Wednesday, October 2

There’s a saying: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I can’t think of a situation where that phrase is more appropriate than in the local elections in deep red communities, where a handful of Democrats are running against election deniers in down ballot races. It’s the focus of my latest feature. In this edition of Eye On The Right, I also want to send a special shoutout to the Pigpen Project and the Arizona GOP, who both were on my radar in recent weeks for reasons you can read about below.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Matt Cohen, Senior Staff Writer

Against The Election Deniers

In my latest feature, I interviewed four candidates for local office in pivotal swing states running against the election deniers in their communities. These candidates were recruited to run by Contest Every Race, a project of the progressive, anti-fascist incubator and consulting firm Movement Labs. They’re just four of 42 candidates that Contest Every Race endorsed in down ballot races across six swing states in November.

The impetus for the effort is one that really struck me: when it comes to local elections — especially in rural and conservative-leaning areas — Democrats aren’t putting a lot of effort into these races. According to data conducted by Contest Every Race, Democrats left 32% of down ballot races in seven surveyed swing states in 2022 uncontested, whereas Republicans only left 13% uncontested.

I understand why it might seem like a fool’s errand for anyone to run as a Democrat in an election for county supervisor or state senator, where the political makeup is overwhelmingly Republican. But it’s important. It’s how the political demographics of these areas shift. That was the gist of the conversation I had with Cameron Schroy in Pennsylvania, who’s running for the state senate seat currently held by Doug Mastriano, a well-known election denier and failed gubernatorial candidate who notoriously bussed people to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

When I talked to Schroy — a career civics teacher — last week, he had no illusions that winning his election would be anything short of a miracle. It’s a deep red district where Mastriano is very popular. But that isn’t why he’s running.

“Locally, at least, we see a lot of apathy, which is quite unfortunate,” he told me. “It seems like a lot of people don’t want to be part of the process. And so what comes along with that? What I’ve seen is the loudest voices in the room are the ones that get heard more often because they tend to be more engaged. So part of what I am doing is trying to encourage people, even if, when people with progressive views are the minority in our district and our county, we still at least deserve to be heard.”

Arizona Republicans’ Awkward Moment

Gina Swoboda, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, recently found herself in an awkward position: after years of defending the state’s restrictive documentary proof of citizenship requirement — meaning any Arizona resident who wishes to register to vote in state and local elections must show proof of their U.S. citizenship — she took to social media to essentially advocate against that rule.

That’s right, Swoboda and the Arizona GOP recently advocated to the Arizona Supreme Court that about 218,000 voters who risked losing their right to vote in state and local elections in November should be allowed to cast their ballot, even though they didn’t provide documentary proof of citizenship when they registered to vote. This all happened after it was revealed a data error in Arizona’s elections system cast the eligibility of nearly 218,000 registered voters into question. 

Long story, short: A 2004 Arizona law requires residents to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in all elections — federal, state and local. But federal law doesn’t require such proof to register to vote. So basically, voters who didn’t provide proof of citizenship are registered as a “federal-only voter” and can only vote in presidential and federal elections. That same law states that any driver’s license issued after 1996 can be used as a valid proof of citizenship for registering to vote.

But a database error erroneously marked close to 218,000 registered voters as having provided proof of citizenship, because they obtained their license before 1996. When those voters had a duplicate license issued as a replacement for their original, the system marked them as having provided proof of citizenship when they registered to vote, when in reality, it’s unclear if they did.

It all got sorted out — the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the affected voters would still be able to vote in all federal and state elections in November. But the saga resulted in a somewhat humiliating moment for the state’s GOP. Because a majority of the affected voters were Republicans, the people who spent so much time arguing that no one should be allowed to vote unless they provided strict proof that they are, in fact, U.S. citizens, suddenly were saying that it’s actually not necessary. All because the voters who risked disenfranchisement were Republicans. 

We like to call that hypocrisy.

Pigpen Project ♥️ Democracy Docket

Over the past year, I’ve written a few times about the Pigpen Project, a right-wing group in Nevada founded by conservative activist and lobbyist Chuck Muth, and their concerted efforts to purge thousands of voters across the Silver State.

The Pigpen Project and Muth are just a small part of the vast ecosystem of conservative groups, both large and small, that are working day and night to disenfranchise as many voters as they can before the November election. Mostly by challenging the voter registration eligibility of registered voters on county- and state-wide levels. I’ve written about dozens of these groups, but it’s Muth and the Pigpen Project that really seem to be bothered by my factual reporting about their efforts.

In the Pigpen Project’s blog, Muth recently responded to some of my reporting: “Matt Cohen of the left-wing Democracy Docket – affiliated with Democrat super-lawyer Mark Elias, who used COVID as an excuse to weaken election integrity laws across the country – is at it again,” he wrote. “In a new screed published yesterday, Cohen went to great lengths in propagandizing misinformation in his attempt to thwart cleaning up voter rolls, including our effort here in Nevada.”

What he was referring to was my coverage of three lawsuits he filed in Carson City and Clark, Storey and Washoe Counties to have voters purged. I’m not entirely sure how my coverage — which simply detailed the allegations of the lawsuits, along with some helpful context of how Nevada recently launched a new state-wide voter registration system — constitutes a propagandizing screed, but I am glad to know that Muth is a dutiful reader of Democracy Docket and the efforts of our founder, Marc Elias. Thanks for reading, Chuck. And I’ll be sure to update our readers as to the outcome of your lawsuits.