a plurality, or majority of those voting. 

Millis, the commission’s Republican chair, ruled that the commission’s vote to reappoint Wolfe had failed even though he supported it.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu has privately admitted as much. He acknowledged in an email he sent to conservative activists in mid-June that was obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal that because of the state supreme court’s recent precedent, “If WEC doesn’t reappoint Wolfe or a replacement, the senate would have no power to get rid of her through the confirmation process.”

What’s Next?

It’s unclear where the process goes from here. Spokespeople for LeMahieu and Kapenga declined to make them available for an interview, or answer questions about Senate Republicans’ plans to try to remove her from office.

The most likely scenarios are that Republicans will either file a lawsuit to try to get the courts to determine that Wolfe can no longer stay in her job because the commission didn’t confirm her for another term, or they’ll try to remove Wolfe on their own with a Senate vote, in which case Democrats will go to court.

The conservative majority that ruled to allow appointees to stay in office indefinitely will no longer exist in just a few days. Liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz will be sworn in to a ten-year term she won in April, giving the court a left-leaning majority for the first time in a generation. This means that the three liberal justices, who last year ruled against allowing people to stay in office past their terms, are now in the court’s ideological majority. 

But there’s no guarantee that the members of the court won’t reverse themselves now that the shoe is on the other foot. Judges can side with their side’s best political interest even if it conflicts with their prior legal reasoning. Protasiewicz has yet to weigh in on the matter. 

“I will take my shots with the court, rather than at the Senate,” Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen said during the hearing where the Democrats abstained from voting on Wolfe’s renomination..

Jacobs, another Democratic commissioner, admitted to Bolts she does not know how the court will rule. “I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anyone does. We’re all just sort of dealing with this unusual situation we find ourselves in,” Jacobs said.

“It’s hard for me to predict what’s going to happen,” Millis, a Republican commissioner, said. “I have no grand strategy. This is sort of unprecedented.”

If Wolfe is removed, the six commissioners would have to execute a rapid job search for her replacement who would remain in the position for a year, likely through the 2024 elections. But the law stipulates that commissioners only have 45 days to find, hire and then vote to appoint a temporary replacement. If they fail to do so or can’t agree on a replacement, the choice would go to the Republican-controlled Joint Committee on Legislative Organization, which includes Republicans who have lobbed baseless attacks against Wolfe.

Wolfe declined to be interviewed for this story.

Freiberg, Fond Du Lac County’s Republican election clerk, told Bolts that she’d recently had a 50-minute phone conversation with Wolfe, who she considers a friend. She said Wolfe kept wondering: “Am I going to have a job tomorrow?”

But Freiberg said in spite of that uncertainty, she knew that Wolfe would continue to put “nothing less than 100 percent into her day-to-day job”—as long as she was still employed.

And if she’s forced out?

“It’s gonna be hard to find anyone qualified to do it. It is a difficult job,” Millis told Bolts. “The worst-case scenario is we’re in some sort of limbo for months.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the position that Wolfe was promoted to. She was made interim election administrator by a commission vote in 2018.

The post Wisconsin’s Election Office In Limbo After GOP Tries To Force Out Its Director appeared first on Bolts.

Robert Sutherland and Doug Basler have a lot in common.

The two Republicans have spent the better part of the past three years sowing doubt about Washington state’s election system, filing frivolous lawsuits that questioned the mail ballot system, and running (and losing) races for office.

And now, they’re both running against avowedly nonpartisan, experienced election administrators in an attempt to take control of two of their state’s largest county election offices.

Next month Sutherland is taking on Auditor Garth Fell in Snohomish County, which stretches from Seattle’s northern suburbs along the Puget Sound into more rural territory in the Cascade Mountains and is the state’s third most populous county; their showdown may extend into the fall’s general election. And in November, Basler is running against King County Director of Elections Julie Wise in the state’s most populous county that includes Seattle. Both are the only two contested races for election administrators in the state this year. 

The pair are long shots to actually win in their races. King County is heavily Democratic, and President Biden carried blue-leaning Snohomish County by 20 points in 2020. But their campaigns are elevating false claims about the election system—and as threats to election workers continue to grow around the nation, that could increase the chance that local election workers face harassment just for doing their jobs while undercutting voters’ trust that their elections are free and fair.

“I am deeply concerned,” Republican former Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed told Bolts. “I think that it would be a big, big mistake for the people Snohomish County to elect somebody who frankly doesn’t believe in the election system, has no trust and confidence in the election administrators that make it work, or trust and confidence in the laws and regulations that have been implemented over the years.”

Wise predicted that she would easily defeat Basler—there’s not much appetite locally for election denialism in a county that President Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin. But she warned that the ongoing candidacies from candidates like Basler contributes to the “hostile environment for public servants” that election workers face nationwide.

“Of course I worry that he would be able to sow distrust into other folks by these unfounded claims,” Wise told Bolts.

