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Analysis Shows Trump Loyalists Have 'Infiltrated' Election Boards in Key States
"With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous."
Sep 13, 2024
More than 100 election officials across eight swing states in the U.S. presidential race have engaged in partisan election denial in recent years, raising fears they could try to turn the November result in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a report released Friday.
The 88-page report, produced by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), details the election denial history of 102 county and state election officials in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The authors found that election deniers have majority control of 15 county election boards in those states and of the statewide board in Georgia.
"What was striking to us about our research is how much election denialism and the voter fraud lie have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states," Arn Pearson, CMD's executive director, toldThe Guardian.
"With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous," Pearson added.
The three Republicans on the five-member Georgia state election board support Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged. Last month, they changed the rules so that they'd have more power to refuse or delay certifying election results while conducting unspecified investigations, and they appear to be preparing more rules changes before November 5.
Trump recently commended the three Republicans by name at a rally in Atlanta, saying they were "on fire" and were "pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory."
In 2020, Trump lost to President Joe Biden, a Democrat, by only about 12,000 votes in Georgia, one of the states expected to be closely contested again this year as the Republican former president faces off against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Trump faces criminal charges in Georgia for trying to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Four other defendants in the felony racketeering case have already pleaded guilty.
Marc Elias, an election lawyer who advises the Harris campaign, said the new rules in Georgia were "somewhere between insidious and insane." He and many other experts have emphasized that election boards are not meant to carry such power. Making a football analogy, Elias said that the rules gave "the scoreboard operator the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether a touchdown was scored," as he toldThe New Yorker Radio Hour.
Partisan conspiracy theories among election officials go well beyond Georgia, the CMD report shows. Pennsylvania has 29 election administration officials loyal to Trump—the most of any of the eight states—and they control the boards in seven counties there, the report says.
The report looks not just at election officials but also other Republican "election deniers" including U.S. congressional candidates and party officials from the eight states. The authors found 239 election deniers including the 102 election board officials.
CMD defined someone as an "election denier" if they had done any of the following: "denying that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election"; "espousing baseless claims or conspiracies about election and voter fraud during the 2020 election or subsequent elections"; "refusing to certify election results, or calling on others to refuse to certify, based on unfounded accusations of interference or fraud"; "expressing support for partisan or 'forensic' audits of 2020 election results"; "filing or expressing support for litigation aimed at overturning election results"; "participating in or supporting the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol or 'Stop the Steal' events."
Experts differ on whether Republican efforts to subvert the election, should Trump lose, will be more or less effective than in 2020.
"Our democracy's firewalls held fast in 2020, but election deniers and MAGA extremists have spent the last four years infiltrating election administration and political party positions in order to disrupt and cast doubt on the 2024 election results," Pearson said in a statement accompanying the report.
However, officials not loyal to Trump have also had more time to prepare for potential election interference, and the Electoral Count Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2022, could make it harder for Trump's efforts to succeed, experts say.
Pearson indicated that Trump's allies on election boards may not ultimately succeed at overturning the election but could sow doubt that damages democracy.
"While it is highly unlikely that these officials, along with deniers in Congress, will be able to prevent certification of the 2024 election results, they are in a prime position to force litigation and delay what should be a ministerial task while they and their allies whip up false claims of voter fraud, noncitizen voting, and a stolen election," he said.
CMD's report follows those of many other media outlets and watchdog groups in recent months, with broadly similar findings, if different exact figures. A CBS Newsinvestigation in May found 80 election-denying officials in seven battleground states. Rolling Stone and American Doomfound nearly 70 in six states in July. And last month, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington issued a detailed report identifying 35 "rogue" officials.
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The Insidious and Bloody Result of ALEC's Stand-Your-Ground Laws
This promotion of vigilantism has resulted in a shoot-first-ask-questions-later culture that has made us all less safe, not more.
