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Episode: The Army of Election Officials Ready To Reject The Vote

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:45:13

Episode Shownotes

On Tuesday night, as the voting ends and the counting begins, the election system itself will be on trial.Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The Times, explains how some local election officials entrusted with certifying ballots are preparing to reject the results and create chaos in the weeks ahead.Guest:

Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: The army of election officials ready to reject the vote.What to know about the potential election certification crisis.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_06
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday night, as the voting ends and the counting begins, the election system itself will be on trial.

00:00:16 Speaker_06
Today, my colleague, Jim Rutenberg, on the army of local election officials entrusted with certifying the vote, who are prepared to reject it and create chaos in the weeks ahead. It's Friday, November 1st.

00:00:40 Speaker_06
Jim, this is our third presidential election in which Donald Trump has been on the ballot, making the claim that if he loses, it will only be because the election was stolen from him. He threatened to make that claim in 2016, but of course he won.

00:00:56 Speaker_06
He very much made that claim after losing fair and square in 2020. And now he's prepared to make that claim once again on Tuesday night or whenever the election's ultimately called if he loses. And you covered every single one of those races.

00:01:10 Speaker_06
In fact, I was in a studio inevitably with you on election night for each one of those. And your beat has become essentially election denialism in the United States in all the forms that it takes.

00:01:23 Speaker_06
So, on the cusp of this third election, where does this denialist movement now stand?

00:01:32 Speaker_05
Well, Michael, thanks for reminding me of our long journey here. But that's exactly what I've been spending the past few months trying to do.

00:01:41 Speaker_05
And visiting swing states, going to local commission meetings to see where this movement that really was born, forged, in the chaos of January 6, 2021, has brought us, because that was the beginning of something.

00:01:58 Speaker_05
It was the beginning of a new movement to deny elections, to change the way elections are run. And this past summer, I found myself at what really, to me, is ground zero of this new movement.

00:02:11 Speaker_05
And it was in northern Nevada, Washoe County, which encompasses Reno, where things had really blown up on this very basic task in this local election system. Tell us that story. I'm going to direct you to a specific day. Please. It's July 9th, 2024.

00:02:30 Speaker_05
A couple months ago. Recently.

00:02:33 Speaker_03
Good morning, everyone. I will call the special board accounting commissioner meeting to order. It is 10 o'clock.

00:02:39 Speaker_05
And we're at a commission board meeting, which, by the way, this commission deals with water issues, sewer issues, streets, you know, the regular stuff. It also certifies elections.

00:02:50 Speaker_05
The commission of Washoe County is gathered for a very specific and easy normally purpose. They are going to certify some recent local primary elections.

00:03:01 Speaker_03
Thank you very much. We'll now move into the roll call, Madam Clerk.

00:03:04 Speaker_05
This is the very basic process of putting the board stamp on, here are the number of votes, here are the winners. We're going to register with this with the state, tie a ribbon around it.

00:03:14 Speaker_03
Thank you very much. We'll now move into item number three, public comment.

00:03:19 Speaker_05
But rather than it being the normal pro forma process, things pretty quickly start to go sideways.

00:03:29 Speaker_17
We have quite a few people signed in, so when I call the second name, please queue yourself up to be ready.

00:03:34 Speaker_05
For a large number of people at this meeting, something's been wrong.

00:03:38 Speaker_09
Good morning, Drew Rebar, for the record. So we're here about elections.

00:03:43 Speaker_05
Not quite sure why— Something's been wrong with elections since 2020.

00:03:46 Speaker_15
In the last four years, we've had nothing but turmoil and fraud.

00:03:51 Speaker_05
Because this group of people does not believe that Donald Trump lost that election. And ever since, they've been convinced that elections in their county just aren't right.

00:04:02 Speaker_10
— Why do we continually have errors every single election? There's an error. Never right.

00:04:14 Speaker_05
I guess it would be like a greatest hits album. Everything you thought you heard in 2020.

00:04:18 Speaker_17
— Directly connects to Dominion, which directly connects to Serbia.

00:04:22 Speaker_05
— Dominion machines switching boats.

00:04:24 Speaker_09
— They were trying to hide stuff.

00:04:27 Speaker_05
They turned off the cameras.

00:04:29 Speaker_04
— Questionable activity in the counting center. — The recent counting of ballots in the primary election, it was unarguably dishonest and corrupt. — Boats are being stolen.

00:04:40 Speaker_18
— That was dirty. Dirty voter rolls.

00:04:43 Speaker_05
Wacko George Soros guys come in and just mess things all up. Alleged malfeasance on a grand scale.

00:04:51 Speaker_19
These people, myself included, are disgusted. These people are out of line.

00:04:56 Speaker_02
You can't certify this recount. You're actually going to be an accessory to the crime, at a minimum, now that you know and that data and evidence is right in front of you.

00:05:05 Speaker_05
The room is packed with people who want the board to reject election certification.

00:05:11 Speaker_14
You're not only citizens, you are servants. Servants of the people.

