A blockbuster story in Rolling Stone magazine in July launched a new election focus area for investigative reporters in the US — and revealed an alarming new threat to the country’s increasingly fragile democracy.
Sign up here for a GIJN webinar on threats to certification and voter eligibility in US elections, held on Tuesday, October 1. The panel will include Justin Glawe, author of the Rolling Stone investigation; Carrie Levine, managing editor at Votebeat; Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); and will be moderated by Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice.
This investigation revealed that — in major counties within the six US states likely to decide the election — 67 conspiracy theorists who believe that Joe Biden is not the legitimate US president have risen to key official posts in their local election systems. Significantly, it also showed that 22 of these 67 county officials have already acted on their election denialism and conspiracist beliefs: either refusing to certify or delaying certification of at least 25 valid local election results since 2020, based on contrived voter fraud concerns.
The story quoted a warning from prominent election lawyer Marc Elias that “I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the [2024] election,” and detailed the strategy behind these local refusals: to sow chaos, disinformation, and “run out the clock” on normal results deadlines, thus triggering a legal pathway to divert the choice of next president away from voters and toward partisan politicians and judges.
Thanks to the state-by-state complexity of US voting rules, and the fact that deeply polarized parties, rather than an independent commission, play key roles in administering the process, the country’s elections are vulnerable. This is especially true since the tipping point for the presidential winner could very well be decided by just a few thousand votes — or discounted votes — in a handful of states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Fears of this nightmare scenario have increased with claims by Republican candidate Donald Trump that he can only be defeated by cheating from his opponent, and by his unprecedented step of publicly naming and praising denialist election board members who have replaced officials that followed established rules.
Weeks after the Rolling Stone exposé, watchdog research group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) released a report that echoed the findings: listing 35 election officials across eight states who have refused to perform their largely pro forma duty of certifying results — and who “may be in a position to do so again” because they remain in office. Titled “Election Certification Under Threat,” the report serves as a useful reference tool for investigative journalists because it also lists legal solutions to this partisan threat to the November voting, as well as the weak points in an election administration system that never anticipated the use of procedural rules as an opportunity to sabotage democracy. The researchers warned: “If county officials successfully obstruct certification, it could have a cascading effect on state and federal certification deadlines. It could also lead to mass disenfranchisement of qualified voters.”
Justin Glawe, an independent journalist based in Georgia, in Puerto Rico in October 2019. Photo: Courtesy of JustinGlawe.com
In an interview with GIJN, the author of the Rolling Stone investigation, Justin Glawe, says his findings, and those from CREW, were likely “just the tip of the iceberg.” He adds that watchdog reporters in the US would be wise to use the few weeks remaining ahead of the election to dig deeper into denialist election officials and any coordination with political campaigns, partisan lawyer groups, and donors.
In a sentiment echoed by an influential New York Times op-ed that cites the story, Glawe says investigations into certification obstruction can play a critical “prebunking” role, by defusing a potential wave of false voter fraud claims after Election Day and alerting the public to the declared intention of officials and election boards ahead of time.
“There are just so many stories still to be investigated on this threat,” he notes. “We should be tying the election denial actions and tactics of local election officials to political campaigns; to party committees — to anybody who is outside of these counties but influencing their results.”
He adds: “Also, my story was just focused on pivot [closely-contested] counties; there are so many counties no one has looked at yet.” An independent journalist based in Georgia, Glawe runs an investigative newsletter called American Doom, which features a more extensive list of denialist officials.
While Glawe drew on some excellent prior investigative work — including a 2023 ProPublica story on midterm result rejections — he says there were two reasons why broad investigations into certification refusals are difficult, and rare. First, because of the sheer diversity of election authority structures in different states — from boards of supervisors and county commissions to local election councils and secretaries of state — this reporting requires patient, systematic research. Secondly, Glawe argues that the general watchdog focus moved away from the threat of election denialism itself after a wave of denialist political candidates lost their races in the 2022 midterm election for Congress.
“There was this narrative that ‘Oh, election denialism lost at the ballot, so it’s going away,’” he recalls. “But I was thinking: ‘Wait a minute: all these lower level denialists are still in these positions of power locally — election denialism is alive and well, and will have consequences for the 2024 election.’”
While county-level certification is generally deemed to be a merely “ministerial task,” the election threat was amplified by two new laws in Georgia in August that now give county officials discretion over certification, and also empowers these officials to delay results to “examine all election related documents.” (Learn the normal certification procedures in this excellent explainer from Democracy Docket.)
The demographic profile of denialists: most are white and Generation X (ages 44 to 59) and are far more likely than other groups to use Facebook as their primary social media platform.
Glawe spent much of the past three years painstakingly building databases of local election officials, with the help of a research colleague, Bree Zender. He scraped social media posts and watchdog databases to identify those that have publicly stated denialist sentiments. And he culled local media reports for refusal instances in cases that have often gone unnoticed by major media.
However, there were also two things that made such an investigation possible for such a small research team. One was the demographic profile of denialists: that most are white and Generation X (ages 44 to 59) and are far more likely than other groups to use Facebook as their primary social media platform. The other was that, unlike militia groups or far-right politicians who delete compromising statements, these officials truly believe the falsehood of a rigged 2020 election, and are generally proud to make public statements about it.
Methods Glawe found useful for the investigation are included below.
Keyword search via the “three dots” search function on the top right of Facebook pages, for accounts where this is enabled. “Facebook has a couple of search mechanisms that some reporters still don’t know about,” said Glawe. “One reporter complained that ‘I can only scroll so far’ on these accounts — but, in general, you can go much deeper.”
The Facebook calendar filter function allows you to search posts on the day of past political events. “There were some we could not identify because they had robust privacy settings,” he explains. “Almost all were from Facebook, with some more outspoken officials on Twitter — people seeking attention to rise through the ranks.”
A WhitePages account — to look up verifying information such as hometowns of subjects.
Google Sheets spreadsheets for election bodies, and to keep track of active or inactive election roles, and denialist attitudes.
Published FOIA archives on anti-democratic tactic communication. Glawe found key records of communications between denialist officials in the FOIA archives of the non-partisan watchdog group American Oversight. “They are doing crucial work on this topic that people should know about,” he says. “When I was doing media searches on some random county election board country, what often came up were emails American Oversight had obtained via FOIA requests for communications records. They have an incredibly detailed, searchable website for relevant FOIAs.” FOIA requests can be found under the “Document Type” submenu on American Oversight’s Documents page.
Watchdog databases on America’s far right. Glawe says useful databases for this work include the Insurrection Index; the Election Threat Index from Public Wise; the Resources dashboard at the States United Democracy Center; and the Center for Media and Democracy’s Insurrection Exposed database. Glawe says he was able to identify 17 denialist officials in swing counties using Public Wise’s database that he had not found otherwise.
“I had to start with: how many states have local election administration?” he recalls. “Many elections board officials are listed online, but many are not, so we had to call each election body to get the names and their party affiliations, and go from there.”
He adds: “With common names: ideally, they would have posted something about being an election official, but in the event they didn’t, there would be a local newspaper recording their appointment to the election board with a grip-and-grin photo. And we could compare that to the picture on Facebook or LinkedIn.”
While the verification of individual denialists is essential, Glawe says one important approach to this kind of investigation is to not seek to be comprehensive on totals, and to be transparent to readers about changing numbers and reporting limits.
His investigation states: “Examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials shows unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.” For Glawe, this combination makes the prospect of US election certification refusals this November even more alarming, because, he warns, “it would greatly increase the risk of political violence.”
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.
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Publish date : 2024-09-01 22:14:00
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