Election lie promoters are taking power
Alittle more than a year ago, all eyes were on the Wayne County, Mich., Board of Canvassers as it met to certify the Detroit area’s 2020 presidential vote. There should have been no suspense about the outcome; Joe Biden won the state’s popular vote handily, and accusations of fraud were demonstrably baseless. But the two Republicans on the bipartisan board were under intense pressure to object to the count, anyway. After they certified the Wayne County vote, President Donald Trump personally called them. Finally buckling under the stress, they tried to rescind their votes. Fortunately for the country and its democracy, it was too late for them to try to upend the election.
Republicans have since sidelined some of the key actors in this story as part of a concerted, nationwide effort to ensure that similar situations will play out differently in coming elections. The greatest danger may come not in Congress or the courts but in nondescript county clerks’ offices, vote-counting centers and other places where ballot-tallying and election administration used to occur without attention or controversy.
A recent Post investigation noted that local GOP officials replaced one of the Wayne County canvassers, Monica Palmer, with a man who said he would not have certified the 2020 vote. The other Republican on the board, William Hartmann, expressed concern that Republican canvasser nominees are now too partisan. In nearby Macomb County, Republicans installed a women who last year called on Trump to suspend electoral college meetings and convene military tribunals to probe supposed election fraud. In Flint’s Genesee County, Republicans purged a longtime GOP canvasser after she defended the integrity of the 2020 vote, which federal observers said was the safest and most secure ever.
After Republicans on a Michigan Senate Oversight Committee found no widespread fraud in 2020, local Republicans censured them; the lead Republican author has received distrust from longtime friends and a barrage of threatening calls.
County officials in Michigan and other swing states fear for their safety following an upsurge in threats. The result will be a wave of retirements — and, potentially, replacements with people committed to the Trump fraud fiction. Conspiracy theory promoters won election judge and election inspector jobs in two Pennsylvania counties last month. The FBI is investigating at least two cases in which GOP election officials appear to have breached IT security in abortive attempts to prove nonexistent fraud.
It is easy to take for granted the mechanics of U.S. democracy, which have functioned without fanfare for generations, and to imagine that someone, somewhere along the line would stop a wayward canvasser, county clerk, secretary of state or state legislature.
If not civil servants or elected officials, then at least the courts would have final say. This naive view ignores the damage that a prolonged controversy involving highly partisan state officials would do to the U.S. political system’s legitimacy, which Trump and his acolytes have already undermined. And it underestimates the uncertainty around who would prevail if government officials tried to abuse their authority to overturn a vote, using laws and procedures that have never been subject to dispute or required clarification.
Democracy works because people of good faith oversee the votes and respect the outcome of free and fair elections. Increasingly, the Republican Party threatens this foundational principle.