The self-inflicted voting machine misinformation crisis looming over 2024

The federal government is about to change its certification guidelines for voting machines — and election officials across the country are bracing for a wave of misinformation that erodes trust in the 2024 election.

Election officials are not-so-quietly freaking out that this long-awaited technical overhaul of voting machine guidelines later this year will be weaponized against them. The officials, who are used to operating in relative obscurity, just endured two election cycles in which seemingly benign issues blew up in their face. Now they're afraid it's happening all over again.

“We have serious concerns that false information will mischaracterize the consequences” of the changes, read a March letter from the National Association of State Election Directors to the agency that oversees the change in guidelines. “All their public communications must be unambiguous.”

They have good reason to be worried. After 2020, supporters of former President Donald Trump who were convinced the election was stolen from him spread conspiracy theories about the security of voting machines, pushing for so-called election audits in swing states and advocating for hand counting ballots, something election officials say will take longer, cost more money and be less accurate.

The new standards are a welcome update after years of work from the agency — the Election Assistance Commission — and election officials, and are broadly supported in the election community. They were formally adopted by EAC commissioners in early 2021, and represent a significant leap forward in requirements on everything from cybersecurity to accessibility for voters with disabilities.

The new standards will be rolled out on Nov. 15, 2023, just a year ahead of a presidential election that might include Trump. On guard against falling public trust in elections, officials worry every word in their new standards will be scrutinized by a new, not always kind, audience.

One word the agency used in the rollout of the new standards is particularly vexing: "deprecation." Election officials worried using the term would fuel false belief that older voting machines could no longer be used.

Machines will not be decertified — the agency had stressed on its website that “deprecation does not mean decertification.” But the agency recently scrubbed the word “deprecation” anyway, knowing it was problematic. Instead they are talking about a “migration” to new standards, one that they hope will have better public relations.

“It’s a terrible word,” said Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, “because nobody really knows what it means, but it sounds very bad.”

Public meetings about how they’re communicating the changes have included extensive criticism, and a national association of top election officials has publicly pressured the agency to not take their concerns lightly.

“By using plain language and being responsive to the needs of election officials, we hope this clarification will help the public better understand this process and that they will continue to have confidence in the country's voting systems,” Donald Palmer, one of the four EAC commissioners, said in a statement when asked about the change.

Officials at the agency say they are doing the best that they can with limited resources.

“We don't have a huge microphone,” EAC chair Christy McCormick said in an interview earlier this year, before the agency moved to the “migration” terminology. “You know, as one of our commissioners pointed out, it's not like we have the money to take out an ad at the Super Bowl.”

McCormick said that a “fifty state effort is needed,” adding that the agency will support election officials “in any way we can.” She said she and other commissioners are already speaking whenever they can to the media, election officials and other organizations, and that the agency has a communications toolkit on how to communicate the migration.

“I think we won’t see new systems by the next presidential,” said McCormick, a belief widely shared by other state and local election officials.

Virtually every system in use in 2024 will be certified under the old standards, not the new ones. Election officials stress that machines certified under previous standards remain secure and approved to use. But they know bad actors might use their words against them anyway.

“There are groups of people out there that are now declaring elections that are not held on equipment that has been certified" under the new guidelines “as invalid,” said Paul Lux, the supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County, Fla. who serves on a board of election officials that helps advise the agency, stressing that such claims are entirely false.

Any confusion — or deliberate disinformation — around the new standards could only add fuel to that fire.

“I don't know if it'll take place in 2024,” said Stuart Holmes, the elections director for Washington state. “But I'm expecting there will be a lot of conversations about the voting systems that were used in 2024 in 2025.”

Biden still won’t nuke the court. But he is upping his criticism of it.

Joe Biden has long resisted calls from his party to go full blast on the Supreme Court. After rulings this week that upended Democratic priorities, he’s getting closer but still isn’t ready to pull the trigger.

Following Thursday’s Supreme Court rulings that eviscerated affirmative action in college admissions, the president took several swipes at the court in terms notably hostile for him. The current court, he told reporters, was not “normal.” Later, he would tell MSNBC that its “value system is different.”

The dual responses did not match the brimstone and fury that came from elsewhere in the Democratic Party, where lawmakers called for a drastic overhaul of the nation’s top court in light of the affirmative action ruling. And after the court ruled against his executive action granting student loan relief, he knocked the decision but didn’t go off on the court like other high-ranking Democrats.

Still, the responses did move Biden incrementally closer to his party’s base, even pleasing some of the progressive activists who have pushed him to adopt hardline changes to the court — and who will be a key part of any successful coalition for him in the 2024 presidential election.

