Local Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia and Voting Rights: Deep Distrust Over a Plan to Close Polling Places

      by

      As legislation to expand voting rights was blocked in Washington, local residents debate a plan from officials in Lincoln County, Ga., who say they want to streamline and modernize their system.LINCOLN COUNTY, Ga. — The showdown over voting rights in the U.S. Senate may be over for now. But the issue is still smoldering in a stretch of Northeast Georgia countryside where local officials recently introduced a plan to close seven polling sites and consolidate them into one.The proposal in Lincoln County has attracted the attention and ire of major voting rights groups and suspicion among some Black residents who say the effort is just the latest example of voter suppression in a state where Republicans recently passed a restrictive new law. Hundreds of upset residents have filed protest petitions that could cause local officials to scale it back.But local officials say the current polling spots are in need of modernization — and that in a county where about two-thirds of the 7,700 residents are white, the plan is simply an effort to make it easier to manage elections. The remaining site would be located close to the polling place that currently serves the county’s one majority-Black precinct.“They seem to think that I’m trying to stop Black people from voting,” said the elections director, an African American woman named Lilvender Bolton. She would administer the plan that was under consideration last week by a mostly Republican-appointed board of two Black members and three white ones.In Georgia, a state where razor-thin voting margins have helped swing the White House and control of the Senate, any effort to change the process of voting has become fiercely contested. And after recent efforts by Republicans in Georgia and around the country to restrict voting, suspicions are high.Lilvender Bolton, who leads the Board of Elections, supports a plan to consolidate voting into one location.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesFor decades, a proposal like Lincoln County’s would have been subject to review from the Department of Justice to determine whether it was discriminatory, a step mandated by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and often referred to as “preclearance.” But this system was effectively gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, and has not returned since, despite efforts to revive it like last week’s Senate debate.David J. Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the failure to reinstitute preclearance this year was a missed opportunity.Mr. Becker was careful to note that he could not tell whether Lincoln County’s consolidation plan was politically motivated or well-intentioned. But with preclearance, he said, residents of areas like Lincoln County would at least have had a sense that a third party had taken a hard look at whether a proposed change to voting in their community would make it harder for minority groups to vote.“Preclearance was a stamp of approval that elections officials could use to tamp down exactly this kind of divisive rhetoric that’s going around,” he said.In 2019, the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights nonprofit based in Washington, issued a report analyzing the areas formerly subject to federal review and found a loss of 1,173 polling places between the 2014 and the 2018 midterm elections.Fully understanding the “potentially discriminatory impact of these closures,” the report’s authors wrote, would require “precisely the kind” of analysis “that the DOJ conducted under preclearance.”Even voting rights groups acknowledge that there are sometimes legitimate reasons for closing polling places: Populations shift, and sometimes the way people cast their vote changes, too. More voters may begin choosing to vote by mail or at early voting locations rather than their precinct.Officials want all voting to take place in Lincolnton, the county seat.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn Lincoln County, Ms. Bolton, the county elections director, argues that the change would make it easier for her to manage Election Day. Her tiny staff is stressed, she said, by the responsibility of setting up and breaking down the complicated electronic voting machines in seven locations spread around the county’s 257 square miles.The failure of the voting overhaul effort in Washington comes after Republican state lawmakers, in the wake of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020, have moved to overhaul election systems in dozens of states, including Georgia, often in the name of protecting against dubious allegations of voter fraud promulgated by Mr. Trump and his allies.The Georgia legislature has also handed control of some or all appointments to local election boards in six counties to conservative judges or Republican-controlled county commissions.Given these recent developments, and the long history of racist disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South, some Lincoln County voters say they would be foolish not to suspect that they are being targeted.“How could you not see it as a pattern?” said Charlie Murray, 68, a Black resident who votes at a nearby church far from the county seat.“They’re making it harder for people to vote,” said another Black resident, Franklin Sherman, 29, a truck driver who usually votes in the same spot.Franklin Sherman, 29, opposes consolidating the precincts: “They’re making it harder for people to vote.”Nicole Craine for The New York TimesLincoln County was among the six Georgia counties in which the rules for selecting members of the local elections board were recently changed by the state legislature.County officials originally asked legislators for the change because they wanted to be able to stagger the members’ terms, said Walker T. Norman, the longtime chair of the county commission and a Republican.Another change — ending the tradition of letting the Democratic and Republican Parties each choose one board member — was prompted by a State Supreme Court ruling, which has been interpreted to hold that private entities cannot appoint members to government bodies, he said.The legislation mandating the changes was sponsored by State Senator Lee Anderson, a Republican who co-sponsored last year’s restrictive Georgia voting bill. He also publicly supported a baseless and unsuccessful U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and three other states. In a recent interview, Mr. Anderson said that in making the changes to the local elections board, he was simply responding to the wishes of Lincoln County officials.Mr. Norman is something of a legend in the county: The community gym proposed as the sole new voting site bears his name — “I got a road named after me too,” he said — and two years ago he changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican because he said it had become too hard to get elected as a Democrat. In an interview, he dismissed the idea that Black voters would be discriminated against by a consolidation. He noted that in all but one precinct, white voters outnumber Black ones.“You can see that they’re not for all the people,” Charlie Murray, 68, said of Lincoln County officials.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“So if we’re suppressing anybody, I’m afraid we’re suppressing the white vote,” he said. “But that’s not our intent, to suppress any vote.”Mr. Norman said that in recent elections, a majority of participants have voted early at a centralized location in Lincolnton. He also described a litany of problems with the current system: Three polling places are within about two and a half miles of one another. Some of the facilities are antiquated. Consolidation, he said, will require less equipment. “We don’t have to use but about half of the voting machines,” he said.But opponents, both Black and white, expressed more concern for the convenience of voters than for that of the voting officials and poll workers.Racy Smith, 56, the owner of a Lincolnton antique and curio shop, said it seemed “ridiculous” to close rural polling places in a county with limited public transportation. “My 86-year-old mom can still drive,” said Mr. Smith, who is white, “but there are so many that aren’t that active who live out in the county.”The Rev. Denise Freeman, a former member of the school board and an activist leading the fight against the consolidation, expressed skepticism about the board’s true motivation. “I think it’s the good ol’ boys flexing their muscle for more power and more control,” she said.On Thursday, Ms. Freeman gave a tour of some of the more remote areas of the county, a few miles from the J. Strom Thurmond reservoir, named for the Republican senator who was known as a segregationist but ended up voting to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.Ms. Freeman talked about her role in the other major racially charged issue that rocked the county in recent decades: an allegation, in the early 1990s, that Black children had been told to sit in the back of a school bus by a driver.The Rev. Denise Freeman, a local activist, outside the proposed site for the new polling station, a gymnasium named after the longtime chair of the county commission. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBlack parents discussed keeping their children out of school. Ms. Freeman spoke up about this issue and other perceived injustices, earning her share of enemies.Eventually, she said, an outside group came in to broker a sort of peace: the Department of Justice.Three decades later, the residents of Lincoln County will most likely need to sort out their disagreement over polling places on their own. On Tuesday, Ms. Bolton’s office was in the process of verifying hundreds of protest petitions from voters in two precincts. Under Georgia law, those two polling places will have to stay open if the petitioners amount to 20 percent or more of the total electors in each precinct.But Jim Allen, a board member, does not believe that the plan is dead. Some form of consolidation, he said, was likely to be considered eventually.Michael Wines More

