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Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level - The Guardian US

Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level - The Guardian US

Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level - The Guardian US
Oct 04, 2022 3 mins, 28 secs

In the first of a new series, we look at how November’s midterm elections could be an inflection point as election deniers seek to take control of the vote counting process.

From the bottom, it seeks to harass, threaten and ultimately remove non-partisan local election officials and make it harder for them to administer elections.

The threat posed by individuals prepared to throw out legitimate election results is especially pronounced in the handful of key battleground states that were decisive in 2020.

That suggests a concerted effort to target roles with the goal of possibly overturning valid election results, a phenomenon that has come to be called election subversion.

Among the Republican candidates are four extreme election deniers running for governor in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

There are also three extreme election deniers running for secretary of state – the top election administrator post – in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.

Marchant, who is closely linked to the QAnon movement, is also leading a nationwide group of election deniers vying for secretary of state positions; should he win in November, he told the Guardian he plans to scrap all electronic voting machines and switch to paper-only counts.

These candidates are being supported by a flood of money that’s unprecedented for secretary of state races, which have long drawn little attention.

In six states with competitive secretary of state races this year, candidates raised $16.3m overall as of the beginning of August, more than double the amount raised at the same point in 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Not accounting for incumbents, who have a significant fundraising advantage, election denier candidates have far outpaced those who have not questioned the election results.

“In years past, a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to name their own secretary of state, never mind one of another state.

The push to put election deniers in control of statewide elections has been complemented by an equally forceful push to exert more influence over election administration at the local level.

Working through the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is linked to Trump’s political apparatus, she’s held a series of events across the country encouraging people who doubt the 2020 election results to sign up to be poll workers.

The group encourages attendees to become embedded in their election offices and to become a “permanent presence” in every election office and to determine whether government officials are “friend or foe”.

A second part of this effort appears to involve putting as much pressure as possible on local election officials, making it harder for them to run elections and seeding the ground for more chaos.

Since the 2020 election, election officials have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment and many are choosing to leave the field.

Already beefing up security in their office, election officials are now being swarmed with voluminous records requests related to the 2020 election, forcing them to reallocate resources to fulfill them that would otherwise be going towards getting ready to run the elections.

“After the 2020 election, we just had to put up with kind of a barrage of garbage that came our way.

At state level, should election deniers win governor or secretary of state positions they would be empowered to wreak havoc around the 2024 presidential election on a scale that will make Trump’s first “stolen election” effort look like a tea party.

He has already made several unsuccessful attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 win by decertifying results in pockets of the state.

As secretary of state, the top election administrator in Arizona, his fraudulent ploys would carry much more weight.

“The way election subversion would most likely play out in 2024 is that the secretary of state would refuse to count a certain segment of votes, claiming they were tainted by fraud, and that would lead to a different slate of electors being sent to Congress,” Marsden said.

Should the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, elevating Kevin McCarthy, an avid backer of Trump’s stolen election lie, to the role of speaker, they would be in a strong position to accept the electors sent to Congress fraudulently by election deniers in the states

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