“The most encouraging comment from the president was the unscripted one,” said Brian Fallon, who as executive director of progressive judicial issues group Demand Justice has been constantly needling the White House to back a liberal plan to add seats to the Supreme Court. “My advice would be to work that into the main message.”

Biden made clear on Thursday that he remains unwilling to go where others in his party are, swatting away the idea of packing the court in his interview with MSNBC. “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we're going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy,” he said.

But the totality of his responses, coming at a time when the court is under heightened scrutiny and increasingly distrusted, suggested a politician inching closer in rhetoric to the activist camp, at least according to those who Biden himself has entrusted with such an endeavor. Former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who served on the president’s commission examining potential changes to the Supreme Court, said that Biden’s comments Thursday were “certainly strong for him.” That he refused to trash the court as illegitimate, she added, was not surprising. It kept with his central political identity.

“If the public doesn’t respect the decisions that the court is handing down, we really are all in trouble,” said Gertner, who has urged Biden to support adding extra seats to the court. “He is walking a line that is an appropriate line to walk: ‘I don’t like these decisions. I disagree, but I am not going to characterize the court.’"

“This is consistent with who he is,” she added.

Biden’s guarded criticism comes at a unique moment of scrutiny for the high court. The overturning of Roe v. Wade last summer led to better-than-expected midterms for Democrats, and Biden’s own reelection campaign is planning to make central a promise to codify abortion protections nationally. And recent reporting scrutinizing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas’ ties to prominent conservative billionaires has amplified calls from Democratic lawmakers for wholesale overhauls of the court.

The structure and composition of the court has remained one of several points of contention between Biden and his base, with the president often occupying the role of institutionalist loath to challenge the legitimacy of another branch of government inside a party increasingly hellbent on getting him to do so.

Biden — who started his career as an attorney before chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s — has long sought to avoid the perception that he would challenge the independence of the Supreme Court. And on the 2020 campaign trail, he ducked and dodged the issue of expanding the Supreme Court, even as his primary competitors and fellow Democrats expressed openness to it or even embraced it.

“Action and reaction, anger and more anger, sorrow and frustration at the way things are in this country now politically,” Biden said during a September 2020 speech, where he was trying to discourage Republicans from confirming a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the waning weeks of the campaign. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate.”

Republicans did not heed that plea. And as they moved closer to ultimately confirming Amy Coney Barrett, Biden chose another middle-road option: Instead of promising retribution, he pledged to roll out the commission of scholars to study changes to the court system.

The commission was viewed in Democratic circles as a classic Washington punt. When its report came together in December 2021, it stopped well short of any sweeping recommendations like adding additional justices or advocating for term limits. It instead endorsed a code of conduct for justices and advocated for the court to continue live streaming audio for its oral arguments. The relatively modest scope of the report was quickly brushed aside in Washington, frustrating even some of the members.

Asked about the report on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters traveling on Air Force One that Biden has “read” it. She disputed the idea that “it’s sitting on the shelf and collecting dust.” But, she added, she did not have “any additional steps to move forward on” to announce.

The Biden campaign declined to comment for this story. The White House, meanwhile, has largely avoided speaking publicly about recent reporting from ProPublica that detailed Thomas’ close relationship with a billionaire Republican donor, and Alito’s vacation with a different billionaire.

When Dobbs was first decided, some progressives criticized Biden’s response as insufficient. Biden signed several executive orders related to abortion and reproductive health but declined to act on others, such as a plan by progressives to put abortion clinics on federal property, his team seeing the more liberal proposals as unfeasible and in some cases harmful.

Biden advisers believe that he sounded the alarm in an effective way — chastising the decision but not casting the judges as illegitimate and making the case that the remedy was through legislative action and elections. They think the rightness of their approach was proven in the policy sphere and at the ballot box: Democrats wildly outperformed expectations in the midterm elections in large part due to voter anger over Dobbs.

Democrats have a diverse bench waiting in the wings. They just need to pitch it to donors.

There's little glory in being second in command. But a Democratic committee tasked with electing top lieutenants across the country thinks it finally has the right pitch to secure major money investments in those races.

The Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association plans to raise $15 million by 2026 and spend $2 million each in a pair of high profile lieutenant governor races in 2024 and 2025. The organization also wants an internal operation to support communication and fundraising efforts for lieutenant governors as they eye reelection — or higher office.

The plans — shared first with POLITICO — would represent a significant step forward for the committee, which says it has raised about $2 million a year since it was first organized in 2018. But it is one that senior aides and the lieutenant governors themselves say is a long-time coming.

For years, party insiders have stressed that the donor class is too focused on federal races, and the highest profile ones at that. The lack of attention paid to state contests has not only led to more conservative policy outcomes in the states, they warn, but less Democratic talent moving through the ranks.

