Election Denier Trump Thugs Force County Election Officials To Quit, Plotting Election Disruption

ABC 15 reported, Election officials step down rather than face a hostile public:

A growing number of election officials in Arizona are speeding up retirements or changing their careers. Nowhere is the trend more apparent than in Yavapai County.

Yavapai’s top election officials, Recorder Leslie Hoffman and Elections Director Lynn Constabile won’t be around to oversee the count.

"I’m not sure what they think that we did wrong… And they’re very nasty. The accusations and the threats are nasty."

This is the result of nearly 2 years of false election fraud claims. https://t.co/l2y7a15Jyj

— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) July 2, 2022

“The rhetoric and the climate of elections has got really, really hot. We’ve been under a lot of pressure,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman will step down later this month. Tired, she says, of all the threats and insults. Hoffman is taking a job that has nothing to do with elections.

“The threats I have, the sheriff patrols my house periodically. It’s getting to be a lot and when the job offer came, I took it,” she said.

Why has this county sheriff not made any arrests? Where is our partisan hack Attorney General and his crack Election Integrity Unit (EIU) to enforce Arizona law against intimidation and threats against election officials?

It’s the first item listed in the Secretary of State’s LAW ENFORCEMENT QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE ON ARIZONA ELECTION LAW (excerpt):

1. OBSTRUCTING ELECTION OFFICIALS
Arizona law prohibits interfering with an election official’s ability to lawfully carry out their official duties, including at voting locations and during the transport of voting materials and ballots.

• A.R.S. § 16-1004: A person who at any election knowingly interferes in any manner with an officer of such election in the discharge of the officer’s duty, or who induces an officer of an election or officer whose duty it is to ascertain, announce or declare the result of such election, to violate or refuse to comply with the officer’s duty or any law regulating the election, is guilty of a class 5 felony.

The Reference Guide concludes with:

7. REPORTING ELECTION INCIDENTS

Law enforcement officers are encouraged to report election-related incidents, including threats or perceived threats against the voting process, election and election-related systems, election facilities, elections staff, candidates, or voters to the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC) at (602) 644-5805 or www.azactic.gov, which will ensure prompt dissemination to appropriate government agencies. The Secretary of State’s Office can be reached at (602) 364-1562 or klorick@azsos.gov. A listing of county election officials, including contact information, is available at www.Arizona.Vote.

If election officials and volunteer workers cannot rely on law enforcement to protect them against threats and intimidation from election denier Trump thugs, what good are they? Why are they not doing the job for which they get paid?

ABC 15 continues:

With early voting beginning July 6, Pinal County Recorder Virginia Ross, who will be retiring at the end of her term, says the office has worked with both parties, law enforcement and County Officials in the months leading up to the 2022 elections.

They’re working to develop and implement new procedures like an updated signature verification system. Voting equipment was tested Friday in Yavapai, Coconino, Mohave and Pima counties in advance of the August primary.

All to re-establish public trust.

“We are prepared, ready to go Wednesday for early voting and all of the new procedures are in place. Like I said, I think the parties and public will be very pleased with what we’ve done,” Ross said.

Yavapai County is solidly Republican. Donald Trump and former U.S. Senator McSally both won the county in 2020.

Despite that, dissatisfaction with Yavapai election officials remains high among some voters.

Yavapai County is a hotbed of insurrectionist Republicans in revolt against the United States. I used to love Prescott. You guys have ruined it for me.

Voters, Hoffman says, have refused to participate in outreach programs aimed at restoring trust in the voting system.

“When you’ve got these movies out there [i.e., the debunked 2000 Mules, “a New York Post editorial — typically a conservative newspaper — said  that Trump “clings to more fantastical theories, such as Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked ‘2,000 Mules,’ even as recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin confirm Trump lost”], and all the stuff on social media that’s what people are reading. They honestly don’t want the truth,” Hoffman said.

This is because the MAGA/QAnon believer is in a politico-religious cult. Cult members are not permitted to question their “Dear Leader.” That’s what makes it a personality cult!

Voter distrust and dissatisfaction is leading experienced election officials to call it quits.

Yuma County Recorder Robyn Stallworth Pouquett is resigning July 18. Coconino County Recorder Patty Hansen will not seek re-election when her term expires in 2024. Years of experience that will not easily be replaced.

