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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Runs Our Elections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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