At least 70 pro-Trump conspiracists are election officials in key battleground counties - and they are poised to make a giant mess on Election Day
By Justin Glawe | RollingStone | July 29, 2024
When election night comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties. Among those election officials are scores of Donald Trump supporters who believe his lies and conspiracies about stolen elections — and will be in prime position to act on those beliefs to try to aid his campaign in November.
In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results. At least 22 of these county election officials have refused or delayed certification in recent years.
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a “ministerial task,” and one required by state and local law. But as Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
While refusals and delays of certification have not held up in court, in Georgia and Arizona, pro-Trump local election officials are seeking to make certification discretionary — lawsuits that are currently being decided by state judges — in order to give his campaign another method to challenge election results in November.
Polls indicate that the race between Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will be close. If employed on a large scale, the certification refusal movement would have disastrous consequences, fueling the fire of election conspiracies and delaying the tallying of votes crucial to determining the next president.
David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County, just outside Atlanta, is at the center of the certification refusal movement in his state.
“At this moment there are NO guidelines on what is required to certify an election in Georgia,” Hancock wrote on his Facebook page in late May. “But some of us are working to change that. Stand by.”
Rolling Stone and American Doom compiled its list of election-denying election officials by culling media reports about refusals to certify results and other denialist behavior — and by searching the social media profiles of hundreds of election officials in the six swing states.
The investigation revealed hundreds of posts from officials expressing belief in lies about the 2020 election and skepticism about November, as well as myriad posts about every right-wing culture war issue and conspiracy theory imaginable — a veritable stew simmering with the toxicity of the online American right.
“Wow!! I can’t wait till after the Next big election… We’ll get to find out more Binden corruption (sic),” Ann Weiler, an election canvasser in Bay County, Michigan, wrote in January 2023. Another Michigan election canvasser, Bonnie Kellogg in Muskegon County, shared a false right-wing news story in November 2020 headlined “Breaking Down the Greatest Electoral Heist in American History,” among other election denier content.
“I don’t trust the runoff,” Larry Brown, an election official in Pickens County, Georgia, who has posted prolifically about his belief in Trump’s election lies, said two weeks after the 2020 election, as Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock faced Republican Kelly Loeffler in a runoff. “The general election has turned in to a mess (sic).”
In Pennsylvania, Erie County commissioner Charlie Bayle — whose role includes overseeing elections with fellow commission members — is one of 19 election deniers throughout the state with power over elections. “Anyone in this country with an ounce of common sense knows the left cheated to some extent,” Bayle wrote in November 2021. “Their philosophy isn’t about making it easier to vote, just easier to manipulate the vote.”
Days after the 2020 election, Walter Nowosad, a commissioner in Douglas County, Nevada, shared an article in which disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell (falsely) claimed that Trump’s legal team had found evidence of voter fraud that could overturn the election results in multiple states. “Someone’s hand has been discovered in the cookie jar,” wrote Nowosad. Another Douglas County commissioner, Danny Tarkanian, wrote in November 2022 that mail-in ballots are “the biggest issue in our election integrity, along with ballot harvesting. This is what the GOP should be questioning.”
Nineteen states have varying levels of local election administration, with county election officials numbering in the thousands. Rolling Stone and American Doom focused on the pivotal counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Elias, the Democratic election lawyer, believes the findings in this investigation only represent “the tip of the iceberg,” because Republicans “are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
The beliefs and behavior of the election officials discovered by this investigation are part of widespread efforts to call the results of November’s election into question, Elias and swing state Democrats say. Those efforts include mass voter challenges, implementation of unreliable hand recounts, restriction of voter registration rules, Republican takeover of local election boards via legislation, and certification refusals.
With an army of Republican lawyers and state lawmakers crafting voter suppression rules and laws across the country, pro-Trump Republicans can also count as allies some of the thousands of men and women currently serving as local election officials. Most of these officials carry out their duties with little to no fanfare. It’s only since 2020 that the routine, often boring, work of administering local elections has become the target of robust right-wing electioneering, with efforts to place pro-Trump zealots on election boards who are increasingly refusing to certify results in pursuit of bogus fraud allegations.
Many of the election deniers discovered in this investigation share their zeal for Trump on social media platforms like Facebook, where they frequently express their belief in election lies amid screeds on the broader right-wing ecosystem of conspiracies.
Hancock, who says he was appointed to the Gwinnett County election in May 2023, is a good example. “Those of us looking to expose what happened in the Nov. election are not going to stop on January 20th,” he wrote on Facebook in 2020. Hancock has shared posts about the discredited Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2,000 Mules and Gateway Pundit stories about supposed voter fraud in Georgia. He said most attendees of the Jan. 6 rally at the U.S. Capitol that led to the violent insurrection were “patriots who have done no wrong.”
