Today’s edition of the NYT The Daily podcast, “The Army of Election Officials Ready to Reject the Vote,” is alarming. There is not yet a transcription but it’s based on Jim Rutenberg’s 25 October NYT Magazine report of the same name. Like the podcast interview, it’s anecdote-driven:
When Clara Andriola took her seat at the Washoe County, Nev., commission meeting room on July 9, she looked out at a sea of angry faces. The commission is Washoe’s main legislative body, and Andriola, a longtime local business executive, was appointed to fill a vacancy on the five-person board last year. She had just won a Republican primary that would almost certainly allow her to keep that seat in the November general election. The commission was required by law to certify elections at every level, from local primary to presidential election. What came next should have been a simple administrative procedure.
But the restless crowd had other ideas. For three hours, they told stories of a primary gone wrong. Some raised concerns about small bureaucratic errors, like improperly addressed ballots. Others shared more exotic allegations, including an unsubstantiated rumor circulating on X about a Serbian scheme to manipulate voting machines. The stories did not add up to any clear theory about what happened or why, but the community had come to believe that democracy was threatened and that there was only one way to save it: They wanted Andriola to vote with her two Republican colleagues to deny her own victory.
Andriola took her legal duty to certify elections seriously, and the stakes of her decision reached far beyond Nevada. Like thousands of administrators around the country, Washoe County commissioners are charged with certifying elections not just at the commission level but also as the first step in the process of formalizing the presidential results nationally. And Washoe wasn’t just any county. It was a swing district in a swing state.
For that reason, Andriola’s hyperlocal primary had taken on national importance. Washoe County’s longest-serving commissioner, Jeanne Herman, was one of the first and only local commission members in the country to vote against certifying Biden’s win in 2020, “because the election was improper,’’ she told me. She was outvoted at the time by the four other commissioners. But in 2022, a local cryptocurrency multimillionaire named Robert Beadles and a growing movement of election denialists helped elect a second commissioner who expressed doubt about the 2020 results, Mike Clark. With one more like-minded Republican commissioner, the doubters would have a three-vote majority.
Andriola had touted her support of Donald Trump in her campaign ads, but she also said that elections “should not be a partisan issue.” She won the primary by a comfortable margin against several election-denying challengers, and her victory was affirmed even after Beadles financed a recount. (Technically the July 9 meeting was for a second certification, of the recount.)
Long story short, Andriola voted not to certify in the face of pressure from the crowd and an inaccurate charge from the district attorney that she could “vote her conscience” but ultimately certified the vote once she understood that this was incorrect.
But what’s crucial to understand here isn’t the single incident but the sea change that’s happened since 2020’s Stop The Steal movement. A concerted effort to persuade people that our entire election system is rife with fraud has spawned a grass roots movement to challenge every election result everywhere and, crucially, install people on local election boards prone to support these conspiracy theories. They have been quite effective.
The upshot is that, unlike 2020, where even Republican Secretaries of State in traditionally red states (with Georgia the most notable instance) did their duty in certifying the pro forma certification of local boards, we may have enough local boards out there who simply refuse to certify.
What struck me from the podcast version was the sheer earnestness of the movement. While I’m quite sure the leadership are a combination of cynics and cultists, the folks out there who have been organized come across as True Believers. A massive effort to find evidence of fraud has produced hundreds of micro-examples of suspicious behavior. And, while pretty much all of it has been debunked, those predisposed to believe fraud find the debunking to be further evidence that there’s a conspiracy. Defenders of the system are, in essence, forced to prove a negative, which is next to impossible.
Further, while my instinct throughout was that this was a Heads I Win, Tails You Lose situation—that is, a Trump/Republican win would be evidence that the election was not stolen while a Harris/Democrat win would be evidence that it was—-it’s actually worse than that. These folks have been so poisoned that they simply believe the entire edifice of our system—the voting machines, the tabulation process, the certification process, etc.—is flawed.