She said that one Republican election observer in last year’s race “was loud, disruptive, and was carrying a gun on her hip”; other local incidents included people driving trucks in an intimidating fashion around ballot drop boxes, and posting signs falsely claiming the drop boxes were under surveillance and that people we’re allowed to return others’ ballots (which is legal in Washington).

“It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise said.

Wise and Fell both backed a new law passed by the Washington legislature that bans firearms at vote-tabulation sites.

“I am certainly concerned about misinformation, disinformation and the impact that can have on the safety and security of voters and our elections workers,” Fell told Bolts.

Basler has promised that if he wins he’ll bring in “citizen oversight and balanced audits” of the county’s elections and wants the county to use “paper ballots hand counted at the precinct level on election day,” even though hand-counting ballots is incredibly slow and has repeatedly been shown to be less accurate than machine counts. 

Sutherland has said he wants to make voters’ ballots, ballot copies and “cast vote records” available for public analysis, even though the secretary of state’s office has advised against it because it could risk publicly exposing who people voted for. 

“Not allowing citizens to see for themselves the ballot copies and compare them to the CVR’s is adding to a greater distrust among voters and for this trend to be reversed new leadership is needed,” Sutherland said in an email to Bolts.

Their campaigns are part of an ongoing crusade to question the state election system’s integrity.

After the 2020 elections, Basler and Sutherland joined Washington Election Integrity Coalition United, an umbrella group for election-denying efforts, in a flurry of lawsuits that sought access to ballots, information, and so-called “forensic audits” along the lines of Arizona’s sham election audit.

Every single one of the lawsuits has now been tossed out of court. The final one, in which Basler and the group demanded Wise’s office supply them with access to all of King County’s ballots, was rejected in mid-June by a judge who ruled they failed to “set forth specific facts showing that there is genuine issue for trial.” 

Sutherland ran for and lost races for Congress in 2014 and 2016 before winning a seat in the statehouse from a conservative rural district split between Snohomish and Skagit Counties in 2018. 

He quickly made a name for himself as a hardliner and conspiracy theorist, attending an armed militia protest in Snohomish that was based on false claims that Antifa was coming to town, and leading a number of protests against COVID-19 restrictions—including a rally where he packed a pistol and said that if Democratic Governor Jay Inslee sent “men with guns after us for going fishing, we’ll see what a revolution looks like.”

He won reelection with 60 percent of the vote in 2020—and immediately amped up his rhetoric, declaring right after Election Day that “It looks like the Democrats are cheating” in the count.

He was even more incendiary in a series of Facebook posts, outright refusing the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Sutherland posted on Facebook that it would be “righteous” if Trump used the military to hold onto his presidency by force. “Prepare for war,” he later wrote in December 2020, according to the Seattle Times. “Joe Biden is not now, nor will ever be my President.”

He used taxpayer funds to attend MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s voting fraud conspiracy symposium in South Dakota in 2021, visited Arizona’s chaotic sham audit that same year, demanded that Washington hold a similar audit for its election and sponsored legislation to end the state’s longtime mail voting system. He also encouraged residents to sue Snohomish County with unproven allegations of voter fraud.

Sutherland was formally reprimanded by the House in early 2022 and eventually fined $2,500 for swearing and screaming at a state capitol director of security who, following the requirements then in place for all lawmakers, refused him entry into the state capitol in Olympia because he wouldn’t take COVID test.

In 2022, a moderate Republican ran against Sutherland and beat him in the all-party general election by a 16-point margin.

But that didn’t deter Sutherland. He kicked off his campaign for Snohomish County auditor in late April with a fundraiser headlined by Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who has turned himself into a leading figure in the election-denying movement with a poorly reasoned analysis that claims to show Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the number of votes that he did in 2020.

Basler has also been a vocal, though even less successful, candidate for office.

He ran against Democratic U.S. Representative Adam Smith in a staunchly blue Seattle-area congressional district in 2022.

“I have questions about the integrity of our voting system, particularly in King County, Washington,” Basler declared during his one debate with Smith in 2022. “Mail-in voting is a disaster.”

After his loss to Smith, Basler requested a hand recount of votes in two precincts—even though he’d won just 28 percent of the districtwide vote in the election.

Basler and Sutherland were among the many election-denying candidates who lost election in Washington last year. Sutherland was one of four incumbent GOP state representatives who went down to defeat after attacking against the election system. And in one of the state’s most high-profile races, MAGA champion Joe Kent lost the general election in a GOP-leaning House seat after defeating moderate GOP Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach President Donald Trump, in the primary. But a few did win, including an election-questioning candidate who defeated an incumbent for Mason County Auditor.

Basler didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. Sutherland declined an interview, but emailed along a written Q&A in which he said the 2020 election was “a prime example of how to lose the confidence and trust of voters” and attacked Fell for not allowing him access to the actual voter ballots.

