Election Workers Are Facing Immense Pressure to Back Trump’s Lies
Throughout the 2024 campaign, federal law enforcement and election officials from both sides of the aisle have consistently sounded the alarm about the cascade of right-wing, Donald Trump-inspired threats that election workers are facing as they attempt to perform the basic, essential task of administering America’s democratic elections.
Now, Election Day is here, and Team Trump, conservative activists, dark-money groups, and the world’s richest man are leading a coordinated and multi-pronged pressure campaign to coerce election workers into doing Trump’s bidding — pressing them to refuse to certify the 2024 election results, based on conservatives’ unfounded claims of voter fraud and Trump’s incessant lies about how Democrats are stealing the election from him.
The sprawling pressure campaign involves crowdsourcing false fraud claims on platforms like X, the platform owned by billionaire Trump booster Elon Musk, and efforts by Trump-aligned dark-money groups to alternately lobby and intimidate local election officials, to try to persuade them to throw out election results that don’t favor the former president.
With the power of X amplifying their efforts, this network of Trump supporters hopes to build the narrative of a stolen election based on unsupported claims of voter fraud. In many cases, this supposed evidence simply reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic functions of election administration, as is frequently apparent on Musk’s “Election Integrity Community” on X.
Musk has requested that users submit instances of “election integrity issues” to this community, which features branding from his pro-Trump Super PAC, America PAC. It has quickly become an online corkboard for misinformation and conspiracies.
Speaking about Musk’s effort to turn X into a Trumpist election “fraud”-watching machine, a Trump campaign official tells Rolling Stone that “we” — including the former president — “are head over heels in love with what he’s doing.”
That feeling is common though not universally shared within the upper ranks of Trumpville. For instance, one conservative lawyer — who is busy working on the Team Trump efforts to prepare for a potential post-election battle royale in the courts — says this week that they’ve perused allegations and so-called evidence flagged in Musk’s X “community,” and they have primarily seen materials that are “just completely wrong” and would fall apart in court instantly.
“It’s very reminiscent of the Rudy stuff,” the staunchly Trump-backing attorney says, referring to the conspiracy theories and garbage “evidence” pushed by the Rudy Giuliani-fronted legal team during Trump’s post-2020 election attempts to cling to power. “We keep saying we want to avoid all that” if a protracted legal fight materializes between Team Trump and Team Harris, “so we don’t get humiliated in front of a judge,” the lawyer adds.
For all their supposed efforts to run a cleaner operation than Giuliani’s world-historically shambolic one, Trump and his closest and most prominent allies have shown an eagerness for throwing out numerous election-denial conspiracy theories and dirty tricks in this year’s presidential contest.
Then there’s the lobbying campaign being carried out by conservative dark-money groups.
In Cobb County, Georgia, an organization called Follow the Law 2024 recently sent a letter to election officials encouraging them to “stop fraud or dishonesty,” suggesting their role in certifying results is discretionary, even though experts say certification is mandatory under Georgia law. In Fulton County, a county commissioner who supports unfounded claims of widespread election fraud touted the organization’s work in a private social media post.
In several Atlanta metro counties, including Fulton, the dark-money group Tea Party Patriots recently advertised for poll watcher positions that pay $300 for a four-hour shift, according to screenshots of the since-deleted posts reviewed by Rolling Stone and American Doom.
These developments in Georgia are part of nationwide efforts to claim a stolen election on behalf of Trump. True the Vote, the organization behind the debunked election fraud documentary 2000 Mules, has set up a website with live streams of ballot drop boxes in Arizona and Ohio, and publishes user-submitted videos of polling locations. As of Monday night, more than 1,200 user-submitted videos were available on the site. One begins with a man’s face as he turns the camera around in order to film the outside of the Sussex Civic Center in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, from his car for an hour and a half. The existence of the website has not been previously reported.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D), the top election official in the state, says the conspiracists are ultimately going to “help prove how well-run and transparent our elections are,” adding, “If they want to help prove how much normal nothingness is happening with our elections in Arizona, we welcome their help.”
