New rules, big storms: A politics writer on the scrutiny that Election 2024 needs

Episode transcript

Gail Russell Chaddock:  Remember when election night meant that you’d know the winner if you stayed up late enough? There would be a congratulatory phone call, campaign workers on camera in big halls would cheer, or weep, and it would be over.

But November 5th isn’t shaping up to be one of those nights. Close races in polarized times are always tough. But last minute changes to voting rules and back to back hurricanes on the eve of this vote add to difficulty and delay, and distrust. The expectation of chaos on election night can seem inevitable or even normal.

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Chaddock:  This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. Cameron Joseph has covered Washington since 2009, mainly focused on elections, Capitol Hill, and the White House, picking up top awards for distinguished reporting of Congress and excellence in political journalism along the way. He’s now a senior Washington reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, and this is his first appearance on this podcast. Welcome Cameron!

Cameron Joseph: Thanks for having me.

Chaddock:  There are many choices for covering an election. You could write about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, what they said, what people said about them. You chose to seek out county election officials and poll workers that no one has heard of. Why are their stories important in campaign 2024?

Joseph: Well, I think that folks don’t always think about the people who actually run these elections, who are nonpartisan workers, probably tens of thousands of people across the country, who really make the actual election function. And they have frankly had a really tough couple of years. They faced trying to get an election off without a hitch during the peak of the COVID pandemic in 2020. They had a lot of, especially in some of these swing states, a lot of rule changes that were very closely scrutinized, to make it safe for folks to vote by mail. A lot of states expanded their mail ballot rules. They faced a lot of criticism.

Mail ballots are frankly a lot harder to process and count and track than in-person ballots, and so that created an additional logistical hurdle for a lot of them. They kind of thought they were through the woods. And then we saw the false claims from President Trump that he had won the last election, and some even wilder claims from other folks that specific election workers were rigging the results. And we saw a defamation claim, uh, being settled against Rudy Giuliani recently for a lot of money from two Georgia election workers, because he’d spread false information and then they faced death threats. So these folks are under an incredible amount of pressure and scrutiny and distrust.

And then on top of that, they’re facing increased pressure at the last minute. Last-minute rule changes. And in both Georgia and North Carolina, two important swing states, they just had a hurricane rip through the state. Some of these counties, the voters are scattered to the four winds because of the damage from the hurricanes. And the actual infrastructure of the election that they’d spent many years trying to make sure is ready has been damaged. Some of the actual things that these folks are facing, especially in the hardest hit areas of North Carolina, are just unfathomable.

Chaddock:  What drew you to small mountain communities in North Carolina, for example, for a hurricane story that covered such a wide area?

Joseph: Well, there’s a confluence of two things. The first is that while Hurricane Helene did an incredible amount of damage from the Florida coast up through Georgia, part of South Carolina, North Carolina, the worst damage and the worst flooding occurred in mountainous Appalachia, especially in North Carolina.

And the second factor here is North Carolina is a swing state. Votes in North Carolina are going to draw a lot more attention. I talked to the elections head in Yancey County, which is up on the North Carolina Tennessee border, about an hour north of Asheville under normal circumstances. Part of the county is cut off from the rest of the state. The only way to drive into the county seat is to take two hours of backroads through Tennessee and then come back because the interstate is still closed. And so, the idea of being able to vote early in person when you’re in a situation like that is daunting. There’s 11 voting sites in that county, and all 11 of them are not options right now. Some of them are fire stations that are being used for emergency response. One of them is a junior high that is now being used to house folks whose houses were damaged or wiped away.

And so, she’s going out this week, I believe, and see where she can put up FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] tents nearby so that the folks in that county can vote. And she wants to make sure they’re as close as possible because a lot of the county doesn’t have internet, still. You know, cellphone service up in the mountains is very spotty in the first place. And so folks who show up without this information that the place that they’ve always voted has been shifted aren’t going to be able to go on their phone and look up: Where do I need to go now? And so she needs to make it visible, from wherever the voting site was, to be able to get to the new site. And so it’s this incredibly daunting task that’s being made even more difficult by claims that the government support in these mountain towns is actually there to hurt the people. Uh, and so there’s a lot of conspiracy theories bouncing around the internet that [are] making it even harder for FEMA, for example, to be able to come in and help folks get back on their feet.

Chaddock: There were some last-minute rule changes after the hurricane swept through North Carolina, passed unanimously by the State General Assembly, and signed by a Democratic governor. What were these changes, and how have they stirred up claims of conspiracy?