“There’s a steep learning curve. I tell everybody there’s some 1,700 laws or something that cover my office,” Ross said. “That does take time so that’s a lot of institutional knowledge.”

But wait! It gets worse. The Arizona Republican Party is training an “army” of these election denier Trump thugs to work as volunteer election workers so they can disrupt the election from the inside.

The Guardian reported, Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm:

Republicans and other conservative groups are undertaking a huge effort to recruit election workers, a push that could install people with unfounded doubts about the 2020 election in key positions in voting precincts where they could exert considerable power over elections.

At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. [Recently subpoenaed by a criminal grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia.] Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020.

The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.

Coup Plotters all who should be indicted and convicted for seditious cospiracy and insurrection.

Mitchell has described the effort as a way to take control of the apparatus of local elections, according to ABC News.

“Given that people who were part of the attempted coup are behind this, it’s certainly something that at a minimum we need to be vigilant about,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works closely with election officials across the country on election administration issues.

That recruitment is happening alongside a similar push from the Republican National Committee, which has already recruited 16 in-state election integrity directors, more than 15,000 poll workers and 10,000 poll observers in battleground states, said Gates McGavick, an RNC spokesman. Officials from the RNC have spoken at Mitchell’s summits. McGavick said the RNC “works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity” but the party was “not part of a formal coalition with any outside groups”.

“Any individual participating in our election integrity program who does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed,” he said. [Yeah, sure they will.]

The effort is focused on getting people to sign up poll observers and challengers as well as election workers who help run voting precincts and count ballots. Parties and campaigns have long hired observers and challengers to monitor the polls, but election workers, temporary employees hired by local election offices, have largely been seen as non-partisan.

[T]here are concerns that conspiracy-minded workers could abuse their positions to slow down the voting process and spread false or misleading information about what they see at the polls.

In 2020, observations from poll observers played a critical role in spreading information that Trump and allies would use to spread the false claim the election was stolen in states like Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. In Detroit, an observer said she saw ballots being delivered in the middle of the night and workers illegally awarding votes to Biden. In Phoenix, those who used Sharpie pens to fill out ballots had their votes rejected by machines, poll observers said. Even though those claims, based on misunderstandings of election rules, were debunked, many of them continue to live prominently among those who believe the election was stolen.

“You have those people who may have worked the precinct who intentionally don’t understand the procedures and that can then, with some level of authority, spread misinformation,” said Barb Byrum, the clerk in Ingham county, Michigan, a state where there is a big push to recruit GOP election workers.

“With that said, I understand that the Republican precinct worker applications as of recent have been prompted by election conspiracy groups.”

At the North Carolina summit in June, guests received a 20-page document that offered a detailed blueprint for forming statewide and local taskforces to monitor election officials. One section encourages citizens to research whether Republican officials in the state election office are “effective or silent partners”. Another section advises activists to figure out who in the state attorney general’s office is responsible for working with elections officials and whether that person is a “friend or foe”.

That kind of language is “absolutely outrageous”, Becker said. Election officials have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment since the 2020 election and many have quit their jobs. [See above.]

“They’re citizens. They’re professionals. They’re our neighbors,” he said. “If we start to view our fellow citizens as our enemies, we’re lost.”

[T]he event featured speakers from a litany of conservative activist groups, including FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, Citizens United and Heritage Action, according to an agenda obtained by the Guardian. Mac Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, also attended the summit and gave a keynote address. Josh Findlay, the RNC’s national director of election integrity, spoke at the event.

Anyone could attend the event, which cost $20 to sign up for. A Guardian reporter who signed up as a guest was asked to leave the event after Mitchell’s opening remarks. “We don’t allow media to come to our summits, mainly because they’re never nice to us,” Mitchell said at the event. “They make fun of us.”

* * *

Jim Womack, the Nceit chair, advised attendees to form relationships with local district attorneys. “The DA is going to be your person, the person you need to have a relationship with and be able to contact the local law enforcement to take action on something,” he said.

So now Republican county attorneys are in on this conspiracy? This could explain why there have not been any prosecutions for threats and intimidation of election officials in Arizona.

