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.

In Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle and home to the first known U.S. coronavirus case, Sheriff Adam Fortney is facing two separate recall petitions that accuse him of endangering the community’s public health. If either gathers the 44,494 in-person signatures needed within six months, it may leave Fortney fighting for his job next year.

The earlier petition, filed by a county resident, is narrowly focused on Fortney’s refusal to enforce the “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” proclamation of Washington’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee. In late April, Fortney joined the front lines of a burgeoning movement among county sheriffs to refuse to enforce coronavirus-related health orders. “As your elected sheriff I will always put your constitutional rights above politics or popular opinion,” he declared via his Facebook page on April 21. “The impacts of COVID-19 no longer warrant the suspension of our constitutional rights.” He repeated the same message at a news conference the next day. Soon after, a local barber said he was inspired by Fortney’s words and reopened his shop with no masks or social distancing.

But Fortney’s greater legacy as a law enforcement official might be his tough-on-crime position during his 2019 campaign for sheriff, during which he argued that local law enforcement had been too lax and his predecessor too timid when it came to arresting and jailing people.

Fortney ran with the support of local Republicans on a platform of returning “law and order” to the sheriff’s office. He attacked Ty Trenary, the incumbent who ran with Democratic support, for engaging in “catch and release” practices by issuing citations in lieu of arresting people. “If it’s a misdemeanor offense … this sheriff has said that we’re not taking people into jail if they’re high on drugs,” Fortney said on a local radio show. He has also said that jailing people could help them “detox a little,” a view decried by public health advocates. The local jail was rocked by a string of  jail deaths earlier this decade.

“Fortney ran a hard and well-strategized campaign, playing to his base with fear tactics,” Colin McMahon, a local public defender, told the Appeal: Political Report.

Fortney, who was the president of the county’s Deputy Sheriffs Association, a union of sheriff’s deputies, also said during his campaign that the sheriff’s office should function as a “paramilitary organization,” and promised to empower deputies to make more arrests. “I want patrol officers and deputies to be able to do their jobs,” he said in one debate.

Upon taking office in January, Fortney quickly followed through on this platform. He reinstated three deputies whom Trenary had fired for misconduct or excessive use of force. One of those deputies, Art Wallin, had been fired after shooting and killing a man in 2018 following a vehicle pursuit; Fortney was Wallin’s supervisor at the time, and he was reprimanded for failing to call off the pursuit. Fortney reinstated policies that made it easier for deputies to conduct such “hot pursuits,” and he reversed efforts to decrease the jail population during the pandemic. 

The second recall petition filed against Fortney, which is championed by McMahon and a coalition of other local advocates and public defenders, takes this broader view of his short tenure thus far, beyond his resistance to Inslee’s order. 

It emphasizes the criminal legal system’s impact on public health. It makes the case that increasing arrests and bookings harms the community’s well-being, and reinstating the fired deputies risks putting more people in harm’s way, in violation of Fortney’s oath of office. It also faults Fortney for not enforcing Inslee’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order, though at a hearing in June, both parties agreed that Fortney was not required to arrest people for violating the order.

“Every day [Fortney] remains in office, the health and safety of the public is at risk,” McMahon said.

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Many of the sheriffs who have defied stay-at-home orders, like Fortney, have a longtime record of fighting criminal justice reforms. During the pandemic, they have combined their dismissal of lockdowns with a resistance to decarcerate jails, even though jails and prisons have been “petri dishes” for the disease. 

These sheriffs are typically conservatives in Democratic-run states. Isolated statewide, they tend to flex their lawmaking muscle locally with an approach of making aggressive arrests and policing those they see as threats while shielding the people they see as upright citizens. 

For example, Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, went on Fox and Friends in May saying he refused to “make criminals out of law-abiding business owners.” Bianco had earlier resisted efforts to shrink the jail’s population despite it being the site of one of California’s biggest coronavirus outbreaks, which has caused the death of at least one deputy; a federal judge intervened to demand more precautions.

Fortney wrote a Facebook post praising Bianco, and he has scorned statewide policies to decarcerate. 

The Snohomish County Jail population did drop significantly in April when law enforcement reduced jail bookings and the county’s chief prosecutor, Adam Cornell, a Democrat, agreed to implement new bail policies to facilitate some people’s release. But on April 21, Fortney sent a public letter to law enforcement agencies saying it was time to increase the jail population and lift restrictions on bookings. He also took to Facebook to defend his opposition to releases. “The groups that brought this petition are using the COVID 19 pandemic as a cover to further their political/social goals and it is unconscionable,” he wrote in reference to legal efforts to decarcerate in light of the pandemic. “They will not be satisfied until the prisons are empty.” 

McMahon thinks Fortney was trying to “score points with his base,” which “lives in fear of increased crime rates due to reduced incarceration, even though the data does not support that in the slightest.”

Fortney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

On Facebook, he has described his actions as a “political disagreement” with Inslee, casting his potential recall as a debate over policy choices, not dereliction of duty. In early June, a judge ruled that the recall petition was substantiated by enough evidence that Fortney had broken his oath of office to proceed to a recall election, pending the requisite signatures. Fortney has appealed to the state Supreme Court, where the case is pending.

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As politicians and advocates look to new policies and legislation to defund or regulate police forces, sheriffs present an obstacle because their elected positions and independent authority gives them broad fiat to manage their jails and personnel as well as directly decide their department’s policies.

Their power to rehire deputies with a record of misconduct or brutality looms large in the face of the current protests. Much like Fortney, for instance, one of the first moves of Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva after his 2018 election was to reinstate deputies who had been removed for misconduct, including domestic abuse and lying. 

In some places, local officials and advocates have tried, with some success, to use budgets as a powerful source of leverage over sheriffs. In Los Angeles, nethey  persuaded the county board to stop a plan to build a new jail last year. Los Angeles voters also adopted an initiative in March that would divest money from the jail.

In Snohomish, though, Fortney successfully pushed back against proposals to cut his budget this month, despite complaints about his behavior. Because of budget shortfalls, the county board planned to implement a 4.25 percent cut across the board. A group of public defenders and other advocates, many of whom are also behind the recall petition, asked for the county to go further and reduce the sheriff’s budget by 50 percent. 

Fortney objected that his office should be exempt from even the modest decrease being asked of every department.  “There is an actual effort underway to ‘defund’ the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office,” he wrote on Facebook. “I believe the people behind this effort are very few but they are very loud!” 

After a long meeting on June 10, the board decided to cut the sheriff’s budget—and all other budgets—by 3.5 percent, less than its initial proposal. Sam Low, a Republican member of the county council, said in an email that the decision “has nothing to do with the current Sheriff. It is not the Sheriff who would have received a lay-off notice but Deputies.”

Fortney celebrated this as a win on Facebook. “While EVERYONE will still be feeling the budget crunch due to COVID, this compromise will keep deputies on the street!,” he wrote in a post that echoed his past statements about empowering deputies. They just will not be there to facilitate public health guidelines regarding COVID-19. 

The post Washington Sheriff Faces Recall Efforts for Endangering Public Health appeared first on Bolts.