Joseph: So, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, the North Carolina State Election Board stepped in, in bipartisan, unanimous fashion, to make some changes in the 13 counties that were most affected by the storm. The biggest changes were that they are going to allow folks to request absentee ballots to any address that they need. Because a lot of folks are scattered to the four winds. The Yancey County election head said that she talked to folks as far away as Minnesota and Florida who had had to go stay with family and friends. So they’re able to get ballots. And now anybody who has a ballot can drop it off, if you’re from these 13 counties, anywhere in the state of North Carolina. The other change is that they are now allowed to bring in election poll workers from other parts of the state. Obviously, a lot of normal people who were planning on helping out with the election in these short term jobs, both with early voting and especially on election day, where there’s a lot more polling sites, are feeling the impact of the storm as much as anybody else. Uh, some of them have had their homes destroyed, have family missing. They’re going to be able to be replaced by people coming in from other parts of the state.

So, a lot of this is completely [and in a bipartisan way] supported, among other things, [by] elected and appointed officials. There isn’t that much controversy over this. But we’re seeing, as we’ve seen a lot of other conspiracy theories bubbling in North Carolina, we just saw one man arrested for threatening FEMA officials. We’re also seeing, bubbling online about: “Oh, this is just a way to make it easier to steal votes and fake votes.” There’s also been even wilder conspiracies that somehow the government engineered this storm and aimed it at a Republican-heavy part of the state.

So that’s creating, you know, uncertainty for these voting officials. The voting official I talked to didn’t bring up any specific problems with that. You know, she’s in a county that is overwhelmingly Republican. It’s small, a lot of people know each other, they know their neighbors. So you’re a lot more likely to believe a conspiracy that somebody is doing something wrong if you don’t know that person. But, it’s overall problematic because it’s undercutting voters’ faith in the election, both in North Carolina as well as in Georgia, where the storm hit pretty hard.

Chaddock:  One of the most striking observations in your hurricane coverage to me was this sentence: “And the onslaught of election related conspiracy theories since 2020 has led to verbal abuse and death threats against nonpartisan elections workers that have intensified in the wake of storms.” How willing were poll workers to talk with you about this?

Joseph: Well, the poll worker in North Carolina I talked to was largely focused on recovery. Uh, I did talk, when I was in Georgia a week before, and I was in suburban Atlanta for this story, she, you know, she hadn’t faced death threats, but she said she’d been approached grocery shopping, and she was wearing her shirt that said, “ask me how to register to vote,” which is, you know, a pretty normal thing for an election official to wear. A guy came up to her in kind of a threatening manner [and said]: “Oh, so you want to help dead people vote.” And was trying to goad her into a fight. And, you know, she started to snap back and then remembered her de-escalation training, and extricated herself from the situation.

So, you know, that’s a pretty minor example compared to a lot of what these folks are facing. The local official, the Republican who certified the Philadelphia results and defended them as safe and accurate, has faced multiple death threats. In Fulton County, which is where the bulk of Atlanta is, a lot of election workers have faced death threats. And so, it’s a hard enough job when you’re trying to execute an election where you’re counting thousands and some of these counties, tens and hundreds of thousands of votes. A lot of poll workers and election officials have quit between 2020 and now. And so we’re dealing with folks now in some of these places that have significantly less experience than the folks who had been doing this for election after election and really knew the processes. It’s problematic heading into this election. And we also have a lot of folks who are aggressively planning on observing and monitoring the vote, and that’s within people’s rights in a lot of these states.

The woman I talked to in suburban Atlanta, she has, I believe, 10 police [officers] who are going to be at the voting site the entire time during [the] early vote and election day and afterwards. And that’s just one relatively small county outside of Atlanta. And I think that election officials across the country are rightly worried that they’re going to face intimidation and threats and possible violence and isolated cases. And they’re doing what they can to prepare for that. But when you’re talking about, you know, tens of thousands of voting sites around the country, it’s hard to have every voting site ready for that.

Chaddock:  Wouldn’t the sight of 10 police [officers] outside of a voting site reinforce the idea that there is something to be concerned about, and that voting is dangerous?

Joseph: Yeah. It’s a really fine line that folks are trying to negotiate. You know, for many years the understanding from voting rights groups [has been] we don’t want police there because … a lot of them thought that it was an intimidating factor, especially for Black and Hispanic voters. So in some states and some counties, they’re planning on having police out of sight but right nearby. You know, it’s a tough balance because police make some people feel a lot safer and they make some other people feel less safe.

Chaddock:  Yep. You have said so many interesting things in the last three minutes. You mentioned poll workers had had de-escalation training. What is that exactly?

Joseph: Well, I haven’t been through the training myself, so I can’t get into too much detail, but the basic idea is kind of similar to the way that some people handle somebody throwing a tantrum, uh, with their kids, you know. It’s: Alright, let’s just get you to calm down enough so that we can have a reasonable conversation and then move on.

I know in Georgia it isn’t just the de-escalation training, they’ve also given every election site panic buttons that you can push. And it will immediately alert both the Secretary of State’s office and local police. You know, there’s other security measures that they wouldn’t talk about with me, because it’s only effective if folks don’t know about it. And so there’s a lot going on to make sure these folks are safe. Frankly, we just don’t know what’s going to happen. But their attitude is to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

Chaddock:  It’s interesting you’re referring to the lanyards around necks that you could just press the button.