00:05:18 Speaker_05
The way they're addressing the commissioners sitting up there in the stays, it gets pretty heated.

00:05:22 Speaker_14
We're going to have a big barbecue, and we're going to have every one of your pictures up there. And we're going to show those North Valley people how you voted.

00:05:31 Speaker_09
Well, I'll better think about what you're doing now because this is not going to stop here. It's going to be realized. Think about it.

00:05:43 Speaker_05
And a lot of this anger is being directed at the single commissioner sitting up on that dais who's about to actually certify her own election, Clara Andreola. Okay, what should we know about Clara Andreola?

00:05:57 Speaker_05
Clara Andreola is a lifelong Republican, but she does not go for this kind of election denialism. In fact, when it comes to elections issues, she's a swing voter on this board.

00:06:11 Speaker_05
This board is a five-member board with two people who have doubted past election results. are not big believers in certifying elections. And then two Democrats, and Clara Andriola is the swing vote.

00:06:24 Speaker_05
So now here she is about to certify her own election, and the crowd is begging her and the rest of the board not to, but really because of this whole panoply of fraud and problems and doubt about the election system.

00:06:39 Speaker_06
Of which I'm going to venture there's no evidence.

00:06:43 Speaker_05
Yeah, let's just say we have not seen any credible, compelling evidence, and certainly not any that stood up in any court.

00:06:51 Speaker_06
Okay, so what does Clara Andriola say in response to these pleas and this anger from the audience? Commissioner Andriola.

00:07:03 Speaker_07
Thank you, Madam Chair. I really appreciate, to be honest, the fact that everyone, no matter what side of the aisle, realizes that the elections have a lot of room for improvement. Period.

00:07:22 Speaker_05
I hear you. You have concerns. I've got my own issues with the election system here. Like, everything can always be tighter and better.

00:07:30 Speaker_07
But — And where those election laws take place are at the legislature.

00:07:35 Speaker_05
This is not the forum for those concerns. There's the state legislature. If you want, for instance, which many in the crowd do, hand-counted ballots, and you want to get rid of voting machines, let's get a law going at the state legislature.

00:07:47 Speaker_05
But this is not the forum for that. And when it comes to certification, the law is the law, and I have to do this.

00:07:54 Speaker_07
— All of these can be changed through elections at the legislature.

00:08:03 Speaker_05
— And they can be changed, and I'm encouraging— — And, suffice to say, this does nothing to calm this crowd down. Zero.

00:08:14 Speaker_17
— So you're sitting here talking about legislation, Andreola? No. Doesn't work. That's not going to fly.

00:08:23 Speaker_05
In fact, if anything, at times it seems to incite the crowd more. They are so frustrated by that answer. They see it as a cop-out.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
— You know, you're pushing elements of our society in a direction that no American wants to go. We just want to be heard.

00:08:39 Speaker_05
— And I want to make a point here, though, that this isn't like a few comments. This goes on literally for hours. — Wow. — This whole process. But eventually… — There's nobody else signed in.

00:08:52 Speaker_03
Thank you, Madam Clerk.

00:08:54 Speaker_05
It's time to vote. And there's a ritual here where the local lawyer with the DA's office will be invited to speak. It's not formally part of the process, but he'll come and say, hey, Mr. DA, what's our duty here? What do we have to do?

00:09:10 Speaker_03
DA Edwards, if you could just, you know, set the stage here and remind the board what we are doing today.

00:09:18 Speaker_21
Thank you, Madam Chair. You are canvassing the vote today. This is 293.387 statutory duty of the board. There's been a lot of talk about whether this is ministerial or not ministerial.

00:09:30 Speaker_05
Inexplicably. when he's actually an assistant district attorney, starts to speak, the words coming out of his mouth are not what anyone expects to hear. And they certainly don't seem to be exactly what's in the statute.

00:09:46 Speaker_21
— But what I do think you have a duty to do, A, is canvass the vote, and B, to decide what the true results of the election are based on the evidence that you've been presented. So you don't have a duty to vote yes or no on a particular motion.

00:10:01 Speaker_21
You vote your conscience. I tell you guys that a lot, and I think that's what you do here.

00:10:04 Speaker_06
You think it was a different result. You don't have to vote yes. You don't have to vote no. Just vote your conscience. So even though the law, according to everything you've said, everything I've ever heard,

00:10:14 Speaker_06
says that you really do have a duty to vote to certify, this prosecutor in their midst is telling them something else.

00:10:23 Speaker_05
And once the words, you don't have to vote yes, come out of his mouth, now we have a problem for Commissioner Clara Andreola of Washoe County. What does she do with that guidance? Well now, Clara Andreola is in a real fix.

00:10:40 Speaker_05
She's been telling this crowd that she must certify her election. This crowd has been imploring her for hours not to. Someone with the DA's office is saying she doesn't have to. So what does she do?

00:10:57 Speaker_07
Mr. Edwards, you know, cleared some information in terms of our legal responsibility. There's a lot of information that has been shared that, in my opinion, warrants further investigation.