“I traveled the country learning about elections and some potential vulnerabilities with mail-in ballots and tabulation machines and as a result I will bring new ideas to the auditor’s office in order to help improve the accuracy of our elections and to help regain the trust of the voters. And I alone will be committed to creating greater transparency regarding our elections,” he said.

On his website, Basler declares that “It’s no secret that a large cross section of the voting public does have questions regarding the overall election process,” and accuses Wise of eroding public trust by “decreasing transparency and branding anyone who has questions as a conspiracy theorist.”

Basler is the only candidate who’s filed to run against Wise, and in Washington State’s open primary system, the top two candidates move on to the general election, so the two are sure to face off in November. 

Sutherland is facing off with Fell and a third candidate, Democratic-affiliated candidate Cindy Gobel, in the Aug. 1 nonpartisan primary. The two candidates who gather the most votes will move on to a November general election. 

None of the candidates will have any party affiliation on the ballot, which means Sutherland won’t be identified as a Republican.

Fell, who won a close race against Gobel in 2019, called the primary a “competitive race” and said he wasn’t confident in which two candidates would emerge to the general election this time around.

Gobel, a longtime election worker and former colleague of Fell’s, said the election conspiracy theories pushed by people like Sutherland had “really hurt the election community—in 2020, we as election workers, we took a huge mental health hit.”

She said she would likely not vote for either of her opponents in the general election if she didn’t make the runoff, but predicted that her fellow Democrats would go with “the lesser of the two evils” and back Fell.

Christian Sinderman, a Washington-based Democratic campaign consultant who has worked for both Fell and Wise in the past, said that he saw zero chance that Basler could win. 

He predicted that Sutherland’s name recognition and support from “the hardened MAGA base” would be enough to propel him through the multicandidate primary on Aug. 1 to make the ballot in November—but thought Sutherland’s chances in that race were vanishingly small.

“It would take some extreme event between now and November for him to be viable,” he said.

And while the election conspiracists aren’t going away anytime soon, Wise said she hopes that further electoral setbacks will continue to erode election-deniers’ claims in Washington.

“I do think this is sort of the last gasp for election deniers to run in these races,” she said.

The post A Pair of Election Deniers Are Running To Take Over Election Offices In Washington appeared first on Bolts.

Still, all six commissioners secured the Republican nominations on Tuesday in their bids to serve another four years in these offices.

Should they prevail again in November’s general election—and these are all red-leaning counties—they’ll retain control of local election administration during the 2024 presidential cycle. 

Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up who confronted Lancaster County GOP commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons at a public meeting last fall about their ties to election deniers, is alarmed by this landscape.

“We are looking at elected officials—at the highest levels, I’m thinking of former President Trump, all the way down to county election board officials—and we are seeing that they will work very hard to find a way to take votes away from people, even from people who voted for them, just to prove that it’s something that they can do legally,” Hopkins told Bolts on Wednesday. “It’s distressing.”

In most of Pennsylvania, county commissioners double as local boards of elections, with duties ranging from supervising voter registration to tabulating ballots. Their role in certifying election results has emerged as a critical lynchpin in Trump allies’ efforts to take over election administration. “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans last year. But these county officials have broad effects on voting rights beyond the count since they shape people’s access to different ways of voting.

D’Agostino and Parsons last year voted to remove Lancaster County’s only drop box for mail-in ballots, for instance, and Hopkins is concerned by local commissioners’ crusade against mail voting, which is central to Trump’s own lies about fraud. “There are a fair number of people who in the Republican Party have tried to make voting more difficult by taking away ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail,” he said.

D’Agostino and Parsons faced no opponent in Lancaster’s Republican primary on Tuesday. In Berks County, incumbents Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera prevailed against three challengers, while Fayette County incumbents Scott Dunn and Dave Lohr won against two. 

Similar results played out throughout the state. Local GOP officials have attempted to block election certification in a handful of other counties since 2020. And in an extensive investigation of public statements made by county commissioner candidates, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified additional Republicans who have amplified false conspiracies about voter fraud. 

In total, 20 incumbent commissioners were on the ballot this week after supporting the Big Lie in either word—repeating denialist rhetoric in public statements—or else in deed, by refusing to certify a recent election. Eighteen of them won their Republican primaries, most of them in contested races. 

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, Councilmember Samuel DeMarco was unopposed for the GOP nomination on Tuesday, three years after voting to not certify the local presidential results and even signing up as a fake Trump elector. 

DeMarco, in fact, is a very rare elected official anywhere in the country who agreed to add his name to alternate elector lists willing to declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump despite the Republican’s loss in their state. DeMarco was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of an investigation into these schemes; he defended himself, saying that the list was only meant to be used in case the courts overturned the results. “When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” he told TribLive last year.

