Eight National Election Denier Organizations to Watch

[Celerity]

https://globalextremism.org/post/eight-national-election-denier-organizations-to-watch/



Since former President Donald Trump began his campaign against America’s elections in 2020, a whole new industry devoted to undermining faith in key democratic institutions, particularly voting, has emerged. A range of far-right and extremist organizations and individuals have become explicitly anti-democracy, rejecting the legitimacy of America’s elections regardless of a lack of proof of fraud or other electoral manipulation. Among these activists are members of militias and the white supremacist Proud Boys, often working hand-in-hand with far-right organizations to delegitimize election results and election infrastructure. Particularly worrying are anti-government organizations representing so-called “constitutional sheriffs” who falsely believe the federal government has no power over them. Major organizations representing hundreds of these anti-government sheriffs are now involved in election denial and have pledged to investigate and oversee election processes.

But the most important actors in this space are Trump former staffers, lawyers, and allies who have taken up the cause of election denialism and are planning to affect in a partisan manner the election infrastructure that undergirds our free and fair elections. They are already warning that the upcoming midterms will likely be rigged. “I just know that they’re [read Democrats] going to engage in massive election fraud,” conspiracy theorist and Trump ally Alex Jones said on an episode of his Infowars show this week. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who has been sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress related to the January 6 hearings, is also stoking rage on the right, describing on his podcast the upcoming election as the “most important midterm election since 1862,” meaning during the Civil War. In the past year, Bannon has been advocating a “precinct strategy,” and far-right activists have inundated local precincts, signing up in large numbers to be poll workers and engaging in harassment of election management officials and volunteers, up to and including death threats.

As a result of these efforts, the 2022 midterm elections are shaping up to be the most dangerous and volatile of any in recent memory. In the last several months, we’ve seen white supremacists disrupting campaign events and armed activists showing up at election-related public events. Election workers are facing unprecedented threats and the Arizona secretary of state’s office referred a case of voter intimidation to the DOJ in October. An unidentified voter reported that they were approached and followed by a group of individuals while trying to drop off their ballot at an official drop box. The situation is so serious the FBI issued a warning in October about the threats to voters and election workers in the upcoming midterms. A Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) survey this past August found that Americans’ fears are suppressing participation in the democratic process. Most troubling, GPAHE’s survey found Black, Hispanic and young people fear violence at the polls, and that Black voters are more likely to leave without voting if intimidated at the polls, effectively suppressing the vote of a historically marginalized community.

The Trump-inspired election denial movement has already had great impact. In 2021, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. According to the Brennan Center, state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since the organization began tracking voting legislation in 2011. Even more troubling, legislators in multiple states introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely. This effort has gone far beyond measures such as harmful voter identification laws and into more fulsome attacks on how elections work and on election workers themselves. And election deniers are dominating GOP tickets across the country. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that 60 percent of Americans will have an election denier on the ballot this November, and more than 100 election deniers will likely be elected to the House of Representatives. Some election deniers have made it clear that if they win, they will introduce partisanship into how elections are decided.

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