Zachary Roth, States Newsroom

Aiming to send a message, the Biden administration recently spotlighted its indictments and convictions in cases involving threats to election officials or workers.

But with no letup in reports of attacks, some elections professionals say federal law enforcement still isn’t doing enough to deter bad actors and ensure that those on the front lines of democracy are protected this fall.

“Election officials by and large have no confidence that if something were to happen to them, there would be any consequences,” said Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “It is very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman declined to comment for this story, instead directing States Newsroom to a webpage for the department’s Election Threats Task Force.

Launched by the Justice Department in 2021 in response to the wave of harassment of election officials that followed the 2020 election, the Election Threats Task Force works closely with local law enforcement and U.S. attorney’s offices around the country to investigate threats.

In going after those who make threats against election workers, the Justice Department is honoring a foundational purpose: The department was created in 1870 in part to protect the voting rights of southern Blacks during Reconstruction.

Run by John Keller, a top official in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the task force also includes the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the Civil Rights Division, the National Security Division, and the FBI. It also works with several other government agencies, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Since its launch, the task force has brought charges in 17 cases, according to the department’s tally. Eight cases have resulted in prison time, with sentencing scheduled in several more.

In one case, brought in Nevada, the defendant was acquitted.

In March, a Massachusetts man received a three-and-a-half-year sentence — the longest won by the task force to date — for sending an online message to an Arizona election official warning her a bomb would be detonated “in her personal space” unless she resigned.

A Texas man received the same sentence last August for posting threatening messages targeting two Maricopa County, Arizona officials and their families, and separately calling for a “mass shooting of poll workers” in precincts with “suspect results.”

‘Each of these cases should serve as a warning’

Attorney General Merrick Garland highlighted these convictions and others in a May 13 speech at a task force meeting.

“Each of these cases should serve as a warning,” declared Garland. “If you threaten to harm or kill an election worker, volunteer, or official, the Justice Department will find you. And we will hold you accountable.”

But those prosecutions amount to only a tiny share of what the Justice Department has said is over 2,000 reports of threats or harassment submitted by the election community to the FBI since the task force was launched in 2021. Around 100 of those were investigated, according to the Justice Department.

The small number of investigations and prosecutions is largely due to free speech concerns. Legal experts say that anything short of a direct and explicit threat to cause physical harm may well be protected speech under the First Amendment.

“A true threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence,” Keller has said. “If they don’t cross that line into invoking violence, they are generally not going to constitute a criminally prosecutable threat.”

Still, as the 2024 vote approaches, there’s little evidence that the volume of attacks against the people who run elections has declined, or that election workers feel safer.

A recent Brennan Center survey found that more than half of local election officials said they were concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff — around the same number as in 2022, the year of the last federal election. Around a quarter worry about being assaulted at home or at work.

“This is a widespread issue in the elections community,” said Tammy Patrick, the CEO for programs for the National Association of Election Officials, and a former election official in Maricopa County. “It’s happening all across the country. It’s not just a question of it being in swing states, or just being in the city or whatever. It’s happening in a way that is a concerted campaign to create and sow chaos.”

“There is some feeling that the task force is a political tool,” said another election expert, “that allows the administration to say they care and they’re doing something.”

Troubling episodes but little follow-up

In March 2022, anti-fraud activists, accompanied by the local GOP chair, showed up at the office of Michella Huff, the election director for Surry County, North Carolina.

Huff said the activists tried to pressure her to give them access to county voting machines, citing what they said were flawed voter rolls. The group repeatedly threatened to have Huff ousted from her job if she didn’t cooperate, and said they planned to return with the local sheriff, though they did not do so.

Huff declined to provide access to the machines, and reported the episode to the state election board’s investigations unit.

A spokesperson for the board did not respond to an inquiry about whether the report was forwarded to federal law enforcement.

Election security advocates have urged the FBI to do more to probe efforts by supporters of former President Donald Trump to gain access to voting machines in other states, warning that the breaches could have allowed for voting machine software to be compromised.

Huff said she never heard from law enforcement on any level, despite speaking publicly about the episode.

Though Huff wasn’t physically threatened, she said she’d still like to have seen federal authorities do more to respond.

“If it is truly a threat, I think every threat needs to be looked at serious(ly), and it needs to be considered as to what the intent was, if it was successful, and what the repercussions would be if it had been successful,” said Huff. “A threat is a threat.”

More overt efforts to physically intimidate election workers also have at times spurred little law enforcement follow-up.

The night before South Carolina’s 2022 primaries, a Republican candidate who has promoted lies about the 2020 election posted a message on the conservative social media site Telegram, to a group of anti-fraud activists.

“For all of you on the team tomorrow observing the polls, Good Hunting,” the message said. “We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack. Forward.”

During the voting period, groups of activists showed up at multiple polling places to verbally harass, photograph, and film election workers as they did their jobs, recounted Aaron Cramer, the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections.

The activists called the police to at least one polling site, falsely alleging evidence of fraud by election staff. The police came, but made no arrests — though the episode left the site’s lead poll manager shaken, Cramer said.

Cramer said his office provided detailed reports on both the Telegram message and the harassment at polling sites to the Department of Homeland Security, as well as to the state election commission.

“We took that threat pretty seriously,” he said, referring to the Telegram message.

He said he received a response from DHS saying the report was being looked into, but heard nothing after that.

“I don’t know what the conclusions were, or what occurred after submitting that information,” Cramer said.

