The false narrative of a stolen election that inspired hundreds of Americans to storm the U.S. Capitol in 2021 is now fueling a far more sophisticated movement, one that involves local and state election boards across the country.
What was once the Stop the Steal movement is now the “voter integrity” movement. Its aim is to persuade the people who are responsible for certifying local elections of the false notions that widespread fraud is a threat to democracy and that they have the authority and legal duty to do something about it: Deny certification of their local elections.
Here are key takeaways from the full magazine investigation into the people who are putting themselves in place to deny election certification.
Conspiracy theories are working. People believe the election system is rigged.
I talked to election officials in four battleground states. For many of them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan strategy; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, many people felt that they obeyed a higher law. Over months of reporting, this is what I heard again and again. For all the cynicism involved in the effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, and the groundwork being laid to challenge a possible defeat this year, many officials I spoke to were clearly motivated by a deeply held belief that a grand conspiracy was underway.
Deniers are taking over county and state boards that oversee elections.
The post-2020 “voter integrity” movement has many leaders and includes many groups, but among the most important is Cleta Mitchell, who helped on Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in Georgia. Mitchell, though her Election Integrity Network, has exhorted allies to get involved in elections at the state and the local level. “We are going to retake our election system,” she said on her podcast, “one county at a time all over America.”
Once in place on local boards and commissions, they could push changes to voting rules or use their positions to run out the clock on the certification, creating chaos down the line.
They are trying to change the rules.
For the better part of two centuries, American lawmakers and judges have said that the proper forum for contesting elections is the courts. Administrators must certify the results, even if they are flawed, and for good reason: Giving administrators the power to deny certification would mean giving them the power to deny the franchise.
But the modern “election integrity” movement has sought to give local officials more say over which votes count. The state board of elections in Georgia recently passed rules making certification more discretionary. Those rules were blocked in court, but the movement isn’t done trying.
Some administrators are willing to face consequences for their efforts.
Blocking certification carries risk of prosecution, but an increasing number of commissioners and board members have done so since 2020 — in at least 20 counties across eight states.
Though in almost all cases those people were outvoted by their fellow board members, the votes undermined a critical component of American elections. “The whole system is dependent upon, one, everyone doing what they’re supposed to do, and two, doing what a judge has told them they have to do,” Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer in Nevada, told me. “After that, we’re into something else.”
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