The Trump campaign’s lawsuits themselves were on flimsy grounds, and numerous judges in 2020 expressed alarm that they were being asked to disenfranchise millions of voters. DeMarco, who is also the chair of the local Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county, did not return a request for comment. 

Joe Gale, a commissioner in Montgomery County, is one of the two exceptions. Gale voted against certifying election results in 2020, though as the sole Republican on his county board he was not able to block them. “There is no way to verify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said at the time, mirroring lies spread by Trump allies about the results. He doubled down, later opposing certifying the 2022 elections as well. Gale was ousted on Tuesday, finishing third in the Republican primary when only the first two vote-getters move forward to the general election.

But even that vote was not a complete repudiation of election denialism; the Republican who got the most votes in Montgomery, Thomas DiBello, has himself repeatedly amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, as uncovered by Spotlight PA and Votebeat.

Another election-denying commissioner who lost on Tuesday is Stuart Ulsh of Fulton County, a small and rural jurisdiction. Fulton was Pennsylvania’s only known county whose commissioners agreed to let a private group, connected with Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, conduct a so-called audit of voting equipment. State officials then decertified the county’s voting equipment, saying they could no longer be sure it was secure since a third-party had toyed with the machines. 

Ulsh, who later testified in the legislature in defense of this scheme, was eliminated on Tuesday. But his colleague Randy Bunch, who approved that audit alongside Ulsh, came in first in the Republican primary and will move to the general election alongside another Republican. 

Other counties that feature incumbent commissioners who amplified false fraud conspiracies include Beaver, Butler, Juniata, Lackawanna, Schuylkill, Washington, and Wyoming. 

In the night’s biggest loss for an election denier, state judge Patricia McCullough fell short in her bid to join the state supreme court, losing in the GOP primary by seven percentage points.

McCullough gave Trump one of his brightest legal wins in late 2020 when she blocked the certification of state results, only to be quickly disavowed by the supreme court. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she later said, boasting of her boost to “Stop the Steal” efforts.

Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican who defeated McCullough on Tuesday, has herself amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, telling a Republican audience that a bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state had undermined the integrity of elections. Carluccio did not answer a Bolts request for comment, and she also dodged a question on what she meant by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Throughout the state, Tuesday’s elections were marked by relatively low turnout, as is typical for off-year elections. Roughly 820,000 Republicans voted in the judicial primary on Tuesday, which is just 60 percent of the electorate that participated in the GOP primaries 12 months ago. 

Carluccio will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffrey in November. The winner will sit on Pennsylvania’s supreme court and hear potential election cases during the 2024 cycle. Democrats will retain a majority on the court no matter the outcome, though a loss would narrow their edge to 4-3. This general election is expected to be highly competitive. 

But in the counties where GOP commissioners tried to block certification in recent years, most of the incumbents who won their primaries yesterday are likely to have a clear edge in November. Trump carried Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties by large margins in 2020. 

Still, there is recent history to suggest that Pennsylvania Democrats can be competitive in red-leaning territory when facing a far-right candidate; Berks swung blue last year in the governor’s race, which featured election denier Doug Mastriano as the Republican nominee. In each of these counties, the two Democratic and two Republican nominees will run on one ballot, and the top three vote-getters will become commissioners.

DeMarco, the fake Trump elector running for re-election in Allegheny County, is also highly likely to return for another term. Under Allegheny’s complex rules, Democrats and Republicans each nominate only one candidate to complete for two at-large council seats in the general election, so they’re each sure to win unless an independent also enters the race. Local election observers told Bolts that they are not aware of an independent running at this time, though the deadline for one to file is Aug. 1.

“Since it is these local officials who are responsible for administering our elections and certifying the results, it’s critical for Pennsylvanians to not only be aware of this dangerous trend spreading through their cities and counties, but to know who the officials are who could potentially be a threat to democracy,” says Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, an organization that released its own report on local officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have amplified the Big Lie.

The results in Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries on Tuesday stood in marked contrast with those in Kentucky, the only other state with statewide elections this week.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams easily won the Republican primary, defeating two election deniers who’d spread false election conspiracies with 64 percent of the vote. Over his tenure, Adams partnered with Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to support election changes that made it easier for Kentuckians to vote early and to vote by mail.

“I’m really proud that Kentucky Republicans ratified the things that we’ve done to make voting easier at a time that other red states have gone backwards,” Adams told Bolts on Wednesday after his victory. “I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Republicans that use those mechanisms to their satisfaction, and I just didn’t think that they were going to punish me for that.”

Adams will face Buddy Wheatley, a former Democratic lawmaker who promises to champion reforms to increase turnout, in the general election.

In the run-up to the Republican primary, Adams denounced the spread of conspiracies about the 2020 elections and he himself framed this race as a referendum on election denialism. 

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” he told Bolts. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories. You can’t cave.” He defended his decision to keep Kentucky in ERIC, a national consortium to clean voting rolls that a wave of GOP-led states have quit since the start of the year. 

