2022: battle for election integrity begins at the county clerk level, update 9/14-29/22

Post-November 8 midterms, Arizona narrowly elected Democrats to some. major positions, but the election denier stench lingered as one county refused to certify the election while unable to prove evidence of fraud. The secretary of state is suing the county. This county is taking loyalty to MAGA to the stupid, crazy, and dangerous extreme. It is a Republican heavily dominated county, and if successful not even those who voted GOP would have their votes counted, resulting in flipping a house seat from red to blue, setting a precedent for others to destroy the foundation of democracy, free and fair elections. Arizona secretary of state sues after Republican officials refuse to certify county election results | US midterm elections 2022 | The Guardian   (also posted separately on the blog 11/29/22)

This Aug 20 posting is edited from the original and also reposted in its entirety on 9/14/22

Update: 9/14/22 The federal investigation comes down to the Colorado county clerk level: FBI seizes MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's phone in connection with Tina Peters investigation - Colorado Newsline

In Colorado, one county clerk, Tina Peters, took it upon herself to give the codes/passwords to the machines to another Trump ally, and records were moved and locked in a room inaccessible to others. For that, she not only violated rules and laws governing elections but she has also been charged with crimes. Tina Peters indicted by Mesa County grand jury on felony charges (coloradosun.com).

A fundamental danger to democracy is electing someone to the office who administers the voting process and systems who is so partisan that he/she cannot be trusted to play it fair and square and by the book. The laws and rules governing the administration are the referees, and they work so long as they are respected and followed. In sports, imagine a football game without referees, where the team owner sitting in the home team owner's box calls who committed the fouls as he defines them, levies, and enforces the penalties. It only works without a brawl if everyone in the stands and on the field is on the same team The county clerks are the local referees on the field..

How  and where Trump-dominated Republicans are attempting nationwide to replace the election referees in 2022 with their partisans is spelled out in  https://statesuniteddemocracy.org/resources/replacingtherefs/ The attempt to seize voting machines, so only one party has access to them, throw out legally cast ballots, consider all mail-in votes to be fraudulent, and make it inconvenient for people to vote were nationwide tactics used by the Trump-dominated GOP in 2020 that relied on the "stop the steal" slogan to give steam to its agenda of one-party control of the voting process.

We are learning more and more about how the GOP tried to sabotage the vote count in 2020. Per the Washington Post, a firm was hired in November 2020 by Trump allies, including Sidney Powell, conspiring to overturn the election to hack into voting machines in three swing states: Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada and they succeeded. Trump-allied lawyers pursued voting machine data in multiple states, records reveal - The Washington Post The files were shared and downloaded by a variety of those allies. Copied voting systems files were shared with Trump supporters, election deniers - The Washington Post The Trumpist twist was to claim Dominion voting systems had been rigged, yet the actual computer security breach was done by Trumpists who hired a company to do it.

 For those not familiar with Grand County, the Grand County Dems have really upped their game in a county that is becoming less and less ruby red. Of particular interest to me are two races, one for Grand County Clerk and the other for Colorado's Secretary of State. They are the key to fair and free elections, and the tone of both Democratic candidates in their remarks, as reported in the newspaper, was on target. Playing by the rules in the process is the antidote to election deniers. Local and state elections like these are where the battle for democracy is taking place all over the country.

Colorado, a nearly solid blue state, has a nationally known secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat who has carried out the spirit and intent of a GOP constructed mail-in voting system that has layers of bi-partisan eyes on the process to ensure its integrity.   Griswold, as Secretary of State, has made it more convenient and accessible for everyone to vote. She has succeeded in making Colorado a state with one of the highest voter participation numbers in the nation and the state has had record-breaking turnout. She did this by increasing the number of drop boxes by 65 percent, expanding in-person voting, extending accessibility to those on public college campuses and in tribal lands, and instituting automatic voter registration that led to more than 250 thousand eligible Coloradan voters.   She also launched a statewide system so every voter can track their ballot making it easier for all to vote and to vote with confidence.    Making it easier for all to vote, to vote by mail or in person, using paper ballots throughout the system, and putting bi-partisan eyes on the entire process is in step with Democrats' agenda.  In parts of the US, suppression of opposition voter access has been a common practice of the GOP. They have blanketly condemned vote by mail, saying it opens the process to fraud, though the track record in Colorado puts a lie to that line of attack.  Part of the reason is the safeguards written into the Colorado system, and paper ballots make it very easy to audit and find any fraudulent activities.

 The Democratic party candidate for Grand County Clerk, Abby Loberg, is a retired civics teacher and long-time resident of the county. She does not need a refresher course on what democracy is about and why it should be honored, respected, and preserved. She is no party hack. Abby Loberg's GOP opponent's position on whether the 2020 election was stolen is not known, but the GOP candidate is known to be very partisan. She needs to be challenged to reveal her views regarding whether she is part of the "stop the steal" believers and how she would administer elections differently if she believes it.