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Steve Bannon sabe algo

      by

      En Politics Is for Power, el libro de 2020 de Eitan Hersh, politólogo de Tufts, retrató con gran nitidez (e intensidad) un día en la vida de muchos sujetos obsesionados con la política.Actualizo las historias de Twitter para mantenerme al tanto de la crisis política del momento, luego reviso Facebook para leer noticias ciberanzuelo y en YouTube veo un collage de clips impactantes de la audiencia más reciente ante el Congreso. A continuación, me quejo con mi familia de todo lo que no me gustó de eso que vi.En opinión de Hersh, eso no es política. Podría decirse que es una “afición por la política”. Lo cierto es que casi se trata del pasatiempo nacional en Estados Unidos. “Una tercera parte de los estadounidenses dicen que le dedican por lo menos dos horas al día a la política”, escribe. “De estas personas, cuatro de cada cinco afirman que ni un solo minuto de ese tiempo invertido se relaciona con algún tipo de trabajo político real. Solo son noticias televisadas, algunos pódcast, programas de radio, redes sociales y elogios, críticas y quejas compartidas con los amigos y la familia”.Hersh considera que es posible definir el trabajo político real como la acumulación intencional y estratégica de poder al servicio de un fin determinado. Es acción al servicio del cambio, no información al servicio de la indignación. Tengo esta distinción en la cabeza porque, al igual que muchas otras personas, toda la semana pasada le di muchas vueltas al golpe frustrado del 6 de enero, sumido en furia contra los republicanos que pusieron la lealtad a Donald Trump por encima de la lealtad al país y los pocos pero cruciales demócratas del Senado que demuestran a diario su convicción de que el filibusterismo —una táctica obstructiva en el Congreso— es más importante que el derecho al voto. Debo confesar que los tuits y columnas que redacté en mi mente eran muy mordaces.Por desgracia, la furia solo sirve como combustible. Necesitamos un plan B para la democracia. El plan A era aprobar los proyectos de ley H.R. 1 y de Promoción del Derecho al Voto John Lewis. En este momento, parece que ninguno de esos proyectos llegará al escritorio del presidente Biden. He constatado que si adviertes de esto provocas un enojo peculiar, como si admitir el problema fuera su causa. Temo que la negación ha dejado a muchos demócratas estancados en una estrategia nacional con pocas esperanzas de éxito a corto plazo. Si quieren proteger la democracia, los demócratas deben ganar más elecciones. Para lograrlo, necesitan asegurarse de que la derecha trumpista no corrompa la maquinaria electoral local del país.“Quienes piensan estratégicamente cómo ganar las elecciones de 2022 son quienes más están haciendo por la democracia”, dijo Daniel Ziblatt, politólogo de Harvard y uno de los autores de Cómo mueren las democracias. “He oído a algunas personas decir que los puentes no salvan a la democracia, pero el derecho al voto sí. El problema es que, para que los demócratas se encuentren en posición de proteger la democracia, necesitan mayorías más numerosas”.Algunas personas ya trabajan en el Plan B. Esta semana, casi de broma le pregunté a Ben Wikler, presidente del Partido Demócrata en Wisconsin, qué se sentía estar en las primeras líneas de defensa de la democracia estadounidense. Me respondió, con toda seriedad, cómo se sentía. Cada día lo consume una tremenda obsesión por las contiendas a las alcaldías de poblados de 20.000 habitantes, porque esos alcaldes se encargan de designar a los secretarios municipales que toman la decisión de retirar los buzones para las boletas enviadas por correo, y pequeños cambios en la administración electoral podrían ser la diferencia entre ganar el escaño del senador Ron Johnson en 2022 (y tener la posibilidad de reformar la democracia) y perder esa contienda y el Senado. Wikler está organizando a voluntarios que se encarguen de centros telefónicos para convencer a personas con fe en la democracia de convertirse en funcionarios municipales de casilla, pues la misión de Steve Bannon ha sido reclutar a personas que no creen en la democracia para que trabajen en casillas municipales.Tengo que reconocerle esto a la derecha: se fijan muy bien dónde radica el poder dentro del sistema estadounidense, algo que la izquierda a veces no hace. Esta táctica, que Bannon designa “estrategia de distrito electoral”, le está funcionando. “De la nada, personas que nunca antes habían mostrado interés alguno en la política partidista comenzaron a comunicarse a las oficinas generales del Partido Republicano local o a asistir en grandes números a las convenciones de condado, dispuestas a servir en un distrito electoral”, según informa ProPublica. “Aparecieron por igual en estados que ganó Trump y en estados que perdió, en áreas rurales profundamente republicanas, en suburbios de voto pendular y en ciudades populosas”.La diferencia entre quienes se organizan a nivel local para moldear la democracia y aquellos que hacen rabietas nada productivas en vista del retroceso democrático (entre los cuales me incluyo) me recuerdan aquel antiguo adagio sobre la guerra: los aficionados debaten sobre estrategia; los profesionales, sobre logística. En este momento, los trumpistas hablan de logística.“No tenemos elecciones federales”, dijo Amanda Litman, cofundadora de Run for Something, organización dedicada a ayudar a candidatos primerizos a identificar los cargos por los que pueden competir y que colabora con ellos para montar su campaña. “Tenemos 50 elecciones estatales y miles de elecciones de condado. Cada una de ellas cuenta para darnos resultados. Si bien el Congreso puede fijar, hasta cierto punto, reglas o límites en torno a la administración de las elecciones, las legislaturas estatales deciden quién puede votar y quién no puede hacerlo. Condados y pueblos toman decisiones como la cantidad de dinero asignada a su gasto, la tecnología que utilizan o las normas para determinar qué candidatos pueden participar”.Un análisis de NPR reveló que 15 republicanos que compiten en la elección de secretario de estado en 2022 dudan de la legitimidad de la victoria de Biden. En Georgia, el republicano Brad Raffensperger, secretario de estado en funciones, quien se mantuvo firme ante las presiones de Trump, enfrentará en las primarias a dos competidores que afirman que Trump fue el verdadero ganador en 2020. Trump expresó su respaldo a uno de ellos, el representante Jody Hice . También ha respaldado a candidatos a secretario de estado en Arizona y Michigan que lo apoyaron en 2020 y están listos para hacer lo propio en 2024. Como hizo notar NPR en tono prosaico: “Las responsabilidades de un secretario de estado varían, pero en la mayoría de los casos es el funcionario electoral de mayor rango en el estado y se encarga del cumplimiento de las leyes electorales”.Tampoco todo se reduce a los secretarios de estado. “Existe la supresión del voto en todos los niveles de gobierno en Georgia”, me dijo la representante Nikema Williams, presidenta del Partido Demócrata en Georgia. “Tenemos 159 condados y, por lo tanto, 159 maneras distintas de elegir a los consejos electorales y celebrar elecciones. Así que hay 159 líderes diferentes que controlan la administración electoral en el estado. Hemos visto a esos consejos restringir el acceso mediante cambios en el número de buzones para boletas. En general, en estos consejos hacen a un lado a nuestros miembros negros”.La frustrante estructura política de Estados Unidos crea dos disparidades que fastidian a los posibles defensores de la democracia. La primera de estas disparidades es de índole geográfica. El país ataca elecciones celebradas en Georgia y Wisconsin, y si vives en California o Nueva York, te quedas con una sensación de impotencia.Pero eso suena a ilusión y también evasión. Una queja constante entre quienes trabajan para ganar estos cargos es que los progresistas donan cientos de millones a campañas presidenciales y apuestas improbables contra los republicanos mejor posicionados, mientras que los candidatos locales de todo el país no reciben financiamiento.