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2020 changed how America votes. The question now is whether those changes stick
The story of how 2020 changed voting in America has been well told by now: Whether it was 24-hour early voting sites or ramping up mail voting options, virtually every election jurisdiction in the country did something to expand access and make voting easier and safer during the early months of the pandemic.
And voters responded. Roughly 70% of the more than 150 million votes cast in that election were cast before Election Day.
The question now is whether that was a blip in voting behavior, or whether the country will, decades from now, look back on 2020 as the election that changed voting patterns for good.
Men in Tactical Gear Have Been Monitoring Ballot Drop Boxes in Arizona
Footage from outside a ballot drop box in Mesa, AZ. Photo: Maricopa County Elections Department
"Since Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona in 2020, the state has become a hotbed of election denialism among a faction of Republicans. Now, with early voting underway in the midterms, some voters claim that they’re being watched, photographed, and even intimidated as they drop off their ballots at official ballot drop boxes — the method of voting that was at the center of many fraud claims in 2020. The secretary of State’s office is referring complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice, per the Arizona Republic.
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In one complaint, the Washington Post reported that a voter in the Phoenix suburbs said he was confronted by people at a drop-box site.
“There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot drop box filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the drop box and accusing us of being a mule,” the voter wrote, referring to a term used to describe people believed to be illegally gathering ballots. “They took … photographs of our license plate and of us and then followed us out the parking lot in one of their cars continuing to film.”
Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of Maricopa County’s board of supervisors, condemned the actions.
“They’re harassing people. They’re not helping further the interests of democracy,” he said during a press conference. “If these people really wanna be involved in the process, learn more about it, come be a poll worker or a poll observer.”
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The Maricopa County Elections Department shared images on Twitter from surveillance footage of two men dressed in tactical gear with covered faces outside of a ballot-box site in the city of Mesa on Friday. The men left after the county sheriff’s office responded to the scene.
According to the Associated Press, Maricopa County sheriff Paul Penzone said Monday that security surrounding the ballot drop boxes has been increased. During a press conference, Penzone said two cases of voter intimidation have been forwarded to county prosecutors.
“Every day I’m dedicating a considerable amount of resources just to give people confidence that they can cast a vote safely, and that is absurd,” he said.
The nationwide fervor around election-conspiracy theories that began in earnest in 2020 has only strengthened since then, particularly in Arizona. . . "
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Posted: 5 days ago
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Arizona’s Bulwark Against Trumpism Was Just a Mirage
The event was a rally for Lake, and following the supporter who said the prayer, Austin Smith, a Republican state House candidate, told rallygoers they were “chosen” — a state of “pioneers, ranchers, working-class families” in conflict with forces of a “global world order.”
“We want to make sure that Arizona is the Wild West, right?” he asked.
With their Lake flags and buckets of beer, the crowd erupted. The opening lines of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” blared and Lake strode on stage.
Two years ago, the current occupant of the office Lake is seeking, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, had certified Joe Biden’s victory, the first for a Democratic presidential candidate in the state since 1996, infuriating then-President Donald Trump and his supporters. The Republican state House speaker, Rusty Bowers, also resisted Trump’s pressure campaign, then testified before the Jan. 6 committee about it. Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state and, now, Lake’s opponent in the gubernatorial race, had overseen the election.
If there is a center in American politics, in Arizona in 2020, that center held. But as I watched Lake take the stage, it wasn’t clear to me that it still would.
Lake, a former TV anchor and one of the GOP’s most prominent election deniers, has said that unlike Ducey, she would not have certified the 2020 election. When she was asked earlier this month if she would accept the results of her own upcoming race, she replied, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” Separately, she said she would accept the result “if we have a fair, honest and transparent election,” as though the integrity of the election was in any doubt.
In recent polling, she has pulled slightly ahead of Hobbs.
Meanwhile, Blake Masters, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who denied the results of the 2020 election while more recently calling Biden the “legitimate president,” has been gaining ground in his run against Sen. Mark Kelly, while state Rep. Mark Finchem, a celebrity in election conspiracy circles, and Abe Hamadeh, a fellow election denier, have credible chances of becoming secretary of state and attorney general, respectively.
It isn’t hard to see what that might mean for the next presidential election, in 2024. Looking around the state, false claims about the last election are already clouding the present one. Last week, with early voting in Arizona underway, two armed, masked men in tactical gear were seen observing a ballot drop box in Mesa, outside Phoenix. Elections officials were beginning to field complaints of potential voter intimidation, while law enforcement officials said they were stepping up security around drop box sites.
“Craaaaazies,” Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in the state, told me when I asked him about the drop box observers in masks.
But the whole state, he said, is “crazy.”
“There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “It’s going to be a long two years.”
To Lake, the campaign was something different. She called it all — the rally this past Saturday night, her rise in Arizona — the start of a “huge red wave.” And the frisson of excitement in the crowd, the combative rhetoric and the brutal imagery surrounding it suggested a real war at hand....
The next evening, at the Lake rally, that same fervor ran through the crowd. One man holding a large Lake flag told me he was “attracted to a politician who doesn’t bend over and take it in the ass,” while another predicted Lake will win “as long as we can keep the cheating down.”
He was confident they could. Everyone was.
“You feeling good?” said John Rich, the country singer who played after Lake spoke, and who described her as “like a well-spoken Arizona rattlesnake.” “You feel like you’re going to win?”
The crowd roared, the smell of barbecue and kettle corn in the air."
Steven Shepard contributed to this report
Arizona’s Bulwark Against Trumpism Was Just a Mirage
". . .In Arizona, violence hasn’t been just rhetorical. In 2011, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a constituent meeting outside of Tucson. Fourteen years before that, Mary Rose Garrido Wilcox, then a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, was shot in the pelvis by a man who disagreed with her politics.
