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September 27, 2022  | by Fredreka Schouten

VOTER CHALLENGES, PUBLIC RECORDS REQUESTS AND OTHER DEMANDS SWAMP ELECTION OFFICIALS

One morning in late August, Zach Manifold showed up at his job running the elections office in Gwinnett County, Georgia, to find eight boxes waiting, all filled with documents challenging the eligibility of tens of thousands of people to cast ballots.

It was the physical result of a law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2021 that made explicit that any Georgia voter could challenge an unlimited number of fellow Georgians’ right to vote. Conservative activists have seized on that power in recent months to attempt to toss out thousands of voter registrations for people they suspect have moved away or otherwise no longer qualify to vote in this battleground state.

For Manifold’s staff, those boxes also have meant lots of additional work.

“It’s a task,” he told me and a few of my CNN colleagues during a recent interview. “Somewhere in that five to 10 range (of people) all day, every day, six days a week over the last couple of weeks,” he said of the workload to sort through the challenges.

It's not just in Georgia. Around the country, local election officials say they are confronting a wave of new demands on their time – in the form of voter challenges, requests for recounts and what some view as frivolous public records requests, all as they scramble to prepare for November’s general election.

'DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACKS'

Many of the public records requests come from supporters of former President Donald Trump, who are seeking cast vote records -- reports generated by voting systems that show how the election management software recorded each ballot. Experts said the cast vote records offer no evidence of the election fraud claimed by Trump-aligned activists.

But some election officials say the tsunami seems aimed at burdening busy offices as they gear up to prepare ballots, hire workers and carry out other key functions associated with the upcoming elections.

“Mass requests like these are a denial of service attack on election offices," said Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, referring to the practice of swamping websites with phony traffic. "It's trying to create chaos and cause confusion and ultimately force people into making mistakes."

Some election officials traced a recent surge in requests to an August gathering in Missouri, organized by Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who urged people viewing the event to request the records.

In a recent telephone interview, Lindell – who has spread falsehoods about the 2020 election for nearly two years -- told me that he first learned of the cast vote records in June and views them as a way to "detect machine manipulation" of the 2020 election.

Asked how they would, he said: "You'd have to talk to a cyber guy... It's the sequence and the patterns."

'NOTHING THERE'

I did talk to a computer expert, Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University, about the potential to detect voter fraud in cast vote records. His response: “There’s nothing there.”

"As far as I know, no one has ever found anything in this data. Period."

Some patterns detected in the records have simple explanations, he added. If ballots, for instance, were scanned in the order in which they arrived at a central tabulating facility and not randomized, votes from a single precinct could be tallied together and that pattern would be detected by a cast vote record, he said.

But that's not evidence of fraud, Wallach noted.

"This is not news that the people in my neighborhood are a lot like me in how they vote," Wallach said. "This happens all the time."

WORRIES ABOUT STAFF BURNOUT

Former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, left, and Garland Favorito talk at the northwest Georgia headquarters for Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia, in Ringgold, Ga., Thursday, April 14, 2022.

In Gwinnett County, a group called Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia, or VoterGA, had contested the registrations of more than 37,000 voter registrations.

Gwinnett, a racially diverse suburb of Atlanta that Biden won on his way to flipping Georgia in 2020, has more than 562,000 active voters.

The push to remove the voters follows Trump’s baseless claims that widespread fraud contributed to President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia and other states. Those claims have been rejected by multiple judges and members of his own administration.

VoterGA was founded by conservative activist Garland Favorito, who unsuccessfully sought to audit Fulton County’s ballots months after the 2020 election. And its financial backers include The America Project, which was established by two Trump allies -- his onetime national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

Favorito did not respond to my interview requests, but at a news conference earlier this month, activists with the group said they had examined public records and change of address requests to determine whether voters had moved away or improperly registered.

After weeks of work on the part of Gwinnett election staffers, Manifold said some 15,000 to 20,000 of the voter registration challenges lodged by VoterGA will be rejected because they actually deal with objections to ballots cast in 2020.

The Georgia law regarding challenges focuses on future elections. And Manifold said election officials already had flagged for possible removal many of the other voter registrations on the group’s list as part of the normal government process for cleaning up voter rolls.

But even if most of the challenges prove invalid, the Gwinnett staff still had to log long hours to research them.

“My biggest concern probably is burning out the staff sooner in the cycle,” Manifold said, noting that they face 100-work weeks as Election Day draws closer. “It makes it harder and harder to run a quality election.”

PREVENTING ANOTHER JANUARY 6

On Tuesday, the Senate Rules Committee is slated to begin tackling an update of the Electoral Count Act, the arcane 19th century law that pro-Trump allies sought to exploit on January 6, 2021, to challenge President Joe Biden’s victory.

Last week, the House passed its version.

Both aim to make it harder to overturn a presidential election by, among other things, raising the threshold in Congress required to object to a state’s electors. But there are differences between the two: The House bill, for instance, would require the support of one third of each chamber; the Senate version would require just one-fifth.

Currently, only one member from each chamber is needed to object.

The bipartisan bill in the Senate already has the support of 10 Republicans, so it is likely to overcomes any attempt to filibuster the legislation. But it’s not clear when the Senate will take final action on it.

PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson has a good breakdown on the bills and the ways in which they differ.

YOU NEED TO READ

• This piece by the CNN Investigates team that explores how far Matt DePerno, this year’s Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, went in challenging the results of the 2020 election. It also illustrates how a simple human error – one that was quickly discovered and corrected – in Antrim County, Michigan, on Election Night in 2020, bloomed into baseless fraud claims across the country.

• This story by Em Steck of CNN’s KFile on Jim Marchant, the Republican candidate aiming to run Nevada's elections. He has called to end mail voting in the state but she found that he has voted by mail multiple times himself.

• This story in The Washington Post on the campaign by a coalition of five dozen civil rights organizations to get Silicon Valley’s biggest social media companies to fight the election misinformation.

• A report by CNN's Zachary Cohen on text messages that show direct contact between then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a key operative who briefed Meadows on efforts to seize voting machines in key battleground states.

• This report from CNN’s Maeve Reston on Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem’s consistent election conspiracy theory comments in a debate on Thursday with his rival for the job, Democrat Adrian Fontes.

WHAT WE'RE TRYING TO DO HERE

Our goal is to help guide conversations about the battle for voting rights in a critical year for American democracy. We’re sharing the latest developments in the battle for ballot access, hearing from experts, answering your questions and providing practical information about how to vote this year. Conversations about the battle for voting rights in a critical year for American democracy. Look for it in your inbox every Tuesday – along with a way to sign up for the free weekly CITIZEN BY CNN events. And, please, drop us a line to let us know what you think: [email protected]. And get your friends to subscribe here.

CNN's Shania Shelton contributed to this edition.