EP. 38 — PROTECTING OUR NEIGHBORS

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One. 

Weston Wamp: Countless elections had gone by before I thought about the familiar faces that I’ve seen at my local polling place every year or two at the John A. Patten Rec Center where I’ve voted in Chattanooga, Tennessee since I was 18 years old. 

After the 2020 election, I’ll never look at them the same way again.

The election workers who staff my polling site are diligent and hard-working public servants. I don’t know most of them, but I recognize their faces. They’re mostly older, many are retirees. A small nucleus of full-time election workers are supported by a broad group of part-time, patriotic citizens who serve as poll workers.

Who wins the election isn’t their concern. The process is. 

For that reason, they’re sometimes forgotten. But in America, they make up the backbone of our uniquely decentralized system of elections. They didn’t flinch in 2020, doing what they had to do to adapt to the changing environment of a pandemic. And still we had a secure election with the highest turnout in a century. It couldn’t have happened without the election workers who play a critical role — folks who are members of our community, our friends, and family.

But, because of their heroic efforts to make the 2020 election happen, these public servants are now being threatened for doing their job and upholding their office. 

This is Episode 38: Protecting Our Neighbors

Natalie Adona: Well there's a couple of different levels of election officials that I think are sort of important to identify. So there's the permanent people and I would be amongst sort of the permanent employees who run elections. And, yes, we have seasonal employees that are brought on temporarily.

And then there are the people who we consider to be on the front lines, the poll workers. And those are the people who they may not be county employees. They may just be people who volunteer in the community. 

Weston Wamp: As Natalie Adona, an election official in Nevada County, California, explained, elections are run by both long term employees and volunteers, all of whom are crucial to the process.

Natalie Adona: I think we are pretty adamant about selecting people who already have a good sense of what's at stake and what's at stake is the vote, right? But we give them specific training on what the laws are, why it's important to have things like a chain of custody procedure, why it's important to have two people at minimum be with ballots and not just leave them alone with one person, things like that. We do sort of different levels of training, depending on what function it is that we're talking about.

Weston Wamp: As unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud spread after the 2020 election, many of these election workers, from volunteers to elected officials from both political parties became targets, they were shamed, vilified, and even threatened with violence. This is the cost of disinformation. And it’s a big problem.

Al Schmidt: It was clear some months in advance of the 2020 election that Philadelphia was going to be targeted. Not only was the former president — and president of the United States at the time — conspicuously mentioning Philadelphia, whether it was in the one debate where he said, "Bad things happen in Philadelphia." Or his surrogates out there like Newt Gingrich and others suggesting that the National Guard should be sent into Philadelphia to run the election.

Weston Wamp: Conspiracy theories have a way of playing on emotions such that common sense doesn’t stand a chance. In hindsight, this was part of the sinister plan to undermine the 2020 elections.

What seemed to be strong evidence that there wasn’t widespread fraud became part of the case for a rigged election. Among those on the receiving end of accusations from the president of the United States was former Philadelphia City Commissioner and the lone Republican on Philadelphia’s Election Board, Al Schmidt.

Al Schmidt: Essentially, there was an attempt to disregard the outcome of that election before a single vote was cast. So it was conspicuous and you could see it coming. It's still different to see a punch being thrown your way and the punch actually hitting. So it doesn't come to you as a surprise, but it's still something to endure and to go through. And there was clearly this concerted effort to have the vote outcome in Philadelphia brought into question right out of the gate with no actual proof of any wrongdoing whatsoever. And ironically, President Trump outperformed in Philadelphia in 2020 compared to 2016.

Weston Wamp: Schmidt recalls the moment he realized what was going on as the results came in on election night, and soon after how quickly his own safety was endangered.

Al Schmidt: My office was down a hall where there was a TV on the wall, and that was set to CNN, I think. And I was walking past it at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning on election night. And the former president was saying, "Why are they still counting in Philadelphia? The election's over. Polls closed at 8:00 PM. All the votes should be counted." And that was clear when I knew and muttered to myself out loud, "Here it is, he's doing it. He's going to try to prevent our voters’ votes from being counted. Republican voters, Democratic voters, independents and unaffiliateds, and others, to try to prevent our votes from being counted."

And then I, soon after that, gave an interview on CNN early in the morning. And then the president, who apparently watches CNN, tweeted, it sounds stupid, because it's just a tweet, but he tweeted at me by name, calling me a RINO saying that I was refusing to look at a mountain of evidence of voter fraud in Philadelphia and whatever. That's when things really also escalated. That's when the death threats came and all the other ugliness. 

Weston Wamp: Now Schmidt’s example was high profile. He was a notable election official from the minority political party in a major city.