“A los principales donadores demócratas les gusta hacer aportaciones para las cosas ostentosas”, me explicó Litman. “Contiendas presidenciales y para el Senado, super PAC o anuncios de televisión. Amy McGrath puede recaudar 90 millones de dólares para competir contra Mitch McConnell en una contienda perdida, pero el número de candidatos al concejo municipal y el comité escolar en Kentucky que pueden recaudar lo necesario es…”. Frustrada, se detuvo.La segunda disparidad es de carácter emocional. Si temes que Estados Unidos se esté inclinando hacia el autoritarismo, deberías apoyar a candidatos, organizar campañas y hacer donaciones a causas que directamente se centren en la crisis de la democracia. Por desgracia, pocas elecciones locales se organizan como referendos sobre la gran mentira de Trump. Se concentran en la recolección de basura y regulaciones sobre la emisión de bonos para recaudar dinero, en el control del tráfico, el presupuesto y la respuesta en caso de desastre.Lina Hidalgo se postuló para el cargo de juez de condado en el condado de Harris, Texas, tras las elecciones de 2016. La campaña de Trump la dejó consternada, así que quería hacer algo. “Me enteré de este cargo al que nadie le había prestado atención en mucho tiempo”, me dijo. “Era el tipo de escaño que solo cambiaba de ocupante cuando la persona en funciones moría o era encarcelada por haber cometido un delito. No obstante, tenía control sobre el presupuesto para el condado. El Condado de Harris casi es del mismo tamaño que Colorado en términos de población, y es más grande que 28 estados. Se ocupa del presupuesto para el sistema hospitalario, los caminos, puentes, bibliotecas, la prisión. Y también incluye el financiamiento para el sistema electoral”.Hidalgo no desarrolló su campaña como una progresista instigadora deseosa de defender a Texas de Trump. Me explicó que ganó gracias a que se concentró en los problemas que más les importaban a sus vecinos: las constantes inundaciones que sufría el condado, pues una serie de tormentas violentas arrolló la infraestructura deteriorada. “Pregunté: ‘¿Quieren una comunidad que se inunde cada año?’”. Ganó y, después de su victoria, decidió con sus colegas invertir 13 millones de dólares más en la administración electoral y permitirles a los residentes votar en cualquier casilla que les resultara conveniente el día de las elecciones, aunque no fuera la que les habían asignado.La idea de proteger a la democracia respaldando a funcionarios de condado o alcaldes de pueblos pequeños, en particular aquellos que se ajustan a la política de comunidades más conservadoras, puede sonar a que nos diagnosticaron insuficiencia cardiaca y nos recomendaron que lo mejor era revisar nuestras declaraciones fiscales y las de todos nuestros vecinos.“Si alguien quiere luchar por el futuro de la democracia estadounidense, no debería pasarse todo el día hablando sobre el futuro de la democracia estadounidense”, dijo Wikler. “Estas contiendas locales que determinan los mecanismos de la democracia estadounidense son el conducto de ventilación de la estrella de la muerte republicana. Estas contiendas no reciben ninguna atención nacional. Apenas reciben atención local. En general, la participación es de menos del 20 por ciento. Eso quiere decir que las personas involucradas en realidad tienen un superpoder. Un solo voluntario dedicado podría hacer llamadas y visitar a suficientes electores para conseguir la victoria en unas elecciones locales”.O cualquiera puede simplemente ganarlas. Eso es lo que hizo Gabriella Cázares-Kelly. Cázares-Kelly, quien pertenece a la nación Tohono O’odham, aceptó encargarse de una caseta de registro de electores en el colegio universitario en el que trabajaba, en el condado de Pima, Arizona. Le asombró escuchar las historias que relataban sus estudiantes. “Culpamos una y otra vez a los estudiantes de no participar, pero en realidad es muy complicado registrarse para votar si no tienen licencia para conducir, la oficina más cercana de trámite de licencias está a una hora y media de distancia y no tienen auto”, me explicó.Cázares-Kelly se enteró de que gran parte del control sobre el registro de electores estaba en manos de una oficina de la que ni ella ni sus conocidos sabían nada: la Oficina de Registro del condado, con facultades sobre varios tipos de registros, desde escrituras hasta registros electorales. Tenía facultades que nunca había considerado siquiera. Podía colaborar con la administración de correos para colocar formularios de registro en las oficinas de correos de las tribus, o no hacerlo. Si llamaba a un votante para verificar una boleta y escuchaba un mensaje de contestadora en español, podía darle seguimiento en español, o no.“Empecé a contactar a la oficina de registros para hacerles sugerencias y preguntas”, dijo Cázares-Kelly. “Eso lo hice durante mucho tiempo, y no tenía muy contento al funcionario de registros. Hablaba con tanta frecuencia que el personal comenzó a identificarme. No tenía ningún interés en postularme, pero entonces escuché que el funcionario anterior planeaba retirarse, y lo primero que pensé fue: ‘¿Qué va a pasar si se postula un supremacista blanco?’”.Así que, en 2020, Cázares-Kelly participó en la contienda y ganó. Ahora es la funcionaria encargada de los registros en una jurisdicción con casi un millón de personas y más de 600.000 votantes registrados, en un estado bisagra. “Algo que de verdad me sorprendió cuando empecé a involucrarme en la política es cuánto poder tenemos a la mano si solo asistimos a los eventos que hay”, dijo. “Si te encantan las bibliotecas, estas tienen juntas de consejo. Asiste a la junta pública. Observa en qué gastan el dinero. Se supone que debemos participar. Si quieres involucrarte, siempre hay una manera de hacerlo”.Ezra Klein se unió a Opinión en 2021. Fue el fundador, editor jefe y luego editor general de Vox; el presentador del pódcast, The Ezra Klein Show; y el autor de Why We’re Polarized. Antes de eso, fue columnista y editor de The Washington Post, donde fundó y dirigió la vertical Wonkblog. @ezraklein More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Proud Boys Regroup Locally to Add to Ranks Before 2022 Midterms