Oct 29, 2023
In early October, a Florida state senator introduced legislation to repeal the state’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law allowing individuals to use deadly force in self-defense outside their homes. Florida was the first state to enact such a measure, and in the 18 years since its passage, studies have shown that more Floridians are dying because of it.
“The data is clear: homicide rates and gun deaths are higher where these discriminatory, dangerous policies are on the books,” Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-34), the bill’s sponsor, told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
What’s less widely known is the pivotal role the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has played in ensuring the widespread adoption of such laws.
Since its founding 50 years ago, ALEC has brought together Republican state legislators and corporate donors to draft model legislation repealing labor protections, rolling back environmental regulations, and encouraging the privatization of education. Yet one of ALEC’s ugliest efforts has been its collaboration with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to legalize an individual’s right to shoot to kill in public — the bloody legacy of its Stand Your Ground model legislation.
From Castle Doctrine to Stand Your Ground
Stand Your Ground laws are an expansion of what’s known as the “Castle Doctrine,” the common law principle that people are entitled to defend their own homes, even with lethal force. While the Castle Doctrine is legally upheld in most jurisdictions, applying that same principle to public spaces is more controversial. Individuals in states that have not passed Stand Your Ground laws are generally obligated to retreat from a public danger or threat — real or perceived — as long as they’re able to do so, whereas in states with these laws people are allowed to use force to meet the threat.
“A person who uses or threatens to use deadly force,” the 2005 Florida statute reads, “does not have a duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground” as long as that person is in a public place and is not engaged in any criminal activity.
Applauded by the NRA and ALEC, the law has proven to be a game changer, enabling people to use deadly force in public with impunity.
Former NRA president and lobbyist Marion Hammer conceived of that first bill and worked with two Florida legislators who were members of ALEC at the time, State Sen. Durell Peaden and Rep. Dennis Baxley, to get it passed. Baxley, a far-right legislator who is a member of a neo-Confederate organization, had won the NRA’s Defender of Freedom award the year before. “Disorder and chaos are always held in check by the law-abiding citizen,” he said when the bill passed.
The NRA considered the legislation as the “first step of a multi-state strategy,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told a reporter for The Washington Post. And ALEC was the perfect front group to execute that strategy.
Shortly after Stand Your Ground was signed into law in Florida, Hammer proposed that ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force adopt it as a model bill. A month later, ALEC’s board approved it. Since then, the language of ALEC’s model legislation — misleadingly dubbed the “Castle Doctrine Act” — has been incorporated into law in 29 more states, with some adopting especially broad versions of the legislation.
Stand Your Ground proponents like the NRA and Rep. Baxley claimed that these bills would reduce violent crime and make citizens feel safer. Yet countless lives have been lost due to the lethal force they permit. A study published last year in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association found a significant increase in homicides in states with Stand Your Ground laws. An earlier study found that in Florida alone, the rates of homicide increased 24% and gun-related homicide increased 32% between 2005 and 2014. A meta review of 16 previous studies on the impact of Stand Your Ground also concluded that these laws lead to increased rates of homicide, especially due to deadly gun violence.
The American Bar Association called for the repeal of Stand Your Ground laws in a 2015 report, noting that they are racially biased and provide “a low-cost license to kill.”
The Two Faces of ALEC
In the wake of George Zimmerman’s murder of Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, the tides appeared to turn against ALEC and its legislation supporting gun violence. Given the state’s Stand Your Ground law, Florida police had refused to make an arrest, spurring national outrage. At the time, research by CMD traced the bills back to ALEC and the NRA. When the civil rights group Color of Change called for a corporate boycott of ALEC, multiple corporations — including Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo — pulled out from the organization. In a statement, ALEC called Martin’s death a “tragedy,” and attempted to distance itself from the Florida legislation.