The DLGA’s pitch to donors and other party leaders is a bench-building one: Today’s lieutenant governors are tomorrow’s senators and governors. They also note that Democratic lieutenant governors best represent a party that increasingly relies on the support of non-white and women voters. Of the 25 Democratic second-in-commands, which includes states where the secretary of state fills that role, 14 are women and 12 are people of color.

“It is the most diverse organization of elected officials in the country,” said Austin Davis, who was recently elected as Pennsylvania's first Black lieutenant governor. “If you look at the number of lieutenant governors that elevate — whether to the U.S. Senate, whether it's governor, whether it's Congress — this is clearly a bench of folks who are going to be leading our party into the future.”

The DLGA is looking to fashion itself as a training ground for up-and-coming Democrats, connecting them with donors and helping them build policy chops as they consider their political futures beyond their current role.

“For a long time, I think the role of lieutenant governor was sort of in the background,” Peggy Flanagan, the Minnesota lieutenant governor who serves on the organization's executive committee, said in an interview during a meeting of the organization in Washington this week.

Two of Senate Democrats’ highest profile midterm recruits were lieutenant governors: Mandela Barnes, who narrowly lost in Wisconsin to incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, and now-Sen. John Fetterman, who won a close contest in Pennsylvania against Trump recruit Mehmet Oz. And overall in 2022, four now-former lieutenant governors won election as their states’ chief executives, either winning a term outright or winning a full term of their own after previously assuming the governorship following a resignation.

DLGA leadership says that it is eager to foster members’ future ambitions. Kevin Holst, who was recently named the committee’s executive director, noted that would-be donors can “form relationships early” with a “future rockstar in the party.”

Holst said that, beyond putting LGs forth as key fundraisers, one particular area of focus would be turning the committee into a centralized services hub for current and aspiring lieutenant governors.

“It’s a unique committee in which we are focused on electing more LGs, but we recognize that LG isn’t likely the endpoint for a lot of these elected officials,” he said. “Can we provide the fundraising support? … Can we help with press support? Can we help with profile building in their states?”

Republicans also have a party committee focused on lieutenant governors, which is an arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee. The GOP version focuses on all down ballot races in states, including state legislator and secretary of state contests. The RSLC lieutenant governors’ website notes that “these experiences often prepare our lieutenant governors for higher office,” and that over a third of the country’s Republican governors were previously lieutenant governors.

Two tests in the upcoming years for the DLGA will be North Carolina in 2024 and Virginia in 2025, states where the lieutenant governor is elected independently of the governor.

The officeholders in both states are currently Republicans — and both are considered potential gubernatorial candidates in the upcoming cycle.

Part of the impulse behind getting involved in these races is because Democrats lost an ultimately consequential race in North Carolina in 2020, a race the committee says it spent $1 million on. Now Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a controversial and bombastic Republican in the state, is a likely candidate as Republicans look to flip the governorship next year.

“LG was a race that many people didn't pay attention to in 2020, and now it is biting us in the ass,” Holst said.

Is a Democrat really the favorite in the Kentucky governor race?

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is entering his reelection contest in a rare position for a red state Democrat: the frontrunner.

It is a remarkable chain of events for Beshear, the son of a popular former governor who upset then-Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by just 5,000 votes in 2019. Beshear is riding into his reelection bid with sky high popularity, not just for a Democratic governor in a state that Donald Trump carried by nearly 26 points in 2020, but for any governor generally.

Republicans believe Beshear is beatable, but they admit it will be tough.

“I think he's the favorite,” said Scott Jennings, a prominent Republican consultant in Kentucky. “Do I think he can be beaten? Yeah, I do. But I think it's going to be expensive, and it's going to take a while.”

Beshear will have all the advantages generally granted to incumbent governors: the power of the bully pulpit, sky high name ID and approval, and a deep warchest — as of the end of last year, he had over $4.7 million in the bank. A late January survey from Mason-Dixon Polling found that 61 percent of voters in the state approved of the job he was doing, and he had notable leads over potential challengers.

Beshear has hosted regular “Team Kentucky” updates and has been ever-present for Kentuckians, who during his tenure in office have navigated the coronavirus pandemic and a string of natural disasters.

And Democrats in the state point to a boom of economic growth during his tenure in office. A page on Beshear’s official website brags about delivering “the highest and second-highest revenue surpluses in the history of Kentucky, thanks to strong fiscal management and a hot, record-breaking economy,” which is anticipated to be a major theme in his campaign.