The planning underscores what many see as the biggest threat to future elections in the US. Having people who believe there is massive fraud in elections claim they witnessed such fraud could provide critical pretext officials could use to justify not-certifying a valid race. Trump and allies deployed a similar strategy in their effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Jen Fifield adds, GOP poll watcher training casts unfounded suspicion on Arizona elections:

The Republican National Committee is telling potential Arizona polling place observers that there are “festering problems” in how elections are run, such as security issues with vote-counting machines and problems with voter rolls, as it trains them for the state’s upcoming primary election.

The RNC training delivers the message that the “2020 election had serious problems,” worrying experienced former election officials and lawyers who have trained observers in the past and who say the point of training should be simply to encourage observers to watch for violations of law at the polls without disturbing the peace.

Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, who as an attorney led Republican observer training in the 2000s, said the messaging concerns him because his focus was always on providing a straightforward picture of what was legal and what was not at the polls.

“It’s not about kind of ginning people up, which is what that sounds like,” Gates said. “That’s the narrative, though.”

Votebeat watched an RNC Zoom training at the invitation of an attendee, and separately received information about an in-person training from an attendee, after an RNC spokesperson said that reporters were not allowed to attend.

Asked about the intention of the messaging, Ben Petersen, the RNC Arizona communications director, said that the committee’s staff and volunteer training “emphasizes the need to comply with federal and state laws protecting voting rights.”

“Any individual participating in our election integrity program who does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed,” Petersen said. [Yeah, sure they will.]

The idea that Republicans who don’t believe the 2020 election was fair — a majority in the country, according to a poll late last year — could try to disrupt in-person voting during the Aug. 2 primary is causing election officials across the state and around the country to make changes to protect from internal threats. During California’s primary earlier this month, election officials in Shasta County said observers tried to intimidate them during the vote count.

As of 2021, Maricopa County began requiring polling place observers to fill out forms detailing any problems before leaving the polls, a way to avoid unsupported allegations surfacing after the fact. Yavapai County is also doing that, as well as restricting where observers can go within polling places and ensuring that each location has experienced and bipartisan staff prepared to handle any problems.

In response, the Arizona Republican Party says it is concerned that election officials may be attempting to unfairly limit Republican volunteers’ access to the polls. The RNC is asking election officials to provide specific details about hiring practices for poll workers, which are hired and trained by the counties and are separate from poll observers selected by the political parties.

Republican lawyers say it would be unfair, and perhaps even unlawful, for election officials to block workers and observers from the polls just because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that widespread voting fraud exists. [Consider it a “red flag” law for election deniers. This is simply “due diligence” by county election divisions to prevent sabotage or disruptions by election denier Trump thugs.]

Plus, any attempts to limit skeptical workers might backfire, said Republican attorney Kory Langhofer, who represented the Trump campaign in 2020 court challenges in Arizona.

Langhofer should be disbarred for filing frivolous claims which were dismissed for lack of evidence. See Politico: “The 65 Project, a new bipartisan group spending millions to try to disbar 100 lawyers who worked on Trump’s post-election lawsuits. Its initial round of ethics complaints targeted top names on Trump’s team, filed with their respective state bars in March. The group is now gearing up to file a wave of complaints against lesser-known attorneys who filed legal cases on baseless evidence, Michael Teter, the group’s director, confirmed.”

“If your goal is to convince people the election is fair then you want both parties, including people who believe they have been unfair in the past, to participate,” he said. “If you start to not hire those people, that’s a great way to make sure everyone is paranoid about the elections.”

Dude, they are already paranoid! That’s why they are election denier conspiracy theorists!

Jumping ahead:

Training tells attendees 2020 election ‘uncovered festering problems’

The Republican National Committee has so far been hosting the Arizona election integrity trainings for observers, with a national schedule on www.gopvictory.com, across Maricopa County and on Zoom since at least April.

For the most part, the trainings are straightforward: They discuss the party’s goals (to increase Republican participation as poll workers and watchers and ensure the upcoming elections are fair) and what the role of an observer is (to ensure election laws are followed at polling places).

One section of the training, in particular, reminds attendees a list of don’ts: don’t be disrespectful, don’t be demanding, don’t interfere or disrupt voting. Another section talks about potential problems to watch for that are relatively straightforward under Arizona law, such as late openings of polling places and long lines.