He is just one of dozens of election officials whose Facebook pages look like the unhinged rantings of extremely online conspiracy theorists. Examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials shows unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.
The posts show that belief in widespread election fraud has proliferated among Republican election officials, who are also skeptical that the coming November election will be free and fair. Some of the officials see Trump as a messiah-like figure battling nefarious forces for the soul of the country.
“This election is not about two different men,” read a meme shared by Kellogg, the election canvasser in Michigan’s Muskegon County. “It is about two completely different America’s (sic). Choose wisely.”
Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, which tracks election deniers at the state and national levels, says that election conspiracists are at work at every level working to call this November’s results into question — but are especially focused on certification.
“From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election … it’s all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election,” Ulmer says. “It makes sense that certification has become one of the tactics used by the election-denier movement to throw sand into the gears of running a free, fair, and smooth election.”
THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO on Election Night 2024 recently played out in Washoe County, Nevada, where a moderate Republican fought to prevent the county commission, which oversees elections, from becoming majority-election denier. Events there in recent months show the chaos that could result from the certification refusal movement in November.
On June 11, Republican Clara Andriola, who was expelled from her local party for not towing the line on election denialism, faced off against Mark Lawson, a former firefighter who was fired for possession and distribution of steroids and who has questioned the results of the 2020 election. Andriola won, but local Republicans cited problems with mail-in ballots — and a bizarre claim about someone in a vote-counting room with a thumb drive — as evidence of fraud. On June 21, Washoe County commissioners Michael Clark and Jeanne Herman, both Republicans, voted against certifying the results of the primary. Andriola voted with the commission’s two Democrats to certify results, which showed her beating Lawson by 1,725 votes.
“We’re not saying that everything was perfect, that there isn’t room for improvement,” Andriola told local media. “All we’re saying is this is the election, these are the results.”
Following the certification, Nevada businessman Robert Beadles, an outspoken election denier who helped finance Lawson’s campaign, personally paid $150,000 for the county to recount the results of three races, including a recount for a Democratic primary contest as well as the race between Andriola and Lawson. After three days of counting, the results were the same — except Lawson had lost by one more vote than was initially counted. But that wasn’t enough. Beadles and other election deniers demanded a hand recount or an entirely new election.
Under pressure from Beadles and citizens who spoke for hours at a July 9 meeting, Andriola then reversed her certification vote and joined Clark and Herman in voting to refuse to certify the primary results for a second time. In the days that followed Andriola’s surprising change of heart, the Nevada secretary of state and Washoe’s county attorney reminded the commission of its legal duty to certify results.
On July 16, Andriola and Clark finally came around, voting with the board’s two Democrats to certify the results of the election, which had taken place more than a month before. Herman still voted against certification.
This debacle played out quietly, mostly in the local press, and held up the certification of Andriola’s win and that of a school board candidate. It took a month to certify the results, which only came after Nevada’s secretary of state and attorney general asked the state Supreme Court to qualify certification as a required duty of county commissions like the one in Washoe.
Counties like Washoe, where Biden won by 4.5 points in 2020, will be crucial to determining the outcome in Nevada this year — and even the presidential election. Delays or refusals to certify results would hold up statewide certification and vote tallies, and potentially the results of the presidential election itself.
Pro-Trump election deniers are working as local election officials in at least 16 counties across the six key battleground states. They include small, rural outposts like Bay, Clinton, Isabella, Macomb and Muskegon counties in Michigan, which have flipped between Democrats and Republicans in elections going back to 2008. The election denier officials there have flown under the radar. Rolling Stone and American Doom found them by searching their social media profiles, primarily Facebook, to ascertain their views.
Elsewhere, swing counties have already been the site of election denial tactics. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterms but saw Republicans narrowly win in 2020 and 2022, recount demands from right-wing groups delayed certification in 2022. In that same election, Berks County commissioners Michael Rivera and Christian Leinbach voted to delay certification over concerns about undated and other improperly prepared mail-in ballots — 16,000 ballots, most of them from Democratic voters, were discarded by county election boards in Pennsylvania. A three-judge panel eventually backed the decision to throw out undated ballots for November 2022’s midterm election.
Also in Pennsylvania, Northampton County commissioner Scott Hough refused to certify results of a local general election in 2023 after being encouraged to do so by the county GOP chair. Trump won Northampton County in 2016 but lost it in 2020.
Hough’s refusal to certify results came amid a smattering of similar occurrences across the country in November and December 2023. Republican election officials in Cobb County, Georgia, which has trended toward Democrats since Mitt Romney won there in 2012, refused to certify results of a local election in November 2023. Cobb was joined that month in refusing certification by Spalding and DeKalb counties in Georgia, Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, Surry County, North Carolina, and four counties in Colorado. Since then, the refusals have continued.