Beshear is trying to follow the playbook of a handful of other recent successful Democratic governors in red states, who were able to secure reelection by casting themselves as competent, good-government-minded bureaucrats focused on fixing kitchen-table problems. They also look to avoid national politics — Beshear said in an interview with the Associated Press in December that President Joe Biden likely wouldn’t be appearing on the trail with him — and hot-button culture war issues.

“I think the through line there is you have a popular Democratic governor who's managed the economy well, and has the economy roaring. Those are difficult to beat,” said Eric Hyers, who is managing Beshear’s campaign. Hyers pointed to the success of Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly — who won reelection last year — and former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who won in 2012 and 2016 and whose campaign he previously ran.

Republicans are expected to spend heavily to try to bring Beshear back to earth. But first the party must land on a nominee, with a major pileup of candidates vying in a May 16 primary for the right to face Beshear.

The Republican field is taking shape

There are a dozen Republicans running, but many in the state generally think three candidates have a shot at the nomination: state Attorney General Daniel Cameron; Ryan Quarles, the state agricultural commissioner; and Kelly Craft, who was Trump’s second (and final) United Nations ambassador.

A protégé of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Cameron first won statewide office in 2019, succeeding Beshear as attorney general. He has been widely viewed as a rising star in the state and nationally and is generally viewed as the early frontrunner to win the Republican nomination.

He also scored an early endorsement from Trump in the contest, who got behind his bid last summer. No other potential 2024 hopeful has weighed in to the primary yet, and it is unclear if they would do so before the general election, which could potentially turn the race into a messy proxy battle.

Quarles is a former state lawmaker who has been serving as the state’s agricultural commissioner since 2016. His campaign launched with a long list of local endorsees in the counties, and would likely rely on that bench of support to try to carve a path to the nomination.

Craft, a longtime GOP activist and donor who is married to the coal billionaire Joe Craft, is the biggest x-factor in the race. Despite her role in the Trump administration, she was almost entirely unknown across Kentucky before she launched her run. To solve that, she has barraged Kentucky airwaves with advertising — already spending at least $1.4 million, according to data from the advertising tracking firm AdImpact, with hundreds of thousands more already booked and almost assuredly much more on the way.

“Two months ago nobody knew who we were, and we were able to go on TV” and change that, said Kristin Davison, a senior adviser to the Craft campaign.

That Mason-Dixon poll from January showed Cameron with a yawning lead in the GOP contest. He was at 39 percent, to 13 percent for Craft, 8 percent for Quarles and 5 percent for state Auditor Mike Harmon, with the rest of the field not breaking two percent. Republicans in the state say the race has likely shifted since then, given that Craft has had the airwaves to herself over the last month, and still has room to move as the primary heats up.

Some of Craft's ads have looked to nationalize the race. Her most recent ad was about standing up to China and made a passing mention to the spy balloon that captivated the country earlier this year, while the one before that had Craft saying “Joe Biden and Andy Beshear are ignoring the border crisis” while standing at the country’s Southern border.

The Republican Governors Association plans on continuing its policy of neutrality in primaries and does not intend to get involved in the race.

But other outside groups are. On Monday, an organization called Commonwealth PAC — which identified itself in state paperwork as being pro-Craft — launched new ads, the first major outside spending of the race. The spots attack Cameron as “nice, but he’s no strong Kentucky conservative,” using a stretched metaphor of a grizzly bear.

A handful of the candidates met for the first debate of the primary on Tuesday. Cameron, Quarles, Harmon and Somerset Mayor Alan Keck met on stage for a debate hosted by the Jefferson County Republican Party and Spectrum News. Craft declined to participate in this debate, citing a travel conflict. But she has committed to participate in at least two future debates. A mid-April debate is planned with the four candidates who appeared on stage on Tuesday and Craft, moderated by Kentucky Sports Radio’s Matt Jones, who floated a 2020 Senate run — as a Democrat — before deciding against it.

But regardless of who emerges with the nomination, Republicans are feeling bullish about challenging Beshear despite his overall popularity in the state. Several pointed to the fact that Republicans passed Democrats in voter registration over last summer — the end of a years-long inevitability in the state as ancestral Democrats abandoned the party in everything but registration — as a strong sign for their prospects, and they argued that even center-right voters who personally like Beshear would come home to the GOP in November.

Part of the calculus, Republicans say, is that they don’t anticipate any of the three leading candidates for the nomination to be anywhere near as polarizing as Bevin.

The former governor, who teased a comeback bid before bailing on filing day, was a deeply unpopular governor during his tenure in office. He was a caustic proto-Trump in the state who relished lobbing bombs at any given opportunity.

“I think all three of our candidates would be well liked by Republicans and would be more than acceptable to the center-right independents, who obviously gravitated away from Bevin toward Beshear,” said Jennings, the GOP consultant.

