Trust in elections gets in authoritarians’ way
A national pattern emerged after the 2020 election in which unsanctioned investigators sought access to voting machines they suspected of shifting votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Thar’s fraud in them thar machines, MAGA cultists alleged, and evidence or not they would not rest until they found it, the Washington Post reports:
In states across the country, including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia, attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote.
In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state attorney general, Dana Nessel (D), requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno.
The expected Republican nominee, Nessel’s office wrote in a petition filed Aug. 5 based on the findings of a state police investigation, was “one of the prime instigators” of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. Others involved, according to the filing, included a state representative and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.
Touch screen voting machine have always drawn side-eye. After Florida in 2000, so did punch card ballots. The gold standard for voting is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a tangible record, a paper trail. Modernity being what it is, states use digital scanners to read the ballots. Tabulators are checked before voting for accuracy and ballots re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals (not in all states) along with hand counts.
Three pressured Michigan township clerks turned over tabulators to “third parties.”
The petition says tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them. The petition says that DePerno was present in a hotel room during some of the testing.
Officials got the tabulators back weeks or months later, in one instance at a meeting in a carpool parking lot. DePerno has denied any wrongdoing, as has Leaf, the Barry County sheriff. The DePerno campaign issued a statement calling the petition for a special prosecutor “an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies.”
Once election officials lose control of voting machines, the machines can no longer be used because of the risk of hacking. Moreover, voters can lose faith in the country’s electoral infrastructure when they hear about machines that have not been adequately protected, election experts warn.
In essence, take them from election officials and you’ve broken them. They must be replaced.
“Unfortunately, we have a number of instances in the last year or so where this sort of thing has happened around the country,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund versed in election procedures. “It is deeply troubling.”
Third parties accessing the machines is illegal, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson reminds the Post, but there is a broader pattern of attempts to do just that in multiple states.
In Michigan, investigators included Leaf, a “constitutional sheriff” who told clerks to keep quiet about his visits. Hawthorne, the clerk from Rutland Charter Township, is just one.
“They seem to think there was some kind of microchip in our tabulators that was throwing votes to Biden,” Hawthorne said. “But Trump won Barry County. He won by 65 percent of the vote, so I don’t know where they’re thinking that any kind of chips were in any of our machines or thinking that something had happened to them. The whole thing is nutty. It is nutty, totally nutty.”
The machine-tampering attempts are widespread enough to provoke national concern.
On Friday, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law sent a memo to organizations representing thousands of local election officials nationwide advising them of the growing problem of machine breaches and how to respond to it. “Public confidence in future elections can be severely damaged by plausible allegations that unauthorized or biased actors have been given physical access to voting equipment,” the memo says.
The memo urges officials to have a plan in place to quickly investigate possible breaches of voting machines and to replace or decommission election equipment if needed. The memo recommends practices to prevent such tampering, including closely restricting access to election systems, instituting background checks on those who have access and installing surveillance cameras.
“It is super important for election officials to know these breaches of election security are occurring and that there have been swift and strong reactions to it,” said Lawrence Norden, director of elections and government for the Brennan Center. “We want to be sure local election officials know they have an obligation to detect and quickly take remedial action if a breach occurs.”
Undermining faith in elections is the whole point of Republican fraud-mongering. From vote suppression effort like Operation Eagle Eye 60 years ago to New Jersey in 1981. From their efforts to kill off ACORN to REDMAP and their push to require photo IDs for voting. In the digital era and in the time of cable news and right-wing talk, Republicans have sown seeds of doubt among a wider audience than ever.
That their allegations of widespread fraud are baseless are beside the point. Weakening trust in the system the way they have neutered truth and agreed-upon facts is how Republicans (and now MAGA) mean to neuter democracy itself and prepare the country for a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman.
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