--:-- Ryan Knutson: The 2024 election is less than two weeks away. It's neck and neck, and Donald Trump is yet again saying that if he loses, it'll only be because of election fraud.
--:-- [Audio clip of Donald Trump]
--:-- Ryan Knutson: If I lose, I'll tell you what's possible, because they cheat. That's the only way we're going to lose, because they cheat. Our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it's to make sure they don't cheat. Because we have all the votes we need.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Now we have two things we have to do. We have to vote, and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating, because they cheat like dogs.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: If Trump loses again, there's now a significant infrastructure in place to help him challenge the election. The former president and his allies have pumped more than $140 million into stop this deal 2.0.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Election officials worry that the effort will sow doubt and confusion about the results. And so many are preparing for chaos, or worse.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: One of the places where this tension is boiling over is Maricopa County, Arizona. Our colleague Jim Carlton took a tour of the county's election headquarters office.
--:-- Jim Carlton: It looked like a fortress. You get there and you see this black wrought iron fence all around. It's brand new. It's like seven feet high. They've put in newly installed K-Rill concrete barriers. And there's security everywhere.
--:-- Jim Carlton: Every entrance, there's multiple sheriff's deputies with magnometers. They put ballots in cages. They put cages, and that's for more protective measures with 24-7 cameras. So it feels very militarized and just kind of like an armed camp. Very, very strange.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Maricopa County's election workers have been conducting active shooter drills and learning how to repel armed mobs. It's trauma training. It's almost like you're going to war. You know, how to apply a tourniquet, body armor, and drones. They're going to have drones. They're going to have police snipers on the rooftops just in case.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For an elections office? Right. And I've been covering elections for decades. I've never seen, you know, procedures like this.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Wednesday, October 23rd.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Coming up on the show, how election offices are preparing for a tense election day. And how Trump and his allies are gearing up for Stop the Steal 2.0.
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--:-- Ryan Knutson: In Maricopa County, one of the people in charge of overseeing the 2024 election is Stephen Richer.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: He's the county recorder, and he's in charge of all the mail-in voting. He was elected four years ago, and right away, he was faced with people challenging Arizona's 2020 presidential results.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: He's looked at the data and the subsequent audits and says the process was accurate and fair. And that Joe Biden won.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Here he is in 2021. All the tests came back clean. The parties themselves oversaw the hand count auditing of 47 plus votes. Those votes matched with the machines tabulated 100 percent.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What was interesting about Stephen is he a Republican and he a longtime Republican. He voted for Trump in 2020.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And yet, because he defended the election in 2020 as fair, he became singled out as kind of a traitor.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And the election deniers have made his life kind of a living hell.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: How so? How has his life become a living hell? I mean, there's been threats.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The threats started really almost immediately against him, his family. You know, the Justice Department has charged three individuals for threats against Richard, including a Missouri man who allegedly called his cell phone and warned, you need to do your effing job right or your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Did Stephen Richard ever think about, like, just saying, okay, yeah, no, the election was stolen or just going along with it?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I asked him that, Ryan. Actually, that was a really good question. I said, why didn't you just, you know, did you feel like going along with it?
--:-- Ryan Knutser: Here's Richard talking to Jim. Did you ever think, though, it was, I mean, maybe you're... Easier?
--:-- Stephen Richer: Of course it would have been easier. Yeah. Did you ever think about it? Of course, no. Nope. Wrong thing to do. Too big of a lie. Too big of a lie and felt very dystopian.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And to me, the fascinating part of this is the dystopian contortion of facts, facts that are very ascertainable, facts that are very concrete.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: By defending the results, Richard has continued to face threats and harassment. And so has his staff.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: He says that 10 of them have quit because they don't feel safe.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, some of Richard's staff are harassed on their way to work.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: He remembers one of his employees breaking down in tears after election deniers took pictures of her and her license plate.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: She signed up for just a job where she thought she could help her community, and she didn't sign up for this, and she went to her car crying.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I went out with her, and then she didn't show up the next day, and we called her, and she just had decided to leave.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: After Democrats won Arizona's Senate seat in governorship in 2022, voters lined up to testify at the Board of Supervisors meeting, where they were certifying the county's election results.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The meeting went on for hours. Those who make a peaceful revolution impossible, make a violent revolution necessary.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It's disgusting watching you pledge allegiance to my flag was disgusting the way that you sold us out.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: This is a war between good and evil, And you all represent evil, including you.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Richer has tried to combat the conspiracy theories by making everything more transparent.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: He says his office has given over 300 public tours. They put cameras in the office, feeding a 24-hour live stream.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The goal is to educate people on the process. We have tried about as hard as possible over the last three and a half years to get information about the process into the hands of Maricopa County voters.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And I don't know of an election jurisdiction in the United States that has invested more in terms of voter outreach and voter communication in terms of tours of our facility, in terms of video live streams, in terms of teletown halls, in terms of videos, in terms of articles, in terms of reports, in terms of even virtual reality tours of the election facility.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So I just I hope that some of that pays dividends for this election.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: So has all the stuff that Richard's been doing, has it been enough to try to calm people down in Maricopa?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Well, from my experience, going down there, no.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Richard ran for re-election this year and lost. So the 2024 election will be the last one who will oversee.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And he's preparing for the possibility that the results will again be challenged.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I don't know of anyone who expects Donald Trump to quietly accept the results if he loses.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Maricopa County isn't the only place where elections officials are taking precautions.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In one Ohio county, polling locations will have radios to keep in constant communication with law enforcement on Election Day.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In Colorado death threats have led some elections officials to have bulletproof vests on hand.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And across the country Trump and his allies have spent the last four years building up a huge infrastructure to challenge the results if he loses.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That after the break.