      by

      The far-right nationalist group has become increasingly active at school board meetings and town council gatherings across the country.They showed up last month outside the school board building in Beloit, Wis., to protest school masking requirements.They turned up days later at a school board meeting in New Hanover County, N.C., before a vote on a mask mandate.They also attended a gathering in Downers Grove, Ill., where parents were trying to remove a nonbinary author’s graphic novel from public school libraries.Members of the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, have increasingly appeared in recent months at town council gatherings, school board presentations and health department question-and-answer sessions across the country. Their presence at the events is part of a strategy shift by the militia organization toward a larger goal: to bring their brand of menacing politics to the local level.For years, the group was known for its national profile. The Proud Boys were prominent at the rallies of Donald J. Trump, at one point offering to serve as the former president’s private militia. On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members filmed themselves storming the U.S. Capitol to protest what they falsely said was an election that had been stolen from Mr. Trump.But since federal authorities have cracked down on the group for the Jan. 6 attack, including arresting more than a dozen of its members, the organization has been more muted. Or at least that was how it appeared.Away from the national spotlight, the Proud Boys instead quietly shifted attention to local chapters, some members and researchers said. In small communities — usually suburbs or small towns with populations of tens of thousands — its followers have tried to expand membership by taking on local causes. That way, they said, the group can amass more supporters in time to influence next year’s midterm elections.“The plan of attack if you want to make change is to get involved at the local level,” said Jeremy Bertino, a prominent member of the Proud Boys from North Carolina.The group had dissolved its national leadership after Jan. 6 and was being run exclusively by its local chapters, Mr. Bertino said. It was deliberately involving its members in local issues, he added.That focus is reflected in the Proud Boys’ online activity. On the encrypted messaging app Telegram, the Proud Boys’ main group in the United States has barely budged in number — with about 31,000 followers — over the last year. But over a dozen new Telegram channels have emerged for local Proud Boys chapters in cities such as Seattle and Philadelphia over that same period, according to data collected by The New York Times. Those local Telegram groups have rapidly grown from dozens to hundreds of members.Other far-right groups that were active during Mr. Trump’s presidency, such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, have followed the same pattern, researchers said. They have also expanded their local groups in states such as Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan and are less visible nationally.“We’ve seen these groups adopt new tactics in the wake of Jan. 6, which have enabled them to regroup and reorganize themselves,” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches domestic extremist groups. “One of the most successful tactics they’ve used is decentralizing.”Members of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters did not respond to requests for comment.The Proud Boys were founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice. Enrique Tarrio, an activist and Florida director of Latinos for Trump, later took over as leader. The group, which is exclusively male, has espoused misogynistic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated it as a hate group.By the 2020 election, the Proud Boys — who often wear distinctive black-and-yellow uniforms — had become the largest and most public of the militias. Last year, Mr. Trump referred to them in a presidential debate when he was asked about white nationalist groups, replying, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”Enrique Tarrio during a Proud Boys rally last September. He was arrested in January.Mason Trinca for The New York TimesAfter the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the group grew disillusioned with Mr. Trump. The president distanced himself from the riot and declined to offer immunity to those who were involved. The Proud Boys have also experienced a leadership vacuum, after Mr. Tarrio was arrested two days before the Capitol attack on charges of property destruction and illegally holding weapons.That was when the Proud Boys began concentrating on local issues, Mr. Holt said. But as local chapters flourished, he said, the group “increased their radical tendencies” because members felt more comfortable taking extreme positions in smaller circles.Many Proud Boys’ local chapters have now taken on causes tied to the coronavirus pandemic, with members showing up at protests over mask mandates and mandatory vaccination policies, according to researchers who study extremism.This year, members of the Proud Boys were recorded at 145 protests and demonstrations, up from 137 events in 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a nonprofit that monitors violence. But the data most likely understates the Proud Boys’ activities because it doesn’t include school board meetings and local health board meetings, said Shannon Hiller, the executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan research group that tracks political violence.Ms. Hiller said the Proud Boys have shown consistently high levels of activity this year, unlike last year when there was a spike only around the election. She called the change “concerning,” adding that she expected to see the group’s appearances intensify before the midterms.On the Proud Boys’ local Telegram channels, members often share news articles and video reports about students who were barred from schools for refusing to wear a mask or employees who were fired over a vaccine requirement. Some make plans to appear at protests to act as “muscle,” with the goal of intimidating the other side and attracting new members with a show of force, according to the Telegram conversations viewed by The Times.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4U.S. nears 800,000 Covid deaths. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      A South African Town Lacks Water and Electricity. But Mayors? It Has Two.

