Dem
51
GOP
49
Maricopa County (see above) isn't the only place where elections are going to be run by people who are election deniers. Rolling Stone decided to take a look at the matter, with distressing results. Among the folks managing this year's election will be at least 70 officials who are on the record as "stop the steal"-ers, with 22 of those having actually refused or delayed certification of results at some point in the past.
The picture painted by the magazine's report is disheartening, to say the least. These folks are swimming in a sea of propaganda, culture wars and conspiracy theories. Many of them have the zeal of true believers, and don't much care if a few pesky laws have to be broken along the way. And while they tend to oversee relatively small numbers of ballots, a state cannot report its results until all the ballots are in. So, in swingy states, these election deniers will be in a position to drag things out, until pro-Trump lawyers can get involved, and throw even more wrenches into the works.
And this is not the only bad news of this sort this week. CNN had a piece about an organization called True the Vote, whose mission is to remove registered voters from the voting rolls. Their primary tool is an app called IV3, which has address information for voters. And what members of True the Vote do is compare the information in IV3 to voter registrations, and file challenges whenever they think something is awry.
There are a few obvious problems here. The first is that the information in IV3 is often inaccurate or out-of-date. The second is that there have been lots and lots of challenges of people registered at legal, but unorthodox, addresses, like rooms at nursing homes. The third is that election officials are actually pretty good at keeping voter rolls updated as local and state laws require, and the challenges submitted by True the Vote waste time and resources needlessly.
Thus far, half a million voter records have been challenged. And while most challenges are unsuccessful, some have succeeded, particularly with "friendly" elections officials. And so, some perfectly legitimate voters have been disenfranchised.
And here's the kicker: Like so many Trumpy operations, this one is ultimately a grift. Certainly, the thousands of people using the IV3 app are serious about "election integrity," as they see it. But the founder of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, and the director, Gregg Phillips, have been using donations to the organization to line their own pockets, very possibly in violation of federal law.
All of this is reprehensible, and one can only hope that the guardrails of the system will mitigate much of this bad behavior. Nonetheless, it is also clear that, as per usual, if the Democrats want to win the presidential election, they are going to have to run up the score as much as is possible. (Z)