Election officials who back Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ stir concern in swing states

ANN ARBOR, Michigan – In Michigan’s Macomb County, the Republican head of the board that will certify November’s election results called on former U.S. President Donald Trump to fight to stay in power after his election loss in 2020.

In North Carolina’s Henderson County, a Republican election board member emailed legislators in August to claim, without evidence, that Democrats were flooding the state with illegal votes.

And in Pennsylvania, considered a must-win for both Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, Republican officials in six counties have voted against certifying results since 2020.

Four years after Trump tried to overturn his election loss, his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become an article of faith among many Republican members of local election boards that certify results. Their rise raises the chances that pro-Trump officials in multiple jurisdictions will be able to delay or sow doubt over the Nov. 5 presidential election if Trump loses.

Reuters examined election boards in the five largest counties in each of the seven battleground states that are likely to determine the election’s outcome. It found that nearly half – or 16 of the 35 county election boards – had at least one member who has expressed pro-Trump skepticism about the electoral process, including theories that Trump won the 2020 election, doubts about the integrity of voting machines or beliefs about widespread fraud in mail ballots.

The Reuters tallies are based on a review of public records, social media and news accounts as well as interviews with election officials.

In all, Reuters documented 37 election skeptics on the election boards of the five most populous counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – including 20 who have voted in the past to not certify results. Many smaller county boards in those states also include election deniers. Wisconsin was the only swing state whose big county election boards appeared free of such skeptics.

State officials say there is little chance that local boards could block certification indefinitely. A more likely scenario is that local delays cascade to the state level, ultimately resulting in states missing the Dec. 11 deadline set by federal law for states to submit election results to Washington. That could provide an opening for Trump and his Republican allies in Congress to try to overturn results if he loses, say Democrats, election officials in swing states and voting-rights specialists at legal nonprofits.

“By sowing doubts at the county level about whether an election should be certified, they are laying the groundwork to argue that if President Trump loses in a particular state, that the electoral slates from that state should not be counted,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Trump’s camp said the former president was focused on protecting “legal votes.” “President Trump’s election integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election,” said Republican National Committee spokesperson Claire Zunk, in a statement on behalf of the RNC and the Trump campaign. Zunk did not directly respond to a question on whether his campaign was laying the groundwork to contest a potential loss.

New safeguards have made it harder, but not impossible, for partisan lawmakers seeking to overturn the election.

Trump’s efforts to undo his 2020 loss culminated in his supporters’ bloody attack of Jan. 6, 2021, on the U.S. Capitol. The rioters attempted to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump still won’t admit that he lost in 2020 and has refused to commit to accepting the results this year.

Congress sought to stave off any recurrence by passing a law in 2022 tightening the certification process. Among other provisions, it required the approval of one-fifth of the U.S. House of Representatives and of the Senate to consider a challenge to a state’s results. In 2020 and previous years, only one lawmaker in each chamber was needed for a challenge. As before, a majority in both is required to reject a state’s electoral votes.

Ultimately, however, the question of whether the winner becomes president depends on a new Congress sworn in on Jan. 3 and its ability to withstand any pressure to overturn a state’s results. If Republicans win control of both chambers, they could have the votes to reject some state results and ultimately award Trump the White House.

Mike Johnson, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, “intends to follow the Constitution” for this year’s election, his spokesperson said, without elaborating. Johnson joined other Republicans in challenging the election results in 2020 and refuses to say that Trump lost four years ago.

Some election law experts expressed hope that Congress, regardless of which party prevails, will ultimately adhere to norms and rebuff any attempts to overturn the results, as it did in 2020. But they fear that false claims of fraud and disputes over the results could spark widespread unrest.

“It will be a period of chaos and confusion, and that will be leveraged by grifters to raise money and incite anger and violence,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that works with election officials in both parties.

Much has changed since Trump’s poorly organized legal campaign to overturn Biden’s victory. Trump has purged his party of nearly all dissent. The Republican National Committee is now controlled by Trump loyalists, including a daughter-in-law. It says it has recruited 200,000 poll watchers and workers to monitor and combat what Trump claims, without evidence, will be an attempt by Democrats to steal votes.

The prevalence of election skeptics in positions of authority over the vote reflects how deeply the “Big Lie” that the 2020 contest was stolen from Trump has permeated the party, said Lindsey Miller of Informing Democracy, a nonprofit that is studying threats, to election certification.

In Georgia – a focus of Trump’s efforts to upend the 2020 result – Trump allies on the State Election Board this year passed new rules that might allow certification delays so that local election officials could investigate fraud. Democrats have sued to block the rules. Last month, the board said all ballots would have to be hand-counted; Democrats have sued to block that rule, too.