      by

      Dysfunctional and collapsing rural towns may test voters’ loyalty to the ruling African National Congress party in nationwide municipal elections on Monday.LICHTENBURG, South Africa — Walking through what could be the charming tree-lined streets of Lichtenburg in South Africa’s rural heartland, pedestrians skirt around piles of uncollected trash. Shop fronts darkened by electricity blackouts line the main road. A recently built community center has been stolen, brick by brick.Mayor Daniel Buthelezi believes he can turn the town around. So does Mayor Tsholofelo Moreo.Two men simultaneously claim to be the mayor of Lichtenburg, a community of about 182,000 people 150 miles west of Johannesburg. Both are members of the African National Congress, or the A.N.C., the party that rules South Africa and this neglected town. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Misinformation Threatened a Montana National Heritage Area

      by

      GREAT FALLS, Mont. — In the summer of 2020, as pandemic shutdowns closed businesses and racial justice protests erupted on American streets, Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics but was alarmed about what was happening to the country, found a way to make a difference.The connection to the turbulence of national politics might not have been immediately clear.Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.None of this was true.Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana’s leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana. It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.Which is how a humble bid for a small serving of Washington pork by a group of local civic boosters became yet another nasty skirmish in the bitter nationwide struggle between the forces of fact and fantasy.From her point of view, the tale of Ms. Grulkowski’s one-woman crusade is a stirring reminder of the power of political activism. “I thought, ‘Here’s the world going crazy,’” she said, explaining her motivation.From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”The dispute has split communities, become a wedge issue in this fall’s political campaigns and left proponents of the heritage area flummoxed at their collective inability to refute falsehoods once they have become accepted wisdom.“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”Most of the heritage area’s key supporters are Democrats, and virtually all of its opponents are Republicans. But partisanship doesn’t explain everyone’s positions.Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot.“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”Giant Springs State Park near Great Falls is part of the proposed Big Sky Country National Heritage Area.Louise Johns for The New York TimesThe Lewis and Clark Expedition first documented the Giant Springs in 1805.Louise Johns for The New York TimesCongress and President Ronald Reagan created National Heritage Areas in the 1980s as a partnership between the National Park Service and local boosters, who are required to match federal investment with funds raised locally. The 55 existing heritage areas, in 34 states, recognize, among other histories, metropolitan Detroit’s automotive background, Utah’s Mormon pioneers and Tennessee’s part in the Civil War. They collectively receive about $21 million annually — a pittance in the park service’s $3.5 billion budget — and have no impact on private property rights, a finding confirmed in a 2004 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.Then the 2020 political season arrived.Rae Grulkowski and her husband, Ron Carpenter, falsely told farmers and ranchers that the heritage area would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides.Louise Johns for The New York TimesWith the coronavirus ravaging the economy and protests lighting up her computer screen, Ms. Grulkowski said, she walked into a local Republican Party office one day and asked what she could do to help. Someone told her to attend a meeting. So she did.There, she heard a presentation by Jeni Dodd, a former reporter for The Great Falls Tribune, who was running in a Republican primary for the Montana State Senate. Ms. Dodd had latched on to the heritage area as a waste of public money and a thicket of conflicts of interest for board members and elected officials. She wrote essays in local weeklies and started a Facebook group calling the proposal a “Big Sky Boondoggle.” It didn’t get much traction.But Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.When Ms. Grulkowski, who owns a septic cleaning company, tried using Ms. Dodd’s group to push the idea that Montanans’ property rights were at risk, Ms. Dodd kicked her out for promoting lies.“I’m not happy with people saying it will seize your property, because that is disingenuous,” Ms. Dodd said. “I said to her, ‘I think you need to be careful about the message. It isn’t actually the way that it works, what you’re saying.’”But Ms. Grulkowski plowed ahead.Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River, was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s.Louise Johns for The New York TimesThe Missouri River runs through Fort Benton, which is a National Historic Landmark.Louise Johns for The New York TimesOne of her letters reached Ed Bandel, the local board member for the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, a powerful lobbying force. Mr. Bandel, who grows wheat and peas for energy bars on 3,000 acres, persuaded the farm bureau to oppose the heritage area and enlisted other agriculture groups to follow suit.The bureau printed thousands of 4-by-6-inch cards saying “Just Say No!” and listing Ms. Grulkowski’s Facebook group and other opponents, including realtors, home builders, grain growers, stock growers and wool growers. Mr. Bandel, his son and Ms. Grulkowski left the cards on tables at supportive restaurants.By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.Ed Bandel, right, and his son, Jess, grow wheat and peas for energy bars. They persuaded the Montana Farm Bureau Federation to oppose the heritage area.Louise Johns for The New York TimesBut when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.Outside of a poultry coop, as her chickens and ducks squawked, Ms. Grulkowski ticked through the falsehoods she had read online and accepted as truths in the past year: The Covid vaccine is more dangerous than the coronavirus. Global child-trafficking rings control the political system. Black Lives Matter was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The United Nations is plotting to control world population and seize private land. Mr. Trump was the rightful winner of last year’s election. Even in Cascade County, where Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the vote, Ms. Grulkowski argued that 3,000 illegal votes were cast.“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.The “Just Say No!” message is on billboards along Interstate 15 and on Highway 87 into Fort Benton, and on bus-stop benches in Great Falls.Louise Johns for The New York TimesIn the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”Ms. Grulkowski badgered supporters of the heritage area to withdraw financial backing. She raised the money to plaster the “Just Say No!” message on billboards along Interstate 15 and on Highway 87 into Fort Benton, and on bus-stop benches in Great Falls.Three of the heritage area’s board members quit in frustration. Ms. Weber herself resigned from the Cascade County Commission last December after her fellow commissioners voted to oppose the heritage area.“It’s very easy to take fear and mistrust and make it work for you. It’s very hard to fight back against all of that,” Ms. Weber said. “It’s kind of like trying to convince someone to get vaccinated.”The issue is now roiling November’s municipal elections in Great Falls.“It’s a legitimate concern anytime you have anybody telling you a possibility of someone telling you: You can do this or you can do that with your own property,” Fred Burow, an auctioneer challenging Mr. Kelly for the mayoralty, said.Jane Weber conceived of the idea for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area.Louise Johns for The New York TimesMs. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.Kitty Bennett More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Once a City Hall Reporter, Always a City Hall Reporter’