Adams acknowledges that it may be easier to push back against the Big Lie in a state where Republicans already dominate, compared to a place like Pennsylvania where ”the stakes are higher.” But he cast election denialism as a national crisis, pointing to threats in places that aren’t as competitive in presidential elections such as Tennessee or New Mexico, where some GOP officials tried to block local certifications last year. 

“This is not a six state problem, it is a 50-state problem now,” he said.

The post Pennsylvania GOP Doubles Down on Election Deniers, Including a Fake Trump Elector appeared first on Bolts.

Patricia McCullough, a Pennsylvania appeals court judge, issued an order in late November to halt certification of the state’s elections. It was a rare bright spot for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” crusade and its false claims of electoral impropriety, but his victory was short-lived. Within days, Pennsylvania’s supreme court unanimously reversed her ruling and shut down the case by dismissing it with prejudice.

The case, the justices ruled, offered an “extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the General Election.” The state supreme court has since repeatedly reversed McCullough in other election cases, including overturning a ruling she joined last year against the state’s expanded mail-in voting rules, and rejecting her advice that the state adopt a Republican-drawn redistricting proposal. 

McCullough is now running to join the court that so directly questioned her judgment. The death of Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer in October has left a vacancy that voters will fill this year. The winner will join this swing state’s high court and hear cases that touch the 2024 election, just as Trump vies to be on the ballot once more. 

In the run-up to Tuesday’s Republican primary, McCullough has enjoyed financial support from “Friends of Doug Mastriano,” a political committee that supports Mastriano, the prominent election denier and Trump ally who unsuccessfully ran for governor last year on an agenda of disrupting state elections.

The primary pits McCullough against Carolyn Carluccio, a local judge endorsed by the state’s Republican Party who has also echoed some false claims of election impropriety. Two Democrats, Deborah Kunselman and Daniel McCaffrey, face off in a primary on the other side of the aisle, with a general election scheduled for November.

Dan Fee, a political consultant who works with liberal judge candidates in Pennsylvania, though he is not affiliated with any in this election, says McCullough siding with Trump didn’t surprise those who’ve followed her rulings over the years. 

“Republican judges across the country stood up and said, ‘This isn’t right.’ If you’re the judge who said that this passes the smell test, that raises real questions,” Fee said, calling McCullough a “national outlier of Republicans across the country.”

Judges of all political stripes rejected Trump’s claims in late 2020. The Washington Post tallied at least 38 Republican-appointed judges had ruled against Trump in the five weeks following the 2020 election. That included a Trump nominee in federal court who called a lawsuit to overturn Wisconsin’s results “extraordinary,” and the supreme court in Arizona, which is filled entirely with justices appointed by Republican governors.

“It’s almost hard to overstate how clownish these cases were and how poorly they were litigated,” attorney Sarah Gonski, who argued in favor of the Democratic Party in several Arizona cases in 2020, told Bolts. “The judges that heard our cases in Arizona were routinely Republicans. Every single one of those judges except for [McCullough] said, ‘Get out of my courtroom.’ It was definitely surprising.”

McCullough, in fact, has embraced that distinction. She said in 2021, “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.”

She made that comment during her first run for state supreme court, in 2021, just months after trying to block certification. She lost by 19 percentage points to now-Justice Kevin Brobson in the GOP primary. During that campaign, she boasted about her relationship with Trump: “I am the only candidate I know that had a tweet from President Donald Trump, and Donald Trump actually tweeted that I was a brilliant woman of courage,” she told Pittsburgh’s CBS station, in apparent reference to a post by Trump on Nov. 26, 2020.  (Trump did score some other small legal victories in late 2020, but other judges did not agree to halt certification.)

Neither McCullough nor her primary opponent, Carluccio, responded to requests for comment on this story.

Carluccio has also signaled comfort with voting restrictions and election conspiracies.

Asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer whether she believes election results in 2020 and 2022 were “free and fair,” she dodged the question. “If even one Pennsylvanian has concerns about our electoral process, we must address them,” she said. “Our government cannot simply dismiss the concerns of a large portion of our electorate.”

The Inquirer’s question came on the heels of Carluccio telling a local GOP audience that she opposed Act 77, the 2019 bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state; she claimed it had led to “hanky panky,” echoing Trump’s false allegations that mail-in voting has led to voter fraud.

Act 77 was already at the core of the 2020 case in which Trump allies sued to halt certification, as they sought to invalidate the mail-in ballots cast in the state thanks to the expanded statute. In reversing McCullough’s order in favor of the plaintiffs, the state supreme court cited the “complete failure to act with due diligence” since Act 77 had passed a year before. More than a year later, in early 2022, McCullough again sided with Republicans in another case they brought against Act 77, striking down the law as unconstitutional in a 3-2 ruling. The supreme court upheld Act 77 in August. 