But Brian Corley, the Supervisor of Elections in Pasco County, Florida shared with me that his staff faced an onslaught of hate speech and threats in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Brian Corley: I didn't speak about it during the cycle, but we did... I mean, very, very veiled threats. I was called some stupid names. But what really troubled me, and I didn't address it at the time publicly, was one of my full-time staff who kind of headed up our call center was African-American, and she was called the N-word 15, 20, 25 times and other inappropriate things to a lady, threatened to be shot, threatened to be beaten.

Weston Wamp: Despite his home county going roughly 60-40 for former President Trump, Corley bemoans the prospect of politicizing the election process.

Brian Corley: I've been doing this almost 16 years now. I have no interest in when politics hijacks election administration. Politics should be left to just that, those running for office, the voters, and the other stakeholders.

Weston Wamp: Corley explains that election administration is categorically different.

Brian Corley: I could speak for every one of my colleagues nationwide. I'll be in meetings with my fellow supervisors of elections in Florida; I could not tell you who was Republican or Democrat. I really couldn't. And I don't care. It's immaterial. It's a simple concept; we serve voters and we run good elections. The rest is just fodder for the pundits. But when we're having to deal with accusations of questioning, impugning our integrity, and calling into question our ethics, that gets a bit old after a while.

Weston Wamp: Unprecedented pressure and threats on election workers have caused concern about whether election worker participation will be as high for the midterms. 

Schmidt points out that unsubstantiated allegations dissuading seasoned elections officials could have grave consequences.

Al Schmidt: Those election officials are making our democracy function and counting our voters' votes. And if they falter and they leave and they're replaced by people who don't know what they're doing or people whose job it will be to run elections, but at the same time, trying to undermine confidence in them, that's a very dangerous place for us to be.

Weston Wamp: Natalie Adona expressed concern for escalating tensions after what she saw during the gubernatorial recall election last year. 

Natalie Adona: I think that in recent elections, we have seen an increase of voters who for the most part, I think are civil. They understand that everyone's just trying to do their job and do their best. But my vote center workers had expressed that some of them were very surprised by how aggressively some voters came at them if they had to, for example, explain the rule on no electioneering or might have been sort of generally distrustful of the 2020 election, sort of stuff of that nature. So I think that it's hard to say whether that is a sort of increase of intimidation, but it was something that was noted in the recent gubernatorial recall that we had in California.

So yeah, I think it is definitely a concern. It's something that I had included in the vote center training module, just to sort of give these workers a heads up that they may encounter situations that could be difficult. And to give them some tactics to de-escalate situations and just get the voter in, get them voting, and send them along their way. 

Weston Wamp: Even in the face of such difficult and unknown circumstances, for his part, Corley is optimistic that election workers will return.

Brian Corley: I think we're going to be okay. We've done some outreach to them. We've not really seen a huge tsunami of those who are not wanting to come back. But it's something that keeps me up at night, worrying about that. We shouldn't even have to have this discussion, quite frankly. It's almost embarrassing, but it is something that's a concern. But I think ultimately we'll be okay.

Weston Wamp: It’s a testament to their character that our friends and neighbors like those that help run elections in Corley’s county are not deterred from their duty, given the hostility that they’ve seen. And this is important, because the stakes could not be much higher as election officials begin to recruit part-time election workers and volunteers in advance of the 2022 midterm elections.

Issue One’s Legislative Director Elise Wirkus is actively engaged in efforts to find bipartisan consensus on legislation that would protect election workers for the first time in our country’s history.

Elise Wirkus: I think there's a lot to be done at the state level, and what I know is there's a lot that Congress and the federal government generally can do to support election officials at this point. So what that looks like is, of course, there's more expansive legal protections that could be passed and that would face the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, just as everything else does. And there's also a serious conversation we're having between protecting election officials and election funding, and how these things are inextricably linked. So with more robust or more regular federal funding, election officials could, if permitted by Congress and the Election Assistance Commission, they could invest in better physical security for them and their staffs. They could also invest in better cyber-security trainings for them and their staffs, doxing training.

These are the kinds of things that election officials have raised that they could spend to improve their own security and help them do their jobs effectively and safely if given more federal funding. 

Weston Wamp: Beyond funding, Wirkus says the Election Assistance Commission and the Department of Justice could coordinate to better ensure protections for American election workers.

Elise Wirkus: Attorney General Garland set up a task force specifically addressing this threats problem this summer, and they are investigating current threats to election officials, but there's still a lot more they can do and a lot more guidance that they can provide to election officials who are on the receiving end of a lot of this negativity and threats.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of “Swamp Stories,” we’ll look at the overwhelming body of evidence that social media has played a corrosive role in our politics — and talk to experts about what the road back to civility looks like.

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, senior producer Evan Ottenfeld, producer Sydney Richards, and editor Parker from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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