Election officials feel besieged by conspiracy theorists and fear that a lack of support for their work is going to squeeze experts out of the field, according to a new poll. The survey from the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning think tank and advocacy group, showed that nearly 8 in 10 local election officials feel that threats against them and their colleagues have increased in recent years, and a majority say that they are either very or somewhat concerned about the safety of their fellow administrators. The question of how to deal with threats has become a constant conversation among election officials at all levels of government, many of whom fear that it could discourage people from staying in their field of election administration, or even joining it in the first place. “Over the long run, if this continues, it will be a lot harder to get folks to stick around,” said Natalie Adona, the assistant county clerk-recorder of Nevada County, Calif. “People will retire maybe because they’re just ready to retire because they’ve been doing this for so dang long — or maybe because they feel that the risk is not worth it. But there will be more retirements.” The poll results confirm Adona’s feeling, with 3 in 10 of the officials surveyed saying they know at least one or two election workers who have left their jobs in part because of fears for their safety. Sixty percent of the respondents said they are concerned that those issues will make it more difficult to retain or recruit election workers in the future.
National: Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? | Charles Homans/The New York Times
Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization that since World War II has warned against autocracy and repression on the march around the world, issued a special report on a country that had not usually warranted such attention: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced “an acute crisis for democracy.” In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an influential Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time. The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both products and accelerants of a process of American democratic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and has continued since. In states across the country, Republican candidates are running for office on the platform that the 2020 election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election system: bills that would place election oversight or certification in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and in some cases even bills specifically punishing officials who blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments, happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the principles of self-determination and democracy.
Full Article: Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? – The New York Times