By Joe Miller
This Week: MAGA Election Lies Are Inundating State and Local Election Officials
With the upcoming January 6 Committee hearing scheduled for 1pm EDT next Wednesday, election deniers have been working overtime to derail investigations and upend local election administration ahead of the midterm elections.
Across the country, local election officials are becoming swamped with a surge of legally-dubious records requests. In North Carolina, MAGA constituents are seeking confidential voting records with personally-identifiable information. Likewise, Pennsylvania election offices are inundated with a surge of voting records requests, straining already short-staffed election offices with an impossible task. In Nevada, the Republican National Committee is suing Clark County after county officials rejected a public records request for records containing confidential information about the county’s poll workers.
Minnesota voting officials say misinformation is fueling widespread election skepticism in the state. At least five counties have seen election board meetings interrupted by MAGA constituents repeating unproven claims of “election fraud,” as Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced “an organized outside effort to undermine and poison well-earned public confidence in our election system.”
Georgia prosecutors are now seeking new data related to a voting systems breach orchestrated by Trump lawyer Sydney Powell and Atlanta-based cybersecurity firm Sullivan|Strickler, as part of a broader lawsuit (separate from the ongoing Fulton County grand jury investigation) challenging the security of Georgia’s voting systems. Newly-released surveillance footage from inside the Coffee County elections office exposed a discrepancy between witness testimony by Trump ally and false elector Cathy Latham, who was a plaintiff in a 2020 lawsuit seeking to stop Georgia from certifying the election in 2020.
Elsewhere, in ongoing anti-democratic efforts to subvert the will of voters:
A Wisconsin lawsuit, filed by the same conservative law firm that successfully banned ballot drop boxes earlier this year, is asking a judge to declare a federal voter registration form illegal in the state.
In Georgia, new research found that voting access has decreased under new ballot restrictions approved by Governor Brian Kemp that will affect nearly 1.6 million newly registered Georgia voters for the first time in November.
In Michigan, Trump’s political action committee has donated $150,000 to the ‘Secure MI Vote’ ballot measure, a yet-to-be-approved initiative proposing new restrictions on Michigan elections – mirroring suppressive legislation passed by the state legislature and vetoed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
And finally, Arizona plaintiffs Mark Finchem and Kari Lake have revived a joint lawsuit seeking to force Arizona election officials to hand-count all ballots in the November election. The renewed litigation came just days after the state representative came under fire for accusing former Vice President Mike Pence of orchestrating a “coup” to unseat Donald Trump in 2020.