But Cramer added that the experience produced a successful effort to increase collaboration with local, state, and federal authorities — with the result that the county is much better prepared to respond to, and anticipate, similar incidents this year.

“When you’re on the defense, you’re kind of reacting to everything, and I think that’s how the past was,” said Cramer. “And now we’re being proactive.”

‘I dread November for you guys’

Patrick, of the National Association of Election Officials, said that while she understands the need to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment, authorities must balance legitimate free speech concerns with their urgent duty to protect those conducting elections.

And, she suggested, they may not always be getting that balance right.

“We need to be really careful that we’re not allowing people to yell fire in a crowded theater,” Patrick said. “And that we’re not allowing people to use what they are potentially claiming as their freedom of speech as a way of creating chaos in a system, or to threaten individuals who are just trying to do their job.”

In addition, election professionals say they’ve complained for years that after they submit reports about threats and harassment to the FBI, there’s often a lack of follow-up beyond an acknowledgment of receipt.

Of course, law enforcement frequently can’t share details about their work, even with those who were targeted, in order not to compromise an investigation. But Patrick said even basic information could be helpful.

“Even letting them know that the report is being worked, so it doesn’t just go into the void, and a victim knows there’s going to be a knock-and-talk, gives the individual who made that report some sense of closure,” Patrick said, referring to when federal agents show up to speak with a suspect at their home.

The problem may be exacerbated by a lack of understanding among some in the elections world about what federal law enforcement can and can’t do. Many election officials, said Cohen, of the National Association of State Election Directors, want front-end help with steps like bolstering physical security to better prepare for incidents.

“Law enforcement, and especially federal law enforcement, is only coming at the back end,” said Cohen. “Their goal is not prevention or recovery, their goal is prosecution. And it has taken our community, I think, a long time to understand what we should be expecting from DoJ.”

Ultimately, said Cohen, the prosecutions brought by the Justice Department appear to have done little to reduce the number of threats election workers are subject to today.

“I’m really grateful that DOJ has secured convictions in Arizona,” said Cohen. “But I don’t think securing convictions in Arizona three years later has actually deterred anything in Arizona.”

Indeed, Arizona has been a hotbed for election misinformation, and its election officials continue to be targeted by a consistent stream of threats, according to multiple reports.

Huff, the county election director in North Carolina, said that with a major election approaching, members of the public often express sympathy for her and her staff — an acknowledgement that the vitriol they’ve been facing is only likely to get stronger.

“Out in public, I get that,” Huff said — ‘Boy, I dread November for you guys.’ ”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

As the Republican National Committee ramps up plans to monitor the polls for illegal voting this fall, the national party is increasingly working with a loose network of anti-fraud extremists who have been found to routinely spread election lies.

The extremists also have close ties to the prominent far-right conspiracy theorists who tried to overturn the 2020 results of the presidential election.

The director of the Republican National Committee’s department for “election integrity” – tighter voting rules that prioritize anti-fraud measures over access – spoke at an April 4 online meeting hosted by two Florida activists who are close allies of the pillow entrepreneur and leading election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

States Newsroom attended the meeting, and video of it was posted online by the organizers.

It was just one of several recent episodes in which top RNC staff have reached out to large-scale purveyors of election falsehoods or right-wing extremists as the party recruits volunteers to guard the vote.

Election officials and election administration experts have repeatedly said there is no evidence of large-scale fraud or illegal voting in the 2020 election. Hundreds of lawsuits intended to uncover significant fraud have found very little.

The GOP’s growing outreach to these groups serves as the latest warning about the threat to this fall’s vote that could still be posed by the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, election experts say.

“It’s one thing when fringe conspiracy theorists spread lies about elections,” said David Becker, an election administration expert who founded and runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “But it’s particularly disappointing to see a major political party give a platform to extremists whose testimony and statements have been found time and again to be false, and non-credible by the courts.”

“On the issue of democracy, today’s Republican Party is more irresponsible and more dangerous than it was in 2020,” said Marc Elias, a top Democratic election lawyer, in a statement that blasted the GOP’s effort to “court and nurture a network of right-wing election vigilantes.”

A spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.

Recruiting volunteer voting monitors

At the April 4 meeting, RNC election integrity director Christina Norton laid out the party’s plan to closely monitor the voting process, especially in swing states. Norton explained how the volunteers in attendance, eager to root out voter fraud, could get involved.

“We don’t see this program as being siloed or separate,” said Norton, a former deputy director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and a veteran of Florida GOP politics. “This is a full partnership with the grassroots and the local activists on the ground.”

Soon after, Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, began his own presentation, stressing that Republicans would face a challenge to overcome what he said is mass Democratic fraud in states across the country.

Based on his own “quick count” done before the call, Keshel said, five key counties in North Carolina saw a total of 150,000 fraudulent votes in the 2020 election.

There’s also “big-time abuse” in Madison, Wisconsin, said Keshel, who has made frequent presentations across the country, using comparisons of vote totals in past elections to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Milwaukee, too, has a “big-time ballot harvesting scene,” he said.

As for Arizona, Keshel declared, the state’s two largest counties are “where the cheating is going on,” though Democrats are also “stuffing margins in the event of a close race” in other parts of the state.

“The corruption of elections is based on the corruption of voter rolls, and everything springs forward from that,” Keshel said.

Neither Norton nor anyone else on the call, which organizers said reached its Zoom capacity of 500 attendees, with around 1000 more watching a livestream, objected to Keshel’s claims, for which he provided no evidence.

Jessica Marsden, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a democracy advocacy group, said it’s become common for anti-fraud activists to style themselves as data experts, and to use scraps of information to build complex conspiracy theories.

