Steven Rosenfeld

Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, appeared to lead as early voting concluded on Friday – a sentiment affirmed by CNN’s latest poll, which reached voters from Thanksgiving weekend through last Tuesday. But Republicans say that their base prefers voting in person at local precincts on Election Day, fueling their hope that a surge will elect Herschel Walker, the Georgia football star whose Republican candidacy was propelled by Donald Trump.

As early voting closed, 1.83 million Georgians had voted in person or returned mailed-out ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office. While daily turnout broke records, including 350,000 votes cast on Friday, only 26 percent of Georgians with active voter registrations have voted so far. In contrast, during 2020’s runoffs, when control of the Senate was at stake, about 4.5 million votes were cast.

In many respects, both parties are reverting to core values and loyalties to bring out voters. At Walker’s rallies this week, he presented himself as a man who has been redeemed by Christianity and, if elected, would oppose the "evil" policies put forth by Democrats and the Biden administration.

Such religious and party orthodoxies were well-received by his supporters, who, in interviews after a Walker rally, mentioned that Trump’s offensive behavior did not stop the former president from enacting policies they approved. And, of course, Walker’s status as a football legend and “good old boy” was appealing.

“Everybody in Georgia loves Herschel. You should have seen that boy run,” said Fran, a retired furniture store owner, who declined to give her last name while attending a Walker rally on Monday in Toccoa, in the state’s northeast corner.

Interviews with voters in Republican strongholds, such as Hall County north of Atlanta, suggested that party loyalty – including the last-minute endorsement of Walker by Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s top-ranking Republican, who did not back Walker in the primary election, will push party faithful to vote on Tuesday.

“I do think it will have some influence on people,” Sloane Mattadeen, who serves in the U.S. Navy, said after voting. “I think there is some authority there.”

On the other hand, Walker has an uphill climb. He received 200,000 votes less than Kemp in the general election and was 38,000 votes behind Warnock out of nearly 4 million votes cast statewide. What makes Democrats nervous is that Walker’s campaign has been eerily quiet in all but the state’s remote regions.

“They ran a quiet, very covert campaign this entire midterm,” said a Democratic congressional staffer who asked not to be named. “You didn’t see Kemp. If it was not for Donald Trump and his big mouth, you may not even know what was going on with Herschel Walker. You don’t see them when they come for fundraisers… The Republicans are making phone calls, but it is not overt at all.”

The GOP’s latest lawn signs do not mention Walker’s name; they just urge people to vote Republican. Typically, one usually sees one or two lawn signs for Walker, which contrasts with a half-dozen or more signs for Warnock on busy streets.

A former state government press aide who recently took a private sector job said that many of Georgia’s Republican leaders are tired of all things Trump, including his hand-picked candidates like Walker. That partly accounts for the lower-profile messaging, he said, adding that the GOP base understands Kemp’s signals.

Whether that comment applies equally to men and women is another variable. As of Friday morning, about 10 percent more women had voted compared to men, the secretary of state's office reported. (Academic experts said that split was normal in Georgia elections.)

Walker’s anti-abortion stance, despite his history of previously paying for abortions and of domestic abuse, both of which Democrats have publicized, was downplayed by several women who said they had just voted for Walker. Other voters, women and men who said they were voting for Warnock, said that Walker’s character was deeply flawed. Black voters went further and said that his candidacy was perpetuating ugly stereotypes about Black men that they have worked for years to overcome.

More Visible Democrats

In contrast, the Warnock campaign and many get-out-the-vote efforts addressing constituencies likely to support him have been highly visible and vocal. Groups that barely existed a few years ago have been conducting voter drives as part of longer-term efforts to empower their communities.

In a warehouse district north of Atlanta on Friday, three dozen volunteers – mostly young women wearing black sweatshirts saying “Go VOTA” – assembled for a car caravan through nearby neighborhoods to urge Latina women to vote. They also planned to knock on 1,000 doors. Organizers from seven groups behind this effort said they already had made more than 90,000 phone calls to voters.

There are grassroots efforts like this across the state. By Friday morning, more than 800,000 white voters had cast ballots, 477,000 Black voters had cast ballots and 24,000 Hispanic voters had cast ballots, the state data hub reported. While the Hispanic numbers were low compared to other groups, this voter drive’s organizers said their voters could make a difference if margins are close.

“I was born in Georgia and raised in Gwinnett County, a lovely multicultural, multi-lingual community,” said Leslie Palomino, senior canvass lead for Georgia at PoderLatinx. “Growing up in a mixed-status family led me, the middle child in a household of five, to become the first eligible voter. Today, I’ll be casting my vote alongside my sister, Kimberly Palomino. Latinas are a powerful force and today we make our voice heard.”

A few minutes later, Palomino and a caravan of flag-waving, horn-honking volunteers left to visit one early voting site and then rouse voters. There was no comparable effort from Republicans anywhere in sight.

Since 2020’s presidential election, two rural counties in Michigan and Colorado that initially reported incorrect results have had outsized roles in spreading Donald Trump’s big lie that his second term was stolen by Democrats colluding with one of the country’s biggest computerized voting systems makers.

The mistaken 2020 election results occurred in two out of the more than 8,000 election jurisdictions across America. They were caused by county officials who did not properly set up the election system computers in Michigan and properly use them in Colorado. The errors, which notably were caught and corrected, received scant attention compared to the sensation they sparked in Trump circles where a cadre of self-proclaimed IT experts—and, later, some of the same officials who erred—asserted that the computers had been sabotaged.

What unfolded inside the election departments in Antrim County, Michigan, and Mesa County, Colorado, in pro-Trump circles that misunderstood but exploited the counties’ errors—and then fueled conspiratorial and likely illegal evidence-stealing gambits in other battleground states (such as Georgia)—is a cautionary tale before 2022’s state and federal elections.

The procedural lapses that led to initially wrong vote counts are among the findings in research by the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project. It has co-authored a forthcoming guide about how vote-counting systems work. Duncan Buell, a lifelong computer scientist who has spent the past dozen years analyzing election systems, software, and data, and served as an election official, co-authored the guide. The lapses have recurred in every election cycle Buell has studied.

The revelation that complications surrounding using the newest voting system computers by local officials helped launch false but widely believed stolen-election narratives comes as scores of Trump-mimicking election deniers are running for state and federal office in 2022’s general election, and as Trump is still falsely claiming that he was re-elected in 2020.

Some candidates, such as Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, said on the eve of her August primary that the voting apparatus would be rigged unless she won—which she did. Lake’s claim drew scoffs, but most reporters and voters do not know how election computers are set up, and then detect and compile votes. Nor are they aware of basic operational mistakes that can mar this process.

The mistakes by a handful of local election administrators are rare but were confirmed and described in detail in several government-led investigations. They appear to be an unavoidable part of managing elections, especially as new technology is used in high-pressure contests.

Programming and operational errors that led to incorrect initial vote counts occurred in DeKalb County, Georgia, in 2022’s primaries, in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 2019’s general election, and 2018 in South Carolina’s general election, which Buell witnessed as a member of the Richland County election board, where the state capital, Columbia, is located.

