With lower than two months to go till Election Day, and with former President Donald Trump persevering with to repeat baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the difficulty of election integrity will seemingly stay on the forefront of many citizens’ minds.
Election officers from seven battleground states convened in Atlanta final week to match notes and put together for Election Day. 4 of them — one Democrat and three Republicans — spoke with CBS Information in regards to the stress and nervousness of their jobs, and likewise their conviction that elections are carried out freely and pretty.
Requested what emotion this 12 months’s election fills him with, Republican Gabriel Sterling, chief working officer for Georgia’s workplace of secretary of state, mentioned, “I really feel prefer it needs to be pleasure, however there’s some angst.”
“The most important factor I fear about is the potential of violence by individuals who lose,” he mentioned.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, mentioned, “We’re each day receiving threats, whether or not it is by way of voicemails, emails, social media or in particular person.”
Benson mentioned she personally is receiving threats, “and it is escalating.”
“They’re all rooted in lies and misinformation, which is all the time disappointing and unhappy, however on the identical time, it is actual,” she mentioned.
Republican Invoice Gates, a member of the Board of Supervisors for Arizona’s Maricopa County, has spoken brazenly about his want for remedy within the face of hostility pushed by election denialism.
“This has sadly turn into a lifestyle, and we have invested as a board in steel detectors, in fencing, in cameras,” he mentioned. “I want we did not have to do that, however we do.”
Gates mentioned that regardless of the threats, he is “gone and gotten the help that I would like and I am feeling nice.”
In Georgia, ballot supervisors are given a direct line to report hassle. It is a textual content software that may “notify the state election’s workplace, the county election’s workplace and the native sheriff’s workplace if there’s a difficulty,” Sterling mentioned, noting the system is in place for a spread of issues that might crop up.
“Is it any individual yelling at folks within the parking zone or is it any individual with a gun?” he mentioned.
When requested in regards to the concern some voters have about the potential of undocumented immigrants voting, Benson mentioned, “I perceive the worry, but it surely’s an unfounded worry.”
Gates agreed, calling the specter of widespread voting from undocumented immigrants “a bogeyman.”
“It isn’t occurring,” he mentioned. “This isn’t one thing that individuals needs to be involved about.”
Philadelphia Metropolis Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, mentioned, “We’re simply not seeing it in any actual numbers.”
Bluestein mentioned that if he might dispel one piece of election misinformation it will be, “that there are magical poll drops in the midst of the night time.”
“That window of time from when the polls shut till the networks are in a position to name the race is the place that window of misinformation can unfold,” he mentioned.
Gates mentioned he needs he might dispose of “the conspiracy principle that our tabulation machines are linked to the web. They are not.”
After the 2020 election, Sterling chastised fellow Republicans for inciting unrest with election denying rhetoric.
“For 200 years, the loser accepting the result and coming again to combat once more in two to 4 years was the way in which the system labored, and all of us accepted it,” Sterling mentioned. “We now have to get again to that being the traditional manner of coping with elections.”
Benson lamented, “We have now endured 4 years of that very same rhetoric. And that is why I feel all of us do really feel just a little little bit of a heightened state of tension going to this cycle that it is much more potential than it was in these darkest days of 2020 that we might see that rhetoric rework into violent acts within the weeks forward. And all of us need to brace ourselves for that.”
Gates mentioned that he continues to be “disillusioned by many individuals within the Republican Occasion — elected officers who proceed to be silent within the face of those threats. We can’t normalize threats of violence towards anybody, however notably these people who find themselves actually operating our democracy.”