“There’s this common thread of almost pseudo-science,” said Marsden. “These fraud theories have been totally debunked, but the aura of expertise that they bring to the effort seems to be seductive to some of these audiences.”

Claims about immigrants

To promote the April 4 meeting in advance, its two hosts, Steve Stern and Raj Doraisamy, used what have been found to be lies about the threat of voting by undocumented immigrants.

In a March 26 appearance on “War Room,” the popular podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, who served as a Trump White House adviser, Stern promised: “We have so many illegal aliens in this country. They want to vote. We gotta stop them. We’re gonna tell you on April 4th how to do this.”

Bannon urged listeners to join the call, telling Stern: “You’re the best.”

A mass April 3 email sent by Doraisamy included a screenshot of a viral post on X charging that “8 million illegal aliens have invaded America under Biden,” and falsely suggesting that they’re being deliberately allowed in so that they can illegally vote for Democrats.

Thanks to this scheme, “the risk of Trump losing is now higher than ever,” Doraisamy wrote, urging readers to attend the meeting.

In fact, the claim in the post, which was also promoted by X owner Elon Musk to his over 180 million followers, is riddled with flaws, as the progressive journalist Judd Legum has shown.

Politifact has rated the claim that 8 million undocumented people have entered the country during the Biden presidency “mostly false.”

RNC courts fringe

In addition to filing a slew of lawsuits aimed at restricting voting, the RNC is planning a ground operation of volunteers to aggressively monitor the voting process.

A Trump campaign spokesperson promised in a TV appearance last month that there would be “soldiers – poll watchers, on the ground, who are making sure that there are no irregularities and fraud like we saw in the last election cycle.”

Meanwhile, a leadership change has increased Trump’s control over the national party.

In late February, Ronna McDaniel, whom Trump backers had criticized as out of touch with the grassroots, stepped down as chair. She was replaced by Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, and Michael Whatley, the former chair of the North Carolina GOP, who has emphasized the election integrity issue.

In an April 7 interview, Whatley avoided answering whether the 2020 election had been stolen.

Speaking on Fox News in March, Lara Trump pledged that the election integrity department would receive “massive resources.”

In recent weeks, the RNC has been at pains to show conservative activists – including those who have played key roles in spreading election lies – that it needs their help.

Gates McGavick, a senior adviser to Whatley and the RNC’s top spokesperson on election integrity issues, joined Stern’s podcast last month.

“We want to have open communication with the grassroots. We want to be providing as many resources as we possibly can to the grassroots,” McGavick told Stern. “Our election integrity department is a huge part of how we do that.”

And Christina Bobb, a former Trump lawyer who played a role in the Trump campaign’s “fake elector” scheme and was recently hired as a top RNC attorney, spoke with the far-right podcaster Breanna Morello last month.

“The most important aspect of election integrity from the RNC is empowering the grassroots to do what the grassroots does,” Bobb told Morello.

Bobb also joined a conference call last month with several Trump-allied groups that have spread lies about 2020, the Guardian reported.

The RNC appears not to have publicized any of these meetings, including the April 4 event with Norton, on its social media accounts or its website.

But for activists like Stern, who were used to being kept at arm’s length by the national party, the RNC’s new approach is a godsend.

“I think the RNC is the most important thing here,” Stern told Bannon as he previewed the April 4 meeting. “We’ve never been able to do this with Ronna McDaniel. But they’re coming to us now because they realize the grassroots are the important people in this country, that are going to save this country.”

Ties to conspiracy theorists

The April 4 meeting’s two organizers, Stern and Doraisamy, both have close ties to Lindell, as do several of the other speakers, who have been key spreaders of baseless claims about mass voter fraud.

Lindell spoke at a March 11 event Stern organized, video of which was posted online, to raise money and recruit conservative activists, held at Trump International Golf Club. “There is no more important patriot in this United States than Mike Lindell,” Stern declared as he introduced the conspiracy theorist.

Doraisamy was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune has reported, and went on to found a group, Defend Florida, that went door to door to gather thousands of “affidavits” from Floridians in an effort to show that the state’s 2020 election was corrupted by massive fraud. Election officials have said there’s no evidence for that.

At a 2022 event celebrating the signing into law of a controversial state measure creating an election crimes unit, which Defend Florida said was spurred by their work, Doraisamy thanked Lindell for his help with transportation for the door-to-door effort.

“We could not have been able to do that without your help,” Doraisamy said.

A 2021 Defend Florida rally included numerous Proud Boys, the self-described “western chauvinist” group that played a key role in the events of Jan. 6, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.

Grassroots activists spread fraud claims

Another speaker on the January 4 call, Linda Szynkowicz, the Connecticut-based founder of FightVoterFraud.org, claimed recently on Stern’s podcast that her team has gathered evidence of election violations committed by over 40,000 people across the country. “Most of them are class D felonies,” she added.

In Connecticut alone, Szynkowicz said, her group has found around 11,000 people that potentially can be proven to have violated election laws. She provided no evidence for the claim.

“I always have to say ‘potentially’ because I’m not law enforcement,” Szynkowicz added. “But we know we got ‘em.”

Also given a speaking spot at the April 4 meeting was Linda Rantz, who runs the Missouri chapter of Cause of America, a group that Lindell founded with the goal of getting rid of voting machines.

Another speaker, Jay Valentine, used initial funding from Lindell, the Texas Tribune has reported, to create voter data monitoring software.