The bipartisan odd couple banding together to fight election deniers in Arizona

PHOENIX — Election officials don’t normally draw standing-room-only crowds in basement music halls. But the noise around elections in Arizona is anything but normal right now.

Roughly 120 people crammed into Valley Bar — entering through the back alley, down a flight of stairs into a dimly-lit venue stuffed with rows of folding chairs — in early February to hear recently-elected Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, debate proposals to change how the state votes and counts its ballots. Recent close elections in the state have seen top-of-the-ticket races uncalled for days, an issue they’re eager to address.

Even more surprising than Fontes and Richer drawing a crowd to discuss election administration amid local Super Bowl festivities and a major golf tournament is the fact the two men were sharing a stage at all.

It’s been little more than two years since they faced off in a bitter, acrimonious election, with Richer ultimately unseating then-Maricopa Recorder Fontes in November 2020 to become the chief election official for the country’s fourth-largest county. Richer was sharply critical of how Fontes was running the county office, alleging he was overextending the role beyond that of a neutral administrator.

But Richer voted for Fontes in 2022 to be secretary of state, he told POLITICO in an interview the day before the event. “If you would have told me that two years ago, I would have been very confused as to what had happened,” Richer said. “But then again, what's happened over the last two years is very confusing to me, and is very exceptional.”

“What’s happened” is that Arizona became ground zero for conspiracy theories, mainly fed by former President Donald Trump and his allies, that a vast underground cabal was working to steal elections. Arizona was one of the handful of states where Trump unsuccessfully tried to overturn the results in 2020. But the movement has metastasized far beyond that — into a GOP-led review of Maricopa’s votes denounced by the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors, and then a Republican ticket in 2022 that largely subscribed to the “stolen election” mythology, including Mark Finchem, the GOP secretary of state nominee Fontes defeated. Those midterms saw resurfaced and unsubstantiated allegations of intentional malfeasance in elections, as well as a failed attempt by GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and others to get the results overturned.

Now, the top election officials in Arizona and its biggest county are preparing to battle the same forces in 2024, amid the pressure and scrutiny of a presidential race. The cascade of attacks on Arizona’s democratic system has seen Fontes and Richer make peace over their differences — to a degree. It’s one of the most striking examples of one-time political foes setting aside past rivalries to band together over the big question of democracy.

“It’s not often that you find yourself in a position to really evolve a lot on the way that you see someone,” Fontes said at the event at the bar.

“There was a point in time … I genuinely, genuinely wished him great ill. And he deserved it,” he said, to laughter from the crowd.

Two very different men

The two offices have fundamentally different roles. Fontes is responsible for helping set statewide election policies and run training for local election officials, while Richer splits responsibilities for the county with the board of supervisors, conducting many of the day-to-day duties of running elections and interacting with voters.

But Maricopa is no ordinary county. It accounts for over 60 percent of Arizona’s registered voters, and both offices must work closely together to prepare for next year.

The relationship between secretary of state and Maricopa recorder is “almost a marriage that you have to go through,” said Helen Purcell, who served as Maricopa recorder for decades before Fontes defeated her in 2016. “You are responsible for different things,” she said, noting that she had worked very closely with secretaries of state on implementing the state’s voter registration system and the state manual setting election policy.

Fontes and Richer, both attorneys by trade, are temperamentally almost polar opposites.

Fontes is a gregarious and charming Marine Corps veteran. He has a big personality and is eager to be at the front of a political movement — or a fight. That tendency has triggered chatter among Arizona’s political class about his long-term political aspirations. When asked to describe Fontes, Richer described him as “brash, he’s charismatic, he’s sort of larger than life,” before ruefully noting that Fontes is also a “damn good singer” as well.

Fontes, a mariachi performer who was a lead male vocalist during his time at Arizona State, joked in an interview that he would “absolutely wipe the floor with” Richer in a karaoke contest.

Richer, by contrast, is far more bookish. The recorder is a “measure twice, cut once” data guy who regularly references the Harry Potter book series. In a past life, he was a self-described “movement conservative” think-tanker and one-time investor in a bar and a frozen yogurt shop in Washington — both now shuttered. He’s prone to authoring detailed reports to try to get his point across, including his most recent in January: A 28-page missive on changes he thinks should be made to state election law.

Fontes’ assessment of Richer?: “He’s an earnest man” who has an “interesting and quirky sense of humor” and is willing to listen to all comers.

“They’re very entertaining, very personable, very charming. Both have got their own style of charisma,” said John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz., who endorsed Fontes for secretary of state and served on his transition team. “But they also don’t belong in the same universe. … When I think of Stephen, I think of Woody Allen, and when I think of Adrian Fontes, I think of Foghorn Leghorn.”