00:11:12 Speaker_05
Along with the other two Republicans on the board.

00:11:14 Speaker_07
I am not going to certify the vote.

00:11:18 Speaker_05
She votes no. And what no means is that her own election now will not be certified. She's voted against herself. She's voted against herself.

00:11:29 Speaker_03
And it looks like Commissioner Andriola, Vice Chair Herman, and Commissioner Clark voted not to certify the recount. So we will now move on to item six, which is

00:11:41 Speaker_05
For the first time that anyone knows, since Nevada became a state in 1864, a county has failed to certify an election.

00:11:49 Speaker_06
A truly remarkable moment. And if we return to that question where you started, Jim, about where this denialist movement stands. What does this vote by this one commission in Nevada really tell us about where this movement stands?

00:12:10 Speaker_05
It shows you, and it's punctuated by the elation in the crowd, that this movement has now succeeded in at least being able to block certification, to do the thing Donald J. Trump could not do in 2020, to stop the process.

00:12:29 Speaker_05
And, Michael, it turns out it wasn't a one-off. That, in fact, for the first time in our lives, we can really say this, this has been happening around the country over the last few years.

00:12:40 Speaker_06
Just explain that, because I don't think of this happening across the country. We've done an episode about one election board in Georgia that's passed some laws. That's it.

00:12:51 Speaker_05
Yeah, and I have to say that it was surprising to me in reporting this story how frequently this happened. Washoe was extraordinary because they really blocked the certification.

00:13:01 Speaker_05
But in at least 20 counties across several states since 2020, a lot of board members have done this new thing, vote no on certification. And I just can't stress enough how unusual this is.

00:13:14 Speaker_05
This had never really happened at this volume in American history.

00:13:17 Speaker_06
No, when we think about the quote-unquote success of the election denialist movement in its own eyes, we think of it raising doubts. We think of it trying but failing to stop a vote count. What you're suggesting is entirely different.

00:13:38 Speaker_06
a success that literally marks the invalidation of an election.

00:13:43 Speaker_05
It's a great way to put it because that's what the crowd in that room and the movement that believes in this overall see certification as legitimizing elections.

00:13:53 Speaker_05
It's a blocking certification, gives them that mark of shame, but it's much more important than that because if this happens in November,

00:14:03 Speaker_05
Now we've got a real problem, because next time it'll be the presidency on the line, and believe it or not, one county can affect certification all the way up to January 6th.

00:14:16 Speaker_06
Right. This, you're saying, was an election for the world's least important position, the local commissioner. I care about water and sewers. Next time, literally, it would be for a vote to confirm the electors for the presidency.

00:14:32 Speaker_05
Yeah, because every state needs to do this certification process by certain dates in the fall ahead of the Electoral College vote, ahead of the January 6th vote. So now we get into this whole other territory. So a problem like this is pretty major.

00:14:51 Speaker_05
And I have to say, what happened in Washoe County, this isn't by accident. This is actually part of a long-running, coordinated campaign that had been taking shape for years.

00:15:09 Speaker_06
We'll be right back. So, Jim, tell us the story of how we get to this decision in Washoe County not to certify this election.

00:15:21 Speaker_05
I can give you a specific date. Again. Yeah. January 7th, 2021. Not the 6th. Not the 6th. The 7th. It's over. It seems that this Stop the Steal movement has hit an inflection point pretty soon. Impeachment will be getting underway.

00:15:37 Speaker_05
Social media shuts down content about stolen elections, which have been running rampant in the lead up to January 6th.

00:15:43 Speaker_06
And kicks its leaders, Trump, his campaign advisor Steve Bannon, off a lot of these major social media platforms.

00:15:48 Speaker_05
And thousands of others. But what happens to the anger that drove it? It's still there. To many millions of Americans, this is a completely illegitimate election. It can never happen again. That gets said a lot.

00:16:05 Speaker_05
And the truth is that the people behind January 6, they failed. The elites, even their own party, failed. Biden became president, in their view, completely illegally. So a new movement really quickly starts to form, shockingly quickly.

00:16:26 Speaker_05
And it comes together in two different ways. First, you have this anger, this notion, what can I do to change this? How can I as an individual go out there and stop this? I need to do something. That's at the grassroots level.

00:16:42 Speaker_05
At the same time, you have some new Trump-style groups forming, money is flooding in, like millions of dollars are flooding in, to organize this grassroots movement. Harness it, right? Harness it.

00:16:53 Speaker_05
And again, shockingly quickly, all the players, and it's pretty broad. hit upon the same strategy. On January 6th, it was about members of Congress, a handful of people in Washington, maybe some state legislatures. Now it's, no.

00:17:07 Speaker_05
The place to fix this is in my own backyard, on the local level. The start of the certification process, not the end of it. And some key figures emerged to sort of midwife this. Hmm. Such as?

00:17:26 Speaker_16
We need a real investigation. I don't think we have one yet. Yes, it's true. And yes, it is a crime.

00:17:32 Speaker_05
There's a woman called Cleta Mitchell.