      by

      Patricia Mazzei has spent nearly 15 years covering Miami. The experience helped her make sense of a controversy swirling around the city’s new police chief.MIAMI — Ten years ago, I sat inside the over-air-conditioned chambers of the Miami City Commission for many long hours to cover a tense debate over the fate of a beleaguered police chief.Recently, I did it again, returning to the same City Hall — to the same second-row seat, in fact — to report on a different commission discussing the future of a different official, Chief Art Acevedo, with a precarious hold on his job. Back then, I was a local government reporter for The Miami Herald, where I worked for 10 years. Now, I am the Miami bureau chief for The New York Times. Once a City Hall reporter, always a City Hall reporter.My job on the National desk is to cover Florida and Puerto Rico, a wide-ranging beat that makes it impossible to attend every City Commission meeting (of which there are many) or follow every bit of gossip (of which there are even more). In the nearly four years since I have been at The Times, I have written about hurricane hunters, climate change and statewide elections.But sometimes the story takes you back to the beginning. Knowing how City Hall works, and its bizarre and colorful history, has been essential to understanding Miami and translating its eccentricities to Times readers. Just as all politics is local, all news is local, too, and this is why I was back in my old seat.City Hall reporters have a Spidey sense that tingles when drama is near. That is why I told my editor, Kim Murphy — herself a former City Hall reporter in Mississippi — that I planned to drop in on a recent commission meeting about Chief Acevedo, who was hired to lead the Miami Police Department six months ago. His arrival made a splash — a big-name hire for a city trying to establish itself as a player in big tech. He was chosen by Mayor Francis Suarez, who faces re-election and has grown his national profile over the past year. But the hype could not save either the chief or the mayor from the political entanglements of powerful city commissioners.A majority of city commissioners were mad at the chief, in part because he had — jokingly, he said later — referred to the Police Department as being run by a “Cuban mafia.” (The chief himself is a Cuban immigrant.) In response, Chief Acevedo had written a long letter essentially accusing some commissioners of corruption.Cops, corruption, Cuba: The day had all the makings of quintessential Miami political theater.This, after all, is one of the best news cities in the country — not only for its well trodden Florida Man oddities but also because of its many local governments and their corresponding soap operas. Miami-Dade County alone has 34 cities. That’s a lot of elected officials, a lot of public employees and a lot of news, which The Herald and other outlets cover admirably, though there never seem to be enough local reporters to hold everyone accountable.Becoming a national reporter was liberating in many ways. My time is no longer dictated by the whims of local officials. I can tackle a wider range of issues. I get to explore more of the country. But it is also more challenging to write for an audience that goes beyond local readers. Why would someone in another state or another part of the world care about a little Florida story? Sometimes it’s the stories that seem obvious to people living here that make good national stories. Other times it’s the oddball anecdote that you find yourself telling friends about that demands a larger audience.We chose to write about Chief Acevedo, and the machinations of Miami politics, in The Times because his story has elements that resonate in any big American city currently trying to bring reforms in policing, as it balances entrenched competing interests.The city has gone through six police chiefs in 11 years, though not all their tenures have been as contentious as Chief Acevedo. The meeting to discuss his fate turned into something of a circus. In the afternoon, I got a slew of text messages from sources who had seen me on the meeting livestream, remarking on how wild it was. Many Miami government types had been watching for hours, transfixed by it all.A few days later, commissioners held another special meeting to further discuss Chief Acevedo. I was not, technically, covering the story. But I turned on the meeting and watched anyhow. I could not tear myself away.This week, the saga came to an end: The city manager suspended Chief Acevedo with the intent to fire him. His ouster, as expected, made headlines. But it is also be just another outlandish chapter in the history of the Magic City. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      California’s Housing Crisis Looms Large for Gavin Newsom