Comparable errors occurred using different voting systems, Buell noted, including computers from the country’s two biggest voting system firms, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems.

“It is worth noting that all the errors observed in Antrim County, on Dominion equipment, have comparable errors that I have observed since 2010 in analyzing the ES&S data in South Carolina,” he said.

Election law attorneys and policy experts who are alarmed about the escalating threats to election officials by Trump factions since 2020 do not like to talk about the possibility that local officials may struggle with the newest election system computers. They have spent months defending election officials as above-the-fray experts that should be trusted, and pointedly say that it is a false equivalency to compare mistakes that get caught and corrected with intentional lies and stolen election conspiracies.

“I have no doubt in my mind that we would be in the same place had a water main in Fulton County not broken [in an Atlanta voting center], had Antrim County not happened,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a non-partisan, non-profit that created a legal defense fund to assist threatened election officials. “These were excuses for the delegitimization of an election that was otherwise much more secure by any measure than anything we’ve ever had, thanks to paper ballots and audits.”

“Trump was using the rhetoric long before any specific instances happened in 2020,” said Ben Ginsburg, a longtime Republican election attorney, speaking at a September 6 briefing with Becker. “And David is exactly right. The system is designed to recognize that things aren’t going to be perfect. That’s why every state has recount proceedings, [vote] contest proceedings, and litigation. So, the notion that there will be mistakes is built into a process.”

Nonetheless, the fact remains that about two-thirds of the 74 million people who voted to re-elect Trump still believe the propaganda juggernaut that the election was illegitimate. In contrast, there are few efforts that explain and contextualize actual errors that occur. Typically, comments by election officials are terse and short-lived news items, acknowledging that mistakes were made and corrected.

Meanwhile, as the 2022 general election nears, many election officials are beefing up security protocols at county offices and operation centers, steps that may make their processes less transparent and invite more conspiratorial accusations.

Setting Up Voting Systems

This article is the start in a series that will explain what happened as actual mistakes occurred and how they become fodder for outsized false claims and disinformation about election results, officials and voting systems.

That some county election managers did not properly set up or use their system’s computers before 2020’s general election is not entirely surprising. Nor is it very surprising that Trump’s allies were poised to follow the former president’s cues and seek to exploit any error or procedural change to buoy their rhetoric.

What must be remembered are the claims of rigging and the concerns about changes to election processes occurred during a pandemic. In the middle of 2020’s presidential primaries, the COVID-19 pandemic arose. Some battleground states that did not postpone their primaries experienced a range of snafus, from poll workers who did not show up to last-minute consolidation of voting sites, creating confusion, congestion and delays for voters and election workers.

By summer, many states responded by encouraging the use of mailed-out ballots, which is a big procedural and logistical change for vetting voters and processing ballots. That abrupt transition came as many locales were using a new generation of election computers for the first time in a presidential election, which is always the highest turnout and most stressful general election to administer.

Introducing any new voting system or balloting option can be confusing for officials and voters. Election officials across the country knew their work would come under a microscope, and they took extra steps to ensure their results would be correct—emphasizing that most of the county would be voting on paper ballots for the first time in many presidential elections. But what is largely unappreciated about the newest generation of voting systems is they contained more individual computerized devices to process ballots than the prior generation of machines.

The new computers could number in the hundreds or thousands depending on the jurisdiction’s population. They include ballot-marking devices, scanners reading ballots, tabulators compiling precinct votes, and a central computer compiling all of the jurisdiction’s results. Each device must be programmed and synced with other computers at polling places and county operation centers.

Getting the correct ballot to voters and configuring the computers that cast or count votes is not simple or trivial—not when jurisdictions have 100s of different ballots. (Ballots vary as local races are added.) Nor are programming mistakes a “minor clerical error [that] turned into a major conspiracy theory,” as an August 26 report by the New York Times characterized Antrim County’s issues. Clerical tasks involve typos, not configuring, syncing, and verifying hundreds of ballot styles, thumb drives, and computers spanning voting sites and county headquarters.

In Antrim County, Michigan, election workers did not check if all of the computers had been properly programmed and synced after some ballots were redesigned at the last minute. As a result, ballot scanners and tabulators did not have the correct list of candidates and wrongly assigned votes. The initial returns incorrectly reported that Joe Biden had won the conservative northern Michigan county.

In Mesa County, Colorado, the back-office election manager did not know how to use a computer that completed the processing of batches of 1,000 ballots to compile countywide results. As political party observers stood by, she double-counted more than 20,000 ballots. The scene was captured by overhead video cameras. She later made the same mistake in April 2021’s municipal election.

These mistakes were caught and corrected. Their details were documented by government investigations that issued several key reports. In Michigan, the first report (March 2021) was prepared by one of the country’s leading voting system analysts for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. The second report was by the state senate’s Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee (June 2021). In Colorado, Mesa County prosecutors issued a report (May 2022) that described the operational errors and also refuted accusations by pro-Trump IT specialists that claimed the computer system had secretly stolen votes.

What was somewhat surprising after the 2020 election was the emergence of a cadre of publicity-seeking, self-proclaimed, pro-Trump IT specialists who started claiming that the election was stolen at the same time the Trump campaign lost more than 60 state and federal court lawsuits for lack of evidence.

The self-proclaimed election IT experts had virtually no prior experience with analyzing election system computers. Nor were they apparently aware of other post-Election Day safeguards that find and fix vote count errors. Nonetheless, they asserted that they found unexplained signs of fake votes that they attributed to secretive programming by the equipment manufacturer. Their accusations were among the many efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubt on the election’s outcome before and after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

But what was unexpected was that some of the county officials tasked with setting up and using these computers—including those who erred—would, months later, blame the mistakes on their computers, or publicly say their election system had been hijacked or were vulnerable to such hacking. In the spring of 2021, these officials began actively colluding with Trump’s conspiracy-minded IT squad.

Viral Lies, Slow Accountability

Of course, other partisan Republicans wanted Trump to win and helped set the stage for putting forth false stolen election claims.

Antrim County’s initial miscount went viral in pro-Trump circles. In early December 2020, a state judge, a former Michigan House Republican minority leader, ordered local election officials to allow outside investigators to analyze the county’s voting system’s computers. A firm hired by Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, copied the system’s hard drives, software and data. (The copies, which the court said were not to be shared, were slowly and selectively leaked. They were widely distributed at an August 2021 forum led by Trump ally Mike Lindell.)

In mid-December 2020, a pro-Trump IT firm, Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), issued its “forensic audit” report on Antrim County’s computers, which were made by Dominion Voting Systems (whose system was also used in Georgia and Arizona). Its summary said, “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systematic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generated an enormously high number of ballot errors.”

Matthew DePerno, the Michigan Republican Party’s 2022 nominee for state attorney general, helped produce the ASOG report. (In August 2022, Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, a Democrat seeking re-election, appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the illegal breach of the voting system. The appointment sought to avoid conflict-of-interest accusations.)