According to documents obtained by the progressive group American Oversight, Valentine has worked closely with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to convince lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states to use his “fractal programming technology” to uncover mass fraud.

“Voter fraud is a nationwide crime perpetrated locally, mostly by Democrats,” Valentine has written separately, promoting the idea of a national election fraud database. “We cannot fight industrial, sovereign, large-scale, election fraud with reports, press releases, and webinars.”

Yet another April 4 speaker, Marly Hornik, founded New York Citizens Audit, which she has said conducted an “open-source audit” of the state’s voter registration database.

“We have found millions and millions of registrations that are clear violations of New York state election law,” Hornik said last year on The Lindell Report, a TV show and podcast started by Lindell. “The database is being manipulated. We have hard evidence of that.”

Last year, New York Citizens Audit received a cease and desist letter from the state attorney general, charging that the group’s volunteers “confronted voters across the state at their homes, falsely claimed to be Board of Elections officials, and falsely accused voters of committing felony voter fraud.”

To those working for a fair and peaceful election this year, it all adds up to a major concern.

“Lying about election fraud is dangerous, plain and simple,” said Marsden of Protect Democracy, noting the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well as threats leveled against election workers. “Having a major political party sign on to those lies and lend them credibility is reckless and heightens the risk of violence affecting voters and the election.”

New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and Twitter.

Fearing that Democrats hold a crucial edge in ballots cast before Election Day, national Republicans are working to convince their voters to take advantage of mail and early voting this year.

“We can’t play catch up. We can’t start from behind. We can’t let Dems get a big head start and think we’re going to win it all on Election Day,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said in November on a conference call aimed at promoting the group’s Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage early and mail voting. “Things happen on Election Day.”

But the party’s army of lawyers is, more quietly, sending a very different message. The RNC is fighting in courtrooms and legal filings in key election battlegrounds across the country to make it harder to cast a mail ballot and to have it counted.

On Feb. 20, attorneys for the RNC were in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, in a bid to require that Pennsylvania throw out mail ballots with missing or incorrect dates.

Eleven days earlier, they filed a lawsuit challenging several provisions of Arizona’s newly adopted election rules, including a rule allowing voters who have not shown proof of citizenship to cast a mail ballot.

And that same day, they asked a court in Georgia to uphold a state law that imposes stricter rules on mail voting.

Separately, in recent months the RNC has asked courts to let it join the defense of laws in Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina that similarly impose tighter rules on mail voting (judges in the latter two states denied the requests, while the Ohio motion was approved).

The party also has sued to block a New York law that lets people vote by mail without an excuse (the state’s Supreme Court this month dismissed the complaint). And it has formally weighed in against proposed changes to Nevada’s election rules, including one that makes it easier for election officials to prevent volunteer observers from disrupting the counting of mail ballots.

In January, the RNC went further than ever, filing a lawsuit in Mississippi that it has said aims to obtain a nationwide ban on mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. RNC lawyers stated plainly in their complaint that Republicans’ interests are at stake because mail voting tends to favor Democrats.

States with close races targeted

Though it’s received relatively little attention, the RNC’s legal onslaught could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Nevada are all set to be among the closest states in this year’s presidential race, while Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada host pivotal U.S. Senate contests. New York, meanwhile, is home to several swing congressional districts that could determine control of the U.S. House.

And the legal effort against mail voting has been matched by a legislative one. Thirteen states, including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Ohio, have passed 16 bills to restrict mail voting since the start of 2023, according to a database run by the Voting Rights Lab.

It all amounts to a multi-pronged effort to suppress voting by mail, voting advocates say — one that could threaten access to the ballot this fall, especially for Democrats, who are now more likely than Republicans to use mail voting. At its core are legal arguments aimed at persuading judges to interpret the law in ways that are explicitly adverse to voters.

The push sits uneasily alongside an RNC campaign to encourage GOP voters to embrace mail and early voting. But it’s right in keeping with former President Donald Trump’s years-long, evidence-free campaign against voting by mail.

“In courtrooms and state legislatures across the country, Republicans are doing everything in their power to restrict mail-in voting,” said Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, in a statement. “The RNC’s legal strategy is clear. The Republican Party no longer seeks to earn the support of a majority of the American electorate. Instead, they are launching a legal assault on our democracy.”

A spokesman for the RNC did not respond to a request for comment.

A muddled message on mail voting

In 2020, many states loosened rules on mail voting in response to COVID-19. That year’s election saw record high turnout despite the pandemic, with nearly half of all voters casting a mail ballot — a huge increase from around 22% in 2016.

Even with COVID-19 tamed, many states have kept their more liberal mail voting rules in place, or, like New York, have passed new laws expanding access to mail ballots.

While leading Democrats have embraced mail voting, Trump has repeatedly denounced it, falsely claiming it opens the door to massive fraud.

“MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020, adding that the result would be a “RIGGED” election.

It’s true that several of the extremely rare instances of proven voter fraud have involved mail voting. But there’s no evidence of systematic mail voter fraud of the kind that Trump has claimed threatens the integrity of a presidential election.

A voter fraud database run by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists 279 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots,” going back to 1988 — since which time hundreds of millions of mail ballots have been cast.

Meanwhile, GOP lawyers have gone to the mat to try to put the mail voting genie back in the bottle.

“We’ve watched Democrats systematically try to codify those post-COVID changes that they made, and we’ve been in the courts trying to keep those pre-COVID protections in place for our elections,” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel explained in October. “There’s been a battle waged.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Democrats have in recent elections used mail voting at significantly higher rates than Republicans. So pronounced is the split that in 2020, President Joe Biden won the mail vote in 14 out of 15 states analyzed by 538.com, while Trump likewise won the Election Day vote in 14 out of 15.