Other elections on Tuesday feature candidates who have aligned with Trump’s Big Lie. In Kentucky, the Republican secretary of state is running for re-election against an election denier who has the backing of Mike Lindell. In Pennsylvania, VoteBeat and Spotlight PA identified dozens of local candidates who have amplified false claims about the 2020 election in places like Washington County.

The shadow of “Stop the Steal” efforts also loomed large in 2023’s only other supreme court race, in which liberals flipped control of Wisconsin’s high court in April. That election saw more than $31 million spent, a national record for a judicial race. Bloomberg reports that the four Pennsylvania candidates have combined to spend less than $1 million so far, though spending could intensify in the six months before Nov. 7.

Unlike in Wisconsin, the court majority is not in question in Pennsylvania this year. 

With one seat on the bench now empty, Democrats hold a 4-2 majority, and November’s victor will fill the seventh seat.

This election could open the door, however, to Republicans regaining court control in Pennsylvania in the future. The terms of three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic supreme court justices end in 2025; if they seek another term, they would face an up-or-down retention election. One Democratic justice, Christine Donahue, is set to hit the mandatory retirement age in 2027, which will prompt a vacancy. Should Republicans win this year, it may help them flip the majority later in the decade.

In the near term, Pennsylvania is likely to remain at the epicenter of election-related litigation, and the state supreme court will continue to be central to resolving that litigation.

“Anyone who remembers 2020 and is thinking ahead to 2024 knows that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is going to play a critical role in how the state runs its elections and how the outcome of the election is managed and dealt with,” Victoria Bassetti, senior advisor at the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, which works to protect ballot access and beat back voter suppression, told Bolts. 

She added, “No one should ever, ever be complacent or overconfident about how courts will rule in these cases, which means that every election and every judge who’s elected to that bench is important.” 

The post The ‘Stop the Steal’ Judge Who Wants a Seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court appeared first on Bolts.

“(T)here’s a time where we all have to make a little bit of sacrifice. Our president called us to D.C.,” he told local news at the time. “It was inspiring to be there and I hope he calls us back.”

His loyalty to election denialism has not appeared to harm his political career; he was re-elected last fall after a tight Republican primary and a blowout general election, and, earlier this year, he was named chair of the Senate panel tasked with reviewing election policy. 

Azinger is now one of several election deniers leading legislative committees on election law, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Arizona. Others have been elected to lead state Republican parties in recent weeks.

This takeover of GOP infrastructure by candidates who spread false conspiracies about the 2020 election has continued even since their high-profile losses in the fall of 2022. But in West Virginia, voting rights advocates say Azinger’s appointment to the chamber’s elections subcommittee has barely registered as scandalous. Bolts found this is neither being covered in local media nor inspiring any particular outcry among fellow lawmakers or the general public.

Senator Mike Caputo, a Democrat on the elections subcommittee and the longest-tenured member of his party’s tiny Senate caucus, told Bolts, “The voters in Senator Azinger’s district elected him. They knew what his actions were. That’s just the way it is around here.”

Azinger’s heightened influence over election policy in his state fits neatly within the status quo in GOP-dominated West Virginia, where voting access is relatively restrictive, turnout is among the worst in the nation, and election deniers abound in the halls of power—and specifically in offices with real influence over election policy. 

Republican Secretary of State Mac Warner, for example, appeared at a pro-“Stop the Steal” rally outside West Virginia’s capitol building in December 2020, and was quoted that day saying “it’s important” to keep Trump, who had already lost, in office. Warner is now running for governor.

Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey signed on to a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn 2020 election results in key swing states won by President Joe Biden, and Warner endorsed the effort.

In January of 2021, both current West Virginia members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans Alex Mooney and Carol Miller, voted to overturn 2020 presidential election results. Miller now faces a challenge from former Delegate Derrick Evans, who was imprisoned for three months in connection with storming the U.S. Capitol and last month announced he is running for Congress.

Eli Baumwell, interim director of the ACLU of West Virginia, is one of those playing defense against the state’s increasingly overwhelming GOP majority. He said it helps obscure Azinger’s appointment to the elections subcommittee that the “fringe” keeps shifting further right in West Virginia on a number of other political fronts, which are taking attention away from elections policy. 

This session has brought a slew of anti-LGBTQ legislation, including House Bill 2007, which seeks to ban gender-affirming health care for West Virginia children. That policy passed the House by a vote of 84-10 and now sits in the Senate, which Republicans control. The House also passed a bill to give state funding to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which discourage people from learning about or seeking abortion—something already near-totally banned in the state. Another bill, passed by the House this week, expands religious exemptions that critics worry will allow organizations to discriminate.

Amid that backdrop, it’s easy for a Senate subcommittee on election policy to go relatively unnoticed.

“We are continually dealing with more and more extreme politicians,” Baumwell told Bolts. “Mere attendance at January 6 isn’t even enough to understand how extreme some of these people are.” 

