In many ways, the 2022 election was an example of the plane landing safely.
The fallout from former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election — and the fraud conspiracy theories, hostility toward election officials, and promises of poll-watching activities that those lies produced — has not translated into widespread chaos in districts across the country. the country on Tuesday.
“We see that everyone is an adult,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican. “We see the candidates being gracious and admitting and admitting that they lost.”
A number of factors contributed to the largely drama-free midterms, according to election officials and voter advocates.
Among them was the clear message sent by election officials in key states that disruptions at polling places will not be tolerated. A federal judge’s ruling that cracked down on some behavior deemed intimidating outside Arizona polls during early voting was another shot.
But it was also the two years of preparation — and lessons learned from the difficulties of responding to the disinformation that surrounded Trump’s 2020 election defeat — that helped avoid Election Day confusion that could be exploited to cast doubt on the Results.
“One of the things is we had a chance to prepare for it – everybody did. It came out of nowhere in 2020,” said Chris Harvey, the former Georgia elections director who is now deputy executive director of the Georgia Peace Officer Training and Standards Council.
Counting continues in several key states, and there is still the possibility of a runoff vote, particularly if the margins are slim in Nevada and Arizona – where the Senate and gubernatorial races are competitive – or in California, where some House races they could determine control of the lower chamber.
While there was little evidence Tuesday of voting disputes at the polls themselves, that didn’t stop Trump and his allies spreading lies about the 2020 election from running the same playbook this year on routine issues in places like Maricopa County, Arizona.
But those allegations were a reminder of how small administrative hiccups were used to fuel the baseless allegations of fraud that permeated the 2020 vote.
“The coming days and possibly weeks will provide many opportunities for domestic and foreign actors to continue to undermine our election and create chaos,” said Chris Krebs, a former Department of Homeland Security official who led the agency’s cybersecurity arm during the election. of 2020. . “It will be a real test of our mental toughness, but I am much more confident today than I was yesterday about our ability to cut through the nonsense and defend democracy.”
Those in the election community said the past two years, where election officials have been targeted for harassment over false allegations, have prepared them to work proactively to dispel such false allegations.
“Election officials were very aware of the tense environment they were operating in,” said Nate Persilli, a professor of election law at Stanford University. “Although their procedures were not significantly different (from 2020), they knew they were being scrutinized by both legitimate forces and conspiracy theorists.”
In Georgia, training and coordination between election officials and law enforcement helped them feel confident they had planned for all eventualities, according to Harvey, whose agency certifies law enforcement in the state.
“When election officials are more confident, it conveys a sense of calm and ease,” Harvey said, adding that the feeling then travels by “osmosis” to voters and the public.
Claims by election naysayers that there would be “tons of people out at the polls” spurred people to help with voter protection work on Election Day, said Suzanne Almeida, director of government operations at Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group.
There were some unusual incidents at polling places on Tuesday, including a man arrested after threatening voters with a knife in a Milwaukee suburb, briefly forcing a polling place to close, though there were no injuries and he was arrested without incident, police said. .
At the same time, election naysayers appear to have greatly overestimated how big their turnout would be at polling stations, Almedia said.
From the “red wave” to Trump’s responsibility: Here’s how the media covered election night 02:16 – Source: CNN Business
“What we’re seeing taking place is a proper sizing of what was supposed to be a much more significant threat than it actually turned out to be,” he said. “Sometimes with tactics like this, the story is the intimidation. It’s about making a movement seem bigger than it is, it’s like making a fringe idea feel very mainstream and like it’s everywhere.”
After two years of election naysayers boasting that they would flood the polls with observers to find fraud, those promises led them to produce no legal evidence Tuesday of mass fraud at the polls, said Ben Ginsberg, a retired Republican. attorney, who also praised the work of election officials to prepare for potential conspiracy theories.
“I think it was a little bit of a surprise the way he played it two years ago, and this time it wasn’t a surprise,” said Ginsberg, who now co-chairs the nonpartisan Official Legal Defense Election Network, which provides legal assistance to election workers. . “A lot of election officials were a lot more transparent in explaining things, a lot more knew what to look for.”
Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, has been battling misinformation about the election for months and has seen frivolous open solicitations and harassment drive local officials out of their jobs this year in unusually high numbers.
At one point, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, took specific aim at Adams, urging his supporters to “bombard” the pollster with requests for public records.
But after the FBI seized Liddell’s cell phone as part of an investigation into an election security breach in Colorado, the requests and trolling quickly died down, Adams said. “I don’t think he’s lost credibility with the people following him, but … when he was taken down by the FBI grabbing his phone, that kind of dampened the fire.”
Lindell has not been charged with any crime.
After months of campaign turmoil, Adams said Wednesday that the election in his state went smoothly and that candidates and their supporters remained calm.
“I think we dodged a bullet,” Adams said. But he worries the peace may not last.
He noted that a competitive race for governor will be on the ballot next year as Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear seeks re-election in the Republican-leaning state. And after that looms an intense 2024 presidential election.
“I learned that election denial is like a virus,” Adams said. “You think it’s gone and then some new variant appears. So right now he’s in a dormant phase and I think he’ll be fine for a couple of months and then he’ll be back.”
Trump allies vocally spreading the former president’s lies about the 2020 election zeroed in on Tuesday in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where a printer problem in several precincts prevented some ballots from being properly scanned.
“They are trying to steal the election with bad machines and DELAY. Don’t let it happen!’ Trump wrote on his social media.
Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of the right-wing group Turning Point USA, tweeted a false claim about two-hour wait times in Maricopa County on Tuesday afternoon — which the county denied in a tweet.
The use of social media to fuel doubts about voting machines mirrors the tactics of Trump supporters in 2020, when they spread wild and unsubstantiated claims about alleged fraud involving USB drives and the use of sharps to fill out ballots that were apparently false.
On Tuesday afternoon, a county judge denied a Republican bid to extend polling hours by three hours because of voting machine problems, saying there was no evidence the snafu prevented anyone from voting.
“If people have cases or evidence of fraud, we want to hear it. But to this point we haven’t,” Maricopa Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday. “And right now, we’re laser-focused on beating that number and doing it in an accurate way.”
But that didn’t stop GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — one of several statewide Arizona candidates who embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — from claiming in a speech late Tuesday that she can to have problems with the results, saying it felt like “Pig Day”.
In anticipation of Tuesday afternoon’s protests, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office cordoned off areas where protesters had gathered on Tuesday night in 2020 with a seven-foot chain-link fence. A police helicopter circled overhead, more than a dozen sheriff’s deputies milled around the perimeter fence and a…