That’s led the GOP to fret that it now often goes into Election Day already trailing by a significant margin. In response, the RNC last year launched the Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage Republicans to vote early or by mail.

The effort includes websites in all 50 states, and even an ad recorded by Trump — albeit without much visible enthusiasm.

“Sign up and commit to voting early,” Trump says. “We must defeat the far left at their own game.”

But Trump has continued to muddy that message.

“You know, we have these elections that last for 62 days,” Trump declared last month in his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. “And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen. We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.”

RNC court filings

The RNC’s legal assault on mail voting suggests a similar view. In several court filings, RNC lawyers have suggested that tight safeguards are needed to ensure mail voting doesn’t allow for fraudulent votes.

Ohio’s law that restricts who can return a mail ballot on behalf of a voter should be upheld, the RNC argued in one typical filing, because it guards against “an increased risk of voter fraud and other irregularities.”

The Republican bid to restrict mail voting is part of a larger effort by the party since 2020 to devote more resources to “election integrity” — tighter election rules that prioritize anti-fraud measures over access. It includes a year-round election integrity legal department, which has said it worked with over 90 law firms and participated in nearly 100 lawsuits during the 2022 cycle.

So far this cycle, the RNC has paid over $4 million to two top Republican law firms, Consovoy McCarthy and Wiley Rein, according to FEC records. Thomas McCarthy, a co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, is listed on RNC motions in the Mississippi, Georgia and Wisconsin cases, among others.

The focus on “election integrity” comes as McDaniel, the RNC chair, is reported to be stepping down at the end of the month. Trump’s choice to replace her, North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley, has stressed the importance of tight voting rules for Republican success, States Newsroom has reported.

Chipping away at mail votes

The most far-reaching of the RNC’s cases is the lawsuit it filed with other Republicans in January against a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots that arrive up to five days after an election to be counted, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

Federal law sets Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the suit argues, so by extending the election past that day, Mississippi is violating federal law.

The RNC has said the goal is to obtain a ruling from a judge that bars post-Election-Day ballots from being counted not just in Mississippi but nationwide. The 5th Circuit, which contains Mississippi, is known as perhaps the most conservative judicial circuit in the country.

Election law experts have said it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that a court could accept the RNC’s argument.

If the case were to reach the Supreme Court, at least one justice appears friendly. In 2020, when the court upheld Wisconsin’s ban on late-arriving ballots, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that states have the right to set election deadlines “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue when thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

Mississippi is one of 18 states — including key battlegrounds like Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Texas, and New York — plus the District of Columbia, that count ballots that arrive after Election Day. (North Carolina last year passed a law that restricts mail voting in several ways, including by banning ballots that arrive after Election Day. It’s that law that the RNC sought unsuccessfully to help defend from a court challenge by Democrats, which is ongoing.)

The number of votes at issue could be significant. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service said it processed nearly 190,000 ballots in the two days after the election. Most of those, it said, were in states that allow late-arriving ballots.

The Mississippi lawsuit makes clear that, despite the Bank Your Vote campaign, Republicans want to curtail mail voting because they think it gives Democrats an edge.

“Because voting by mail is starkly polarized by party, [allowing late-arriving ballots] directly harms Plaintiffs,” the RNC’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “For example, according to the MIT Election Lab, 46% of Democratic voters in the 2022 General Election mailed in their ballots, compared to only 27% of Republicans. That means the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”

Pennsylvania case also crucial

The Pennsylvania case is another that could reverberate. In November 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled — in response to a suit filed by the RNC and other Republicans — that over 10,000 mail ballots on which the voter had neglected to write the date on the outer envelope, or had written an incorrect date, must be rejected.

The state’s NAACP chapter filed its own suit in federal court in response. The RNC quickly intervened, arguing that the state Supreme Court’s ruling should be upheld. A district court ruled for the NAACP in November, finding that the Civil Rights Act bars states from rejecting votes based on immaterial paperwork errors. The RNC appealed, arguing for a narrower interpretation of the landmark civil rights law, setting up the Feb. 20 hearing.

In a sign that the case could have an impact beyond Pennsylvania, 17 Republican-led states last month submitted an amicus brief in support of the RNC’s position.

The other cases may not have the same reach as those two. But together, they broadly aim to tighten the rules around mail voting to a degree that could significantly chip away at mail votes.

RNC lawyers have marshaled a range of arguments in these cases.

They have claimed, unsuccessfully, that New York’s law expanding access to mail voting violates the state’s constitution, which bans no-excuse mail voting. They’ve said Georgia’s new deadline to apply for a mail ballot of seven days before Election Day doesn’t violate the federal law barring deadlines of fewer than 11 days, because the federal government lacks the authority to regulate these deadlines.

No mail voting rule appears too small to escape the notice of RNC lawyers. This month’s lawsuit against Arizona targets a new rule that lets voters who registered without proof of citizenship — and therefore, under Arizona law, can vote in federal elections only — receive a mail ballot, arguing that state law bars these voters from voting by mail.

And they’ve submitted comments to a Nevada commission, criticizing a proposed rule there that gives election officials more power to ensure the counting process for mail ballots isn’t disrupted. The new powers could let election officials infringe on the public’s right to witness the counting, the group’s lawyers assert.

Meanwhile, supporters of mail voting say Republican fears about an influx of Democratic mail votes may be misplaced.

