One Midwestern county will be experiencing an unexpected delay in reporting election results, and a local election administrator is placing blame at the feet of a top Republican Party official.
In Vigo County, Indiana — which houses Terre Haute — news outlets WTWO and WAWV reported that Vigo County Republican Party chairman Randy Gentry "allegedly raised concerns about the election process."
Exactly what Gentry did has not been reported, but it was apparently disruptive enough that Vigo County Clerk Brad Newman mentioned Gentry by name when telling reporters that there could be a significant delay in the official reporting of election results.
The Vigo County Election Board convened Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. local time for an "emergency meeting," in which the names of each party's election workers designated to count absentee ballots were read. Newman called the meeting a major setback for reporting results on time.
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"It’s unfortunate because we had to wait to start doing our process until nine this morning, so I don’t know that we’re going to get everything done today,” Newman said. “This will probably go into tomorrow and maybe Thursday just because of [Gentry’s] for lack of better words, obstructionist behavior. And quite honestly the people of this county deserve better, Republican or Democrat.”
Gentry's unspecified challenge could resemble what Wired magazine reported was a coordinated effort by far-right groups to disrupt the election process in several states across the country. In that report, the outlet noted that groups like True The Vote, Check My Vote, the Election Integrity Project and the Nevada-based Pig Pen Project all planned to mount "mass challenges to voter eligibility" in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,” pro-democracy activist Brendan Fischer told Wired earlier this year. “And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility.”
Conservative groups have also been litigating in several pivotal swing states like Georgia and Michigan in an effort to purge voters from the rolls prior to Election Day. Some experts are worried that these lawsuits are bad-faith efforts to cause "chaos" for election officials to overwhelm key counties in battleground states.
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"When you see efforts to do mass challenges in the midst of the presidential primaries and months before a major election, you’ve got to wonder whether the intent is to create chaos and confusion amongst voters rather than legitimate list maintenance,” Center for Election Innovation & Research founder and executive director David Becker told Stateline this spring.
Despite the warnings of potential disruption, swing state election officials in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have said that the voting process has gone smoothly despite sky-high turnout. By the end of Georgia's early voting period, more than four million ballots had already been cast.
Click here to read WTWO and WAWV's full report.
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