Yet when ALEC announced that it would disband its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in 2012 (formerly the Criminal Justice Task Force) — which had shaped Florida’s law into a cookie-cutter Stand Your Ground model bill — the chair of the task force made quiet assurances that the work would continue through other channels. “ALEC’s decision won’t impact the important issues we’ve worked on,” former Texas State Rep. Jerry Madden told The Christian Post. Since 2012, Stand Your Ground laws have continued to surface across the country.
ALEC has never repudiated its support for Stand Your Ground laws or pushed to undo any of the legislation. And as recently as 2021, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson assured concerned members that although the organization no longer explicitly pursues social policies, it’s able to push its agenda through other means.
Justice Delayed, Justice Denied
Just 80 miles north of the luxury hotel in Orlando where ALEC held its 50th annual meeting, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law came into national focus again in June when Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman, shot and killed her 35-year-old Black neighbor, A.J. Owens, through Lorincz’s closed front door. She later admitted to having used racial slurs in verbally harassing Owens’ four children.
Although Lorincz was inside her home when she killed Owens, the local sheriff cited the state’s Stand Your Ground law as a reason to hesitate making an immediate arrest. “We have to rule out…whether this deadly force was justified or not before we can even make the arrest,” Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods told the press on June 5.
What makes Stand Your Ground laws especially insidious is that they flip the burden of proof. “Now police and prosecutors must prove a negative — that a shooter was not in fear for their life — to even bring a case,” Reveal reported. “According to legal experts, that’s an almost impossible standard to meet, meaning that many shooters won’t face charges for crimes as serious as murder.”
“‘Stand Your Ground’ laws threaten public safety, encourage armed vigilantism, and promote a culture of ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’” Sen. Jones told CMD.
“The National Rifle Association and the American Legislative Exchange Council have a stranglehold on Republican lawmakers here in Florida and across the country,” he continued. “These entities have traded campaign checks in exchange for fealty from legislators, and as a result, our communities are less safe.”
Lisa Graves and Arn Pearson contributed to this article.
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How Wolf-PAC Is Helping ALEC Rewrite the Constitution Along Right-Wing Lines
The group, formed during Occupy Wall Street with the goal of overturning Citizens United, is collaborating with ALEC in its push for a constitutional convention.
May 25, 2023
In spearheading far-right efforts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is increasingly counting on an unexpected ally: a campaign finance reform group founded during the Occupy Wall Street protests more than a decade ago.
ALEC, a pay-to-play operation in which state legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to advance a right-wing agenda, has long advocated for an Article V constitutional convention in order to win a balanced budget amendment and radically curtail federal powers.
Given ALEC’s blunt efforts to restrict voting rights, quash organized labor, gut environmental regulations, and promote the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud, association with the organization is considered politically radioactive for liberal Democrats, let alone those further to the Left.
“We want an army to fight for an amendment to declare corporations are not people.”
Yet one progressive organization seems to have missed the memo.
Wolf-PAC, a group focused on overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that opened the door to unlimited corporate spending on elections, has been pressing for a constitutional convention since its founding in 2011. And although the group’s sole goal is curtailing corporate political spending, in recent years it has joined ALEC’s Article V gatherings, collaborated with ALEC allies on delegate selection issues, and testified alongside right-wing groups seeking a constitutional convention at state legislative hearings.
“We want an army to fight for an amendment to declare corporations are not people,” founder Cenk Uygur announced in establishing Wolf-PAC during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests at New York’s Zuccotti Park.
Instead, Wolf-PAC has chosen to team up with the nation’s biggest corporate lobby group to pursue its goal—and is helping to advance ALEC’s right-wing plans for revising the Constitution in the process.
The Road to a Convention is Paved with Fuzzy Math
Despite their disparate goals, ALEC and Wolf-PAC are pursuing the same agenda, attempting to get 34 states to submit convention resolutions in order to trigger an Article V constitutional convention.