“Americans have used mail ballots for over a hundred years because they provide a safe and convenient way to ensure the right to vote,” said Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for mail voting. “Research has demonstrated time and time again that voting at home increases voter participation and turnout for all, with no partisan advantage for any side.”

“Attacks on mail ballots are red herrings to distract from their true intent — making it harder for citizens to vote, and sowing distrust in our elections,” Smith Warner said.

With U.S. democracy plagued by extremism, polarization, and a growing disconnect between voters and lawmakers, a set of reforms that could dramatically upend how Americans vote is gaining momentum at surprising speed in Western states.

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016, when Maine became the first state to adopt it. But increasingly, RCV is being paired with a new system for primaries known as Final Five — or in some cases, Final Four — that advances multiple candidates, regardless of party, to the general election.

Together, proponents argue, these twin reforms deliver fairer outcomes that better reflect the will of voters, while disempowering the extremes and encouraging candidates and elected officials to prioritize conciliation and compromise.

Ultimately, they say, the new system can help create a government focused not on partisan point-scoring but on delivering tangible results that improve voters’ lives.

Alaska, the only state currently using RCV-plus-Final Four or Final-Five, appears to be seeing some benefits to its political culture already: After years of partisan rancor, both legislative chambers are now controlled by bipartisan majorities eager to find common ground and respond to the needs of voters, say lawmakers in the state who have embraced the new system.

A slew of other states could soon follow in Alaska’s footsteps. Last year, Nevada voters approved a constitutional amendment that would create an RCV-plus-Final-Five system — for the measure to take effect, voters must approve it again next year.

Efforts also are underway to get RCV-plus-Final-Five on Arizona’s 2024 ballot, and RCV-plus-Final-Four in Colorado and Idaho — where organizers announced Wednesday that they’ve gathered 50,000 signatures (they need around 63,000 to qualify). Even Wisconsin Republicans, who in the redistricting sphere have fought reform efforts tooth and nail, in December held a hearing for bipartisan legislation that would create RCV-plus-Final-Five, though its prospects appear dim.

Meanwhile, Oregon voters will decide next year whether to adopt RCV alone. And this year, Minnesota and Illinois lawmakers passed bills to study RCV, while Connecticut approved a measure that allows local governments to use it.

There are even flickers of interest at the national level. In December alone, two leading Washington, D.C. think tanks that often find themselves on opposite sides — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress — each held separate panel discussions that considered RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five.

Katherine Gehl, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, and the designer of the Final Four/Five system, calls RCV-plus-Final-Five “transformational.” (Her organization now says advancing five candidates to the general works best, by giving voters more choices.)

“There’s a huge pressure on reformers to say, this is not a silver bullet,” said Gehl. “And OK, I get that.”

But, she added, “I think it’s as close to a silver bullet as you can come.”

Meanwhile, a backlash to reform is brewing, with several Republican-led states banning RCV in recent years. A coalition of national conservative election groups last month warned Wisconsin’s legislative leaders that RCV and Final Five are “intended to dramatically push our politics to the Left.”

Understanding the process

Here’s how RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five works.

In the primary election, candidates from all parties compete against each other, with voters picking only their top choice, as in a conventional election. The top four or five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.

In the general, voters use RCV to pick the winner. They fill out their ballot by ranking as many of the candidates as they want, by order of preference.

If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-place votes are allocated. If there’s still no candidate with a majority, the process is repeated with the next-to-last candidate. This continues until someone gains a majority and is declared the winner.

Supporters of the system say the Final Four/Five primary gives a voice to a broader share of voters, while the use of RCV in the general helps ensure a fairer result. Under the current system, two similar candidates together may win a clear majority but split voters between them, allowing a third candidate to win with a minority of votes.

But even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under.

Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate.

Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue. It isn’t hard to find evidence for this lately, both in Washington and in state capitals across the country.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win.

Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

“People do what it takes to get and keep their jobs,” said Gehl, the Final Four/Five designer. “So if you change who hires and fires, which is to say, November voters instead of primary voters, and you change the system so that there’s real competition in November every time, even once you’re an incumbent, that forces accountability.”

A success story from the Last Frontier?

The experience of Alaska, whose voters passed an RCV-plus-Final-Four system in 2020, offers an illustration.

At its first use in 2022, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an independent-minded Republican distrusted by the party’s conservative wing, was reelected. Mary Peltola, a moderate Democrat who kept in place her Republican predecessor’s chief of staff, was elected to the U.S. House, defeating Sarah Palin, the conservative Republican former governor. (Murkowski and Peltola endorsed each other).

Meanwhile, voters reelected Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican – suggesting, reformers say, that the system can produce a wide range of outcomes.

And more women ran in 2022 than in the five previous cycles combined — highlighting how allowing anyone to run, regardless of party, can boost opportunities for under-represented groups.

But the effect on how candidates and lawmakers have approached their jobs has been more dramatic still, advocates say.

Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican, told the Center for American Progress event that, after angering GOP voters by working collaboratively with Democrats, she lost her 2020 primary, held under the old election system, to a staunch conservative. Giessel had been in office since 2011.

Giessel said that when she ran again last year under RCV-plus-Final-Four, her campaign didn’t even buy the database showing voters’ party affiliations that most candidates rely on to identify supporters, because she needed to target voters of all stripes. Helped by being the second choice of many Democratic voters in the general election, Giessel won back her seat.

“You’re requiring us as candidates to be much more authentic,” said Giessel of the new system. “We’re not speaking to a party platform anymore. We’re speaking to the citizens.”

