Watchdog Finds 35 'Rogue' Election Officials Still in Position to Deny Results in 2024

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, released a report on Monday showing that 35 county officials around the country who've previously tried to subvert election results are still in place to do so.

The 113-page report not only identifies "rogue" election officials who pose a risk of obstructing the certification process in order to help Republican nominee Donald Trump but also includes state-by-state and federal election law analysis meant to help thwart such obstructionism. CREW's state-level analysis covers eight key swing states.

CREW warned that county officials in the eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—have refused to certify results in elections of relatively little consequence as a test run for obstructing the consequential 2024 election, in case they dislike the results.

"I think there's almost no question that this is going to happen," Noah Bookbinder, CREW's president, said of the obstructionism on The Rachel Maddow Show Monday night. "And it seems to be happening in a way this year that is more systematic than it has been in the past. So that's deeply, deeply concerning."

"The good news is it's clearly illegal in all of these states and there are steps that can be taken to effectively halt it," he said.

The report makes it clear, as previous nonprofit research has done, that election certification is not optional or discretionary: it is a ministerial duty. The authors wrote:

It is not an opportunity for county officials to politically grandstand, lodge protest votes against election practices they dislike or investigate suspected voter fraud," the report says. "State laws provide robust mechanisms outside of the certification process—including recounts, audits, evidentiary hearings before state election boards, and election contests in court—to investigate suspected fraud and errors. These are the legally-designated avenues for resolving the rare cases where genuine problems arise in an election, not the certification process.

The authors also explained that certification is just one stage in a multi-step process and must be done in a timely fashion to avoid disruptions, which could feed conspiracy theories.

Many of the laws pertaining to the certification role of election officials date back to the turn of the 20th century, when they were passed in order to stop partisan election deniers of that era, the report says.

Democrats have been especially concerned about election obstructionism since 2020, when then-President Trump tried to subvert and discredit the presidential election results—making false claims about voter fraud—after his reelection bid failed. That effort culminated in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the U.S. Congress was preparing to certify the results.

Many county officials around the country, presumably feeling they had license given Trump's rhetoric, also voted against or delayed certification in 2020, but their efforts were unsuccessful due to being outvoted or legally forced to certify.

However, Republicans intent on winning at all costs are more organized this year, and there's more emphasis on the county level, CREW warned.

"The legal ground game that was brought to bear against certifying the election in 2020 was junior varsity compared to what we are going to see this year," Joshua Matz, a lawyer on the board at CREW, toldThe Guardian. "There is now a much better organized, much more sophisticated, far better funded and far more intentional effort to thwart the smooth and steady certification of election results required by the law."

The CREW report includes information on each of the 35 rogue officials, including their names and their stated reasons for refusing to certify one or more elections; many of them are included on the list because they tried to obstruct elections in the past two years.

Some of the county officials who've refused to certify elections have given reasons that are "brazenly lawless," the report says. In North Carolina, two officials voted against certification as a form of protest, and in Arizona two officials voted to delay certification as a "political statement." In other cases, in Georgia and Pennsylvania, obstructionist officials have offered a "veneer" of legal justification, the report says.

Very few county officials have faced legal consequences for their efforts to subvert the election process.

The CREW authors argued that the federal government needs to be ready to step in to enforce the Voting Rights Act and other laws.

"Because the states administer elections, they are the first lines of defense against county-level certification subversion," the report says. "But the federal government also has a vital role in enforcing relevant federal statutes and constitutional provisions protecting the right to vote. Thus, if a state is unable or unwilling to take action against rogue county officials who threaten to disenfranchise voters in violation of federal law, the U.S. Department of Justice should intervene."