|
Listen To This Story
 |
In 2020’s presidential election, the big lie that Donald Trump won was fed by small mistakes made by local election officials across the country.
In Antrim County, MI — a rural Republican expanse — election workers did not fully reprogram all of their vote-counting computers after last-minute changes to three precincts’ ballots. That lapse meant software put some Trump votes one line down — in Joe Biden’s row — as it compiled its results spreadsheet. Antrim initially reported that Biden beat Trump.
Trump supporters were alarmed. They raced to pro-Trump media and declared the election was being stolen. Self-appointed computer programming vigilantes flew in from Texas and other states. They attacked Michigan’s voting machines and its statewide results — where Biden won by 155,000 votes. They launched an investigation that Trump cited.
By the time the dust settled, resolving the set-up error caused “a net gain of 12 votes for Trump,” Michigan’s secretary of state reported. An investigation sanctioned by Michigan’s secretary of state and attorney general found that Trump’s vigilante experts had ineptly misread dozens of computer log reports confirming what had happened.
Members of the conspiracy-minded crew soon traveled to rural Coffee County, GA, where, with the help of sympathetic election officials, they illegally copied its election software.
They then turned to Arizona’s largest county, where, empowered by GOP state senators, they launched the Cyber Ninjas audit. That effort in Maricopa County smeared that state’s results for months before sheepishly admitting that, as The Arizona Mirror’s headline said, “Biden won (by more votes) and no evidence of fraud.”
The point of this recounting is not merely to underscore that propaganda can outrun and obscure what factually happens in elections. It is to highlight a recurring issue that will be a factor in public perceptions about 2024’s presidential election. Namely, mistakes with setting up or using election computer systems will occur this fall. And they will likely become launching pads for more conspiracy theories, especially among pro-Trump Republicans.
Forewarned Is Forearmed
While there has been tremendous coverage about possible constitutional crises between Election Day and Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results in January 2025, there has been little discussion about what might occur and get out of control earlier in the process. That is, officials in a handful of the 10,000-plus jurisdictions in America conducting 2024’s general election will inevitably make some mistakes.
Like Antrim County’s set-up error and its ensuing propaganda whirlwind, similar errors and theatrics occurred in Pennsylvania and Colorado in 2020, and in Georgia and Arizona in 2022. They have continued in 2024’s primaries and other local elections. Crucially, the errors were found and fixed, as the process of administering an election is filled with redundancies and safeguards to catch and correct mistakes. That’s a virtue of a slow bureaucratic process.
There’s another reason we’re likely to see more election administration mistakes this fall compared to past elections. Trump’s escalating attacks on officials have led to a nationwide exodus from the profession.
Nonetheless, this year saw wrong return addresses printed on mail ballot applications in Ohio. Wrong party registrations were recorded in Delaware. Votes from pre-election tests were accidentally counted in Montana. And a ballot-processing program wasn’t set up to count mailed-out ballots in New York, delaying that local election’s results. You get the idea.
These mistakes were detected, quarantined, and corrected. They had no impact on who won. But similar and other mistakes will occur in 2024’s general election, according to election law experts who are urging the press to be skeptical of elevating errors and false claims — which are already coming from Donald Trump and his allies.
“Our election system is highly decentralized. It’s not always fully funded in the way that it should be. And it relies on a lot of volunteers across the country,” said Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken, in a briefing by the American Bar Association and the Knight Foundation. “And when you have a system like that, you often find that mistakes happen.”
There’s another reason we’re likely to see more election administration mistakes this fall compared to past elections. Trump’s escalating attacks on officials have led to a nationwide exodus from the profession. One-third or more have retired or left, the Bipartisan Policy Center reports. While many election workers were promoted to fill those posts, 2024’s general election is their first time running an election, and it will stress-test their knowledge and systems the most — as presidential elections draw the most voters, ballots, scrutiny, and, in 2024, the all-too-real potential for Stop-the-Steal vigilantism.
Even new innovations designed to help voters can be iffy. In mid-September, VoteBeat, a nonprofit media outlet, reported Pennsylvania’s latest polling place locator app was not always accurate. It offered this comment from an unnamed senior official: “There are many new election directors around the state who may not know about the data entry errors or how to fix them.”
With Trump encouraging Election Day voting — not early or mail voting — you can see where a snafu in finding one’s polling place in a pivotal battleground state may go.
Finally, Admitting Elections Aren’t Perfect
Preemptively warning the press that mistakes will happen — but will be caught and corrected — is a new election defense strategy. In the past, neither officials nor voting rights advocates have said much about these kinds of errors. But now they are pulling back the curtain.
Gerken told reporters:
The kinds of things that you see in election controversies actually happen pretty regularly. So, the first thing I want to note is not to assume, because you haven’t seen this happen, that something nefarious is going on… I would say, if there’s an election reporter’s mantra, it ought to be “never attribute to partisanship that which might be explained by deferred maintenance.”
There’s more to this than “deferred maintenance,” however, as that labeling suggests that the voting technology is old and rusty. It’s not. After 2016, when Russian spy agencies hacked a Florida contractor who programs election system computers for counties, several states’ voter registration databases, and the Democratic National Committee’s emails, virtually every state has updated its election system computers and cybersecurity.
In 2024’s general election, not only will upwards of 98 percent of the national electorate be using paper ballots, which can be physically examined in legal settings, but today’s election systems produce voluminous data trails every step of the way. as most computers do.
But configuring and operating this technology is complex. Elections have different stages, with different computer systems and data sets. Even in rural counties, hundreds of devices must be programmed and synchronized.
