Election workers can be the best whistleblowers about interference, but they need protection from backlash

Election workers and officials help keep American
democracy healthy. (Photo by Ernie Journeys, Unsplash)

With November elections less than a month away, "lawyers at the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization, are preparing for a potential influx of calls from a new type of client this fall: election workers," reports Molly Bloom of Route Fifty. "Local, county and state election officials, poll workers and even contractors like voting machine operators are best positioned to identify and warn of attempts to interfere with the election process."

Over the past decade, election workers have faced increasing public scrutiny, rudeness and even threats of violence. Bloom explains, "Nearly 40% of local election officials reported experiencing threats, harassment or abuse last year, according to a Brennan Center for Justice survey. And 62% reported concerns about political leaders engaging in efforts to interfere with how election officials do their jobs."

Dana Gold, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Democracy Protection Initiative, told Bloom, "These are just public servants who we are depending on to really protect our democracy." The initiative created a guide for whistleblowers in battleground states. It aims to empower election workers with knowledge on how and when to speak up if something seems irregular.

For U.S. democracy to remain healthy, election workers need to report possible election interference without fear of retribution from the public or political officials. Bloom reports, "The laws protecting those who might blow the whistle on any interference, much like the laws governing the administration of elections, vary by state." Gold told Bloom, "There's no one law for whistleblowers. That's why it's important to get advice early.”

In 2021, when the Election Official Legal Defense Network was founded to "provide pro-bono legal help and advice for election officials, it was hailed as the first organization of its kind."

When it comes to managing election interference, 'think local.' Elections are run by neighbors, not 'overlords.'

Building community trust in election officials can
help voter confidence. (Adobe Stock photo)

Establishing community trust in election officials and reminding voters how the democratic process happens in their neck of the woods can help counties counter election deniers, conspiracy theorists and overall election intrusions, reports Chris Teale of Route Fifty. "To fight election misinformation, think local. That was the advice from state elections officials and legislators during a panel discussion at the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Legislative Summit."

Election advocates and officials can begin by consistently explaining who runs local elections. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams told Teale, "It's important to focus on the locality of this because when you see conspiracy theorists, they point to these grand designs of these overlords. . . . But those people don't really run the election. It's your neighbors. It's people that you literally know. It's important to get away from the top-level view of the system and focus on the ground level.”

Chatbots and other AI tools can spread inaccurate candidate and voting information, which states are working to correct; however, local engagement might be the best way to get voters the most current voting dates and information. "It’s crucial for officials to ensure that they are 'trusted voices' in the community disseminating information, said Arkansas State Rep. Carlton Wing," Teale adds. "Showing that the election process is fair is better than telling people it is, Adams said."

Recruiting and training poll workers is another way to protect elections from interference. "Jurisdictions of all sizes need to recruit poll workers, who have left in the face of a variety of obstacles. . . . One way to help prevent any politically motivated attacks on election procedures and build public trust could be to have politicians work the polls, in states where that practice is allowed."

A webinar briefing on potential election threats and how reporters can cover them will be held on Aug. 6

Cait Conley

If you're a journalist looking for help to cover security threats and other issues in this year's election cycle, The Journalist Resource is offering a free webinar, "Election Security: Threats and Mitigations," on Tuesday, Aug. 6 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., E.T. The session is open to the public. Register here.

Cait Conley, senior advisor to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, will lead a practical briefing on known and potential threats to the 2024 elections, how election stakeholders are mitigating those threats, and advice on how journalists can prepare to report on them.

Attendees will learn:

• The landscape of threats to the 2024 U.S. elections.
• What those threats mean practically to the security or integrity of the election process.
• What election officials, vendors and the federal government are doing to protect the security and resilience of the U.S. election infrastructure.

A question-and-answer discussion will follow Conley's presentation.

The webinar will be available on journalistsresource.org after the event.

About the speaker:
Conley's role supports CISA’s election security efforts. She leads CISA’s work in partnering with state and local election officials to manage and reduce risk to the nation’s election infrastructure.

Election official turnover is nearly 40% in some states, new report shows. Workers quit to avoid 2024 conflicts.

Election official have left their jobs to avoid 2024
conspiracies. (Photo by Elliott Stallion, Unsplash)

Underpaid, overworked, and sometimes threatened or harassed, many election officials have left their jobs rather than face the 2024 election cycle. Some states face a dramatic shift of experienced workers leaving and taking their expertise with them. "In some battleground states, more than half of the local election administrators will be new since the last presidential race, according to a new report from the democracy-focused advocacy group Issue One," reports Miles Parks of NPR. 