      by

      Having survived a recall vote, the governor is free to focus on the state’s homeless population and housing shortage. He has more room to maneuver than he did when he first took office.The median home price in California has eclipsed $800,000. Tenants in the state are among the most cost-burdened in the country. Each night more than 100,000 residents sleep outside or in their cars. A crisis, a disaster, the religion of sorrow, a disgrace — whatever journalists and politicians call it, people across the state, including all the major candidates for governor in the recall vote this week, agree that the situation is untenable.The question is what, if anything, the governor can do about it. It’s something that Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the past three years talking about. And now that he has won a decisive victory in the recall election, which cost close to $300 million and consumed the state’s and governor’s attention for several months, Mr. Newsom is turning his attention back to problems like housing.In many ways the answer there is different from what it was when he took office in 2019.Right now the focus is Senate Bill 9, which would allow duplexes in neighborhoods throughout the state and is one of the hundreds of unsigned bills that piled up on Mr. Newsom’s desk during the recall campaign. But even if Mr. Newsom signs it, which he is widely expected to do in the coming days, his legacy on housing is likely to be less about laws passed on his watch than his administration’s ability to enforce them. That’s because the executive branch has gained much more power over state housing policy than it had even a few years ago, after years of state frustration with how difficult the local governments make it to build housing in California.Mr. Newsom’s administration has come to embrace the role, taking action like suing cities for not building enough to keep up with population growth and creating a team to ensure that cities approve new housing. The moves are part of a nationwide shift in power — away from city councils and toward statehouses — over the $1 trillion annual residential construction market.“It used to be that housing was run by the local planning departments and California governors didn’t really pay attention,” said Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “That has changed.”Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has tried to get through the pandemic emergency by extending the state’s eviction moratorium even as the federal one lapsed, and pouring money from the state’s budget surplus and various coronavirus relief packages into homeless funding and programs like an effort to turn hotels into supportive housing.But California remains one of the most difficult places in America to build housing, causing a supply-and-demand imbalance. It is the leading edge of a nationwide problem that is pricing middle-income families out of ownership and has one in four rental households paying more than half its pretax income on rent.A polling site in El Centro, Calif., on Tuesday, when a statewide vote kept Gov. Gavin Newsom in office.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesPlanners, economists and both political parties have long called for states to use their power to ease the housing shortage by breaking local logjams. They point out that suburban governments have little incentive to fix the problem since they are accountable to homeowners who prefer that prices only go up. That conundrum has vexed would-be housing reformers since at least the 1970s, and emerged during California’s recall campaign in the Republican debates, where candidates talked a lot about adding more housing but shied away from discussions of where that housing would go.These often contradictory comments were a perfect encapsulation of Californians’ mood: They are universally unhappy with the state’s cost of living and the tent cities that have appeared along freeways, in parks and on beaches. But homeowners remain fiercely protective of their power to say what gets built near them. Kevin Faulconer, a former San Diego mayor and a Republican candidate in the recall election, all but ran away from his own pro-density policies in California’s second-largest city by saying, “When we see some of these pieces of legislation that want to eliminate single-family zoning in California, that’s wrong.”Mr. Newsom has tried to walk this same line. In 2018, he campaigned on a “Marshall Plan for housing” that had a goal of delivering 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. He came to regret the figure once he was in the governor’s chair, and it became fodder for his leading recall opponent, the talk show host Larry Elder, who seized on it as an example of broken promises. Mr. Elder did not need sophisticated research to find fault with the number: In a state that permits around 100,000 housing units a year, delivering 3.5 million — 35 years of housing at the current pace — is close to a physical impossibility.Mr. Newsom has been mostly quiet about big zoning legislation ever since. He did not take a position on Senate Bill 50, a contentious measure that would have allowed apartment buildings in neighborhoods across the state. And he was largely quiet about Senate Bill 9 as it passed through both houses of the State Legislature and lingered on his desk.Mr. Newsom, at a rally on Monday in Long Beach, Calif., has emphasized enforcement of existing housing laws.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat he has done instead is enforce existing laws more aggressively than his predecessors did. Two weeks after Mr. Newsom assumed office, California’s attorney general sued Huntington Beach for failing to plan for sufficient new housing. Since then, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development has sent hundreds of letters telling cities to change or simplify their planning codes to comply with state law.The governor’s most recent budget allocated $4.3 million to staff a “housing accountability unit” made up of planners and lawyers who will monitor local governments’ housing decisions and intervene when they’re not following state law.Zoning defines a neighborhood’s physical character and who might be living next door, so it has captured most of the attention in California’s housing debate. But over the past few years, the Legislature quietly passed a slew of smaller measures that when strung together have radically changed the relationship between state and local government. The new rules change how much housing cities have to plan for, make it harder for them to stop developers from building and ultimately deprive them of funding and local control if they drift too far from state mandates.Because they transfer more oversight of housing from localities to Sacramento, the question of how aggressively those laws are enforced has fallen to the executive branch. It’s one thing for the state to pass laws to desegregate neighborhoods, set aside more land for subsidized housing and require cities to permit backyard cottages. If enforcing them isn’t a priority — which has long been the case with housing laws — they are bound to be ignored.In an interview after the recall vote, Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Mr. Newsom who works on housing policy, rattled off a series of bill numbers and the esoteric text of planning codes to point out dozens of housing regulations that remain mostly unused. Environmental measures that support increasing density to reduce car trips. Various laws allowing backyard units. A way for developers to sue cities that don’t follow their own zoning rules. These are the types of statutes the new housing accountability unit will try to enforce.“I’m never going to say we’re done passing laws and we can’t do more,” Mr. Elliott said. “But what we really need to do if we want to see units spring up is get several dozen people thinking about this and only this, and empower them to reach out to cities.”Will Mr. Newsom ever get anywhere near 3.5 million new units? No. Even if it were politically possible, it would strain lumber and labor supplies.It took California several decades to get into a housing crisis this bad. Lofty rhetoric and promises for millions of units make do for a campaign slogan, but the reality looks more like a process of slowly digging out. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      2020 Election Spurs Resignations and Retirements of Officials