There is no partisan equivalency with the GOP’s deliberate embrace of election lies about 2020, the process, and close results, nor with the violence that erupted at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s ongoing threats to punish his foes.
These steps and technicalities have not been well explained by officials and the press — neither historically nor recently. As a result, since Trump’s 2020 loss, that void — where the public might have had a better understanding of why election results are accurate and legitimate — has been filled with stolen election conspiracies and propaganda that have become partisan gospel.
To be fair, both major parties traffic in election fears to raise money and motivate their base. But it would be wrong to equate the Democrats’ voter suppression claims with Trump Republicans’ claims of stolen elections. There is no partisan equivalency with the GOP’s deliberate embrace of election lies about 2020, the process, and close results, nor with the violence that erupted at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s ongoing threats to punish his foes.
Looking Under the Hood
At the press briefing, Gerken introduced longtime Republican Party election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, longtime Democratic Party election lawyer Bob Bauer, and David Becker, a former US Department of Justice Voting Section attorney and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. The three men, who have spent years debunking Trump’s 2020 election lies, founded an Election Official Legal Defense Network to assist officials under attack.
In 2022, these panelists did not want to discuss mistakes by elections officials when pressed by this reporter in their briefings. (I had co-authored a short e-book explaining how election computers were set up and noted recurring errors.) Now, two years later, they are talking about mistakes and urging reporters not to fall for, nor hype, snafus.
Ginsberg said:
If there’s one thing I’d impart, it’s that as the charges start flying in the election — and we’ve seen in the buildup [before 2024’s Election Day] how the charges will fly in this election — know that process, the election process itself, has been well-developed, and has safeguards in every one of the aspects of it. As part of reporting, it’s important to contrast charges with the actual safeguards in the process.
“What Ben said is absolutely true,” added Bauer, who brought up one of the most prevalent current accusations by Trump Republicans — that millions of noncitizens are registering to vote and will cast ballots in the presidential election. (This claim isn’t true). Bauer continued:
We have, through the operation of state laws, federal laws, and, frankly, best practices in various jurisdictions, any number of ways that we have arrived at the very happy place — although one wouldn’t know it from the rhetoric in this country — that, by and large, ineligible voters are screened out.
But the dichotomy between the dry details of how elections work and the kneejerk appeal of rapidly spreading partisan propaganda hung over the briefing.
September’s Republican Propaganda
The present strategy by the Trump-led Republican Party apparatus is filing last-minute lawsuits in battleground states that target the current stage of the process — which, in turn, provokes media coverage that sows cliches, cynicism, and doubt before voting begins.
In September, that strategy has meant impugning voter rolls, voter registration rules, and apparently poking at right-wing judges on state courts to try to obtain an order to purge voters — even though the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 bars such removals within 90 days of an election. (The US Department of Justice just published its “guidance” restating this prohibition on last-minute purges.)
If you parse the daily digest of press clips on ElectionLine, a reputable nonprofit website and trade journal for the profession, you will see, on September 13, for example, ongoing litigation and new lawsuits filed by Trump Republicans in most battleground states.
“It’s important to note what really isn’t a story,” said Becker, the former Justice Department voting section attorney, as he urged reporters to be careful about covering litigation that was intended to shape public opinion but most likely would fail in court.
“You’ve got to report when a lawsuit is filed,” he said. “But a lawsuit being filed, or the volume of evidence that’s attached to a pleading, or the number of affidavits [witness statements] literally means zero until that evidence has been scrutinized.” He continued:
A lot of us who’ve litigated in the past will say the only main requirement you need to file a lawsuit is do you have enough money to pay the filing fee — and campaigns definitely have enough money. But are [these] cases that are brought more for political reasons and publicity reasons, to stoke up the base — importantly, to raise money, and to incite anger, and potentially violence?
Becker suggested that the press — and this goes for the public — “Ask the question, ‘Why now?’ Also, ask the question, ‘Is there something else they could have done [sooner to address whatever problem is being alleged]?’”
Will Actions Speak Louder Than Words?
“One of the points that I often raised in 2020 is that Donald Trump had an absolute right to full statewide recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states he claimed he won,” Becker continued. “He would have had to spend about $20 million to get those recounts. He raised about $200 million in the aftermath of the election. He requested statewide recounts in none of those three states.”
The good news, the panelists emphasized, was that the legal backdrop going into 2024’s general election favors facts and the way elections are run. The bad news, they countered, was that the viral online media landscape favors propaganda.
Acknowledging that officials will make mistakes along the way, the panelists urged reporters to be wary of overreaching partisan bombast, false claims, and conspiracy theories. But whether the press can counter the weaponization of the process remains to be seen — especially as partisan headwinds are stiffening.
Trump has continued to lie about voters and voting, while saying his foes — “those he sees as working to deny him a victory,” as The New York Times put it — should be prosecuted if he loses this fall. And much of the electorate remains bitterly divided about trusting the process.
“Only one-third of Republicans and two-thirds of Democrats in the United States think that election officials are trustworthy,” ABA Journal said about new American Bar Association research. “Additionally… 46% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats said they would not consider the 2024 election results to be legitimate if the other party’s presidential candidate won.”
Against that volatile backdrop, there might not be much patience or understanding about the inevitable mistakes by election officials that are surely to come.
Steven Rosenfeld is a longtime national political reporter. Most recently, he has specialized in election administration and disinformation. He has covered those topics for Washington Monthly, The New Republic, L.A. Progressive, AlterNet and others. Previously, he covered money and politics for National Public Radio, Monitor Radio, and Marketplace.