Overall election official turnover is "notoriously hard to come by — but experts have been saying for years that they worried about a mass exodus driven by the polarized environment," Parks reports. The Issue One report focused on 11 western states and "found that the problem of voting official turnover is particularly acute in the region's swing states, where conspiracies have flourished. . . . More than 160 chief local election officials — nearly 40% of the region's officials — have left their positions. Experts say they expect to see a similar trend in other states as well, as recent polling and NPR's own reporting have indicated many people in these roles fear for their or their colleagues' safety."

Marine veteran Josh Daniels, a Republican who became an election official in Utah County, Utah, in 2019, "grew to love the complex minutiae that went into running an election. . . . But when the time came to decide whether to run for reelection in 2022, Daniels decided against it. Voting conspiracies had become too much to take." Daniels told Parks: "It was just exhausting. It really was like "The Twilight Zone" of government service. "Groundhog Day". . . every day you wake up, and it's the same thing over and over again. It doesn't matter how much information and data you share; it doesn't matter how many concerns you answer. There will just be a new group of critics to again dish out the new conspiracy of the day."

With so much knowledge walking out the door and inexperienced officials filling the gap, a new problem surfaces -- the number of human errors new employees make while learning their roles. "Issue One found that the officials who left took with them more than 1,800 years of experience. . . . New voting officials make more mistakes than seasoned ones. So the exodus brought on by election conspiracies may beget more conspiracies, as first-time honest mistakes are treated like evidence of malfeasance."

Rural election voting processes have improved since 2020; the election denial movement could pose a threat

As the country gears up for November voting as well as a future presidential election, experts are voicing concern over the election denial movement, which threatens to disrupt improvements in how votes are cast, counted and reported in rural America, reports Claire Carlson of The Daily Yonder. "Civics experts say rural communities have the most to lose from the pressures of the election denial movement. . . . Rural America already has lower voter turnout rates, which some researchers argue is due to inadequate election infrastructure. One 2022 study found that voting-by-mail restrictions hurt rural voters the most because there are fewer rural polling locations than urban ones, increasing the distance a person must travel to cast a vote."

U.S. voter engagement has trended steadily upward, "The 2020 presidential election saw the highest turnout in the 21st century with 66.8% of citizens age 18 or older casting a vote, according to the Census Bureau," Carlson writes. "Former President Donald Trump's unfounded attacks on the U.S. election system and the resulting election-denial movement put these gains in jeopardy."

La Plata County Clerk Tiffany Lee in the county elections
office (Photo by Ilana Newman via The Yonder)

The election-denier movement focuses its suspicion on rigged voting machines, for which the only antidote is  manual counts. Carlson reports, "[There are a] growing number of counties–rural, suburban, and urban–where election deniers have successfully urged local governments to recount election results or throw out electronic voting machines altogether." Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University who studies election denialism, told Carlson, "We're at this period that I think should be being celebrated as a sort of high point of participation in American democracy." Carlson reports, "reversing improved election infrastructure – the use of equipment that more accurately counts votes and ensuring better access to voting through absentee and mail-in ballots, for example – could set back civic participation."

Carlson reports, "After Trump left office, the election denial movement morphed into a "core group of 'influencers. . . .These influencers have made it a full-time job traveling the country to spread the election denial movement's primary message: elections are being stolen, and it's the government's fault."

Charles H. Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published research earlier this year exploring election-denial roots. He told Carlson, "The thing that we're seeing in 2020 that we didn't see in 2016, or in 2012, or other times when these sorts of [election integrity] questions arose, is that we now have about a half-dozen of these traveling road shows." Carlson reports, "In La Plata County, Colorado, an influx of open records requests have poured in since 2020, challenging the county's election tools, including Dominion Voting Systems, an electronic voting hardware and software company, and mail-in ballots. The county has relied on mail-in ballots since 1992." La Plata County Clerk Tiffany Lee told Carlson: "What's happened to us is people from the outside and different organizations that don't have anything to do with our local communities are attacking us because ‘Oh my gosh, you have Dominion or you use mail ballots, and we don’t trust you.'"

Nearly one in three election officials report being 'abused, harassed, or threatened;' some are ousted from their party

Marge Bostelmann at her home in Wisconsin
(Photo by Taylor Glascock, special to ProPublica)

Republican Margaret Rose Bostelmann of the Wisconsin Elections Commission refused to agree with other GOP members on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. For that, she has been banished from the party, report Megan O'Matz and Mariam Elba of ProPublica, who cite her as an example of the harassment many local elections officials are facing.