Asked by Bolts about the reception to Azinger’s subcommittee chairmanship, Julie Archer, of West Virginia Citizens for Clean Elections, said, “I think people care, but also, when I think about some of the issues that some of our partners and allies are dealing with, … there’s just so much bad stuff, and people only have so much headspace for outrage.”

Azinger declined to be interviewed for this story.

Despite his participation in federal election subversion, plus newfound control of the subcommittee gavel, Azinger this year did not champion much in the way of legislation on elections, the state’s log shows. 

The most controversial bill he has sponsored on this front, Senate Bill 516, would make it easier for dark-money political donors to donate in even higher amounts. The bill passed the Senate earlier this month, and currently sits in the House.

Other Republican lawmakers filed a pile of legislation that worried voting rights advocates, including bills to refer voter fraud cases to the (pro-election subversion) attorney general instead of to local prosecutors; to make state voter ID laws stricter; and to repeal the state’s automatic voter registration programs. 

The package is all but dead—it would take an unexpected suspension of legislative rules by GOP leaders to revive it—with West Virginia’s legislature set to adjourn its session in less than two weeks. That’s in keeping with Republicans’ recent approach on elections policy: one nonpartisan evaluation of West Virginia’s 2022 session found the legislature was “restrained” on that front. 

That Azinger and his party aren’t doing more to restrict the vote may be explained by the fact that Republicans are more likely to pass legislation in this area in states with closely contested general elections. West Virginia is hardly competitive; Trump beat Biden there by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, and Republicans won nearly 90 percent of legislative seats in November.

Analyzing voting-access legislation around the country, researchers out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Spelman College found last year that, “among Republican-dominated states, the most active legislatures were those in which the 2020 presidential election was close.” They add, “legislative activity to expand or contract the electorate has often been motivated by electoral threat.”

Still, West Virginia generally ranks among the worst states for voting access, according to several nonpartisan groups. It does not provide no-excuse mail voting, ballot drop boxes or same-day registration. While it was an early adopter of automatic voter registration, implementation was repeatedly delayed, which Azinger supported, and voting rights advocates say the existing program is hardly effective.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, West Virginia voter turnout was fourth-lowest among states in 2020. Last November, West Virginia turnout was second-lowest in the country, at under 36 percent.

Azinger, in fact, may be more open to certain measures that might expand the state’s paltry electorate. Kenneth Matthews, a formerly incarcerated West Virginian working to restore voting rights for people released from state prisons on parole or probation, said Azinger at one time indicated he might support that policy, Senate Bill 38. Still, the Senate subcommittee on elections did not hold a vote on the bill, despite holding a hearing, before a legislative deadline.

“He applauded me for the efforts I’ve put in for my re-entry,” Matthews told Bolts, “and he said he’s glad I’m up here advocating and letting my voice be heard.”

Azinger has also not questioned the legitimacy of results within West Virginia. Around the country, election-denying Republicans are often more trusting of election systems, and open to liberalizing them, in their own jurisdictions. In rural Nevada, for example, a county elections chief this month told Bolts she is routinely hounded in her own community about election security—but that those questioning her usually are upset about other counties. And in Cochise County, Arizona—a hotbed of election-denier activity—Votebeat reported this month that the local elections chief “defended his own county’s election but couldn’t defend elections elsewhere in the state.”

Regarding the disconnect between Azinger’s more muted approach to elections in West Virginia and his proudly conspiratorial views on federal elections, Matthews notes that “it’s easier to see the weeds in your neighbor’s yard than your own, sometimes.”

The post West Virginia Adds to Election Deniers’ Ongoing Takeover of State Politics  appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s not just people questioning you at work. It’s at the grocery store, or at your niece’s birthday party,” she said. Her county covers an area almost as big as New Jersey but has a population of just over 6,700 people.

“I pretty much know everyone,” added Donaldson, a Democrat starting her fourth term in a county then-President Donald Trump won by 51 points in 2020. “They don’t trust us. We’re letting them watch the process, but you can’t really argue with those people that have believed misinformation. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve known you. They’ll say, we know you’re doing it the right way, but the county next door isn’t. Well, that doesn’t make you feel any better about your job.”

This relatively new stressor is part of the long tail of election denialism that was kicked off by Trump during the 2020 presidential election. It remains as an animating belief among some on the right that entire electoral systems—and the people who run them—are irredeemably untrustworthy.  

The constant harassment has been enough to force many in Donaldson’s field out of the profession. A 2021 Brennan Center national survey of election workers found that a third had been made to feel unsafe because of their work, while about one in six said they’d been outright threatened during the past election cycle.

In Nevada, it’s been felt acutely. The clerk of Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, stepped down last year amid threats to herself and her office. The clerk of rural, deep-red Nye County also stepped down, because commissioners there voted to conduct ballot-counting by hand, and was replaced by a new clerk who has promoted election conspiracies. Clerks in tiny Lander and Mineral counties both resigned in late 2021.