      by

      The draining work of 2020 has spurred resignations and retirements. In a recent survey, one in three officials said they felt unsafe in the jobs.WASHINGTON — In November, Roxanna Moritz won her fourth term unopposed as the chief election officer in metro Davenport, Iowa, with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot.Five months later, she quit. “I emotionally couldn’t take the stress anymore,” she said in an interview.For Ms. Moritz, a Democrat, the initial trigger was a Republican-led investigation into her decision to give hazard pay to poll workers who had braved the coronavirus pandemic last fall. But what sealed her decision was a new law enacted by the Iowa legislature in February that made voting harder — and imposed fines and criminal penalties on election officials for errors like her failure to seek approval for $9,400 in extra pay.“I could be charged with a felony. I could lose my voting rights,” she said. “So I decided to leave.”Ms. Moritz is one casualty of a year in which election officials were repeatedly threatened, scapegoated and left exhausted — all while managing a historically bitter presidential vote during a pandemic.She has company. In 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections has left. One in four election officials in Kansas either quit or lost re-election in November. Twenty-one directors or deputies have left or will leave election posts in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, according to a tally by the reporting consortiums Spotlight PA and Votebeat.Some of those represent ordinary churn in a job where many appointees are nearing retirement, and others are subject to the vagaries of elections. In a survey of some 850 election officials by Reed College and the Democracy Fund in April, more than one in six said they planned to retire before the 2024 election.Others are leaving early, and more departures are in the wings. In Michigan, most of the 1,500 clerks who handle elections run for office, said Mary Clark, the president of the state Association of Municipal Clerks. “That said,” she added, “I am beginning to hear rumblings from a few appointed city clerks who are wondering if this ‘climate’ is worth the stress.”Election workers sorting ballots at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia last November.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAt a gathering of Florida election officials this month, “multiple people came up to me to say, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this,’” said David Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “There are the threats, the stress, the attacks on democracy on the officers, on the staff.“We may lose a generation of professionalism and expertise in election administration,” he said. “It’s hard to measure the impact.”In interviews, some election officials said they also worried that a flood of departures in the next two years could drain elections of nonpartisan expertise at a hinge moment for American democracy — or worse, encourage partisans to fill the vacuum. They cite moves by partisans alleging that the last election was stolen in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere to run for statewide offices that control election administration.That may be less likely at the local level, but the pain is no less acute. “We’re losing awesome election administrators who have tenure and know what they’re doing,” said Michelle Wilcox, the director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections in Wapakoneta, Ohio.The 2020 election was brutal for election officials by any measure. Beyond the added burden of a record turnout, many effectively found themselves conducting two votes — the one they had traditionally overseen at polling places, and a second mail-in vote that dwarfed that of past elections. The pandemic led to shortages of poll workers and money for masks and other protection equipment and vastly complicated voting preparations.Atop that, baseless claims of rigged voting and vote-counting by President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans elevated once-obscure auditors and clerks to public figures. And it made them targets for vilification by Trump supporters.A report issued last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University underscored the consequences: In a survey of election officials, one in three said they felt unsafe in the jobs. One in five said they were concerned about death threats.Better than three in four said the explosion of disinformation about elections had made their jobs harder. More than half said it had made them more dangerous.“The fact that one in three election workers doesn’t feel safe in their jobs is an extraordinary number and a real challenge to our democracy,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior democracy fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The center contributed to the report.Election challengers yelled as they watched workers count absentee ballots in Detroit last November. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIf lies and misstatements continue to fuel mistrust of elections and a hostility toward those who run them, “the entire infrastructure of how the nation governs itself becomes at risk,” he said.In Ohio, Ms. Wilcox said she and her office staff logged some 200 additional hours to conduct a November election that drew 25,940 voters — an almost 80 percent turnout.The 2020 vote, she said, was the first to include training in de-escalating standoffs with angry voters who refused to wear masks, and the first in which officials spent considerable time addressing baseless claims of fraud.“It was tough,” she said. “I was like, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’”In Butler County, Pa., Shari Brewer resigned as director of the Board of Elections in April 2020 — even before the state’s presidential primary.“I could see what was coming,” she said. “We had already budgeted for extra help and overtime, and this was the first primary in Pennsylvania where mail-in ballots were implemented” — a state law allowing no-excuse absentee balloting had passed the previous year.The workload increased, and no help arrived. So after 10 years — and still at the bottom of the county’s pay scale, she added — she threw in the towel.Indeed, the report issued last week said election officials singled out the crushing workload as a reason for leaving. Behind that, Mr. Rapoport said, is the failure of governments to address what he called an enormously underfunded election system that is a linchpin of democracy.The report called on the Justice Department to create an election threat task force to track down and prosecute those who terrorize election workers and for states to allot money to add security for officials. It recommended that federal and state governments, social media companies and internet search engines develop ways to better combat false election claims and take them offline more quickly.And it also asked states to take steps to shield election officials from political pressure and politically motivated lawsuits and investigations.Officials processing ballots in Madison, Wis., in November.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesParadoxically, Republican-controlled legislatures have moved in the opposite direction on some of those issues. Texas and Arizona have enacted laws explicitly banning private donations to support election work, embracing false claims from the right that private foundations in 2020 directed contributions to Democratic strongholds. Republicans in a dozen states have considered launching Arizona-style investigations of the 2020 vote despite warnings that they are feeding a movement of election-fraud believers.Ms. Clark, the head of the Michigan clerks’ association, said she believed that the pace of departures there would be influenced by the fate of Republican-backed legislation that would tighten voting rules and restrict election officials’ authority.And in Iowa, the Republican-controlled legislature voted this spring to shorten early-voting periods, clamp down on absentee ballot rules, sharply limit ballot drop boxes — and take aim at the county auditors who run elections. One clause eliminates much of their ability to take steps to make voting easier. Another makes it a felony to disregard election guidance from the secretary of state and levies fines of up to $10,000 for “technical infractions” of their duties.In Davenport, Ms. Moritz said, the pandemic and election-fraud drumbeat all but upended preparations for last year’s election. Tensions rose after she sparred with the Republican-run county board of supervisors over accepting donations to offset rising election costs.When poll workers were hired, she said, she checked with officials to make sure there was enough money in her $80-million-a-year budget to cover hazard pay. But the supervisors had set their pay at $12 an hour, and she failed to ask them for permission to increase it.Ms. Moritz says she made a mistake. “Nobody benefited from it but the poll workers,” she said. Two weeks after the election, when the county attorney called to tell her the pay was being investigated, she said, “I literally puked in my garbage can.”The supervisors have said their inquiry was not politically motivated, and the state auditor, a Democrat, is looking into the misstep. But in the storm of publicity that followed the supervisors’ inquiry, Ms. Moritz said, she began to receive threats. And any thought of staying on vanished after the legislature began to consider reining in auditors’ powers and penalizing them for errors like hers.“People are starting to second-guess if this is the profession they want to be in,” she said. “It was always a stressful job, and now it’s more so. And all these things coming down the pipe make it worse.”Susan C. Beachy More