Among the first of them in 2024 was Hancock’s refusal to certify results of Georgia’s March presidential primary for reasons he hasn’t clearly stated.
“This is the opposition to validating the process before certifying the election that your county Board of Election (sic) members in Georgia are currently facing,” Hancock wrote on his Facebook page on May 23, sharing a link to guidance on preventing certification refusal from Protect Democracy, a left-leaning nonprofit. Hancock went on to falsely claim there “are NO guidelines to what is required to certify an election in Georgia.” Protect Democracy says that’s not true, and like many election experts and legal scholars, the group contends that Georgia state law stipulates certification “is a mandatory, ministerial duty, meaning that officials have no discretion to refuse to certify election results.”
In late April, Centre and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania held up certification over ongoing court battles waged by Republicans regarding mail-in ballots. Both are swing counties, and Luzerne is home to election deniers Harry Haas and Alyssa Fusaro, a county councilor and election board member, respectively. Haas has posted on his Facebook page about election conspiracies, including writing in November 2020 that there are “many arguments to suggest this election was stolen.” Fusaro has refused to certify results twice, both in 2022.
In May, two months after Hancock’s refusal to certify results in Georgia, Republican canvassers Bonnie Hakkola and LeeAnn Oman refused to certify results in Delta County, Michigan. A week after that, Fulton County, Georgia, election board member Julie Adams refused to certify results of the May 21 primary.
Adams is now suing with the help of lawyers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trump-supporting think tank. Adams and AFPI have asked a judge to rule that Adams has “discretion” to delay or refuse certification on the grounds that fraud may have been committed in a given election.
Such a decision would go against decades of legal precedent, says Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has written on the subject of certification.
“I doubt any court will find that election officials can refuse to certify election results beyond the narrow reasons set forth in state law,” Muller says.
Still, local election officials continue to press the issue of certification. On June 24, Adams again refused to certify results, this time in a low-turnout local runoff.
CERTIFICATION IS SEEN BY REPUBLICANS as one of the first legal steps to challenging the results of elections — and has been since the days immediately following the 2020 election, when the Trump White House consulted with fringe lawyers and conspiracists on ways to challenge the results of Trump’s loss.
At a White House meeting attended by some of those figures, including Sidney Powell, disgraced former Army Gen. Mike Flynn, and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, the issue of seizing voting machines to prove election fraud was floated. In a never-issued executive order that resulted from that meeting, the Trump White House proposed having the Department of Justice seize voting machines in strategic locations in order to prove that Democrats had used them to steal the election.
As evidence of this fraud, the draft executive order cited the refusal to certify results in Coffee County, Georgia, where election conspiracists sat on the county election board. Coffee’s mention in the document is telling: It signals that Republicans believe certification paves a legal path to challenging results — and in the case of the draft executive order, more extreme actions like seizing voting machines and instituting martial law.
Since then, there have been at least 25 instances of certification refusals in eight states, Rolling Stone and American Doom found. Georgia leads the way, with seven certification refusals since the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the Georgia State Election Board — which now includes two Republicans who American Doom found are election conspiracists — has begun crafting a rule that would allow for county election officials to refuse certification if a “reasonable inquiry” can be made into fraud claims. The rule stems from a request from Michael Heekin, Adams’ Republican colleague on the Fulton County election board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Challenges to certification are just one part of an “anti-democracy strategy” being enacted nationwide, says Ulmer of the States United Democracy Center. Across the country, Republicans in state legislatures have passed 22 bills aimed at what they call “election integrity,” which in many cases “increase penalties for screw ups” and “take power away from election officials” in favor of political appointees, like those on Georgia’s State Elections Board, according to Ulmer.
Right-wing groups are behind mass voter challenges in Georgia and elsewhere, sometimes filing off-the-books challenges to sympathetic Republicans on election boards with the help of apps created by election conspiracists. Also in Georgia, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would allow for Republican takeovers of election boards.
In Arkansas, state officials have passed a rule that limits the ability to register voters online after a left-wing group was successful in registering hundreds of Arkansans, many of them in rural Black communities. In Arizona, Trump-aligned legal groups have filed at least eight lawsuits aimed at voter suppression, including one that argues county election officials should be able to refuse certification.
“In 2020, there were 85 or so lawsuits filed over the election. Right now there are more than 150 lawsuits currently in court, and about half of them are filed by vote suppressors or election deniers,” says Elias, the Democratic election lawyer. “If I would have proposed in 2020 the idea that there was a species of people like this who are trying to make it harder to vote and not certify elections, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
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