Subject: The Army of Election Officials ...
Ready to reject the vote

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/1...

I've been talking about this from time to time. I'm glad to see it's been gathered together into a proper news article.

To better understand what this could mean for the country and for democracy in the months to come, I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.

I also found a growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law.

Prepare yourself to deal with lots of uncertainty in the coming weeks.

--Peter