"Fellow Republicans have exiled her and disparaged her, sought to upend her career. . . . Because she refuses to support false claims that Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election," O'Matz and Elba report.

Green Lake County
(Wikipedia map)

For over 20 years, as Green Lake County's clerk, Bostelmann oversaw its elections "without controversy," ProPublica reports. "But two years into her term in a Republican slot on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, she became a target, denounced and disowned by the Republican Party of Green Lake County, which claimed she had failed to protect election integrity in the state. Now a suit filed in June by a Wisconsin man who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud seeks her removal from the commission."

The hostility toward Bostelmann is being seen throughout the country, ProPublica notes: "In an April survey of local election officials nationwide, the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization, found that nearly one in three reported being abused, harassed, or threatened because of their job."

Don Millis, the Republican who chairs the election commission, also "has expressed frustration with the election conspiracy theorists. He said he considered some of the agitators to be 'grifters' who are conning people of goodwill into thinking there is something wrong with the election system," ProPublica reports. He told reporters: "It's not about winning or preventing fraud. It's about getting publicity or attention. It's about grifting, convincing others to donate to their cause. . . . There are many people who believe them, who don't know any better."

Bostelmann is unsure how a system that once flowed smoothly is now steeped in tension, and why lawsuit plaintiff Peter Bernegger, grandson of the founders of Hillshire Farm, the Wisconsin deli meat and sausage company, has targeted her. "But she does know that things in Green Lake began to change in 2020, during Trump's reelection bid," O'Matz and Elba report.

In rural Ga., a seemingly unlikely rebel against Trump is part of 'a precariously narrow but consequential' slice of voters

Cody Johnson leaves Beulahland Baptist Church in Beulah, Ga.,

where he voted in the state’s runoff election for U.S. Senate.
(Photo by Michael S. Williamson, The Washington Post)

Republicans’ midterm shortfall left many political observers asking, "How did that happen?" As the dust settled, the answers included this: an undercurrent of American resistance was making its way through the country. It may have been exemplified by a man named Cody Johnson in northwest Georgia, writes Stephanie McCrummen of The Washington Post.

On Election Day, "Nearly everything about Cody Johnson suggested he would vote a certain way," McCrummen writes. "He was white. He was 33. He was an electrician with no college degree. He had a beard and a used pickup with 151,000 miles, and he was angry at what the country was becoming. Most of all, he was from northwest Georgia, a swath of rural America where people who looked like him had voted in large majorities to send Donald Trump to the White House."

But Johnson voted against U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called ”an embarrassment,” and against Trump-backed Senate candidate Herschel Walker because he didn’t want “some stupid s--- to happen,” he told McCrummen, who sums up, “He voted against every single Republican on the ballot for the same reason he supported Joe Biden in 2020, which had been the first time he voted in his life."

“I don’t want extremists in office,” he said. “And I have some small glimmer of hope that maybe things aren’t as screwed up as I think they are.”

Johnson's resistance was not singular. McCrummen writes: "All across the country, a similar uprising was underway as an unexpected tide of people showed up for midterm elections, turning what was supposed to be a rout for the Republican Party into a repudiation of Trumpism. In Arizona, voters rejected candidates who embraced white nationalist ideas and conspiracy theories about election fraud. In Pennsylvania, they rejected a candidate who said America is a Christian nation. Similar results had rolled in from New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and other states including Georgia, where Walker would lose in a runoff earlier this month. Even in the deep-red 14th Congressional District, Greene saw her winning margin from 2020 slip by 10 percentage points."

Neither pollsters nor politicians can see the stories that make up a life. In the case of Johnson, McCrummen writes, "it is the story of a thousand life experiences that add up to a certain kind of American character, one that can arise from the very landscape where the Trump movement took root." To explain how he got where he is politically, he and McCrummen took a trip “across the 14th District, an area that stretches from the Appalachian foothills to the outermost edges of Atlanta’s sprawl.” It’s an engrossing read.

UPDATE, Dec. 24: McCrummen's thesis is supported in a story by The New York Times, which reports, "A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system," write Charles Homans, Jazmine Ulloa and Blake Hounshell. Their examples include a young Republican committee member in Lancaster Township, Pa., who was ousted as committee chair when he criticized the local party's alignment with a group that had spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines; and a former federal worker in Kingston, Nev., pop. 194,who said she believed the 2020 election was marred by fraud, but voted Democratic because of the Supreme Court's overturning of federal abortion rights.

