Publish Date:October 6, 2023

News Roundup: The Election Worker Brain Drain

As 2024 draws nearer, there’s growing alarm about how election conspiracy theories are affecting local and state election workers — and about the implications a high turnover has for the administration of elections.

Since 2020, election workers have been resigning in large numbers, with one recent report from Issue One finding that more than half of local administrators in several key swing states will be new on the job since the last presidential race.
In Arizona, for example, 55 percent of the state’s county voting officials took their positions after 2020. In Nevada, 59 percent are new.
In a March survey of election officials conducted by the Brennan Center, 45 percent of respondents said they feared for the safety of their colleagues on the job, and nearly a third said they had experienced harassment, abuse, or threats at work.
In the same survey, 1 in 5 local election administrators said they were likely to leave their positions before the 2024 election.
Since it was formed in 2021, the Justice Department’s task force dedicated to addressing threats to election workers has reviewed more than 2,000 reports of threats and harassment.

The brain drain isn’t just a side effect of the election denial movement that has sought to undermine faith in our democracy. It also has the potential to exacerbate the mistrust that has grown from former President Trump’s lies about his 2020 loss. “New voting officials make more mistakes than seasoned ones,” NPR’s Miles Parks reported last week. “So the exodus brought on by election conspiracies may beget more conspiracies, as first-time honest mistakes are treated like evidence of malfeasance.”

The conspiracy-driven hunt for voter fraud has also led to disruptions in election processes. Records we reported on this week provide new details about allegations that far-right activists interfered in ballot recounts in Michigan last year.

Following the passage of two ballot initiatives in that state, a right-wing group called the Election Integrity Fund and Force (EIF) petitioned for recounts. According to previous reporting by Votebeat, election officials encountered problems with some EIF challengers who had attempted to touch ballots they wanted rejected or had threatened officials with criminal charges.
In an email we obtained, an attorney representing public interest groups urged the Michigan Board of State Canvassers to authorize recount supervisors to direct challengers to cease any conduct that violated recount rules.
According to the email, during Dec. 7 recounts in three Michigan counties, members of EIF were seen touching voting materials and equipment, standing on the “wrong side of the table” while workers were sorting and counting ballots, and threatening election officials by telling them they were committing fraud and would go to jail.

On the Records

Election Denial in Shasta County, Calif.
Records obtained by American Oversight and reported on this week by the Redding Record Searchlight shed new light on how far-right election denial has taken hold in northern California’s Shasta County, where baseless claims of fraud led the county to cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year.

The records include communications between prominent election denier Mike Lindell and Kevin Crye, a member of the county Board of Supervisors’ ultra-conservative majority. They also include communications between Crye and Terry Rapoza, an activist with the far-right “State of Jefferson” movement, which seeks to create a new majority-conservative state made up of counties in southern Oregon and northern California.
Lindell — who supported the Board’s decision to end its contract with Dominion and even said he would cover the county’s legal fees if the state sued Shasta County for violating laws — wrote in one email to Crye: “As everyone is aware, we need to get rid of all electronic voting machines in our elections. … I promise, if you have any pushback, including lawsuits against you or your county, I will provide all of the resources necessary, including financial and legal, for this fight. Also, the Election Crime Bureau will be at your full disposal.”
We also submitted a request to the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office seeking any communications officials may have had with election deniers. The office responded with a letter stating that the requested records would not be released because they are “an intrinsic part of an individual confidential law enforcement investigative files.”
This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that limits the ability of local governments to hand-count ballots. Patrick Jones, the president of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, told ABC News, “If they try to stop us from hand counting, then there will be litigation.”

American Oversight

News Roundup: The Election Worker Brain Drain

On the Records

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