Giessel now leads a bipartisan majority coalition, formed within days of the election. Members have focused on consensus issues that are priorities for voters, including boosting education funding, lowering the cost of energy and passing a balanced budget.

“We have seen much more collaboration on the budget,” said Giessel. “There’s a much more open process now, understanding that everyone needs to have input.“

An analysis by the R Street Institute, a center-right Washington, D.C. think tank, found that Alaska’s new election system “gave citizens greater choice and elevated the most broadly appealing candidates, in turn improving representation.”

Reformers in Nevada — gearing up for next year’s campaign to pass RCV-plus-Final-Five a second time after it won with 53% of the vote last year — have noticed Alaska’s early success.

Over 40% of all registered voters in the Silver State aren’t affiliated with a major party, and the figure is growing. It was these voters’ frustration over being denied a voice in the state’s taxpayer-funded closed primaries that initially drove the push for reform, said Mike Draper, the communications director for Nevada Voters First, a political action committee that organized the ballot measure.

As in Alaska and elsewhere, there was also a related concern about politicians playing only to their base.

“Candidates and electeds, through no fault of their own, are not incentivized to … work to solve problems,” said Draper. “The primary incentive is to make sure they stay in the good graces either of the party, or of that fringe group that’s active in the primaries.”

Top figures in both major parties, including Nevada’s Republican governor and its two Democratic U.S. senators, oppose reform. A lawsuit brought by Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias that aimed to keep the measure off the 2022 ballot was rejected by a judge.

‘A scheme of the Left’?

Though elected Democrats in Nevada and some other blue states have come out against reform, the most vocal opponents have been red-state Republicans and national conservative groups. They argue it would confuse voters and further reduce confidence in election results.

Some even see a progressive plot. An October analysis by the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability called RCV a “scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats.”

Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota — all Republican-controlled states — have passed legislation in recent years to ban RCV. Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature also passed an RCV ban, but it was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

In Alaska, conservatives have launched a campaign to advance a ballot measure repealing their state’s reform. Palin, who has blamed the system for her loss to Peltola last year, calling it “wack,” is playing a prominent role in the effort.

Still, advocates say there are also signs of emerging interest among some Republicans in other states.

Last year, the GOP lost several winnable statewide races after primary voters nominated extremists like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona. Now, some in the party think reform could allow them to advance more electable candidates.

“Even among Republicans, I’ve had my fair share of conversations where they are starting to recognize that the system isn’t putting forward candidates who are necessarily the best general election winners,” said Matt Germer, an associate director and elections fellow at the R Street Institute.

“So there’s even some growing interest among Republican electeds to say, hey, what we’re doing now is not growing our party. And if we really want to change our country, we’re going to need to grow our party, and that means appealing to enough voters to win elections.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

Back in July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

A federal court had recently granted a temporary injunction, in Missouri v. Biden, finding that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to remove content, related both to elections and the COVID-19 vaccine, that it deemed false and harmful.

The ruling is being appealed to the Supreme Court, which last month temporarily blocked the order. But one committee member wanted to press the advantage.

“What is disinformation?” asked Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“Disinformation is inaccurate information…” Mayorkas began.

“Who determines what’s inaccurate?” Johnson interjected almost immediately. “Who determines what’s false? You understand the problem here?”

Moments later, Mayorkas testified that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a unit of DHS whose activities were part of the case, focuses on fighting disinformation from foreign adversaries — speech that would likely enjoy fewer First Amendment protections than speech by Americans.

But Johnson was ready.

“No, sir,” Johnson said. “The court determined you and all of your cohorts made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech. So don’t stand there under oath and tell me that you only focused on … foreign actors. That’s not true.”

“I so, so, regret that I’m out of time,” Johnson concluded.

Johnson’s forceful performance lit up right-wing media, burnishing his credentials as a conservative stalwart and a fiercely effective Republican partisan.

This was hardly the first time that Johnson had put the Biden administration on the defensive over its efforts to fight online disinformation — false or misleading information that is deliberately spread to advance a political or ideological goal. In fact, in recent years, there appear to have been few national issues on which Johnson, who in October was elected by the GOP as speaker of the House, has played a more prominent role.

Johnson’s efforts have largely succeeded. Since 2020, the federal government and social media companies have scaled back their work to counter online disinformation — thanks in part, experts say, to the furious pushback from Johnson and other leading Republicans.

Disinformation specialists increasingly worry that voters in next year’s election may have to contend with a barrage of lies flowing freely online.

“It’s going to be a wild ride,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who studies how people respond to disinformation. “We are going to see a deluge of misinformation and … a great deal of confusion online.”

A spokesman for the speaker’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the growing concerns about election-related disinformation.

Pulling back on countering disinformation

In 2020, amid a flurry of online lies about both the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, social media companies stepped up their efforts to curb disinformation, including labeling some of President Donald Trump’s tweets as misleading.

These initiatives, especially the platforms’ work to limit the spread of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the election’s final weeks, spurred a backlash from conservatives. Though information from the laptop hasn’t been shown to significantly implicate President Joe Biden, the authenticity of the laptop itself has since been confirmed

The ensuing pressure campaign by congressional Republicans like Johnson, decrying what they call censorship and collusion by government and Big Tech, has led both the Biden administration and the platforms themselves to rein in their efforts to protect voters from disinformation.

Last year, DHS announced the Disinformation Governance Board, charged with coordinating efforts to identify and counter online disinformation. Weeks later, after a fierce Republican backlash, it shuttered the panel.