UPDATE, Dec. 27: "Republicans faced similar unexpected setbacks with the small but crucial slice of voters who don’t identify with either major party, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate," The Associated Press reports, with and graph (below) and examples. "Some Republican strategists say the finding is a sign that messages that resonate during party primaries, including searing critiques of Biden, were less effective in the general election campaign because independent voters were searching for more than just the opposition."

Truth about election fraud: It’s rare, says The Fact Checker

The 2022 midterm elections are underway and many Americans have voiced concern over election fraud. An October Fox News poll showed that more Republicans than Democrats are worried that fraud could play a part in election outcomes. They shouldn't worry so much, writes Glenn Kessler of The Fact Checker column of The Washington Post, who shares his analysis:

• By every single metric, election fraud is rare in the United States.
• Almost no elections in the past 50 years have been flipped because of documented voter fraud, with occasional exceptions at the local level.
• Whenever experts and reporters have tried to tally cases of election fraud, the numbers remain minuscule.
• False claims about the prevalence of voter fraud are nothing new.

There are logical reasons for this," Kessler writes. "The decentralized system of American elections — where elections are run by more than 8,000 local governments and almost 90 percent of Americans vote on paper ballots, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — make it impossible to steal a nationwide election through voter fraud." He notes The Associated Press's comprehensive report on the 2020 election, which found 475 fraud cases out of 25 million votes in the six decisive states, and rulings against Donald Trump's claims by "at least 86 judges, including Trump appointees." (AP allows any weekly newspaper to republish its report, with a link to it.)

The Heritage Foundation says it knows of 1,384 proven cases of vote fraud, dating back to 1979, and is "following dozens of other prosecutions that are ongoing," Heritage Senior Fellow Hans von Spakovsky told Kessler. That’s 32 per year, out of 2 billion votes cast, "according to a calculation for The Fact Checker by the Brennan Center for Justice," Kessler reports. "In a critical review of the Heritage numbers, the center said the database “confirms that widespread voter fraud does not exist.”

The most notable recent case of vote fraud was in North Carolina in 2018, when courts "ordered a new congressional election after an absentee-ballot scheme was discovered in one county that helped to narrowly tip the election to the Republican," Kessler notes. "Suspicions rose after 61 percent of the vote-by-mail ballots in the county were cast for the Republican candidate, despite the fact that only 16 percent of them were registered Republicans." The case illustrated a general rule of vote fraud: The smaller and poorer the electorate, the easier fraud can be accomplished.

Despite ample evidence that mail-in voting is secure, rhetoric against it increases as Election Day nears

Two years of warnings against mail-in voting have had an effect on politicians and policy makers. "Over the past two years, GOP-controlled states have made it harder for citizens to vote by mail, and blue states have made it easier," Will Norris reports for The Washington Monthly. 

Developing evidence shows mail-in voting is not harmful to either party. Consider the unique circumstances of one rural town, Norris writes: “Emerson, Nebraska, is a farming town of 900 in the state’s sparse northeast expanse. Its Republican-leaning, nearly all-white population makes Emerson not unlike dozens of other rural communities in the state. It is unique, however, for being the only town in the state divided between three counties: Dixon County, which covers the western half of Emerson; and Dakota and Thurston counties, which make up the northeastern and southeastern quadrants of the town, respectively."

Emerson and Dixon County, Nebraska (Wikipedia maps)

"Those odd lines made Emerson a litmus test for one of the most contentious issues in the 2020 election: vote by mail. Under state law, Nebraska counties with fewer than 10,000 residents have the option to conduct their elections entirely by mail by sending ballots to all registered voters. Dixon County chose to do so. Dakota and Thurston counties decided otherwise and ran their elections the old-fashioned way, with polling places," Norris writes.

In Emerson, 2020 votes were counted without a whisper of fraud. In fact, "Turnout in the all-mail Dixon County half of Emerson was 8.3 percent higher than on the other side of town, according to a study by the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit research organization," Norris reports. 

This study and others shared by Norris provided evidence that regardless of party lines, mail-in voting increases voter turnout. If a county has more Republican support and allows mail-in voting, Republican contenders will get more votes. 

Christopher Mann, a political scientist at Skidmore College, told Norris, “This idea that vote by mail is a form of voting that inherently advantages Democrats is just flat wrong. . . . It is a mode of voting that creates opportunities for political parties to mobilize their supporters.”