00:17:34 Speaker_19
You are a hell of a lawyer and tough. And that's what we need.

00:17:40 Speaker_16
Welcome to Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell.

00:17:43 Speaker_05
Who's counting with Cleta Mitchell is her podcast. Who's counting as in who's counting the votes. Exactly.

00:17:49 Speaker_16
Our goal is to build a platform for building a national infrastructure for election integrity. And that's what.

00:17:59 Speaker_05
Cleta Mitchell had been a lawyer for the Trump effort in Georgia, where he was trying to overturn his 2020 laws. And she starts a group called the Election Integrity Network.

00:18:09 Speaker_05
And at this group, she really argues that if you want to change things, if you really want to make a difference, you have to go local.

00:18:16 Speaker_16
Just because they think that they own the election offices and the leftist groups have infiltrated the election offices, we're going to take it back.

00:18:23 Speaker_05
We're going to take those... Getting in people's faces, making the change so it never happens again, as Cleta Mitchell will put it in her podcast.

00:18:30 Speaker_16
And we're going to retake our election system one county at a time all over America.

00:18:36 Speaker_05
We are going to take back our elections one county at a time.

00:18:41 Speaker_23
And at the same time... This is all to empower you, ladies and gentlemen, for no money. OK? This is all to empower... Steve Bannon.

00:18:48 Speaker_05
You remember who he is? I do. Presidential advisor. He has a podcast called War Room. War Room lost its YouTube channel, but it was still available on Apple, and it still had quite a big audience.

00:18:59 Speaker_22
So Steve Bannon... There's a lot happening this week. People are getting revved up. People are getting fired up. People are getting madder, as they should.

00:19:06 Speaker_05
...starts using his podcast to say, hey, guys, We're all angry. You know what? I see you locally. You're all want to do stuff. Let's go local.

00:19:15 Speaker_23
At the school board level, right at the at the county supervisor level, at the precinct level. This is we're taking it. We're going to take this back village by village, precinct by precinct.

00:19:26 Speaker_05
So it's going right at the system at the very start of the process. And they come up with this template for this system. There's even a name for it, the precinct strategy.

00:19:35 Speaker_05
And it's almost as if, if you're a local activist in a community, you could take this template right off the shelf to start your own election integrity group.

00:19:43 Speaker_06
So how does this template ultimately translate into action in Washoe County? Well, to me, it's a fascinating story.

00:19:50 Speaker_05
And interestingly, a lot of it centers around one wealthy individual. His name is Robert Beatles. a crypto millionaire?

00:19:59 Speaker_23
He discusses this strategy out in the open on Bannon's War Room podcast.

00:20:09 Speaker_02
We need to do like a peaceful purge, you know, bringing in American firsters.

00:20:13 Speaker_05
And he's there in Washoe County and Beatles sees the anger in the community, shares the anger in the community.

00:20:20 Speaker_02
So now they can organize and strategize and figure out how to take back our country using peaceful means through the priesting strategy.

00:20:28 Speaker_05
And he becomes sort of a central organizing node to take the anger and channel it into more constructive or destructive, depending on your view, direction. Such as? Well, for one, he starts a website. It's called Operation Sunlight.

00:20:46 Speaker_05
And that's going to be the local media hub for everything. It's going to give people, like-minded people who feel like something's wrong, a place to go to get information and maybe even some direction. So, you know, he had articles.

00:21:00 Speaker_05
He had special Beatles bombs. And it's enumerating all these problems he thinks he's seeing there, claiming that he's busted the county, he's caught them with the fraud, suggesting maybe there's even racketeering going on.

00:21:13 Speaker_05
It's just loaded up with problem after problem that he and his like-minded citizens of Washoe County believe they are seeing. And that in turn helps give people a place to go to maybe organize.

00:21:25 Speaker_05
And he almost deputizes some of them to go, let's go out there and find the fraud. Let's prove what we're saying once and for all. And prove it, how? For some, it becomes almost like a detective hunt, right? Like it's like a thriller, right?

00:21:39 Speaker_05
Where the local citizens can take it upon themselves to investigate the fraud to be their own detectives, election integrity detectives. And I ended up meeting two of these election integrity investigators.

00:21:54 Speaker_05
And their names are Janice Hermsen and Susan Van Ness. And what should we know about them?

00:22:03 Speaker_14
Well, I've always got this tendency to be an investigator.

00:22:07 Speaker_05
They sort of describe themselves as like citizen grandmas. Susan's retired and Janice runs a small bookshop slash publishing house slash sort of printing center where I actually visited with them and spent some time with them a few weeks ago.

00:22:22 Speaker_13
Because mine didn't start until after 2020. Right. And as soon as that hit, I said, oh man, we're in trouble.

00:22:30 Speaker_05
And they didn't know each other at the beginning of all this.

00:22:34 Speaker_13
Yeah, you're telling me this dude got 81 million votes. Yeah, that didn't happen. It just didn't.

00:22:40 Speaker_05
But they're both in the same boat.