In response to ASOG’s report, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, commissioned one of the nation’s foremost election technologists, the University of Michigan’s J. Alex Halderman, to analyze what happened. His March 2021 report said ASOG’s review “contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions,” including repeatedly misreading computer logs that record every operation—from ballot paper jams to votes.

Halderman also described how Antrim election officials had failed to properly set up the system, which, in turn, led computers to assign accurately detected votes on paper ballots to the wrong line—and wrong candidate—in the county’s final results database. “The EMS [election management system] ignored most votes intended for [Joe] Biden, reported all votes intended for Trump as votes for Biden, and reported all votes intended for [Libertarian Jo] Jorgensen as votes for Trump,” his report said. “This pattern lets us almost exactly reproduce the erroneous initial results.”

But Trump’s allies, including his data gurus, ignored Halderman’s report and the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee’s report, issued by Republicans that June. Instead, they seized upon a strategy that they took to other states. Their mindset was to create chaos and doubt, so they went looking for fodder for their claims.

One day after the January 6 insurrection, the Atlanta-based technology firm that Powell hired to copy Antrim County’s voting system went to rural Coffee County, Georgia. There, a pro-Trump election official allowed the systems’ hard drives, software, and data to be copied. The official claimed in an online video that the system could be rigged, which also went viral in Trump circles.

In April 2021, Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk, shared unauthorized copies of her county’s election system with Trump’s IT allies. Even though Peters’ back-office election manager mistakenly double-counted votes, which was found and fixed, Peters went on to promote pro-Trump conspiracy theories and seek the GOP nomination for Colorado secretary of state in 2022’s primaries. (A day after she lost the primary, Peters was charged with 10 crimes tied to the data breach.)

Some of the IT specialists involved in these efforts then turned up in Arizona in its state-senate-sponsored post-2020 review led by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based IT firm. Its CEO, Doug Logan, contributed to ASOG’s report on Antrim County and was among the IT “experts” who went to Coffee County. In Arizona, he repeatedly raised doubts about the presidential election in the state’s most populous county. In September 2021, Logan announced that Biden won, but his team did not provide evidence showing that his IT squad had accurately recounted votes.

The Trump activists spent months claiming the presidential election was stolen. Many became fixtures—along with their false narrative—on pro-Trump media after the election and remain so today. In contrast, the responses by state and county authorities that initially defended their voting systems, and subsequently investigated and rebutted the accusations, drew less coverage.

Notably, the governmental responses cited and explained the procedural errors by county election managers before and after 2020’s Election Day—errors that were exploited and contributed to a disinformation juggernaut. These investigations also laid the groundwork for prosecuting rogue election officials, and possibly their partisan collaborators, for the illegal data breaches.

Mesa County’s Peters, for example, now faces 10 misdemeanor and felony charges. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who Trump lobbied to “find votes” in an infamous telephone call that was recorded, has authorized a “computer trespass investigation” by state police in Coffee County. Michigan is investigating Antrim County’s unauthorized election data breaches.

But behind the stolen election allegations, which continue in Trump circles, and slower-moving criminal accountability, is a troubling trend that recurs in every election cycle. In a handful of counties, local election managers do not properly set up or operate their computers, giving election-deniers a propaganda vehicle.

These mistakes may be the exceptions, not the rule, across America’s 8,000-plus election jurisdictions. However, they are not “minor clerical errors,” as The Times characterized. They are errors at the start, and at the heart, of counting votes.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

Three months before the 2022 general election, momentum is tangibly growing for holding Donald Trump and Trump Republicans legally accountable for a range of criminal activities tied to their ultimately violent effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But Trump’s stepchildren – scores of current candidates who won’t accept the 2020 election’s outcome and want to control future elections – will be on this fall’s ballots, underscoring that the anti-democratic threats posed by Trump Republicans have evolved and are not over.

“It’s time for every American to pay attention,” said a July 28 update by States United Action, a bipartisan organization opposing election deniers and defending representative government. “These aren’t just fringe candidates. Election lies are showing up in the platforms of politicians with years of government service as well as candidates seeking office for the first time.”

As of July 28, 22 states and the District of Columbia have held their 2022 primaries. More than 60 percent of secretary of state contests, whose responsibilities include overseeing elections, and 40 percent of races for governor and attorney general “currently have an election-denying candidate on the ballot,” States United Action reports. Their tally does not include scores of like-minded candidates seeking state legislative races and even law enforcement posts.

“This is America versus Trumpism,” as one analyst said on a late July briefing that sought to tie the impact of the hearings by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol to the less-widely recognized stakes in 2022’s general election.

“Across the country, politicians who won’t accept the result of the last election are seeking control over future elections,” States United Action said. “Election Deniers are now seeking these jobs and positions across the country in a coordinated attack on the freedom to vote.”

In coming weeks, political media may begin to assess the political paradox of looming threats by GOP authoritarians to expand their gains since 2020 – which include passing 50 state laws that “politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections” – against the prospect that Trump and his gang may at last face criminal charges for their failed coup.

In August, numerous states will hold primaries with election deniers seeking the top statewide offices – governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Those primaries include Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri on August 2; Wisconsin on August 9; and Florida on August 23.

Shifting Opinion on Trump Coup

Meanwhile, the January 6 Committee’s investigations have shifted public opinion. When their hearings began in June, there were still questions – at least among independents and moderate Republicans – about whether Trump and his enablers had committed crimes and whether the public would pay attention. After eight hearings, which will resume in September, it is clear that growing numbers of Americans are watching, there is no doubt Trump led an ultimately violent criminal conspiracy to overturn the presidential election, and the pressing question is whether there will be accountability under state and federal criminal codes.

The momentum for accountability also can be seen in revelations that the Department of Justice is questioning a larger circle of Trump allies, including his cabinet. At the same time, missing texts surrounding Trump’s actions on January 6 have grown from the Secret Service guarding Trump to top Department of Homeland Security officials. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has alerted many Trump aides they may face prosecution.

Election lawyers tracking these developments say that criminal charges likely to first appear in Georgia – possibly before the general election. The DOJ is expected to act after the election (unlike 2016 when the FBI in late October reopened its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails).

Polls have found that 60 percent of likely 2022 voters see Trump’s failed coup as criminal. Political independents – who support Republicans or Democrats – are increasingly frowning upon Trump’s lies and tactics, expect accountability, and say they would not vote for 2020 election-denying candidates seeking office in 2022’s general election.

“Sixty percent of Americans say that they were not patriots and 63 percent say they were not bystanders,” pollster Celinda Lake said at a late July briefing by Defend Democracy Project, a Washington-based group dedicated to the principle that voters determine election results.

2022’s Election Deniers

However, as the focus expands from holding the coup plotters accountable to countering ongoing power grabs by Trump Republicans, the challenge gets more complex.

