In the Press

But despite the mounting criticism of the board, even from other Republicans, it seems for the moment ready to plow ahead with additional rule changes — and unlikely to roll back the ones it just approved.

“There haven’t been any consequences yet for this unconventional behavior,” Peter Simmoms, Georgia Policy Strategist at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, told TPM. “There’s currently no reason for the board to act any differently.”

Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarianism group, has tracked 34 instances since 2020 of state or local election officials attempting to delay or deny election certifications in nine states. Six of those states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania – are considered electoral battlegrounds that could help determine the election’s result in November.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Such efforts to challenge voters’ eligibility en masse are “inadequate to address voter eligibility by themselves and also redundant to the work already done by election officials,” according to research on the rise of mass voter challenges by Protect Democracy, a national nonpartisan group promoting fair elections and anti-authoritarian policies.

Chris Crawford, a policy strategist at Protect Democracy, identifies what this approach might entail: “We need to build a broad coalition of people who may have strongly held differences of opinion on politics or policy, but who are willing to prioritize the defense of our democracy. This does not mean that the differences go away, but it means that we can preserve the system that allows us to have those disagreements peacefully.” (See Mr. Crawford’s recent Short Take, “How poll workers are defending democracy.”)

“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, ‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’ or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy who works on voting rights issues. “I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period.”

“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election,” Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy, told the Guardian. “There’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced.”