“They have no choice but to figure out a way together. They’re both reasonable, decent people,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the voter advocacy group All Voting is Local, who also served on the Fontes transition team and works regularly with both offices. “Reasonable, decent people, whether they had a contentious race or not, are going to put their best foot forward.”

‘The bromance only goes so far’

That’s not to suggest that they are best friends — on stage, Fontes noted that “the bromance only goes so far” — or that they don’t have deep, ideological disagreements over how elections should actually be administered.

Richer said that Beau Lane, a more “Main Street”-style Republican who lost to Finchem in last year’s GOP secretary of state primary, would have had his support in the general election against Fontes, had he won the party’s nomination. Richer added that he’s “happily” told Fontes as much.

And Fontes still bristles at the criticisms leveled in a 2019 “audit” Richer conducted for the state GOP following the 2018 midterms. (Broadly, Richer’s report didn’t allege that Fontes broke the law, but Richer argued at the time “it raises some serious questions” about the office.)

On stage, they told good-natured jokes about how close the 2020 election between the two was. They also disagreed on some of the recent proposals that Richer laid out to try to speed up the reporting of unofficial election results in Arizona, which typically takes days to resolve. The main sticking point was Richer’s proposal to move up the deadline for people to drop off mail ballots in person, a convenience for many voters that also adds processing time to actually count the votes. Voters can currently drop off mail ballots in person up to Election Day, but Richer proposed moving up the deadline to the Friday before an election.

But what has bound them, both say, is respect for the voters’ will in elections at the end of the day, and their staunch opposition to the lies of stolen elections in the state.

“I think it starts with the fact that we’re both attorneys, and we understand compartmentalizing political fights, or in our case legal fights, from personal relationships,” Fontes said. “A fool is a lawyer who stays angry after the gavel drops.”

Fontes also added that Richer was not the only Republican who crossed the aisle to back him in 2022 against Finchem, who did not respond to an interview request. In addition to Republican officeholders like Giles or Richer, the now-secretary of state said that he was also able to attract some “big, big Republican money people,” who are “trying to figure out a way to get rid of the crazy, or at least pull the crazy away from winning primaries.”

A test of that will be the 2024 elections. In addition to another high-profile Senate race in the state, Richer could also be on the ballot himself. He is up for reelection next year, and should he run, he would likely face not only a competitive general election but a primary challenge from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, with which he has clashed for almost the entirety of his time in office. Richer has faced censures from both the state and county Republican parties.

Richer told POLITICO he was undecided on whether he would run again, saying he’s set a “vague April/May deciding point for myself.”

He described thinking through the process of running again: “More than ‘could you win,’ but ‘that just doesn’t sound fun,’ going through the process.”

But, Richer added, “On the other hand, the position has never been more meaningful. We are at a moment in American history where this county — and this office — are playing a significant role.”

Election deniers set sights on next target

Swing state voters broadly rejected candidates in last year’s midterms who questioned the results of the 2020 elections. But unfounded accusations of fraud and other malfeasance continue to tear at the machinery of U.S. elections.

The latest example comes from Alabama and its newly elected secretary of state, Wes Allen. His first official act upon taking office earlier this month was unusual: The Republican fulfilled a campaign promise by withdrawing Alabama from an obscure interstate compact that helps states maintain voter rolls, citing data security concerns.

That consortium — known as Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC — has been a genuine bipartisan success story, finding buy-in from red states like Florida and Texas and blue states like Colorado and Connecticut to help them remove duplicate voter registrations and catch potential instances of double voting.

But conservative conspiracy sites like The Gateway Pundit and the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit that filed lawsuits that unsuccessfully sought to overturn the 2020 election, have attacked ERIC as part of a liberal plot to control the underpinnings of American elections.

Allen’s abandonment of ERIC illustrates how ideas stemming from the falsehood of a stolen presidential election remain in the bloodstream of the American democratic system, even after its most well-known proponents were shut out from winning key positions in major swing states in the midterms.

It also suggests the era of bipartisan, behind-the-scenes, mundane cooperation on the mechanics of running elections is at risk.

“It’s not the start, nor the end,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney who was central to setting up ERIC over a decade ago. “If you've been to any meetings of election officials over the last few years — if you've been to anything where consensus is attempted — it seems that fewer and fewer want to engage in that.”

Becker, who is now the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, retains a non-voting position on the board of ERIC, which is otherwise made up of voting representatives from member states.

Allen’s office did not respond to an interview request or to written questions about his decision to pull the state out of ERIC. But in a statement accompanying his letter to ERIC, he said that: “Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months.”