In GOP-majority state legislatures, these authoritarians used 2020 stolen election lies and old cliches demonizing Democrats to pass new laws criminalizing small errors in the bureaucratic tasks conducted by election workers and established get-out-the-vote routines by campaign volunteers. The most common focus of the punitive laws is limiting the use of mailed-out ballots and restricting voters’ options to legally return them.

A related threat concerns a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this fall. It involves the radical right-wing legal theory that was at the heart of Trump’s failed coup, the so-called independent state legislature doctrine. Its most extreme version claims that the Constitution only empowers state legislatures to set election rules and run elections: not state constitutions, state supreme courts, gubernatorial vetoes, election boards or citizen initiatives. (Trump’s forged Electoral College certificates in seven states sought to delay Congress on January 6 and redirect the certification of 2020’s winner to GOP-majority state legislatures that would have backed Trump.)

These new laws and legal gambits are based on old lies and partisan prejudice. Since the 1980s, Republicans have been claiming that Democrats can only win if they fabricate voters and votes – so-called voter fraud. But Trump’s stolen election lies and failed coup, which can be called election fraud, have been seized upon by pro-GOP opportunists.

Self-appointed election integrity activists have emerged and promoted themselves to Trump’s base and right-wing media as super patriots. These posers have raised millions from Trump voters by hawking conspiracy theories that have been debunked by credible Republicans. But their bogus analysis and lies, amplified by right-wing media, have enraged Trump’s base.

The consequence is that violent threats against election officials have escalated and not abated. This targeting has roiled the previously boring and bureaucratic field of election administration, which typically are county-level operations staffed by local civil servants.

For example, on July 29, a Massachusetts man was arrested for an alleged bomb threat against the Arizona secretary of state’s office. In Wisconsin, a pro-Trump sheriff in suburban Racine County is refusing to investigate pro-Trump activists who forged online ballot requests; they wanted to show the process was dishonest but instead were caught by election officials.

“In many ways, the Republican election officials have it worse than the Democratic election officials,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a non-profit, non-partisan organization that has organized an election official legal defense network, in a late July media briefing.

“The Republican election officials know the [2020] election was secure. They did a remarkable job. Most, if not all of them, voted for Trump,” he continued. “And now they find themselves under attack and, unlike election officials in maybe deeply blue areas, when they go home at night, their own families, and friends… wonder if they helped steal an election because they have been lied to so much [by Trump and his boosters].”

Frontline Responses

Election officials have responded to this fraught new environment by tightening security and seeking to proactively reach out to local media and community leaders to try to bolster greater awareness that modern election administration is accurate and filled with checks and balances.

Numerous non-profit groups have catalogued the danger signs and have sought to respond. CEIR, for example, has organized a nationwide legal defense network to assist threatened local officials. Neal Kelley, who managed the nation’s fifth largest election district in Orange County, California, is now working with the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which seeks to train local police to protect election officials and voters from illegal threats and intimidation. Grassroots groups like Scrutineers, which educates activists about election administration, recently conducted non-violent conflict resolution training for election observers.

In many respects, defeating Trump Republicans in 2022’s general election is seen by these advocates of fair elections and representative government as the most tangible line of defense before the 2024 presidential election. As the January 6 Committee’s disclosures continue and prosecutors move closer to indicting Trump Republicans for their 2020 actions, these and other pro-democracy advocates hope the public will put country ahead of party and vote this fall.

“An informed voter is a powerful voter,” said States United Action. “Election Deniers are on the ballot in many state primaries in August, including all 11 primaries for secretary of state. And pro-democracy candidates of both parties will be on the ballot in the general election this fall. It’s never been more important for our state leaders to believe in free, fair, and secure elections.”

A Department of Justice task force to combat violent threats against election workers has received more than 1,000 referrals since it was launched in July 2021 but has only secured one conviction, a House hearing revealed Wednesday.

“It’s received well over 1,000 reports of threats, but it’s only secured one conviction,” said Rep. Richie Torres, D-NY, House Homeland Security Committee vice chair. “Which raises the question, ‘Why only one conviction?”

At the hearing on the election security landscape, the lack of accountability was also tied to more local law enforcement. Often police departments were reluctant to press charges after being contacted by the election officials, the committee was told, because police officers often did not know where the legal line was between illegal threatening conduct and permissible political speech.

“Law enforcement, in many cases, is unaware that issues on Election Day or leading up to the election can be a real threat or a real issue,” said Neal Kelly, who now chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which seeks to educate police on this issue, and was formerly the registrar of voters in Orange County, California, and was a police officer before that.

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“Beat officers, officers on the ground, just are not familiar with criminal code for election violations or that threats to election officials are occurring in large numbers,” he said. “When I was in Orange County, I had police officers respond to some scenes and they just thought it was a civil matter. They were not aware that there were actually criminal violations that occurred at a vote center.”

The House hearing comes as 2022’s general election is heating up and there is disagreement over what are the biggest ongoing threats facing voters, election officials and American democracy. Polls conducted since the House January 6 Committee has been holding hearings detailing ex-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have shown many voters, especially independents, want provocateurs and insurrectionists held accountable.

“The threats to election security vary widely in the United States,” said Torres. “There’s the threat of a cyberattack on election infrastructure. There’s the threat of influence operations that radicalized people with misinformation and disinformation… And there’s a threat of violence and harassment and intimidation against election officials themselves.”

Torres asked which threat was mostly likely to “endanger” the 2022 midterms.

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Elizabeth Howard, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and New York University law school and a former Virginia state election official, replied that widespread threats to election officials were her top concern “because of the cascading effects that result.”

“What we’re seeing across the country are election officials who are deciding to leave the profession,” she said. “For example, five of Arizona’s 15 counties now have new election directors this cycle. Six of Georgia’s most populous counties have new election directors this cycle. This creates the potential for more mis- and disinformation because the people taking the retiring election officials’ place are not going to have the same level of experience [running elections].”

Kelly said that the 2020 election “amplified” the harassment, but “I’ve heard them before. If you go back to 2018 in Orange County, there was a number of similar threats and issues arose when we had congressional districts flip from red to blue... It’s not just at the national level. It can certainly happen at the local level. We see that, and I will say this, it’s not just the battleground states.”

“In every single election we see rumors, we see myths and disinformation,” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, who had to leave her home and have police protection after the 2020 election and after her state’s recent 2022 primary. “Those rumors tend to peter out.”

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“Unfortunately, we are still on a daily basis, in my state and across the country, living with the reverberating effects of the big lie from 2020,” she continued. “The recent activities that happened in my state where we almost failed to certify an entire county’s worth of votes in a primary election [Otero County] are a direct result of that rhetoric.”

At Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic members of Congress were united in squarely blaming Trump’s false stolen election claims, and, to a lesser degree, social media platforms, that paired conspiracy-minded people with conspiracy theorists, for the uptick in threatened violence. Republican committee members, in contrast, said increased federal oversight of state-run elections was their top worry, and often went on to repeat Trumpian conspiracy theories about 2020.

