Prompted by conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, activists across the United States are using laws that allow people to challenge one person’s right to vote in order to challenge the registration of thousands of voters at once.
In Iowa, Linn County Auditor Joel Miller had to deal with three similar objections in the previous 15 years. Miller received 119 in just two days, after Doug Frank, an activist from Ohio who is touring the country to spread doubts about the 2020 election, passed through the state.
In northern Florida, in Nassau County, two residents challenged the registrations of nearly 2,000 voters just six days before last month’s primary. In Georgia, activists are filing mountains of objections in the heavily Democratic counties that make up metro Atlanta, including more than 3,500 in one county last month.
Election officials say the vast majority of objections will be moot, because they dispute the presence on voter rolls of people in the process of being removed because they moved out of the region. Still, they potentially create hundreds of additional hours of work as election offices prepare for the November election.
“At best, they overwhelm election officials heading into an election, and at worst, they force people who shouldn’t be off the voter rolls,” said Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice, an organization that has monitored the rise of such challenges.
People who defend the lies of former President Donald Trump are flooding election offices across the country with requests for public records and threats of litigation, creating an overload of work for election officials as offices prepare for congressional elections. of November.
“It wastes our time, because we have to consult with county attorneys about the appropriate response,” said Rachel Rodriguez, election supervisor for Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes the state capital Madison.
She received duplicate emails two weeks ago demanding public documents: “It takes up valuable time that we don’t have as election officials when we’re trying to prepare for the November election.”
Michael Henrici, the Democratic commissioner for elections in Otsego County, New York state, received a one-line email last week warning of unspecified litigation over “voting integrity,” followed by a complaint that he had not responded.
“They are not people with specific complaints,” added Henrici. “They’re getting a podcast letter form from someone and sometimes they’re just filling in the blanks.”
Numerous investigations and reviews, including one by the Trump-era Justice Department, have concluded that there was no significant fraud in the 2020 presidential election and courts have rejected dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies, but Trump has continued to insist in which there was an alleged widespread fraud that cost him re-election. That has inspired legions of supporters to become a kind of impromptu election detectives across the country, questioning election officials whenever they can.
In Linn County — in the state of Iowa and which includes the city of Cedar Rapids — Miller said he and the auditors who oversee elections in the other 98 counties have been inundated with requests for public records and questions from voters.
“The avalanche happened over a two-week period,” Miller said, after the tour by Frank, who uses mathematical projections to claim that a vast conspiracy stole the election from Trump and that it is “happening among auditors all over the world.” condition”.
Electoral offices routinely review their voter rolls and remove voters who have moved or died. Federal law restricts how quickly they can remove those names from the rolls, and conservative activists complain that election officials don’t act soon enough to purge them.
The most recent objections stem from conservative activists who compare mailing address changes and other databases with voter rolls. Election officials say that’s redundant, because they’ve already taken those steps.
The challenges sometimes come after conspiracy theorists have gone door-to-door, often through heavily minority neighborhoods, looking for evidence that ballots were illegally cast in the 2020 election.
Harris County, Texas, which is largely Democratic, received nearly 5,000 objections from a conservative group that went door-to-door checking voters’ addresses. The county elections office says it has dismissed the challenges it was required to review by law before the election and will finalize the rest after the Nov. 8 election.
Activists in Gwinnett County, which encompasses Atlanta’s increasingly Democratic northern suburbs, spent 10 months comparing address changes and other databases to county voter rolls. Last month they presented eight boxes with challenges. They said some 15,000 were complaints that in the 2020 election, specific voters were inappropriately given mail-in ballots. Another 22,000 were by voters they say are no longer at their registered addresses.
There are so many challenges that election officials haven’t been able to count them all, but Zach Manifold, supervisor of elections in Gwinnett County, said that in every objection box his office examined, voters did indeed receive mail-in ballots properly.
But if any voters whose names were questioned try to vote in November, the county board of elections will have to determine whether their vote will count. They only have six days to make that determination, because under Georgia law they have to certify the election result by the Monday after Election Day.
Manifold estimates his office has a month to record and investigate the challenges before mailing ballots for the November election. “It’s a very short time to do everything,” she lamented.
Many of the large counties facing such challenges are places where President Joe Bien defeated Trump in 2020, including Gwinnett and Harris counties, but organizers of those efforts deny they are targeting Democratic counties and say they are working name of all voters.
In Nassau County, Florida, for example, Trump won with more than 72% of the vote.
“They should be happy that the voter rolls are being purged so they can be sure that their votes count,” said Garland Favorito, a conservative activist who collaborates with promoters of Trump’s electoral lies and who collaborates in the challenges in Georgia.
Favorite warned that there will be more objections in other Georgia counties.
Under a law passed last year in the Republican-majority Georgia legislature, there are no limits on the number of election challenges that can be filed in the state.
Most states implicitly place restrictions on these challenges, said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. States require that a complaint contain specific personal information about the names in question and establish penalties for those who file complaints frivolously.
Florida is an example of that. Its law on objections to voter rolls only allows complaints to be filed 30 days before an election, requiring election officials to contact each challenged voter before Election Day. It’s a crime to file a frivolous lawsuit, but challenges to registered voter rolls came close last month to derailing the Nassau County primary.
Two women who belong to the conservative group County Citizens Defending Freedom filed nearly 2,000 challenges with the county election office six days before the Aug. 23 primary.
Fortunately for the office, the objections were filed in the wrong format. Supervisor of Elections Janet Adkins told activists they would review them anyway, but after the primary.
“Taking away a person’s right to vote is a serious thing,” Adkins said.
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