Gabe Sterling, the Republican chief operating officer for Georgia’s office of secretary of state, told Reuters he doesn’t believe local officials can block certification of the state’s results. “My big concern is they are going to create smoke around things,” Sterling said.

The RNC said it has already filed more than 100 lawsuits against local and state authorities to challenge elements of the voting process, a legal offensive seen by critics as preparation to contest a Trump loss.

The Democratic National Committee and the Harris campaign are responding to “every attack on voter access from the Trump campaign and their election-denying allies at the RNC,” said DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd. He didn’t provide details about his party’s legal team or strategy.

Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, says his office braces for trouble, including efforts to hold up certification. “We’ll use any legal means necessary,” Fontes said in an interview, including court actions. “The election deniers don’t care what the law says.”

ELECTION DOUBTERS INSIDE THE SYSTEM

In the U.S. election system, voting is run and local governments, usually counties count results. Results are checked and certified by local boards – the first step in a process that, for presidential elections, ultimately is made official by the U.S. Congress in January.

The work of these boards is meant to be routine and certification automatic. But that changed after 2020. Fueled by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines and fake ballots, Trump-supporting officials in multiple states have since tried to delay or block certification.

Each time, state officials quickly forced the locals to reverse course, sometimes using court orders or threats of criminal charges. Six top state election officials told Reuters they were confident they could do so again this year but worry about chaos if multiple counties decline to certify.

Certification disputes have cropped up in North Carolina, another closely contested state.

In heavily Republican Surry County, two Republican election board members were dismissed by the state elections board in a March 2023 public vote after trying to delay certification. One replacement, Jimmy Yokeley, has expressed concern about noncitizens casting votes and pressed the five-member, majority-Democrat board to check citizenship more stringently, according to emails obtained by Reuters in a public records request. Yokeley did not respond to a request for comment.

Voting by noncitizens is already illegal in federal elections, and there is no evidence it occurs in significant numbers. Still, Republicans have made the issue a central talking point. Trump has amplified it, repeating the unfounded claim that Democrats want open borders so they can register illegal immigrants to vote.

Linda Rebuck, a Republican election board member in North Carolina’s Henderson County, sent an email in August to Republican legislators saying that, without new measures to combat fake voters, “we are going to lose NC to the Dems in November which will likely mean we lose the country.”

Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the state Board of Elections, rebuked Rebuck in a reply for spreading “false and misleading statements, and partisan remarks.” Rebuck did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview, Brinson Bell said she’s bracing for activists to challenge the results. “That’s what we’re preparing for. It does not end on November 5. We’ve got a long haul,” she said.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Pennsylvania went to court to compel certification by three counties. They had refused to include mail-in ballots that lacked a handwritten date in their certified results for that May’s primary nominating contest.

The counties – Berks, Lancaster and Fayette, which all have majorities of Republican voters – ultimately certified the results after a two-month delay. In Luzerne County, where voters are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, an election board in 2022 at first deadlocked but later voted to certify in the face of a lawsuit and media attention.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said his office would sue any of his state’s 67 counties if they declined to certify their results on time. “We’re confident, because of how clear the election law is in Pennsylvania, that the courts would expeditiously require those counties to certify their elections,” he said at a conference in Michigan last month on threats to the election system.

In the battleground state of Michigan, Republicans who have openly questioned the honesty of the election system sit on canvassing boards of some of the state’s largest counties. In the third-biggest county, Macomb, the chair of the board of canvassers, Nancy Tiseo, called on Trump in 2020 to not concede the election and to set up “military tribunals” to investigate fraud. She did not respond to a request for comment.

A state law passed this summer clarifies that the job of canvassers is to check the vote totals, not to hold up certification because of suspicions of fraud. If a Michigan county board balks at certification, the county must send all election records to the state canvassing board, which will certify within 20 days of the vote.

Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, said she is concerned that some canvass board members might choose not to certify the results, both to gum up the process and to fuel a narrative that the election was marred by fraud. “We are more clear eyed about what we’re up against and what we could be facing,” she said in an interview.

People entering Bad Axe, a town in Michigan’s Huron County, are greeted by a five-foot wooden Trump sign put up by Luke Deming, vice chair of the county Republican Party and husband of Kellie Deming, a member of Huron’s canvassing board.

Kellie Deming this year declined to vote to certify results in her county, which favored Trump by a 39-point margin in 2020. She told Reuters she felt she couldn’t trust the numbers submitted by local election clerks even though the board’s other three members voted to certify. She’s unsure if she’ll certify this November’s results, she added.

Asked about the 2020 election, she asserted that Biden is not president. “President Trump is still president,” she said, and hung up without an explanation. She did not respond to further requests for comment.

“It’s a distrust that we never had before,” said Evelyn Conkright, a Democratic member of the Huron board. “We’re all on edge.”

(This story has been refiled to restore the dropped letter ‘s’ at the end of paragraph 8)