Although all 27 constitutional amendments passed since the document was first ratified in 1788 have been initiated by Congress, Article V of the Constitution lays out an alternate procedure for proposing amendments: convening a constitutional convention, which requires two-thirds of state legislatures (currently 34) to pass convention resolutions. Both methods, whether initiated by Congress or through the states, require amendments to be ratified by three-fourths of the states before becoming part of the Constitution.
The push to get 34 states to request a constitutional convention has been slow going for Wolf-PAC. Only California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont have passed its resolutions so far, and the group hasn’t scored any new victories since 2016. Two of those states have since walked back their Wolf-PAC resolutions—New Jersey in December 2021 and Illinois in April 2022—when their legislatures voted to rescind all past state calls for a constitutional convention (a setback Wolf-PAC only partially acknowledges on its progress map).
Conservative proponents of a convention have proposed increasingly more eccentric accounting methods to accelerate states’ calls for a convention.
It’s not just Wolf-PAC that has faced defeat on this front. David Super, a Georgetown legal scholar who closely follows the issue, points out that “the momentum is in the other direction: Over the past few years, five [additional] states (Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, and New Mexico) have rescinded Article V applications submitted decades earlier.”
In response, conservative proponents of a convention have proposed increasingly more eccentric accounting methods to accelerate states’ calls for a convention.
In the summer of 2020, constitutional convention advocates led by anti-labor firebrand and former Republican governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker and conservative activist David Biddulph, co-founder of ALEC’s Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, embraced a new legal strategy aimed at forcing a convention by counting a half dozen historic “plenary” (or generic) convention resolutions in order to reach the 34 states needed.
Critics such as the progressive group Common Cause refer to this as the “fuzzy math theory,” pointing out that this accounting method incorporates arcane resolutions that have remained on the books even though the issues in question have become moot—such as New York State’s call from 1789 that sought a convention in order to draft a Bill of Rights.
Despite Wolf-PAC denying that it favors aggregating convention calls in this way, right-wing groups are happily lining up its proposed campaign finance reform resolutions alongside ones proposed by the right-wing group Convention of States Action (COSA), founded by Tea Party organizer Mark Meckler.
Path to Reform, an ALEC-affiliated coalition that organizes pro-convention gatherings called Academy of States, specifically counts Wolf-PAC’s three remaining convention resolutions in a handful of scenarios that they say could help them reach the 34-state threshold. At an Academy presentation last July, Path to Reform’s Director of Education Vickie Deppe argued that Wolf-PAC’s three convention resolutions can be counted with 19 COSA resolutions because they all address issues of money in politics.
“The Convention of States Project application includes fiscal controls and placing limits on the federal government,” Deppe said in a related video called Fact Check: Article V Convention in less than 24 months? “These are concepts that could certainly be brought to bear on the problem of money in politics.” By adding together Wolf-PAC and COSA applications, along with a handful of generic resolutions, Deppe claims that Wolf-PAC already has convention calls from 30 states.
Strange Bedfellows
This unusual partnership between Wolf-PAC and right-wing groups has only strengthened since December 2021, when the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) first revealed that the group was participating in one of ALEC’s Academy sessions.
At the July 2022 session— known as Academy 3.0 and held in Denver—Wolf-PAC’s National Counsel Samuel Fieldman presented on possible procedures for convention delegate selection, an issue ALEC is also trying to address through state legislation.
“Feedback on the presentations was overwhelmingly positive,” according to a recap email from Path to Reform and the State Legislators Article V Caucus, “thanks to the efforts [of] Sam Fieldman of Wolf-PAC,” among others.
In addition to attending the ALEC-sponsored Academies, Wolf-PAC members have been teaming up with a former COSA staffer to push convention legislation in various states.
In his presentation, Fieldman cited ALEC’s 2011 Article V Handbook by Rob Natelson—a conservative constitutional theorist whose work underpins the fuzzy-math theory of convention applications—though later in the session he noted that he doesn’t agree with everything Natelson argues.
