Election pressure and voting lies could be anywhere this year : NPR

There’s one big difference, Tina Barton says, between running an election in a battleground state and a non-battleground.

It’s what happens when there are mistakes.

“If a human error happens, it’s easily explained in the press and it’s not a story,” Barton says. “You have a human error in a battleground state and all of a sudden it can become a massive conspiracy.”

Barton would know.

In 2020, she oversaw elections as city clerk of Rochester Hills, Mich. On election night, her office mistakenly sent an unofficial absentee vote file twice because the first one didn’t initially appear to send.

Such mistakes happen every election cycle in a national process run by tens of thousands of human beings. A machine isn’t plugged in. A poll worker sleeps through their alarm clock and doesn’t open a precinct on time. Someone gets handed the wrong ballot.

In Barton’s case, the issue didn’t impact actual votes, and it was corrected in the tally the following day.

But it changed her life regardless.

The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee accused her office of improperly giving votes to Democrats, and Barton received a rush of death threats, including a voicemail saying she deserved a “throat to the knife” because she had “frauded out America of a real election.”

More than half a decade later, for better or worse, election officials in swing states like Michigan, Georgia and Arizona are more used to that level of pressure and scrutiny.

In this year’s midterms, however, because the races that will decide control of the U.S. House and Senate are spread around the country, local officials in places like Iowa, Alaska, New York and Kansas may find themselves in the national spotlight for the first time.

Chris McGinn is executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. In an interview with NPR earlier this year, he noted that Texas has been a reliable Republican state for the better part of 50 yearswhich has meant fewer competitive elections and less pressure on voting officials in federal election cycles.

A huge part of McGinn’s job has been preparing clerks for the possibility that could change this year, considering the U.S. Senate race there could decide the balance of power in that chamber. The Republican nominee for that seat sought to help President Trump overturn his 2020 election loss.