On the day of the Lake rally, while Hobbs was talking with supporters at El Portal, the restaurant Garrido Wilcox owns in Phoenix. I asked Garrido Wilcox how the political climate in Arizona today compares to then.
“It’s scarier now,” she said.
Garrido Wilcox, a Democrat, is optimistic about her party’s prospects in next month’s elections. But Democrats here can read headlines just as well as anyone, and it’s become obvious that Lake is on a tear.
In fact, to read some of the coverage – “Kari Lake and the Power of a Polished MAGA Message,” or “Why Kari Lake Is the Next Republican Star” – the election is already over. Lake, amid speculation that she could be a presidential or vice presidential contender, recently pledged to “serve eight years” as governor.
“Kari,” one Democratic strategist texted me, “is going to be president at this rate.”
Part of the problem for Democrats is Lake’s appeal. Then there’s the midterm election climate, which is unfavorable for Democrats everywhere. Biden only won Arizona by about 10,000 votes. But the other thing making some Democrats uncomfortable is Hobbs, who by her own admission is not as “polished” as Lake, who refuses to debate and who strategists inside and outside of Arizona had privately been expressing concerns about all summer.
... The night before Lake’s rally, I drove to the site of a ballot
drop box in Mesa where two sheriff’s deputies were measuring the
distance between the box and a spot in the parking lot where a
59-year-old woman and her son (“I came for the free food,” he said,)
were eating popcorn and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. From her blue
camp chair, the mother watched the ballot box.
“It’s just about the ‘2,000 Mules’ movie,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Andrea, referring to the widely discredited film about 2020 election fraud. “Did you see that? That’s bad stuff!”
Andrea said she wasn’t sure the election was rigged, but she thought it was “unfair” and that people “don’t like being lied to.” The 2020 election, she said, at least got Republicans more involved in Arizona politics.
“I think the fact that people are paying attention, they kind of woke us up,” she said.
She described her presence as a deterrent to would-be-cheaters, and she waved amicably at a voter in a compact car who, after dropping his ballot, left with his middle finger up for her.. .
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2022 is turning into a stress test for the election system
This year’s midterms are not shaping up to be normal elections. In an environment in which one party is gripped by skepticism and denialism about foundational democratic processes, new avenues are opening for voter intimidation and election interference — a stress test that could be a small taste of what is ahead in the 2024 presidential election.
Early signs of danger are popping up across the map at multiple levels in the election system.
Threats against voters: In Arizona, Maricopa County officials say men wearing tactical gear and masks have been observing a ballot drop box in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb. Voters have complained about these menacing figures to the Arizona secretary of state’s office, one alleging that the watchers photographed them and accused them of being what some on the right refer to as “mules” — that is, people who illicitly collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes.
This is all, sadly, unsurprising. After Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona in 2020, Donald Trump and his allies refused to accept defeat. Arizona’s Republican-led state Senate conducted a partisan “audit” of the results that found nothing of concern — but still fueled unfounded doubts. This year, at the top of the ticket, Republicans have nominated gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, one of the country’s most vocal election deniers.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll released Wednesday showed that 43 percent of Americans are “concerned about threats of violence or voter intimidation while voting in person,” and two-thirds worry that “extremists will commit acts of violence after the election.”
Undermining local election officials: Houston-area officials last week requested federal election monitors from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in response to the news that their own state government plans to send a squadron of election monitors there...
✓ Partisan and nonpartisan observers have been on the Election Day scene for decades. But in the current environment — in which the majority of Republicans say they believe Mr. Trump’s lie that he was denied a victory in 2020 because of massive fraud — having an army of monitors is a recipe for confrontation and intimidation at the polls. As The Post has reported, the Republican National Committee and its allies have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to observe and lodge complaints about voting. Meanwhile, nearly a dozen states, from Texas to Montana and Utah to Florida, have passed laws giving election observers far more autonomy within polling places.
Americans might even have to worry that the Election Day worker helping at the local polling place, once a symbol of civic spirit, might be a partisan agent seeking to claim nonexistent fraud or engage in other misconduct...What to do to protect the system: In this country’s decentralized voting system, state and local officials are the first line of defense. States such as Colorado, Maine and Oregon have recently passed laws specifically aimed at protecting election workers, but most states have not. So the burden is on local officials...
What to do to encourage more voting: Since the 2020 election, Republican legislatures have passed a wave of restrictive voting laws — 42 of them in 21 states, with most already in place for the midterm elections, according to the latest tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. In general, it is harder to cast ballots in red states than in blue ones, a recent analysis in the Election Law Journal showed.
✓ That is why it is imperative for the federal government to act. Congress should boost federal penalties for threatening election workers. It should also reempower the Justice Department, which has seen its tools under the Voting Rights Act stripped away by the Supreme Court. Most urgent right now, in the absence of new legislation, is for the department to send monitors to places where intimidation is likely to happen — and to investigate and prosecute it where it occurs.
✓ Finally, Congress should send a lot more money to states to secure and improve voting. Federal funds could finance election technology upgrades, poll-worker training (the quality of which varies widely from place to place) and voter education. Ms. Poland, the Ohio county election director, said her office conducts “behind the ballot tours,” showing those concerned about voting integrity their facilities, methods and safeguards.
✓✓ Yet even if local, state and federal officials fail to rise to the moment, voters can still have the final say. Americans of goodwill and common sense should refuse to allow threats, intimidation, antidemocratic lies, malign poll workers or vigilantes in body armor to prevent them from casting ballots. And when they cast their ballots, it should be for candidates who condemn these tactics — not those who encourage and profit from them."
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