Lindsey Miller: Election Officials Under Attack By Bad-Faith Actors Are Resigning In Record Numbers. That Should Concern You.
By Lindsey Miller
In the years since election denialism and The Big Lie motivated thousands to violently try to disrupt the final certification of the 2020 election, anti-democracy actors have continued to reject election results, interfere with the local administration of elections, and attempt to spread further distrust throughout the vote-counting process.
They wield disinformation as a weapon, exploit the public’s lack of knowledge about the post-vote process to sow confusion and try to throw sand in the gears of election administration at every opportunity.
Dedicated and experienced public servants like registrars, clerks, and county board members are key to ensuring that our elections run smoothly—but election deniers and anti-democracy actors are making it monumentally harder for these officials to perform an already demanding and hard job.
Election offices from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio have been inundated with public records requests, thought to be due to election deniers sending requests about 2020 or attempting to validate conspiracy theories. Even worse, one in every six election workers has been threatened, according to a recent Brennan Center survey. The Department of Homeland Security identified the use of violence at voting locations and against election officials as a top concern going into the 2024 election. Officials have been doxxed, had their homes swatted, faced angry mobs, and received suspicious powder-laced letters.
As a result of this toxicity, we’re seeing resignations, early retirements, and even attempts at recalls because officials refuse to bend the law. A registrar in Nevada was driven out by election deniers. The elections director in Arizona’s Cochise County resigned after defending midterm ballots from those seeking to overturn the will of voters. Officials have decided that working to ensure the smooth functioning of our democracy is no longer worth the toll in this new, hostile landscape.
Since 2019, Pennsylvania has lost a whopping 293 combined years’ worth of experience overseeing elections from departing officials. And where there once were only conspiracy theories falsely threatening the accuracy of our elections, this widespread loss of expertise creates a real vulnerability in our ability to carry out the democratic process.
Experienced officials and election workers make sure that the small human errors that happen every election don’t snowball into a crisis amplified on the 6 o’clock news, which then becomes the seed of the next election denial conspiracy theory, as we saw recently in Northampton County, Penn. And most critically, they work to ensure that no voter’s trip to the polls ends in disenfranchisement.
Perhaps even worse than the risks posed by an overreliance on inexperienced election workers is the problem caused when election deniers themselves fill the vacancies, and bring with them an intent to disrupt the process.
That’s why we at Informing Democracy work to support the job of administering elections by shining a light on the people and processes behind them—so that voters know what should happen after casting their ballot and have confidence that the layers of built-in error checks and audits ensure that election outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters. Following the 2022 elections, we found more than 200 officials who provoke concern due to their actions and rhetoric.
In 2024, we will continue to review election officials’ records to uncover those who are not committed to a free and fair election and publish our findings so pro-democracy groups can be prepared to combat any attempts to sabotage the vote-counting process after polls close in November. Election deniers are poised to fill the void these experienced officials are leaving, but we will uncover them.
If you want to help ensure that every vote—regardless of who it is for—is cast and counted, and the rightful winner seated, one of the most important things you can do is become involved in your local election process. Opportunities range from being a poll worker on Election Day to running for local office. Each plays a vital role in ensuring our fellow Americans’ voices are heard at the ballot box.
We need believers in our democracy to stand up. Together, we can and will protect it from the election deniers who want to overturn the will of the people.
Lindsey Miller is the Director of Strategic Research at Informing Democracy and manages the organization’s portfolio of election officials. She has more than a decade of experience researching elected officials, political candidates, and policy areas.
