Tuesday, September 17

My latest investigation, a collaboration with Public Wise, dropped last week and it’s easily one of the most ambitious projects I’ve done in my time at Democracy Docket. You can read more about that below, along with an update on the RNC’s litigation efforts, plus thoughts on our recent interview with U.S. Congressional candidate Trisha Calvarese, and why she might have the juice to unseat Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 4th district.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer

The Election Deniers on the Ballot in Your Community

My latest investigation, in collaboration with pro-democracy nonprofit Public Wise, looks at the election deniers on the ballot this November in state and local races in seven key states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In all, we identified 230 election deniers running for public office, from elections commissioners and municipal clerks to board of commissioners members and state lawmakers. All of whom currently hold office and are either running for reelection, or for another position with their local government.

Our investigation is significant, not just because it’s the first comprehensive look at the number of election deniers running in down ballot races in November, but because it only represents a fraction of the total number of election deniers on ballots this year. When I first started this project, I had a much broader idea: I wanted to know how many election deniers will be on the ballot in every state.

One of the most common refrains I hear from people about voting is: “Who are all these people on my ballot?” Most voters know every detail of the presidential and congressional candidates on their ballot, but often have little information about the candidates running in state, local and municipal elections. What are these positions and what impact will they have on people’s lives? As it turns out, many of these positions directly impact how elections are run on the state, county and municipal levels. Which is why it’s vital to know more about who’s running. The people serving as county clerk or on the board of administrators are in a position of power to impact an election. So it’s important to know what their views are.

But rather than give you the cliff notes of our investigation — you can read it here, I promise it’s not a long read and worth your time — I wanted to talk about what it didn’t include. Of the states surveyed, the names we included are all people currently in office, meaning the election deniers running for office for the first time — or who previously but don’t currently hold office, but are on a ballot November — weren’t included. Neither were the election deniers running for U.S. Congress. Neither were any election deniers on ballots in 43 other states. It’s not that we didn’t want to include people who meet all these criteria, it’s just that we didn’t yet have the means to obtain all that data. In other words: our elections are so decentralized that trying to track down every person on every ballot throughout the country in November is a Herculean task that we simply don’t have the means to do at this time. And that we were still able to identify 230 election deniers in our narrow scope of this investigation should tell you all you need to know about the state of election denialism in the country leading up to the election in November.

Or, as Public Wise Executive Director Christina Baal-Owens told me: “January 6 was not one day. It’s been a long and very organized movement, and the next part of this movement is getting people who believe in election denialism and that agenda into local offices. This is a movement that could continue to grow in the shadows. It could keep slipping into these unopposed or really low turnout races, and then [these people] have an incredible amount of power over elections and then other parts of life.”

The Wrath of the RNC

In the last edition of Eye on the Right I talked about the Republican National Committee’s unprecedented legal assault on voting rights — and why the data behind the numbers shouldn’t have you worried. I still believe that, but I can’t ignore that the RNC is nonetheless trying their damndest to disenfranchise voters.

On Sept. 3, the RNC sent letters to the secretaries of state in seven swing states attacking a pro-voting nonprofit called Vot-ER. If you aren’t familiar, Vot-ER is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that partners with healthcare professionals to integrate “nonpartisan civic engagement into healthcare settings.” Basically, they help to register voters in medical settings, training healthcare professionals to register people to vote, should they be interested. Seems like a pretty noble mission, no? Not according to the RNC, who accused the group of being part of a Democrat-controlled conspiracy to illegally register voters. “It is run by activists aligned with progressive causes and organizations and is funded in no small part by dark money groups managed by the left-wing Arabella Advisors,” the RNC’s letters read, referencing a for-profit political and nonprofit consulting company.

Needless to say, it’s all BS. “Voter registration is one of the most frequently mentioned barriers to voting, and many elections officials are looking for new & efficient ways to keep their state’s voter registration information up to date,” Aliya Bhatia, Vot-ER’s executive director, told me in an email. “Vot-ER has always been clear in its mission to remain nonpartisan, and we are guided by a bipartisan advisory board, including Republican & Democratic former elections officials, to ensure that our work reflects the needs and concerns of all voters, regardless of political affiliation.”

In addition to its attack on Vot-ER, the RNC filed a trio of lawsuits in the past couple of weeks — two in North Carolina and one in Michigan — attacking procedures related to voter IDs and absentee ballots. Should you be concerned about these lawsuits? The answer is in the numbers.

Does Trisha Calvarese Have the Juice to Beat Lauren Boebert?

To end this edition of Eye On The Right, I want to bring your attention to a recent interview that my colleague Courtney Cohn did with Trisha Calvarese, who’s running to unseat one of the most notorious Republicans in Congress, Rep. Lauren Boebert.

It’s going to be a tough race for Calvarese — not just because Boebert is, well, who she is — but because Trump won Colorado’s 4th district by 16 points in 2020. That’s a pretty big margin and one that would be tough for any Democrat to overcome. But Calvarese has some things going for her that makes me think it’s going to be a close race. Most importantly, her background connects with the working class in ways Boebert has failed to do in her political career.

Prior to getting into politics, she worked for the AFL-CIO: America’s Unions, along with a stint at the US National Science Foundation. It’s that experience working with one of the largest federations of unions in the country that really sticks out to me about Calvarese — and something that shines through in her interview with Cohn.

When asked how she would like to protect democracy in Colorado and the country in general, Calvarese gave such a good answer that really gets at the central reason as to why Boebert has failed as a member of congress: “Democracy is really on the ballot. It’s on every single ballot in America. And it’s not just at the ballot box, it’s also in our workplaces. You should have a voice on the job, and that means restoring our union rights. So, [we need to be] making sure that we’re electing those pro-democracy candidates up and down the ballot for results.”

How well has Boebert supported unions and workers in her time in Congress? Let’s check the scoreboard.