CISA, the DHS agency about which Johnson grilled Mayorkas in July, has stopped reaching out to social media companies to share information, NBC News recently reported. The same outlet also reported that the FBI recently put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence campaigns. The bureau’s interactions with the platforms now must be pre-approved by government lawyers.

Another DHS program, Rumor Control, which provided quick responses to election disinformation on election night and beforehand, also appears to be on the wane, NPR reported.

The government’s retreat has upped the onus on social media companies to proactively monitor disinformation. But these efforts, too, are set to be less robust in 2024 than they were in 2020, after layoffs have reduced staffing on trust and safety teams.

Last year, Meta loosened constraints on political advertising to allow ads on Facebook and Instagram that question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. And X owner Elon Musk announced recently that he has eliminated the site’s elections integrity team, claiming it was “undermining election integrity.”

Experts suggest the more hands-off approach from the platforms is in part a response to the Republican outrage, which has left tech leaders reluctant to alienate powerful figures who may expand their control of the federal government just over a year from now.

“The platform leadership often felt that 2020 put them in a horrible position for potentially what the next administration might look like,” said Tim Harper, who runs the Elections and Democracy program at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which advocates for tech policies that promote democracy. “And so they’re a little bit more wary of what the political implications could be after the 2024 election.”

Meanwhile, technological advances, especially those involving generative AI, have made online disinformation much more sophisticated and harder to see through than in past elections.

“Think about where we were in 2016 and 2020,” said Wineburg, the Stanford disinformation expert. “The St. Petersburg labs spewing disinformation, often with spellings and tortured grammar — that’s gone. Just plug it into an LLM (a Large Language Model — an AI-driven algorithm that can convincingly generate human language text) and it’s going to look like it’s not only by a native speaker, but a native speaker who understands proper grammar.”

Johnson warned of ‘censorship industrial complex’

Since his ascension to the speaker job last month, Johnson’s leading role in the Republican pushback has received little attention. But, over the last year-and-a-half, he has used congressional hearings, legislation, and conservative media appearances to relentlessly warn about the dangers of what he has called the “censorship industrial complex.”

When Mayorkas announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, it was described as a working group with no operational authority. But conservatives were quick to paint it as an Orwellian scheme to censor political speech.

The far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, who has 1.7 million followers on X, called the panel a “Ministry of Truth” — language soon picked up by Johnson and other congressional Republicans.

“The Biden Administration’s decision to stand up a ‘Ministry of Truth,’ is dystopian in design, almost certainly unconstitutional, and clearly doomed from the start,” Johnson said in a press release announcing legislation he was introducing to defund the board. “The government has no role whatsoever in determining what constitutes truth or acceptable speech.”

A week later, in a sign that Republicans recognized the benefits of highlighting the issue, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy introduced his own version of Johnson’s bill, with Johnson as a co-sponsor.

Johnson and other Republicans also seized on the news that the board would be run by Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation scholar. They noted that ahead of the 2020 election, Jankowicz had called the Hunter Biden laptop a “Russian influence op.”

“She’s supposed to be in charge of determining what is true and what is acceptable speech, and it’s just outrageous,” Johnson told Newsmax.

Jankowicz was targeted with abuse and death threats, and within weeks she had resigned. When, not long after, the board was shuttered entirely, it was perhaps Republicans’ most concrete victory on the issue.

But Johnson hasn’t let the subject drop. In March, he appeared on Fox News to discuss a subpoena issued to Jankowicz by a newly formed House subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government, chaired by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, to which Johnson had been named.

“We have a lot of questions about the foundation of (the disinformation board),” Johnson said. “How were they going to determine what is so-called disinformation? What were they going to do with this? It’s pretty scary. We have to make sure that this never ever happens again.”

Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.

“The executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,” Johnson declared. “That’s the headline. That’s the takeaway today.”

In May, at another hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, this one focused on the FBI, Johnson said the bureau “worked with the social media platforms hand in hand, almost as partners over the last two election cycles, to censor and silence conservatives online that they disagreed with.”

At yet another hearing In July, not long after the federal court ruling that the bureau and other agencies had violated the First Amendment, Johnson grilled FBI director Christopher Wray.

Like Mayorkas, Wray said his agency focused on disinformation from foreign adversaries.

“That’s not accurate,” Johnson jumped in. “You need to read this court opinion because you’re in charge of enforcing it … (It) wasn’t just foreign adversaries, sir, it was American citizens. How do you answer for this?”

That same month, Johnson teamed up with Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to introduce more legislation on the subject. The Free Speech Protection Act would bar executive branch employees from censoring protected speech and impose “mandatory severe penalties” on executive branch employees who censor protected speech. The bill has not advanced in the House.

“The dystopian scheme by the government, Big Tech, academia, and many NGOs to censor American citizens and silence conservative voices is far-reaching and dangerous,” said Johnson.

The outrage generated by Johnson and his colleagues has had an impact. As the 2024 election looms, experts say, those looking to undermine elections by using false information to confuse voters online are in a stronger position than ever — not least because they will have had four more years to perfect their craft.

“There are people who are highly incentivized to harm our democracy by raising doubt about elections, and they have been actively organizing and raising money over the last three years,” David Becker, the founder and executive director for the Center on Election Innovation and Research, which works with election officials to improve election administration and build voter trust, recently told States Newsroom. “In 2020, those that were trying to undermine that election were largely making it up as they went along with crazy legal theories and chasing bizarre pieces of disinformation. They are going to be better prepared.”