Election officials nationwide have faced an unprecedented wave of threats since 2020, when Trump tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in several states, falsely claiming the election had been stolen from him. In Georgia, all election workers now wear lanyards with an emergency call button that, when pressed, immediately alerts law enforcement to respond to their location. After polls close Tuesday, memory cards from voting machines containing the results from polling locations will be transferred to secretary of state facilities by police.
“MAGA’s plan is clear: Spread false claims about election fraud, use the false claims to anger their followers, and encourage them to cause chaos at election offices,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, the progressive, Georgia-based voting rights organization.
WHILE THE CROWDSOURCING EFFORT is the public-facing aspect of the campaign, it’s the role of dark-money groups and influential conservative organizations that signals the chaos to come in a post-election period expected to feature scores of legal dog fights and constitutional clashes.
Follow the Law, the group that is quietly lobbying local election officials to refuse to certify results of a possible win on Tuesday by Vice President Kamala Harris, is tied to the Heritage Foundation and Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.
The opaque group, whose website launched this summer, bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair, and represent the true votes of all American citizens,” according to its website. Follow the Law is behind recent attempts to persuade election officials that they can refuse to certify results if they suspect election fraud has occurred, documents obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom show.
This is a novel interpretation of state laws that generally define the act of local election certification as a mandatory, “ministerial” task, election law experts and Democrats have said. With few exceptions, local certification of election results has historically been a ceremonial task — until 2020, when some rogue, pro-Trump election officials began to refuse to certify results. Since then, election officials have refused to certify results at least 30 times in eight states.
The issue of certification is important. Widespread certification refusals could prompt governors to miss a federal deadline of Dec. 11 to submit statewide results, opening up the possibility that congressional Republicans could then baselessly object to those results, as Rolling Stone and American Doom previously reported.
In Georgia, local election certification has been at the center of controversial moves from a trio of pro-Trump members of the state election board, who have passed rules that would have given county election board members more power to refuse to certify results and slowed down the counting of votes. Courts recently found that those rules went against state election laws.
But Follow the Law is leading a campaign to persuade county election officials that they actually can refuse to certify results, despite scores of court rulings and expert interpretations of state election laws. In early October, the Cobb County election office received a letter from Follow the Law that began by thanking election officials for their work, then got quickly to the point.
“You have taken an oath to stop fraud or dishonesty and make sure every election is as accurate as possible,” states the letter, which was obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom. “We know some people may wrongly say your job is just a ‘rubber stamp,’ but we know better. Your work is more than that — it’s essential to ensure that elections are fair and that the public can trust the process.”
While the letter did not explicitly implore Cobb County officials to refuse to certify results, its framing is similar to arguments from pro-Trump election officials in Georgia who say they should have more power to refuse to certify results.
“If [a board of elections] has no choice but to certify an election, then why require them to vote to certify the election?” David Hancock, an election denier on the Gwinnett County election board, wrote in a January email obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom.
Additionally, a “checklist” from the group, whose intended audience is local election officials, reminds them of statutory requirements for election superintendents to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast at each precinct with the number of voters who signed in at those locations. That checklist was shared on Telegram — the preferred home of many right-wing groups preparing to contest the election — by Bridget Thorne, an election denier serving on the Fulton County board of commissioners, on Oct. 27.
“I have no idea who [the] Follow the Law group is?” Thorne tells Rolling Stone and American Doom in an email. She did not respond to subsequent questions about where she obtained the checklist, which does not appear on the group’s website.
Follow the Law’s letter to Cobb County is identical to a message sent to an election official in Eureka County, Nevada, that was published by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch. Both letters were signed by Melody Clarke, a deputy director at Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation. The letters were sent on Oct. 4.
Follow the Law has also run ads in legal journals in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as ads in Georgia supporting rules passed by the MAGA majority on the state election board, ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch reported. Clarke could not be reached for comment.
The pressure campaign from conservative dark-money groups extends to Michigan. There, the election denier group United Sovereign Americans — which is involved in scores of lawsuits raising fears of noncitizen voting — published a guidebook aimed at county election officials that argues they have the ability to investigate fraud claims before certifying results, The New York Times reported. As in Georgia, election law experts say this is not the case.