00:22:42 Speaker_14
Because I know that they stole it from this county. I know that I know all the people and I know how many people turned out to vote for Trump. And what they're saying isn't true.

00:22:50 Speaker_05
They are convinced that there's no way Biden legitimately won Washoe County. There's not their Washoe County. No way.

00:22:56 Speaker_14
And at that time, I'm going, OK, I'll do anything because I know.

00:22:59 Speaker_05
And they're looking for things to do about this.

00:23:01 Speaker_14
Then I started going and asking for people that were doing election integrity. And I hadn't met you yet. And I went to the Republican Party and they kept giving me the wrong answers. Oh, we're not going to look back at that.

00:23:13 Speaker_14
And I said, the hell, we're not going to look back at that election.

00:23:16 Speaker_05
How can they channel this feeling into something more constructive?

00:23:19 Speaker_14
And it took us through 2020 to find somebody who we thought was honest and was going to go looking into that, and that was Robert Beatles.

00:23:29 Speaker_05
And they both end up meeting each other through Beatles.

00:23:32 Speaker_13
I hooked up with Beatles because he had a meeting at his house and you were signing up for different things to do and all that. So that was my initial meeting as far as knowing who he was.

00:23:42 Speaker_05
And was that different ways to litigate 2020 or going forward for 2022?

00:23:47 Speaker_14
It was primarily. It was to investigate 2020 and see what happened.

00:23:52 Speaker_05
And with Beatles, they start getting some assignments.

00:23:57 Speaker_14
He gave us this huge stack list, and we started clear up there at Fish Springs, and we went all the way through it, down to— They start traveling around the county with these assignments.

00:24:08 Speaker_05
And what were you doing, just going through it?

00:24:10 Speaker_14
These were the people who voted. And you were talking to them and seeing if they— Or if you could find them, because they were vacant lots.

00:24:19 Speaker_05
These voter lists, are they dirty? Is something wrong here?

00:24:23 Speaker_14
There was one that Google showed us was a goldmine up on a hill, and 150 people voted from that goldmine.

00:24:30 Speaker_05
For instance, they go to a goldmine where they say it's a goldmine where they see voter addresses and they're saying, well, there are no voters here.

00:24:40 Speaker_14
Like the goldmine. There was a dorm, a huge dorm over here at UNR. It burned up. It wasn't even feasible. 1,000 people voted from there in 2020. OK, then we went to the nursing homes, and oh my God. These people were comatose.

00:24:58 Speaker_14
And they were listed as voting.

00:25:00 Speaker_05
And they're seeing what they view as real problems with the election system. And they're, to me at least, seemingly very sincere about wanting to fix things.

00:25:11 Speaker_05
And I want to make one note here because I've spent a lot of time over the years looking into these allegations about voting.

00:25:17 Speaker_05
And often what you find is that there's a reasonable explanation for things or things that look a certain way really aren't what they look like once you go and dig into it. I also want to say that I spoke with the county.

00:25:30 Speaker_05
I took some of this to the county, which said that what people don't realize is the system is built to protect voters. It's not made to easily kick somebody off who maybe made a mistake on a form.

00:25:41 Speaker_05
And there are laws around when you kick people off of rolls, or maybe there are homeless people who do live by a goldmine. So election administrators know that there are these problems.

00:25:51 Speaker_05
They're fixing them all the time because it's a human endeavor, right? These elections are run by human beings. often overworked, underpaid workers, volunteers, the system's creaky. It's worked. It's delivered result after result after result.

00:26:08 Speaker_05
It's not perfect, so there's a constant effort to tighten things up, but there's a tension building here.

00:26:16 Speaker_13
Well, 2022 was worse almost for us, for me anyway.

00:26:19 Speaker_05
And Janice and Susan get really animated as they walk me through this.

00:26:23 Speaker_14
June of 2022 was when they signed us up to go out and ballot run. We went from place to place. They had these voting sites set up. It was in total disarray.

00:26:35 Speaker_05
Not only are they hunting ballots, but they're studying tape at counting centers to see how the ballots are being counted.

00:26:41 Speaker_14
There was cameras. I sat 24 hours a day almost, slept at my computer. I caught stuff.

00:26:51 Speaker_05
In fact, at one point, one of them, Susan Van Ness, says she stations herself outside of the counting center at nighttime.

00:26:58 Speaker_14
Like the night of the election that we stayed out there so far to watch, to see if they were in there.

00:27:03 Speaker_05
to make sure that all the protocols are being followed.

00:27:06 Speaker_14
We were just taking pictures from the sidewalk.

00:27:08 Speaker_05
To the way that ballots are moved in and out of the building.

00:27:11 Speaker_06
So during a local election, she stations herself outside of the place where votes are being counted so that she has eyes on the process.

00:27:18 Speaker_05
to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to do. And wherever they look, they're seeing confirmation of their suspicions, right? They're collecting those mistakes. They're trying to send them to the right authorities at the county, at the state.

00:27:30 Speaker_05
— Did you guys put a report together on all this?

00:27:32 Speaker_14
— Oh, yeah. Beatles did all this together.