Amid that turmoil last year, Nevada became a focal point for far-right efforts to overtake election administration. Jim Marchant, a Trump-endorsed election denier who echoed Nye County officials’ conspiracies against voting machines, ran for secretary of state in Nevada, while also taking a lead in coordinating a national slate of election deniers to run for the position in critical battleground states. Most lost in November, including Marchant. 

Despite Marchant’s loss, these pressures have still left election administration in Nevada in a challenging position. Now, about 40 percent of county clerks in the state are either brand new to their offices or, having taken over mid-term for a departed clerk, are serving their first complete terms. Some have never worked in elections before. 

The man who beat Marchant, Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, has also never worked in elections. In an interview with Bolts last week, he indicated that he was getting up to speed on important questions about voting access for Native communities; engagement of eligible voters newly released from prison; and potential improvements to the state’s automatic voter registration system.

“The biggest challenge” Nevada faces, Aguilar said, is building and preserving a robust, institutionally knowledgeable elections workforce. 

“Making sure we have people wanting to work in election departments, people wanting to work at the polls,” he said. “If we don’t take care of the human component, these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Nevada, like other states, has three major elections—presidential primary, general election primary and general election—in 2024.

“If people don’t feel safe going to work, they’re not going to work in these departments or on the polling sites,” Aguilar added.

Nonpartisan national elections experts generally rate Nevada’s voting systems above those of other states. It has in recent years distinguished itself from most of the rest of the country by offering universal, automatic mail voting; by implementing a modernized version of automatic voter registration; and by allowing same-day registration—among other policies.  

But workforce problems this state faces present a different type of challenge to election integrity that can’t be solved with voting procedure innovations alone. 

Aguilar is working to implement—ideally in time for 2024 elections, he said—a program that will take substantial administrative burden off of local election officials by centralizing the state’s voter registration information in a single database his office would maintain. At present, county offices must maintain their own databases and report up to the state, an arrangement which Donaldson, president of the Nevada Association of County Clerks and Election Officials said “we all have issues with.” Aguilar asked the legislature for $30 million to do this. So far the new governor, Republican Joe Lombardo, has supported the ask, Aguilar says.

The new secretary of state is also backing at least two new proposed laws this legislative session meant to protect election workers. One, Assembly Bill 59, would allow state election officials to shield their home addresses from public records; the other, expected but not yet filed, would make it a felony to threaten, harass or intimidate election workers. 

These proposals roughly mirror policies to discourage and punish harassment of election workers in other states, including Washington, Maine, and Colorado. These new laws have passed with bipartisan support, though advocates against mass criminalization have cautioned against the suggestion that new or harsher criminal penalties are appropriate solutions.

States Newsroom reported last year that in Washington, for example, the ACLU opposed a new law calling for up to five years of prison time in some cases, on the grounds that the state’s criminal code already allows for punishment of harassment—regardless of whether a victim is an election worker. And in Maine, criminal defense attorneys pointed to the fact that existing criminal penalties often do not actually deter criminal behavior.

Kerry Durmick, Nevada state director for the nonprofit voting rights group All Voting is Local, said they are skeptical of the proposal to increase criminal penalties.

“I’m not going to come out on this particular bill until we see the language,” Durmick said. “We don’t want it to go too far and have the effect of intimidating voters, or have a negative effect on criminal justice by creating a new felony. But we do want to protect election workers.”

Aguilar is convinced his policies are on target because, he said, similar ones in Colorado and other states are working. Matt Crane, who directs Colorado’s association of county clerks, said it’s not yet clear whether that is true. His state’s law only went into effect in June.

“I think it gives people some comfort knowing they’re protected. I think it’s too early to say how much,” he told Bolts. He added that the pressures on election officials that inspired the Colorado and Nevada legislation have died down a bit lately, but “there’s no question, with [Arizona’s losing gubernatorial candidate] Kari Lake running around with her absurdity, with Trump running for president, this stuff isn’t going to go away.”

Donaldson said she and other clerks in the state are on board with Aguilar’s agenda, and especially the new statewide registration database, but that she’s not sure legislation alone can cure what ails her profession. After all, she noted, no statehouse bill would extinguish misinformation, or seek to regulate the freedom of her constituents to bark at her in the grocery store.

“I don’t have that answer,” Donaldson added. “It’s hard because we try, with the help from the secretary of state’s office, to put out the correct information, but how do you make people believe it? I don’t know how we could do better at those kinds of things.”

She worries this trend will be especially taxing in rural communities, where misinformation and harassment are less often abstract or faceless because they come straight from neighbors. Her county, Pershing, is the type where multiple generations have been taught by the same local school teachers.

“It’s easier to ignore when you don’t know them,” Donaldson said. “But it’s every day now. It becomes a lot.”

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