While courts have deemed certification a mandatory task — and some state-level officials have said they will take local election officials to court if they refuse to certify the election — pro-Trump members of county election offices could still amplify bogus fraud claims, Democrats and misinformation watchdogs have warned.
Julie Adams, a regional director at the Election Integrity Network and member of the Fulton County election board, said on a recent call hosted by the network that she and other election officials could use fraud claims to refuse to certify results or demand that courts throw out results.
“Maybe we all find discrepancies, and we file an immediate injunction,” Adams said in the call, which was first reported by the New Yorker. “Maybe we go to the press. Maybe, when we’re certifying, we say we’re certifying under protest.”
Adams has been intimately involved with efforts to give herself and other Georgia election officials more authority to refuse to certify results. She introduced a rule that was passed by the state election board purporting to allow county election board members to refuse certification if a “reasonable inquiry” determines fraud had occurred. That rule has been shut down in court.
Adams was separately the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute demanding that she be given discretion to refuse to certify election results. The judge in that case, too, found that certification is mandatory.
But the battle over certification is not over. In Gwinnett County, the election board passed a rule that will allow board members to review an extensive list of documents and records prior to certifying results — mimicking another rule that was passed by the state election board and subsequently deemed by Georgia courts to violate state election law.
And the pressure campaign on county election officials in Georgia isn’t just limited to Follow the Law. In a handful of counties, a prominent Christian nationalist influencer has held gatherings to instruct citizens on how to demand county election officials refuse to certify results following the election, Lawfare reported.
David Clements, a former law professor fired from his position at a New Mexico university for refusing to adhere to Covid-era health policies, has told attendees of his election workshops that they’re engaged in a “spiritual war” to prevent Harris from winning the election.
At least 21 election deniers serve on county election boards throughout Georgia, Rolling Stone and American Doom have found.
IF COUNTY OFFICIALS refuse to certify results, they’ll do so — as they have in the past — based on unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. Republicans have recruited a nationwide network of poll watchers to hunt for evidence of supposed fraud.
Recently, the Tea Party Patriots advertised for poll-watcher positions that paid $300 for a four-hour shift, Rolling Stone and American Doom have learned. Ads for the positions on Indeed, which have since been taken down, offered work in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. All four counties count election deniers on their election boards. Adams, who in addition to Mitchell’s organization and her duties as an election official also works for Tea Party Patriots, did not respond to a request for comment.
The poll-watcher efforts are operating in conjunction with an army of online sleuths hunting for potential viral moments that can supply the basis of unfounded fraud claims — videos of voting machines’ glitches, ballots that contain misspellings of Republican candidates’ names, and videos of trucks supposedly delivering illegitimate ballots to counting centers in Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere.
There is perhaps no space containing a greater volume of these baseless claims than Musk’s Election Integrity Community, which is being run as part of Musk’s work with his pro-Trump America PAC. The community is a nonstop feed of speculation and wild rumors about supposed instances of fraud that are piling up far faster than election officials can debunk them.
There, Mitchell amplified a completely unsubstantiated claim about a Black man who said he was made fun of at an Atlanta polling location because he was voting for Trump. A man in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, filmed two men at a Harris campaign office, speculating that because it was near a post office location, that they were involved in voter fraud.
Even outside the X community, Musk’s platform is rife with unfounded claims of election fraud and conspiracy-theorizing by election-denier activists and officials. X users have claimed they’re making thousands of dollars from sharing election misinformation, according to the BBC.
In comments on MSNBC on Sunday, Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, blamed Russia, Iran, and unnamed Americans for spreading election lies.
“If you go to Telegram, and even if you go to X, there’s a substantial amount of content out there that’s just looking for engagement, that’s looking for amplification,” Krebs said. “And it’s not just Russia, it is also Iran. Plus we have domestic actors who are creating their own lies for their own political purposes.”
Two videos, which have been deemed fake and the product of Russian disinformation by federal law enforcement, continue to make the rounds in Musk’s forum. One depicts supposed Haitian migrants claiming they illegally voted in Georgia. The other purports to show a man tearing up Trump ballots in Bucks County. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has said both videos are Russian disinformation.
This story is being published in partnership with American Doom, a newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
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