00:27:37 Speaker_05
— But they're also working with Beatles, who's channeling all this into potential lawsuits.

00:27:41 Speaker_14
— He started organizing it, and then we started doing affidavits.

00:27:46 Speaker_05
He's suing the state. He wants to sue the county. He even worked up a case that gets all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course, he himself will say that its chances of getting heard are long, but it gets there.

00:27:57 Speaker_14
— If he wouldn't have been able to bring lawsuits, if he wouldn't have been able to go down and get the data, we wouldn't have been able to move forward, because The Beatles is giving up his fortune.

00:28:11 Speaker_06
This really does feel like the realization of that post-January 6 vision of deputizing local people, making them the tip of the spear when it comes to, quote-unquote, election integrity. It's precisely that.

00:28:23 Speaker_05
But I should say, a lot of these lawsuits are getting totally blocked by judges. One judge literally writes about one of the cases. It was, quote, Gossamer threads of whimsy, speculation, and conjecture.

00:28:36 Speaker_05
And it's not just judges who are getting impatient with this activity. It's the election officials who are on the other side of it. They've been inundated with requests for public information, often about things that aren't really problems.

00:28:49 Speaker_05
And it's creating an extra strain.

00:28:53 Speaker_06
On an already creaky system.

00:28:54 Speaker_05
On an already creaky system is what the officials will tell you. I think the answer from the other side is, but that's how you fix it.

00:29:00 Speaker_05
But the elections officials have begun to view it as there's no amount of explaining that we can do that anyone who believes what they believe are going to accept.

00:29:11 Speaker_06
I wonder if you ever confronted these two women with that critique, that nothing would ever satisfy them, that they will always be suspicious of the system even when credible explanations of some of the anomalies or problems that they find are given to them.

00:29:28 Speaker_06
Well, I did ask that question in a way.

00:29:31 Speaker_05
How do you react? Because look, I have to write a lot. There's no evidence for this thing. Like, how do you react to us when we say that? I think I know.

00:29:39 Speaker_13
How do we react when you say, we ignore you? To be honest, that's what I do. Well, everybody's just gotten to the point where they just say mainstream media doesn't have a clue.

00:29:48 Speaker_05
And she said, we just ignore you. That we don't get it, right? Because we're in the same. That you don't get. The Times doesn't get it. The Times doesn't get it. The mainstream media doesn't get it.

00:29:58 Speaker_05
That we're the same as the election officials who aren't listening.

00:30:01 Speaker_06
Overly bought into the system.

00:30:03 Speaker_05
Yeah, part of the system.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
So beyond recruiting these citizen sleuths, what else does this precinct strategy look like in this community?

00:30:13 Speaker_05
Well, Beatles helped conduct this takeover of the local Republican Party. which there have been a lot of moderates in charge in Marshall County. He brings in a more far-right sensibility with a lot of help, working with other activists who are angry.

00:30:28 Speaker_05
And the real goal is to get onto the local boards that really make decisions in the county, especially when it comes to voting. So you're back at this board of commissioners, where our story began. And when Beatles started, interestingly,

00:30:42 Speaker_05
There was one person who doubted the 2020 results and voted against certification. But just one? Just one. One of the first people in the country to do it in that cycle. And she was there, but she was outvoted four to one.

00:30:55 Speaker_05
So the idea here is if we can get more people like us onto the board, we can have control of the board, then they would have a lot of say over how voting goes and ultimate say over certification. So in fact,

00:31:10 Speaker_05
As they move forward with everything else that's going on, they get behind a candidate who also says he doubts the 2020 results, Mike Clark, and they succeed in the 2022 midterms in getting him onto the commission.

00:31:25 Speaker_05
So now you have a five-member board with two people who are ready to vote no against certification. Right.

00:31:31 Speaker_06
Which, of course, brings us to that fateful July 9th meeting where Andreola will cast the decisive third vote not to certify the election results.

00:31:43 Speaker_05
Yes. And now, since I've been talking and talking here to you, you can... Endlessly. Endlessly. You now see where what's really going on in that meeting is everything I just described is coming together at one place at one very critical time.

00:31:58 Speaker_05
And in fact, if you go back and listen to the tape from that meeting, you can hear all the traces of this.

00:32:07 Speaker_13
This is the document from Operation Sunlight.

00:32:11 Speaker_05
You can hear references to Operation Sunlight.

00:32:14 Speaker_08
— Operation Sunlight, a wonderful publication created by Robert Beatles.

00:32:19 Speaker_05
— You can hear references to Beatles himself? — We should applaud Mr. Beatles for what he's doing.

00:32:25 Speaker_02
— Mr. Beatles has been fighting.

00:32:28 Speaker_00
— Not only has Robert Beatles provided evidence, and it's not done.

00:32:31 Speaker_02
— Good afternoon, Robert Beatles. Please put all my comments on the permanent record, thanks.

00:32:36 Speaker_05
— In fact, Beatles is in that crowd.