Joseph: Exactly.

Chaddock:  There was one other phrase you used that I’d love to hear more about. You talked about “aggressive planning to observe.” What is aggressive observation?

Joseph: Well, it can take a lot of different forms. And some of it is simply an effort that’s happening in both parties, that I think is very legitimate, to have election observers to make sure nothing is happening untoward. You know, if it’s a state that has ID checks, [it’s] that IDs are being checked. If it’s a state that doesn’t have ID checks, [it’s] that some local official isn’t going rogue and trying to force people to show ID. That the chain of custody to keep ballots secure is being upheld.

Those are all, frankly, good things that election observers from both parties are involved [in]. The concern comes when people are there not to observe, but to disrupt. And, you know, we’ve seen protesting outside of a major vote counting center in Detroit when Michigan was counting its ballots last time around. And we saw, recently, the Jack Smith report on Donald Trump’s legal case.

An unnamed Trump official basically encouraging disruption of that vote count in Detroit. Things got pretty hairy there and pretty intimidating. And luckily, most people who were there to agitate were kept out of the actual voting center. But that’s the type of thing that’s a real risk. We saw in 2000, “the Brooks Brothers Riot,” is what it has been termed historically, where Roger Stone, who’s now chief unofficial advisor for President Trump, encouraged Republican activists to go and disrupt a local hand recount in an area that was heavily Democratic, in order to help preserve George W. Bush’s lead in Florida and his win in the state. So, those types of things are where the line gets crossed from good faith efforts or even partisan efforts to make sure your side is getting what is fair for them, to the problematic election disruption where it’s damaging rather than helping a fair count.

Chaddock:  Are you aware of any instances of where Democratic observers or crowds can be intimidating as well?

Joseph: I’m sure it’s happened. Top of mind, there aren’t specific examples where Democrats have tried to interrupt the vote count. Um, there’s plenty of legal cases where this is kind of a shirts-and-skins thing, where Democrats and Republicans will be fighting in court. And depending on where an election sits, one side might be arguing a thing that they argued the exact opposite of the last time, and that is totally fine. Those are the types of things that happen every election that should be played out in court, whether you like the decision or not. Um, it’s the extra legal interruptions that get problematic. I am sure this has happened by Democrats in the past. Back in the old South, during Jim Crow, there was plenty of voter intimidation and violence. There’s one case in 2008 that, you know, I think got blown out of proportion, but there were a couple of folks from a group called the New Black Panthers outside Philly voting sites that people deemed intimidating. And there was a Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department investigation. But in recent years it has been more on the right … but that doesn’t mean that only one side does it.

Chaddock:  You know, that extra legal point is very important. I’m so glad you said that. There’s a lot in a story that could involve risk for someone who is named saying this or that. Do you allow people to speak on background or off the record?

Joseph: I absolutely do. You know, there’s two buckets here. Politicians understand how the game is played, in terms of being able to manipulate, you know, get information out there without their fingerprints attached by going on background. That’s kind of a dance that you play, especially in D.C. I tend to try and be more resistant to that. But, you know, a lot of information is only available, people will only be willing to share it if their name isn’t attached to it. Sometimes that’s because they’re playing games and sometimes that’s because they actually have concern for their jobs, concern for their safety. I am less trusting of claims made on background, but it’s part of the news gathering process. And in order to let people feel safe and secure, sometimes it’s a necessity. People tend to be more honest when they’re having to put their name next to a quote, or they can at least be called out for lying.

Chaddock:  That’s right. How many times you read in a story “someone close to the negotiation said, blah, blah, blah.” Well, are they really close? Do they have other reasons for saying it? The name lends credibility also to readers who are looking at your story.

Joseph: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. And that’s why I work so hard to make sure to talk to everybody involved on all sides. Try and recognize where my own blind spots and biases may come in. And, you know, I’ve worked at some publications that have leaned left, and I have a pretty good track record of a lot of Republicans still talking to me because they knew I was going to be fair to them and treat them honestly. And you know in the editing process at the Monitor, there’s a lot of work to take out any verbiage that may be seen as biased, and let facts speak for themselves.

Chaddock:  Wouldn’t it be great if there were editors all over the internet, you know. Before you punch your comment in anger, a little voice says: “Now wait a minute, are you sure?” I [would] love that.

You know, the rule changes in Georgia were also advanced at the last minute, but not unanimously endorsed by the legislature. Who proposed these rules, why at the last minute, and why were these rules so troubling to local officials, and, it turns out, the courts? That’s a case we’re going to take up in detail in the next episode of this podcast. Hope you can join us.

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Chaddock:  You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Jingnan Peng, with additional editing by Clay Collins. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.