“Isn’t it true, by implication, that the ballots cast in Wisconsin – by absentee drop box deposited ballots – were illegal in the 2020 election,” Rep. Dan Bishop, R-NC, asked Oliver, referring to July 2022 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that banned their use one month before the state’s upcoming primary.

“I cannot speak to the ins and outs of the specific legality, the constitutional questions that came forth in Wisconsin,” Oliver replied. “What I can tell you is that in states like mine, where we have secure 24-hour monitored systems that are permissible under state law, [that] we do not see the level of concern. And frankly, the alleged fraud that has been leveled against such ballot collection systems.”

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These kinds of exchanges evaded the central question of what the most pressing security threat was facing upcoming midterm elections. And, as important, what could be done to counter election-centered threats and violence?

“When something like 40 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, about 60 to 70 percent of Republicans… clearly, that is the root cause of the threats of violence that many nonpartisan election officials are facing,” said Rep. Tom. Malinowski, D-NJ, addressing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, where polls have found 62 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. “What should responsible leaders in our country be doing to address that false believe out there?”

“I guess I find the silver lining to every cloud – that folks are interested in this topic right now at a level that they would not normally be,” replied LaRose. “I view this as an opportunity to educate people about the safeguards that exist, and make sure that information is available in every part of our state.”

Only the committee vice chair, Torres, asked repeated questions about the Justice Department’s election threats task force and why it only had one conviction.

“Is the issue one of law and the law is insufficiently protective of election workers or is it one of enforcement?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“The DOJ task force has taken important steps but clearly what they’ve done is not enough,” Howard replied, summarizing her more detailed written testimony. “We think that they need to expand the task force to include state and local law enforcement. As our Brennan Center survey showed, almost nine out of 10 election officials who had been threatened reported those threats not to federal officials, but to their local law enforcement.”

The DOJ did not testify. But later in the hearing, Kelly amplified Howard’s comments by noting that most local police officers are unfamiliar with election-related crimes and are reluctant to present cases to local prosecutors.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Washington, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to reporters and pushed back on the accusation that the DOJ wasn’t doing enough to hold perpetrators of 2020-related election violence accountable.

Garland replied:

“There is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what it’s not doing, what our theories are, what are theories aren’t, and there will continue to be that speculation. That’s because a central tenant of the way in which the Justice Department investigates — a central tenant of the rule of law — is that we do not do our investigations in public. This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into. And we have done so because this represents, this effort to upend a legitimate election, transferring power from one administration to another, cuts at the fundamental of American democracy. We have to get this right. And for people who are concerned, as I think every American should be about protecting democracy, we have to do two things. We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election. And we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism – the way the Justice Department conducts investigations. Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy.”

Garland primarily was referring to crimes surrounding the planning and execution of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Other recent news reports have said that internal DOJ memos suggest the department would not likely indict Trump before the 2022 midterm elections, if he were to be indicted.)

In contrast, the testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee concerned the ongoing and current threats to local and state election officials by followers of the big lie, where local and federal police, for differing reasons, have barely held those threatening violence to account.

A who’s who of political conservatives – former federal judges, U.S. senators and GOP election lawyers – have issued a report that is the most extensive rebuttal yet of Donald Trump’s stolen election claims in six of 2020’s battleground states.

The report, “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,” refutes the 187 claims made in Trump’s 64 post-election lawsuits, as well as erroneous conclusions in several post-election reviews that pro-Trump state legislators outsourced to pro-Trump contractors. (Trump lost every lawsuit except one that involved a non-election issue.)

But the report’s most intriguing aspect may be the short summaries where it described how sufficient numbers of otherwise loyal Republican voters in six states turned away from Trump in 2020 compared to 2016, causing his loss.

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Those summations, coming from conservatives, echo the January 6 committee’s testimony from mostly Republican witnesses, which polling has found have been persuasive among political independents to reject Trump’s ongoing election-denying claims and frown on 2022’s election-denying candidates.

“Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states,” the report’s introduction said. “Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016.”

“President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy,” it continued. “This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.”

Lost Not Stolen was co-authored by former U.S. Sens. John Danforth (Missouri) and Gordon Smith (Oregon), former federal judges J. Michael Luttig, Thomas B. Griffith, and Michael W. McConnell, former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg and David Hoppe, former chief of staff to ex-House Speaker Paul Ryan.

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Here are excerpts summarizing the ticket-splitting in the six battleground states.

Arizona

“Biden outperformed [Hillary] Clinton’s 2016 results, and Trump performed worse than he had in 2016,” the report said, before parsing Biden’s 10,457-vote margin.

“Disaffection for Trump among Republican voters led to ticket-splitting that hurt Trump and helped Biden,” it said. “Nearly 60,000 voters did not vote for Trump even though they voted Republican down-ballot; of these, 39,000 voted for
Biden. Considering only the two most populous counties in the state, more than 74,000 disaffected Republicans did not vote for Trump in 2020; 65% of these (48,577 votes) voted for Biden; those 48,577 votes alone represent 4.6 times Biden’s margin of victory over Trump.”

Georgia

Biden beat Trump by 11,779 votes, making Biden the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.

“Biden capitalized on grassroots organizing, a rapidly diversifying electorate, significantly increased turnout, and suburbs growing in population and becoming inhospitable to 2020 Republican candidates,” the report said. “Democrats have made slow and steady gains in Georgia, with candidates focusing on bringing out Democratic voters who did not vote in previous election cycles, thus closing the gap with Republicans in recent elections. In addition to bringing out Democratic voters, Biden also succeeded among swing and suburban voters.”

Michigan

In 2016, Trump won by 10,700 votes. In 2020, Biden won by 154,188 votes.

“Biden’s victory is attributed to gains in suburban counties, especially those in Detroit suburbs, as well as strength in urban cores and small metropolitan areas,” it said. “Trump increased his share of votes in 63 of the state’s 83 counties, winning 73 counties; but Trump won fewer counties than the 75 he took in 2016, and the counties he did win are sparse in population. In addition, support for third-party candidates dwindled from 5% of the vote in 2016 to just 1.5% in 2020.”

Nevada

Though not widely covered nationally, Trump’s allies filed 10 suits that claimed that “thousands and thousands” of people voted illegally.

“President Biden carried Nevada by a margin of 33,596 votes over Trump, out of nearly 1.4 million votes cast,” it said. “Biden’s win in Nevada, like Clinton’s, is attributable to a reliable base of Democrats in southern Nevada [greater Las Vegas]. He performed far better with Latina women than Latino men and outperformed Trump with independents.”

Pennsylvania

In 2016, Trump won by 44,292 votes, compared to 2020 where Biden won by 80,555 votes out of 6.9 million votes cast.

“While Biden’s largest vote margins came from dense population centers with large Black populations, including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he made gains in Republican counties and outperformed Clinton in counties she won in 2016,” it said. “Democrats saw increased support in suburban Philadelphia counties (as compared to 2016), while Republican gains in suburban Pittsburgh were not as great.”

Wisconsin

In 2016, Trump won by 22,748 votes. In 2020, Biden won by 20,682 votes.