00:32:39 Speaker_14
Susan Van Ness, I'm from the North Valleys. I ask the Lord to be here with me with the Holy Spirit.

00:32:45 Speaker_05
And Susan Van Ness is in the crowd. Huh. And the crowd there, they've similarly been on this ride.

00:32:52 Speaker_15
I've caucused, I've canvassed, and I've seen so much fraud and illegal things going on.

00:33:00 Speaker_05
Looking into the fraud, growing in their own concerns.

00:33:03 Speaker_17
You guys weren't there. We are. And you're saying nothing happened?

00:33:11 Speaker_05
And then, of course, there's that moment when this lawyer with the district attorney's office introduces this confusing notion for Andreola that her vote on certification is, in fact, a, as he put it, a vote of conscience, which of course leads her to vote against her own certification.

00:33:27 Speaker_05
And what's so interesting is that you hear that same idea from a bunch of people in the room that day, this idea that you do have discretion.

00:33:38 Speaker_02
You're duty bound to investigate this, all of you, including the DA's office. You cannot legally certify this recount or election. So do your job. Don't certify the fraud.

00:33:46 Speaker_05
The board has the discretion, the power, nay, the duty to block this election that, in their view, like so many elections now, cannot be trusted.

00:33:56 Speaker_09
You guys have the power to stop it.

00:33:59 Speaker_12
I'm urging you all to use due diligence.

00:34:03 Speaker_20
If there's any question of fraud, then I think it is your duty to prove to us that there was no fraud.

00:34:14 Speaker_05
And really what that argument amounts to is a rewriting of the job. Because the job of certification is not a discretionary act.

00:34:26 Speaker_18
There's not really any law that says you can't do this. And the citizens are asking for it.

00:34:33 Speaker_05
It's throughout the country for the better part of two centuries been a mandatory act. So they're basically asking for a change.

00:34:40 Speaker_05
They don't see it this way, but this is effectively what they're asking for is a change in the job and a change in the powers that that board actually has, which go beyond what it does have, which is really only the ability to stamp the results and send them along.

00:34:58 Speaker_06
And what ends up happening after the board makes this vote.

00:35:04 Speaker_05
Clara Andreola goes back to her office. She tells it to me. She spends the night there. She's there at 11 o'clock researching, determines this was not the right thing to do. So she pretty quickly second guesses herself.

00:35:16 Speaker_05
Like almost immediately, but wants to really go deep in the law, sees it's in fact a classy felony potentially to block it. This is a serious thing. You have to certify. Calls for a revote. And within days, they do revote, she certifies.

00:35:31 Speaker_05
She takes back her vote. Takes back her vote, her election goes through along with a couple others that were in the mix, and all would seem to be fine. However, you may ask, and I'm going to ask for you, why are we even talking about this?

00:35:46 Speaker_05
Because it all got solved, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Problem solved. What the heck, Jim? Let's move on. Sorry, sorry, but time out.

00:35:52 Speaker_05
Because you have to remember that there are 10,000 voting jurisdictions that are going to face this same situation this fall. And it's going to be much higher stakes. And it's going to be much more of a pressure cooker.

00:36:09 Speaker_05
You could so easily have another lawyer who's being inundated with questions about what is this weird duty? Why do we have this certification? What's the point? Give similarly bad advice, and another board could not certify.

00:36:23 Speaker_05
In fact, a lot of voting rights lawyers are girding for this to happen in a number of places at once. So this is, in fact, a cautionary tale.

00:36:32 Speaker_06
Okay, but here's where I think it's important that we push on the guardrails that do exist. I can't think of an example, maybe you can, where the courts have allowed anything like this to stand, right?

00:36:51 Speaker_06
The courts are the final arbiter when it comes to local election commissions losing sight of their actual legal obligation and deciding, yeah, they do have this discretion when they don't.

00:37:02 Speaker_06
So isn't that a pretty strong built-in layer of protection within our system, despite how concerning everything you're laying out here is?

00:37:11 Speaker_05
Well, I do have to say it is. And longtime election lawyers who are looking at this say, OK, judges will come in. They will make this happen. So there's a system in place.

00:37:22 Speaker_05
And in fact, there's even a new law post-January 6 the Congress drafted to make it even easier to get these situations to the court as fast as possible.

00:37:32 Speaker_05
But the fear is that you're going to have some judge somewhere who doesn't want to move it that fast. Or maybe there are questions about how discretionary is this and what right does the board have. And then you start dragging things out.

00:37:47 Speaker_05
What if some board members say, OK, judge, you can tell us. that we have to do this, but we refuse. Now what do you have? Are you going to have prosecutions? That's going to look not good, right?

00:37:58 Speaker_06
Especially after all the years of Trump's trials. Okay, I have a final question along these lines of, but wait. If Donald Trump wins on Tuesday, how moot is all of this?

00:38:15 Speaker_06
Because if he wins, presumably, these people might be very happy to certify, and we don't really have any of these showdowns that we're contemplating here.

00:38:25 Speaker_05
I think you're right on the certification part, but I ask that question a lot to people I spoke with in all these states. And again and again, the answer was surprisingly no, that a Trump victory is not going to convince them that everything's okay.

