Pleasant Politics

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Election workers, the vast majority of them women, say they're feeling vulnerable to the charged political climate surrounding the 2024 election. 38% of the women staffing the polls say they've experienced threats, harassment, or abuse, fueling the violence, disinformation, and conspiracy theories following the 2020 election.

Joining us now, Elizabeth Landers, lead correspondent for the Scripps News Disinformation Desk.

"And Liz, you traveled to Surrey County in North Carolina to really dig deep on this. What did you find?"

"We traveled there back in June to get a sense of how disinformation is impacting election workers, specifically the almost all-female team that heads up Surrey County's elections. This is a small county. It's about 70,000 people. It's best known as the birthplace of Andy Griffith. And it's overwhelmingly a red Republican area, went 75% for the former president in 2020. Despite that though, and despite him winning that area, this small community has been dealing with mis- and disinformation around the elections since they took place."

"And the woman who heads up the elections there is Michelle Huff. She's a team of just four other people helping her administer these elections. They're working on this year-round. She described to us how things have changed since 2020. Take a listen."

"I was actually in one store in downtown Mount Airy. I was cornered and pressed for 20 minutes. This person was getting everything that they felt 2020 election that Trump did not win because of what election officials in this country did. Even in my church, all of sudden election officials are people to not be trusted and not believe."

"And Allie, disinformation in Surrey County for Michelle really reached a head in 2022. She said there were people that showed up at their office, confronted her about their voting systems, were asking her to see the voting machines, which the North Carolina State Board of Elections says that would have been illegal to give access to people who are not allowed to be around voting machines, that access to critical infrastructure there. They said they had evidence that the voting machines were pinging cell towers in 2020. So they were pushing conspiracies and unfounded information to her."

"And Michelle has said that she has had to harden their office, make changes there that she never thought that she would have to consider the safety of herself, her staff, her family. But really, she has in the last four years. And she is concerned about this in the lead up to the election in November."

"It makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that this is a county that went so squarely for Trump. And yet the aspersions and bad faith that he has put upon the election system writ large are clearly even playing out in red counties. So then given what we saw in 2020, given what she's experiencing in counties like this one, what's being done to protect election workers? And I also imagine that this is impacting the number of people who want to be election workers."

"Absolutely. The Brennan Center for Justice, who we interviewed for this piece, says that they are losing election workers at sort of an unprecedented rate right now. People just don't want to do this kind of work because of these threats and harassment that they're dealing with. And in addition to that, they're losing the institutional knowledge. There's a lot of minutiae that are involved in election administration. Every state in this country has a different way that they administer these elections. So the Brennan Center is concerned about that."

"And I would also just add to that 80 percent of these election workers in this country are female. So part of the reason that we were focused on this story is because we've been tracking how disinformation is impacting women over at Scripps News. We've been kind of doing a series on this. And this is really impacting election workers because so many of them are women across the country, Allie."

"Really great reporting, Liz. It's going to have a long tail as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Thank you for tracking it and thank you for bringing it to us."