ERIC collects voter registration and motor vehicle data from each member state regularly throughout the year, the organization says. That data is used to produce several reports identifying voters on their rolls who may have moved to or from other member states or within a state, who may be registered in multiple states — which in itself is not a crime — or who may have died.

The system can also generate a report on voters who may have voted in different states in the same election — which generally carries criminal penalties — and people who appear to be eligible but are unregistered to vote, which ERIC members are required to contact.

The Gateway Pundit published a series of posts in mid-January 2022 about ERIC, claiming it was part of a left-wing cabal. And in December 2022, the Thomas More Society said it has filed complaints in three states about ERIC and planned to continue to do so in more. A spokesperson for TMS did not respond to a request for an update on the filings.

Allen was the second secretary of state to pull his state out of ERIC. Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, announced last January that Louisiana would “suspend” its participation in the program and sent a letter in July withdrawing entirely.

John Tobler, a spokesperson for Ardoin’s office, said the office had conversations with ERIC officials before it left, but did not make Ardoin available for an interview and declined to answer specific questions about the move.

The announcement from Ardoin’s office about the suspension alleged: “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data.”

In a statement at the time, Ardoin said he spoke with “election attorneys and experts,” but did not identify those people, nor the watchdog groups and media reports. Ardoin’s campaign website says he “demanded answers from ERIC … to keep Louisiana's elections secure,” linking to a brief local news article from January about the announcement.

On the campaign trail, Allen more closely echoed the postings from Gateway Pundit website: He said he opposed ERIC because it was a “Soros-funded, leftist group,” referencing the prominent liberal donor George Soros.

The group is entirely funded and controlled by member states, after receiving initial startup support from The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012.

Despite the two states leaving the organization, ERIC still broadly maintains bipartisan support. Republican officials have praised ERIC for helping their states remove from the rolls voters who have either moved out of state or died, and for its use as a backstop to catch people who potentially cast ballots in two different states in one election.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis highlighted ERIC by name in a summer press conference as helping to catch potential cases of double voting. (DeSantis announced the state would join ERIC in 2019.) And one of its biggest proponents of the program was Allen’s predecessor, now-former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, who regularly defended the value of ERIC after Allen raised it as an issue on the campaign trail.

“ERIC does something that no other entity is capable of doing,” Merrill, a Republican, said in an interview in November, following the midterm elections. “The people who have complaints about ERIC and who have concerns about ERIC, don’t understand ERIC.”

Trey Grayson, a Republican and former Kentucky secretary of state who remains active in the election administration community, said in a text that he was a “big fan” of ERIC and that it was an “important tool” to maintain accurate voter rolls. He said it was disappointing to see the two states leave the group.

“I especially find it disappointing because in general we Republicans tend to care more about cleaning up the voter rolls,” Grayson wrote. “And these Republican secretaries are shooting those efforts in the foot with their decisions.”

Officials from other member states also expressed displeasure over the exit of Louisiana and Alabama. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said he was “disappointed with the decision because I think the more members there are in ERIC, the stronger ERIC is.”

The scuffle around ERIC is just one point of agitation between election officials. Recent public meetings of the National Association of Secretaries of State, a longstanding, bipartisan organization, have showcased the tension growing within the group. Sessions at NASS meetings now focus on the increasingly fraught task of ensuring the safety of election officials from physical threats, and there has been public chatter about the risk of insider threats to election offices.

And a few sessions have triggered sharp disagreements among secretaries that, at times, have gotten heated. That could continue to grow, with several newly-elected secretaries in red states who have at least questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election now eligible to join the organization, Allen among them.

But Simon — who is set to assume the NASS presidency in the summer of 2024 and helped lead a near-unanimous NASS resolution for election audits in 2021 — said he was still hopeful that there would be plenty of room for behind-the-scenes election cooperation to survive and thrive.

“I actually have thought about that,” Simon said when asked if the tension around ERIC could metastasize into something more. “We might have differences, including on this issue, but I really don't think it changes the fundamentals. … So I don't see this as a body blow to cooperation among secretaries of state of varying political viewpoints.”

‘The most important election nobody’s ever heard of’

Control of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court is on the ballot this spring, and the contest could decide the fate of abortion rights, redistricting and more in the critical swing state.

Should a more liberal-leaning jurist win the job in the April election, it would flip the balance of the state’s highest court for at least two years.

There are significant policy outcomes hanging on the result. The court chose the state’s political maps for the decade after the Democratic governor and Republican Legislature deadlocked, and it’s likely to hear a case challenging Wisconsin’s 19th-century law banning almost all abortions in the near future. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court also decided major cases on election laws and voting rights before and after the 2020 presidential election.

“The 2023 Wisconsin state Supreme Court race is the most important election that nobody's ever heard of,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party. “It has implications that will affect national politics for years to come, really at every level of government.”