00:38:38 Speaker_05
There was, among some people, this idea that it's a rigged system, and if Trump wins, it's because it was too big—our vote was too big to rig, that Trump's support was too big to rig. And I actually asked Susan and Janice this question.

00:38:51 Speaker_05
If Trump wins, then this problem goes away, right?

00:38:55 Speaker_14
No, it doesn't. It doesn't.

00:38:56 Speaker_05
Because you don't know what they're going to do.

00:38:59 Speaker_14
There's going to be an uproar like you wouldn't ever believe.

00:39:02 Speaker_05
And they came down in a similar place.

00:39:05 Speaker_13
Yeah, and I think that we have to clean it up. We have to continue to work hard.

00:39:10 Speaker_05
They said, in fact, the system is bad. We're not going to be shaken from that.

00:39:14 Speaker_13
I'm not going to say I don't support Trump, I do, but that's not my motivation. My motivation is we need to have our vote count. My grandkids need to know that when they go to vote, when they're old enough, that it's really going to mean something.

00:39:27 Speaker_13
I mean, that's where I'm coming from.

00:39:29 Speaker_06
I mean, insofar as they believe that, it's interesting how much they're ultimately parroting what Trump says. And we have spent a lot of time in this conversation.

00:39:40 Speaker_06
describing a deputization of local people to question the system, and that clearly seems very important. But at the end of the day, it is Donald Trump who has created the Stop the Steal movement.

00:39:56 Speaker_06
And it is Donald Trump who repeats it and amplifies it. I mean, I can show you a tweet from, we're taping on Wednesday, October 30th, that Donald Trump sent out within the past few hours describing falsely widespread cheating in Pennsylvania.

00:40:11 Speaker_06
And when Susan and Janice say what they told you, they're repeating him. He remains the single most important person in this movement.

00:40:24 Speaker_05
Well, he's actually really an avatar of a movement that predates him. Just explain that.

00:40:32 Speaker_05
There's long been, and we've covered it, I think I've done daily episodes about it, a conservative movement, much smaller, more lawyerly, that said there's great fraud in this country, which does not stand up to true fact checking, right?

00:40:47 Speaker_05
But under that argument, they work to restrict voting laws and voter ID. They're trying to make these strict laws about it. But what Trump did was he took it all, as the saying goes, to 11, right? He took it to this other place.

00:41:04 Speaker_05
And this isn't a continuation of conservative legal arguments about voting rights in this country. This is about the machinery of democracy.

00:41:12 Speaker_05
The machinery of democracy that has been functioning pretty well for the better part of two centuries, questioning things that have never really been questioned before, like certification.

00:41:22 Speaker_06
And I think it's fair to say no matter what happens to Trump next week, that is a huge element of his legacy.

00:41:32 Speaker_05
I do not see this just going away. It's just, it's too strong. It's too resistant to everything else, all the other evidence that's come along.

00:41:43 Speaker_05
And it makes me think that if he were to lose and he wakes up the next morning and he decides he wants to accept it, he wants to concede, I really don't think if he were to go out and tell his people, drop it, accept it. — Don't fight it anymore.

00:41:59 Speaker_05
— Don't fight it. I don't think that the desire to block certification, the belief that it's just not right, I don't think that goes away. And therefore, I don't think he could stop this, even if he tried.

00:42:12 Speaker_06
— Well, Jim, thank you very much.

00:42:20 Speaker_05
— Thanks for having me.

00:42:26 Speaker_11
We'll be right back.

00:42:34 Speaker_06
Here's what else you need to know today. In another last-minute showdown, Kamala Harris assailed Donald Trump for remarks that he made on the campaign trail about women.

00:42:44 Speaker_19
My people told me about four weeks ago, I was saying, no, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women. Sir, please don't say that. Why?

00:42:54 Speaker_19
They said, we think it's very inappropriate for you to say so.

00:42:59 Speaker_06
During a rally in Wisconsin on Thursday night, Trump recounted how his advisers had urged him to stop claiming that he would protect women.

00:43:14 Speaker_06
Harris, who is eager to turn out as many women voters as possible, quickly seized on his remarks as further evidence of Trump's paternalism and his desire to take rights away from women.

00:43:32 Speaker_01
to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.

00:43:42 Speaker_01
And this is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women.

00:43:54 Speaker_06
Remember, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. This week, David Marchese speaks with the philosopher Peter Singer.

00:44:04 Speaker_12
I have set up Peter Singer AI, and so on my website you can connect to a chatbot who has been trained on all of my works, and actually does remarkably well channeling my views to people with ethical queries.

00:44:19 Speaker_06
Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Aastha Chaturvedi, Eric Krupke, and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willans, with help from Chris Haxel.

00:44:33 Speaker_06
It was fact-checked by Will Peichel, contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion Lozano, Alishaba Itoub, Sophia Landman, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley.

00:44:49 Speaker_06
Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Lansford of Winterleigh. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you on Monday.