“Biden’s win has been attributed to improved performance in Wisconsin suburban and smaller metropolitan counties, as well as traditional Democratic strength in urban areas,” it said. “Republicans’ margins in Milwaukee’s suburban counties were lower than in 2016, while Democrats made gains in urban cores and large suburbs and reduced their losses in small metropolitan areas.”

Enough, Conservatives Say

The Lost Not Stolen report said that Trump’s repeated stolen election claims were baseless and harmed public confidence in American democracy and elections. It quoted numerous court decisions were judges were extremely critical of Trump, such as this excerpt from a federal court ruling in Michigan:

“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process. It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

The report’s co-authors urged “fellow conservatives” to stop following Trump’s continuing claims that the 2020 election was stolen and to instead focus on better candidates in 2022’s midterm and 2024’s presidential election.

“We urge our fellow conservatives to cease obsessing over the results of the 2020 election, and to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation,” it concluded.

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Trump embraced that argument, called the independent state legislature (ISL) theory as a way to overturn his defeat in key states. It had been gathering dust in right-wing think tanks and academia, where it was championed under the banner of so-called constitutional originalism, whose adherents want the government to mimic what the founders established in the 18th century.

Trump, as the January 6 hearings have shown, saw the assertion of legislative authority as one way to seize a second term. Republican-majority legislatures, led by his loyalists, theoretically could bypass their state’s popular vote and appoint pro-Trump Electoral College members. Even though courts rejected Trump’s suits, and no legislature followed that script, 84 GOP activists and officials in seven swing states forged documents giving Trump their Electoral College votes.

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“There is no legal theory that is more closely connected to Trumpism and the failed Jan. 6 coup,” Marc Elias, a Democratic Party lawyer, wrote in a July 6 blog.

The notion that arch-partisans should subvert elections did not end with Trump’s defeat. Instead of receding into disgrace, his attempt to push state legislators to muscle out outcomes can now be seen as opening a much more serious window with potentially deep anti-democratic consequences.

Unlike Trump’s bungling lawyers, the activist Supreme Court will hear a case next fall that centers on the independent state legislature theory. The narrow question in Moore v. Harper is whether the North Carolina Supreme Court can overrule its legislature that drew gerrymandered districts. If some version of the ISL theory is validated, the broader implications are that the Supreme Court could gut the modern system of checks and balances that govern state elections.

“This would be as deep a dig into American democracy that we’ve seen in at least a century,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Policy and Governance. “Just look at the recent period. Both Democratic and Republican states have passed laws to enhance their party’s opportunities in November and have had their supreme courts step in and reject those.”

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“And that’s an example of the kind of institutional battle that the American system of separation of powers, both at the national level and the state level, has invited,” he said. “What the North Carolina case foretells, if it’s actually upheld by the Supreme Court, is an end to that at the state level. It would remove the state courts as a check on the rapacious use of partisan power.”

Jacobs and other election scholars emphasize that the acceptance of a case does not mean that the court’s mind is made up – even though three justices have said in other rulings that they support the independent state legislature theory. But rather than reject the case outright, the Supreme Court is lending credence to a power grab that has been, until now, inconceivable in mainstream legal circles.

“The ultimate big problem with ISL theory is that we’ve always run our elections differently,” said Thomas Wolf, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “You really do end up where the legislature is essentially supreme with the exception of some federal constitutional, or some federal legal checks, on their power.”

Runaway Trump Republicans

The 2020 election’s aftermath has shown what Trump Republicans are willing to do – and suggests what the Supreme Court might validate or incite.

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The cadre that forged Electoral College documents in swing states was not alone. On January 6, 2021, after a mob delayed Congress’s certification of the Electoral College winner, eight senators and 139 representatives voted to reject Biden’s victory. Back in battleground state capitals, pro-Trump legislators followed up by launching bad-faith investigations to hunt for illegal voting – Trump’s excuse for why he lost; not that he was rejected by GOP moderates.

The post-2020 legislative inquiries found nothing. But the disinformation they sparked on pro-Trump media convinced his base that Joe Biden was not elected legitimately. Legislatures are not courtrooms. The pro-Trump legislators faced no penalty for indulging evidence-free conspiracies apart from not getting re-elected. (As of mid-June 2022, more than 100 election-denying candidates for statewide office or Congress have won their GOP primary.)

The big lie led to Republican-controlled legislatures passing new laws to complicate voting in Democratic strongholds. Democratic governors in states like Michigan, where Republicans control the legislature, vetoed the new laws. Republican governors in Florida, Georgia and Arizona signed them.

While many of the initial reactions to the Supreme Court’s acceptance of Moore v. Harper have concerned its potential impact on 2024’s presidential election, further reflection by election experts suggests that any embrace of the ISL theory could open up a Pandora’s Box of backsliding on the frontlines of American democracy.

The fallout could include the dismantling of nonpartisan government election administration by replacing best practices – which, during 2020’s pandemic, allowed for more voting options – with brazen partisan schemes.

“There’s the cataclysmic potential impact on the separation of powers in the American federal system,” said Jacobs, who also oversees a program that trains election officials. “There’s also a practical impact of the nonpartisan professional administration of elections, the work that very few Americans know about, but that’s responsible for the fair conduct of our electoral machinery.”

Election Administration Impacts

A few pundits have asked what state legislatures could do if they faced no checks and balances from their state constitution, state supreme court, gubernatorial vetoes, and state agencies. One scenario is legislators could grant themselves the power to certify all winners. But the possible impacts are much wider and local, a look at post-2020 litigation, legislation and enacted laws reveals.

“In the run up to the November 2020 presidential election, state courts heard and considered dozens of cases involving the application of state election law,” Elias noted. “As importantly, after the election, Trump and his allies lost 28 lawsuits in state court, nine of which involved the Trump campaign itself. In 2021, at least 39 voting rights and redistricting lawsuits were decided at the state court level.”

The scope of these lawsuits and legislation involves almost every stage in voting and counting ballots. Before 2020’s Election Day, there was litigation about voter registration, voter purges, voter ID laws, limits to voter assistance, absentee ballot requirements, use of drop boxes to return those ballots, absentee ballot return deadlines, timetables for fixing mistakes by voters and more.

In response to Trump’s loss, Republican-led legislatures have imposed new limits on voter assistance, rolled back voting with mailed out ballots, expanded partisan observers and imposed penalties on election officials who may seek to maintain order, and, in Georgia, reconstituted local election boards with GOP appointees.

In other words, partisan legislatures that face no checks and balances could drastically change how their state’s elections are run. That reaction was seen in 2013 in many southern states, after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the Justice Department’s federal oversight of new election laws and rules under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Like today’s abrupt shuttering of abortion providers in red states, that 2013 ruling saw numerous voting restrictions erupt.

A May 2022 report by a trio of pro-democracy groups, A Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Election Administration, previews what may come if the ISL theory is validated.

