These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers
Former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 18, 2024. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
At least 70 pro-Trump conspiracists are election officials in key battleground counties — and they are poised to make a giant mess on Election Day
by Justin Glawe
When election night comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties. Among those election officials are scores of Donald Trump supporters who believe his lies and conspiracies about stolen elections — and will be in prime position to act on those beliefs to try to aid his campaign in November.
In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results. At least 22 of these county election officials have refused or delayed certification in recent years.
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a “ministerial task,” and one required by state and local law. But as Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, says Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
While refusals and delays of certification have not held up in court, in Georgia and Arizona, pro-Trump local election officials are seeking to make certification discretionary — lawsuits that are currently being decided by state judges — in order to give his campaign another method to challenge election results in November.
Polls indicate that the race between Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will be close. If employed on a large scale, the certification refusal movement would have disastrous consequences, fueling the fire of election conspiracies and delaying the tallying of votes crucial to determining the next president.
David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County, just outside Atlanta, is at the center of the certification refusal movement in his state.
“At this moment there are NO guidelines on what is required to certify an election in Georgia,” Hancock wrote on his Facebook page in late May. “But some of us are working to change that. Stand by.”
Rolling Stone and American Doom compiled its list of election-denying election officials by culling media reports about refusals to certify results and other denialist behavior — and by searching the social media profiles of hundreds of election officials in the six swing states.
The investigation revealed hundreds of posts from officials expressing belief in lies about the 2020 election and skepticism about November, as well as myriad posts about every right-wing culture war issue and conspiracy theory imaginable — a veritable stew simmering with the toxicity of the online American right.
“Wow!! I can’t wait till after the Next big election… We’ll get to find out more Binden corruption (sic),” Ann Weiler, an election canvasser in Bay County, Michigan, wrote in January 2023. Another Michigan election canvasser, Bonnie Kellogg in Muskegon County, shared a false right-wing news story in November 2020 headlined “Breaking Down the Greatest Electoral Heist in American History,” among other election denier content.
“I don’t trust the runoff,” Larry Brown, an election official in Pickens County, Georgia, who has posted prolifically about his belief in Trump’s election lies, said two weeks after the 2020 election, as Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock faced Republican Kelly Loeffler in a runoff. “The general election has turned in to a mess (sic).”
In Pennsylvania, Erie County commissioner Charlie Bayle — whose role includes overseeing elections with fellow commission members — is one of 19 election deniers throughout the state with power over elections. “Anyone in this country with an ounce of common sense knows the left cheated to some extent,” Bayle wrote in November 2021. “Their philosophy isn’t about making it easier to vote, just easier to manipulate the vote.”
Days after the 2020 election, Walter Nowosad, a commissioner in Douglas County, Nevada, shared an article in which disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell (falsely) claimed that Trump’s legal team had found evidence of voter fraud that could overturn the election results in multiple states. “Someone’s hand has been discovered in the cookie jar,” wrote Nowosad. Another Douglas County commissioner, Danny Tarkanian, wrote in November 2022 that mail-in ballots are “the biggest issue in our election integrity, along with ballot harvesting. This is what the GOP should be questioning.”
Nineteen states have varying levels of local election administration, with county election officials numbering in the thousands. Rolling Stone and American Doom focused on the pivotal counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Elias, the Democratic election lawyer, believes the findings in this investigation only represent “the tip of the iceberg,” because Republicans “are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
The beliefs and behavior of the election officials discovered by this investigation are part of widespread efforts to call the results of November’s election into question, Elias and swing state Democrats say. Those efforts include mass voter challenges, implementation of unreliable hand recounts, restriction of voter registration rules, Republican takeover of local election boards via legislation, and certification refusals.
With an army of Republican lawyers and state lawmakers crafting voter suppression rules and laws across the country, pro-Trump Republicans can also count as allies some of the thousands of men and women currently serving as local election officials. Most of these officials carry out their duties with little to no fanfare. It’s only since 2020 that the routine, often boring, work of administering local elections has become the target of robust right-wing electioneering, with efforts to place pro-Trump zealots on election boards who are increasingly refusing to certify results in pursuit of bogus fraud allegations.
Many of the election deniers discovered in this investigation share their zeal for Trump on social media platforms like Facebook, where they frequently express their belief in election lies amid screeds on the broader right-wing ecosystem of conspiracies.
Hancock, who says he was appointed to the Gwinnett County election in May 2023, is a good example. “Those of us looking to expose what happened in the Nov. election are not going to stop on January 20th,” he wrote on Facebook in 2020. Hancock has shared posts about the discredited Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2,000 Mules and Gateway Pundit stories about supposed voter fraud in Georgia. He said most attendees of the Jan. 6 rally at the U.S. Capitol that led to the violent insurrection were “patriots who have done no wrong.”
He is just one of dozens of election officials whose Facebook pages look like the unhinged rantings of extremely online conspiracy theorists. Examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials shows unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.
The posts show that belief in widespread election fraud has proliferated among Republican election officials, who are also skeptical that the coming November election will be free and fair. Some of the officials see Trump as a messiah-like figure battling nefarious forces for the soul of the country.
“This election is not about two different men,” read a meme shared by Kellogg, the election canvasser in Michigan’s Muskegon County. “It is about two completely different America’s (sic). Choose wisely.”
Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, which tracks election deniers at the state and national levels, says that election conspiracists are at work at every level working to call this November’s results into question — but are especially focused on certification.
“From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election … it’s all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election,” Ulmer says. “It makes sense that certification has become one of the tactics used by the election-denier movement to throw sand into the gears of running a free, fair, and smooth election.”
THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO on Election Night 2024 recently played out in Washoe County, Nevada, where a moderate Republican fought to prevent the county commission, which oversees elections, from becoming majority-election denier. Events there in recent months show the chaos that could result from the certification refusal movement in November.