Everyone agrees the 2020 election ended in disaster, though it wasn’t because of the results.
After President Joe Biden was announced as the projected winner of the election, opponent and then President Donald Trump went on a legal rampage in an attempt to challenge and discredit the results. Not only were the results challenged in court, but Trump also took to his social media channels and to the podium to spread lies, claiming the election was “rigged” or even “stolen.”
Now, four years later, election deniers have taken over positions of authority with local boards of elections across the nation, particularly in key swing states like North Carolina.
Rolling Stone, in partnership with the website American Doom, released an exclusive story breaking down how these 70 or so election deniers could jeopardize the ability to certify the election results in November. The identified election deniers in charge of local elections are reportedly from the following states: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. All of those states — except North Carolina — went to Biden in 2020. At deadline,Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris leads in polls for all states.
In North Carolina, American Doom found eight different officials of concern: John Adams of Burke County; George C. Hague in Pasquotank County who has consistently posted anti-LGBTQ+ and racially insensitive memes on his public Facebook page with some of the attacks geared toward the Elizabeth City mayor; Byron Waters of Halifax County, who has posted memes attacking President Biden and reposts of PragerU videos filled with conspiracies and misinformation; and Anthony Iovino of Burke County, who has taken to Facebook to question Harris’s racial identity and calling those who are against Trump or Republicans “stupid.” Other election officials who are known to be deniers include Tim DeHaan and Jerry Forestieri, both of Surry County.
In Mecklenburg county there are two election officials in question: Elizabeth McDowell and Mary Summa. Summa is a member of the Board Of Elections (BOE) and serves as the General Counsel for the North Carolina Values Coalition. McDowell is listed as a Republican and secretary for the BOE. Both previously voted against certifying election results for President Biden in Charlotte’s home county in 2020.
Of the around 70 officials identified across the aforementioned swing states, 22 have gone on to refute or delay certifying election results in the last four years.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election,” says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless and more prepared.”
Certifying election results were seen as nothing more than a “ministerial task” prior to 2020, but since then, Republicans have used the process to exacerbate claims of voter fraud and to spread misinformation. But not only does this allow conservatives to undermine the integrity of our electoral system, it permits the refusal to uphold the results of a democratically decided election. According to the reporting from Rolling Stone, Republicans have already refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election.
David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County outside Atlanta, is one of the spearheads among the election denying movement in Georgia. He took to Facebook in recent months to claim there were “NO guidelines on what is required to certify an election in Georgia,” which is false. Every state has its own due process to certify elections, as each individual state is responsible for managing elections as laid out by the U.S. Constitution.
But Hancock isn’t the only election official who is completely unaware of how the system he’s a part of works.
“I don’t trust the runoff,” Larry Brown, an election official in Pickens County, Georgia, stated in the weeks leading up to Sen. Raphael Warnock facing Republican Kelly Loeffler in a runoff election in 2020. ““The general election has turned in to a mess (sic).”
Walter Nowosad, a commissioner in Douglas County, Nevada, shared an article claiming the Trump legal team was hiding evidence of voter fraud in the days after Trump’s election loss. Another Douglas County commissioner, Danny Tarkanian, wrote mail-in ballots are “the biggest issue in our election integrity, along with ballot harvesting. This is what the GOP should be questioning.”
Lizzie Ulmer is a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, an organization which tracks election deniers both in federal and state agencies. She said election deniers are zeroing in on the certification process as a way to call the results of the election into question.
“From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election … it’s all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election,” Ulmer says. “It makes sense that certification has become one of the tactics used by the election-denier movement to throw sand into the gears of running a free, fair, and smooth election.”
Up to this point, all refusals to certify election results have been struck down in court. However, like Ulmer clearly says, pro-Trump election deniers are organizing amongst themselves to try to challenge the 2024 results. When you pair that with some of the comments Trump has made in the last few days (“Get out and vote, just this time … you won’t have to do it any more”), you get a recipe for an attempt to dismantle democracy as we know it.
In fact, there was a scenario in Washoe County, Nevada, that could replay itself on the national scale this year.
Republican Clara Andriola was a moderate Republican who fell out of favor with her party after she refused to spew misinformation regarding the 2020 election. She faced Mark Lawson — a former firefighter who was fired for possession and distribution of steroids and an adamant election denier — in an election for county commission, the body which oversees the election process in Washoe.
Andriola went on to win the election, but not without challenges from the election-deniers on the commission already. Local Republicans went on to claim something was amiss with the mail-in ballots, implying voter fraud was present. Because of these claims, Washoe County commissioners Michael Clark and Jeanne Herman (both Republicans) voted against certifying the results. Nevada businessman Robert Beadles, an outspoken election denier who also happened to help finance Lawson’s campaign, paid $150,000 to have a recount.
But three recounts only revealed Lawson had lost by one more additional vote than previously thought. That wasn’t enough for some folks — they started to demand a hand count or a whole new election altogether. The Nevada secretary of state and Washoe’s county attorney had to intervene in order for the results to be certified by the board.
Counties such as Washoe will be critical in determining which way swing states like Nevada will go, and could even be the difference in who is elected as president. Refusals to certify results or delaying certification at the local level will result in delays at the state and, in turn, the national level.
It’s clear to this writer what’s going on: conservative, election-denying Trump supporters are organizing to overthrow any election results they don’t agree with. While they are claiming to do this as a way to “save” America, intervening in the democratic process will be the death of our Republic and the beginning of a regime of right-wing policies and hateful rhetoric.
There is an interesting book “Our Final Presidential Vote” in which a Trump-like character declares himself the winner of the 2024 Presidential election by instructing his team not to certify results in swing states.