The groups tracked hundreds of bills in 32 states and found five categories of legislative overreach: “Usurping control over election results,” “Requiring partisan or unprofessional ‘audits’ or reviews,” “Seizing power over election responsibilities,” “Creating unworkable burdens in election administration,” and “Imposing disproportionate criminal or other penalties.”

Enacting these measures would upend America’s elections – for voters, election officials and for the legitimacy of American democracy – it concluded.

“Left unchecked, these legislative proposals threaten to paralyze the smooth functioning of elections,” it said. “Election administrators could be left powerless to stop voter intimidation. Election rules could devolve into a confusing and contradictory tangle, subject to change at the whims of partisan lawmakers. Election results could be endlessly called into question and subjected to never-ending, destructive reviews conducted based on no responsible standard. At the extreme, election results could simply be tossed aside, and the will of the people ignored.”

The key phrase from that assessment was “left unchecked,” which is exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court’s originalists might unleash in Moore v. Harper.

Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows wanted a presidential pardon. He had facilitated key stages of Trump’s attempted 2020 coup, linking the insurrectionists to the highest reaches of the White House and Congress.

But ultimately, Meadows failed to deliver what Trump most wanted, which was convincing others in government to overturn the 2020 election. And then his subordinates, White House security staff, thwarted Trump’s plan to march with a mob into the Capitol.

Meadows’ role has become clearer with each January 6 hearing. Earlier hearings traced how his attempted Justice Department takeover failed. The fake Electoral College slates that Meadows had pushed were not accepted by Congress. The calls by Trump to state officials that he had orchestrated to “find votes” did not work. Nor could Meadows convince Vice-President Mike Pence to ignore the official Electoral College results and count pro-Trump forgeries.

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And as January 6 approached and the insurrection began, new and riveting details emerged about Meadow’s pivotal role at the eye of this storm, according to testimony on Tuesday by his top White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson.

Meadows had been repeatedly told that threats of violence were real. Yet he repeatedly ignored calls from the Secret Service, Capitol police, White House lawyers and military chiefs to protect the Capitol, Hutchinson told the committee under oath. And then Meadows, or, at least White House staff under him, failed Trump a final time – although in a surprising way.

After Trump told supporters at a January 6 rally that he would walk with them to the Capitol, Meadows’ staff, which oversaw Trump’s transportation, refused to drive him there. Trump was furious. He grabbed at the limousine’s steering wheel. He assaulted the Secret Service deputy, who was in the car, and had told Trump that it was not safe to go, Hutchinson testified.

“He said, ‘I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,’” she said, describing what was told to her a short while later by those in the limousine. And Trump blamed Meadows.

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“Later in the day, it had been relayed to me via Mark that the president wasn’t happy that Bobby [Engel, the driver] didn’t pull it off for him, and that Mark didn’t work hard enough to get the movement on the books [Trump’s schedule].”

Hutchinson’s testimony was the latest revelations to emerge from hearings that have traced in great detail how Trump and his allies plotted and intended to overturn the election. Her eye-witness account provided an unprecedented view of a raging president.

Hutchinson’s testimony was compared to John Dean, the star witness of the Watergate hearings a half-century ago that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon for his aides’ efforts to spy on and smear Democrats during the 1972 presidential campaign.

“She IS the John Dean of the hearings,” tweeted the Brooking Institution’s Norman Eisen, who has written legal analyses on prosecuting Trump. “Trump fighting with his security, throwing plates at the wall, but above all the WH knowing that violence was coming on 1/6. The plates & the fighting are not crimes, but they will color the prosecution devastatingly.”

Meadows’ presence has hovered over the coup plot and insurrection. Though he has refused to testify before the January 6 committee, his pivotal role increasingly has come into view.

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Under oath, Hutchinson described links between Meadows and communication channels to the armed mob that had assembled. She was backstage at the Trump’s midday January 6 rally and described Trump’s anger that the crowd was not big enough. The Secret Service told him that many people were armed and did not want to go through security and give up their weapons.

Trump, she recounted, said “something to the effect of, ‘I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the mags [metal detectors] away. Let the people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.’”

As the day progressed and the Capitol was breached, Hutchison described the scene at the White House from her cubicle outside the Oval Office. She repeatedly went into Meadows’ office, where he had isolated himself. When Secret Service officials urged her to get Meadows to urge Trump to tell his supporters to stand down and leave, he sat listless.

“He [Meadows] needs to snap out of it,” she said that she told others who pressed her to get Meadows to act. Later, she heard Meadows repeatedly tell other White House officials that Trump “doesn’t think they [insurrectionists] are doing anything wrong.” Trump said Pence deserved to be hung as a traitor, she said.

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Immediately after January 6, Hutchinson said that Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president but did not do so. She also said that Meadows sought a pardon for his January 6-related actions.

Today, Meadows is championing many of the same election falsehoods that he pushed for Trump as a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a right-wing think tank whose 2021 annual report boasts of “changing the way conservatives fight.”

His colleagues include Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who pushed for Trump to use every means to overturn the election and leads CPI’s “election integrity network,” and other Republicans who have been attacking elections as illegitimate where their candidates lose.

Hutchinson’s testimony may impede Meadows’ future political role, as it exposes him to possible criminal prosecution. But the election-denying movement that he nurtured has not gone away. CPI said it is targeting elections in national battleground states for 2022’s midterms, including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Trump did not give Meadows a pardon. But in July 2021, Trump’s “Save America” PAC gave CPI $1 million.

One day after Arizona’s 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s supporters, including armed protesters, converged on Maricopa County’s ballot counting center. That morning, a local congressman, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-AZ, had amplified Trump’s stolen election claims. He tweeted that Trump votes were uncounted in his state’s most populous county because many voters had used sharpie pens, which bled through the paper and spoiled their ballots.

Although the rumor, dubbed “Sharpie-gate,” was false, Gosar made a beeline for the protest. Rather than urging those present to accept disappointing results, he validated their fears. Gosar was not alone. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another ambitious Republican – now running for the U.S. Senate as a “true conservative” – announced an investigation. These reactions, abusing their office’s prestige and authority, were not unique.

Trump called Maricopa County’s top elected Republican to pressure him to stop counting votes. The Arizona Republican Party, like the GOP in many battleground states, filed baseless lawsuits. Later that month, Trump’s Washington-based lawyers, who knew that Joe Biden won, flew into Phoenix. They met with GOP legislators, who let them use Arizona’s statehouse as a stage for making more false claims. In December, loyalists from state party officials to legislators, forged and signed a fake Electoral College certificate saying that Trump had won. Then they lobbied the vice president to count their fraudulent and illegal votes on January 6.

The fourth hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol will focus on how Trump’s team pressured local and state government officials to overturn Biden’s victory. Tuesday’s witnesses include two Republican election officials from Georgia and a state legislator from Arizona who resisted Trump’s pressure and received numerous threats from Trump supporters that have continued into 2022’s elections.

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The events in Arizona followed a template also seen in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to the panel’s disclosures and other reporting compiled by States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization advancing free, fair, and secure elections.

