Threats, lies and voting
Packages with mysterious white powder show up at their workplace. The phone rings with a bomb threat. Or an email warns that the sender knows where they live.
They Didn’t Sign Up for This — What a time to be an election official, huh?
I spent an hour at a meeting with other journalists arranged by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office.
(Pate attended only part of the gathering. He had to leave to take part in a weekly call with county auditors from all across the state on how to get ready for the 2024 general election.)
During the meeting, we could ask whatever questions that we wanted about early voting, in-person voting and the election system. Staff asked for our help in getting out information…facts, not B.S…about Election Day and the election process.
I don’t think that I have ever been invited to anything like this before. Of course, I don’t think that our country has ever experienced a period of time where a malevolent group of liars, cheats and grifters tried so hard to use fear and confusion to influence the outcome of an election.
Declining Faith — The percentage of people who have lost faith in the election process has grown over the past two decades, according to polls (72% in 2004 vs. 57% in 2024). But there is a significant partisan difference in the confidence level.
A Gallup poll found that the majorities of Democrats (84%) and Independents (58%) are confident about election security but Republicans (28%) are not.
The percentage of Republicans who are confident in the election outcome plummeted following Donald Trump’s win in 2016 with nearly half of Republicans losing faith (Their confidence was 55% in 2016.)
For the past four years, Trump has repeatedly claimed that fraud is the reason that he lost — not the voters. Some Republicans believe those claims, even though Trump failed in dozens of court cases to prove what he claimed.
The Challenge — Iowa’s secretary of state and staff wanted the media to remind people that representatives for both Democrats and Republicans can monitor polling sites on election day. This isn’t a secret process.
Also, machines are NOT connected to the internet where someone in Venezuela can manipulate the final numbers. There aren’t people dumping boxes of illegal ballots into county auditor’s offices either.
Secretary of State Pate, a Republican, has his work cut out for him. Many of the disinformation, falsehoods and voting lies are being pushed by his party. But he has been public about his confidence in elections and frequent in making himself available for interviews and for news conferences regarding voting integrity.
Pate is serving his 14th year as secretary of state and overseeing his fourth presidential election. But never has he had to deal with an election cycle like this one.
60 Minutes — Much of the focus of “60 Minutes” concerned Kamala Harris’ interview (Tim Walz was interviewed, too). Trump backed out. But another important part of the show was the piece on a Maricopa County, Arizona local election official who paid the price for being a Republican who didn’t profess widespread fraud conspiracies.
Better Times Ahead? — On “Inside Iowa Politics” we talked to Iowa Business Council President Joe Murphy about what is driving new optimism from some of the state’s largest business leaders.
One of our subscribers sent me an intriguing idea for debates following my previous column where I questioned why the CBS moderators agreed NOT to fact check during the presidential debate.