Wolf-PAC’s inclusion in the Academy of States infuriated the far-right leaders of COSA, as CMD has previously reported. Meckler, who believes Citizens United was “one of the greatest free-speech decisions in American history,” considers collaborating with Wolf-PAC to be “extraordinarily dangerous” and refused to engage in a previous Academy presentation due to their presence along with other “leftists.”
Yet distinctions between the groups are becoming increasingly muddled. In addition to attending the ALEC-sponsored Academies, Wolf-PAC members have been teaming up with a former COSA staffer to push convention legislation in various states.
In New Hampshire, former Wolf-PAC volunteer-turned-state Representative Jodi Newell (D-4) has introduced a procedural bill (HB 392) specifying that, should a constitutional convention ever be called, delegates would be elected by popular vote, not appointed by the state legislature. Both Fieldman from Wolf-PAC and Ken Quinn, a former regional director for the Convention of States effort and current regional director of U.S. Term Limits, testified in favor of the bill.
And although Wolf-PAC testified as neutral in a New Hampshire hearing on COSA’s convention application, the testimony had the effect of normalizing the work and claims of Michael Farris, one of the original founders of the Convention of States Project and former president of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian hate group.
Wolf-PAC built upon Farris’s testimony, which proffered the “theoretical tools” that would limit a convention, by offering the “practical tools” that would work hand-in-hand with them.
U.S. Term Limits (USTL), which advocates for term limits at all levels of government, was founded by Eric O’Keefe, a right-wing operative with deep ties to the Koch political network who also co-founded Citizens for Self Governance (CSG), the parent group of COSA, where he sits on the board.
Wolf-PAC currently has applications for a constitutional convention pending in three states: Oregon (HJM 1), Washington (SJM 8002), and Maine (SJR 705). Only the Maine resolution—a joint product of Wolf-PAC and USTL that advocates for amendments addressing congressional term limits as well as political spending—specifies that the application “may not be aggregated with any other applications on any other subject.” The wording of the Oregon resolution indicates that the application only “intends” to be aggregated with those on a similar subject.
Big Picture
Legal experts note that there is nothing in the Constitution that limits the scope of a constitutional convention once called. They warn that a runaway convention could generate major changes to the balance of power between states and the federal government, and may end up undermining many rights and protections currently afforded under federal law. Scores of progressive and good-government organizations, including CMD, have joined together to oppose an Article V convention on those grounds.
After ALEC and its allies spent more than a decade arguing that fears of a runaway convention are baseless, it adopted a model No Runaway Article V Conventions Act in December 2021 to try to quell those fears. Wolf-PAC’s Fieldman teamed up with ALEC’s Biddulph at the Academy 2.0 that month to present on the bill, which would limit the types of amendments delegates could introduce at a convention to those that were included in its initial application.
Either way, any constitutional convention under the rules envisioned by ALEC and COSA would make it virtually impossible for Wolf-PAC’s anti-Citizens United amendment to succeed.
“We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
Most of the constitutional convention measures passed in recent years specify that each state would give legislative leaders the power to handpick its delegates and would get one vote, regardless of size, according to CMD’s research report titled Convention of State Politicians. Under those rules, Republicans would have “control over a nearly three-fifths supermajority of state delegations, enabling red states representing only a third of the U.S. population to determine what amendments get sent out to the states for ratification,” the report found.
Audio obtained by CMD confirms that this is the Right’s strategy. At an ALEC event, former Pennsylvania senator and current COS Senior Advisor Rick Santorum stated that, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
“I think we are on the cusp of a supermajority moment,” Meckler added. To emphasize that progressives will have no say at a contemporary constitutional convention, Meckler pointed out that Tories had no role in the crafting of the Constitution and that Confederates had no choice in the adoption of post-Civil War amendments.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Wolf-PAC’s collaboration with ALEC helps right-wing dark money groups move closer to that objective. According to internal ALEC documents obtained by CMD, the organization is pushing for a constitutional convention as soon as summer 2024.
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