Some local elections officials buy into fraud conspiracies; many elections officials feel unsafe - Entrepreneur Generations

America’s decentralized election system depends on the professionalism and integrity of local and state election officials. Now some of them worry that some of their colleagues have become a threat to the system.

In Colorado's Mesa County, for example, chief elections official Tina Peters and her top deputy have allegedly embraced debunked rightwing conspiracy theories about the election. In April she required her employees to attend an after-hours gathering and listen to a speech by well-known conspiracist Douglas Frank. Also: "Over the course of the past month, in a lawsuit filed by the state’s top elections official, Peters and her deputy have been accused of sneaking someone into the county elections offices to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines," Emma Brown reports for The Washington Post. "Those copies later surfaced online and in the hands of election deniers. The local district attorney, state prosecutors and the FBI are investigating whether criminal charges are warranted."

Now that the audit of Arizona's Maricopa County ballots has failed to turn up evidence of election fraud, conspiracists are looking to Peters' report, which she says she commissioned because it proves election irregularities. "The report, which Peters’ attorney, Scott Gessler, also included as part of defending her and Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley to block the two from overseeing the fall elections, alleges that nearly 29,000 election files were deleted during a routine upgrade of the county’s now-decertified election equipment in May," Charles Ashby reports for The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

"I’ve always worried, working in this space, about people who want to harm our elections or sabotage them from the outside — the foreign actors trying to hack elections," Mike Beasley, a lobbyist for the Colorado County Clerks Association, told Brown. "I’ve never until now had to worry about what goes on on the inside. And now we’ve crossed that threshold."

In recent months, former president Donald Trump "has endorsed several proponents of the 'big lie' to become secretaries of state in key battlegrounds. And experienced election administrators at the local level have been fleeing their jobs amid skyrocketing stress and threats to their personal safety," Brown reports.

Recent polling from The Brennan Center for Justice found that one in three election officials feel unsafe in their job and one in five are worried about death threats.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/3m2tMnJ Some local elections officials buy into fraud conspiracies; many elections officials feel unsafe - Entrepreneur Generations

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