Party organizations and ideological outside groups — both sides of abortion debate, for example, as well as labor groups — are planning to spend millions on advertising and activating extensive field networks. It will be the latest multimillion-dollar judicial race in recent years, which reflects both the outsize importance of the outcome and the increasing focus on contests further down the ticket — and away from Washington.

The court currently has a 4-3 conservative majority. But one of the conservative-held seats is open after Justice Patience Roggensack decided not to seek another term. Further scrambling the politics, another conservative justice — Brian Hagedorn, who was elected in 2019 — has sided with the liberal justices in the past on some high-profile cases.

“It is becoming clear the Democrats want to use the Supreme Court as a vehicle to circumvent legislators who actually make policy decisions,” said Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state Republican Party, ticking through a range of additional issues that could be in play at the court, from school choice to photo ID for voting and gun control measures. “If the liberals pick up another seat, they will have a rock-solid majority that never deviates from liberal activism.”

Voters must first navigate an unusual primary before choosing the new justice. There are four judges running for the position, which is technically nonpartisan, with two on either side of the ideological divide.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, who was appointed to a spot on the court by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 before losing a 2020 election for a full term, and Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow, who rose to prominence for her handling of the trial of the Waukesha Christmas 2021 parade attack, are running on the right. On the left, the candidates are Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell and Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz.

The top two finishers in the Feb. 21 primary will face off in the April 4 general election. The split field raises the possibility that two ideologically similar candidates advance to the general election, as has happened in some recent congressional elections with all-party, top-two primaries. But most observers don’t think that is likely.

Still, the unusual primary dynamics have left many major players on both sides on the sidelines for now. Both state political parties are remaining neutral between their ideologically aligned candidates in the primary, and so is Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.

One notable exception there is Fair Courts America, a group supported by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein. It has pledged its support — and “millions of dollars” — to Kelly.

Assuming two judges on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum advance in the primary, the general election is expected to revolve around clear differences on redistricting and abortion policy.

On redistricting, the court ultimately selected a congressional map drawn by Evers. But it was one that leaned Republican anyway, after the court called for a new map that hewed as closely as possible to the old one. A similar and more protracted fight also broke out over legislative lines — and more challenges to the maps could arise in future years, especially if the balance of the court flips.

“I think it is huge,” Evers said in an interview on the sidelines of the Democratic Governors Association winter meeting last month, specifically citing the redistricting battle. “The Supreme Court has leaned conservative on almost all of the issues. So yes, this is a big deal.”

National party groups that are heavily involved in the redistricting fight — such as the Republican State Leadership Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee — are also planning to play in the race.

The NDRC, Democrats’ main national redistricting organization, is remaining neutral in the primary but has started to reactivate its network in the state ahead of the general election. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, the organization’s chair, is likely to travel to the state for the general election.

Wisconsin’s race has also taken on increased importance for pro- and anti-abortion rights groups in the wake of two decisions this month from the Idaho and South Carolina state Supreme Courts, which recently heard cases on the states’ abortion restrictions. A near-total ban was upheld in Idaho, but a law preventing the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy was thrown out in South Carolina.

The issue could come in front of the Wisconsin court soon. State Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, has sued to overturn the state’s 1849 law that makes abortion illegal in almost all circumstances. While that case is winding its way through the courts, abortion providers have stopped performing the procedure because of ambiguity around enforcement of the law.

Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group that spent $600,000 on North Carolina state Supreme Court races in the fall, said his organization is also planning to invest in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. It’s part of the group’s growing spending on state-level races in the post-Roe era, he said, “to make sure that Wisconsin doesn't end up with a fabricated right to abortion decided by activist judges.”

Democrats, in particular, are likely to focus on the issue to drive voters to the polls. Wikler, the state party chair, called the contest a de facto ballot initiative on a “statewide abortion ban,” citing the likelihood of court arguments on the 1849 law.

Planned Parenthood, the pro-abortion rights mainstay, is planning to spend six figures on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, between national and local affiliate investments. The organization, in conjunction with other partner groups, is planning voter education campaigns, a GOTV drive and independent expenditure advertising for the general election.

Both sides say the issue is expected to become much more prominent in the general election. Ahead of the primary, Wisconsin Right to Life, another anti-abortion group, is working to educate its members on the importance of the race. But Gracie Skogman, the group’s legislative and PAC director, said the group will be “much more focused” on the general election.

“The unfortunate news is the majority of voters that we have interacted with are not aware of the stakes of the election, the candidates who are on the ballot, the views of the candidate, or the tie between our current pro-life statutes and the results of the election,” Skogman said. “From our perspective, there's a long way to go.”