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--:-- Ryan Knutson: How would you describe what the Stop the Steal campaign was like in 2020?
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It was this very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That's our colleague Rebecca Ballhaus. She's been digging into the evolution of the Stop the Steal movement.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: It was led by a disorganized and very chaotic group of lawyers.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And it seemed like Trump was sort of trying to throw everything at the wall to see what would stick.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And what kinds of things was he throwing at the wall?
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: They were filing lawsuits, asking for recounts. They were trying to void tens of millions of votes.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: They were leading this public campaign where they were challenging the vote count.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And you saw people holding press conferences and Trump saying on Twitter that the election had been rigged and all these different efforts, but it was a total mess.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Last time around, Stop the Steal culminated in January 6th, where Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try and stop the certification of election results.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: In the end, Stop the Steal didn't succeed in overturning the election.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: While Trump lawyers filed dozens of lawsuits claiming election fraud, no court found those claims to be valid.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: But the idea has spread.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: A Gallup poll this year says that only 28% of Republicans have confidence in the accuracy of presidential elections.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And for this election, I think in the last four years, we've seen sort of a professionalization of Stop the Steal.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And while there are still plenty of conspiracy theories and sort of strange characters who are involved in the effort, we've also seen the movement get sort of a D.C. treatment where you have nonprofits, you have super PACs, and you have all kinds of outside groups that have cropped up to work on this effort that they call election integrity.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: In recent years, election integrity groups have been raising tons of money.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: I've been working to trace that money through an analysis of tax and campaign finance filings and other records.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And I found that a network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires have given more than $140 million to nearly 50 election integrity groups since 2020.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And for what was a much more fringe operation in 2020, we've also seen tens of millions of dollars pouring in from some of the wealthiest conservative families in the country to groups that are promoting claims of election fraud this time around.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And to be clear, is there any evidence that this year's election is vulnerable to fraud or that the integrity is in any way in doubt?
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: There is not. I mean, election officials, both Democrats and Republicans, in many states say that this movement is basically targeting problems that don't exist.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: What these groups can do is slow down the voter count and bury local elections officials and paperwork in lawsuits.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: The RNC has already filed more than 120 lawsuits in various states on election rules in the lead up to election day.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And I think what we'll see after the election is the continuation of those kinds of efforts, both trying to change the rules for the future, but also contesting various outcomes, demanding recounts in various states, requesting that certain votes be thrown out because of the way in which they were cast.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: I'd expect those to be the sorts of lawsuits we see.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And I mean those are all thrown out in 2020 Yeah and the lawsuits that the RNC has filed so far have also been largely unsuccessful.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: But I think those are also really a part of this larger public awareness campaign.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And so every time the RNC proceeds in one lawsuit, they hail it as an election integrity victory.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: Another way these groups are preparing to fight the election is by challenging voter registrations.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: So states have to do maintenance on their voter rolls because people move, or they change their addresses, or they change their names, and you want to make sure that the same people aren't registered to vote in a number of different places.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: In most states, it's legal for any voter to go to their local government and challenge someone else's ability to vote.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: These Trump-aligned groups have created online tools that make it easier for their supporters to challenge voter registrations in mass.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: For example, I reported that one single volunteer challenged the legitimacy of 30,000 voters in Fulton County, Georgia alone.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And that creates an enormous amount of work for election officials who are having to comb through tens of thousands of these challenges to determine what's right and what's wrong.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And often the tools don't work that well.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: What these tools are missing is some of the personal identifying information, like a social security number or a full date of birth in many situations.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And so they end up flagging a lot of names that are actually correct voter registrations.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: Because of this, some counties have refused to consider the challenges from one of the tools, called Eagle AI.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: These groups have also been mobilizing people in another way, by recruiting poll watchers.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: They're people who are there when people are casting their ballots on election day, or before Election Day, and they're just sort of there to observe the process.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And this is something that has long been a part of elections, that people are watching the process unfold.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: But what's unusual here is that you have these outside groups that have spent a lot of effort training people to sign up for these positions and also telling them, you know, for years and years that voter fraud is around every corner.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And if the poll watchers see anything suspicious, they've been trained on how to report it.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: There's one group that started what's basically Facebook for election fraud, where users can post or comment or share any possibly, I think they call it election irregularities, and then submit reports to the group.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: So it's just intended to sort of keep this influx of reports of potential issues coming in over the course of the election.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And I think in a year where election officials have already faced threats and, you know, all kinds of potential violence and are doing all sorts of training to prepare for that, having poll watchers who are coming into this with a real agenda and are documenting everything they see could really sort of heighten the tension there.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: What does everything that we've talked about, the poll watchers, the challenging of the voter rolls, what does that mean for how elections officials in places like Maricopa County will handle Election Day?
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: So what that means is that you have election offices that are left sort of underfunded and understaffed.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And it's at a time where they're facing more security threats than ever.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And so what people who watch this space carefully say is that it could mean that there's more chaos and less organization at the polls on Election Day.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And if there is more chaos and less organization on Election Day, then that presumably makes it a bit easier to say that there are problems and therefore the result can't be trusted.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: That's right. I mean, what election experts who are following these groups closely say is that their goal is just to have there be more anomalies that they can point to after the election.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And so if you have all these things that are going wrong on Election Day, it does make it that much easier to say, you know, look at all the room there was for fraud.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: I think that's probably ultimately the point of this, is that even if Trump loses the election and does not successfully overturn the results in his favor, half of the country will think he won.
--:-- Rebecca Ballhaus: And that's that is not good for democracy.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: OK, it's going to be an exciting November and December and January. Too, probably.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That's all for today. Wednesday, October 23rd.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Additional reporting in this episode by Vera Bergengrunen and Mariah Timms.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