But in the Zoom training Sanchez also said the 2020 election had “serious problems” even though experts and election officials have repeatedly said it was actually one of the smoothest modern elections in history.

Sanchez said laws were disregarded and many questions are still left unanswered, even though Arizona courts found otherwise.

He told attendees the election “uncovered festering problems,” and said that there are security issues with vote-counting machines. Multiple pre- and post-election audits, done by Maricopa County and contractors the county hired, found that machines counted votes accurately and were not connected to the internet.

DeRose, Gates, and Langhofer all said that the focus of the trainings in the past was always on what was allowed under the law and what wasn’t.

Gates said he believes some of the statements in the RNC training are political, something he always tried to avoid.

“My slides would have said something like the right to vote is fundamental,” Gates said. “And we want to make sure every eligible vote is counted.”

Tammy Patrick, who helped both political parties in Maricopa County train observers for years when she was the county’s compliance officer, called the RNC’s messaging “deeply problematic” because it primes observers to come in believing there are massive problems with the system.

“If you are pre-positioning the observers that there is all this criminal activity they need to uncover, they are going to view what they are seeing from a completely skewed viewpoint,” she said.

Patrick said the intentions of these new poll observers worries her. “They think they are going to find the body,” she said.

DeRose said he didn’t see any major problems with the messaging in the training. But he also said that, when he led the trainings, he tried to screen people who he thought were there with ill intentions.

“I had this guy show up in 2009 with a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ shirt,” DeRose said of his time training Republican observers in Virginia. “This guy is just going to be trouble. We aren’t going to credential him.” [See! A self-imposed “red flag” law for election deniers. This is simply “due diligence.”]

Langhofer, the Republican attorney who represented the Trump campaign and has also represented Arizona Senate Republicans in their battles over Maricopa County’s ballot review, said the number one thing that is important to do in the training is to “make sure people aren’t overzealous.” Langhofer has been involved in Republican trainings for poll observers since 2012.

“Most people who volunteer to be involved in early voting and Election Day are very sincere, citizens who just want to help the system run well,” Langhofer said. “But some small percentage of people are overzealous, or emotional, and can be disruptive.”

Like Langhofer? He is busy today filing an appeal from the case he lost in Mohave County Superior Court to the Arizona Supreme Court on behalf of the Arizona GQP seeking to end early voting by mail in Arizona – which begins today in the Primary Election. The Purcell Principle should result in a quick denial of his appeal.

THIS WEEK Wednesday & Thursday deadlines for responses to @AZGOP bid to move suit to end Arizona mail-in voting to AZ Supreme Court.
▶️ This is appeal of judge's ruling in Mohave County – @kelliwardaz's home – that mail-in voting is constitutional. https://t.co/NyFYwazXVR https://t.co/WwppUeoNLq

— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) July 5, 2022

Election officials respond with rules for observers

With the increased interest and recruitment, Mortellaro in Yavapai County said that the county added a number of new procedures this year for observers for the upcoming elections because “we are a little concerned about them disrupting things this election.”

“We are trying to put procedures in place that would block that before they happened.”

This includes emphasizing that observers are only able to talk to the inspector of the polling place, and never voters, and placing observers in particular spots in vote centers where they are unable to cause a disruption.

Mortellaro said those restrictions would vary by polling place, but generally the county doesn’t want observers near the line of people being checked in, as “that’s a great opportunity for them to talk politics to people in the line.” The county also doesn’t want them where they can look over voters’ shoulders while they are filling out their ballots, and doesn’t want them near voter check-in stations.

“We have to be worried about people messing around with machines,” he said.

Observers will also be required to fill out a form they hand in before they leave that lists any problems they saw that day. If they didn’t see any, they have to write “N/A.”

County Recorder Leslie Hoffman said county officials are hopeful that will prevent people from hearing election fraud claims elsewhere after they leave and then claiming the same problems also happened at their polling place.

“We want to make them accountable,” Hoffman said. “If there is something wrong, we want to make sure we address it. Or, if not, we want to know that too.”

The county got the idea for the form from Maricopa County. Generally, Mortellaro said, county recorders are sharing ideas for ways to prevent disruption in polling places this year.

