Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense

WASHINGTON – It is perhaps a metaphor for the time that even the volunteer who checked you on the polls in November now has a legal defense committee.

The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which made its public debut on September 7th, is of course offering to represent more than just election workers. The organization was created to counter the waves of political pressure and public bullying that election workers have been exposed to over the past year.

The group has already received inquiries from several election officials, said David J. Becker, executive director of the nonprofit electoral innovation and research center that oversees the project. Without going into detail, Mr. Becker said that her inquiries “related to issues such as harassment and intimidation”.

The network is the creation of two powerhouses in republican and democratic legal circles, Benjamin L. Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post earlier this month, the two wrote – Mr. Ginsberg was a senior GOP attorney for 38 years and Mr. Bauer was both a Democratic Party attorney and a White House adviser in the Obama administration – that such attacks were directed against people “Supervised” The counting and casting of ballots on an independent, non-partisan basis is destructive to our democracy. “

“If such attacks are not addressed, our system of self-governance will be damaged in the long run,” they said.

Mr Ginsberg, who broke with his party and has become a scathing critic of former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and Mr Bauer are election experts themselves. The two men jointly chaired the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, established in 2013 by former President Barack Obama, which – with limited success – called for the modernization of electoral processes and equipment to make voting easier and safer.

In an interview, Mr. Bauer said that he and Mr. Ginsberg are recruiting attorneys for the Legal Defense Network in hopes of building a siege organization with legal support. “Dozens have already signed up for the effort, and many more are expected to join soon, said Becker.

The center is non-partisan and offers to represent election workers of any political orientation, regardless of whether they work in a red or a blue district. But as the announcement by Mr Ginsburg and Mr Bauer implicitly noted, the problems of election workers only increased after the 2020 general election and came almost entirely from conservative supporters of Mr Trump and lawmakers in Republican-controlled states.

According to a survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University released this summer, a third of election workers say they feel insecure about their jobs. In Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and other states, ardent believers in Trump’s lies about the stolen elections have threatened state and local election officials and their families with violence and even death. Some election workers went into hiding or sought police protection.

Republican-controlled state lawmakers have responded to fraud allegations by taking control of some aspects of electoral administration and fines or even jail sentences for violating the rules.

Trump’s offer to undermine the election

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Pressure on state officials to “find votes”. With the president continuing to refuse to admit the election, his most loyal supporters declared January 6th, when Congress convened to formalize Mr Biden’s election victory, as a day of reckoning. That day, Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary speech in front of thousands of his supporters, hours before a mob of loyalists forcibly stormed the Capitol.

In Iowa, electoral officials who fail to abide by the new electoral rules will be prosecuted by a new law. A new Texas law makes election workers criminally liable if they are believed to knowingly obstruct the view of partisan election observers. In Florida, a new rule fines local election officials up to $ 25,000 for leaving ballot boxes unattended or for allowing voters to cast ballots after official opening hours.

Becker from the Innovation and Research Center described the increasing intimidation of election workers as unscrupulous. “These are officials in most cases,” he said. “These are not people who do this because they want to get rich and famous. You do this out of a sense of duty. “

The legal network is likely valuable precisely because most of the people it will serve are actually ordinary citizens, said David Levine, an electoral integrity expert with the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy. Mr. Levine has worked as an electoral officer in the District of Columbia and Idaho.

“It’s hard enough to do your job well when you’re dealing with a lot of stress and long hours, much less wondering if your decisions could pose threats to your co-workers and your family,” he said. “It serves an important purpose to say, ‘We have your back, no matter how big or small your electoral jurisdiction is, or how wealthy you or your community may be.'”

Mr. Bauer has mixed feelings about the applause for the new company.

“It’s hard to say we’re successful because the demand for this type of support is huge,” he said. “That there is such a demand is deeply worrying.”