“The same lies and conspiracy theories that fueled the January 6 attack contributed to threatening and violent messages aimed at election officials,” its Arizona update said. “These threats were launched over email, voicemails, texts, letters, social media, and in-person events, including gathering outside election officials’ homes.”

As the hearings continue, there are not only questions of what accountability will ensue for participants in Trump’s failed 2020 coup, but what can be done about a Republicans who still embrace the stolen election lie. This past weekend, for example, the Texas Republican Party adopted these claims in its party platform. That action follows scores of election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022 and winning their primaries.

“These candidates and their successful primary campaigns are a stark reminder that the insurrection—and the lies that sparked it—did not end on January 6, 2021 or when former President Trump left office,” wrote States United’s leadership team, Noman Eisen, Joanna Lydgate and Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey’s ex-governor and a Republican) in Slate. “And they are proof that the kindling for the attack—and the continued stoking of the fire—is alive and well in the states.”

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The trio contend that local accountability would have the greatest impact with stopping the cynical and dangerous stolen election claims. They suggest disbarring the “bad lawyers” who perpetuated the evidence-free falsehoods, which means ending their legal careers. They said that “district and county attorneys can bring criminal charges” against the coup’s participants and cited the investigation in Georgia’s Fulton County, where Trump tried to get Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes to reverse Biden’s victory. (Raffensperger and his deputy are witnesses on Tuesday.)

They further suggested that local prosecutors go after militias like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for confrontations with police, citing a lawsuit by the District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine. They also suggested that state attorneys general go after Trump’s post-election fundraising where false claims were used to dupe donors, citing a Michigan inquiry that’s underway and a possible New York State investigation.

“Democracy cannot exist without the rule of law,” they wrote. “Seeking accountability for those who step outside those bounds is critical to stopping the ongoing insurrection before it’s too late. If we want to prevent an election hijack in 2022 and 2024, it’s going to take a full-speed-ahead approach to accountability. And just like with our elections, we believe those [accountability efforts] will be run and led by the states.”

Tuesday’s disclosures may suggest which legal venues would be best for seeking accountability.

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But there is another aspect of accountability that involves understanding and confronting the dysfunctional political psychologies that enabled this crisis. Pro-Trump politicians, candidates and campaigners seem to share a mindset where they valued obtaining power above other personal, public, and professional considerations. It’s one thing to be a loyal and ambitious politician. It’s another to mimic party leaders who lie, show indifference to facts, embrace chaos and violence, bilk supporters, and say such actions were patriotic — and still are.

The hearings are revealing how far people who admired or envied Trump were willing to go. As new details surface so too are suggestions for how and where to hold participants accountable. But what has not yet been revealed is what might excise the dynamic in political life that allows such self-serving people to advance, and, as just seen in Texas, to keep lying.

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But Barr and other top DOJ officials who recounted telling Trump what was wrong about his persistent claims of illegal voters, forged ballots, and altered counts, not only said that Trump refused to believe them, but that he had become “detached from reality,” as Barr put it, and instead surrounded himself with conspiratorial opportunists led by Rudy Giuliani.

In short, Trump rejected multiple FBI investigations in battleground states based on hundreds of interviews – disclosed for the first time during the committee’s June 13 hearing. Instead, he used the stolen election narrative, to, among other things, to raise $250 million from his voters, funds that the committee found were given to loyalists who fanned the stolen election lie, such a $1 million to a foundation run by Mark Meadows, his former White House chief of staff.

“The big lie was also a big rip-off,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA. “We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go.”

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However, the revelation that the Justice Department investigated stolen election claims and found nothing is a remarkable disclosure during the second hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, as federal prosecutors almost never publicly discuss investigations that do not bring charges. Those senior DOJ officials also lambasted Trump’s self-appointed election experts as “amateur” investigators and publicity hounds who knew little about how voting, voting systems, and vote counting work.

Just days before Barr resigned in mid-December 2020, he recounted a meeting with Trump where the president handed Barr a report – since repeatedly debunked, including by the GOP-majority Michigan senate – that claimed that votes had been electronically flipped from Trump to Joe Biden. (The bogus report’s authors included people who went on to lead the post-2020 review in Arizona and are still perpetuating conspiracies in Georgia). Barr, under oath said:

“He [Trump] held up the report, and then he asked that a copy of it be made for me. And while a copy was being made, he said, ‘You know, this is absolute proof that the Dominion [voting] machines were rigged. The report means that I’m going to have a second term.’ And then he gave me a copy of the report, and as he talked more and more about it, I sat there flipping through the report and looking through it. And to be frank, it looked very amateurish to me. It didn’t have the credentials of the people involved, but I didn't see any real qualifications. And the statements were made very conclusory like this, ‘These machines were designed to engage in fraud or something to that effect,’ but I didn’t see any supporting information for it. And I was somewhat demoralized because, I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with… he’s become detached from reality…’ On the other hand, when I went into this, and would, you know, tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest [by Trump] in what the actual facts were.”

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Barr was not the only senior DOJ official to describe the stolen election promoters as amateurs and propagandists. BJay Pak, the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, who was appointed by Trump and resigned two days before the January 6 insurrection, described how his office investigated how a doctored video clip – purporting to show a stash of ballots being taken from under a table and mingled with other ballots – was false. He testified:

“Unfortunately, during the [Georgia] Senate hearing, Mr. Giuliani only played a clip that showed them pulling out the official ballot box from under the table and referring to that as a smoking gun of fraud in Fulton County. But, in actuality, and review of the entire video, it showed that was actually an official ballot box that would [properly be] kept underneath the tables. And we saw them pack up because [of] the announcement that they thought they were done for the night. And then once the announcement was made that you should continue counting, they brought the ballots back out and they continued to count… The FBI interviewed the individuals that are depicted in the videos, that purportedly double, triple counting of the ballots, and determined that nothing irregular happened in the counting and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.”

Richard Donahue, a former deputy acting attorney general, recounted in videotaped testimony that he repeatedly told Trump different stolen election scenarios were false. For example, there was no truckload of ballots smuggled into Pennsylvania. There was no 68 percent error rate in Michigan’s voting machines. There was no ballot box stuffing in Georgia.

“I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Donahue said. “We look at the allegations. But they don’t pan out.”

June 13’s hearing also featured videotaped testimony from top Trump campaign officials, from campaign manager Bill Stepien to campaign attorney Alex Cannon who also said that various election theft scenarios embraced by Trump were unfounded and conveyed that to him. An Arizona based claim that “thousands of illegal citizens” voted, Cannon said, turned out to be “overseas voters voting in the election; I obviously saw people who were eligible to vote.”

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But Trump did not want to hear these views. He surrounded himself with people who kept repeating the election was stolen – loyalists who top DOJ and campaign officials debunked.

“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” Barr said. “I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

However, tens of millions of Republicans believed the words of their president and candidate, and several years after the 2020 election, still believe that it was stolen – even though Trump’s Justice Department and the FBI not only investigated and disproved those claims, but in sworn testimony to the January 6 committee, ridiculed the loyalists pretending to be investigators.