At the same time, the Arizona Republican Party is concerned that Republicans workers and watchers will be kept from the polls.

Kelli Ward, who chairs the state GOP [Arizona’s principal election denier, Coup Plotter and fake GQP elector], tweeted on May 12 that she was “told that Election Departments around Arizona are requiring illegal ‘ideological tests’ of poll workers and that they are actively discriminating against #AmericaFirst Republican applicants.”

Oh boo-freakin-hoo! It’s called due dilligence, lady!

A public records request first reported by Arizona Agenda that was filed by attorney Eric Spencer on behalf of the RNC to at least Cochise County – the party didn’t respond to questions about where else they submitted requests – asked election officials to provide documents about party poll observer access and the poll worker hiring process.

This included a request for any documents “describing any limitations to serving as a poll worker or otherwise temporary worker based on political views,” with examples such as “reviewing a prospective worker’s social media” and “making worker assignments based (in whole or in part) on political views.”

Asked about the requests, Petersen, the RNC spokesman, said public records requests related to election administration issues are “nothing unusual and various groups on both sides of the aisle do the same.”

Votebeat did not find any evidence that election officials were unfairly or illegally screening poll workers. But a few election officials did say that, in recent years, it’s become important to watch for “red flags” when screening workers that could indicate they intend to disrupt or fail to follow applicable laws in the polling place. [Huh? Huh? What did I say?]

Yavapai County, which is hiring about 300 poll workers for the upcoming primary, started interviewing all poll workers for the first time this year, instead of letting the leader at each polling place, the inspector, choose their team. This is to ensure the county has more control over the makeup of workers in each location, Mortellaro said, “to make sure we are getting the kind of people we want.”

Mortellaro said the county doesn’t directly ask for opinions about the fairness of elections during the interview, but sometimes candidates bring up politics.

Hoffman, the county recorder, said an example of a potential issue is a poll worker candidate who, when told they can’t wear political clothes in a polling place — something against the law in Arizona — gets upset about it.

Asked what might prevent them from hiring someone, Hoffman said that might be someone saying, “I want to make sure things are done right — I’m really going to be watching everybody.’”

“At that point, take the training to be an observer instead,” Hoffman said, “Because that’s what they do. If you’re a poll worker, you need to do your job.”

Marra, who is hiring about 250 poll workers for the upcoming primary, said the county asks poll worker applicants to fill out an online questionnaire, which includes a question about why they want to be a poll worker.

Some applications stood out to Marra this year because they said they had never been a poll worker before but wanted to make sure the election was fair. She said she doesn’t see that as harmful, but said there are certain things that would cause concern, such as someone saying something specific about wanting to damage equipment.

She’s also started including more information in trainings about voter intimidation and harassment.

Patrick, the former Maricopa County elections compliance officer, who is now a senior advisor of elections at the nonprofit nonpartisan Democracy Fund, said she doubts election officials would excessively screen election workers, simply because it’s so hard to find enough workers in the first place.

She said it’s important for election directors to ensure that they have experienced workers at each polling place, to balance the numbers of workers by political affiliation, to increase the number of workers roaming polling places for issues, and to review their hotline and communication strategy.

Nonetheless, Republicans are worried their volunteers will be improperly kept out. Langhofer said election officials shouldn’t be disqualifying workers based on their beliefs about the 2020 election, and he believes any discrimination based on political beliefs would be illegal. He also said it’s not a “fringe position” to have concerns about the fairness of the 2020 election.

“This is a common view in American politics [among Republican electio deniers],” he said. “You can’t be excluding mainstream views.”

Wrong! We do not legitimize the Big Lie fascist propaganda. It must be rejected and dismissed as a lie at every turn.

DeRose also said he would be concerned with any attempt to screen poll workers on their beliefs of fairness in the election.

“Who is asking the questions, who is designing them, and who is making the decision?” DeRose said. “That, to me, could be rife with problems. Our system already contemplates that people are going to have views.”

DeRose said, for him, the line would be if someone said they wanted to disrupt the election.

He said that people who think there are problems with how elections are run should work at polling places and see how mundane the process is.

“Come spend the day in the polling place,” he said, “and try to stay awake.”

If you see something, say something. Call the Election Protection Hotline: 866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683).