Voter challenges, records requests swamp election offices
>swamp
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-georgia-presidential-florida-dfbe7f00418a35c70c9d53fa3a260111
Spurred by conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, activists around the country are using laws that allow people to challenge a voter’s right to cast a ballot to contest the registrations of thousands of voters at a time.
In Iowa, Linn County Auditor Joel Miller had handled three voter challenges over the previous 15 years. He received 119 over just two days after Doug Frank, an Ohio educator who is touring the country spreading doubts about the 2020 election, swung through the state.
In Nassau County in northern Florida, two residents challenged the registrations of nearly 2,000 voters just six days before last month’s primary. In Georgia, activists are dropping off boxloads of challenges in the diverse and Democratic-leaning counties comprising the Atlanta metro area, including more than 35,000 in one county late last month.
Election officials say the vast majority of the challenges will be irrelevant because they contest the presence on voting rolls of people who already are in the process of being removed after they moved out of the region. Still, they create potentially hundreds of hours of extra work as the offices scramble to prepare for November’s election.
“They at best overburden election officials in the run-up to an election, and at worse they lead to people being removed from the rolls when they shouldn’t be,” said Sean Morales-Doyle of The Brennan Center for Justice, which has tracked an upswing in voter challenges.
The voter challenges come as activists who believe in the election lies of former President Donald Trump also have flooded election offices across the country with public records requests and threats of litigation, piling even more work on them as they ready for November.
“It’s time-consuming for us, because we have to consult with our county attorneys about what the proper response is going to be,” said Rachel Rodriguez, an elections supervisor in Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes Madison, the state capital.
She received duplicate emails demanding records about two weeks ago: “It’s taking up valuable time that we don’t necessarily have as election officials when we’re trying to prepare for a November election.”
Michael Henrici, the Democratic commissioner of elections in New York’s Otsego County, received a single-line email last week warning of unspecified “election integrity” litigation, then a follow-up complaining he hadn’t responded.
“These aren’t people with specific grievances,” Henrici said. “They’re getting a form letter from someone’s podcast and sometimes filling in the blanks.”
Multiple investigations and reviews, including one by Trump’s own Department of Justice, found no significant fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and courts rejected dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies. But Trump has continued to insist that widespread fraud cost him re-election. That has inspired legions of activists to become do-it-yourself election sleuths around the country, challenging local voting officials at every turn.